A Gate at the Stairs

  “Look, Mary-Emma!” And she would. It was a beautiful thing, having a little girl in tow. Why hadn’t my own mother known? Perhaps there was too much winter permanently in our veins.

  Mary-Emma would point toward the street sewers, seeing a raccoon scuttle in. “Cartoons down there!” she exclaimed.

  Dwarf irises, bearded irises, and the first mosquitoes emerged simultaneously, each with their subtly striped gray-violet plumage. Where were the bearded dwarves to add semantic meat to the flowerbeds? Well, some yards did have ceramic gnomes in their yards à la Germany.

  The strengthening light sparkled in the trees’ new leaves, and the thick bosomy smell of lilacs floated in waves across our various paths. The humid spice of honeysuckle hung over the garbage cans. I even met the threesome next door, who finally emerged after winter, looking very beautiful. The woman—I remembered her name was Catherine—smiled at Mary-Emma. And Mary-Emma did not smile back but hid behind my leg.

  “She never says hi to me,” said the woman, Catherine. The two men had continued on ahead. “I hope it’s not because I’m white!”

  I stared at this crazy, Satie-playing woman. “A lot of people she knows are white,” I did not say, “including her parents,” and so I said nothing but just watched as she trotted up ahead to be with her men.

  In the Thornwood-Brink flowerbeds were the strangest blooms of all: tall leafless stalks crowned by purple floreted globes. They looked like probes, or sentries, or gaslights, or wands, the handsome goons of the garden. Alium, they were called, and in actuality were giant mutant chives. Their bulbs were like onions, and squirrel-proof, and they were supposed to be a kind of accent flower, but Sarah had planted them thickly all around the house in a kind of fierce, orchardlike fence, as if to enhance TV reception.

  “Look at this!” exclaimed Sarah at the front door, pulling a printed sheet of paper from her mailbox. “The plant nazis are back! Apparently I have buckthorn and nipplewort in my yard and they would like me to get rid of them pronto! You know, the thing with plant nazis is that they start with the plants …”

  The dogs next door were wild with their games. In the sky the returning geese were winging over, their honking alto bark like the complaining squawk of a cart.

  “Last year they were after me about the nap of the lawn! They said I was mowing in the wrong direction and it disrupted the look of the neighborhood to have the blades of grass bent in a slightly different direction in one of the yards! I was mowing this way”—and here she tipped her whole body—“when I should be mowing thattaway.” She tipped her body back the other direction. Indignation gave her a dancer’s energy. And the warming weather caused her nervous thinness to emerge from beneath her usual thick sweaters.

  One of the pictures Reynaldo took of Mary-Emma that I liked best showed her looking upward at the camera in hope and joy, and I took it to Kinko’s and had it blown up and then I went to Walgreens with Mary-Emma herself in tow and bought a shiny red made-in-China frame. The African-American cashier looked quickly at me and then at Mary-Emma and said, “You should braid her hair. No black girl’s worn an afro since 1972.” Then she handed me my receipt without looking at me. I took the purchase back to Sarah’s, put the photo, which was in my backpack, into the frame, and then propped the whole thing on the dining room table as a gift. I could hear Sarah on the phone in the kitchen, working out the wording details on this week’s menu. “‘Sheathed in bacon’? I don’t think so. It sounds—well, I don’t need to tell you what it sounds like. And look at that chicken again: there are too many adjectives in front of it. It’s like we’re trying to hide something.”

  “Whossat?” I whispered to Mary-Emma, pointing at the dining room wall, toward the sound of Sarah’s voice.

  “Mama,” she said, smiling.

  “And whossat?” I pointed at the picture of her on the table.

  “Emmie!” she said, excited.

  “That’s right,” I said, and I danced her around the living room. The windows were open and we could hear the dogs yapping and chasing each other next door. When I spun and stopped I then saw Sarah just standing there in the dining room. Oddly, I could smell her: she was wearing my perfume.

