A Gate at the Stairs

by Lorrie Moore

  My father phoned to ask me if I’d like to help him with the farm. He had recently started a three-season-spring-greens angle to his business and needed help with it: I would run out in front of his newfangled thresher-shaver and scare the mice away. My brother was packing up for boot camp at Fort Bliss and would be gone all summer and all harvest. Did I have another job? Was I interested?

  I said I thought that would be good exercise and I appreciated the offer. As a coincidence, I told him, my other job was suddenly over. I’d come home on the bus on Monday and we could talk about it more. I had to clean the apartment to get our deposit back.

  “You will miss Robert’s graduation if you don’t come sooner. It’s on Sunday.”

  “Well, I’ll take the early Sunday bus,” I said.

  What had I learned thus far in college? You can exclude the excluded middle, but when you ride through, on your way to a lonely and more certain place, out the window you’ll see everyone you’ve ever known living there.

  I had also learned that in literature—perhaps as in life—one had to speak not of what the author intended but of what a story intended for itself. The creator was inconvenient—God was dead. But the creation itself had a personality and hopes and its own desires and plans and little winks and dance steps and collaged intent. In this way Jacques Derrida overlapped with Walt Disney. The story itself had feet and a mouth, could walk and talk and speak of its own yearnings!

  I learned that there had been many ice ages. That they came and went. I learned there were no mammals original to New Zealand. I learned that space was not just adrift with cold, flammable rocks. Here and there a creature was riding one, despite the Sufic spinning of the rock. The spores of lightless life were everywhere. I think I learned that.

  VI

  My brother and my father picked me up at the bus station, figuring I’d have a lot of stuff. Robert was wearing his graduation gown but carrying his cap.

  “Well, you don’t have that much,” said my father, puzzled.

  “I put a lot in storage,” I said. I tugged at Robert’s gown. “Hey, congratulations.”

  “It’s more of an accomplishment than you may realize,” he said, abashed.

  “What time is the ceremony?”

  “Not until two.”

  “And you put on that gown already?”

  “You bet.”

  “We have already taken a thousand pictures,” mused my dad.

  “You didn’t answer my e-mail,” said my brother.

  “What e-mail?” I asked.

  “The last one I sent you!”

  “You told me to ignore it.”

  “No, not that one. The one after that!”

  I was slowly remembering that I had archived it for later.

  “Is your address still bassface-at-isp-dot-com?” he continued.

  I always believed my e-mail address was clever and hip until I heard it said aloud. “It is. Jeez, I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened.” I would change the subject. “How are you?”

  “Great!”

  “Really? Nobody’s great!”

  “Well, it’s not great with a capital G. It’s actually g-r-a-t-e. That may not be so good.”

  “No, it may not be. How did that happen?”

  “I got grated on a curb.”

  “Ha! Did he ever,” said my dad.

  “Did you just make that up?” I asked my brother.

  “No,” he said, smiling and climbing into the truck. “I’ve been working on it for weeks.”

  “Weeks?”

  “Well, not weeks. Months, actually.” He was working hard to sound upbeat and had landed on bizarrely merry.

  “Did you leave that Suzuki of yours back in Troy?” inserted my father as we were driving off.

  “Yes. I did.”

  “Too bad!” said my brother. The topic of the lost e-mail had too much regret and belatedness attached to it and was no fun. Unlike the motorbike. “I wanted to see you buzz around the ceremony this afternoon. It would cause a sensation!”

  “That’s just what I want to do.” I stared out the window of the truck. Irrigation sprinklers like the skeletons of brontosauruses were sprawled across the farm fields.

  At home I had to help my mother dress, in the room she called “the store.” Here she would stack up boxes of apparel that she had mail-ordered but not tried on to see whether she would keep them or send them back. When she was ready she would go through and open them one by one, but until then they stayed in the store—which was in essence a kind of mail room.

  “Gail?” my dad called up for my mom.

  “We’re in the store!” she called back, and I helped her try on something I thought would be fine, and then yanked the tags off for her. “Send the rest back,” I said. “But wait—what is this?” There was a beautiful black hat with a feather sticking straight up and a sash dangling down the side.

