A Gate at the Stairs

by Lorrie Moore

  She led me into the living room, stopping at the large back window first. I followed her, tried to do what she did. In the yard most of a large oak tree split by lightning had been hacked and stacked by the garage for winter firewood. Near its old stump another tree—tenuous, young, with the look of a swizzle stick—had been planted, trussed, and braced. But Sarah was not studying the trees. “Oh, for the love of God, look at these poor dogs,” she said. We stood there, watching. The dogs next door were being kept in the yard by an invisible electric fence. One of them, a German shepherd, understood the fence, but the other one, a little terrier, did not. The German shepherd would get a game of chase going around the yard and lead the terrier right to the electrified border and then stop short, leaving the terrier to barrel on ahead into the electricity. The stunned terrier would then come racing back, shrieking with pain. This amused the German shepherd, who continued to do this, and the shocked terrier, desperate for play, would forget, and get started again, and barrel on into the electricity again, yowling. “This has been going on for weeks,” said Sarah.

  “Reminds me of dating,” I said, and Sarah spun her head, to size me up again. I could see now that she was at least two inches taller than I was; I could peer up her nostrils, the weave of tiny hairs like the crisscross of branches seen from the base of a tree. She smiled, which pushed her cheeks out and made the blush beneath them look shadowy and wrong. Heat flew to my face. Dating? What did I know of it? My roommate, Murph, had done all the dating and had essentially abandoned me so that she could now sleep every night with this new guy she’d met. She had bequeathed me her vibrator, a strange swirling, buzzing thing that when switched to high gyrated in the air like someone’s bored thick finger going whoop-dee-doo. Whose penis could this possibly resemble? Someone who had worked in a circus, perhaps! Maybe Burt Lancaster’s in Trapeze. I kept the thing on the kitchen counter where Murph had left it for me and occasionally I used it to stir my chocolate milk. I had once actually gone out on a date—last year—and I had prepared for it by falling into a trance in a lingerie store and buying a forty-five-dollar black Taiwanese bra padded with oil and water pouches, articulated with wire, lifelike to the touch, a complete bosom entirely on its own, independent of any wearer, and which when fastened to my particular chest looked like a dark animal strapped there to nurse. I was filled with a pleasing floating feeling while wearing it; I felt heated and sacrificial, and so I imagined it improved my chances in the world, my own actual bust having been left (I once joked) on a plinth in the basement of the Dellacrosse library, the better to free my spine for erect walking.

  All that preparation was the futile preening of a fly: my poor date cleared his throat and told me he was gay. We lay there together on my bed, only partially disrobed, our black underwear misadvertising our experience. His back was full of rosy pimples: “bacne,” he’d called it. I rubbed my fingertips across it, a kind of Braille, its message one of creaturely energy and worry. “Queer as Dick’s hatband,” he announced into the room, candor—or a pretense to candor—being the cheapest and most efficient assault on hope (a hope, I had to admit, that had, to use my dad’s expression, gilded its own lily-liver and become an expectation). “Dick’s hatband?” I’d repeated, staring at the ceiling. I had no idea what that meant. I thought mutely and appallingly of the band on a hat that Dick Hickock might wear. We’d stayed up for an hour after his confession, both of us trembling and teary, and then got up and for some reason decided to make a cake. We had wanted to have sex but ended up baking a cake? “I really, really like you so much,” I said when the cake was done, and when he said nothing in reply, a hard, stubborn silence entered the room and reverberated as if it were a sound. I said awkwardly, “Is there an echo in here?”

  And he looked at me pitifully and said, “Well, I wish there were, but there’s not.” Then he went into the bathroom and came out wearing all my makeup, which for some reason made me believe he had lied about being gay. “You know,” I said, testing him, but mostly pleading, “if you concentrated you could be straight. I’m sure of it. Just relax, close your eyes once in a while, and just do it. Heterosexuality—well, it takes a lot of concentration!” I said, a begging sound in my voice. “It takes a lot for everybody!”

