A Gate at the Stairs

  I distracted myself with language: Right as rain—what did that ever, ever mean? I was a farmer’s daughter and couldn’t tell you. Was the rain wet?—that I understood: sarcastic tropes of obviousness were always the provincial way, and were made even more obvious by individual personal recklessness. Was the pope Catholic? Does a bear live in the woods? Was he a liver in the woods, and would the pope if hungry (and if caught in the woods along with the bear, heaving their respective masses around, snapping the branches and flattening the grass) eat it? And would the pope die if he did?

  The rain began pelting me as if it were hail—and perhaps it was hail: cold and stinging. Icy wetness stung my nose and cheeks. Things seemed to be metallically hitting the fender plates of my bike. I had no helmet. My lone headlight seemed to shine its light only a few feet ahead as I kept racing toward it, like a greyhound toward a moving teasing hare. Wind whirled around my ears as if in a vortex, a true gale, my mother’s own name: I would be the daughter of storm. Additionally, I had eaten Sarah’s food and no doubt would be maddened and end up a gorgon! My hair was being blown and tangled into stiff sticks of straw. The key was not to lose heart. In all things probably. Even for gorgons. And so I was determined not to.

  “It’s not safe for you to be riding that little bike for hours in the dark.” Both my parents were waiting up for me. I entered like a drowned thing, my hair whipped to mop strings.

  “You’re wearing your pearls,” said my mother.

  I had forgotten. And checked again to feel them. I was drenched.

  “They can get wet,” she said, trying to hide her surprise and approval. “That’s OK. It’s actually good for them.” And then she added, “We got a postcard from Robert today.”

  “Really?” She handed it to me.

  “No more,” said my father, unyieldingly, trying to get my attention. “You’re to ride that scooter only in the day.”

  I looked at my brother’s postcard. Hey you all, it read, instead of “Dear Family.” Who said “Dear Family,” anyway? Nobody. Greetings from deep in the love handles of Texas. Food here is like a cross between Alien 5 and Predator 3. We are shipping out tomorrow. Love, R. It was nothing. Said nothing. On the front was a picture of El Paso, with its relentless blue sky like lobelia that had died then gone to heaven and become an invasive. I’d never known a blue sky could look so mean.

  “Did you hear me about the scooter?” my father asked tensely.

  “Yes,” I said. “OK.” And then I pulled out a copy of the menu and gave it to him. “I found your potatoes,” I said.

  “Is that so,” he replied.

  I did what I was told. I rode the scooter only in the daylight, into town to get soda pop and movie rentals. I sometimes rode it after working with my dad in the lettuce fields, my bird outfit still on, weaving along the county roads with their lettered names—F, M, PD—that stood for nothing that I knew of. The emptiness of them, and the revving on the curves and hills, was another kind of flight. Sometimes the thought again occurred to me that I was the extraterrestrial trying to get back home to outer space. Or somehow, as with my half-Jewishness, perhaps I was only part extraterrestrial, a mixed breed, a sci-fi tragic mulatto; as anyone could see, I didn’t really know how to get back to outer space at all. I was clearly making a botch of it. The breeze cooled me, even as a bird of prey, though if a storm was brewing, insects began to sense it in panic; slow-flying horseflies the size of bumblebees, as well as gnats and dragonflies, were blown onto my face, catching in my wings and sometimes even in my teeth and throat, if I’d been singing to myself. I would have to turn around and ride back to the house.

  Some days, work done, I would just roam the property. Sandy soil was good not only for potatoes but for cottonwoods and basswoods as well, which on our land were giant and shade-giving. I would roam through our tiny ghost orchard, the cherry trees of which had been left unpruned three seasons running now and were spiky, gnarled, and largely fruitless, awaiting, perhaps, a buzz saw, a table maker—or a Russian play! Sometimes I would find an actual clutch of darkening cherries, and as with the apples in the adjacent three-tree cider orchard, I liked to find the fruit that had been slightly roughened. I had a habit from long ago, which my mother had failed to discourage: biting into the bruised spots of apples and cherries, the places under the skin where they had made their own wine, sweet and brown.

