A Gate at the Stairs

  “Well, the birth mother is pregnant, and the woman I’m working for is going to adopt the kid.”

  There was silence all around, even from my dad, as if this were a situation to be considered for all its various and deep sadnesses.

  “It’s a good thing,” I added. “This girl—she could never be a good mother. And the lady who’s hiring me? She’s kind of neat. She’s nice and pretty and she owns a fancy restaurant in town.”

  “That’s why she needs you,” said my mother, concerned. “She’s too busy for a child.”

  I was about to try to defend Sarah when my father asked with unfeigned interest, “What restaurant?”

  “Le Petit Moulin,” I said.

  My mother turned and made a knowing face. “A fineschmecker running a place for other fineschmeckers.”

  My father smiled broadly. “Oh, I remember her. Very nice woman.” My mother turned her back to us, flipping the flapjacks and throwing the latkes into hot oil, refusing to let go of her skepticism regarding the whole matter. My father continued. “She would come and check out those potatoes as if they were diamonds. But she would sometimes take the ones with a bit of rot in them anyway, knowing that once the rot part was cut out the rest of the potato would be sweeter than most. Smart lady.”

  “Why can’t she have her own children?” asked my mother, continuing in her doubt.

  “Mom, I don’t know. I can’t ask. I hardly know her.”

  “What about her husband?”

  “What about her husband?”

  “Who is he?”

  It was a little surprising even to me that I knew so little about him. “I think he’s probably a professor of some sort, but I’m not sure.”

  “Hmph,” said my mother. “Academics.” Now she was muttering. “They all shoot from the hip. And the hip is always in the chair.”

  “What did you say?” asked my father.

  “Nothing,” said my mother. “Keeping a safe distance never keeps one from having an opinion, is all. Having no dog in the race doesn’t keep people from having extremely large cats.” Then she added, “Pull your seat up to the table. The food is ready.”

  My father had more of a sense of humor than my mother. “Just because I’m hard of hearing,” he said to her now, smiling, “doesn’t mean you’re not mumbling!” Yet it was his sense of adventure she had had to sign on for long ago, good-naturedly, and in reluctant love, and he had taken her on something of a journey, out here to the country, to this farm. But she had been game. At least at first.

  “Oh, well, someday maybe I’ll open a restaurant,” she said now, sighing brightly, which seemed about as happy as she got—a sigh with some light in it. She then added a remark that typified the sort that filled me with loathing for her. “You know, with the new year approaching, I’ve come to realize I’ve done nothing these past decades but devote my energies to the interests of others. So, soon? I’m going to start focusing on myself.”

  “Well, before you get started, darling,” said my father, “could you please pass the syrup?”

  Once when I was a kid my father planted ten acres of corn and rye and then midsummer plowed just the rye, making a graphic ribbon effect through the rolling fields. “This would be best seen by air,” said my dad. The whole reason he had become a farmer is that he thought it would be fun. And so he hired a guy from Minneapolis to take an aerial photo of it, and we stuck it up on the fridge with little spud magnets. It looked beautiful—the gold of the mown rye striping the green corn and both undulating through like a performing pair of lovebird dolphins. This, I pretended, was a picture of my parents’ marriage. My mother had thought she was marrying a college president’s son but got a hobby farmer instead, yet she’d followed him. She stayed with him wherever the hell it was they were going. She was like a stickleback fish caught inland as the glacier retreated and the rivers—the only access to the sea—disappeared. She would have to make do, in this landlocked lake of love. I knew, as she had mentioned it, that she’d thought there’d be money—he’d grown up in a house with columns—but she hadn’t realized there was none: the house was owned by the college. Even when she and my father came to Dellacrosse and bought our old brick house, with its falling-apart shed and barn but its flowerbeds gorgeous with pansies and impatiens, she didn’t understand that those particular flowers were annuals, and so she waited for them to return the next year, feeling dashed and betrayed when they didn’t. Another mirage! But eventually she learned to plant her own. And for a while she was a pro. Until she got too tired. That was when she installed mirrors in the flowerbeds, slowly learning the art of mirage herself.

  After our late breakfast the winds picked up, and soon there was a thunderstorm, the sky yellowish and the clouds filled with the crunch and rip of lightning. The leafless trees looked frail and surprised. The sudden downpour eliminated practically all the snow on the ground, and because the drainage on the county roads was so poor, they filled like canals with water, just sitting there glistening, ready to turn to ice when the temperature dipped later in the afternoon. Which it did.