  “That’s not for a graduation.”

  “No, it’s not. Unless you’re the one graduating: then you could flip the sash as you walked across the stage and blow a whistle with the feather between your thumbs.”

  “It’s for something, though,” she said, holding it with more affection than was seemly. “I don’t know what yet.”

  “A party from fifty years ago, maybe.”

  “Hey, around here? There are a lot of those. And you still can’t wear a hat like this.”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “Oh, online somewhere. What does the box say?”

  I tried it on myself.

  “Very nice,” said my mother. “Perhaps I should give it to you.”

  “Yes, perhaps you should!” I laughed. “I could wear it to all my classes!” I placed it back in the hatbox, which smelled of cedar and insecticide.

  The graduation was inside the gymnasium due to a forecast of rain, and in the middle the tornado siren went off and we all just stayed put. Personally, I felt this sound effect was suited to the occasion. The girls all wore high heels beneath their black graduation gowns and wobbled across the stage with great uncertainty, except one who strode quickly, then slipped and almost fell. I didn’t know any of them. Pinned to their chests they wore large white peonies that looked like the heads of angora cats. The boys pumped their fists in the air at the slightest inside joke. When Robert walked across the stage to grasp his diploma, the principal, good-naturedly, pretended to hold it back, but Robert smiled, and so did the principal, who patted him on the back, gave him the thing, and sent him on his way. He was liked, I could see that. People really liked Robert. In the crowd his posse called out “Gunny!” and “Gunny, got your gun?” and that’s when the full implications of his going off to the army really hit me. Why hadn’t I given it sufficient thought before now? Well, that was an easy one to answer, but still. It was not an excuse.

  When the tornado siren stopped, we stepped outside and there was sunshine everywhere. It was the season of white flowers; to go with the girls’ peonies the school grounds were edged with bridal wreath and daisies. Only one dark rain cloud was left in the sky, like an evil genie, and it was making a hasty retreat in the breeze.

  My brother left for the ironically named Fort Bliss the very next day. We took him to the bus station and said good-bye. We gave him little presents. A rabbit’s foot key chain. A tortoiseshell toothbrush. I gave him a copy of poems by Rumi and a three-by-five card that said Here’s a reply to your forgotten e-mail: don’t forget to write!, which, in case it sounded like sisterly snottiness, caused me to throw my arms around him and hug him hard. “You put the soul in soldier,” I whispered to him. “Just don’t get one of those flag tattoos.”

  He pulled away from my embrace. “Why not?” he asked, and I could see he was desperate for the knowledge and reasoning behind anything. I could see he felt shorthanded, underequipped, factually and otherwise. Just the night before he had said, “Afghanistan has provinces? Like Canada?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said now, shrugging. He beamed
anyway. He was no longer a boy; he had become a young man. How had that happened? Nothing I said or knew had I known for very long, and so its roots were spindly and unsteady and the whole thing unsharable. “Don’t be nervous ’bout the service,” I said. It was a line I’d heard in a song somewhere. “You’ll be fine. Oh, and this,” I said more quickly, confidentially, discreetly stuffing a tampon in the side pocket of his duffel.

  “Good God, what’s that for?”

  “Just—for an emergency. Worse-case scenario: it stanches wounds.”

  “Where do you learn this stuff?” asked my brother.

  “From movies,” I said. “I’ve told you that before.”

  We had brought Blot with us, and Robert knelt down and grabbed the dog’s head. “Good-bye, Blot, you bum,” he said, pulling the dog close and giving him a rub.

  My father thrust a wad of bills into Robert’s front jacket pocket. My mother was the most misty-eyed, and my brother, as if to calm and please her, stayed peppy to such an artificial and generous degree that you could see he had no idea what he was doing. Even hoisting his duffel bags, he looked uncertain. My mother leaned in to kiss him and swept her hand through his wavy hair. “Oh, they’re going to shave it all off.”

  “Let’s not get maudlin about hair,” warned my dad.

