A Gate at the Stairs

  Never before in my life had I understood so deeply what it meant not to believe one’s ears.

  “My-kull!!” exclaimed the girl inside driving. The boys in the back snickered a little, and she swung the car away from the curb. The rear tire spun and flung snow into the wagon, which made Mary-Emma laugh at first and then, when the rock-frozen snow hit her face, made her cry. I hadn’t known any of this was possible in this town. Dellacrosse, perhaps—although I’d never actually heard it there—but here? Here was so proud of itself. Here was so progressive and exemplary. Here was so lockstep lefty. Here was so—white. The only color they knew here was the local one they took on for camouflage and convenience. If this were Salt Lake City, I knew, half the people here would have happily been Mormons. Instead, righteous and complacent and indistinguishable from one another, they were all members of the ACLU and the Freedom from Religion Foundation.

  “Fuckers,” I found myself saying. I picked Mary-Emma up just to hold her, letting the wagon roll slightly away and bang into a parking meter. She was so swaddled in her giant slippery snowsuit that I could hardly hang on to her. But I carried her into the coffee shop we happened to be near and sat her on the couch by the gas fireplace and unzipped her snowsuit to warm her there. The log was fake and the fire rolled around it blue and cold as water—an ornamental fountain more than a hearth. Mary-Emma’s hair was damp and pressed to her head. Well, I would get her some hot chocolate. “Foggers,” she said to me, and then we both laughed. “Don’t say that, though,” I added, in warning.

  “Oh, my God!” cried Sarah. “Oh, my God, oh, my God. That’s it, that’s it.” She began pacing around the kitchen after I told her what had happened. I did not repeat the actual word that Mykull had said but just used the phrase “the n-word.” I was holding Mary-Emma, who was playing with my hair, lifting it up and then letting it fall in my face, laughing when I would blow on it and make it move.

  Sarah continued. “My God! Who knew this was possible in this city? At the little folk music festivals in the county parks in summer you see all kinds of mixed-race families. I thought this was the perfect town … OK, not perfect, but I thought this was the best possible situation for Emmie. I thought we would not be letting her down by bringing her here, and now I see my own naïveté.” The finger-raking of her hair, which had become familiar to me, began now with two hands.

  “Perhaps if you are black, there is nowhere, really,” I said, thinking of the boy in Sufism, and Sarah just stared at me.

  “I’m forming a support group. Don’t laugh.”

  But I wasn’t laughing.

  “I’m going to use the very mechanisms of this town against it—this goddamn self-satisfied town that …”

  “That drinks its own bathwater!” I said, borrowing a Dellacrosse expression for Troy. It was a metaphor and not a metaphor and is what the outlying areas of the state all felt: that Troy was a piece of smug, liberal, recycling, civic-minded monkey masturbation. That it was gestural, trying to make itself feel good—which in Dellacrosse meant “better than everyone else.” That it wasn’t real. That was the true crime. Its lack of reality. Whatever that meant. Also, once a year some rural girl came to Troy for the weekend, drank too much, and ended up raped and beaten to death in some apartment or park.

  Sarah looked at me with sudden searching concentration. It was a look I was coming to know and it was one I felt inside of me often, a feeling of aghast but childlike scrutiny: it said, Why are there more space aliens on this planet than there used to be? Or are we the space aliens and are the human beings, uh-oh, coming back?

  “Yes,” she said slowly, then picked up speed as if snapping herself out of a daze. “Well, I guess all towns sort of drink their own bathwater. But they don’t all have cruelty-free tofu! I’m going to get a support group going, and I’m going to bring families of color into this home, and we are going to discuss things and pool our strengths and share our stories and plot our collective actions and all that shit. Would you supervise the children?”

  “What children?” I knew that the owner of the Moroccan restaurant on Wendell had children. Would they come? Last October someone had shot up the restaurant sign with actual bullets, then ripped it off and rebolted it upside down.

