A Gate at the Stairs

by Lorrie Moore

  “John, we’re on a turnpike!”

  “There’s a picnic table up there—he can wait there. We’ve put up with this long enough! Our parents wouldn’t have put up with this!” The refrain of a generation, uttered in bewilderment.

  “Our parents wouldn’t have done a lot of things.”

  “Well, maybe they were right. Get out!” he shouted at Gabriel, who looked only a little stunned. Suddenly the little boy was compliant. He clicked the handle and quickly got out, pushing the door shut as hard as he could. He began walking toward the picnic area, with his one shoe. No one was there and the tables were covered with the same sooty spring snow that had become slush on the road.

  “Oh, God, now look what’s happened,” said Susan. “I’m getting out with him.” She turned to gather her bag from the backseat. The car began rolling slightly.

  “I can’t believe he did what he was told for once!”

  “John, he has one shoe on. Turn into this rest area right now.” She felt around in the back for her bag and perhaps the other shoe. Where was it?

  “I can’t stop here, apparently. I’ve either got to get completely off the shoulder or …”

  Trucks blared their angry elephant sound behind him.

  “You must. Stop. Here.”

  “I’m trying,” he said, but when he pulled the car ahead he overshot the rest stop turn and there was only a steep ditch to drive into unless one got back on the road. Someone blared a horn behind them, and now the pressure of the honking traffic caused him instead to feel he had to merge, and when he drove the car forward to avoid the ditch, he studied the vehicles in his rearview mirror, then pulled quickly into traffic.

  “What are you doing?!” Susan’s voice was a gaspy shriek.

  “I couldn’t get back in the lane and make that turn both.”

  “Slow down and pull over! I’m getting out.”

  “How can I do that here? I can’t without causing an accident. Just wait,” he said. “Bear with me here.” He sped up instead. He seemed to think that speeding up would be better, to get the whole thing over with faster. “We’re going to have to be a little inventive! Though I’ve heard of someone who did something like this.”

  “Like what?! Let me out!” She undid her own seat belt and turned around again in her seat. A whimpering sound was forming at the back of her throat.

  “Don’t worry. It will be a kind of time-out for Gabriel,” he said, now appearing a little panicked and checking his rearview mirror again. What was a time-out? Was time literally stopped while everything else continued without it? People were pulled out of time? But not by Einstein. This was done by people who were the opposite of Einstein. “He needs to understand one or two things about the world, and perhaps this will help. We’ll get off at the next exit and circle back and pick him up.” The circle tour of manhood. John’s face was starting to tighten with anguish, the grip of regret. “Bear with me. We’re going to improvise a bit.” Susan saw Gabriel in her side-view mirror, receding to something tiny until the road’s turn took him out of her vision entirely.

  At this juncture something exploded like a gunshot in the kitchen—Noel’s forgotten can of Coke—and we both jumped. Liza came up from the basement with a basket of clothes. Even though I had met her only once before, now she seemed to be everywhere.

  “I’ll bet it’s that damn Coke can of Noel’s,” Sarah said, opening the freezer and seeing brown frozen droplets sprayed all over it.

  Sarah sighed. “Liza, would you like a little wine?”

  “Oh, yeah,” she said, and she listed out loud what was still in the washer and what was still in the dryer and what was hanging and what was folded, what was still wrinkled and what was pressed. I was full of apprehension. “Tassie,” added Sarah, starting to write Liza a check, “we’ll talk later.”

  “Sounds good,” I said, and left quickly. As I did, a FedEx deliveryman had stepped up to the porch with an overnight package—probably risotto!

  I rode home on my Suzuki, climbed into bed, and tried to read for my literature class: “Dog in the manger!” I said; for I knew she secretly wanted him … Deep into some of Madame’s secrets I had entered—I know not how … I know not whence … I pulled the sheet over my head. “You OK?” shouted Murph from where she sat at her computer.

  “No,” I replied, but in our apartment this did not make the least impression.

  There was actually only one more Wednesday. The usual sparkiness of the notes had a fizzled edge, like the jagged dissolution of a warming orchestra that had suddenly decided not to play The chorus was dominated by a new woman’s voice, someone whose diction was as clipped and quick as an auctioneer’s.

  “The only black people you know went to Yale.”

  “Yeah, all the white people she knows went to Yale as well.”

  “Whitest person in the world is Dick Gephardt—have you ever noticed that? He has no eyebrows! He’s translucent!”

  “He wasn’t graphic enough to become president!”

  “See or be seen.”

  “Did you say, ‘From sea to shining sea’?”

  “Now we’re doing deafness?”

  “What?”

  “Deafness jokes. I love them.”

  “And don’t get me started about Islam!”

  Once again, the don’t-get-me-started-about-Islam guy. Was he fishing? Was he a spy? It was hard to listen from two flights up and follow when the kids I was supervising were after me to sing “Knick-knack-paddy-whack-give-your-dog-a-bone”—the alternative words to the Barney love song, which they found exotic and hilarious.

  “We should all work in soup kitchens.”

  “Why I do work in a soup kitchen. I am raising an African-American child in the twenty-first century.”