  “It may take more than I have,” he said. I made him coffee—he asked for cream, and then cold cream and then paper towels—and then he left, taking a slice of warm cake with him. I never saw him again, except once, briefly, from across the street when I was walking to class. He had shaved his head and was wearing thick violet boots and no raincoat in the rain. He walked in a bouncy zigzag movement, as if avoiding sniper fire. He was with a woman who was more than six feet tall and had an Adam’s apple the size of a small swallowed fist. A long scarf—whose was it? I couldn’t tell; at points it seemed to belong to them both—flew exuberantly behind them like the tail of a kite.

  Now Sarah turned back to the window. “The neighbors just put in that invisible fence,” she said. “In November. I’m sure it causes MS or something.”

  “Who are they?” I asked. “The neighbors, I mean.” I would show some anthropological interest in the neighborhood. No one I’d interviewed with had yet called me back. Perhaps they’d desired a lively take-charge type and I’d seemed dull, slow to get involved. It had started to worry me that if I wasn’t careful my meekness could become a habit, a tic, something hardwired that my mannerisms would continue to express throughout my life regardless of my efforts—the way a drunk who, though on the wagon, still staggers and slurs like a drunk.

  “The neighbors?” Sarah Brink’s face brightened artificially, her eyes wide. Her voice went flat and stagey. “Well, in that there dog house there’s Catherine Welbourne and her husband, Stuart, and Stuart’s lover, Michael Batt. The Welbournes and the Batts. Who could make up these names?”

  “So—Michael’s gay?” I said, perhaps now showing too much interest.

  “Well, yes,” said Sarah. “Much is made of Michael’s being gay. ‘Michael’s gay,’ the neighbors whisper, ‘Michael’s gay. Michael’s gay,’ Well, yes, Michael’s gay. But of course the thing is, Stuart’s gay.” Sarah’s eyes looked merry and bright—the frantic but pleased cheap sparkle of Christmas dreck.

  I cleared my throat. “And what does Catherine think of all this?” I ventured. I tried to smile.

  “Catherine.” Sarah sighed and moved away from the window. “Catherine, Catherine. Well, Catherine spends a lot of time in her room, listening to Erik Satie. The beard, poor thing, is always the last to know. But look.” She wanted to change the subject now, get down to business. “Have a seat. Here’s the deal.” She motioned with an arm tossed suddenly out in a spasm. “Childcare,” she seemed to begin, but then stopped, as if that were sufficient.

  I sat down on a small sofa that was upholstered in a kind of pillow ticking. Childcare, like healthcare, had become one word. I would become a dispenser of it. I opened my backpack and began fumbling through it, looking for a copy of my résumé. Sarah sat across from me on another pillow-ticking sofa, the very brightness of her looking as if it might stain the cushions. She twisted her legs up and around each other in such a way that the lower half of one gave the illusion of jutting out of the upper half of the other, as if she had the backwards knees of a crane. She began clearing her throat, so I stopped fumbling and set the backpack aside.

  “Already the winter air is getting to me,” she said. She turned and coughed again loudly, in that parched fashion that doctors call “unproductive.” She patted her flat stomach. “Here’s the deal,” she said again. “We are adopting.”

  “Adopting?”

  “A baby. We are adopting a baby in two weeks. That’s why we’re advertising for a sitter. We’d like to line someone up ahead of time for some regular hours.”

  I didn’t know anything about adoption. I’d known only one adopted girl when I was growing up, Becky Sussluch, spoiled and beautiful and at sixteen having an affair with a mussed and handsome stude
nt teacher that I myself had a crush on. In general I thought of adoption much as I thought of most things in life: uneasily. Adoption seemed both a cruel joke and a lovely daydream—a nice way of avoiding the blood and pain of giving birth, or, from a child’s perspective, a realized fantasy of your parents not really being your parents. Your genes could thrust one arm in the air and pump up and down. Yes! You were not actually related to Them! Strangely, at the stamp machine at the post office, I had recently bought the newly issued adoption postage stamps—Adopt a Child, Build a Family, Create a World—and gleefully adhered them to my letters home to my mother. It was a form of malice I felt entitled to. It was quiet and deniable.

  “Congratulations,” I murmured now to Sarah. Was that what one said?

  Sarah’s face lit up gratefully, as if no one had yet said an encouraging word to her on the matter. “Why, thank you! I have so much work at the restaurant that everyone I mention this to acts peculiar and quiet, so meanly worried for me. They say, ‘Really!’ and then all this tension springs to their mouth. They think I’m too old.”