  Past the old springhouse now used as a shed, past the root cellar built strongly into a small hill near the woodlot, I often headed down toward the fish hatchery with Blot just to look around. Blot himself was mostly interested in locating his old feces from last summer, stools that had turned dry and white as space snacks. “Blot! Get over here!” I would have to call him loudly, lest he tear off on some odiferous, self-seeking pilgrimage, never to be heard from again. Lucy, our nanny goat, was newly tethered for the summer, as she had wandered over to the adjacent construction too often and gnawed on the plywood gazebos.

  Beneath my feet the ground sometimes gave way soggily: mole tunnels. Along the path the roots of old oaks had sometimes curled back around on themselves to encircle a clutch of wild-flowers. Others stretched across the path not only like a stair’s edge but like the backbone of an ancient animal in an eroding grave. It was amazing to me the charisma of some of these trees, even as the lights were going out in them, the finger-leafed oaks, which were the ragged remnants of old savannah, and the star-leafed maples: my brother and I had climbed them and read in their strong branches. Some had hollowed trunks that allowed you to get right inside, in a sort of hiding cure of some sort, disappearing until you felt better; or you could just climb in and pop out for the hellbent surprise of it. The creaturely fire of them never seemed to extinguish itself entirely. Through the years, and at my dad’s distracted encouragement (perhaps to get us out of the trees), we had also spent time reinforcing the fish hatchery banks with stones plucked and gathered from the fields. The pond always seemed to need buttressing. We made piles from the round, fist-sized field rocks, before we planted them into the embankment. Sometimes they looked as friendly as our very own potatoes. Other times they looked like piles of tailless rodents, and in certain lights they could startle.

  I had an idea that the fieldstones I didn’t take to the feed shop for sale to gardeners I would save for the hatchery. Its walls had held largely because we had been children and had been enthusiastic in our repairs, laying the stones tight as Legos. We’d also used a mortar of assorted grit: sesame seeds, toothpaste, bubble gum, and glue. And although the mortar had long ago washed away, the stones had settled nicely due to our original design and diligence in placing them. Plus, the stream was gentle. Fish still found their way in there and stayed. Certain weeks in summer our breakfast consisted of walleye and toast.

  The tennis meadow, as we called it, was on my mind, too, as something to salvage—but for what? Sedge and porcupine grass had cracked open the blacktop; vetch and vetchling, pennycress and loosestrife moved in along the edges; all manner of nightshade, turkeyfoot, and gumweed had grabbed its opportunity. The court had disintegrated to dry dirt in some spots and was edged in rusty, crumbly mold in others. Remnants of the service lines were now indistinguishable from lichen that had etched the broken edges of the concrete piece by piece. Sedimented macadam. “Macadamia nuts!” my father used to joke. He had no use for tennis: it reminded him of his own childhood, which he had left behind, a childhood where, as in England, the countryside meant tennis. What else might it mean? He had been determined to discover what else.

  I decided to make a little project out of the meadow. First I took my father’s clippers and cut the daisies and pink clusters of milkweed: I thought I would put them in some vases around the house but quickly saw they were crawling with ants. Then I took the mower and rake and took the thistle and pigweed and every other blooming thing down. With my father’s blowtorch I completely burned and cleared the space between the two wood posts, where the net would be. The net posts were now cracked and sw
ollen from years of weather. Creeping Charlie wound round them like Christmas ribbon on a gift bottle of wine. I raked out the crumbled court in between, making about a two-foot cleared, charred path. Then I placed along it a twenty-foot runner of indoor-outdoor carpeting I’d found in the barn. I strung a thick old rope between the poles, and I took my collection of Rumi poems and carefully flattened and unstrung it so I could hang folded pages along the crease, tacking them into the rope with pushpins, and I lay underneath and read. It had always been my desire to have a device that might hang from the ceiling with a lit book—why had no one invented this yet?—and this was the closest I’d come to experiencing it.

