Boris Fishman - Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo

“I don’t know why you didn’t call. . at the beginning,” Madam Stella said into Maya’s shoulder. The Madam lit a cigarette and blew a column of smoke at the gravel. Maya eyed the cigarette enviously, but was afraid to ask. “I offer the full suite of services,” the older woman said. “From the cradle to the grave. Infertility, difficult pregnancy, difficult birth, post-partum depression. Some people have me on retainer — they come once a week, just in case. Families stay with me for generations.” The Madam gargled out a phlegmy laugh. “That sounds as if I’ve been around since the war with Napoleon.”

Maya glanced nervously at her watch. She knew Alex would be checking the clock soon, her cell phone going off. She had brought it this time, had no cover.

“Guess my age,” Madam Stella said.

“Fifty-five?” Maya said, underestimating by twenty years in the name of politeness and a discount at the end of the hour.

Madam Stella whistled. “Try seventy-three.”

“We’re here for a game, okay?” Maya whispered though Max was out of earshot. “He doesn’t know.”

“There are demons in his head,” Madam Stella said. “We are going to very nicely, very politely, ask them to leave. Do you have any demons in your head, Mayechka?”

Maya was briefly startled by this intimate address, used only by her mother and Raisa.

“If it’s a game, everyone plays,” Madam Stella said.

Like a well-painted face that parts to reveal ruined teeth, the smooth, eggshellish exterior of the building gave way to a rotten, sagging staircase that creaked under the four climbers as they summited to a garret of the kind Maya had always imagined inhabited by a Dostoevsky consumptive. If the street was in St. Petersburg, the garret was in a lightless village deep in the Carpathians, next to which even her uncle’s Misha’s modest countryside home was vast. Maya was stunned to discover herself more correct in this than she wished: Madam Stella had them gaze through a window — the mastiff got its plate-sized paws on the windowsill — that revealed a patch of ground sealed by a cellar door. Everything that Madam Stella pickled and cured in the autumn was down there, covered in the summer months by enormous blocks of ice that the workman changed out weekly for a small fee. Madam Stella had had her residence disconnected from the electricity line, and held money only when she received payment or transferred several bills to the workman. Everything that she ate and brewed, she foraged in the botanical garden; she hardly ate meat, and for dairy she bartered.

“With whom?” Maya asked, looking anxiously around the premises: two rooms, the first of which doubled as a kitchen, bedroom, and entryway.

“With the people who have it,” Madam Stella cheerfully informed her. “Sit.”

Where? The twin bed, despite summer, was loaded with horsehair blankets and two enormous square pillows. The dining table held a log of butter the size of a loaf of bread on a triangular cutting board; a bottle of spirits that would have reached Maya’s waist; and a huge clump of tiny, yellow-tipped field flowers that resembled the frizzy hair of a giantess; but no chairs. There was a sour smell in the air that Maya traced to a bread yeasting in a large industrial sink. Her son was poking his nail into it. Maya hissed at him. He scurried back to her side, where she grasped his hand and stood like a wax figure, trying not to touch anything. She felt an attack of remorse; her decision had seemed inspired when she had seen the classified in the Russian newspaper, now reckless and rash.

On one wall hung a clumsy painting of an older woman, a black band of mourning in the corner. Above it, a display of herbs was mounted on a board of cherry-red wood, clump after clump socked into aluminum cones, a handwritten legend beneath: eucalyptus, valerian root, coltsfoot, mint, bur marigold, stinging nettle, cranberry leaves, melissa, motherwort, cabbage. The other walls were decorated with farm implements, for decoration or use who could say: a scythe; clamps with a human-height handle for extracting hot pots from a furnace; ancient, rusty mandolins; not one but two pitchforks.

Madam Stella, who was rummaging in a pantry next to the bed, noticed and said: “All of that’s from the garden.” Her hand emerged wrapped around a jar. She set it down next to the butter. “Young man, I require your help,” she said. Reluctantly, Maya let go of Max’s hand and he followed the Madam into the next room, from where they returned with three backless stools, Max’s lips pursed as he fought to keep his above ground. Madam Stella carried two while her dying cigarette bounced between her lips, the smoke wreathing the room.

“I live like this because I want to,” Madam Stella replied smokily to Maya’s bewildered expression. Max bounced onto his chair in exhaustion, his palms on his knees like a worker, resting. “I made ninety-four thousand dollars last year.”

Maya laughed nervously. Even a witch had to brandish her salary if she was a Soviet witch.

“Now, who wants to begin,” Madam Stella said, unscrewing the jar. The room was filled with a sharp smell that made Maya sneeze. She knew the mixture was slimy and gray without seeing it, perhaps because the odor was of the swamp, of seaweed.

“How about you, honey?” Maya said to her son. Max sat on his little stool with concentration, as if he needed to gather strength for the next task.

Madam Stella made a ts-ts-ts noise with her tongue. “Don’t you know that ladies go first?” she said to Maya. Finally disposing of the cigarette that had expired in her mouth, ash tumbling to the floor, she lowered herself heavily to the second of the three stools, which miraculously sustained her, and gallantly directed Maya to the third.

“This way to the gallows?” Maya said, again laughing anxiously.

“Sit, darling, sit,” Madam Stella said impatiently. Though the Madam was endowed with supernatural curative powers, she did not have supernatural levels of patience. “Your son needs to see how the game is played.”

Maya sat down. Immediately, she was assailed by a fantastic weariness. She wished the chair had a back. When the jar of gray slime appeared at her nose, she was surprised to discover that it was neither slime nor gray, but a harder, less viscous black substance that smelled like freshly paved highway, as if it had altered its scent on its journey from table to nose. Perhaps she had altered in sitting down. She tried to shake off foolish thoughts — she was so tired. If she planned to help her son, she had to be alert — she had to figure out how to sleep a full night.

Maya peered into the jar, then at Madam Stella, wondering whether the treatment was contraindicated if you weren’t the one with the problem. She remembered Soviet people who had been helped by a healer but had then taken to this doctoring with indiscriminate zeal, developing new ailments or diminishing the efficacy of earlier treatments. But Maya felt she could not bring this up without reinviting Madam Stella’s impatience and closed her eyes. Soon, she felt two fingers at her temples, each smudged with the gray substance, abrasive as a cat’s tongue. She smelled nicotine and knew Madam Stella’s face was just inches from hers, her voice reaching Maya as if muffled in cotton, the scent of cigarettes mixed with lipstick and breathing.

“Everything’s resting,” the voice was saying. Against Maya’s temples, the tar was like a salt scrub, and Madam Stella’s fingers — again Maya was reminded of a cat, for Madam Stella’s fingertips were as soft as the pads of a paw, only the sharp edge of her fingernails occasionally nicking Maya’s hair. “Everything’s resting,” Madam Stella intoned. The veins under Maya’s temples eased into a washed-out slumber — she saw a road whose markings had been wiped out by a long rain — and the bone under her eyebrows pillowed into soft clay. Maya wanted to open her eyes and check on Max, was he finding this strange or frightening, and she would in just a moment, a moment.