Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo E-Book

Boris Fishman

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

'You're the mother. You will raise him as you see fit. But I want to ask you for one thing... Please don't let my baby do rodeo.'Eight-year-old Max has gone missing. Again. His behaviour is a mystery to Maya and Alex, his Russian immigrant parents who adopted him as a baby in America. He has started wandering away from home, talking to wild animals, eating grass, and refusing to sleep in a bed. Can they really raise this feral child?Their uneasy marriage has tamed Maya's free spirit - but when Max is found after his most recent disappearance, she insists that they all drive from New Jersey to the boy's native Montana, to reconnect with his biological family. Maybe it will help them understand his mother's cryptic message?Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo is a beautifully nuanced and poignant novel about adoption, married love, and what it means to truly belong.

Leseprobe

ONE, AN IMPRINT OF PUSHKIN PRESSUS PRAISE FORDON’T LET MY BABY DO RODEO

‘An eloquent and uncynical tale of how far people must travel to find out what they truly want and who they truly are’

Chicago Tribune

‘Fishman describes the turmoil of family, parenthood and cultural emotion with urgent, sly detachment. His language has the originality and imagination of someone who comes to English with unexpected thoughts and rhythms in his head, and is, simply, a joy to read’

New York Times Book Review

‘Fishman smartly observes that the assimilation novel and road-trip novel make good partners. Both, after all, are about finding freedom. A comic novel about parenting infused with emotional intelligence’

Kirkus

‘Touching… a sensitive and surprisingly adventurous exploration of one woman’s wonder and suffering’

Publishers Weekly

‘A writer who knows that familial conflict is the realm of intense feeling packaged in tiny gestures’

O, the Oprah Magazine

‘Fishman is a writer who uses his words with deftness and precision’

Los Angeles Review of Books

‘Fishman’s novel veers from gently, quasi-comical to broad-stroke satirical to earnestly heartfelt… It stretches beyond themes of adaptation to champion the importance of getting in touch with the great wilderness – both in nature and oneself’

Heller McAlpin, NPR

‘A layered story of identity and the challenges of weaving our many differences into compassionate bonds… a nuanced, compassionate novel’

Shelf Awareness

‘A wonderful and quiet look at the eternal question of what it means to belong’

Christian Science Monitor

‘Readers will be left thinking about belonging and family, and how varied the experience is for those born elsewhere’

Booklist

DON’T LET MY BABY DO RODEO

Boris Fishman

For my mother

For West is where we all plan to go some day.… It is where you go to grow up with the country.

—ROBERT PENN WARREN, All the King’s Men

The conquest of the physical world is not man’s only duty. He is also enjoined to conquer the great wilderness of himself.

—JAMES BALDWIN, The Price of the Ticket

Contents

Title PageDedicationEpigraph I East 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9  II West 10 11 12 13 14 15 16  Acknowledgments About the AuthorAbout the PublisherCopyright

I

East

1

2012

Maya had been early to pick up Max the day he didn’t come home with the school bus. Usually she was still powering up Sylvan Gate Drive when the old yellow bus sputtered to its crown, the doors exhaled, and Max tumbled out, always before the Kroon girl because Max always took the front seat. Even in the family Corolla, it was Alex at the wheel, Max in the passenger seat, and Maya in the back. Maya had gathered that the popular children sat back of the bus. She had asked Max once why he wasn’t among them. “There’s too much noise in the back,” he had said, and she had felt a hidden satisfaction at his indifference.

That day, after a week of disabling warmth premature even for New Jersey in June, a note of unhumid reprieve had snuck into the air—Maya had caught it on her drive home from the hospital—and so she had walked out of the town house early. On the rare occasions Alex was home early enough to collect Max, he drove the thousand yards to the head of the drive—Alex enjoyed the very American possibility of this convenience. But Maya walked. She was on her feet all day at the hospital, but she shuttled between three rooms and it was all indoors.

In Kiev, Maya’s mother had always awaited her by the school doors, painted and repainted until they looked like lumpy old women. The walk home was time alone for mother and daughter; by the time they reached their apartment, Maya’s father would already be at the kitchen table slouched over the sports section, the only part of the newspaper where things didn’t have to be perfect. Maya’s mother would begin their walk by asking all the questions a mother was required to ask of a daughter’s school day—even as an eight-year-old, Max’s age, Maya understood this as a formality—but then, after a discreet pause, Galina Shulman would bring her daughter up to date on the indiscreet doings of “the great circus” of their thousand-apartment apartment building.

Maya was exhilarated by these walks for she felt her mother spoke as if Maya was not present, or if she were, then as an equal, a friend, not a daughter to whom convention described responsibilities. So—a silent hello to a woman now five thousand miles away—Maya picked up Max from the school bus. It wasn’t particularly necessary—the danger was not in the distance Max would have to cover down to their town house, but in his time out in the world. But it was Maya’s only time alone with her son. She used it to try to understand why she couldn’t always speak with Max in the same easy, unspooling way her mother had spoken with her. Maya did not have her mother’s imagination; that was part of it, certainly. Nor did she have her mother’s curiosity about her neighbors, though Maya knew that this was a failure of her looking, not their living. But none of that seemed the answer. Maya asked her son about school, questions he answered politely and briefly—she never failed to marvel at the unkinked Russian speech of her not-Russian son—and then both fell silent. All she could think was to take his hand, and he let her hold it. She felt she was failing him in some way. Failing him, and couldn’t say how; she felt thick and graceless.

They had been lucky, the adoption supervisor had kept reminding them, as if he worked on commission. American parents often had to go abroad to find children: Malaysia, Korea, Romania. Bribes, endless waiting, no medical records. Whereas the Rubins got an outright American. Who got an American any longer, and a brand-new baby instead of a child old enough to have been terrorized by somebody else? Maya had the ungrateful thought that she did not want an American: She felt that she would have more to say to a Romanian child. In the sleepless hold of another interminable night, she had shaken awake Alex and said so. He closed his fingertips around the knob of her shoulder, as if she were a loose lightbulb: “He’s a newborn. Was New Jersey familiar to you when you moved here? This house? But now it’s all home.” He turned onto his side, cupped one of her breasts from behind, and said: “Sleep, Maya—please.”