A Gate at the Stairs

  “Well, happy birthday,” I said, and together with Mary-Emma in my arms sang him “Happy Birthday” in Portuguese. As we finished the last lines—“muitas felicidades, muitos anos de vida!”—we sang them with great articulated gusto, as at the concluding ring it reminded me of “Ina Gadda Da Vida.” Clapping began behind us, and I turned.

  There were Sarah and Edward. Only Edward was smiling. “Very nice,” said Sarah, looking at me. She was wearing a gold sweater knit in tight roseknots so that her slim arms looked like ears of corn. On her head was her thick cotton chef’s toque. “What language is that?”

  “Portuguese,” I said. “I think.”

  “Portuguese,” Sarah repeated, nodding her head.

  “It’s my birthday,” said Noel, to help me out.

  “Yes, well, happy birthday, my dear Noelle!” She kissed him on his cheek and then threw one arm around him and kept it there. I could see he’d been working for her for years.

  He pointed at her but looked at me to tell me this: “I love her!”

  “Yes, but, darling, you left your Diet Coke in the freezer and it exploded again.” Sarah would not smile. Or rather, she would not smile big.

  I turned with Edward and Mary-Emma as we headed back to the kitchen. Edward was shaking his head. “He’s always doing that with the Diet Cokes,” he said.

  I went to warm a muffin in the microwave for Mary-Emma, and Edward suddenly stopped my arm. “Look,” he said. “There’s a moth in there.” Without putting the muffin in, he pressed On to see what the moth would do. This penchant for torture, in the guise of curiosity, was the same sick experimentation of certain doctors, of bored boys, of lunatics, and it was in Edward, too. The moth was not singed. Neither did it flutter and combust, as a heartless data-seeker might have predicted. As I myself had predicted. Had I missed my own latent calling as Mad Inept Scientist? The moth did nothing at all, just stuck whole to the plastic wall of the oven. Probably the poor creature had already been dead for some time. I cleaned it out with a paper towel, then warmed Mary-Emma’s snack.

  “Well, I wanted to see,” said Edward.

  Thoughts of Bonnie preoccupied me. I dreamed of her at night. She was always approaching to say something but then said nothing. She floated. She zoomed. She burst forth from adjacent rooms. There were no doors and then suddenly one would appear and swallow her. She would emerge through a wall. She was always empty-handed. She was gaining weight. Her clothes were the pale gray of plastic copy machines and desktop printers. She would not speak. I couldn’t get her ever to say a word.

  At the Thornwood-Brinks’ the phone rang a lot, and when I answered it there was a long pause before the hang-up. Then for a while the phone calls seemed to cease.

  Worried that Bonnie had taken her own life, I googled Bonnie Jankling Crowe again, expecting to find, as ever, nothing. I instead found a notice from a Georgia newspaper about someone named Bonnie J. Crowe who had been found murdered in an apartment in Atlanta. No known suspect. No evidence of robbery. Investigation pending. My heart leaped up. Of course! I thought. This would be exactly the sort thing that would happen to poor doomed Bonnie. Here I was worried she was suicidal when in fact getting herself murdered would be more her style.

  But how would she have had the money to get to Atlanta? Might she have sold her new gold watch for which she had traded a child and been ushered into a retirement from if not all happiness at least all things Mary? I went on eBay and discovered a gold watch for sale there by someone who went by bonniegreenbay. And how many Bonnie Crowes were there in this world? How many bonniegreenbays? I had to stop. I had discovered too much. I had learned things there was not a test on: I had to get back to my studies. The soundtracks to The Longest Day and Saving Private Ryan played incessantly in my apartment.