  “The hypothetical children. The ostensible children. The imagined children. That kind.” She smiled.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Tassa hair up ’n’ down,” said Mary-Emma, still playing with it as if it were silky string.

  And so the weekly meetings got their start. Every Wednesday evening I would be upstairs with the children: Mary-Emma, two four-year-olds named Isaiah and Eli, a five-year-old named Althea, and a girl named Tika, who was eight and who sometimes helped me with the little ones and other times just sat in a corner and read Harry Potter. Often other families would make an appearance: an Ethiopian doctor and her sons, a seventh-grade boy named Clarence and a fourth-grader named Kaz. There was an Adilia, a Kwame, and more. They were mostly “of color,” as was said by all the adults downstairs, a range of shades from light to dark, though most of the parents downstairs, I noted, were white. Most were the transracial, biracial, multiracial families Sarah and Edward knew thus far in Troy, and probably more would be recruited. Upstairs I built Lego forts with the kids, or thought up little hiding games or wrestled or sang. Their voices were boisterous and fun and, being kids, they had their own words: “Nanana-booboo, you can’t catch me,” they would tease one another. The way in which the play-taunts of children resembled the calls and cries of animals was interesting to me. Only once did Sarah summon me downstairs to help her make a quick emergency dessert for the group: we microwaved the peach baby food and spooned it as hot puree over ice cream. “We used to eat this in Dellacrosse all the time,” I said, changing the facts slightly.

  “Really!” said Sarah.

  “Yes. Sort of. It was better than some old raisin cream pie—pudding and pits we called that pie.”

  “Pits?”

  “My mom always bought cheap raisins with the stems still on and poking out.” I continued dripping the hot peach liquid on the little scoops of ice cream, which had been dug out of the carton with a melon baller. Naked, they looked ready for ping-pong.

  Everyone, except the children, exclaimed over the dessert’s deliciousness.

  “You can just eat the ice cream,” I told the kids upstairs.

  And amid the shared stories of public school biases and gang statistics and the strange comments of acquaintances, remarks would waft up through two floors, out of interest and earshot for the kids, but if I strained I could hear.

  “… and I walked into the school for the conference and there was the teacher shaking Kaz and banging his head against the wall …”

  “… institutionalized bigotry can subtly convince you of its rightness. With its absurdity removed, its evil can compel …”

  “And even the adults pat her hair as if it’s the funniest thing they’d ever seen on a mammal … and of course available for public patting, like a goat in a zoo …”

  “There’s a great woman on the south side who does hair …”

  “Of course homework is just a measure of the home! And so the kids of color will always fall behind …”

  “The African-American peer group is the strongest and the Asian-American is the weakest—that is, Asian-American parents have power that African-American parents do not.”

  “School is white. And school is female. So it’s the boys of color who have the hardest time, and if they’re not into sports the gangs will lure them in …”

  “I guess we sort of knew that already, but still.”

  “It’s all so unfair.”

  “Where are the reparations for slavery, or for the Indians, who got some of the money back, just not a lot of the land.”

  “I don’t think the casinos count.”

  “Oh, baby, they count.”

  “You know, there are people in our department sitting on piles of inherited
money who object to a black person making five thousand dollars more than they do. ‘It’s the principle,’ they say, and you just don’t know where to begin with that one.”

  “You know, the Jews got reparations from the Nazis, but who got the actual money? Well-to-do Jewish grandchildren who hardly need it at all. In Ohio and Brazil there are grandchildren of Nazis who are truly destitute …”

  “All right, where are we now? How did we get onto this?”

  “What?”

  “Would anyone like more wine?”

  “At this point we could use a little gin …”

  “Well, even the Indians got a few casinos—”

  “We discussed that already—”

  “But no one in Africa or here ever received reparations from anyone …”

  “Is that true?”

  “Sonya Weidner’s working on that—aren’t you, Sonya?”

  “Well, the Jews are working on that.”

  “Really?”

  “How the hell should I know?”

