A Gate at the Stairs

  “Did you have a good breakfast?” he asked.

  “I did,” I lied.

  “Sometimes that’s all it takes,” he said, turning back around, and I studied his hair-cape some more, its weird, warm flip.

  The foster home we pulled up to was in a working-class subdivision. The foster family’s name was McKowen, and on their garage was a big letter M in bright green plastic.

  “Are you ready to scootch?” Edward asked Sarah.

  “I so am,” she said.

  Edward twisted back toward me. “That’s Sarah’s idea of the quintessential mom word: scootch. Scootch over. Scootch in. Everybody’s gotta scootch and the moms are the scootch directors.”

  “That’s right,” said Sarah.

  “I can kind of see that,” I said, sounding doubtful rather than agreeable as I’d intended. Sarah turned the car off, checked her reflection quickly in the rearview mirror, scrutinizing her teeth in case they were dotted like dice with the scorched remnants of breakfast, then opened her door. The driveway was shoveled, and we all scootched out. The slam of our doors all in a row made me think of a squad car pulling up and the cops hopping out and going cautiously for their guns. Sarah was first to the porch, eager and businessy, and rang the bell. Edward and I were still trailing behind her like the rookies. She was already standing with the storm door propped open against her shoulder. She was loosening her scarf. When the white wooden door of the McKowens’ opened, she removed her hat, which had pom-poms on its ties. She quickly, unnecessarily poofed up her hair. “Hi, I’m Sarah Brink,” she said, and thrust out her hand. “We’re here to see the baby?”

  The woman who answered the door was large and blond and seemed to have a bit of a limp as if one hip were stiff, though all she was doing to suggest this was shifting her weight in the doorway. “Nobody told us anyone was coming,” she said tersely.

  “Roberta Marshall said she made the appointment,” said Sarah as we pulled up behind her.

  “Who’s that?”

  “She’s with Adoption Option?”

  “No, we’re a foster family for Catholic Social Services, and no one has called us about this at all.”

  “Oh, dear.” Sarah turned and looked at Edward, her eyes welling a little. I was getting this strange kidnapper feeling and wanted either to run for it, clear to Canada, or to bust in there and grab somebody. I hadn’t eaten breakfast, and I had to calm my mind.

  Everyone stood there breathing and no one knew what to do at all. The woman in the doorway was studying us closely. I wondered what we looked like to her. Overeducated, well-preserved liberal types from Troy with their college-age daughter. Or some kinky ménage à trois. Also from Troy. To the rest of the state, Troy was the city from which all kink and pretentious evil sprang. I often thought of it that way myself.

  The woman at the door, Mrs. McKowen, sighed, as if defeated. “I don’t know why they call them organizations. They are all just a mess.” She widened the aperture between door and doorjamb. “Well, you’re here, so you might as well come on in and see Mary.”

  “Mary?” Sarah hadn’t bothered asking about a name—she clearly had her own name picked out and Mary wasn’t it.

  “The little girl. You do want to see her, don’t you?”

  “Oh, of course. This is my husband, Edward,” Sarah said hurriedly, “and our friend Tassie.” I nodded at Mrs. McKowen and she squinted at me a little, clearly wondering who the hell I could be.

  We walked into a living room with yellow walls, a green rug, and a brown plaid couch. The television was blaring morning TV. Brightly colored plastic blocks and inexpensive cloth animals, fuzzy and fresh—a caterpillar and a bumblebee—were scattered on the floor. There was a teenage girl hovering in the back doorway to the unlit kitchen, and she just watched us without saying anything. The baby Mary was dressed in a pale mint green one-piecer, the feet of which had been cut off so she could fit into it. She was too big for such clothing. She was not really a baby at all but looked almost two, yet she was still in a wheeled plastic walker, which was placed in front of the television, which she was watching. Just some crap talk show, it looked like to me—“So you left him because he wouldn’t take his Zoloft?” a well-coiffed woman was asking another on the TV screen—not even a program for children. Mrs. McKowen came in and flicked it off. “Mary, look, you’ve got some visitors!” The little girl turned in her conveyance and gave us a full-lipped smile. Her teeth were tiny white shells. She had silky dark hair, skin that was a mix of biscuit and taupe, and eyes that were black and bright: she looked like a savvy Indian rug merchant. She flung her arms in the air to be lifted. The walker she treated sort of like a little office. And now she wanted out.