  I accidentally nodded. I had no idea, conversationally, where we were. I searched, as I too often found myself having to do, to find a language, or even an octave, in which to speak. I wondered how old she was.

  “I own Le Petit Moulin,” Sarah Brink added.

  Le Petit Moulin. I knew of it a little. It was one of those expensive restaurants downtown, every entree freshly hairy with dill, every soup and dessert dripped upon as preciously as a Pollock, filets and cutlets sprinkled with lavender dust once owned by pixies, restaurants to which students never went, except if newly pinned to a fraternity boy or dating an assistant dean or hosting a visit from their concerned suburban parents. I knew Le Petit Moulin served things that sounded like instruments—timbales, quenelles—God only knew what they were. I had once tried to study the menu in the lit window near the entrance, and as I stared at the words, the sting of my own exile had moistened my eyes. It was a restaurant that probably served my father’s potatoes, though my father would not have been able to go in. The lowest price for dinner was twenty-two dollars, the highest, forty-five. Forty-five! You could get an oil-and-water bra for that price!

  I fumbled in my bag again for my résumé, and found it folded and bent but handed it to Sarah anyway. I spoke. “My father supplied a few of the restaurants around here. A few years back it was, I think.”

  Sarah Brink looked at my résumé. “Are you related to Bo Keltjin—Keltjin potatoes?”

  It startled me to hear my father’s potatoes—Kennebecs, Norlands, Pontiacs, Yukon golds, some the size of marbles, some grapefruits, depending on drought and digging times and what the beetles were up to—all summed up and uttered that way right here in her living room. “That’s my dad,” I said.

  “Why, I remember your father very well. His Klamath pearls were famous. Also the yellow fingerlings. And his purple Peruvians and Rose Finns were the first to be sold in those little netted berry pints, like jewels. And those new potatoes he called ‘Keltjin duck eggs.’ I had a theory about those.”

  I nodded. Returning from his English honeymoon with my mom, my father had actually smuggled a many-eyed jersey royal straight through Chicago customs, and upon returning to Dellacrosse, he’d grown them in pots and troughs in the barn in winter and in the ground in spring and sold them to restaurants as “duck eggs.”

  “I’d rush out to the farmers’ market at six a.m. to get them. Come April, I should put those back on the menu.” She was getting dreamy. Still, it was nice to hear my father spoken well of. He was not really respected as a farmer back home: he was a hobbyist, a truck farmer, with no real acreage, just some ducks (who every fall raped one another in a brutal fashion we never got used to), a dog, a tractor, a website (a website, for Christ’s sake!), and two decorative, brockle-headed cows of dubious dairiness. (They were named Bess and Guess, or Milk and Manure, according to my dad, and he would not let them trample the stream banks the way most of the farmers around us did with their cows. I had once milked Bess, carefully cutting my fingernails beforehand, so as not to hurt her; the intimate feel of her lavender-veined and hairy breasts had almost made me puke. “All right, you don’t have to do that again,” my dad had said. What kind of farmer’s daughter was I? I’d leaned my forehead against Bess’s side to steady myself, and the sudden warmth, along with my own queasiness, made me feel I loved her.) We had also once had an ebullient pig named Helen, who would come when you called her name and smiled like a dolphin when you spoke to her. And then we didn’t see her for a few days, and one morning over bacon and eggs, my brother said, “Is this Helen?” I dropped my fork and cried, “This is Helen? Is this Helen?!” and my mother, too, stopped eating and looked hard at my father: “Bo, is this Helen?” The next pig we got we never met and its name was #WK3746. Later we got a sweet but skittish goat named Lucy, who, sometimes along with our dog, Blot, traipsed around the yard, free as a bird.

