Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo (33 page)

“Alex can't have children. He has Klinefelter's—a syndrome. They discovered it when we tried to get pregnant. But his parents think it's me. They decided that I was infertile and that he was covering up for me, a gentleman. Little by little, that story became fact. A word here, a word there. It bothered me at first, but then you think, Who cares, anyway? If they knew their son was infertile, they would not sleep at night. They would feel as if life had laughed in their face. But I . . . they love me. In the way they know how. But I will always be the adopted daughter. So if it's me, they can go to sleep at night. Though I am sure they worry: Will Max inherit this blemish from Maya? And then they remember Max is not Maya's. And this helps them sleep. Max wouldn't exist in our lives without the blemish, but they couldn't sleep calmly if the opposite was the case, wondering if he would inherit it. The release is built into the flaw.”

He watched her silently, absorbing the information.

She exhaled at the glass of the window, leaving a mark that then narrowed and vanished. She turned the shades so that the room was invisible to anyone outside, but, properly angled on the bed, one could still make out the mountains a little. Crossing her arms, she raised her blouse over her head. She shivered though the room had warmed up overnight. Her skin was paler than the snow outside. She removed her bra and her small breasts fell free. She stepped out of her pants, then her underwear—she had been
wearing homely white briefs, but could not induce herself to feel shame. She lowered herself onto the bed. She had forgotten to take off her socks.

Marion was motionless on his side of the bed. She was seeing a new expression on his face, and she thought how much more there was to learn about him. If they had a life together, she would learn something new about him over and over. It would not end for many years, and perhaps ever.

She tried to fit him for the mask of death she had slipped so easily onto her mother, and herself, and Alex, and Max. But she could not picture Marion as anything other than there, his face taken up with a mournful amusement. He was older than her, but despite the slightly bent fingers, the tiredness around the eyes, and the loose skin she felt feeling his heart, it felt more difficult to imagine his death. Perhaps she knew him too little, had him too flimsily to be able to calmly let go. And yet, she felt she knew him. Some things, she knew. She knew that if he walked out of the room, she would love him. If he took off his clothes, but wore a condom, she would love him. If he didn't use a condom, but nothing came of it, she would love him. If he didn't, and something did, still she would. Every single outcome was the right one.

Her legs parted slightly from a slow-sweeping lurch in her stomach. She felt a dull furrow open, as if by a sledgehammer dragged by someone too young to lift it. It was her—she was dragging the sledgehammer. She was on Misha's farm, dragging the sledgehammer, everything still up ahead. From the furrow things wanted to spill. The sensation was of some sort of impending evacuation, and she turned over because it was all happening there. Her knees, pressed into the roughly starched cotton of the bedsheet, nearly buckled but she grunted and dug in. She pushed her face hard into the pillow so that no light came in—she wanted to be underwater without adequate air. She closed her fingers over the thin vertical iron slats of the headboard, such as it was, and dug her nails into her skin. She would love him if he walked out of the room, but if
she heard the buckle snapping on his jeans, the flop and rustle of denim—she would love him a little bit more.

“Your son is wild because of you,” Marion said.

She looked up at him insolently, and said: “Don't be frightened of me.”

The first thing she felt were two fingers on the strong vein inside of her thigh. They ran down it, feeling it like an old scar. Then his hands moved to her ass, and he held it in his hands like two breasts, just holding, like a cat with tinfoil in its mouth. He spread the cheeks with his fingers, and she let out a soft groan while reaching for his jeans buckle. Working with one hand, she undid the button and zipper and pulled down the jeans around his thighs. He wore nothing under them. Sliding out from under his touch, she pushed her face into his groin, and inhaled around him. He smelled clean, human but clean, like the leaves that stay cool on the floor of the woods even though the sun is shining with force. His penis was warm on her cheek, and she pressed her head into it. They were oddly positioned, like two wrestlers in an impasse, no winner, he on the bed on his knees, she worked into him like a burrow. His hands scaled and descended her back, the two panels on either side of the spine like the wings of a book, firm board over soft flesh.

When they had enough of feeling each other, they rearranged themselves on the sheets, Maya under Marion, the blanket kicked around their feet. The room was submerged in a half gloom; Maya felt around herself a softly swallowing grayness broken only by the vague shape of his body. Alex came into her mind, but instead of shutting her eyes against him, she apologized to him for feeling none of the fault he wished she would feel—she would begin feeling it as soon as this ended, but she wanted to do this now, forgive me, my love—and waited until he went away. When Marion entered her, his hands levered on her hip bones below him, she kinked up her back, drove the crown of her head into the mass of pillows beneath it, and issued a low, satisfied grunt at the uneven
ceiling. Then she clasped his arms and forced him down onto her. She wanted his weight.