  “Hey, baby,” said Sarah, picking Mary up, but the child’s feet were caught in the walker’s canvas leg holes and the whole contraption lifted as well, a little disastrously, and Sarah could not untangle Mary’s feet, and Mary began to cry.

  “Oh, dear, that thing is caught on her,” said Sarah. I stepped forward to help, and to his credit Edward did, too, and we pulled the walker off the child, but by this point Mary was crying for Mrs. McKowen and wriggling in Sarah’s arms, trying to get away.

  “Oh, Mary, come here, child,” said Mrs. McKowen, and she took Mary from Sarah and comforted her. Mrs. McKowen looked back at Sarah drily. “Do you have experience with children?”

  “She’s a little old for that thing,” Sarah said, trying not to sound flummoxed.

  “Why don’t you all have a seat?” said Mrs. McKowen, and we quickly did. The teenage girl in the shadows remained there. Sarah was next to Mrs. McKowen, who sat the now calm Mary in her lap. Edward sat in a chair near the TV. I noticed that he miscalculated social distances, and it was an impediment to his charm. He was either too close or too far away. Eighteen inches, I read once, was exactly the right distance, but he seemed never there, even metaphorically. Now he was mostly far and still.

  “Do you want to say hi to your visitors?” said Mrs. McKowen to the toddler. “You want to go to your new mama?”

  “Mama?” said the little girl, and she twisted around toward the teenager still hanging back in the shadows. This sudden attention caused the teenager to disappear entirely. And that’s when it became clear that the teenage girl was the one raising this child. Mrs. McKowen was taking in the support money, and the teenager, who perhaps had no life beyond this faux motherhood, was about to have her heart broken in a new and different way for teenagers. “Mama?” cried Mary again, looking in the direction of the dark kitchen. I guessed that the girl had secretly, quietly encouraged Mary to call her “Mama.”

  “Hey, baby?” began Sarah, ingratiatingly, and the little girl looked at Sarah.

  Thus began their tentative approaches toward each other. Each was playful and affectionate. Sarah scootched closer and made her fingers crawl like a spider up the little girl’s arm. The little girl smiled and hunched her shoulders up by her ears and said, “Neck,” indicating that she both did and didn’t want to be tickled there, so Sarah both did and didn’t, getting the mix just right. And soon Mary was on Sarah’s lap and playing with her watch and touching her opal earrings and Sarah was making the goofy sounds and talking in the high-pitched agitated and ingratiating voice that adults around babies did naturally if ridiculously because look, see, it worked.

  The hovering teenage girl in the doorway seemed to step backwards, into an actual engulfing shadow or perhaps a china closet. This seemed to loosen the tongue of Mrs. McKowen, who began to exhibit that midwesternism of tone that was the opposite of what was typically aimed for even in a city like Troy, where friendly things—Hello, Can I help you?—were said with acerbity and anger in the cadence. Here, as in the country where I grew up, very provocative things were said with an innocuous lilt. Tone was all. Gift wrap was all. Perfect the wrap, and you could put whatever you wanted in the box. You could put firecrackers. You could put dog shit.

  “So,” said Mrs. McKowen, “have you met the birth
mother?”

  “Yes,” said Sarah.

  “And you’re sure you want that woman’s child?”

  Edward began to cough. “Excuse me—is there a bathroom I might use?”

  “Why do you say that about the birth mom?” asked Sarah.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Mrs. McKowen. “I guess, well, the lady’s not the sharpest tool in the shed.

  “Washroom’s around the corner,” she said to Edward.

  Edward got up, turned the corner, and abandoned us.

  “She wants to go back to school,” said Sarah.

  “Sikhool,” repeated Mary.

  “Yes, school,” cooed Sarah.

  “Yes, school,” said Mrs. McKowen, sighing. “She’s always talking about that.”

  “You see her often?”

