A Gate at the Stairs

  “Oh, look, here they are,” murmured Sarah, and I looked up to see a heavily made-up middle-aged woman in a deep pink parka holding the arm of a girl probably my age, maybe younger, who was very pregnant, very pretty, and when she smiled at us, even from that distance, I could see she had scarcely a tooth in her head. We stood and moved toward them. The girl wore an electronic bracelet on her wrist, but was clearly unembarrassed by this because she energetically thrust her hand out from her sleeve in greeting. I shook it. “Hi,” she said to me. I wondered what she had done, and why the bracelet was not around her ankle instead. Perhaps she had been very, very bad and had both.

  “Hi,” I replied, trying to smile companionably and not stare at her stomach.

  “This is the mother, here,” the woman in the pink parka told the pregnant girl, indicating Sarah. “Sarah Brink? Amber Bowers.”

  “Hi—it’s so wonderful to meet you.” Sarah grasped Amber’s hand warmly and shook it for too long. Amber kept turning back hopefully toward me, as if she were as baffled as I was to be in the company of these mysterious middle-aged women.

  “I’m Tassie Keltjin,” I said quickly, shaking Amber’s penalized hand yet again. The delicate knobs of her wrists and her elegant fingers were in strange contrast to her toothlessness and the hard plastic parole band. “I’m going to work for Sarah, as a childcare provider.”

  “And I’m Letitia Gherlich,” said the adoption agency woman, shaking my hand though not letting go of Amber’s coat sleeve, as if she might escape. Amber did have the face, if not currently the body, of someone who perhaps more than once had suddenly made a run for it.

  “Hey, Letitia,” said Sarah, who threw her arms around her as if they were old friends, though Letitia stiffened a little. “Here, come sit down,” she added. “The waitress is bringing coffee.”

  After that, things moved with swiftness and awkwardness both, like something simultaneously strong and broken. We hung up coats; we ordered; we ate; we made chitchat about the food and the snow. “Oh, there’s my probation officer,” Amber said, giggling; her face brightened, as if she had a little crush on him. “I think he sees us. He’s sitting right over there by the window.” We looked up to see the probation officer, his blue jacket still on, his bottomless Diet Coke stacked with ice. A going-to-seed hunk in a windbreaker: the world seemed full of them. We all just stared to buy ourselves time, I suppose, and to avoid the actual question of Amber’s crimes.

  Letitia began to speak to Sarah, on Amber’s behalf. “Amber is happy to meet Tassie as well as you, Sarah.” Here Amber looked across at me and rolled her eyes, as if we were two girls out with our embarrassing mothers. I had been noticing Amber’s face, which was as lovely as advertised but sassy, with a strange electricity animating it, and with the missing teeth she seemed like a slightly educated hillbilly or an infant freak. Her hair was a gingery blond, shoulder length, as straight and coarse as a horse’s tail. “Amber is wondering, of course, about your religious plans for the baby. She is very interested in having the baby baptized Catholic, aren’t you, Amber?”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Amber. “That’s the whole point of this.” She pulled out the front of her bulging stretchy sweater and let it snap back.

  “And of course, she would hope you would have the child confirmed as well, when the time came.”

  “We could do that. We could definitely do that,” Sarah said agreeably.

  “Were you raised Catholic?” asked Amber.

  “Uh, well, no, but my cousins were,” said Sarah, as if this solved everything.

  Letitia, nervous about the sticky parts of a deal, said cheerily, “The birth father is white. I did mention that to you, didn’t I?”

  Sarah said nothing, her face momentarily inscrutable. She picked up a lone cold french fry the waitress had yet to clear and began to chew.

  Letitia continued. “Tall and good-looking, like Amber.”

  Amber smiled happily. “We broke up,” she said, shrugging.

  “Do you have a picture of him, though? To show Sarah?” Letitia was selling the idea of the handsome white boy-dad.

  “I don’t think I ever had a damn picture of him,” said Amber, shaking her head. Now she looked at me, grinning. “Except in my mind. My mind’s a regular exhibition.” The phrase was oddly reminiscent of the Mussorgsky we’d just listened to in the car. And her mouth, with its few and crooked teeth, bits of shell awash on a reef of gum, seemed a curious home for her voice, which was slowly surprising, with its intelligence and humor. There was a lull now. Amber suddenly leaned back, physically uncomfortable. “So, where’s your husband?” she asked Sarah.