  On Saturday nights I visited Reynaldo on my own. I no longer wore the water bra—that jig was up, or that jug-jig, as Murph called it. He did not seem to mind my lack of dairiness, as we said of cows. In fact, he seemed enthralled or at least very attentive, and once said he preferred small-breasted girls. (“And you believed him?” a later boyfriend would say to me cruelly.) If the gray dress was not available, I would be forced to make an outfit from all the different black things I owned, which were all a slightly different black: there was the bluish black and the olive black and most oddly the reddish black—all faded or shiny or worn to a hue unique unto itself and impossible to wear with anything else that was black. I would add a silvery swampy sweater, with dangling balls or quartz for earrings, like a third and fourth eye in the dark against my hair. I wore lipstick that made my mouth look bloody. I wore mascara that by morning had collected like soot in the corners of my eyes. I wore an army green jacket that looked unexpected with a fuzzy ivory scarf looped around the collar like the scruff of a chow.

  As if adorned for a costume party’s idea of a terrorist, I wore my Egyptian scarab necklace and my Arabian Goddess perfume and a clumsy blue ring made in the backstreets of Karachi. I was politically incorrect. The idea was a surprise attack. Which seemed to work. Often we didn’t talk at all. His arms were soft and strong. His penis was as small and satiny as a trumpet mushroom in Easter basket grass. His mouth slurped carefully as if every part of me were an oyster, his, which made me feel I loved him. He would pull away and look at me happily from above. “You have the long, pettable nose of a horse,” he said, “and a horse’s dark, sweet eyes.” And I thought of all the horses I had seen and how they always seemed to be trying to get their eyes to focus and work together. Their eyes were beautiful but shy and lost, and since they were on opposite sides of their heads like a fish’s, one of them would sometimes rear up in skepticism and fear and just take a hard look at you. I felt nothing like a horse, whose instincts I knew were to run and run. I had mostly in life tried to stand still like a glob of coral so as not to be spotted by sharks. But now I had crawled out onto land and was somehow already a horse.

  There was a tender but energetic adhoccery to our sex, the way there is when young people are not embarrassed by their bodies—what they look like and what they want. Kissing was urgent yet careful, luminous and drinklessly drunk. He hovered—quivering, tense, and flight-bound—I bucked, humped, and arced, a dancer in a sea lion suit. Afterward, he would sometimes say, “That was one for the scrapbook!” When I slept in his bed, I slept deeply and long. When I went to the Thornwood-Brinks’ directly from there, I would sometimes walk, sometimes take my Suzuki scooter. Sarah would flee the house with arbitrary explanations: “I don’t want the Mill to become one of those precious little restaurants with everyone so serious in their white jackets like they’re technicians in some sort of lab. Though look at me.” She pointed to her own Marie Curie getup. “I look like a dental hygienist.” This was the sort of snobbery I noticed even among the most compassionate Democrats. I could hardly say I was immune. What was education for, if not to acquire contradictions? At least it looked like that to me. “I mean, Edward works in a lab and he doesn’t even wear a white jacket. Though maybe he should … And yet honestly, some discipline is required in every kitchen. I left a note for you on Emmie. She’s got a tiny bit of a cold and the Tylenol drops and instructions are right there on the counter. Bye!”

  She had bought a new attachment for the bicycle, which I would put Mary-Emma in instead of the wagon, and we rode around the park that way, while Mary-Emma sang and hummed herself to sleep, her voice wobbly on the bumps. I would pass the town’s few black and Latino kids fishing in the pond for dinner, and I would think of the absurd disparities of everyone, how Mary-Emma was now a little African-American princess while these poor kids at the pond were the casualties of a new pull-away-and-don’t-look society. Here is where churchlessness had gotten us. Not that far. And so I often admired Reynaldo’s piety. Still, the kids were having fun fishing. But I could see they hadn’t yet caught a thing. Nonetheless, it was spring, and they were young, and even hedge fund managers couldn’t take that away from them.

  On
Wednesday days when I was with Mary-Emma, the noon whistle would blare and the dogs next door would go barking mad in choral reply, as if saluting some larger king dog. On Wednesday nights, as if echoing this, the house once more filled up with visitors and their remarks. Contentious shards of discussion floated upward like dust shaken from a rug.

  “Postracial is a white idea.” This again. It had all begun to sound to me like a spiritually gated community of liberal chat.

