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The drive back home was less fraying than the drive out. The roads out multiplied, multiplied, multiplied until the great green signs above the roadway forced a driver to choose between six lanes and four highways; the roads back fed and funneled until there was only the single drive leading down to the Rubins. It was not a grand house. But they were marking their twentieth year inside it. Nothing of particular distinction had happened inside it: the occasional barbecue, a snowstorm. Longevity helps where singularity fails.
Maya and Alex had had to fight no one for the town house. It was a strange construction — no basement, a ground floor with an open design, and a cluster of bedrooms off a tight landing upstairs. It was unfitting for a standard Acrewood family, which needed a formal dining room and a basement for toys. No, the Rubins didn’t have any children. No, they didn’t know when they would. Alex attempted to explain that it wasn’t a practical home — it would make resale challenging — but Maya had pleaded with him. The architecture made her feel open, unboxed. They had Filipinos, always smiling, next door, an old Italian who made his own wine on the other side, and up the drive a retiree now devoted full time to enforcing development code, such as when Alex was alerted by the management office that he had painted their garage door the wrong shade of off-white. They all lived in standard Acrewood homes, and Maya loved when the plum-colored darkness swallowed them up.
Inside, the clutter Maya had tried to keep away was eventually introduced anyway by the inability of the elder Rubins to refrain from buying things for their children. Within Eugene and Raisa, the immigrant desire to see how much of a day could pass without the spending of money collided with the American unease at seeing the sun sink without having parted with so much as a cent. The elder Rubins resolved this conflict by refusing themselves the luxuries that they then bought for the children. In this way, every windowsill in Maya’s dining and living rooms came to be decorated by items like a set of martini glasses filled with plastic gin bobbing with plastic maraschino cherries and olives. While cleaning one weekend, Maya reached out a finger and dragged one of them off the sill by the stem. She watched it bang to the floor without breaking. Dismayed, she picked it up and put it back on the sill. There were eleven more.
“Maxie?” Maya called out to the backseat. “Have you ever wanted a different name?”
Alex shook his head at the wheel.
“Where do names come from?” Max said. The seat belt back there looked too large on him, as if it wouldn’t protect him in an accident. He was flanked by the same tray of Turkish confections, minus the one bottle Bender had kept out of politeness. Maya and Alex would have to hide the tray in the garage and empty it down pasha by pasha.
“Mamas and papas give names to their babies,” Alex said. “When they’re born,” he added carefully.
“Why did you call me Max?” Max said.
Maya wondered if this line of questioning meant that Bender was on to something. “Did Bender say something, honey?” Maya said. “I mean, Dr. Bender?”
“You take Maya — your mama,” Alex said. “And you take Alex — me. And you add them together. What do you get?” He inclined his heads toward the backseat. No answer came.
“You take the first two letters of your mama’s name, and the last letter of mine, and what do you get?” Alex repeated.
“Max,” Max acquiesced.
“See?”
“I like it,” said Max.
“He likes it,” Alex repeated.
“But that’s not what Grandma and Grandpa did with you,” Max said. “Eugene. And Raisa.” He thought about it.
“Sometimes you get named after someone your parents want to remember,” his father said. “I had a grandfather named Alex. He died before I was born. They called me Alex to honor him.”
“What’s honor?”
“You’ll learn all about it when you grow up,” Alex said. “Don’t crowd your head.”
“Honor is respect,” Maya said. “It’s when you like someone very much.” She turned back to her son. He seemed less upset than when they had left. She allowed herself to be supported by this.
“If you like another name better than Max, you can tell us,” she said. She weathered a look from Alex. “For instance, when I was little, I wanted to be called Zoya. Do you want to call me Zoya once in a while instead of Mama?”
Max shook his head.
“Okay — what if I call you Maximilian?”
“No.”
“What if I call you Sam?”
“Noooo,” Max whined.
Alex kept his eyes on the windshield — she could try if she wanted. He savored his success with Max and did not want to be sullied by Maya’s failure. Maya fidgeted in the front seat. Her seat belt was suffocating her. She hated seat belts. She had been told at the hospital that in some countries motorists could purchase T-shirts emblazoned with a diagonal black stripe, to fool traffic policemen.
“What about Tim?” she said to her son.
“What is wrong with you?” Alex hissed.
Maya saw the beginning of tears on Max’s face. Because she had gone too far? Because Alex had raised his voice? They did not allow themselves to argue in front of Max. Alex’s eyes bored into the side of her face. “Watch the road,” she said in defeat. She asked him to pull over, knowing he didn’t like to — he didn’t wish to be in the breakdown lane unless he was really in breakdown — and climbed into the backseat next to Max, where she covered him with kisses. She cradled her son against the flat board of her chest and rocked him until he quieted down. Alex chauffeured silently the rest of the way.
When they returned to the house, Alex shut himself in the garage, as if he had been the one whom Maya had unfairly attacked. Maya, no nerve to take on a large meal, diced fresh vegetables for a salad. She was so absentminded that after she had chopped cucumbers, carrots, and a handful of roasted red peppers, she started hacking the knife through a mound of corn kernels. She let the knife fall to the board, drew a wrist across her forehead, and closed her eyes. She was interrupted by the porch door sliding open to reveal Eugene and Raisa hefted with grocery bags. “So, are the inner demons cured?” Eugene yelled. As if Alex had been waiting for the appearance of referees, the garage door burst open.
“Who’s got the inner demons?” he battered his wife. “Tim, she calls him.” He lowered his voice. “Why don’t you tell him his mother’s name, too? Sit him down and tell him the whole story.” He raised it again: “Meanwhile, that genius wants him to change his name and purchase an animal.” He held up a palm, fastidious and insulted; the fingers were tight with each other as if he was swearing on a sacred book. “No more quackery. I went along with this, but: enough.”
“I told you,” Eugene said happily.
“But Bender was your idea,” Maya said to her husband. “I wanted to take him to an American psychologist.”
“Was taking him to a psychologist my idea?” Alex said. “Psychologists are for mentally ill people.” Alex mimed a paraplegic. “Max is fine. I’ve talked with him. We understood each other. He’s perfectly normal.”
“Except for this one thing,” Maya said. “Which puts his life in danger.”
Alex cast Maya a contemptuous look. “You keep taking him to Bender and the like, they’ll find what you want and ten other things. Anything to keep the checks coming.”
“Someone’s always cheating you, Alex,” Maya said.
“For me, this is the end of the conversation.” Alex’s look furiously offered to repay further silence with silence. Eugene and Raisa swiveled their heads between them.
“Bender made several points in his book—” Maya began.
“The end!” Alex bellowed. He did not allow himself to raise his voice at his wife often.