A Gate at the Stairs

  “Yes.”

  “Enough said,” said Julie. “Wanna hold your child?”

  “Let me see if she’ll come to me,” said Sarah. She reached toward the little girl and said, “Come here, baby.” The little girl went with her calmly, and Sarah settled her happily on her canted hip.

  An elderly African-American woman came walking by and she looked at all of us, but especially at Sarah holding Mary. “Is that your child?” she asked Sarah doubtfully.

  “Yes, she is,” said Sarah, smiling in a dazed way as if she had just been smacked gleefully in the head.

  The older woman stopped and looked at Mary, then Sarah. “Well, that’s the most beautiful child I’ve ever seen,” she said, and then moved on.

  Edward turned to Julie, and said, “That woman was hired by Adoption Option.”

  Julie laughed. “I doubt it.”

  “You don’t think the agency might be worried because there’s a dearth of white babies and they need some added promo?”

  “Edward,” chided Sarah, but she was beaming, and now so was Mary.

  Dearth.

  Mary was spectacularly pretty. I was only just now noticing it. Perhaps the blast of outdoor air had freshened her face, or the light blue of her snowsuit flattered her coloring—who could say. She was a beautiful thing. Her smile was impish but sweet, and her deep dark eyes had presence and considerable intelligence peering out beneath her flannel hat. She was a watchful child, and despite all the upheaval she had the aura of a deeply loved one. Still, there was something in that light blue alone that showed her off to advantage. The color looked like a different color on her—one that all the little girls of the world would want and snatch away from the boys if they could see it this way, this aqua of the angels. One of the few times I’d ordered clothing from a catalog—with my mother’s MasterCard—I’d ordered all the items the black models were wearing. The color of the fabrics—oranges, greens, turquoise, and ivory—looked so good against the models’ skin, but when they arrived and I put them on me, they looked like crap. My own skin, with its splotches of pale red and blue, made me a queer shade of lavender. I looked like a dead thing placed inside a living. So whenever I heard the word dearth, a word that sounded like a cross between death and birth, a miscarriage perhaps, or the sleeping car in a train wreck, this made-up color—the lilac of lifelessness—was the thing that leaped to mind.

  “Baby Mary?” said a receptionist carrying a large file, and Julie pointed to Sarah. “That’s us,” she said.

  The receptionist smiled at Mary and chucked her cheek. “Looks like she’s been eating a lot of squash and carrots!” she said merrily.

  It was the beginning of a long stretch of thinking I was hearing things.

  “She’s biracial African-American,” said Julie.

  “Oh! Well. I’ve got the birth mother’s file here, too, which you are allowed to look at. The last name, of course, has been whited out for her privacy.”

  “Yes—Edward? You want to stay out here and look at the file? You’re the scientist. Julie and I will go in with the baby.”

  “Sure,” he said.

  That left me in the lobby with Edward. At last I had stayed behind—but with Edward and the thick medical history of the birth mother. I sat next to him on an orange leatherette sofa as he patted the file and looked at me. “Shall we see what it has to tell us?” He was looking through me; some other thought had erased me, and he soon pulled his gaze back entirely.

  “I guess,” I said. He turned his attention to the file. He had assumed the brusque amiability of someone used to having assistants.

  It seemed an utter invasion of privacy looking at all these descriptions of personal and bodily matters, but on all the pages of the medical records Bonnie’s name was whited out. Sometimes the entirety of it, sometimes just the last name. The afflictions that ran in the family were heart disease, bipolar disorder (the suicide of an uncle), acne, and curvature of the spine. For the patient herself there were many pages of influenzas, psoriasis, depression, anxiety disorder, shingles, herpes, high blood pressure, and at the end pregnancy resolved with a caesarean. There had been some drinking at the beginning of the pregnancy, a six-pack or two here and there. Edward stared at that page, reading. “Catholics will confess,” he said to me without looking up, and then turned the page. I was trying to match up all this medical history with the large, stiff, overplucked Bonnie that I had met. On one of the pages—a sonogram page that a radiologist had attached to another report—someone had not noticed the patient’s name and so had neglected to white it out: Bonnie Jankling Crowe.