  I found time every day to go there, and it was a sanctuary from the bobcats and graders that were still at work in gazebo-land. If it was buggy I would bring some repellent and spray the air, then step through the cloud of it as if it were a spritz of cologne. I lay down and stared up: the shade of these words made a magical tent. Because of the field’s sheltering from the breezes, the pages didn’t flap around much in the air, and if I wanted to rearrange or reposition them in any way I could do so. While I read, butterflies occasionally landed, as if to check out these new cousins, and then took off again. I would read Rumi and ponder love and its ecstasies as well as the extinction of the self in divine essence until I found myself fumbling in the pockets of my shorts for a stick of gum. Which I would unwrap, blowing off any pocket dirt, and chew, while still reading. When I grew weary of Rumi, I put up Plath, whose brisk, elegant screams I never grew tired of, until I did, and then desiring something different yet again I began to hang recipes of things, carefully dismantled from old cookbooks my mother no longer wanted. I would study their notation, their confident sorcery, their useful busyness. They were the opposite of poetry, except if, like me, you seldom cooked, and then they were the same. I would take the pages in when done, in case of rain.

  I did go swimming—once, at the Dellacrosse Village municipal pool. In normal attire I rode my Suzuki there on the hottest day of August, and then, stripping down to one of my mother’s old one-piece bathing suits, the padded foam bodice of which helped keep me afloat, I swam lengths up and down in the turquoise water until I was exhausted.

  I didn’t see anyone there I knew, except a girl I’d gone to high school with, Valerie Bochman, who already had a roly pink baby who was dashing, diapered, through the sprinklers of the adjacent wading pool while Valerie watched from a towel. Oddly, the baby was not that cute. He looked pale and fat and empty-eyed. I knew Valerie had gotten married but I’d forgotten to whom and didn’t know what her last name was now. She’d buried her old name and acquired a new one, like a witness in a federal protection program. How would we girls find each other again when we got to be middle-aged and came back and tried to look one another up in the phone book? We would all be missing. There was a protection program for you. Before I headed back to the pine-slatted changing room to shower off the chlorine and stare bleakly at the lime-scaled showerhead, which with its raisiny rubber nozzles had the look of a blueberry Stilton, I gave a weak wave across the pool at Valerie. But she didn’t wave back. She just looked at me vaguely, smiling in a noncommittal way that showed no recognition whatsoever. So I left. Perhaps she would suddenly remember me on her way home.

  Every night I lay in my bed, staying up past ten, reading. The light from my lamp attracted insects through the holes in one of the screens, and by eleven I would look up at the ceiling and it would be crawling with bugs, small, medium, and large, light and dark, all collecting up there in ominous flocks as if awaiting Tippi Hedren. Once, a leggy winged albino thing landed on my book, and its oddness fascinated me, though I soon slammed it between the pages. Once I awoke in the middle of the night and could see that through the crack between my door and the badly settled frame there was a long sliver of light from the hallway, and fireflies could enter the room; they sparkled in and out like fairies, as if the door were nothing at all, as if there were no separating this room from any other space. They were like visions, really, but ones I’d not had as a child, when I’d slept through the night with a depth and stillness that was no longer possible.

  Whenever I put my bird costume on I felt once again like Icarus—take that, Professor Keyser-Lowe of Classics 251!—though I realized this wasn’t, mythically speaking, either lucky or apt. But it was becoming the most fun I’d had all year. Sometimes in the evening, the summer moon a tangerine shard—an orange peel stuck up there like the lunch garbage of God!—I’d get all set to go out and my father would say, “Oh, I’m sorry, not tonight, we’re not harvesting tonight,” and I would say, “Oh, OK,” but then I’d just go out anyway. Perhaps I was becoming addicted to being a hawk or a falcon or whatever it was I was. Perhaps I just needed the evening run. Often Blot would come with me, trotting along behind. Lucy would look longingly from her rope. The thrushes whistled their flutey country song: Run to your home hear me / why don’t you come to me? They sounded insincere and happy.