  The nonverbal sounds were like wind—coming in rushes and then falling back. There were bursts of sinus explosions, which were what laughter was in winter, followed by low rumbles of sighing and dismay. There was the pouring of wine and the eating of hors d’oeuvres while trying to speak.

  “Racial blindness is a white idea.” This would be Sarah.

  “How dare we think of ourselves as a social experiment?”

  “How dare we not?”

  “How dare we use our children to try to feel good about ourselves!”

  “How dare we not?”

  “I’m in despair.”

  “Despair is mistaking a small world for a large one and a large one for a small.”

  “I’m sure that’s what I’m doing.”

  There was a cawing sound that could have been a pack of dogs or geese returning or simply the radiators starting up.

  “Let’s face it: we’re all living in a bubble of some sort—of every sort.”

  “Look at the way banks are making loans these days. No matter how many times people watch It’s a Wonderful Life, they still don’t get it!”

  The opinions downstairs were put forth with such emphasis and confidence, it all sounded like an orchestra made up entirely of percussion: timpani and cymbals and the bass notes of a piano. Even a snare drum would sound stuttery, feathery, and hesitant by comparison.

  “You and your academic diversity! Diversity is a distraction.”

  “Not in the Amazon, it ain’t. It’s glue. It’s the interlock of the interlocking pieces.”

  “The Amazon! Is that where we are? Look, the whole agenda, like feminism, or affirmative action, is decorative. Without a restructuring of the class system, the whole diversity thing is a folly.”

  “Oh, I see! A communist! A revolutionary who wants to challenge simple college admissions diversity as being unrealistic as a mechanism of social change. I love this. Let me come to your dacha next week and I’ll explain everything …”

  “Another false dichotomy. Don’t you agree, Edward? Mo’s just setting up a false dichotomy? It doesn’t have to be diversity or socialism, affirmative action or class equality. One is easier to do, granted, and doesn’t cost anything.”

  “It costs! In terms of diversion and resources, it all costs!”

  “That’s a load of crap!”

  I had once seen a load of crap. It was carried to our house in Don Edenhaus’s truck and dumped right at our barn for composting into fertilizer.

  “You are one of those right-wingers who puts on the Halloween costume of a socialist so you can infiltrate the left and get them to listen to your criticism—but I’m not listening …”

  I turned toward my charges and said as if in mimicry: “Ladies and gentlemen, we are pleased to present ‘It’s Time to Shut UP!’ starring me!”

  “And starring me!” laughed the little girl named Tika.

  “And me!” copied Mary-Emma, and we all staggered around the room with our hands over our mouths.

  In our sequestered nursery behind and above the baby gate at the stairs, there was scarcely an argument. Sometimes there were squabbles involving Legos, which Mary-Emma was too young for and would stick in her mouth. One of the parents, well intentioned, always brought them. Once, Mary-Emma, initially delighted and gracious about other children in her room, fell into a heap of sorrow and rage over a stuffed talking Elmo. And once someone called someone else a “dingbat,” but it was a word so unfamiliar to everyone, including the speaker, that no one’s feelings got hurt. Mostly they all played nicely, even if they brought more energy into the room than either Mary-Emma or I was used to. Sometimes they asked me questions.

  “Do you go to college?” asked Clarence.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Do you like it?”

  “I do.”

  “You do?” exclaimed Tika.

  “Well, not every day is perfect.”

  “I want to go somewhere where every day is perfect.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Me, too!”

  “Me, too!” and then we screamed the laughter of absurd desire. It was like some strange mocking echo of the conversation downstairs.

  I sang “There Was an Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly.” “I don’t know why she swallowed a fly, perhaps she’ll die.” Not one of them had heard it before—perhaps it was considered too gruesome for children now, with its heartless “She’s dead, of course” at the end, but they all were mesmerized, including Mary-Emma, who began trying to learn it. I had to keep pulling Legos out of her mouth, and because she was becoming toilet trained I hurried her twice to the new potty in the bathroom—such was her excitement at company. From downstairs there came talk I hoped the kids didn’t hear.