  “Oops,” said Edward, noticing as well but not pointing to it, though he didn’t have to. Now we would both know forever. “Let’s not tell Sarah,” said Edward. “She’s got a slightly obsessive side.”

  “Oh, OK,” I said. And so I entered a small conspiracy with him. I no longer knew anymore what I was consenting to when I said whatever I found myself saying. Yet it didn’t seem to matter.

  Edward now decided to close up the file. “Nobody’s perfect. Everyone has a relative or two that’s come down with some crud or stuck a fork in someone’s eye or dynamited a perfectly good shed.”

  This astounded me. “Absolutely,” I said.

  He stood and tucked it under his arm as if he were already regretting having shared it with me, and then he walked across the lobby and got a drink of water. I watched his figure stooped over the bubbler—his longish hair fell forward into his face. He was still wearing his coat, but it was open and dangled like collapsed cloth wings. Turning, and sweeping his hair back with one hand, he came back to sit on the orange sofa but sat farther away from me, turned to smile quickly and perfunctorily, then resumed a kind of staring out into the space of the room, one elbow propped broodingly on the sofa arm, his hand positioned across his own mouth, as we waited for Sarah to return. At one point he turned to me and said, “One shouldn’t buy babies, of course. As a society we all agree. And mothers shouldn’t sell them. But that is what we keep telling ourselves as these middlemen get richer and richer and the birth mother continues to empty bedpans while wearing her new wristwatch.” He paused. “They’re only allowed to receive tokens, like a watch. Nothing real, like a car. The nothing-but-a-watch law is considered progressive, since babies must not be sold, or exchanged for cars. And so they are exchanged for watches.”

  “It’s all morally confusing, isn’t it,” I ventured.

  “It sure is,” he said.

  Sarah came out smiling, holding baby Mary, who was now clutching her and snuffling back tears. Julie trailed behind them. “They had to take blood from her foot for an AIDS test. She’s really too old for that not to hurt.”

  “And she’s too young to have AIDS—unless the mother has it. Why don’t they test the mother?” Edward was suddenly into the various offenses involved in all these procedures.

  Julie shrugged. “You can’t do it that way. State law.”

  There were a lot of laws. We were not allowed to bring the medical records out of the hospital, so Edward returned the file to the receptionist’s desk. We could not just leave with the baby. We had to leave with Julie, too, and go back first to Adoption Option and sign papers. In the parking lot Julie said, “Wait a minute, let me get something from my car,” and while she trotted to her car Sarah said quietly to Edward, “Anything in the medical records we should worry about?”

  “Not really,” he replied.

  “Not really?”

  “No,” he repeated with emphasis. “It’s no different really from anyone else’s history.”

  “No different really?”

  “Don’t pounce on my adverbs,” said Edward. “No. Honestly.”

  “You just stepped on my toe.”

  “What?

  “You just rammed into me a little and stepped on my toe.”

  “Sorry. I’m sure our car rental agreement covers it.”

  “Yeah,” said Sarah, sighing. “Darling, remember when
we murdered someone and American Express took care of everything?”

  That same joke! But Edward wasn’t smiling. A shadow passed between them. A sepia tinge came over Sarah’s eyes. A horse-drawn sled jingled its harness bells off in the distance: this town would turn winter into a holiday if it killed them. “The family that sleighs together stays together,” Sarah murmured to me. Or, that is what I thought I heard, though there was no levity in her voice. She took one hand briefly away from Mary to squeeze mine in reassurance. Or in promise. Or in regret. Or in happy hope. Or else in some secret pact that involved a little bit of everything.

  Julie came back bearing a white plastic trash bag, which she jammed into the backseat with me, Sarah, and baby Mary. She got in the front, with Edward, and came with us, as she technically, as of the moment, was the custodial parent.

  Edward was fussing with the heater. “A car that controlled the outside weather as well—now, that would be climate control,” he was saying.

  “Hey, baby,” Sarah kept murmuring. “Hey, baby, baby.” She turned to me and in a stage whisper said, “You know at my age, your estrogen starts dwindling and you cannot speak to anyone in a civil voice. But then a baby comes along and look how one speaks.”

  Civil, but not civilized.

  “All the irritation is borne away,” she added.

  For now, I thought, like a scary dummy in one of those horror films in which the ventriloquist goes mad.

