They moved quickly, passing bridges, silent woods, other homes, though each one looked like the white farmhouse from where Max’s parents were called, set back from the road by two or three hundred feet. Children waved at them from the bridges, drivers peeked out of their windows. They had an escort of turkey vultures, circling overhead. Max’s feet were pegged to the pike’s flank, and it nosed through the water so neatly that only the rare drop reached his face, a cold pinprick of wet.
Bah-bah-bah. Max turned around and said to hold on, it wouldn’t be long now. He knew the place was coming, but when this stand of poplars ended, another began, and then a farmhouse, a swamp, a row of marshy fields, a thicket of electrical lines. It wouldn’t come.
But then it did come. Max didn’t have to tell the pike to slow down; it stopped and idled in place. To the unaided eye, there was little about this clearing to mark it apart from the many they’d passed, a plain field surrounded by hundred-foot trees, so tall they seemed to be talking about something up at the crowns. The roots were so thick the crowns didn’t sway even when the wind gusted. Here and there wildflowers grew, winks of violet, yellow, and rose.
Max turned as far as he could inside the boy’s hold. Then he put his own arms around him, and they held each other briefly. Then the boy, also knowing the moves, slid off Max, and plopped into the water. He stood up, drenched, and smiled an embarrassed, toothy smile, his eyes rolling back in their sockets. Max nodded. The boy turned away and slopped to the shore. Max called out that he would be back with the others. “Just remember, I have to take you back before morning.” The boy turned around and spoke as if no impediment addled his mind: “I’ll wait for you here.”
5 2002
Alex and his parents had wanted children and grandchildren with the same mindless hunger with which they sat down to meals. None had prepared for the possibility that this may not be biologically possible. They believed that America was at fault; it wouldn’t have happened like this back home. There — maybe it was the food, which had no preservatives; maybe the slow pace and absence of stress — everyone was fertile. America regarded adoption as a normal course, so American bodies adjusted to fit the culture’s endorsement. This country all but authorized its citizens to go barren.
The Rubins’ desire to become parents and grandparents was eclipsed only by their conviction that adopted children were second-class, by definition unwanted; and why would a child be unwanted? Because something was wrong. Maya was repelled by adoption no less than the Rubins; imagining it was like imagining marriage to someone one hoped one would figure out how to love. As Maya greeted the dubious outcomes married life had harbored for her — medical work, after all; all the ways in which the elder Rubins did not resemble her parents — childlessness had not even occurred to her, perhaps because she held to the same expectations about Russian fertility. She didn’t know any infertile Russian couples. She knew very few people, Russian or otherwise, outside the Rubins, but the Russians among them were all fertile. Even Bender, the pulped, gray-faced psychologist in Whippany, and his snow-haired wife had a small Bender knocking around some college.
When Alex and Maya met, Maya was indifferent toward children. When she happened upon one, she spoke to him like an inattentive adult. In a woman like her, even displaced to America, the alarm should have beat sooner than in an American body — but it didn’t. When children came up, she started clearing the table and made fun: Alex, should we have five? Or six? The elder Rubins loved making fun; it meant everyone was in a good mood. Maya also made a different kind of joke: “Running my cash register with one hand, turning over grechanniki with the other, and holding the little one with a third?” Like a sputtering engine, the Rubins’ laughter caught in their throats. If Maya had to work all hours in a café, of course Raisa would look after the child. But — that idea had not gone out of Maya?
Had Maya wished childlessness on them? Now, no child possible, she had the time to open a café—a chain of cafés. That was the bitter irony for the Rubins. For Maya, the bitter irony was that now she could not. That obsession had belonged to another woman; every obsession withers if you just hold down the obsessive, she thought. She laughed at the way she had dramatized her youthful situation — could her fantasy, to cook in some café, have been any paltrier? Now, Maya would not know how to run a café if the keys were handed to her. That devil she had spoken to Alex about ten years before — he had abandoned her. Her devil giving up; the passage of time; the female clock; Moira at the hospital with her stories of Ricky and Anthony and the dean’s list; also, the maternity ward was just a floor down from mammography — who knew why, but the desire for a café had been replaced by a desire for children. But the Rubins refused to consider adoption. It’s not that they didn’t love losing. There was a sweet surrender in it. But the loss had to be clean.
Because Maya was the interloper among them; because America had brought her to the Rubins; because she worked in medicine and occasionally expressed a contrasting opinion — the duty of persuading the Rubins to adopt fell to her, even as her own reluctance remained. The amount of time that infertile couples spend on fertility treatments — luckily and unluckily, this was not necessary in the case of the Rubins — Maya spent instead on persuading the family out of its hostility to adoption. The Rubins would not even rent a local apartment when they went to the Mexican coast — used beds and sheets made them feel unhygienic and poor, even if a hotel performed the same changeovers — and she wanted them to take on a used human being? No. Heads shook. No, Mayechka, no. And so the name Rubin will come to an end? she asked, hitting them in a tender spot. It’s already ended, Eugene sighed, and then said that it was his and Raisa’s fault; they should have had more children. At which point Alex removed himself from the table, and the dinner went on in a spectral silence.
Maya stopped making her case — the appealed-to must want the appeal. Then, during one dinner, apropos of nothing, Raisa mounted another attack on adoption. She conceded that it was a fine and honorable thing to do, to give a homeless child a home and all that, and perhaps she was not only backward but obsolete to remain opposed, but she could not bring herself around. She was too old, too set. Her sin, but not one she could overcome. It was then that Maya understood that despite the show they had been giving her, they would all sign on — but only if she took on the responsibility. And so she said: “We’re adopting.” She was right: They all shrugged, including Alex. They were good parents-in-law, a good husband: They would give their beloved, capricious Maya what she wanted. Everything they endured over the next two years — nine months, morning sickness, and painful labor were a favor from God by comparison — they endured for her.
They chose the adoption agency from the Yellow Pages, like a tailor. Independent Adoption Services had retenanted a former department store; the space, contrived to hold circular clothing racks, rows of registers, and banks of mirrors, was overlarge and overexposed for the more delicate task of finding new homes for children, and every time Maya attempted to navigate its fluorescent cubicles and cream-colored hallways, she ended up at bathrooms for the handicapped. It wasn’t until she strode the halls of IAS that Maya understood what people meant by auras and magnetic fields. She felt like a dog responding to an unseen but undeniable scent. It was bad.