  I examined Sarah’s face for the stiffened look of the accused. “He’s, oh, he’s at a meeting his lab is having with the university. I run my own restaurant in town, so I can make up my own schedule as far as meetings go. But, well, he’s at the beck and call of others—at least today he is.”

  “Do you think you really have time for a baby, owning a restaurant and all?” Amber was not shy. If she had been shy, not one of us would be at Perkins right now.

  Sarah refused to be flustered. She’d heard remarks of this sort a dozen times. But before she could speak, Letitia spoke for her. “That’s why Tassie is here. Tassie’s the backup. But Sarah will always be around. She’ll be the mom. And she can do a lot of her work right out of the house—isn’t that right, Sarah?”

  What work could Sarah do from the house? Yell at Meeska about the coulis?

  “Absolutely,” Sarah said. “Oh, I forgot. I brought you a present, Amber.” She took a CD from her purse. “It’s a mixed CD of my favorite classical music.”

  Amber took it and stashed it in her bag with the most fleeting of glances. Perhaps she’d had a slew of these lunches as a means of collecting goodies, which she would later sell on eBay. “And I have a present for you, too,” she said, and handed Sarah a foil-wrapped pat of butter she plucked from the bowl on the table. “It’s wrapped!” Amber said, smiling wickedly. The CD hadn’t been. A scalding boldness gripped Amber’s face, then a kind of guilt, then drifty blankness, like songs off a jukebox list, flipped through unchosen.

  “Thanks!” said Sarah gamely. You had to hand it to her. She opened up the butter and applied it to her mouth like lip gloss. “Prevents chapped lips.”

  “You’re welcome,” said Amber.

  When we all walked out to the parking lot, the probation officer followed. The American flag was flapping noisily next to the Perkins sign; the air was picking up wind and snow. The probation officer walked to his car and got in but did not start it. Amber’s face was completely lit up. I saw that she was fantastically in love with him. She was not concentrating on any of us, and something about this provoked Sarah.

  “Well,” she said, studying Amber with an artificial smile.

  “Yes, well,” said Amber.

  “All right then,” said Letitia.

  “Can I give you some advice, Amber?” Sarah asked, standing there, as Letitia clutched Amber even tighter. Letitia was ecstatic to have a white birth mother in tow, one with a little white bun in the oven, and did not want a rival agency to get ahold of her. Or so Sarah would say later. The windbreakered parole officer gave a wave and drove off.

  “What?” Amber said to Sarah, but to me she smiled and said, “He was definitely following me.”

  “When I was your age, I had some rebellious ideas,” Sarah continued her unsolicited advice to Amber. “I got in trouble now and again, here and there, but I realized it was because I was doing things I wasn’t any good at. Look at this.” She tapped Amber’s electronic bracelet with a gloved index finger. “You’re eighteen. Don’t sell drugs. You’re no good at it. Do something you’re good at.”

  Sarah meant this tough-love speech compassionately, I could see, but Amber’s face flushed with insult, then hardened. “That’s what I’m trying to do,” she said indignantly, and tore herself from Letitia’s grip, walked over to what was apparently Letitia’s car, and got i
n on the passenger’s side.

  Baby, it’s scold outside, Murph would have said if she were there.

  “We’ll talk later,” Letitia called to Sarah, waving good-bye and hurrying off to Amber. Perkins’s flag was whipping loudly in the snowy wind.

  “Well,” said Sarah as we both got into her car. “That was, for all intents and purposes, a complete disaster.”

  She started up the engine. “You know?” she continued. “I always do the wrong thing. I do the wrong thing so much that the times I actually do the right thing stand out so brightly in my memory that I forget I always do the wrong thing.”