  “Sell it to a wig maker!” I said, chucking him on the arm. “Get cash!” I couldn’t help at that moment but recall the time Robert had put Crisco in his front cowlick to tame it. It had frozen on the way to school, before we even got to the corner bus stop. But by midmorning the grease was melting and dripping down his forehead. I tried not to think of other times when he was younger and would absentmindedly pick scabby barleys from his nose. Now was not the time to think of him as a hapless child.

  When the bus hissed and rumbled away, my brother’s face still pressed at the tinted window, my mother dabbed at her eyes and could only say, “I’m going to throttle that recruiter.”

  “Now, Gail,” said my dad. Then he added, “If you throttle him, how will I get to hear him yelp and groan when I kick him?” This cheered my mother up.

  I began working in my father’s baby greens field that very week. My job was to run in front of the shaver, a special attachment on the thresher, which he had contrived himself and which he was amused by and drove proudly like a car, though our field was so small that it was hard for him to make the turn-arounds. I ran ahead of it with fake feather and plastic hawk-wing extensions on my arms, whacking at the greens to scare the mice so they would not get into the mix. (If we had to take the greens to the triple-wash facility, it ate into the profit.) My father had actually designed my outfit for this, partially from a kite we had once brought to the Dellacrosse Kites on Ice festival. The costume had an aquiline-beaked mask and long wings I slipped my arms through, dipping them as I ran, brushing near the ground, beating the leaves, to resemble an actual predator and to encourage rodents to run from the shaver: nobody wanted sliced mice in their salads. At least not this decade.

  I trotted, swooped, and shooed. I was the winged creation of my dad, like Icarus. I could feel myself almost flying, the way I flew in dreams: not very high, just running along and then sometimes lifting off just a little so that my stomach moved up into my heart. For a second. Not unlike my Suzuki on a speed bump.

  I would also clear the field of rocks; it was at times rocky as a beach, stones rising to the surface from a quarrylike underworld. I collected them in a loader either to repatch the fish hatchery or to sell at the seed shop. The ones they sold at the seed shop were from China. All the way from China! Everything from China, even the rocks! It was not an expression yet, like coals to Newcastle—like rocks to Dellacrosse—but it would be soon, said my father, as it was the confounding truth.

  In this manner, most often masked and winged, I spent the summer days. Running twenty feet ahead of my dad as he rode the reconfigured thresher, I would run and dip and swoosh and in theory scare off rabbits as well. Mice darted, snakes did their undulating gumshoe. With my dad in the mornings I had worked up a song: “Squirrels and mice and moles better scurry / when I am a hawk in a hurry / when I am a hawk in a hurry with some fringe on top.” Even Miles Davis had liked this tune.

  My father worried that I might be getting too good at this task and scaring off all the real predators that would help keep the rodent population down.

  “Hey, that’s life in the the-ay-ter!” I said. The whole soundtrack to Oklahoma played in my head. The sun burned. There was a bright golden haze on all meadows. The sky shone as blue as forget-me-nots, and often the smudged thumbprint of a morning moon hung suspended above. The air before noon was soft, with the coppery smell of dirt. We would mostly work early, and then evenings, when things (me, the lettuce) were cooler. Midday I spent resting and reading, drinking cold lemonade and Coke out of Ball jars that had lost their tops. Sometimes in the afternoon there were thunderstorms so sky-crackingly violent it was like life on another planet entirely. The storms seemed different from the ones of my childhood. These were sky-wide and tree toppling, moving across the state with the fury of marauders—pelting rain and wind that could switch the current of a creek—and then afterward, total calm in the air, sparkle and breeze, as if nothing had happened at all.

  Although I avoided most community picnics—I had never liked sitting on the ground with a paper plate while flies bit your legs, or sitting squeezed in at an old picnic table on a bench that gave you splinters—on the Fourth of July I went with my parents to the county baseball field to watch the fireworks. As this was the first fireworks display since 9/11, the county had rented a metal detector and we all had to walk through, the daylilies, in Packer green and gold, in bloom to either side of us.