  “I’d like to keep Mary as her name—”

  “Mary,” said Mary, brightening at the sound of her own name. It was the only name around her that stayed constant. There were now once again all these new names of new people for her to learn.

  “But I’m going to add Emma to it. I’ve always loved the name Emma.” I could see in Sarah’s face the look of a chef taking charge of her own kitchen.

  “Mary-Emma?” asked Julie from the front seat, her voice one of professionally maintained neutrality—barely.

  “Yes, Mary-Emma,” said Sarah dreamily. “And then Bertha, after my grandmother: Mary-Emma Bertha Thornwood-Brink. I’m afraid she’s going to be one of those children with too many names.” I knew them from my freshman year: the trainlike names that were like a bulletin board of parental indecision, obligation, genetic pride, misplaced creativity, and politics of every sort. Even Murph had a legal name so long that her great-uncle was stuck in there somewhere. Sarah was massaging Mary-Emma’s hand. Mary-Emma was dozing off in the car—she’d had an intense day already. “Oh, I suppose people will think we should name her Maya or Leontyne or Zora, something that honors the heritage of black women. And of course I will educate her in all of that. But I love the name Emma.”

  “As long as we don’t name her Condoleezza,” said Edward from the front seat, “I will be a happy man.”

  “Mary-Emma,” said Julie, staring straight ahead through the windshield and offering no further comment. A navy blue dusk was descending on us, although it was only four in the afternoon. “You take a right up here,” she said, directing Edward.

  “Thanks,” he said, flashing Julie a smile that seemed to beg her for connection.

  Sarah from the back noticed and yet didn’t. There was a long period of wordlessness in which she was just lightly, protectively petting the sleeping arm of sweet-faced Mary-Emma. Finally Sarah said out loud, to no one in particular, “I wonder if there are any Hitlers in the phone book.”

  Back in the Adoption Option office, there were small stacks of papers to sign. Roberta greeted us heartily, admired the baby, then took Julie only slightly aside.

  “How’d things go with the McKowens?”

  “A scene at the door, I’m afraid.”

  “I was worried about that. They’d left some angry messages on the answering machine. Well, they have no parental rights. I don’t know what they think they’re doing.”

  “They’d just had her so long, they’d grown attached, I think,” said Julie. She was still holding the white plastic bag. She handed it to me. “Here is Mary’s stuff. Or Mary-Emma’s. Excuse me. The McKowens had Christmas with her, and they got her some things. Clothes in general belong to the foster-care system. Except the ones the child is wearing.”

  “We bought some at Sears. Do we sign here?” Sarah turned to ask both Suzanne and Roberta.

  “Here,” Edward said, indicating, and they resumed their reading and signing. And then the strangest: they were writing checks, separate checks.

  “Edward and I are splitting this down the middle,” said Sarah. She was scribbling something on a scrap of paper, doing the arithmetic. “We like things to be even between us.” She paused, then murmured, “Though usually they’re not even—just odd.” No one laughed. “Oh, well.”

  “The legal fee is billed into the total, but you’ll receive a separate receipt for that in the mail.” Roberta, too, looked with surprise at the separate checkbooks. “The payment for foster care is also included.”

  Sarah was directing Edward: “Nine thousand one hundred twenty-seven and fifty cents,” she said quietly, but it might as well have been shouted from the rooftop.

  “Does Bonnie get nothing?” asked Edward.

  “You can get her a watch,” said Roberta. “No money. That’s illegal in this state.”

  Sarah put her hand on Edward’s arm. “We’ll get her a really nice watch,” she said.

  I peered inside the plastic trash bag. It was amazing to me that you could still be the tiniest thing and have stuff. On the other hand, it also amazed me that there was so little of it, and so it seemed sad that a human being was going through the world accumulating all this needless crap and yet also pathetic that this was all she had. She herself neither knew nor cared, I was sure. Inside the bag there was a stuffed yellow caterpillar, a green blanket, some plastic blocks with letters on them, a cardboard animal alphabet puzzle, a stuffed monkey in a little denim leisure suit.

  “Congratulations,” said Roberta. “You have yourself a beautiful baby.”

  “And no drugs,” added Suzanne in a kind of happy hiss. “That’s excellent.”

