A Gate at the Stairs

by Lorrie Moore

  Classes began in a deep cold spell, a high of one-below for the week. This was more like the winter weather of memory. Cold burst into the room from a mere open kitchen drawer, forks and knives piled like icicles. Our landlord’s generous heat was nothing in the face of this. The stem of the doorknobs on the front door conducted the cold from outside so that even the inside knob froze the hand. Cold air seeped through the slits of the electrical sockets. Clothing pulled from the closet was chilly, and in the basement laundry room of our apartment house clothes that did not dry completely in the dryer emerged white with frost. A glass of water put on the nightstand at night might be ice by morning. One looked out through the window, when one could, through pointed icicles that were like the incisors of a shark; it was as if one were living in the cold, dead mouth of a very mean snowman. Kay, the woman upstairs who had no life, decided as an experiment to throw boiling water off the upstairs back porch. She let us know by paper notice slid under our doors that this would happen at eleven a.m. on Monday, and so the rest of us gathered and watched it hit the air in silence and come down as slow, quiet steam and slush. We’d been told it would turn instantly to pellets midair, but perhaps something in the water—chlorine, or the salts of the water softener—kept it from doing that. On the street, the wind was so bitter, it seemed to bypass cold and become heat. Breathing burned the nostrils. Cars on every block wheezed and gagged and would not start. The combination of the cold weather and dry indoor heating had caused the longer nails on my picking hand to weaken, crack, and break beneath the quick, stabbing the pink hammy skin below, so that my fingers bled and I had to bandage them before I went out.

  And then it warmed just enough for a blizzard, followed by another, as if the prairie were in a hiccup. Winds howled in the chimneys and under eaves, knocking ice blocks from the roof. And then when the air was finally still, a stupor descended, induced by accumulated snowdrifts, which were banked against the sides of houses like a comforter thrown over to calm an agitated dog. There was in the air a cold resignation good for reading.

  My Intro to Sufism was taught by a self-described “Ottomanist,” which made me think of someone lying back with his feet up on a padded footstool, with a remote, in autumn. He looked charmingly rattled and had his arm in a sling. He was Irish, and he spoke in the airy r’s and staccato of County Brokencanencork, as Murph liked to refer to the entire country of her forebears. “For those of you who are in any way concerned about my teaching the class,” said the professor, “believe me: I know more about this topic than anyone in this department. And for those of you concerned about my teaching while on painkillers for my arm, believe me: I also know more about teaching while high than anyone else in this department.”

  I sat next to a tall, handsome brown-skinned boy, who smiled at me and then sent me a note, as if we were in high school. What am I doing in this class? he wrote. I am Brazilian. What are you?

  I didn’t know what I was in this particular context. I wrote back on his sheet of paper, I am a quasi Jew. What am I doing here?

  I don’t know, he wrote back.

  In capital letters I wrote, WHAT IS THE BEST WAY TO KILL MYSELF? WOULD A PEN TO THE NECK BE QUICK? Then passed it back.

  He read it and beamed, smothering a laugh that brought forth a slight snort. The professor, who was speaking, looked glancingly in our direction and then away. The boy next to me wrote in all capital letters: YOU DEFINITELY SHOULD NOT BE IN THIS CLASS.

  I’m not sure what Sufism is, I wrote back. I slid him the paper.

  I’M NOT SURE WHAT WINTER IS, he wrote once more in all caps.

  Welcome, I scrawled. Usually it’s not this warm—a reversal of the old local joke. Usually it’s not this cold, we used to say to visitors during a midwinter thaw.

  WHAT???!!!!! he wrote with great energy.

  I feel that mysticism isn’t really happening here in this course, I wrote.

  IT ISN’T.

  Are you quasi mystic? I wrote.

  I’M PESSI-MYSTIC, he wrote back, AND OPTI-MYSTIC. BOTH.