Though Marion was only slightly taller, their bodies did not have the same rhythm; he pushed in while she was pushing out. Eventually, she smiled sheepishly at him, and he, licensed by her, at her. Uninstructed, he withdrew. She slid out from under him and pointed with a finger at the pillow, which now went under his head. His erection faltered, and he muttered sheepishly. She closed his mouth with her lips. It was their first kiss. It seemed so belated. There was so much else that they'd forgotten to kiss. There was old sleep on his tongue, but she wanted it. She wanted everything having to do with him. She lifted her lips from his for the second it took to say “I want everything having to do with you” and then covered his mouth again before he could answer, though his eyes answered her—with disbelief and rising desire. They kissed for so long that they forgot everything else.

In the night, the difference between one minute and four works differently, but they kissed for four minutes, not one. Then they stopped kissing and lay hidden in each other's mouths until Maya felt the outer edges of sleep. No. She withdrew herself from him, and pulled her lips down to his chest, covering one nipple with her teeth, her hair falling over his chest. Then the other. It stirred him—she felt him growing full under her. She unsealed herself from his chest with a long inhalation. Then she took his penis with her fingers, and worked it inside herself. The rhythm was better this way. Her back kinked again, she raised and lowered herself on him while their bellies took sweat from each other. Each lowering-down was a soft pop, her ass on his thighs. She preferred down, because she felt more of him. Now, some milestone having passed, she allowed herself to make noise—a long call, meant to travel. He was shyer than her, and it was several minutes before he forgot his reticence and moaned with an uncomplicated satisfaction.

She was consumed by his look of stupefied wonder—wonder at her. She had never seen a man more plainly happy. So even in the
midst of all that was happening, plain happiness was available. She would not have dared to guess. She felt for his face, and scratched it with her fingernails. His neck, ribbed with age. She wished her fingerprints to become altered by him; she wished for some part of him to pass into her in a way that wouldn't dry and leak out. He warned her that he was close. She warned him to remain inside her. She needed just a little bit more. But he was already lost to new information. He clasped her ass in his hands, and cast himself into her with a force he counted on her to understand and forgive, one finger grazing the pleated spout of her asshole every time he pushed up. It accelerated her, and they came almost at the same time, him hitting the walls of her so forcefully that he cried out. She fell on him; they ran with sweat, running off them onto the sheets. And again, they lay hidden in each other. Until he was soft enough that he slid out of her in the wetness. And still they remained, drying and leaking out and memorizing the other. To no value because memory is nothing next to the thing.

They drove back to the Dundee in silence. The storm, which in the night had only dusted the pavement, seemed to have changed its mind, the slate-gray sky swirling with snow. Because of the weather, Marion had offered to accompany her; he would find a lift back. She agreed—for no reason having to do with the weather. Her heart wobbled at seeing another man in the seat Alex had occupied, and occupied responsibly, for two thousand miles.

The mountains watched her go the way she had come with neither pity nor shame nor sympathy nor regret. Marion, who sometimes regarded her with the same motiveless curiosity, kept his eyes on the road and said nothing. She relished the silence, the snow like the cotton damping a wound. The new skin over the ground was thin, and only briefly unblemished, but it worked for the moment; she was at the remove that she wanted. For instance, the Escape was past the turnoff for 2207 New Missouri Trail South before Maya thought of Harry Sprague and Sangu Sethi—she saw her: big-lipped, big-haired, big shiny white teeth with a gap: the lurcher of the family—caught up in each other in bed, the dogs at their feet. She knew this steadiness would desert her soon, but it was holding for now, and past this she decided not to think. They were pulled up at the Dundee, idling, before she fully noticed they were in Adelaide.

“I want you to go upstairs, get your family, and drive out of here,” he said. “We're in the outer ring now—it's going to keep getting worse before it gets better. You have an hour to outdrive it. I'm not asking only for you.”

She told him yes, even though she didn't know whether she was
telling the truth. It was so difficult to tell the truth; it didn't line up neatly with love.

She felt his face with her hand. He closed his eyes against it. When he opened them, he was looking at her through the grid of her fingers. He reached up, closed her hand with his, and returned it to her side. Then he stepped out of her car and stood in the falling snow until she walked out on the passenger side and clicked the alarm, which rang as if it were supposed to say something for them as well. He smiled the forestlike smile, the wrinkles at his eyes marked by neither love nor hostility, rather the baleful amusement she saw there sometimes. But before he walked away, the amusement was replaced by something that did resemble love. He nodded slightly, and in that small motion, Maya felt a greatness of love. She almost cried out for him. Then Marion flicked up the sheepskin collar of his jacket, hiked up his shoulders, and strode away. She watched him go.

From the balcony of Room 31, wearing nothing but a shirt, a pack of cigarettes crumpled on the table next to him, Alex watched also.

