A Gate at the Stairs

by Lorrie Moore

  Inside the house Sarah headed for the dining room, turning on two small lamps as she went. Edward placed the sleeping Mary-Emma on the table, still in her seat, her snowsuited legs and arms dangling off, her chin sunk into her collar. She’d had a big day, whether she knew it or not.

  “Well,” said Sarah, looking at her.

  “Yes, well,” said Edward.

  Sarah was still wearing her yarn cap with the earflaps and the dangling pom-pom ties, and she took the right pom-pom and tossed it around her head like a tether ball. It made a muffled cable-knit thwack against her head. “Now what?” she said.

  We all might have burst into hysterical laughter, and we probably would have if a sleeping child weren’t propped in the middle of the dining room table, next to two candlesticks, a Stengel sugar bowl, and some salt and pepper shakers. Adoption, I could see, was a lot like childbirth: Here she is! everyone exclaimed. And you looked and saw a pickled piglet and felt nothing, not realizing it would be the only time you would ever feel nothing again. A baby destroyed a life and thereby became the very best thing in it. Though to sit gloriously and triumphantly in ruins may not be such a big trick.

  “Well, I should take Tassie home, is what,” said Edward.

  “And leave me here all alone?” Sarah said in mock terror, still in her goofy hat. “You must be joking.” She clutched his sleeve.

  “You must be joking,” said Edward.

  “I am. I’m joking,” said Sarah.

  Sort of, I thought. And then she said it herself.

  “Sort of.” She smiled. There was a flash of mutual disgust between them.

  Then Edward drove me back to my apartment. “Thank you for helping us on this very complex mission.”

  “You’re very welcome,” I said. What else was there to say?

  “We’ll see you in a couple of days. I’m sure Sarah will phone very soon.”

  “Sounds good,” I sang out into the dark of the car. Sounds good, that same midwestern girl’s slightly frightened reply. It appeared to clinch a deal, and was meant to sound the same as the more soldierly Good to go, except it was promiseless—mere affirmative description. It got you away, out the door. Once again.

  IV

  Classes did not start until the following week. But nonetheless I could feel the semester winding itself up as if with the hand crank of a Gatling gun, readying itself for unleashing. The spring semester! It was both aptly and inaptly named. Since it had not yet officially begun, I slept until noon, then woke and made a sad little breakfast of poor man’s baklava: a large biscuit of shredded wheat with honey poured over and chopped peanuts sprinkled on top. The kitchen was still in its state of neglect. More strawberries in the refrigerator, which it seemed I had only just bought, had once again withered, turned this time the turquoise-gray of a copper roof. The bread, too, had a powdery blue mold that would have made a lovely eyeshadow for a showgirl—perhaps one who also needed the penicillin. The heel end of another loaf, weeks old, was sitting on the counter in a plastic bag with what looked like a snake inside: a coil of mold with orange and black markings. It was the Frugal Girls’ Museum of Modern Art.

  The landlord had returned to not stinting too badly on the heat. Happiness. In the mail a check came from Sarah for three hundred dollars—it seemed both too much and too little, but I did not actually bother to calculate the hours and what the pay should have come to. I went to the bank and deposited the check and took back a hundred of it in twenties to spend on new books and food. I sat in my apartment with the most inane sorts of magazines, all left there by Murph, which I read with an avidity and dementia typically brought on by hair salons and winter. “Four Things Men Find Hot.” I could never find all four—they were seldom listed numerically or in a conspicuous place. Once you had the magazine open, you had to dig around among the ads (which was their ploy), trying to find them scattered there, and even when you did they were always in slight disguise. Clearly no one at any of these magazines knew for sure what men found hot, though they were hoping you would believe they did. Or maybe everyone at these New York City magazines knew only gay men, and so the things they knew that men found hot they were afraid to actually tell their readers.

  Surprise seemed a theme.

  As did things with food.

  As for the clothing depicted in these pages, I was at a bored loss. It seemed uncool to spend that much money to look like an experimental cake. What would be cool was something different: more murderous, and not depictable. From what I could see, the best look would involve not just something new, but something with insouciant jewelry and ominous leather goods denouncing something old that lay deep within yourself and others. Probably I would never accomplish this. Without explicit instruction I had no feel or instinct, at least not for the new part. I felt, however, that if called upon, I could do the other part—denunciation—but privately. Privately part cool, since I partook of denouncing (silently, violently) all the time.

