The soup bubbled over, hissed the flames, stained the burner, slithered down the face of the oven until it disfigured the kitchen tile. Alex sprang from the recliner intending to halt the absurd progress events had made while he had allowed himself to drift off — he could not let down his guard even for thirty minutes on the backside of the day. But, seeing the wild look in his wife’s eyes, he had his first apprehension of the fact that within twenty-four hours he might be holding his son.
+
It was nearly dusk when the headlights of Laurel and Tim’s coffee-and-milk Datsun swept across the Rubins’ living room. The previous evening, Alex had been made to extract the ancient United States driving atlas the Rubins had been given by the resettlement agency when they’d arrived in America. It still held together — Alex rarely opened it. The cover depicted a dark-skinned man in jeans and Native American headdress hopping around a campfire, an Alaskan iceberg, tall buildings in New York, and a curvaceous brown river.
If they were from Montana, and they were halfway to the Rubins at ten o’clock on Friday evening, when would they reach Acrewood, New Jersey? Maya was returned to the algebra classes of her youth: If Comrade So-and-So’s train starts at Point A at eleven o’clock. . “Maya, don’t be silly,” Alex said. “Do they stop for the night or do they keep driving? How long do they sleep? It’s not possible to answer. Don’t panic. When they come, they come.” But his voice carried a tremulous note — as superiorly acquainted with America as Alex was, he was alarmed at the prospect of two people from Montana in his home. Three people.
She pushed the atlas at him and asked him to try. He pulled out a notepad and worked at it, finally announcing that Laurel and Tim would be in Acrewood at around seven P.M. the following day, depending.
“So I have to make dinner.”
“You don’t have to make dinner.”
“You want to welcome these people with an empty table?” she said. She sank into a chair and covered her eyes. “This is absurd, every step of it.”
He laid his palms on her shoulders. “Maya, look at me,” he said. She did, because usually he didn’t produce effort of this kind. “We’ve been reading books for a year. We have enough diapers for our child to shit himself until college. This is what you wanted. Your son is coming.”
She began to whimper into her fist.
“Now this makes no sense,” Alex said.
“I made you do it,” she said.
“Did you?” he said. He stared at his hands on her shoulders. “It’s a dramatic experience, Maya, so it’s natural you would feel upset now. But it doesn’t mean you’re upset. You’re happy.” Maya rolled her head into her husband’s shoulder, and he pawed at it.
Maya did cook, if only out of anxiety; the dining table was filled with highlights of the Ukrainian kitchen: peppers marinated in buckwheat honey, lemon, and garlic; cabbage salad; and, for good luck, the grechanniki that Maya had made all those years before. The table also featured a Mishkin, who, for one, was glad Maya had cooked. When no one was looking, he thieved a disk from the plate of grechanniki, encountering the same problem Alex had all those years ago: It wasn’t possible to have just one. But he couldn’t have another — the Datsun bounced onto the driveway. The dense woodland of gray hair that crowned Mishkin’s heavy-jawed face doubled handily as a napkin for his oil-stained fingers — in her nervousness, Maya had forgot to lay out actual napkins. Mishkin looked like he was rubbing anxiety out of his scalp, which neatly aligned him with the Rubins. “Here come the cowboys,” Alex said mournfully. Gathered at the living room window, the Rubins could not see into the vehicle, though they believed they could be seen. For a moment, no one emerged.
“Must we open their doors and invite them in?” Alex said.
The two young people who eventually stepped out of the vehicle were shocking in their youthfulness. They were Maya’s age when she had come to America — was that how young she had looked then? The young woman, Laurel, wore a superfluously pleated yellow sundress under a turquoise blouse with buttons. She crouched before the passenger’s-side mirror, which showed her that her hair was unpresentable, and called out in a sharp, hoarse voice to her boyfriend to wait while she fixed. Tim, coming around the car, paused. He had a limp in his right leg and wore a baseball cap. Maya knew his eyes were blue without seeing them.
He looked like the Slavic boys who had used to ask out Maya. She was adopting a non-Jewish child: this arrived with visceral clarity at the moment Maya saw Tim’s eyes on the other side of her doorstep. He swept off his baseball cap, revealing a blond buzz cut of a type Maya had seen on military men, and ears that stood out slightly. He had a plain face — he had a nose, and eyes, and ears, but they did not cohere into anything especially memorable — and weariness in his eyes, but otherwise you couldn’t tell, or smell, that he had been driving for two and a half days.
“Ms. Maya, Mr. Alex,” he said, nodding shyly and extending his hand; he didn’t know their last names. “You must be Mr. Mishkin,” he called out behind them, and she knew that was the first Jewish surname he had spoken in his life.
“Bad luck to shake across the divider,” Alex said, pointing at the threshold. “Come in, you’re tired.”
Behind Tim stood Laurel. It must have been due to the radical emptiness of the territory they inhabited that such a plain-looking boy could seduce a girl of such prettiness. In this, maybe Montana was like the Soviet Union after the war — any man would do, twenty million having been lost.
She wore no makeup; the white around each pellucid green iris burned with redness. Her hair was blond like Tim’s, the color of starved grass. She had finger-combed it, and it splayed everywhere; it fell from a central part like two messy sheets. The sundress, which bore a pattern of monkeys on unicycles, looked like a child’s outfit, and was even poorer on close inspection. Maya enviously eyed the two full breasts; was she feeding the child? Under the sleeve of the dress, she saw the sash of an ACE bandage; Laurel was restraining the breasts, to discourage milk.
On the small landing behind them was a car seat with a small bundle in it. The boy was asleep, unmindful of the adults. There was a small gym bag next to him, too small to contain a person’s whole life. Tim turned back and picked up the seat. Maya and Alex stared at him, dumbfounded, and even Mishkin was overcome by a deferential silence. “Where should I put him?” Tim asked his wife.
“Give him to the parents,” Laurel said coldly, and stepped inside. Tim followed. From one of her pockets, she withdrew folded pieces of looseleaf: “Been writing through ten states,” she said to Maya. “Sleep, formula — it’s all in there. There’s some extra in the bag. You mind emptying it so we can have the bag?”
Tim, as the male biological parent, extended the bundle in his arms to the male adopting parent. The male adopting parent would have preferred his wife to receive the newborn, but hesitated to appear less than authoritative before the profoundly American male before him. The tiny, affectless creature continued to sleep, the slightly upturned nose sniffing the air. His little tongue was shimmied between his lips, like a cat’s. The skin — it was newer than anything Maya had seen. That was the only word for it: new. She thought: How could someone part from this creature? What kind of person did you have to be? The little person jerked in his sleep, the shoulders shrugging invisibly, and she felt her last, unspeakable terror give way: He was living and breathing; he really existed.
“He was cranky all afternoon,” Laurel said. She spoke with the steadiness of someone ten years older — it unnerved Maya. Is that what childbearing did to an eighteen-year-old? She wanted Laurel to be as nervous as she was. “I got him to go down just a little while ago. Let him sleep a little bit longer?” This catalog of domestic rituals and observations covered Maya with jealousy.