A Gate at the Stairs

by Lorrie Moore

  Fade. Could events return, retrace their heavy-footed passage, to the place from where they had accidentally come? Could even a child grow vaguer and … . fade?

  “Much has been made of the doom of not remembering. But remembering has its limitations. Believe me, it is good to forget.”

  “Yes,” I said. Though everything that I ever forgot I always remembered again later, so perhaps it didn’t count.

  “Sometimes when I reconsider this event, as a route to forgiveness, I recast it and make it Susan who is actually driving. Yet it still comes out the same. Sometimes.”

  I didn’t know whether it mattered. I didn’t know what to say. I felt as if I were watching the lion lady being eaten by the lion.

  “It was an accident,” I said.

  “Negligence is the legal word. One of them, at any rate.”

  In my mind I did a quick survey: pride, weakness, uneasy deferral to power. Paralyzing strangleholds of the unconscious, amnesia of convenience, dark twists of character, and secrets in the past? Babbling during grief? Jokes while dying? Hadn’t I had a midterm on these?

  I was now at the bottom of my wineglass, where there was no further loam or briar to assist.

  Sarah was speaking. “… I had always been opposed to a woman’s taking her husband’s name, but when I changed mine I suddenly knew the relief in such an act. It was a relief I imagined all those marrying women had felt from the beginning of time, immersing themselves in a new life, a new way, a new identity, instead of clinging to the old self as if it were solid and whole and not half baked and assaulted—which it always is.”

  I would never take a man’s name. I knew that, in the deepest part of me, even though I also suspected that the women who did take their husbands’ names understood something about marriage that I didn’t. Me? I would never even let a man drive.

  “Of course then we were unable to conceive again. I was too old.”

  “Really,” I said. None of this was my business. What could I care about the threads and seeds of someone else’s fertility, the scooped-out womb of a melon at a picnic I was not attending? What did I care? I was back under the coat with Gabriel and Peter Gabriel and St. Peter and his gate.

  Sarah poured some more SB into her glass and then into mine, and I gulped at it. “I’ve had to tell you all this because the adoption agency has now found out everything. And it has jeopardized the process with Emmie,” said Sarah. “As maybe it should. It’s my fault. We were less than forthcoming.”

  What? Who were these people, “Susan” and “John,” “Sarah” and “Edward”? They could not hang on to anything.

  The wine heated my neck. “You’re going to give up Mary-Emma?” There was too much emotion in my voice.

  “This at long last is our formalized punishment,” she said. “When there’s hell to pay, are you paying hell, or paying with hell?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. My hands gripped at each other.

  “Well,” she said. “I’ll let you know.”

  Startled and furious at everyone, I could not believe the things I was hearing anymore. Briary, loamy SB flew to my lips. “You sought her out and brought her here. She loves you! Excuse me for saying this, but you have a responsibility now that’s greater than … than …” Than what? Than before? Than others’? Than mine? Was this my stab at saying Hey, what am I supposed to do here? I haven’t a clue, but this, these words, is what I’m choosing. “You have to fight it! For her!”

  “Edward doesn’t want to, it seems,” said Sarah. And here she looked more tired than I’d ever seen her in months of tiredness. “It’s not entirely up to us, you see. Even if we lose out, or choose not to battle at all, maybe it would all be for the best. People would find out. Her schoolmates in the future might know. Maybe we should let Emmie go. Even if we didn’t have this particular thing in our past, maybe she shouldn’t be with us. You know, this kind of adoption is complicated. If all those Wednesday nights have taught me one thing, it’s this: love is not enough.”

  All those Wednesday-night bull sessions had taught her that love is not enough? That’s where she was getting her information? And that’s what she had taken away? Who was the woman who was going to kill Karl Rove? Wasn’t that her? I wanted to shake her.

  “I am not enough,” she added. She was fighting despondency with rigidity. Where had I seen this before? Bonnie.

  I was quiet. Did she not have me to help? Wasn’t that why I was here? Was I failing, too? You have me, I wanted to peep but didn’t.