  We rode home mostly in silence, Sarah offering me gum, then cough drops, both of which I took, thanking her. When I glanced over at her, driving without her sunglasses, her scarf wrapped now around her head like a babushka, she seemed watery, far away, lost in thought, and I wondered how a nice, attractive girl—for I’d thought I had glimpsed on the way up the girl I imagined she once was, her face still and thoughtful, her hair in the sun ablaze with light—how a girl like that became a lonely woman with a yarny shmatte on her head, became this, whatever it was. After a childhood of hungering to be an adult, my hunger had passed. Unexpected fates had begun to catch my notice. These middle-aged women seemed very tired to me, as if hope had been wrung out of them and replaced with a deathly, walking sort of sleep.

  Sarah’s cell phone played the beginning to “Eine kleine Nachtmusik,” its vigorous twang not unlike a harpsichord at all, and so not completely offensive to the spirit of Mozart, who perhaps did not, like so many of his colleagues, have to roll about as much in his grave since the advent of electronic things.

  Sarah pulled the phone from her bag and slowed the car slightly while she did. “Excuse me,” she said to me. “Yeah?” she said into the phone. All this despite the bumper sticker on her car that read PERHAPS YOU WOULD DRIVE BETTER WITH THAT CELL PHONE SHOVED UP YOUR ASS. She also had one that said, IF GOD SPEAKS THROUGH BURNING BUSHES, LET’S BURN BUSH AND LISTEN TO WHAT GOD SAYS. It was interesting to me that such a woman, one with such rhetorical violence adhered to her car, had gotten past the adoption agency’s screening processes, whatever they were. She also had a third bumper sticker that said BORN FINE THE FIRST TIME—though cell phones and Christianity were going to be the very things to bring her a child. Her fourth was no more promising: BEHIND EVERY SUCCESSFUL WOMAN IS HERSELF.

  I don’t know why I could hear so clearly—perhaps Sarah was a little deaf and had the volume on everything turned up high.

  “Sarah, hi, it’s Letitia,” I heard.

  “Hi, Letitia.” I believed I wasn’t supposed to listen, so I looked out the window at the bleak snowy landscape; the sun was low and feeble, dissolving whitely like a lemon drop. Each town we passed through had a Dairy Queen, with customers lined up, even in winter. When I looked back at Sarah I saw her powdered, thinning skin like a crepe, with the same light freckles as a crepe, her gnarly-knuckled hand, arthritic from chopping herbs, going through her spiky russet hair, knocking back her scarf. How did her stand-up hair defy not just gravity but even the additional weight of a scarf? Why did my own hair always lie flat, defeated by atmospheric physics of all sorts, unimproved even by the most widely advertised of sticky gels? Education had not entirely elevated my concerns in life. It had probably not even assisted my analyses of these concerns, though that was the most I could hope for. I was too fresh from childhood. Subconsciously, my deepest brain still a cupboard of fairy tales, I suppose I believed that if a pretty woman was no longer pretty she had done something bad to deserve it. I had a young girl’s belief that this kind of negative aging would never come to me. Death would come to me—I knew this from reading British poetry. But the drying, hunching, blanching, hobbling, fading, fattening, thinning, slowing? I would just not let that happen to moi.

  Sarah switched ears, making it harder for me to hear, but then switched back and slowed to let a convoy of trucks pass. I could hear Letitia. “If this doesn’t work out with Amber, there are babies on the international market. We’ve had a lot of luck with South America. Paraguay has opened up again, and other countries, too. And they’re not all brown there, either. There’s been a lot of German influence, and some of these kids are beautiful, very blond, or blue-eyed, or both.”

  “Well, thanks for the info,” said Sarah brusquely. “Get back to me on Amber.” Letitia then said something I couldn’t make out, and Sarah said quickly, “Gotta run—there’s an ice patch ahead,” and snapped the phone shut.

  “The babies of Nazis,” Sarah said, shaking her head. “They’re hawking Nazi babies. Racially superior. Unbelievable.” She raked her fingers yet again through the bright desert grass of her hair. I didn’t ask her how a tiny baby could be a Nazi. What did I know? Maybe it could. “Blue eyes!” she cried. “The human race has really come a long way!” She shook her head again, this time with a horsey, nasal exhalation of disgust. “I knew someone in cooking school who was a blue-eyed Jew. He said his sperm was in great demand at the local sperm bank and he was making a lot of spare cash. He was at first a funny story and then a kind of expression we all used: ‘Gettin’ over like a blue-eyed Jew in a sperm bank.’”