  For several days I let drift take over me. I turned on my computer and aimlessly roamed the Internet. I would click this and then that and pretty soon I was looking at stock car racing or Demi Moore’s bare pre-op breasts. A billion ads for herbal remedies and computer security systems flew onto the screen. I took on-screen Oscar quizzes. I googled old friends from elementary school. Nothing. I googled Lynette McKowen. Nothing. I googled Bonnie Jankling Crowe, whose full name I now knew—illegally. Nothing again. I went back to Demi Moore’s bare pre-op breasts and wondered about the half-life of regret.

  When I went to bed at night I suffered my first bout of insomnia. This is what death would be like, I feared: not sleep but insomnia. To sleep no more, as I had learned in Pre-1700 British Drama. I had never feared insomnia before—like prison, wouldn’t it just give you more time to read? I’d always been able to sleep. But now I lay there, fretful as a Bartók quartet. My mind wandered through the night hours uneasily, and it was indeed like prison: when the sky began to lighten, I was in disbelief and filled with terrible, buzzing tiredness.

  Once I woke with the feeling that I had actually died in the night. I awoke with a sense that during ostensible sleep I had encountered not just life’s brevity but its speed! and its noise and its irrelevance and its close. How we glamorized our lives! our bodies! which were nothing more than—potatoes! with a potato’s flat eyes and pale pink snappable roots. I lay there in bed in a peaceful form of depression. In another town, one less antagonistic toward religion, this mood—pre-prayer, pre-God, pre-conversion—might have been assigned some spiritual significance. But for people in Troy, God was mind-clutter: a cross between a billboard, a charlatan, a hamburger, and a fairy king. I had always thought God was part of a sensible if credulous denial of death, one that made life doable. How could that be wicked? Why bother criticizing that? Why disparage the crutches of the lame? Why vainly imagine one’s own gait unhobbled? Besides, religion gave us swearing. Before Christianity, what was there? “By Jove”? But life in Troy was to be taken without any lucky charms of any sort. It was neo-reformation. The walls of my winter room seemed a silvery, quilted satin, like the interior of a coffin. I began to feel there was no such thing as wisdom. Only lack of wisdom.

  Finally, Sarah phoned. “Tassie, how are you—it’s been days!”

  “Days and nights,” I said stupidly.

  “I’ll say,” she said. “Poor Emmie sobbed for two nights. She’d wake up at three in the morning and just cry and cry, poor thing. She would look out into the dark of her new room and just not know where she was. I would just take her and rock her back to sleep. But now I think she does understand and she seems to have settled right in. I am wondering whether you are free this afternoon? It’s time for me to check back in on my maniac restaurant and see how it’s doing.”

  “Is Emmie her name now?” This seemed strange.

  Sarah paused. “Well, we found ourselves using her initials right away—M.E.—and before we knew it, well, there we were with Emmie. It suits her, I think.” />
  “Does she still respond to Mary?” I asked, having no common sense.

  “Well, I don’t really know,” said Sarah.

  I did not mind the walk to their house. I walked briskly for the first time in days. The stadium in its arc was like a frozen tidal wave outside my apartment. The cold knocked the sleepiness from my head as well as my days-long, tortured hallucination of deep existential vision. The sky was partly clear, with ballooning clouds floating absurdly above, as if for a party that had yet to begin. Low on the horizon there were different clouds, like old plowed snow at the end of a street. I was like every kid who had grown up in the country, allowing the weather—good or bad—to describe life for me: its mocking, its magic, its contradictions, its moody grip. Why not? One was helpless before everything.

  In the front of the house the gate at the stairs was still broken. I slipped through and on up to the porch. When I rang the doorbell no one came, and so I knocked with my knuckles on the glass pane of the thick wood door. Sarah opened it dressed in the Madame Curie look I soon learned she favored: a white lab-style coat and black tights. Her matte red lipstick lent a kind of movie version air of Madame: hard crimson elegance in the riverbed cracks of her lips. She didn’t want to look like the other chefs in town, with their country-hippie garb, scarves, and flowery print shirts. A restaurant was a science, she would tell me, not a square dance. Perhaps that was where she got it wrong.