  “Who took this?” she said, indicating the photograph on the table.

  I was taken aback, as if struck by a mechanical hand belonging to no one. “A friend. I thought you might like it.” Sharp heat plucked and pinched at my eyes. I had only wanted to please and surprise her, but now I felt suddenly very tired. I glanced at the photo again, to try to see it from her point of view, and noticed that in it Mary-Emma was sitting on Reynaldo’s prayer rug. I hoped it looked like a yoga mat.

  “What friend?” she said, looking stern and troubled.

  “A friend of mine,” I said stupidly, as I was now afraid and unsure. At this point Sarah seemed to lose concentration. Out front a car was idling high but driving by slow, the bass of its stereo deep in a rap song, vibrating and loud. It was a local hit, one recorded here, and it went “Out of Troy! Black Boy! You show your indignation, you end up on probation!”

  “Whoever that is, they keep driving past: this is the fourth time this week and the second time today. That’s not your friend, is it?”

  “No,” I said. “My friend is Brazilian.” As if this explained everything, the innocent photography, the innocence generally. A maiden knows her love like the sky the distant grass. That is, knows her love sort of, and from aloft sees not a blade. My head was full of middling poetry, only some of it my own.

  “There it is again!” she exclaimed, and then she turned quickly to get to the front window to see, I assume, if she could actually make out the driver, the car, the spinning rims, the license plate.

  She turned back toward me. “Have you noticed this car going by anytime before?”

  “I don’t know what car it is.”

  “Well, any car going by with a thundering bass and slowing down on this block?”

  Actually, I had noticed it. The rap music and the car. You could hear its approach, the car turning the corner, the music booming like a furnace firing in a basement below you. I was attuned to the bass notes. But what I had noticed more, and what concerned me more, was the phone ringing and then when I answered it, as Sarah had instructed me to do, “Thornwood-Brink residence,” there was a long silence, then a hang-up. My thoughts had wandered to Bonnie, that she was home alone, not getting her life together at all, not nearly as she had hoped, not even close, and was instead lying fetally on a sofa in a position of seller’s remorse, tears of devastation streaming down her cheeks. How not.

  But I could see now that Sarah’s concerns were not with Bonnie but with the mysterious, gone-missing birth father. I could see she imagined that it might be he who was driving past, having somehow found out Mary-Emma’s new address. He had not officially signed off on any papers. And though the agency had done all the things it was supposed to do, advertise in the local papers and seek him out in the halfhearted legalistic manner that fulfilled their obligation, it was easy to imagine a young guy in a bar or at work or walking with a cousin on a nice day back from church or home from school and suddenly hearing he had a child given up for adoption, and somehow wanting the child back. Had she not imagined the birth father as one of the Green Bay Packers, as I had? A minor celebrity, handsome, carefree, with no time for a relationship, let alone a child? At the very least she should have imagined him as perhaps the wayward son of one of the aging running backs.

  “I’m not sure that I’ve paid that much attention,” I said.

  “OK!” Her face reddened. “Have you paid attention to this?” She pointed wrathfully at the photo. “The photographer? Have you paid attention to him? Who is this person taking pictures of Emmie?”

  I did not say anything, because I could no longer speak.

  The car with the booming rap song trawled by once more. “There it is again!” Sarah cried, and raced to the window. I could see her lips moving silently, memorizing, and then s
he went quickly into the kitchen and wrote down the license plate number on a Post-it.

  “I’ve put the license plate number by the phone. If you see that particular car again, let me know.”

  “OK.”

  “It’s just …” And here she moved both hands through her hair in anguish, her words a kind of muttering to herself. “My whole life feels like a horror show of slowly moving cars …” I didn’t know what she meant by that—a funeral? “Look, I’m sorry. I’ve upset you,” she said. She touched my shoulder in what might have been tenderness, but I was too frozen to discern exactly. “Thank you for the picture. I understand. It’s a lovely picture. She looks darling. But no more. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” I said automatically.