  “Edward is not on board. I can’t stress this enough. Emmie deserves better than us. Ideally, she should be with black parents. At least one. Ideally.”

  “But she’s mixed! Besides, there were no black parents for her.”

  Sarah looked startled at my words. “Well, I know, but some time has gone by now: maybe some have newly become available. We have to look at the bright side of this. She should have better people who would show her the way. Edward and I are not good at being canaries in this particular coal mine. We are like two canaries looking at each other and saying, ‘Are we going where I think we’re going?’ One could write a whole sad children’s book on the subject. The worried and chattering canaries headed for the mines!”

  “What about the feelings of a two-year-old girl?”

  Sarah began to speak with a slowly building force. “You know, maybe I’m not good at this. Last week I was so stressed, I said to her, ‘If you don’t go in there and watch TV right now, there will be no TV for the rest of the week.’”

  I tried to smile, perhaps ruefully. “Is that so wrong?”

  Sarah stiffened. “Maybe women have been caught in a trap: we work harder so we can have more babysitters so we can work even more so we can have more money to hire more babysitters.” I tried not to feel personally stung by this. “I almost took all her frozen yogurt pops and zapped them in the microwave. As punishment. I think nuking the treats is a sign of something not good.”

  “Well, you didn’t actually do it.” I was in over my head.

  “I didn’t?” she said, testing me.

  There was being in over your head and then there was being sucked completely under. My heart pounded against my chest like a prisoner against bars. I was sure I had read that expression somewhere and now I knew what it meant. When people in deep water started to drown, parts of them exploded. “No,” I said.

  “No,” she agreed. “I didn’t. She’s a fantastic little girl. She really is. I love her to death.”

  I did not say anything. She blanched at her own words.

  “So do I,” I said. I would rescue her.

  “I know you do. You know? When she first came into our lives, neighbors would stop by with little presents and they would always look at her and smile and say, ‘What a lucky little girl.’ They thought she was lucky to have us. But one day I took her for a walk in the neighborhood and the most racist person on the block came up to us, smiled at Emmie, and said to me, ‘You are very lucky.’ She’s the one who got it right.”

  “Maybe everybody’s lucky,” I said awkwardly, adding, “that is, if they are lucky.”

  “Or maybe in the end everybody’s unlucky. She shouldn’t have a punishing, faithless father whose idea of racial equality is to bring a rainbow coalition into his bed.” Now things were beginning to harrow me again. “Forget that! That was just the wine! But, well, you know that Edward is a flirt.”

  I said nothing. If she wasn’t careful, everyone would rush out of her life, like out of a burning building.

  “He can’t do relationships. Can’t really do acquaintanceships. He can’t do people at all. In fact, really he should just stay off mass transit!” Here she sipped some more wine. “All forms of transportation!”

  “He bikes a lot,” I said dopily.

  She smiled in a bitten, crooked way.

  “The problem with seeing one’s marriage as a farce,” she continued, “is that all the slamming doors are in your heart. Well, that’s not
the only problem.”

  “There’s always Farceholics Anonymous.” I was now being inhabited not just by loamy, briary wine but loamy, briary Murph. “I’ve actually heard of that,” I added, lying.

  “Really?”

  “Really,” I lied again. Perhaps I had lost my mind.

  Her voice was mordant. “A match made in heaven—where do you get those? That’s what I want to know!”

  I now put my wine down on the coffee table and was wringing my hands as I used to when I was a child. “I think you have to actually go to heaven to get one.”

  “Yes,” Sarah mused. “I suppose they don’t ship. Or rather, they don’t ship well.”

  “Yeah, you’d have go to the source. Where they’re made. That’s a lot of stairs. And steps. Stairs and steps both. There are always obstacles.”

  “Yesterday at the bank I accidentally made off with the suction canister at the drive-in teller. Maybe what Emmie really shouldn’t have is a mother who is too busy.”

  This again seemed to negate me. I was the one who was hired to neutralize or at least mitigate the busyness. But I hadn’t succeeded and could feel myself being neutralized and mitigated instead.