  In the rental car on the way home back to Troy, Sarah sat vigilantly in the back next to Mary-Emma, who was soundly asleep in the carseat Edward and Sarah had purchased at Sears, along with clothes, during my nap. “Well, we’ve done it,” said Edward. “The future’s going to be a little different now. We’ve now got a horse in the race.”

  There was a long pause, our tires hitting the gray slosh of the road. For driving, a January thaw was always preferable to actual ice, but when it was over things froze more treacherously than before. And in its melting and condensing the roadside snow turned to clumps reminiscent of black-spotted cauliflower. Better never to have thawed. “I once went to the track,” mused Sarah. “I was eleven and I went with my uncle, who came with all these statistics on the horses—a stack of papers the size of a phone book. He was poring over them, figuring out which horse to bet on, and I said, ‘Uncle Joe, look, there’s a horse named Laredo and I have a dog named Laredo.’ And my uncle just looked at me and put his papers away and said, ‘OK, let’s bet on that one.’ And so we did.”

  “Did it win?” I asked from the front seat. Edward seemed already to know this story. He continued along the bleak winter road. What was it—was it Doppler radar?—that involved the difference in pitch between the leading end and the trailing end of the reverberation? I had taken a physics course last year with a short unit on sonar.

  “Did it win?” I squeaked out again into the sharp silence of the car—but no one said anything. Edward was a scientist and so was used to heading straight into the unanswering darkness with his climate-controlled car. Snow began to fall. Large snowflakes in a lazy swirl, the flutter of ballerinas down a spiral staircase—a classic snowfall, one for the movies, one to bag and sell. For driving, however, it was a scary fairyland. Still, it was hypnotic to watch, and soon a great fatigue came over me, and after some time I thought I heard Edward say something and then Sarah’s voice sa
y very quietly, “Well, all sex is a form of rape. One could argue.” And then she added, “Please, in this weather, don’t drive with one hand.” I looked out the window and saw a white convertible sailing past us with the bumper sticker GUILT SUCKS: HAVE SOME FUN! The driver was a little white-haired lady hunched scowlingly over the wheel. “Did you hear me?” asked Sarah, and Edward’s middle-aged face turned slightly, tensed with an adolescent’s wordless hate. He appeared to continue to steer with his right hand lightly holding the bottom of the steering wheel, his other hand shoved defiantly and absurdly in his pocket. At Sarah’s request I turned on the radio, which filled the car with a soft murmur. “How many teams with a dome for their home field have won the Super Bowl?” it was saying. “And now here is Luigi Boccherini’s ‘Festival in C’!” We passed through the marshland village of Luck, whose municipal welcome sign read YOU’RE IN LUCK. And though on leaving I spied no sign saying NOW OUT OF LUCK, every aspect of it soon was implied. Edward had taken a wrong turn, and we had to turn around and go back through the town. YOU’RE IN LUCK another sign again said, and I imagined a horror movie wherein we never found our way out of this town, and kept driving back into it again, its greeting a maddening taunt.

  Eventually, I must have fallen asleep, and when I awoke there was an achy pinch in my neck. The car engine was off and we were in front of Edward and Sarah’s house. “It’s good to come in the front door with a new baby,” Sarah was saying to Edward. “There’s a superstition about bringing a baby in the back. Plus, it’s politically incorrect.”

  “There’s not a soul around,” said Edward. I looked at my watch: midnight. I was feeling like a sleepwalker, needed at this point only for whatever I could help carry into the house from the car, and so I found myself lugging Mary-Emma’s plastic trash bag of cheap plush toys as well as a grocery bag of miscellaneous snacks for the car, which had neglected to announce themselves—Ritz crackers, Nutri-Grain bars, a plastic six-pack of flavored water—and so were entirely unopened. The carseat Mary-Emma was in was a newfangled double one, with an interior upright seat set within another, and so the insert could be lifted out with Mary-Emma still in it. Edward managed the awkward weight of this with just a little tug, and Mary-Emma stirred only slightly while Sarah clawed in her bag for the house keys. We pushed in past the gate, Edward fussing with the broken hinge, and stepped carefully down the steps then back up the porch stairs to the front door. Everything in this January night possessed a lunar stillness and a lunar thrill. You could see the earth from here!