  “As if Al Qaeda has ever even heard of Dellacrosse,” said my father once we were seated. “I guess absolutely everyone wants to be on the map. No matter what map it is.”

  “It’s a form of terrorism not to bomb this town,” I said. My father gave me a look.

  “Keep your voices down, you two,” said my mother. She had brought snacks of lemon frosting sandwiched between graham crackers, a favorite of my childhood, and when we were seated she passed the little Tupperware box back and forth to my father and me.

  Once the sun set completely, its murky rose stretched taffylike across the horizon, the air grew cooler, and the show began. Like the operation of a rocket ship, the fireworks were staged to burst at designated points across the sky. Peonies and chrysanthemums bloomed forth from spasms and explosions. Were we having fun? Dripping sparkle sizzled and dissipated, then resumed; the deathly silence before each burst began to fill me with dread. Screeches, whistles, booms: the barium green and copper blue held too many intimations of war. We were a glum trio, my parents and I, our necks nonetheless arced and our heads dropped back onto the flattened hoods of our sweatshirts, watching all this lit-up drizzle. Our snack was gone. We had eaten the whole container’s worth.

  Would it have been so bad to have remained a colony of England? I wondered fiercely with every bang. Would it have been so terrible if every dessert was called a pudding even if it was a cake, to grow up saying “in hospital,” to lose a few articles, to spell gray with an e, to resprinkle the r’s, to have an idle king, an idle queen, and put all the car steering wheels on the right? Well, perhaps the steering wheels would be worth fighting for. Perhaps our Founding Fathers had had an intimation of that one.

  “There was a lot of smallpox in the eighteenth century,” I said on the way home, squeezed between my parents in the front of the truck.

  “There sure was,” said my dad. “But they started the inoculations around the time of the war, I think.”

  “Well, we can celebrate that, at least,” said my mother. “Sometimes I think it might not have been so awful to be English.”

  “Oh, my God—I was just thinking the same thing!”

  “Tories in the lorry!” exclaimed my dad.

  “Well, how awful could it be? England looks
great in pictures. You went there on your honeymoon!”

  “We would have been colonists,” said my dad.

  “So? Would we have had to wear big scarlet Cs around our necks?”

  My father leaned past me to say to my mother, “You send a kid to college, and look what you get.”

  “Corinne Carlten wears a big gold C around willingly,” I said.

  “How is Corinne these days?” asked my mother.

  “I really wouldn’t know,” I said, and then fell silent. Every exchange with my parents ended up in some boring place I didn’t want to be.

  “And how about Krystal Bunberry, since her dad got sick and all.”

  “Dunno,” I said. “She was nice to send that toilet paper, though!”

  “If we were still English,” said my father, “we’d be drinking more and driving on the wrong side of the road—pretty much what people do on the Fourth of July anyway.”

  “I don’t like all the words in our national anthem,” my mother said. She had given up on me and my friends as a topic of conversation. “‘Bombs bursting in air.’ What kind of song is that to sing? When sung in large crowds, everyone takes a deep breath and it sounds like ‘bombs bursting in hair.’”

  “Hush,” said my father.

  Then we all looked out at the road. The high crucifixes of phone and electric poles, in line on either side, multiplied and shrinking in the distance almost to a vanishing point, made me think of the final scene of Spartacus.

  “Think the corn’s knee high?” asked my mom, and soon our truck lights swung and shone onto our own driveway and we were home.

  I watched movies that I rented from Farm & Fleet. They weren’t very good; Farm & Fleet was new to it, and the selection was small, though we never actually used the phrase slim pickins at our house; it would have been bad luck. Like placing your pocket-book on the floor or your hat on the bed. But I was watching a lot of Jennifer Aniston movies and documentaries about Brazil and Argentina. I would return them the very next day. Sometimes I would drive around, taking the long way back. It was lovely summer weather, and the shoulders of the county trunks were bruised blue with chicory, then snowy with Queen Anne’s lace, for a while mixing, making a kind of weed gingham along the roadsides. Prairie grass flowers had been replanted in places and in others had never left: meadow rose, Turk’s cap, lady slipper, laurel.