Maya rummaged in the rolltop desk in the home office and withdrew a note pad. On the first line of a fresh page, she wrote, DANGERS. Below, she wrote:
1. snowstorms
2. rainstorms
3. hailstorms
4. bad brakes
5. snakes
6. getting robbed
7. one of us getting hurt
8. all of us getting hurt
9. running out of water
10. running out of gas
11. poisonous berries
12. poisonous plants
13. losing our bags
14. losing money
15. losing each other
Outside, the enormous oak creaked with the weight of the wind. Back and forth it went, like a badly oiled swing. It was the sound of loneliness, a malevolent mystery to which the answer was you and you alone. Upstairs, Alex was snoring lightly, his mouth ajar. The wind kicked up, rustling leaves, and a branch scratched at the siding of the house as if asking for shelter.
If they went, it would have to be now. If it was in the fifties here, it would be in the thirties there; that much Maya knew. In the morning, she would pack warm clothing. She would buy lanterns, thermoses, warmer socks. She would place herself in the hands of the clerk at the camping store. She would flirt and get a discount. She would take Eugene’s Escape without asking.
She shut the light and lay down on the living room couch. She dreamed of a field of snow. Her house — it was not the house she shared with Alex, but she knew it as hers, a smallish log cabin with a yellow sconce outside the door — was off its foundation and sliding through the snow like a sled.
II West
10
Maya whimpered and awoke. Her head was cantilevered over the shoulder of the passenger seat of the Escape, a ball of pain at the base. Fearfully, she angled it back. The pain was less blinding than shaming — a promise, good for days, to remind her of her carelessness. For careless behavior, you paid.
She looked around unpleasantly — why had she passed the night in the car? The Escape, boxy as a slow animal, tilted off the sloping berm of the road, the blacktop steaming with mist, which, along with the golden light it was suffusing, indicated early morning, though sedans and pickup trucks passed regularly. Had the Escape broken down? They had barely started. Maya allowed herself to relish the tantalizing possibility of this failure: They could turn around with honor.
She squinted against the light on the passenger side. The berm ran off into a stubbled field that dead-ended, it was difficult to tell in the morning glare how far, in the foothills of humpbacked brown elevation. On the other side of an electric fence, fat white cows marked the field like an irregular crop. Oblong white birds popped around the cows, leaping for worms in the turned-over earth. The cows were folded down in heavy-thighed, spinsterly repose, studying the creatures that had washed up at the edge of their kingdom. Maya felt observed. The mindless vacancy attributed to cows could be seen also as mindless concentration. Before Maya’s eyes adjusted to the light, she had a mirage of the brown stone humps behind the animals rapidly rearranging themselves before slumping once again into stillness.
She turned, fresh pain blossoming in her neck. Max was supine across the backseat, his mouth open in slumber, a small blanket tossed about his feet. Several feet off the berm, his ankles covered by grass, Alex was smoking. Maya squinted: Alex was not a smoker. Carefully, expecting it to deliver fresh pain, she pulled on the door handle. The door began to ding, as if responding to an emergency.
The bitter, piney astringency of the air, flecked with something metallic as well as the universal scent of cow shit, walloped her so that she reached out for the frame of the car. She had an afterimage of the road: The drivers were wearing jackets. One face in particular loomed retroactively, which genetics or weather or excessive inebriation had scoured with a supreme network of cross-hatching channels. That face had beamed out its last smile when Maya could walk under a table.
The door dinging, catastrophically urgent, stirred Alex. Maya tried to close the door far enough for the cursed sound to cease but not so hard that she would rouse Max. Alex stiffened as she hobbled toward him.
“It smells like somebody’s poking your heart with a needle,” she said, folding her arms around her chest for warmth, but it was a satisfying coldness, clean and riveting.
“Fall is coming,” he said philosophically.
“You kept going,” she said.
“I wasn’t tired,” he said unpersuasively.
“Under cover of night, you covered as much ground as you could to get this over with sooner.”
He didn’t look up at her, instead working at something in the grass with his foot. Alex had found that, as he became older, people were more willing to take him at his word. He interpreted this as evidence of an increasing substantiveness, a coherence into someone possessed by ideas and opinions that raised no doubts among others. At the office, his father dealt with him as an equal partner, deferring to his views on Turkish versus Georgian kashkaval, and the secretary rushed to address his requests with the slight fearfulness and apology that indicated respect. At home, his mother and father stated their opinions, the former cautiously and the latter insistently, but the decisions were Alex’s. Only his wife strayed from this pattern. Not always, and when she didn’t, he thought of her reserve and cooperation as another benediction of aging, wisdom, maturity. But then the other Maya would come. He wondered if all these things worked differently for women.
They had left Chicago the previous morning after three days of house arrest by Eugene’s older brother Karl and his wife, Dora. Each day, they awoke in a cramped corner bedroom with a low ceiling, were herded into the also low-slung living room — the house, like the woman who ran it, was short and wide, one endless floor-through — and were incarcerated there as one meal turned into another, the holes in conversation filled by the crystal carafe in Karl’s hand and aphorisms he had clipped from the Russian newspaper. Dora occasionally appeared to switch serving plates and immediately vanished back to the kitchen — she seemed unstarved for Karl’s insights — except for a period on Saturday afternoon when she left the house altogether (Alex and Maya gazed at her departing frame longingly) and came back with half a dozen silk shirts for Max and Alex from Marshall’s. Maya wondered why she had been passed over, but eventually decided it was a compliment of sorts — unlike the men, who would wear a burlap sack if it buttoned easily, women could not presume on each other’s behalf.
Maya did not think of her own home as particularly Americanized, but next to Karl and Dora the Rubins were indigenous. In these fifteen hundred square feet of America, the Soviet Union lived on, long after it had exhaled its final breath elsewhere, a hallucinatory enclave where linoleum covered the floor and the wallpaper sagged with a Persian rug. What nation was this? Every evening, Maya and Alex staggered back to their bedroom, bloated on carp and Karl’s wisdom. It bred a beleaguered solidarity between them that had now been destroyed by Alex’s reckless action.
“We were supposed to see places,” Maya said.
“We are supposed to see the parents,” Alex said. The cigarette smoldered in his fingers. Maya, her back to the keening strain of motors from the road, felt that each passing driver was studying the foreign couple off on the shoulder. Studied from both sides, by cowlike humans, and humanlike cows.