  “Well, it’s a requirement of Catholic Social Services that she come here to visit the child once a month. Creates an opportunity for bonding, which they don’t want to be accused of having deprived her of. Also an opportunity for change of heart. Which I don’t see coming about in any complete way.” She paused. “You believe her story about the rape?”

  “What rape?”

  “Lynette?” called Mrs. McKowen, and her loud voice caused the toddler to burst into tears. “Could you come feed Mary? It’s getting to be on towards lunch.”

  The teenage girl stepped out from the shadows and toward the baby, who burst into a watery smile at the sight of her.

  “Lynette, this is Sarah and … her people,” she said with a vague wave toward me and toward Edward, who had just returned from his quick pee.

  “Hi,” said Lynette, and she picked the baby up and away from Sarah, settling her easily on her blue-jeaned hip, then took her out of the room. That was that.

  “She didn’t tell you she was raped?” said Mrs. McKowen. Now that the baby was gone there was a certain force in the question.

  “No,” said Sarah.

  “Hmm,” said Mrs. McKowen.

  “Maybe she wasn’t.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “Maybe she just wanted an excuse for what she was doing.”

  “Maybe. Don’t see how that works, though,” said Mrs. McKowen, who then said no more, and soon she stood, walked to the door, and opened it.

  We left, looking for lunch.

  “Let’s see, where shall we go? It’s early, so we should miss the crowds.” Sarah turned on the car radio. The radio was on some sort of soul station and was playing a rap song with extreme female moaning in the background. “You gotta do it, roll it, run it, up it, down it. Gotta do it, roll it, run it, rock it …”—a conjugation of every sort. Edward flicked the radio off disdainfully. But Sarah turned it back on. “Sex is the only good thing the world has given them. At least listen to it.”

  I could see she was getting ready to enter a new understanding of society. It would be artificial and touristic. It would be motherhood in a safari suit. But how not? It was better than some. Probably it was better than most.

  We found a metal-edged diner, went in, and sat at the counter side by side, letting our coats fall off our shoulders and dangle from the stools, anchored by our sitting butts. The counter had been freshly wiped with some piney disinfectant and right where we sat there was an old red Coca-Cola dispenser that resembled the outboard motor of a boat. I sat between Sarah and Edward, like a child. This they seemed to like, but it made it hard for me to have any appetite at all. I could not eat, as if eating were the most inappropriate and irrelevant and perhaps even revolting thing we could be doing right then. At one point I turned too quickly and the wrist edge of my sweater sleeve knocked some french fries to the floor. When I was younger I could get away with not eating something I didn’t like by claiming to my parents either that it was too rich or that it had fallen on the floor. (Later I would use this with people: “She was too rich” or “He fell on the floor—what is there to say?”) And here I was now suddenly verklempt by my indifference to food. I was floating away from myself. My breath would go musty and sour if I did not eat, so I tried. I ordered a vanilla milk shake and sucked it down. Edward and Sarah would occasionally reach across me to touch each other—a hand on a thigh, or upper arm, or shoulder—and then retreat into their separate and separating spaces. Everyone was quiet, though I wasn’t sure why.

  We returned to the hotel, headed to our respective rooms. I noticed that when older people got tired they looked a lot older, whereas when young people got tired they just looked tired. Sarah and Edward looked a little aged; our early lunch had not refreshed them and some worry had knotted their mouths and generally dragged their features downward. They were waiting for a phone call, they said, and they would call me after they got it.

  “OK,” I said, and crawled back into my room and into my bed with my clothes on. I’d brought only one book, the Zen poems, and was finding their obliqueness fatiguing and ripe for parody. I decided instead to investigate the official Judeo-Christian comedy, and pulled the Gideon Bible from the nightstand drawer. I started at the beginning, day one, when God created the heavens and the earth and gave them form. There’d been no form before. Just amorphous blobbery. God then said let there be light, in order to get a little dynamic going between night and day, though the moon and stars and sun were not the generators of this light but merely a kind of middle management, supervisors, glorified custodians, since they were not created until later—day four—as can happen with bureaucracy, even of the cosmic sort. Still, I thought of all the songs that had been written about these belated moon and stars and sun, compared to songs about form. Not one good song about form! Sometimes a week just got more inspiring as it went along. Still, it was truly strange that there was morning and night on day one though the sun wasn’t created until day four. Perhaps God didn’t have a proofreader until, like, day forty-seven, but by that time all sorts of weird things were happening. Perhaps he was really, completely on his own until then, making stuff up and then immediately forgetting what he’d made up already. People were dying and coming back and having babies and then not able to, so their handmaidens would instead. Then I slid into the nap I knew the lunchtime milk shake would bring on if I just let it.