  After class, I went home and with my earphones on picked around on my electric bass, pressing my fingers into the steel strings, toughening my calluses. I loved “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” which I referred to as “Mozart.” I played and sang aloud over and over again the line “How I wonder what you are,” which without any audible accompaniment, to Kay-with-no-life upstairs, I knew sounded like the mad howling of a simultaneously sexed-up and brutally injured alley cat. She had already told me this. Honoring the classics, I apparently nonetheless sounded undone in agony. When I felt finished, when I felt expressed and spent, I found an old pack of Murph’s Marlboros and smoked one in front of the bathroom mirror, blowing the smoke up and out, and turning my head slowly this way and that as I did. In the dim lights I did not look so bad.

  Sarah and I made one trip to the courthouse, to pick up copies of the provisional adoption papers from the judge’s office. After six months they would be signed and Mary-Emma would officially be Sarah’s. And Edward’s. Until then she was in their foster care. On our way in we passed a bench in the corridor on which sat a row of young boys awaiting hearings of various sorts. Some of the boys were as young as nine. They were all black. We carried Mary-Emma past them and they all looked at her and she at them, everyone entranced and baffled. In the judge’s office the clerk and envelope were waiting for us. Sarah took the envelope with a smile. “Is this your other daughter?” the clerk said of me.

  “Twenty’s a cute age,” Sarah said to me later in the car home.

  Once she and Edward asked me to stay overnight, like a bona fide nanny, and I said OK. They were going to have a date night together and would be out late, so my just staying over would be the most civilized thing. This worry about civilization seemed tardy for just about everyone. “Sure,” I said.

  When I arrived for their Saturday-night date, Sarah said to me, “Don’t be afraid to rock Emma against your bare skin. Breast to cheek, belly to belly. I do it all the time. It soothes adopted children who haven’t been genuinely nursed.”

  “OK,” I said.

  “It’s a good thing you’re not actually nursing,” Edward said to Sarah. “You’d probably try to make a cheese.”

  Sarah rolled her eyes. “He keeps thinking I’d make some boutique cheese!”

  After they left, Mary-Emma and I spent the evening watching so many different toddler videos—baby songs and train stories—that she beamed with happiness every time the FBI warning came on at the start of a new cassette. I made cookies. I did my animal imitations. I gave her a bath and in the bathroom tried some of Sarah’s wrinkle tonic on my own chapped cheeks and then rubbed the extra into Mary-Emma’s knees, which were dusky and dry. There were also jars of cream made from Andean snails and lotions from Japanese sake; we stuck our fingers in and smoothed the little dollops into our arms.

  And though she was too old, when her bedtime arrived, I lifted my shirt and bralessly rocked her to sleep in the upholstered glider in her room, both of us falling asleep there. When I snapped awake, there was a figure in the doorway: Edward. I pulled my shirt down groggily.

  “We’re back,” he said quietly.

  “Should I go home?” I asked.

  “Not at all,” he said. “Make yourself at home in the guest room downstairs. Good night.”

  And I placed Mary-Emma in her crib and crawled off downstairs to the second floor to sleep in my underwear. Edward again appeared in the doorway there. “All went well?” he asked, smiling.

  “Yes,” I said, from under the covers.

  “Well, good.” There was a long silence with a slowly fading smile in it—his. “Well, good night, then,” he said. Handsome is as handsome does, my mother used to say. Dashing dashes.

  “Good night.” And when he left I got up and pressed the door tightly shut.

  In the morning Mary-Emma dashed to all our rooms, newly, wordily singing, “Time-for-to-get-up my daddy. Time-for-to-get-up my mama
. Time-for-to-get-up my Tassa.” Sarah made pancakes and we poured syrup on everything, even into our coffee. For stray minutes we seemed like a family, laughing and chewing. I felt included. We were all in this together.

  But family life sometimes had a vortex, like weather. It could be like a tornado in a quiet zigzag: get close enough and you might see within it a spinning eighteen-wheeler and a woman.

  “Thank you for our date night,” Sarah said to me when I left. Her face looked tired and drawn. With every new word or phrase Mary-Emma learned, one seemed subtracted from Sarah.