+

Room 31 was blacked out, the heavy shades drawn in full. Max was asleep on the rollaway in the alcove; the bedding on the queen was a mess. The room was heady with the papery aroma of hotel coffee, so stale that Maya's eyes burned with new fatigue at the scent of it. She had not slept properly in three nights. How much longer could she endure? She stood looking at her son for a long minute, so that if he awoke, he would have been frightened, a spectral shape in the room. Carefully, Maya parted the shades and slid open the heavy balcony door. Alex did not turn around. He gazed ahead, his hand shivering as he brought the filter of a smoked-down cigarette to his lips. He dragged on it before she could speak, burned himself, winced, but continued to hold the cigarette as smoke trickled through his teeth.

She called for him, and he turned around. Little red flashes
ran through his eyes, and underneath there were gray pouches of puffy, blown-up skin. He opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out, and he turned around to face the street once again. You could feel the coldness of his skin without touching him. A half-drunk cup of coffee waited next to the cigarettes, and next to it the coffeepot, nearly full.

She went back inside, upset the bed by pulling off the blanket, returned outside, and draped it over his shoulders. He shuddered at her touch. She put her arms on his shoulders.

“You got caught,” he said.

“I wanted to be caught,” she said.

He leaned forward to be free of her touch. “What kind of person are you?”

“Please look at me.”

“You are the last thing I want to look at,” he said.

“We will have to look at each other for two thousand miles. Please look at me.”

“I don't want to know,” he said.

“Please don't say that,” she said. “Please stop saying that. I want you to know. I need you to know. I can't live any longer pretending we don't know what we know.” She lowered herself next to him and encircled his waist with her arms. “I came back, Alex. But not because you've been sitting here killing yourself. Killing me.”

“People don't change,” he said.

“I need you to fail trying,” she said. “For fifty years or so. Then you can stop. We will do it together.”

“Together,” he said derisively.

“Stop that,” she said. “Stop it. Please.”

“What do you want?” he said to the street.

“I want to go, Alex. I'm ready to go.”

Alex stared at the snowflakes settling on the railing of the balcony. In less than a week they had gone from their living room to the balcony of this motel in a lost Western town, staring at weather they had not seen since their childhoods in Russia. He
had been right, too right—disorder awaited just outside the walls of your home, walls eternally in need of shoring up and defense. However, his wife wanted the disorder—that was equally inarguable. What does a person do when his life comes to this kind of dissent, when it takes back the promise it's made? He didn't know. Simply, he didn't know. Alex stood up unsteadily, stared at the coffeepot as if about to bus it, then decided to leave it outside, snowflakes melting with a hiss on the still-warm glass of the pot. When they stepped inside, Max, as apparently fond of beds outside New Jersey as unfond of them there, farted and clutched the pillow more tightly.

+

They were sliding down an artery to the county road when Maya saw the sign: the Last Gasp Rodeo & Pancake Breakfast at the Adelaide Fairgrounds, down an artery off the artery. Maya looked at Alex, who had no objection left in him. “Just for a minute,” she said. She turned to the backseat, from where Max looked up with slit eyes. He had been rushed through a breakfast of cereal and juice from a vending machine. “One last stop before we go,” Maya said. And then she asked Marion's forgiveness for not leaving when she promised she would.

The detour required backing up—the road was too slick with snow to reverse; Alex would have to turn around in poor visibility without sagging into the irrigation ditch off to the side; the driving lanes were so narrow—so there was a long moment of Alex sitting silently after he had slid to a stop and put on his hazards. But then he lowered the window, stared carefully in both directions, jerked the vehicle forward, back, and forward again, and soon they were negotiating the ruts of the washboard road that led to the back side of the Adelaide Fairgrounds.

She had imagined rodeo as a nighttime activity, with massive generator-powered lights flooding a field—that's what she had found online—but the Last Gasp was a morning event. A cement
mixer was turning batter in a corner of the parking lot for the pancake breakfast.

“Come with me, Maxie?” she said to the backseat.

“But it's snowing,” Max said.

“Please come with me,” Maya said.

“What's going to happen?” Max said.

“The cowboys play with the animals,” Maya said. “Do you remember how you played with those deer?” Max looked at her questioningly. “I'm not mad at you about that anymore,” she said. “You don't know why you liked it—but you liked it. Well, the cowboys like riding horses. And bulls. It's fun for them.”

The arena smelled powerfully of cow dung and something greasy like motor oil. Cold air gusted off the packed earth. Maya held Max's hand tightly. A loud, grating bell went off and in past the bleachers she heard pounding hooves, the earth rippling slightly beneath her. The entire place—past the entry booth, a small hangar for the pancake breakfast, and beyond it, a partly covered arena surrounded by gym bleachers—vibrated with an air of unfamiliar ceremony. The ticket window held a potato-nosed ancient rubbing his hands in front of a space heater.

“Rodeo association is running a special for the last event of the season,” he said, showing them a mouth of false, sterling-white teeth. “Beautiful ladies get in for free. And future rodeo stars get in for free. So your total is zero.”

