Boris Fishman - Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo

He looked like the Slavic boys who had used to ask out Maya. She was adopting a non-Jewish child: this arrived with visceral clarity at the moment Maya saw Tim’s eyes on the other side of her doorstep. He swept off his baseball cap, revealing a blond buzz cut of a type Maya had seen on military men, and ears that stood out slightly. He had a plain face — he had a nose, and eyes, and ears, but they did not cohere into anything especially memorable — and weariness in his eyes, but otherwise you couldn’t tell, or smell, that he had been driving for two and a half days.

“Ms. Maya, Mr. Alex,” he said, nodding shyly and extending his hand; he didn’t know their last names. “You must be Mr. Mishkin,” he called out behind them, and she knew that was the first Jewish surname he had spoken in his life.

“Bad luck to shake across the divider,” Alex said, pointing at the threshold. “Come in, you’re tired.”

Behind Tim stood Laurel. It must have been due to the radical emptiness of the territory they inhabited that such a plain-looking boy could seduce a girl of such prettiness. In this, maybe Montana was like the Soviet Union after the war — any man would do, twenty million having been lost.

She wore no makeup; the white around each pellucid green iris burned with redness. Her hair was blond like Tim’s, the color of starved grass. She had finger-combed it, and it splayed everywhere; it fell from a central part like two messy sheets. The sundress, which bore a pattern of monkeys on unicycles, looked like a child’s outfit, and was even poorer on close inspection. Maya enviously eyed the two full breasts; was she feeding the child? Under the sleeve of the dress, she saw the sash of an ACE bandage; Laurel was restraining the breasts, to discourage milk.

On the small landing behind them was a car seat with a small bundle in it. The boy was asleep, unmindful of the adults. There was a small gym bag next to him, too small to contain a person’s whole life. Tim turned back and picked up the seat. Maya and Alex stared at him, dumbfounded, and even Mishkin was overcome by a deferential silence. “Where should I put him?” Tim asked his wife.

“Give him to the parents,” Laurel said coldly, and stepped inside. Tim followed. From one of her pockets, she withdrew folded pieces of looseleaf: “Been writing through ten states,” she said to Maya. “Sleep, formula — it’s all in there. There’s some extra in the bag. You mind emptying it so we can have the bag?”

Tim, as the male biological parent, extended the bundle in his arms to the male adopting parent. The male adopting parent would have preferred his wife to receive the newborn, but hesitated to appear less than authoritative before the profoundly American male before him. The tiny, affectless creature continued to sleep, the slightly upturned nose sniffing the air. His little tongue was shimmied between his lips, like a cat’s. The skin — it was newer than anything Maya had seen. That was the only word for it: new . She thought: How could someone part from this creature? What kind of person did you have to be? The little person jerked in his sleep, the shoulders shrugging invisibly, and she felt her last, unspeakable terror give way: He was living and breathing; he really existed.

“He was cranky all afternoon,” Laurel said. She spoke with the steadiness of someone ten years older — it unnerved Maya. Is that what childbearing did to an eighteen-year-old? She wanted Laurel to be as nervous as she was. “I got him to go down just a little while ago. Let him sleep a little bit longer?” This catalog of domestic rituals and observations covered Maya with jealousy.

“It’s safe to drive a tiny baby all that way?” Alex said skeptically.

Of this liability, Maya had not even thought. There were so many, all of them unfamiliar, that this one had not even occurred to her. She wanted to give her husband a restraining look, but she was grateful for the question. Alex noticed things that she didn’t — by leaving unnoticed the many things that she couldn’t ignore. He allowed those to slide off him, leaving attention for those that mattered.

“It’s seven weeks,” Laurel said. “Their necks are ready by then. That’s why we waited to come here till now. We started the paperwork only once he came out, but we found you a good while before he was born.” Together, Maya and Alex looked at Mishkin behind them, but he only shook his head — he didn’t know that Laurel and Tim had been planning to drive. Maya didn’t know whether she should resent Laurel. She looked at Alex — his eyebrows were crossed with suspicion.

“Why did you pick us?” he said.

“Alex,” Maya said. “Let them come in, look around.”

“If they’ve graced us with a visit, they can tell us,” Alex said in a way that left clear that no one would be coming in or looking around until the question was answered.

“It was one thing the most,” Laurel said. “It was what you wrote about putting your roots down here for a long time. Here in New Jersey.”

Hearing his work praised, Alex softened. “And all the other things that go without saying,” Laurel went on. “You’re good people. Stable, and nice home. You have money. You know what’s a baby.”

Alex looked at Maya, asking with his face what he should do with the child.

“Please come in, won’t you?” she said to Laurel and Tim.

The guests moved down the hallway. The young man favored his right leg. In the presence of such foreign characters, the spread Maya had spent all of Saturday preparing suddenly appeared unacceptably foreign itself. With forced casualness, she took her guests through the dishes. They nodded politely.

“We really shouldn’t,” Tim said. “We’ve got a lot of driving ahead. They only gave us so much time at work.”

“But you’ll stay the night,” Maya said. “We have extra bedrooms. We want you to see the house.”

“And what is work?” Alex said, hoping to distract the guests from agreeing. He unburdened himself of the car seat on the tiled floor and quickly checked Maya to see if he shouldn’t have.

“Laurel’s at the front desk at the Ramada,” Timothy said. “And me—” He wanted to fidget with his cap but it was long off his head. He rasped his buzz cut with a nail.

“He does rodeo,” Laurel said.

“That’s with the bulls,” Alex said. “And that’s a living?”

Tim shrugged. Alex sensed that he was wearing a mask of discomfort for Laurel’s sake. “You have one out here too, once a year,” Tim said. “At Madison Square Garden. More of a show.”

“We haven’t been to that,” Alex said.

“But we will,” Maya reassured Tim. “We will go this year, absolutely.”

“No, you won’t,” Laurel said. From a pocket hiding among the pleats of her dress, she withdrew a crumpled pack of cigarettes and a lighter. The other four stared at her.

“I didn’t start it till after,” she said, reading the togetherness of Maya’s brows. Also Mishkin’s — finally, Maya and Mishkin were concerned in the same way.

“Because we were told the child was healthy,” Alex said. Maya, who had been exhaling after Laurel’s comment, froze after Alex’s.

“The child is healthy,” Tim said curtly. His face unclenched, regretting his sharpness. “This process been stressful on Laurel.”

“Hooray, Tim, for your heart is twenty-twenty now,” she said.

“No one smokes in the house,” Alex observed.

“I’m sure it’s fine ,” Maya said, staring at her husband. She wished to reward Laurel for starting to smoke only after the birth of her — their? her Maya’s? her Laurel’s? — son.

“I’ll go outside,” Laurel said.

“I’ll join you,” Maya said.