  On the weekday mornings that I walked to the Thornwood-Brinks’ the sharp air turned my cheeks to meat—on one of Sarah’s menus lying on the counter I had once seen the phrase “beef cheeks;” maybe this was how they were made! My nose dripped profusely when I stopped at curbs and crosswalks. But when I kept moving—the snow so cold it squeaked like Styrofoam beneath my boots—single clear drops, like baubles, collected just inside my nostrils and dangled pendulously until I dabbed at them with a gray carnation of Kleenex that had died long ago in my pocket, never to wake again. Moreover, the dabbing caused the tissue to disintegrate further, and soon it was little more than crumpled, powdery ice against my nose. My too-thin socks, also, left my feet cold even in good boots. Why was it that here in Troy country girls had the thin cotton socks (from Home Dollar) and the suburban girls had the thick ones (J. Crew or L.L.Bean)? Was it that we just had bigger feet and no room in our shoes? Or did we not think of the weather as something separate from us, although we should have? Perhaps we accepted the weather as being us, weren’t terrified of it, carried around all its severity and storminess inside us, as a kind of defeatedness. Our outer veneer was thin and meek and weak—futility!—and part of our defeat. Our inner giving up, self-designed to simplify life, matched the outer, and left us merely dazed. Thus, the socks. And thus other things.

  Edward was sitting alone at the kitchen table when I came in. His hands were pushed inside the green sweater sleeves of each opposite arm, like those of a girl trying to stay warm, but his hair—its mix of old road snow and smoke—gave him the steely look of the wise elder. The contradiction—the hair, the girlish hands-up-the-sleeves—was unusual to my eye, and if you studied it, perhaps some conclusions could be reached about the nature of his character, but I didn’t then appraise it with any purpose, and the look of him just seemed to produce a slightly odd and comic swirl of hybridity. On the sides his hair was receding and thinning, something you noticed more after a haircut, which I could see he’d recently had. The balding of men! I had once seen a documentary that traced the lives of ten boys from the age of seven on, and with every installment more and more scalp emerged on the subjects; the film, intended to examine the struggles of masculinity and social class, was one long glacial retreat of hair.

  “Well, hello,” he said. “You come bearing a lovely warm perfume!”

  The heat of the house quickly thawed every part of me but my toes.

  “You’re not at the lab today?” I asked, listening not for his answer but upward, for any sound of Mary-Emma. I thought I heard a repeated bleating sound that could simply have been a plastic smoke alarm with a low battery.

  “I was waiting for you,” he said.

  “For me?”

  “Waiting for you to get here so I could leave.” His hands came out of his sleeves.

  “Am I late?”

  “Not really,” he said. His expression was mysterious: a stern, amused indifference. The look of maverick science, perhaps! I knew the Mayo Clinic was showing some interest in his work. “Sarah’s working down at the Mill, as we say. She’ll be back at six. She thought even though it’s cold that you might bundle Emmie up and take her for a walk in the wagon. You’ll see there’s a red wagon on the front porch, which may work better than that stroller on the ice.”

  “Yes, I saw the wagon coming in.”

  “Good,” he said, fixing me with his gaze.

  For a moment I was forced to study him back. His nose, bony and beakish in profile, was wider and tuberous when looked at straight on. His eyes were trying to do something with mine, but I wasn’t sure what. He seemed too old for our eyes to be doing anything. Not only had the years eaten their way into his hairdo, two prints of scalp astride a central silvery lock, but it seemed he had darkened the roots, perhaps with the shoe polish I’d seen at the bathroom sink upstairs. His shoes were always brown. Like Sarah’s, his hair was a production, of nature and art: it was as if his face had washed up on his head, like a tide, and left its mark, and then some artistic boy had come along to the same beach with a little paint.

  “Sarah believes that babies should be aired,” he said finally. “She also believes in forcing hats on babies even when they’re screaming against it. She believes in doing this because they look so cute that way and we want a lot of cute pictures. Apparently.” He sighed. “And so we just shove the hats on.”

  “Beauty is painful, as the supermodels say.”

  “Right!”

  The alarmlike bleating was intensifying. “Is that Emmie?” I asked.

  “Yes, that is. I’ll leave her to you.”

  I went up to find her and behind me heard the back door shut, the car start and rumble out of the driveway and away.

  Obviously I didn’t know how long she’d been crying. But her face was puffy and swollen, her cheeks fever-bright. The hot stink of diaper was in the air; she would need to be changed. “Hey, baby!” I chirped, and she swung her arms up to be lifted out of the huge crib.