  Waning light rouged and bronzed the clouds so they looked like a mountain range. As the dusk washed over, I galloped up and down the rows of three-season spring mix, and my dreams of flying would return. As ever, in my flying dreams, I never got very far off the ground, and now here if I took a leap I felt my wings supporting me, kitelike, just a split second above the field. I would hover, buoyed, my wings finding a little air, and so when I landed I would instantly leap up again, the ball of one foot pushing off—that split-second feeling of almost being able to set sail was enough of a thrill. Actual sustained flight would have been beside the point, and too scary to boot. This was my modest dream come true: unambitious flight. The kind that never even got high enough for a view.

  Alone at dusk I was quiet; I sang nothing. At the field’s edges and near the barn and the root cellar, light still held in the yellow razzmatazz of the goldenrod. With the first full drop of the sun the swallows swooped out from their mud nests to feed. Then the barn bats followed—the small ones darting, then the larger ones, like cougars with wings, crawling their way through the air, ignoring the mosquitoes, heading for the fireflies. I sometimes studied their flight, which would never be mine, and neither did I really want it to be, but nonetheless, the balletic motions, both searching and swift, were things to be admired.

  I was perfecting my soar and leap every evening as the sky deepened into night. All the daytime machinery of the nearby construction lay still, and the sawing scherzo legs of crickets began their summer repetitions—like the feisty strings in a piece by Philip Glass. The cicadas throbbed and shook with the rattle of tambourines, the peepers trilled—they all came together in a choral way. Sometimes there was the braying of a lone and distant goose. I would head toward the far woodlot, toward a spot where there was bluegrass with an overlay of rye, something that would have made a perfect soccer field. I would run toward that grass and back, feeling the slight takeoff of my wings, a sudden if momentary weightlessness. The reddening sumacs on the other side of the woodlot were fruiting early this year, and I would sometimes run in their direction as well. If Blot barked too excitedly or nipped at my heels or jumped at my wings, I ran him back to the house and would then return to the fields on my own, keeping to the narrow dirt rows between the baby greens and the kale. I ran and banked the turns and ran again, feeling myself float just lightly above the earth.

  And then one evening, the air velvety and vibrating with tree frogs, the occasional bass of a courting bull in the pond thickening the song, the sturdy sky an infinitude of summer stars—what wishing! if one wanted to wish; what guiding of ships! if one were steering one!—there they both were: Reynaldo and Robert. I stopped, my skin hot from running. They were standing side by side at the end of the field, Robert with his yoga mat, Reynaldo with his prayer mat. Each had a cell phone and a volume of poems by Rumi. Their stillness, the fact that as apparitions they seemed to recede and keep the same distance from me always no matter how I tried to close it, and that they didn’t say a wor
d before they turned and walked away, melting into the dark, though the sky remained mapped and spangled with constellations, was an omen. Plus they came again the next night in the exact same way, neither vaporous nor cadaverous, but wordless and turning and walking away, this time with a little bruised-up boy who I realized instantly in the way of visions was Gabriel Thornwood-Brink: this made me understand that they were unfindably dead, all of them, and that now the really useful things of life, like stars, would become incomprehensible decoration.

  I was not there when the two military officers drove up in their military van to my parents’ door to announce my brother’s death, though years later I met someone who had done that kind of work for a living. “It’s very hard and very weird,” he said. “It was the strangest job I ever had. Although completely draped in duty, it was an exercise of total cluelessness, which, for someone who has spent any time in the military, is saying a lot.”

  It was unclear how and why Robert’s death had occurred so suddenly, so soon, so instantaneously—eight weeks of boot camp had been hurried along and they had been shipped quickly overseas, as the all-volunteer army was at the beginning of its being spread too thin. They had only just landed someplace near Helmand Province; they had been there for less than three weeks; there was a BBIED but no QRD, which were all in TK or J-bad along with all the MREs; they were equipped with AKs but even a routine land-mine sweep can go awry. The letter said something different than the person on the phone. In appreciation of our loss a check for twelve thousand dollars came right away, express mail, with Keltjin spelled wrong.