  Here Sarah leaned forward and put her hand on my cheek, which reminded me of Murph. Why were people doing this all of a sudden? “Of course, Emmie has you. That’s been nice.” The hand came down and her gaze turned away. She seemed to be speaking to no one in particular. “So I didn’t name her Maya or Kadira or Tywalla: I named her Emmie. Was that so wrong?” I could see she felt under some critical eye, as she had from the beginning. “You know what my neighbor across the street said to me? ‘I always see the babysitter with the baby, but I don’t see you.’ Day and night, I’m down working at the Mill.”

  Where were effective, urgent words when the world most required them? I felt I needed to persist. But it was like all bad dreams: the dreamer, even while dreaming, thinks, What is going on here? What am I supposed to do? In pleasant dreams, equally strangely, one always seemed to know.

  She continued. “Women chew up their lives trying to heal themselves from the bad arrangements they’ve made with men; all this healing is not attractive. It’s boring.” And then she added, “Anything that does not throw a young black person into despair is all for the good. Unfortunately, I don’t qualify as that. I officially don’t qualify.”

  “Nothing’s ideal. You are her real mother now,” I said boldly.

  “You’re not getting it!” she said sharply, her face flushed with exasperation. “We have been caught in our own home cooking.”

  “Home cooking?”

  She sighed. “That’s restaurantese for throwing something back in the pot when it has fallen on the floor. Deceit. It means deceit. Even if by some miracle we challenge the agency and win, we will have a public story. Emmie will be shunned!”

  “No, no, that’s not possible.”

  “Yes!” she said as if I were an infuriating dimwit. “We all will be spoken of! And when Emmie is old enough, she will hate us.”

  Perhaps I’d become like the teenage McKowen daughter we’d all glimpsed at Mary-Emma’s first foster home. Perhaps I was clinging to something that wasn’t mine to love. Perhaps I was treasuring love that wasn’t mine to treasure. My hands were twisting at each other in a way that my mother used to yell at me for. When I was young she would just lean over and swat them.

  Sarah grabbed the glasses and I followed her back into the kitchen.

  The people in this house, I felt, and I included myself, were like characters each from a different grim and gruesome fairy tale. None of us was in the same story. We were all grotesques, and self-riveted, but in separate narratives, and so our interactions seemed weird and richly meaningless, like the characters in a Tennessee Williams play, with their bursting, unimportant, but spell-bindingly mad speeches. Only Mary-Emma seemed immune, undeviant, not part of that, though she was, and had her own soliloquies to be sure, and would have them up ahead in life—how not?

  Sarah opened the refrigerator, which lit her up again. “The whole thing fills me with terrible thoughts. I suppose I should manage a better philosophical stance. Certainly the French would! They would have the proper comedic perspective.” And here she paused. “Of course, they also have jokes that end And then the baby fell down the stairs.’” She had sealed her rooty puree into a Rubbermaid bowl, the puree I’d seen her chopping many days ago already. She was no longer thinking it should be stashed here.

  “Please,” she said, handing it to me. “Don’t eat this. Just keep it in the back of your refrigerator at home. I’ll ask for it again, but I don’t want it lingering around here right now. Not with the kids coming Wednesdays.”

  “What is it?” I asked. There would be no more Wednesdays. I already felt that.

  “It’s, um, a kind of poisonous paste that, well, gets stains out. Just don’t get it confused with parsnip tapenade.”

  “What’s it made of?”

  “It’s … nothing. But don’t mix it up with food.”

  Then I realized it was that paperwhite puree I had just seen her mincing, mashing the bulbs with a cheese slicer and a pestle.

  “Does it work? In the laundry?” I asked. Meekness returned to cover me and blur my sight like a veil.

  “Supposedly,” she said, with mystery and evasion. “Perhaps someday I’ll have Liza try it on some stains. If you keep it cool and moist and scrub it in with a brush it’s supposed to work. Take it home with you, please, just for now. I’ll ask for it back later. But here, take it.” And she thrust the sealed plastic container at me. I took it. Put it in my backpack. It reminded me of tales I’d read of people carrying yeasts in damp handkerchiefs from Europe—a break with one world and a beginning in another, where one would culture and grow things from the old. Or perhaps one could kill someone instantly with this. Or cure a wart. I didn’t know its uses, really, but obligingly took it anyway, back to my house, where perhaps I would grow a whole new life with it, or clean a rug, or do nothing.