  “Tassa,” she said, as if reminding herself. She was needy and sweet. Her new life story, beginning here, would perhaps be a triumphant one. And when I picked her up and held her, she seemed something so very lovely and uncorrupted—no matter what terrible tale she had actually been plucked from.

  Pulled steadily, the wagon bumped along the icy walk to Mary-Emma’s great glee. “Whoops-a-daisy,” I would say—the wagon would tilt and then fall back, or get stuck in a rut and need a sudden tug that would knock her back hilariously. She would giggle and exaggerate her own falling, leaning every which way in her new puffy pink snowsuit, a small drip of clear mucus appearing at her nose, which she would fetch with her tongue. If we stayed out too long her face would be chapped and as red as a radish. Even with her darkening skin. These kinds of details I was learning. When it seemed too cold I would look for inside venues. Up on the main street of the neighborhood I would take her to a supermarket that had handicapped access and let her race up the ramps, play with the electric doors, attempt hide-and-seek in the aisles. Or I would stop at the mattress store, wheel her in, and look over the place, the real idea being to let her run around and jump from bed to bed while I discussed springs and firmness with the salesman. He would sometimes look worried, seeing her leaping around. “Do you mind if she does that?” I asked hopefully.

  “Oh, no,” he would say, but with a slightly sickened look on his face as out of the corner of our eyes we watched her bouncing and flopping and squealing.

  Because the upcoming March Democratic primary was, in effect, the general election—since no Republican had been elected to city government, perhaps ever—the city plows spent much time in the weeks before the primary clearing the streets. In Dellacrosse we might have gotten some summer road repair in time for the fall showdown—PHIL POTT FOR CORONER (Dickens lives!)—since there the Republicans had a prayer. But here in progressive Troy, apparently, mass seduction by the incumbent had to happen early, and so the mayor resorted to assiduous snow-plowing. The plows seemed to come from everywhere, with their front shovels angled like petrified fish lips. The scraping of metal on ice and then on the street surface itself set a steady metallic treble line to the low rumble of the trucks. In consideration of the spring soil and grass, Troy had also bought a truck that instead of salting the roads sweetened them with beet-sugar brine, and its drip along the streets looked like the trail of a sad thing with bad kidneys.

  I took Mary-Emma up
toward Wendell Street, which was the only street nearby with actual restaurants and stores and other businesses, probably nine establishments in total. It would have passed for the downtown of a tiny village, and I knew the sidewalks were more cleanly shoveled there. On Wendell we headed through the salted-to-slush ice toward the neighborhood branch of the public library. I would show her the children’s books, and despite Sarah’s preference for baked books, we would sit at a table near the radiator and read. Few people were on the street, but the ones we passed smiled at me, then looked at Mary-Emma and then back at me, their expressions not exactly changed but not exactly the same: upon seeing us together, our story unknown but presumed, an observation and then a thought entered their faces and froze their features in place.

  But then a car on the opposite side of the street, full of teenagers, it seemed—I could not tell how old they were—slowed down and looked at us from across the lane. I kept going, headed for the library, but glancing back I noticed that the car had pulled into a side street and was now turning around, coming back down Wendell in the lane closest to me. It pulled up to the curb. A guy with a bright orange mohawk, a big silver ring in his brow, silver studs like cake decorations up the cartiliginous rim of his ear, and a thick black leather jacket that made him look as if he were wearing an expensive chair, leaned out the window. Two other boys were in the backseat—if taciturnity could kill!—and a very ordinary-looking brown-haired girl was at the wheel. I thought the mohawk guy was going to leer at me. Or maybe he would ask to see my breasts or shout that he wanted to put them in his mouth or maybe he would offer to do things with his studded tongue, lick me up, lick me down, suck me head to toe, or maybe he wanted my juicy lips on him or to tell me I had a fat ass but he liked fat asses or that I had a skinny ass but he liked skinny asses and wouldn’t I like to get my skinny ass or my fat one into this fine car with him and his friends so he could do all these fine things? Instead, he glared right at little Mary-Emma and shouted, “Nigger!”