  My dad was chastened down at the Farm & Fleet for having only a few of the props. His farm was a mere kitchen garden that had gotten slightly out of hand—and only slightly. And he had painted his barn not the cheap, blood-camouflaging red of the country (which against the green fields and shrubs reminded my mother too much of Christmas) but blue and white like the sky, the silliness of which was spoken of often in the county feed shops. (Though these colors pleased my mother, I supposed, with their reminders of Hanukkah and Israel, though she professed to despise both. My mother’s capacity for happiness was a small soup bone salting a large pot.) Plus, our farmhouse was too fancy by local standards—cream city brick mixed in with chicago to form a pattern of gold and dusky rose, with the mansard roof of an affluent farmer, though my father wasn’t one. The dentals on the soffits my father sometimes painted brown or orange or sometimes a lurid violet—he altered their color every other summer. What was he, “some pillow biter from the Minnesota Ballet”? He sometimes pretended to be deaf and carried on with his own sense of humor and purpose. He had added a family room by hand, in the green way, the first in the county, and he mixed his own earthen plaster and hand-troweled it onto some wired bales of hay stuffed between the beams. The neighbors were not impressed: “I’ll be damned. Bo’s gone and built a mud and straw hut and he’s attached it to his damn house.” The sills were limestone, but reconstituted, and so they were just poured in. He was seldom deterred. He loved his old blue dairy barn with its rusty pails never thrown away and its adjacent stream that could still cool milk and which ran down to a small fish hatchery. He had a woodlot and few tillable fields. It was simple hill farming, really, but to the locals he seemed a vaguely contemptuous character, very out-of-town. His idiosyncracies appeared to others to go beyond issues of social authenticity and got into questions of God and man and existence. My father tried not to use hybrid seeds—wouldn’t even plant burpless cukes—and so his lettuce bolted early. Perhaps this seemed hilarious—along with the low acreage, even lower attendance at church suppers and county fairs, plus an eccentric spouse of indeterminate ethnicity who slept too late for a farmer’s wife and did not keep herself busy enough with chores. (My mother laid full-length mirrors on their sides in the back of the flowerbeds to double the look if not the actual volume of her gardening.) Worse than farming out of a book, my father seemed to be farming out of a magazine article: the ginseng farmers were held in higher esteem. Still, he would try to ingratiate himself—plant a small field of decoy soy to enliven the soil and lure the pests over from the neighbors’ alfalfa, help them out a little. He rotated crops, not just for soil but in a fun game to confuse the enemy: if one year one put wheat in where the potatoes were and put the potatoes where the soy was, one seldom got borers. Or, one got bored borers—incapable of the excitement required to track down a snack. Our soil looked chocolatey and had structure, like wine, whereas the Atrazined dirt of our neighbors was often a sad heap of dry gray clods. My dad was local and green and organic and correctly slow but had years ago refus
ed to be bought up by any of the organic cooperatives who were buying up the old truck farms. This just isolated him further. He was known as a Tofu Tom, or Bo the Tofu Prince, or sometimes just “Bofu,” even though he grew potatoes.

  “Yeah, his potatoes have a rep—at least in certain places,” I hastened to add. “Even my mother admires them, and she is hard to please. She once said they were ‘heaven-sent’ and used to call them pommes de terres de l’air.” Now I was just plain talking too much.

  “That’s funny,” said Sarah.

  “Yeah. She felt no name existed that accurately described them.”

  “She was probably right. That’s interesting.”

  I feared Sarah was one of those women who instead of laughing said, “That’s funny,” or instead of smiling said, “That’s interesting,” or instead of saying, “You are a stupid blithering idiot,” said, “Well, I think it’s a little more complicated than that.” I never knew what to do around such people, especially the ones who after you spoke liked to say, enigmatically, “I see.” Usually I just went mute.

  “You know, Joan of Arc’s father grew potatoes,” Sarah now said. “It was in her father’s potato fields that she first heard voices. There’re some legendary potatoes for you.”

  “I can understand that. I’ve heard voices myself in my father’s fields,” I said. “But it’s usually just my brother’s boom box clamped on the back of his tractor.”

  Sarah nodded. I could not make her laugh. Probably I was just not funny. “Does your father ever grow yams?” she asked.

  Yams! With their little rat tails and their scandalous place in contemporary art, about which I’d read just last year. “No,” I said. I feared, as interviews went, I was in freefall. I wasn’t sure why either of us was saying what we were saying. “Potatoes are grown from the eyes of other potatoes,” I said, apropos of God knows what.

  “Yes.” Sarah looked at me searchingly.