  Tragedies, I was coming to realize through my daily studies in the humanities both in and out of the classroom, were a luxury. They were constructions of an affluent society, full of sorrow and truth but without moral function. Stories of the vanquishing of the spirit expressed and underscored a certain societal spirit to spare. The weakening of the soul, the story of downfall and failed overcoming—trains missed, letters not received, pride flaring, the demolition of one’s own offspring, who were then served up in stews—this was awe-inspiring, wounding entertainment told uselessly and in comfort at tables full of love and money. Where life was meagerer, where the tables were only half full, the comic triumph of the poor was the useful demi-lie. Jokes were needed. And then the baby fell down the stairs. This could be funny! Especially in a place and time where worse things happened. It wasn’t that suffering was a sweepstakes, but it certainly was relative. For understanding and for perspective, suffering required a butcher’s weighing. And to ease the suffering of the listener, things had better be funny. Though they weren’t always. And this is how, sometimes, stories failed us: Not that funny. Or worse, not funny in the least.

  I forgot about the container in the fridge. As with the wasabi at Christmas, I was careless with takeout. Things mounted in the refrigerator and the sink as Murph and I let a life of spring rains, warming air, romantic dissolution, and pointless essay writing make further mincemeat of domesticity. I got panicked and tried to combine the work of several classes: “Sufic Perspectives of Brontë’s Exfoliating Narrative” or “Meeting at Shiraz: Sufic Perspectives on Pinot Noir.” I was having a lot of ostensibly Sufic perspectives. “The Sufic Hymn of The Dirty Dozen.” “The Sufic Quiet of the Western Front.” “Sufic Mrs. Miniver.” I had memorized the whistling theme from The Bridge on the River Kwai, but this did me no good, as I was never asked to whistle it. Crusty dishes accumulated in the sink, as did a low level of dingy water that would not drain. Half-finished cups of coffee sat on bookcase shelves
, with flies floating on top. When my papers were returned, question marks appeared in all my margins.

  When not working, Murph was going on the Internet, slowly becoming obsessed with astrology. Wanting to see herself outlined in twinkling stars or hoping to bring the heavens at last into fruitful play here on earth, or so it sounded to me, she would say that sun signs were people alone on a mountaintop. They were warm and attracted money and should surround themselves in the colors of wood. The planets whooshed in and out of her conversation. The stars were fire or water or earth or air and contained advice and secrets that would put a box of fortune cookies to shame. When I said, “But how could the positions of the stars and planets have anything to do with our lives down here?” she would just look at me, wounded but portentous. “How could they not?” she would say.

  Murph and I both had a lot of schoolwork, and our music sessions dwindled as I took to racing off to the library on my Suzuki. I got a phone message from my advisor and I was forced to drop Wine Tasting, as they had at long last discovered I was underage. The computer had made this mistake with twenty students. My parents would get a partial tuition refund. Across the street in the stadium, football teams were holding spring scrimmages and fans in green and yellow crowded in to cheer them on, even if the games didn’t count. Life was spent in all sorts of ways. I watched The Thin Red Line. I watched Apocalypse Now.

  The real problems, as far as I could see, which was not that far, remained back at the Thornwood-Brinks’, and the temporary removal from their home of the pulverized narcissus bulb tapenade had not solved them.

  “I dropped a course, so now I have some extra hours,” I told Sarah as I was leaving one afternoon, thinking she might like more help. When I looked at her, I no longer really knew what I saw.

  I felt she could see this, as she said, “Well, we’ll see what happens. I realize I’m not being fair to you, in terms of your schedule and budget. But I’ll try to make it up to you.” A bonus. I had heard of these. They were always fraught. I recalled that promising hand squeeze she had given me those long months ago in January, waiting in the hospital parking lot. And then, recalling more, something she’d said became clear to me: it wasn’t sleighs together; it was slays together.