Boris Fishman - Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo

“Max, my darling,” she said. “Did Madam Stella play the game with you?”

“We didn’t have time,” he said. “She said we would after you woke up. Let you sleep.”

Maya nodded dolefully and scratched Max’s hair with a failing smile on her lips. “We will definitely go another time,” she said.

Again the gruesome word floated up.

By the time Maya was traversing the final artery between the Corolla and home, she was exceeding the speed limit less out of guilt than an anguished desire to reestablish the contours of her life as she knew them before she’d set off. Much as a lump in the breast felt at nine A.M. makes small pain of the toast burned at eight thirty, Maya recalled the uneasy home in which she lived prior to her trip to Madam Stella’s as a redoubt of solidarity next to the fury she was sure was awaiting her now. As her car pulled into the driveway, she resolved to act nonchalant but solicitous when she entered the house. No one would hear argument from Maya tonight. Then she realized she had forgotten the deer repellent.

Perhaps it is when we are at our most vulnerable that life throws us a line (though not until then). When Maya stepped into the house, clutching Max’s hand for comradeship, her mind trying to measure the distance from the truth she was willing to travel in her explanation and how Max would comment, Maya was accosted by an Alex bewildered not by her tardiness or the absence of deer repellent in her hands but by the unannounced appearance of Bender and wife on their doorstep an hour before. If Alex had once been aware of how long she and Max had been absent, now he was aware only of Time Before Bender and Time After. Raisa was off on a walk around the lake — who walked around the lake for hours; well, Eugene had been on her about her weight — and it was left to the men to entertain these sudden visitors with what sense they could make of the dozen Tupperwares in the refrigerator.

If asked, only a moment before, to rate her enthusiasm for a repeat sighting of Bender, Maya would have thought twice. But now her affection nearly toppled him, also his stout, white-haired wife. Bender repeated his story — he and wife had been in Acrewood for a matinee at the community theater and had decided to drop by and ask about Max. Bender blinked, his wet eyes the color of steel wool, as if awaiting a judgment on his claim. But by then Maya was too busy rummaging in the fridge in order to supplement the pathetic table the men had set up: cold cuts, matzoh-like crackers, and a jar of roasted peppers. For life’s emergencies, some men carried condoms, Band-Aids, umbrellas. Eugene Rubin carried a jar of roasted peppers.

As Maya popped open lids and spooned out self-made hummus, Mediterranean chicken, and lemony salad, she understood that Bender’s story was an unskillful lie. The Rubins’ visit had given Bender cover for a return visit of his own, and with it a potential resuscitation of the acquaintanceship that had fallen moribund as a result of. . what? As Eugene and his son, on a typical night, took their customary post-dinner positions in front of the living room television, the son slumping asleep long before the father, who remained alert late into the evening, staring blankly at news program after news program, Maya often wondered how this pastime acquitted itself in superiority to a cup of tea with a human being, even if that human being was Bender, even if Bender was in mortal combat with Eugene for who could exhibit the greater indifference.

In Kiev, the Shulmans’ living room had up to half a dozen extra bodies if it was a weekday, more on the weekend, usually neighbors (this is how Maya’s mother came by so much of her material), two in the corner slinging bile at the president of the tenant council, two others fixed on a soap opera, a solitary soul smoking wistfully out of the kitchen window while sipping from a thimble of balsam. It was not an astrophysics symposium, in fact the television dominated here as well, but at least it served as an invitation to others. And unlike Eugene — who sneered at the false sophistication of Bender and held up, as a contrast, the purity of his own — those who stopped at the Shulmans’ Kiev apartment for balsam and tea did not consider themselves with special regard, in part because they were professional gossips and knew it, and partly because all their lives had low ceilings courtesy of the state in which they had the misfortune to live. And so there was nothing to brag about, was there, might as well enjoy a thimble of balsam with the neighbor. The Low Ceiling made ambition impossible, so not one of those heads was riveted by the next day’s work docket, and that was the only way Maya could explain Eugene’s preferences — the American economy gave you an excuse not to see people. You were unavailable until retirement; until then, it was one long dark night in the embrace of Profit, the eternally undersexed mistress. While Eugene watched TV, he worked over in his head bills of lading, sales numbers, the new van driver — not something you could do with a Bender in front of you. However, now, one hip propping open the fridge door, she was seized by another interpretation. It filled her with pity instead of the usual bafflement. Did Eugene and Alex avoid acquaintances to avoid the possibility of a careless word alerting Max he was adopted? Perhaps they themselves did not understand it.

She made herself stop. Was there nothing that would keep her from drifting away? What crisis was urgent enough? It would have taken nothing for her to crash the Corolla on the ride home. Now, she was blessed to have arrived safely, and she was standing and thinking about. . what? Why did her plans get away from her? With the visit to Stella, she had meant only to help Max. As, now, she meant only to make things easier for the bodies in the living room. Why couldn’t she keep to her plans? She felt afflicted alongside her son; she did not recognize herself. Alex always panicked when the fridge door remained open for too long, wasting electricity, and with a guilty tremor she knocked it closed — she intended to cause no provocation tonight — though everyone was in the living room.

Maya would expertly steer the Benders through several plates and then out the door, earning the gratitude of Alex and Eugene; the problem of her disappearance would be buried in the relief that would follow the Benders’ departure. Maya had failed to get Madam Stella to lay hands on Max, but several weeks had now passed without Max acting strangely, and so perhaps her husband was right, and the thing to do was to leave the boy alone, to let him grow out of it. He had, after all, come out of his bizarre adventure unscathed. Perhaps he was protected. Maybe her son was charmed in some way. If she couldn’t be, then maybe he was. Abruptly, Maya was filled with a light-headed optimism. She took four plates, two in her fingers and two balanced across her forearms, as she had seen waitresses do at the Acrewood Diner, and, feeling a frisson of otherness (she was a waitress in some diner), stepped into the living room.

It was only now that she realized that she’d heard no sound from it for some time. If Maya had been less preoccupied by her thoughts and looked in to check why the Rubin/Bender quartet was so quiet, she would have seen much sooner what they were seeing. They were all four standing in a hushed pall at the sliding door to the backyard — Bender femme was actually shaking her head slightly in a kind of pained wonder. Alex was rigid with disbelief, Eugene impassive, and Bender had slid his hands professorially into the pockets of his striped trousers, as if the vision before them would require not a little professional insight.

What they were witnessing was the resolution of Alex’s problem with deer damage — sans deer repellent. Its ingredients surrounded their son in a clearing beyond the lawn, where the pines began: a carton of eggs from the refrigerator in the garage, a small bucket filled with water, a spray bottle, a second bucket, empty. The five of them watched him extract an egg, crack it on the rim of the water bucket, and seesaw the two halves until the yolk and albumen were separated from the chalaza. The former went into the water bucket, the latter into the other.