  I awoke to a faint knocking on the door.

  “Tassie? It’s Sarah. We’re going to go to the hospital for the baby’s checkup. Do you want to come?”

  “Yes, I’m coming,” I said, then hurried to the door to open it, but it slammed into the brass slide lock through which I peered, dazed, as if through bars, at a slim slice of Sarah.

  My nap had not effectively rebooted me. Sarah was wearing her winter coat, but I could still see she was shrugging beneath it. “The agency is switching foster families and they have an appointment this afternoon at the hospital for our little girl.” She was also wearing that hand-knitted hat with the ear flaps and pom-pom ties. Were these back in style? Had they ever been in style?

  I had to close the door on her completely in order to undo the lock and open it again, this time wide. “Let me get my shoes on,” I said.

  “This was supposed to be the Presidential Suite,” she said, gazing into the room at the holes in the wall.

  “Well, even presidents get shot,” I said.

  “I was just going to say that myself,” she said, smiling. “But I didn’t want to scare you.”

  I didn’t know whether this was interesting—that we were both thinking the same gruesome thing—or even whether it was actually the case. Perhaps it was just rhetorical ESP: Kreskin’s Guide to Etiquette. But even if it was true, that we were about to say the same thing, did this connect us in some deep, private way? Or was it just a random obviousness shared between strangers? The deeper life between two people I had yet to read with confidence. It seemed a kind of vaporous text that kept revising its very alphabet. An exfoliating narrative, my professors would probably say. The paratext of the possible.

  “Sorry this is so beat up,” she added.

  “It’s OK.”

  “Our
bedspread is even more lurid than yours,” she confided. “Maybe hunters come here in hunting season. We’re in the Packer Suite, which is green and gold with footballs on the wallpaper. I kept thinking they were walnuts. The balls, I mean. Edward had to clarify.”

  “Ha! Well, at least the water pressure’s good!”

  “Yes, well, we’ll wait for you in the car out front,” said Sarah, turning to go. Was she trying to keep some irritation out of her voice? Of course! Once again I realized I wasn’t really supposed to go with them to this, but I had forgotten and in my sleepiness had said yes.

  In the car they made small talk about the carseat they had just purchased at Sears. It was next to me in the back, still with some plastic around it. “It looks safe,” I said blithely.

  “They make them better now,” said Sarah. “The kids are more securely locked in. Kids used to be able to leap out in no time.”

  In the hospital lobby, a new transitional foster care person was carrying baby Mary, who was now sporting a hat and had been bundled into a pale blue snowsuit that was perhaps institutionally owned and intended for boys. “Hi, I’m Julie,” said the woman. “I’m a foster parent for Adoption Option. I just fetched Mary here from the CSS foster home—there was a little bit of a scene at the door.” She loosened her hand just slightly from Mary and flapped it toward Sarah like a seal flipper.

  “Oh, really,” said Sarah, shaking her hand. “I’m Sarah.”

  “Yes, I know. And you must be Edward and you must be Tassie.” She gave us each a nod, still hanging on to Mary.

  “A scene?” asked Edward, not letting this go.

  “Well, the birth mother had made her decision—she was switching agencies—but this foster family was a little upset. They were reluctant to let the child go, and the changeover, I’m afraid, was a bit dramatic.”

  “Really?” Sarah looked worried. “What happened?”

  “Oh, I’ll spare you.” Julie sighed and touched the little girl’s nose, making her smile. She turned back to Sarah, hesitating. “You met their teenage daughter, Lynette?”