  “Here’s what else we should do: little windmills in our yards, solar panels on our roofs …”

  “And wooden shoes!”

  “I have faith in this new generation.”

  “Not I! They are all sleepwalking!”

  “Have you noticed that the biracial kids all find each other? They are emerging as their own group.”

  “They call themselves ‘mixed,’ not biracial.”

  “For the kids, having a black mother is more prestigious. So many of these mixed kids have white mothers, and so even they’ve formed their own group. That’s what Jazmyn tells me.”

  “We’re so busy telling young people about the world, we forget there are ways they know more than we do.”

  “Yeah, no, I agree. These students are the best of both worlds. They are serious grown-ups, principled and worldly and gentle in ways we weren’t. And adorable, in a way they won’t be in ten years.”

  “I know what you mean! You want to eat them right up. Get your lips on their chests. There’s nothing wrong either with using a knife and fork.”

  “The hazards of a college town.”

  “Would anyone care for a beer, or are you all drinking wine?”

  “I’m worried about all the precious culture that comes now from nowhere: that is, it comes from trust-funded children’s book authors. ‘The Adventures of Asparagus Alley’ and such things. Adults are living increasingly as children: completely in their imaginations. Reading Harry Potter while every newspaper in the country goes out of business. They know so little that is real.”

  “Yes, you’ve mentioned this before.”

  “Sorry. I guess I need more people to talk to.”

  “When a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, did it really fall? I realize that’s not how the expression goes …”

  “If a tree falls in the woods and there’s no one there, that’s lucky. That’s how the saying should go.”

  “What?”

  “We’re doing deafness jokes again?”

  “What?”

  Deafness, somebody’s, was no doubt the reason I had ever been able to hear these people at all. From two flights up, I had often not known exactly what I was hearing, but still
the sounds rose, in various key signatures and tempos. The acoustics of the house had always been odd. Remarks were suddenly loud, bursting up through the air vents and the stairwells and laundry chute, or suddenly quiet. Was this just the human mouth, or was it the mind as well? Back to the woods: If two things fall in the forest and make the same sound, which is the tree?

  “What’s most galling is the way school integration is used to educate whites, not blacks, to give whites an experience of race rather than blacks an experience of algebra.”

  “The one black principal we have in this town has banned hats.”

  “Soon the mooning, herniating jeans. In a way? I hope so.”

  “When you are white and you adopt a black child, don’t you feel yourself pulled down a notch socially?”

  “In terms of how you are treated and the new concerns you face?”

  “All the things we’ve been talking about from the beginning. Everyone has stories.”

  At eight the parents arrived upstairs to fetch their kids, their teeth dingy with zinfandel, their lips etched and scabby with it. Most kids ran to their parents with great energy, though some, engaged with a puzzle in the corner, refused even to look up. Once again, I loved the way the black mothers would come upstairs and grab their kids, just pull their oldest son’s head to their breasts and say “Hey, baby!” There had only ever been a few black fathers on Wednesdays, but again they, too, were physical, pulling their boys close with an embrace. Some of the parents tried to give me extra money, as a tip, and though I didn’t feel comfortable taking it, I couldn’t make my lips form the words to refuse them. On her way out one girl, Adilia, said to her sister, “You just don’t think you’re living unless you’re tormenting somebody, do you?” Her father turned to me and said, “Sometimes these people we believe are children are actually midgets.”

  I waved, like the widowed aunt seeing everyone off at the train station. I leaned over and pressed Mary-Emma’s head to my chest. I said good night.

  I went home and googled the n-word, opening up a sewer that went on forever.

  For the final installment of her dread tale Sarah should have switched to red wine. Not just for the color but for the fortifying warmth. Instead she had a greenish SB she said was not just briary but also loamy. “It is painful, appalling, really, to have to tell you all of this, though you’ll see, there are reasons,” she said. “It’s not that we are not what we seem. Though I suppose our names once being something else might make you think otherwise.”

  “Yes.” How could it not? “But hey, what’s in a name?” I said. One could always find suitable moments for Shakespeare.

  She put her wineglass down, placed her hands on her brow, and then let her fingers spread upward through her hair. “I can’t remember where I was.”

  Where would she plunge in? Sometimes one is swimming in a lake and aims for a slant of light, only to discover it is brightly colored scum.

  “You were in the car,” I said. And then I wanted to clap my hands over my ears but failed to do so.

  “Yes. It was of course a nightmare,” Sarah said. She shook her left wrist a little, staring at her watch, as if she were reading a magazine. “I just pulled this watch so quickly out of the jewelry box, an earring got stuck on it.” And she showed me some gobbledy-gook metal tangle on her watchband. The surrealism in this house was like a poltergeist.

  “We were in the car,” she agreed, and suddenly stood up and paced around the room while she spoke.

  Susan grabbed his arm. “John! He’s only four! What are you doing?” While John was speeding up, time was beginning to slow down.

  John shook his arm away. “Let me drive! You’re going to get us into an accident!” He had already exited and was negotiating the cloverleaf that got him back on the highway going the other way. “Look, he’s still there: I can see him,” he said.