  “It’s not that I don’t trust your friend. It’s just, I might not trust his Rolodex.”

  “I don’t think he has a Rolodex,” I said daftly.

  Sarah’s eyes bore down on mine. “Now I’m going to tell you something I didn’t tell you before. I never phoned the references you listed on your résumé. I hired you because you seemed angelic to me. You gave off an aura. I didn’t phone one person on your list. Or, well, I phoned one person, but they weren’t home. I didn’t care what any of them said. I was a snob about you. I trusted my own instincts completely.”

  I didn’t know what to tell her. Like everyone, I felt I was a good person. How could I tell her she should have phoned the references? How could I tell her, Why would you place your child in the hands of someone whose references you never checked out?

  “I can see that you love Emmie, and I know she loves you. She says your name when she wakes up from naps. You are, sometimes, the first person she asks for. I don’t mean to sound suspicious of your friend, but I don’t want him taking pictures of Emmie. When you go for walks with her, go someplace else, not to his place, not with him.” She put her hand on my shoulder and smiled. “Love is a fever,” she said. “And when you come out of it you’ll discover whether you’ve been lucky or—not.”

  I was silent and so was she.

  “I am concerned for you just as I would be for anyone,” she added strangely.

  I went into what my mother called okey-dokey mode. I grabbed for the midwestern girl’s shielding send-off. “Sounds good,” I said.

  I began to find back routes to Reynaldo’s. One did not have to go down the most obvious streets. If I took the alleys, past the flowering bushes and the refuse and recycling bins, I could travel unseen, with Mary-Emma and her kick-ass American stroller bumping along the pebbles and potholes all the way to Reynaldo’s. There we would nuzzle and chat and he would make pepper water or early-morning curry, which I then believed to be Brazilian cuisine, and we would eat. Mary-Emma would play, and the pictures Reynaldo took—for his photography class—he no longer gave me, just showed me, and they were mostly taken from behind her as she studied something in her hands, an ashtray or a clock. She could have been anyone’s child in the world. He would play soccer with her and teach her phrases and songs. He always said “Ciao” when we left, and Mary-Emma had begun to repeat it, and wave. “Ciao, Airnaldo!”

  When I brought her back home she was often dozing from the stroller ride and I would take her directly upstairs to the attic nursery, where she promptly woke up. I could hear Sarah on the phone: “… roasted figs, braised wild boar with dried Death’s Door cherries, uh-huh, veal sweetbreads with chestnuts—this is very Sheriff of Nottingham! I mean, it’s springtime. Where is the spring? Where are the new potatoes, asparagus, ramps and fiddle-heads, vinaigrettes and roux? How about that lemon sorbet with the chopped basil on top?”

  Dementedly, and because Mary-Emma would not take a nap now, I made a clapping song out of “ramps and fiddleheads / vinaigrettes and roux,” and after Sarah got off the phone Mary-Emma and I went downstairs and performed it for her, risking that Sarah might feel mocked, but she didn’t—I hoped.

  “Like our song, Mama?” asked Mary-Emma. Sarah seemed both amused and embarrassed, and her laughter contained the slightly hysterical, undulating edge of each.

  “Oh, thank you for this, I guess,” she said, and Mary-Emma ran to her and threw her arms around one of her legs, pressed her cheek against her thigh. Sarah petted her head. “I feel like this restaurant is driving me mad!” she said absently. “Someone just accused me of raping the forest floor. Because of the fiddlehead ferns. And because of the veal, one of the waiters is going around the kitchen bleating ‘Mommy, Mommy!’”

  “Mommy!” Mary-Emma repeated happily, and Sarah smiled.

  “It’s sort of funny,” I said, shrugging. “Though sad, too.”

  “It’s only once a week that we change the menu—why should it be so hard? And then the absenteeism! of the sous-chef alone—not to mention the waitstaff. I’m going to keep all the messages from my voice mail and make a CD of excuses I get from employees: Can’t come in; I’m coughing blood … and I’m going to play it full volume at the end-of the-year holiday party.”