  “This whole town is racially inexperienced and so there is racism on the ground floor of everything.”

  “Including this house. No offense, but you can’t exclude anything.”

  “I understand.”

  “I heard years ago of a white family with an adopted African-American boy, and once he turned thirteen they had a security system put in so he would feel safe when they went out to parties. The system involved the summoning of the police at the slightest thing, even a motion at the windows, and so of course what happens? Once, while the parents were at a Christmas party, the police burst in, and seeing a teenage black male just standing there, they blasted him in the chest.”

  “Did he die?”

  “Not right away.”

  Sometimes there was a simultaneous quiet upstairs and down, like a blanket of snow, as if at that moment no one anywhere in the galaxy knew what to say.

  “Did you teach the children a song about eating live animals?” began a message on my machine from Sarah, which started out as if it were a reprimand and then headed another way. “Well, whatever it was, they loved it and loved you. Thank you. Next Wednesday it would be great if you could come early. Say at four or five if that works for you. Let me know. Thanks!”

  Geology, Sufism, Wine Tasting, British Lit., Soundtracks to War Movies. There was a rumor that several of us were about to be thrown out of Wine Tasting, as we were underage and some computer or other—not the original one—had just noticed. Just as well, perhaps. A grasp of oakiness had continued to elude me. I got citrus and buttery and chocolate, but violet, too, proved difficult. Was it all just baloney? The grind of the semester seemed to be taking place off to one side of me. Still, I did try. I would do my work at night, dive into the blue of my computer screen, which would wash on like a California pool. Then, after swimming in it for a while, I’d come tiredly to the surface with bits of this or that—in my hair, if not my head. My computer desktop indicated I was at least working on things. I was starting, then starting over fresh without deleting the first thing: my screen looked like an aquarium where a hundred tiny square-finned fish had died, randomly frozen in place. Except for the Sufism, taught by the Donegal don, classes marched along forgettably. In the Neut
ral Pelvis I was also learning about the cantilevered torso, the inner space, and the choral om. But in Sufism we learned that Rumi was a man in love, and the absence of the beloved entered all his cravings, which it really didn’t do with Doris Lessing. In Geology we were learning the effects of warmth and cold, which at bottom I began to see was what all my courses were about. In Soundtracks to War Movies we were given a list—every war from the ancient to now, Gladiator to Black Hawk Down—and we were to see as many depictions as we could and note their melodies.

  With Murph gone, I moved my desk away from the window, where the leaking draft would chill and hunch me. I made the computer screen itself into my sole window. From here only I would look out into the world. I googled my father to see what others were saying about his produce and to check out his website and what it indicated about the coming spring crops. I googled Sarah and Le Petit Moulin and learned that she had once cooked dinner at the White House for President Clinton. Perhaps it had gone badly and this is why she’d failed to mention it. Wine before swine? Pearls before martians? Perhaps she had served actual swine. Apparently she had indeed served them pork, local and organic and deposited in what I now thought of as a diaperlike tortilla. Tortillas seemed to me a mistake. She had also served them a walnut and buttermilk sorbet. Perhaps there was also a salad—mesclun with lemon-shallot dressing (I was making up names of dishes in my head: Kiwi carpaccio! Funnel of fennel! Couscous with frou-frou!)—and surely other things. But only the pork and sorbet were mentioned. I googled myself, my laptop screen becoming not only a window but a mirror. I wanted to see how I was doing out there in the world, or rather not I but the other Tassie Keltjin I’d discovered who was a grandmother and an emergency 911 volunteer outside of Pestico. Mirror, mirror, on the wall. Weekly I would google her and see how she was doing. One week she celebrated her fortieth wedding anniversary with her husband, Gus. Another week she tied for second in a pie-baking contest. And then one day I googled her and her obituary flashed up on the screen, and that is when I stopped googling her for a while.