  She had grown up in a family where men were always cruel to other men—in what seemed a conventional way. She had never known what a woman’s role should be in these masculine rites, which were all a kind of refinement of malice. They were polish through pain. One must let the males of the species have their go at each other. Whereas girls just went directly toward polish. Polish via polish—in this way one didn’t have to be internally reworked.

  Still, why had she reached around to get her bag? It had cost her a minute. What did it, or even the shoe, really matter?

  “He’s not up by the picnic table. He’s just on the shoulder, standing there crying! The traffic is so scary and loud!”

  “I’ll wave to him so he knows we’re coming.”

  Speed was John’s solution. He pressed on the gas. As they sped by on the opposite side he honked his horn. At this, Gabriel, seeing his parents speed by, took a tentative darting step out onto the freeway but then withdrew. Was he headed toward the median strip to signal to them? That’s what it seemed, though this happened so slowly, time unwound so hesitantly, nothing was clear. The slowing of time, the careful opening up of each moment, was a gift to use if you could figure out how. This gift of time, this opportunity, was an opportunity for rescue. If rescuing behavior could be summoned. The ability to summon it was a survival mechanism, and those who survived would pass this time-slowing capacity on to their progeny. But behind glass, where Susan was, it was difficult to use, difficult to find the appropriate action even toward her child—should she throw herself from the car?—and so she subjected each moment not to an action but instead to interpretations.

  Was Gabriel just trying to greet them? Or was he trying to get to them? Was he wanting to be with them after everything and all? The forgiveness of children was one of God’s sunny gifts.

  Susan, now once again completely twisted in her seat, the shotgun seat without the convenience of an actual shotgun, began to shout. “Turn! Turn! Turn!” To every thing there was a season.

  “I can’t!”

  “Cross the median strip! Get back to him! Drive over there! John, you’ve got to get back there before he tries to run out!”

  “We’ll be there soon!” This obedience to the rules and flow of traffic was perhaps the way of science. Certainly it was the way of experiments.

  “U-turn now!” She grabbed the wheel. The car swung bumpily across the median strip and a police siren went off in the distance behind them. As if in duet, there was a high-pitched singing in Susan’s ear that could be heard by no one but her—a wheezy screaming without body or noise—a hollowing wind in the head. And as things slowed for them, enough to think and take an action, she could see, looking ahead for their running boy, that though one car had slowed down to let him make a dash for it, another car, not seeing, had already greedily sped up to pass on the left, and before everyone’s eyes Gabriel became the flying golden angel after which he was named.

  “I’m not sure what just happened,” said Susan, who kept repeating these words, and opened the door as the car was still moving. As they reapproached the rest stop, which was on the right, vacant and devoid of picnic or rest, and where the scenic view would remain a mystery, Gabriel was lying far away on the left, across the highway from it, on the muddy median. Several cars had stopped and Susan stumbled from theirs while it was slowing. She fell, then got back up. Traffic was beginning to rubberneck. She ran across the lanes, between the cars until she got to him: his eyes were open and there was a spasm at the mouth; she threw her coat over and beneath and around him like a bunting. Time was still in slow motion but no longer in a way that could even in theory be made use of.

  There was a trial date and there was a hearing and there was a prison sentence not long enough to suit either of them. They pleaded guilty to every charge, large and larger. The judge tilted his head and massaged his face with his hands: he had seen much worse. His job was a curse and he’d grown used to worse. And so, astonishingly, he suspended their sentences. Their loss was considered, by the court, sufficient.

  They changed their names and drove a thousand miles west.

 
“Our lawyer was too good,” said Susan.

  Throughout the telling of this, thank God, Mary-Emma was upstairs, dreaming her dreams. Her parents had gone from a couple who would be different, who would be better than anyone, who were determined to be better than most, to a couple who would be different because they were worse.

  “That woman who would sit there and somehow let a man make that kind of mistake is gone,” said Sarah.

  “She died,” I said.

  “Gabriel died.” My ears were scorched. A bass line from a Peter Gabriel tune thumped absurdly in my brain.

  “But Susan, too,” I said.

  “Susan,” Sarah repeated, as if in a trance. “There is not enough dying that can happen to Susan.” Sun came out momentarily from behind a cloud and briefly washed her with a cleansing light, then moved on as if it had changed its mind, leaving her in the dark once more.

  I wanted to go home and watch movies for the rest of my life. I wanted to see larger and more ravenous and less pathetic monsters than these.

  “We did not have the nerve, in our convicted but legally unpunished condition, to look anyone in the eye anymore. Not where we lived. We did not even hold a decent memorial. How we stayed together I cannot fathom.” She was pacing again. “And yet, how could we not? We were each other’s only consolation. The sort of redemption that was required of us only we understood.”

  “Of course,” I murmured. Although how together they had remained seemed possibly a matter of debate.

  “Strangely, it’s easier to get on with life, to forget one’s losses and misdeeds, if one is not formally punished. People often think the opposite, but it’s not true. Proper official punishment creates a double punishment and gives wholeness and enduring shape to an experience that otherwise is allowed with time to fade and blur and be denied.”