  “Mama,” said Mary-Emma, cooing—wanting, perhaps, Sarah’s leg to go slack.

  Sarah continued to pet Mary-Emma’s head, but at the same time she rolled her own neck around. “When I roll my neck around like this,” she said, sort of smiling and sort of not, “I hear the scariest sorts of crunching sounds.”

  “That happens to me,” I said.

  “Ach,” said Sarah, with her eyes closed. “Every year we do too much with venison and ground cherries. It’s like stuff you’d scrape off your car.”

  Once I brought Mary-Emma back from a walk and found Edward there at home, alone, laughing with someone on the phone. When he hung up, he was still in a good mood. “Papa,” Mary-Emma said mirthlessly, but she lifted her arms and he swooped her up into his.

  “How’d your day go?” he said to me rather than to her.

  “Fine,” I said.

  “Fine,” she said. She began unzipping her own jacket. I walked over to help her take it off since Edward was holding her. This caused us to have to maneuver together.

  “Things well with you?” Edward said to me warmly.

  “Oh, I think so.”

  “Lot on your mind?” I didn’t know where this interest in me was coming from. Did I seem gloomy and preoccupied? Out of reach of his charms?

  “Oh, I don’t know. There’s classes, of course.” And lest he think I was complaining that work and school were too difficult in combination, I hastened to add, “Plus, my brother’s thinking of joining the military.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m hoping he doesn’t”—this was true—“and it’s been on my mind, I guess.” This last was not strictly so, but it should have been. Why wasn’t it?

  “It’ll toughen him up, show him one or two things about the world,” said Edward. “What does not kill him will make him stronger,” he added prosaically, needlepoint Nietzsche.

  “Yes, but what if it does kill him?”

  And here between us passed a look of pale apprehension, some past, some future, the details of which I couldn’t yet know, but each blasting into the room and meeting there, draining the blood from our faces. Only the voice of Mary-Emma—“Papa! Oag cool!”—returned us to the warm crumbs of the present.

  “Nietzschean philosophy doesn’t get its hands dirty with that,” he said, making his way to the freezer. He was suddenly a scientist again. “And neither should you. Philosophers are good at parties but not for cleaning up after. But really: Let me tell you something. Don’t be your brother’s keeper. Don’t worry about brothers. Take it from someone who has a sister. Worry about yourself. The brothers? They’re not really worried about you.”

  Schoolwork was alternately tedious and mesmerizing. I took the notes my professors wanted me to. In the library, in the margins of my books, I wrote “nature equals disorder.” I wrote “fate versus free will.” I wrote “modernism as argument against the modern.” I listened endlessly to the music from Schindler’s List. Then The Bridge on the River Kwai. Mostly,
however, I was alone in my room with Rumi. Murph continued to stay away, although once she sent me an e-mail that described a long fight she had had with her boyfriend and then the kissing and other acts of contrition that had pasted them back together. Another e-mail I got was from my brother. Dear Sis, it began. Only you could perhaps talk me out of this, if you wanted to, but only if you wanted to, because I’m not sensing anyone having any strong desire with regards to my future except myself and it is this: to do something real. I don’t care what part of the world I end up in as long as it isn’t Delton County.

  Then he sent another e-mail that began simply, Please read this new one and ignore previous e-mail, and so I ignored the first but failed to read the new one, seeing nothing dangerously swaggering in anything he’d sent so far.

  Spring warmed the air. Light fell from the sky like sugar from a bowl. At night, if I slept at home, without Reynaldo, he would phone. “Are you asleep?” he would always ask.

  “No.”

  “You sound as if you are. Quick. How many fingers am I holding up?”

  He would make me laugh.

  Noel, Noel, the toilet bowl. Noelle turned off the vacuum cleaner when he saw me. “It’s finally my birthday,” he said. “Really. I put a patchouli sachet in the vacuum bag for the occasion.”