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8

“I moved to the United States to refine my understanding of bureaucracy,” Eugene said sourly. The other Rubins buttered and chewed: Saturday breakfast. Eugene had cleaned his plate and was scratching it with the tines of his fork. “Except you can’t bribe anyone here — the government must be allowed to do a poor job without interference.” He deposited the fork on his plate with a monk’s carefulness — if he allowed disorder into his gestures, he might put the fork through somebody’s eye. He was upset because many pallets of New Zealand honey had been held up at Port Newark over a classification error. He had taken the table through the difference between C4 and C3 sugars. “Ten thousand dollars,” he said bitterly.

“Please don’t count money that hasn’t come in yet,” Raisa said. “It’s bad luck.”

“I’m sure it’s a misunderstanding,” Maya said hesitantly. “If the labels list the right number, they’ll have to—”

Eugene gave her a pitying look.

“You know better,” Maya whispered, nodding.

Eugene burped and said “Oi.” He wiped his mouth and looked at Maya. “A compliment to the cook. And no butter, unless you’re not telling the truth. With butter, everyone’s a chef.”

Maya smiled vanishingly at him.

Eugene turned to Alex and nodded at the backyard. “Those pines look like they’ve had their balls cut off. Pardon my language,” he added, making a face at Max. Then, to Alex: “Your neighbor is showing you his affection?”

“It’s deer,” Alex said irritably. Three weeks later, the argument with his wife was still with him. He had tried to dispel it with a stumpy centerpiece of hydrangea, spray roses, and carnations, which wilted amiably on the table, but it made no difference to either of them. He had done it without meaning it.

“Tie soap bars to the branches,” Eugene said. “I’ve seen people do it.”

“New Year’s all year long,” his son observed. “With Irish Spring instead of tree ornaments.”

“You have to use Ivory,” Eugene said. “Irish Spring isn’t nasty enough.”

“I do your wash with Ivory,” Raisa remarked defensively.

Mechanically, Eugene sniffed the collar of his shirt.

“There’s a spray now,” Alex said. “I just haven’t had time.” He looked at Max, who was trying to saw down the top of a cereal box with a butter knife. Alex looked back at his father. “Do you know what I found on my stoop a week ago? A ceramic deer half the size of this table. Guess who.”

“You should have put it back on his doorstep, the bastard. Sorry, Max.”

“No, I took it into the garage, smashed it to pieces, and lobbed them over the fence one by one.”

“If one of them landed on his face, he could sue you,” Eugene said. “The first lesson of revenge is you leave no marks.”

“Can we change the subject to something more pleasant?” Maya said.

Eugene shrugged and looked at the newspaper. “There’s nothing pleasant in here.”

“Then put it away, sweetheart,” Raisa said. “Speak to the table.”

Eugene obediently folded the paper and looked at Alex. “Let’s shoot one of these deer and leave that on his doorstep.”

Alex held up a pleading hand. “I’ll get the spray this weekend.”

“I’ll get it,” Maya volunteered.

The men turned to her.

“I have errands,” Maya said. “Max will come help. Right, Max? You just have to write it down, Alex, what to get.”

“Maya. .” he said. He was unprepared to contend with generosity. “You won’t get the right one.”

“There’s only one way to learn,” she said.

“Your wife is offering to do it so you can sit at home and relax,” Eugene said. “What’s wrong with you?”

Alex conceded. “It’s called DeerSanta.” He nodded. “Thank you.”

Raisa cleared the table while the men dispersed. Maya sat staring out the window, pretending she still had coffee to finish. It was time to switch the flower water, though the petals were molding and puckering beyond help.

“You’re going to hurt yourself, honey,” Maya said to her son, still serrating away at the cereal box. “Want to come for some errands?” She leaned toward him. “You’ll have the front seat.”

Max kept sawing, as if he hadn’t heard her. “Honey,” she said again. He put down his knife, slid out from under the table, and went into the hallway to find his sneakers.

For three weeks, Max had been quiet. Maya had spent them on the Internet, researching dissociative episodes. They were a kind of sleepwalking — the individual was functional and alert, but obeying a different mental channel. The descriptions terrified her. Her mind pictured a dissociative affliction as an invisible gas, a cellular sickness. Bumps, scrapes, bruises, and pimples: She could get all those out. Cutaneous infections unnerved Alex — he would worry pimples, moping until they went away — but she had a medical specialist’s equanimity toward innocuous things. Things Alex could not see, he dismissed, whereas they were what terrified Maya.

When she wasn’t at work or in front of the computer, Maya shadowed Max. She was clandestine not only from him, but her husband, who seemed intent on regarding continuing panic as a personal treason. Maya found an unspoken ally in Raisa. School having ended, Maya canceled her son’s morning camp, saying she wanted him to spend more time with his grandmother. “Anything?” Maya would inquire fearfully of Raisa upon walking in after work. “Nothing, daughter, stop your worry!” Raisa would exclaim from the floor, where she was demolishing Max at cards. For the welfare of her loved ones, Raisa would give away not only the chocolate in her mouth, but the tongue that was working it — with the exception of cards. A great, unsparing beast emerged when Raisa Rubin took cards in her hands; even an eight-year-old got no mercy. Maya wished to believe her mother-in-law and could not. She slept poorly.

Saltz, the pediatric psychiatrist, Maya did not dare contact — because she did not want to antagonize Alex, or because she didn’t want to hear what he might tell her? Then she was seized by an alternative idea. Was it crazy? Maybe it was imaginative more than crazy. If she were found out, for some reason she felt she would have less to answer for than if she had contacted Saltz. Saltz was a betrayal. But Madam Stella — Madam Stella was just Maya being Maya. The Rubins would understand — they avoided the corners of tables, the stepping over of each other’s legs, the unfurling of umbrellas indoors.

Maya had her own reason. She had been five, playing in the kitchen doorway as her mother swept the floor. Her mother yowled: There was a mouse behind the radiator. Startled by the broom, the mouse scurried out, ran chaotically in several directions, and vanished again. Maya shrieked and began stomping her feet. She tore off her underwear and T-shirt and stood naked, shivering and screaming. Her mother dropped the broom and rushed to embrace her. By that evening, they were on their way to — Tamara? Fatima? a Gypsy name — the two hexed clothing items in a grocery bag her mother held between the tips of two fingers.

The healer, who was young, tall, and heavily boned, looked nothing like the old, gaunt Gypsy women at the market, and her home looked exactly like the Shulmans’: doors of frosted glass, a wall unit, and the wallpaper with bicyclists by a lake. She even wore what her own mother wore, a tracksuit, the soft protuberance of a belly distending the elastic. Her oval face, dark except for slightly eerie eyes of sea green, was beautiful, but the way a horse is beautiful. Maya wondered if she had a Maya. How could she heal someone else’s daughter if she did not have one of her own?