  “A lot of ideas are white ideas.”

  “It’s like postfeminist or postmodern. The word post is put forward by people who have grown bored of the conversation.”

  “And the conversation remains unresolved because it’s not resolvable. It’s not that kind of conversation. It’s merely living talk. Whereas you put post in front of it—what is that? It’s saying ‘Shut the hell up. We’re tired and we’re going to sleep now.’”

  “If you reject religion, you reject blackness.”

  “Black culture here is just southern culture moved north, that’s all.”

  “Well, that’s not all.”

  “Blacks have preserved the South up here—the cooking, the expressions, the accents—better than the southern whites who’ve moved here have.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Uh—isn’t that obvious?”

  “Southern whites who’ve moved north live among the northern whites? And blacks live collected together in segregated neighborhoods?”

  “I’m here representing the Pottawatomie, the Oneida, the Chippewa, the Winnebago, and the Ho-Chunk. I am here to tell you we weren’t successfully integrated because we weren’t given real jobs, let alone intimate jobs in your homes and on your property. Only on high bridges and tall office buildings. Your relationship to us from the beginning wasn’t even exploitive. It was homicidal.”

  “Dave, sit down. You’re mostly white.”

  “Is this the pot calling the kettle black?”

  “I think when the pot calls the kettle black the pot is merely expressing its desire for community. It’s also expressing the pot’s habit of calling bullshit on the kettle.”

  “We can’t solve history. We have to work with what’s now.”

  “What’s now is my son’s white grandparents only just now got around to putting him in the will with the other grandchildren. They want to be congratulated left and right. Good God—he’s ten years old. It took them ten years!”

  “What’s now is these self-admiring people who say, ‘I don’t care whether a person’s black or green or purple.’ As if black were a nonsense color like green or purple.”

  “What’s now is I walk in behind Kwame when we go out to eat and I can see that the hostess is afraid of him—a thirteen-year-old black guy coming into a restaurant. I’m white so they don’t know I’m his mother and am right behind him. They don’t know I’m seeing them. But what I’m seeing is what Kwame experiences all the time. She sees that hooded sweatshirt, she grabs the pager, and then says stiffly, ‘Can I help you?’ Not ‘Here for dinner?’ or ‘Good evening.’”

  “I’ve got a time machine in the trunk of my car.”

  “Oh, I know. And the relatives all love them when they’re little but then when they’re older and don’t look cute to them anymore, look out: they see they have a young black man as a grandson, or an African-American girl full of vim and sass. The sexualized black teenager just so doesn’t work for them.”

  “Let me tell you: even the white ones are a shock.”

  Laughter.

  “Is it racism or racial inexperience?”

  “Oh, we’re back to that.”

  “Girls have it bad, too.”

  “I said girls.”

  “Of all colors.”

  “And don’t get me started on Islam!”

  “And why are we so hateful about black Muslims, for decades these Chicago neighborhoods have been tense about every goddamn mosque and yet we went way out of our way for those honky Bosnian Muslims?”

  “Honky Bosnian Muslims?”

  “Honey, be quiet and just drink.”

  “A suffering sweepstakes—now there’s a fool’s game. Who invented the term suffering sweepstakes anyway?”

  “People who aren’t suffering. People who find it a spectator sport. Can’t one say ‘Ouch’ without being told to shut up? What ‘suffering sweepstakes’? A sweepstakes involves a prize! Besides, everyone who really is suffering knows someone who is suffering worse. Suffering is relative. Or at least it is with my relatives!”

  “Who invented the term suffering succotash?”

  “Here’s a suffering sweepstakes: War was devised to offset the number of women who died in childbirth. The young men killed actually equaled the young women who died. But now it’s all out of whack … so it looks like the old men are plotting to kill the young in order to get all the hot chicks.”

  “So that’s why war was invented. To get rid of the competition. Mother Nature had put too much competition in play.”

  “And who is doing all this engineering again?”

  “Father Nature.”

  “Ah.”

  “Nate—as he’s known to his friends.”