  “Here, come try this,” she said, leading me into the kitchen. The appliances there were of the mammoth stainless steel variety that one did not yet see in Dellacrosse except in the back rooms of feed stores and supermarkets. The cold gray metal of the stove and refrigerator I knew was supposed to be chic, but I preferred the old avocado green of home (not yet a song). On the gleaming stove was a skillet of a paler metal, like white gold. In it were some silvered leaves. She picked one out with her fingers and presented it. I placed it in my mouth, where it seemed to melt slightly and then not, hanging on with a woody toughness. The flavors were a mix of candy store and forest.

  “What is it?” I asked, still chewing.

  “Carmelized sage.” She looked at me hopefully.

  “Awesome,” I said, and meant the word in its every meaning.

  Sarah beamed. “There’s a direct path between earth and heaven, and that is caramel,” she said. “Add a few grains of hand-raked Norman sea salt—and voilà!”

  So this is what Americans were busying themselves with in Normandy now that it had been liberated from the Nazis: hand-raking the sea salt. Soldiers’ tears shipped thousands of miles and sprinkled on a fried leaf. Look D-Day in the eye and tell it that!

  “Delicious. Am I the first customer?”

  “You are,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Mind?—”

  “Oops—and I forgot about these.” She opened the oven and with a terry-cloth potholder took out a couple of picture books. “These are from the library. I baked them to get rid of the germs. I always do that with library books. I’m told you can microwave the germs out, but I don’t completely trust that.”

  I looked at the titles: Lentil and Make Way for Ducklings.

  “I love these books … these were my favorites growing up. When I opened my first restaurant in Boston I called it Make Way for Duckling.” Here she shrugged. “It was not a success,” she said ruefully.

  “Perhaps you should have gone with Lentil,” I suggested.

  She smiled. “Actually, I did. I tried that one next.”

  “Oh,” I said, a little startled. “Well, how about Blueberries for Sal?”

  “You don’t want to know,” she said.

  “Or, well, maybe just McCloskey’s.”

  “That one I managed to avoid. But just barely.”

  “Well, at least you steered clear of The Cat in the Hat.”

  “Emmie is sleeping,” Sarah interrupted in a hushed way. “The nursery’s on the third floor—former attic, but you should be able to hear her when she cries. The acoustics are such that sound carries up and down the stairs as well as through the laundry chute. Unless the doorbell woke her, she’ll be up in an hour, I’m sure. She’s way too old for a morning nap, but last night was not so good, so I’m letting her sleep.” I tried not to take personally what I felt was the slight reprimand of “unless the doorbell woke her.” “Perhaps I should get one of those signs that say NIGHT WORKER, DAY SLEEPER,” she said, smiling. “Also, I’m going to give you a key. You should feel free just to come in. In fact?” And here she walked briskly across the room and opened a drawer full of junk—extension cords, pliers, batteries, appliance warranties—and fished out a key, which she handed me. “This will get you through the front door, darlin’,” she said in some sort of put-on voice, perhaps a line from a movie I’d never seen. That it was accompanied by a wink was intended to help me understand, though it didn’t.

  She put on not her shearling coat, and not her peacoat, but some long wool jacket, with the fuzzy, tight black-and-white tweed of television static. She lassoed a cashmere scarf into a coil around her neck. “Off to the Mill!” she said. “I’m afraid it’s falling apart. Two platings and one small fire—just last night.” She smiled grimly. The spell cast by carmelized sage and its stairway to heaven was now gone.

  “What’s a plating?” I asked.

  “Oh, it’s like an ancient Scots-Irish temper tantrum. One of the cooks throws the other cook’s plate onto the floor. You know, my father was Jewish, so I’m half Jewish—”

  “So am I!” I burst forth, as if we were random transplants from the farthest reaches of Sri Lanka. I’d never met anyone half Jewish before, and for some reason it excited me: a peculiar but benign hybrid is what I felt like, and it seemed fantastic to know of someone else freakishly, well, neutered in exactly this same way.

