6
In the three days remaining before the weekend visit to Bender, the psychologist, each member of the Rubin family arrived at his own accommodations with the new situation. Eugene, having seen Max in bed, asked no questions about whether his grandson continued to spend his nights there. Raisa, wishing to hold on to her victory, did the same; she labored in the kitchen, grateful to be left alone. Maya allowed herself to be reassured that Max did not require a pediatric behavioral specialist, that Bender would do it. In the afternoons, instead of driving home from the hospital, she drove to the curb of Terhune Elementary and waited for her son: This far she could drive, and would have even if she couldn’t. She had proposed to the other Rubins to ask the school to put Max on watch, but they had talked her out of it: Why did she want to mark their child as a misfit? The other children would find out. So the principal was told that Max had merely gone to a friend’s without calling. The principal heard Maya out with indulgence: He had been level-headed while she panicked.
Alex maintained routine — if no one else would stay calm, he would. Only now he didn’t know what to do with his afternoons — he noticed belatedly that he had become attached to his outdoor tent sessions with his son as a pleasurable burden: the men, alone, with the women and parents far away. Now forced to use his imagination to conjure an alternative, his mind rebelled — on principle, he did not like having to use his imagination; the need for it signified an inadequacy in the situation at hand, and he preferred to make peace with the inadequacy, to live without illusions. So he waited for his son to propose the alternative. His son did not, reverting to his afternoon duties at the side of his mother. Seeing them at the kitchen counter on his arrival from work, Alex went upstairs and turned on the television. Downstairs, they chopped and banged pots and stuffed napkins into crystal drinking glasses. Maya tried to consume her son’s attention with greater tasks than before: one afternoon, he was finally elevated to knife work. Her left hand closed his over a fleecy clump of parsley; her right steadied his as he held a small chef’s knife she had gone out to buy for his size. Obediently, Max’s hand moved under hers.
Alex appeared in the kitchen and stared at them — their son could not be entrusted to return from school alone, but she was teaching him to be more deft with a knife? She gazed back at Alex — what was the worry if Max’s behavior was normal, as he insisted? Alex shrugged and walked out to the living room. And yet, ultimately, their eyes separated without animosity; ultimately, their eyes said to each other: I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know. This kinship rubbed the edge from their disagreement: the kind of understanding spouses rely on and regret in equal degree.
As a whole, the Rubins, until now of the opinion that psychology was for quadriplegics and nut jobs alone, relented: Fine, let him go see Bender if Maya wanted it so badly. Their derision for Bender’s profession coexisted with a demand for its effectiveness; if their son and grandson had to succumb to the embarrassment, let him be healed rapidly, at the least. Any other outcome would confirm the other opinion, that it was all quackery. In this way, the Rubins forestalled the possibility of disappointment; each result would give them what they wanted.
Alex insisted on not telling Max about the impending visit to Bender lest he be needlessly frightened, but Max knew that some judgment awaited him; that is understood even by an eight-year-old. Eugene need not have refrained from asking about where his grandson was sleeping — Max continued to spend his nights in bed, though no one seemed to notice, save his mother, who seemed either unconcerned by the original behavior or unmollified by the fix. In fact, during one afternoon’s battered whitefish, Maya knelt down, took Max by the forearms, and said: “You know, you can sleep on the floor. You don’t have to sleep in the bed.” So it did make a difference to her. That night, he returned to the floor. As a kind of insurance in case his grandfather came to complain, Max discarded his pajamas and slept in briefs like a grown-up so his lungs would get bigger in the night.
Maya operated in glazed preoccupation; there was so often, on her face, a gathering of lines that parted only, and only sometimes, when she and Max took up cooking together, to which Max submitted every afternoon for that reason. Even at his age, he understood the cooking as a specialized task performed by a particular caste, but he was too young to understand whether the caste was lowly or high.
Over the whitefish, he had turned up to her and said: “Would you still cook if you didn’t have to feed us?”
She put down her knife and rubbed his shoulder. “But where would you be?”
“Like when we go to Mexico. Do you still make dinner?”
“No, I don’t, sweetheart. Not really.”
“So you do it for us.”
“In a way.”
“So what do you do when no one’s around?”
“What, honey?” she bent down.
“When you’re by yourself. What do you do?”
“I don’t know, baby. I’m not alone that often. When you go away to Mexico, I miss you. I walk around the house. I don’t do much of anything. Maybe it’s not right and I should do more with myself. Why are you asking me?”
He said he was curious.
“Is that why you ran away, Max? Because you wanted to be alone?”
“No,” he said. “I told you — I was sad.”
“But why did that make you want to be alone — instead of with us?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
She let him be.
About Bender, Max had been told that his mother needed to see the psychologist — in the view of some, this was the truth — and could Max come along, because then they could go for bagels, his favorite; his mother had been wanting some, too. When the prescribed hour came, Max came down from his room only on the third summons. He looked pale and sleepy. His jeans hung on him like a laundry bag, and he hadn’t even hitched them with a belt. Maya let it be, but Alex stared at his son distrustfully.
In the backseat — starting to do Bender’s work before they reached Bender, Eugene again claimed that Max was spoiled by indulgence and insisted the boy be retired from the front — Max watched the leafing trees rush by even though Eugene had affixed a DVD player to the back of the passenger seat in consolation. Max had never shown an interest in movies. He had liked blocks, picture books with popping-up animals, little mallets, buttons, and knobs — he dragged it all around, liking the feel in his hands.
Next to Max in the backseat, like a squat, silent animal, rode a case of Turkish cherry jam, an enticement from Eugene to Bender. No Rubin had called a Bender in more than a year, and if memory served — and in such cases, at least on the aggrieved side, memory served dutifully — a Bender had been the last to issue a halfhearted invitation to socialize. So when Maya insisted that Max see a psychologist, Eugene agreed not because he thought the man could be useful — psychologists were charlatans, in his view — but because, disparage Bender or not, the ignored invitation had been eating at him. Eugene declined to be the one to call Bender, however, leaving diplomacy to Anatolian cherries.
“We’re paying him,” Alex had said when his father had proffered the tray, each bottle blown in the shape of a laughing pasha. “I can’t believe he’s charging us, but he is. This isn’t necessary.”
“It’s the jam they serve with tea at the steam baths,” Eugene said. “Bender can develop positive associations and charge you less.”
Alex wanted to call no more than his father, but Bender was a Rubin-side friend — Bender’s wife and Raisa had met at a grocery store years before and dragged the men into acquaintance. More importantly, Bender was the lesser of the evils Maya had dreamed up, the other being an American therapist. And so — even though Max was seeing a psychologist on his wife’s restless urging; even though it was his mother who had drawn the first bridge to the Benders; even though it was Eugene who had insisted on ignoring Bender’s last invite — somehow the privilege of calling Bender had fallen to Alex. He knew that Bender would respond to Alex’s greeting with a long, satisfied silence. But it was even longer than Alex expected. Alex interrupted Bender’s pleasure and tried to explain the issue in a brief, halting monologue, which Bender cut off to issue the magnanimity for which Alex had hoped. “I would be more than happy to see the boy,” he had said in a narrowly professional tone. Then he clarified that it was uncustomary for him to answer the telephone — he had a receptionist; two in the morning, such was demand — and that Bella out front would take down the details. “We take cash and credit cards but no checks,” Bender specified before instructing Alex to hold the line.