  “Nate.”

  “Yup.”

  “Here’s a suffering sweepstakes: Both Black Hawk and Otis Redding died in this county. But Black Hawk gets a bar and a golf course.”

  “He was pursued like a rat. He should get a statue.”

  “Is there a statue?”

  “Is there a statue for Otis?”

  “I think there’s a granite bench.”

  “A granite bench? He would have preferred a golf course and a bar.”

  “A fool’s game.”

  “And this pertains to our discussion how?”

  “Since when did pertaining pertain?”

  “Oh, yes, military recruitment of minorities.”

  “The schools are off to begin with. Busing and integration are never done right, and so it’s a fool’s game.”

  The fool’s-game person again. Or the fool’s-game person’s brother.

  “Look at the schools in this town. The only one that’s not failing black kids is the magnet one where whites are only twenty percent of the school. Now, that’s empowering! Put them in a white school, they are all relegated to the tech courses. They get put in the basement with the vocational teachers. Then they have dropped out by junior year, while the white parents continue to hoard the resources for their gifted and privileged. They want money for stringed instruments! They demand it! They get violins, we get violence. Man, you’d better get some money for some black teachers, I say.”

  “Plus, the school boards are hiding the real numbers. The figures they offer show only dropout rates from senior year. If you drop out before you’re not in the tally, because you’re going to make them look bad. You’re MIA.”

  “So the numbers are a fairy tale.”

  “They’re a bad fairy tale.”

  “Told by a bad fairy.”

  “Oh, I think I know who you mean.”

  “Stop!”

  “The weird thing is that as fudged numbers go, they are still socially and racially unacceptable.”

  There were murmurings and bursts of laughter and indecipherable ebbs and crashes of seeming silence that would suddenly bring forth from a great distance, like the approaching music of Ravel’s Bolero, some new monotonous melody.

  “So what are you saying? That nothing short of a revolution will do?”

  “Well, maybe.”

  “Well, that’s hogwash.”

  I had once seen a hog washed. In whey. The hog was Helen, and she really liked it, the slop of the whey, then later a cool hose.

  “It is the most unhelpful stance.”

  “Darling, maybe it looks unhelpful, but it seems to help others. I mean, someone has to be an idealist.”

  “That kind of idealism is cynicism of the most extravagant and ostentatious sort.”

  “Everything has to be doable here and now?
”

  “Everything has to be less stupid.”

  One of the biracial girls—Althea—stepped forward toward me with a joke. Her face was lit bright with it. “Why do black people get so tall?”

  “Why?”

  “Because their knee grows!” she squealed with delight.

  “Who told you that?” I asked, and she pointed to one of the white girls in the corner. My having been told this joke was a source of such hilarity that both she and Althea covered their faces with their hands and laughed so hard that I laughed, too.

  Reynaldo and I went to movies on campus, ones I deemed romantic date movies, and he would shift his legs around restlessly and joke about the drama’s predictability. “Oh, I knew that they would do that. Of course.”

  “How did you know?” I whispered in the theater’s musty dark.

  “A call came in on my cell phone.”

  And I would squelch a laugh, then minutes later he might say in his intermittent accent, “My cell phone says she turns and walks away right now but then looks quickly over her shoulder.” And of course he would be right. And I would laugh. We would go back to his house and drink tea.

  “The first time I used a cell phone I felt so ashamed walking along talking. Talking to no one. Like a mad person. But God when he made this great world put everything in it. He knew what to put in it so we could someday have cell phones.”

  “Kiss me,” I would say.

  Sometimes we would go to a Palestinian rally, then come home, light little tea lights, and go to bed, candlelight vibrating the room like a handheld camera. He kissed like he’d been kissing for decades. I tried to learn what he knew.

  At night he wrapped himself around me, legs and arms, and we slept spooned like that until in sleep one of us had to move a little. Still, we never let our skin pull entirely away from the other. “Do you believe in spiritual mistakes?” he whispered into the dark one night.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Do you believe an entire country could embark on a spiritual mistake?”