  “Yeah,” I said dopily.

  “You may be too young to know this yet, but eventually you will look around and notice: Nazis always have the last laugh.”

  Then we were wordless through the towns of Terre Noire and Fond du Marais, places named both whimsically and fearfully by French fur traders, before the subsequent flattened pronunciations by Scandinavian farmers made the names even more absurd: “Turn Ore” and “Fondue Morass.” “You’ll find I say about eighty-nine percent of what’s on my mind,” Sarah said. “For the other eleven percent? I use a sauna.” She put a CD in the car player. “Bach’s first French suite. Do you know it?”

  After some clicking and static, it began, stately and sad. “I think so,” I said, not sure at all. My friends had already begun to lie, to bluff a sophistication they felt that at the end of the ten-second bluff they would authentically possess. But I was not only less inclined this way but less skilled. “Maybe not, though,” I added. Then, “Wait, it’s ringing a bell.”

  “Oh, it’s the most beautiful thing,” she said. “Especially with this pianist.” It was someone humming along with the light dirge of the Bach. Later I would own every loopy Glenn Gould recording available, but there in the car with Sarah was the first time I’d ever heard him play. The piece was like an elegant interrogation made of tangled yarn, a query from a well-dressed man in a casket, not yet dead. It proceeded slowly, like a careful equation, and then not: if x = y, if major = minor, if death equals part of life and life part of death, then what is the sum of the infinite notes of this one phrase? It asked, answered, reasked, its moody asking a refinement of reluctance or dislike. I had never heard a melody quite like it.

  “You live near the stadium, right?” asked Sarah. We were already back in Troy. She swung the car down Campus Avenue toward the tiny street, Brickhurst, where I lived. The neighborhoods near the university were already mostly empty for the Christmas holidays, but in houses that were not student housing, frequently there were lights strung along the soffits and the brightened gutters seemed to shout cheerily, “WE are here! WE ARE HERE!”

  “I’m at 201 Brickhurst,” I said.

  “Brickhurst?” I suspected she was one of these out-of-staters who’d moved here a while back but had only a pieced-together knowledge of the town, a mind map assembled on a strictly need-to-know basis. But she was there in less than a minute.

  She put the car in park. She patted me on the shoulder, then let her hand run down my coat sleeve. “Thanks,” she said. “Phone me when you get back into town after Christmas.” Her face looked fantastically sad.

  “OK,” I said, not knowing what else to say. “Sounds good.” It was the midwestern girl’s reply to everything.

  II

  Christmas morning I slept in late. So did my younger br
other, who had picked me up at the Dellacrosse bus station the night before, driving my father’s truck, the one with EAT POTATOES AND LOVE LONGER emblazoned on the back. He’d stood waiting in the parking lot for me to get off the bus, sporting his cheap brown parka and no hat, seeming glad to see me, as if he had something to share, though I didn’t really expect anything: my brother rarely shared. He helped with my suitcase and with my electric bass (which I’d brought with me), sticking both in the back of the truck, and he refrained from his usual remark about only boys playing bass. The electric guitar had been invented fifty miles from here! I was always ready to counter, to no particular person at all, as Robert himself was as steeped in the local myths about Les Paul as I was. I also had an acoustic upright bass at home in my bedroom, with a satchel full of bows attached to its belly. It looked like a fat abandoned archer in the corner, a quiver full of arrows gathering dust. “Ole Bob,” Robert called it, lumping it in with him and my dad. “At least you’re not lugging Ole Bob.”

  Robert, it had often seemed to me, failed to apply himself—musically or academically. Perhaps having an older sister had stymied him a little. He knew I was quietly nuts about my guitar. The Jewish part of us both sort of understood that to worship God was to siphon off the worship of doodads—and we loved doodads (my instruments were insured up the wazoo)—but it didn’t always work that way: sometimes God adhered to something material and physical and earthly, and then all was a little misty for the holder and beholder of the doodad. But my brother was nice to me about it all; in fact, when I thought back to our many years together, he was, essentially, always nice to me, though he did gun the engine a little wildly as we pulled out of the parking lot. To his friends he was known as Gunny, a name my parents hated.