  “Really,” she said, unimpressed. Perhaps she’d known a thousand half-Jews. “Maybe that’s why I took to you.” She smiled one of those flashed-on-flashed-off smiles. “But it’s my impression that Jews don’t act this way. Jews don’t plate. They’re above these particular things. And so they succeed.” She scratched her neck. “But my mother was a Christian and so I was raised a Christian. My whole life, as a result? I’ve been around losers. ‘Let the losers come unto me,’ said Jesus. And they came. The worst are Protestants who behave like Catholics and the best are Catholics who behave like Protestants.”

  These words stunned me. “Actually, Jesus said, ‘Let the children come unto me,’” I said. I was surprised at my own feelings. I was surprised to hear myself say this. I had just a split second ago been so happy to be part Jewish. Whence the Christian pedantry? I was perhaps a little fresh from Christmas.

  “Yes, well, whatever. The children didn’t come unto me.” She paused, collecting herself. There was a kind of jolly bristle in the air.

  “Except the one upstairs,” I reminded her, and tried to give her a forced but hopeful smile.

  “Yes, that’s right,” she said, adding, “I’ve left all the instructions on the counter. And you’ll need to be watchful with that baby gate upstairs. I don’t want her tumbling down. Or you tumbling up!” Then she paused. We stand there blank as walls. “Baby-gate! Now there’s a scandal. You’re so young, I’ll bet you don’t even know how the word gate came to mean disgrace.”

  “Watergate,” I said, though I wasn’t positive.

  “Well, that’s right! Though that was well before you were born.”

  “A lot of interesting things were.”

  “Yes. Well. Oh! Besides the plating we did have one good thing last night: a winter minestrone made with heirloom beans and your father’s fingerlings. A big hit.”

  I smiled agreeably, but I couldn’t imagine those potatoes sitting in soup. As if she could read my mind, Sarah said, “We sliced them. Right at their bumpy little knuckles.”

  It was a brutal thing, food.

  “Everyone loved it. Oh, before I forget,” she added. “There’s ipecac in the cupboard
next to the sink. I’m not even sure how you use it—it’s for situations where poison is swallowed. A woman down the street said, ‘You’re adopting?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, what do I need?’ And she said, ‘Ipecac.’ And I said, ‘That’s it?’ and she said, ‘That’s all I know.’ So now that’s all I know.” Here Sarah looked at me mischievously, her look a complicated room one might wander through, exploring for quite some time if there were any time. “If anything goes wrong, whatever the hell you do, don’t phone me. I’ve left a number for emergencies. It’s 911.” She smiled.

  “I’ll dial the paramedics directly,” I said, smiling in return.

  “Thatta girl. Sorry I have to rush. They are burning the herbal holiday centerpieces as I speak and smoking fish over them.” She hurried out the back door.

  I could hear her car start up and drive away. But then suddenly she was back—the car, the clamber up the stairs, the bursting return through the back door. “I forgot something,” she said, and stepped over to the counter, opened a drawer, and grabbed a kitchen knife, which she stuck gleefully in her leather bag. “A concealed weapon, or a chef’s tool? Who can say? Already, driving around in winter with a shovel in my car makes me feel like a serial killer.” Then she flew off again.

  The instructions, typed and printed out from a computer, were slid into a book entitled Your Baby and Child. I took them both into the living room, where I sat on one of the pillow-ticking sofas, flipping through the pages of the book first. I looked at the chapter “Older Babies” and noted boldfaced headings such as “Beware of lightweight carriages” and “Don’t try to keep your baby clean.” I would have gotten both these things wrong. Treat him like a manual laborer. Skin is the most washable material of any in your house. The advice seemed counterintuitive and random, as if it had said, Whack him along the the neck with scarlet mittens from Belgium. Sarah’s pages seemed sane by comparison. Tassie, When Emmie gets up you will know: she whimpers then goes into a full cry. Reintroduce yourself to her. The changing table is right there in her room (where the crying will be coming from). All the changing supplies are on the shelf. There are sippy cups for milk and juice in the kitchen and she can have whatever she wants to eat—that is, whatever you can find. Sane except for this part: I have arranged for some risotto to be FedExed to her but I will also bring her something home from the kitchen tonight.