Maya huffed out a helpless smile.

The upper bleachers were empty, but the rows near the dirt were full, cameras bathing the astringent air with flashes of silver. She was reassured by the seeming indifference of the crowd to the storm gathering outside. A moan of bovine protest issued from somewhere in the arena, but it was halfhearted, the animal going through some ritual. The loud bell went off again, and now they could see. The lock slipped from the chute gate and the dirt was crowded by a blur of animals, the bell shrilling again before Maya could understand what had happened. The scoreboard said
3.0 seconds. A man was on the dirt—he wore a cowboy hat, a Western shirt with two frilled pockets at the chest, and sneakers—his arms around the neck of a collapsed steer, its eyes wide in stunned, peaceable terror. The cowboy let go, scrambled up on his feet, smiled shyly, and raised his arms toward the stands. “A tenth-second shy of venue record!” the announcer called out. Feet stomped the bleachers and cameras whirred.

She had to watch again—two gates opened, two horses emerged, and between them a steer. She couldn't determine the purpose of the second rider, who veered away to allow the first to slide onto the animal and wrestle it to the ground until by some unknown metric the event was judged complete.

Maya looked over at Max. He was squinting down at the arena. “Doesn't it hurt?” he said, meaning the steer.

“I don't know, honey,” Maya said.

“I don't like it,” Max said.

They stamped their feet in the cold. A fine film of dust settled over their jackets. The cold smell of hide and excrement mingled with the yeasty scent of pancakes being turned out in the main building. In a fenced-off area walled off from the chutes, the riders paced, or chatted, or rubbed their hands together in wild concentration. One was laid down on the dirt, his head on his saddle, and his cowboy hat over his eyes. Clean, unlined faces, a picture of vitality that did not translate to their bodies, which covered for injuries: they hobbled, waddled, and dragged. In the crow's nest, the announcer God-blessed America, and took the crowd through two bars of “America the Beautiful.” “Ladies and gentlemen, this cowboy's only pay this morning is your applause.” When a new event came up, he went through a careful explanation what was what—the rodeo was for experts and newcomers alike.

The events seemed organized by escalating violence. In the next, a horse rider cast a noose around the neck of a calf, the horse rearing up to keep it tight while the rider ran the length of the rope, slammed the calf on its side, and tied its feet up in the air.
The sight felt lurid and Maya turned away. She found herself wishing that the animal would wriggle out and stomp the man who had thrown it to the ground. If Maya had never felt especially close to Max's biological father, she had felt even less close to the animal that must have mangled his leg, even if it was responsible for a long process that ended in her acquisition of a son. But she felt a strong kinship with it now.

“Mama, let's go,” Max said.

“Me too,” Maya said.

The ground cover had increased in the brief time they'd spent in the arena—the snow cracked underfoot. Northeast snow slicked up and slushed, slurping under the feet, but this was the snow of Kiev. Maya's mother would finish her cigarette at the window and Maya her oatmeal at the table, they would take the rumbling elevator down, and crunch snow on the way to school for an endless fifteen minutes, a faint hint of smoke wreathing her mother's speech.

Maya closed her eyes and breathed deeply, Max waiting patiently. When she opened them, she wished desperately to see her mother standing in front of her. Maya looked down at her son and said, “I need to go see my mother.” Did ships sail between continents any longer? No matter—she would go in the hold of a cargo freighter if she had to.

“Your grandmother,” Maya said. This grandmother Max barely knew. Maya experienced deeply the distance that her husband had been remarking on since the start of the trip, only he was measuring to New Jersey and she, now, much farther. His constant remarking on it had tuned it out in her mind, but now she understood very well what he was speaking about.

“I don't remember the last time we built a snowman,” Maya said. “Come.”

Alex, who had remained at the wheel of the Escape, was summoned and asked to gather up snow, which he did with his feet, his hands in the pockets of his too-thin jacket, while Maya and
Max sculpted. Soon, they each had three balls, round as ice-cream scoops. “You're a natural, Maksik,” Maya said. Max clapped his gloves.

A passing elderly couple unlocked arms to insist on photographing the handsome family in front of their winter creation, and the South-Central Montana Rodeo Association scrapbook for the 2012 Last Gasp still holds, next to an image of Curtis Purnell riding the bull Fat Chance to the highest score of the day, an image of the Shulman-Rubins of Acrewood, New Jersey, next to a pair of snowmen.

“My feet are wet,” Alex said.

“Almost,” Maya said.

She knelt before the snowmen and in the belly of the first drew a large T, in the other an L. Alex, sunk in a sullen, sleep-deprived reverie, stared at Maya from the edge of the snow pile.

Max looked up at his mother. “What do the letters mean?”

“Max?” Maya said. “Your papa and I have something to tell you.”