  Our actual Christmas ceremonies for the day, outside of breakfast, had been so painfully casual—no hamentashen, no pfeffer-nüsse, no kringle from Racine—that I wondered why we had bothered. Perhaps my mother, the keeper of ritual, had lost interest in this ostensibly Christian custom now that we had grown, and my father didn’t really know how to take over. Where was the turkey, its yankable heart in a baggie jammed up its butt? On the other hand, my mother had given me a carefully wrapped present of a pearl necklace and watched, teary-eyed, as I opened it. “Every woman should have a pearl necklace,” she said. “When I was your age I got one.” From my father, I knew. And now, with no man in my life, even though I was only twenty, she would be the one to bestow this artifact of womanhood, this rite of passage, this gyno-noose, upon me. That I might in fact never have an occasion to wear such a thing or that I might look like the worst sort of Republican doing so probably never occurred to her. I think she saw it as a kind of ticket off the farm and out into the world, wherever that was.

  “Thanks, Mom,” I said, and kissed her cheek, which was simultaneously powdery and damp. I thrust the velveteen box of pearls high, as if making a toast. “Here’s to Jesus,” I said.

  My mom looked at me from a great and concerned distance. Their present to Robert was a handheld instant star and constellation identifier.

  Another flurry of thunderclouds passed by overhead and hail came pounding down on our roof, and down the chimney, crackling in the fireplace as if to mock the sound of fire and then bouncing out from the hearth onto the wood floor. It was as if I had unstrung my mother’s pearls and just flung them around.

  Afterward we sat around and watched TV. Only once do I remember our going to church on Christmas—the Norwegian Lutheran church in town. My father had cast his WASP eye around at the stained-glass windows and their bright, jellied scenes and designs, and then murmured, perhaps recalling his churchier past or struggling against some ancestral Puritan pride, “I think that’s an original Koshkonong window. Or, wait a minute, let me see, maybe it’s not—” and my mother had whispered in a fond hiss, “Let’s face it, Bo: You know nothing about the goyim.”

  “There’s lots of strange weather all around the country,” my dad said now, sitting down to join us.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, a little frightened. Like a child, I still trusted him to know all.

  “Well, there are a lot of storms in odd places and high winds”—he slowed down to subdue his own dark report—“and eerie calms …”

  “Eerie calms?” I asked.

  “There’s a pregnant pause outside Kenosha that’s scaring the pants off ’em.”

  “Dad!” And I laughed, to please him.

  At four o’clock, with the sun just about set, my brother and I went outside for a walk, and we slid around with our shoes on the new ice. It had been sunny enough before noon so that my mother had put laundry out, and
now in the light wind it billowed from her clotheslines, snapping the ice from its threads like the sails of an arctic whale ship. How many Christmases had we ever been out without boots? Not many.

  “How are Mom and Dad doing?” I asked my brother.

  “Oh, OK, I guess,” Robert said. “They still go at each other tooth and nail, but I’ve learned not to pay too much attention. It’s really all nothing. And better than when they turn their attention to me. Yikes!”

  “They after you about school?”

  “Oh, yeah.” He skittered a stone across the ice with his shoe. “I screwed up a question on a test and got sent to the principal’s.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I said Gandhi was a deer.”

  “A deer?”

  “I got Gandhi mixed up with Bambi.”

  “What?” He was bright, so he came to things quickly without patience. He tended to blurt. If he hit a blank spot he just said something fast. And it was sometimes absurd. He had once said asteroids instead of hemorrhoids, which made me bury my face in my arms.

  “I don’t know—words remind me of other words. Like the word hostage makes me think of sausage. I don’t know why. I just hate all that shit, I’m telling you. But don’t worry, I’m not going to go postal or anything.” We were scooting along inefficiently, hardly lifting our feet so as not to slip. “My grades aren’t good enough, and college applications have to be in first of the month. I may just join the military.”

  “Why?” Alarm struck a note in my throat.

  “It’s peacetime. I’m not going to get killed or nothing—”

  “Anything.”

  “Anything. Two years and the government’ll pay for some of college, and Mom and Dad’ll be off my back.”

  “The government will only pay for some of it?”

  “Well, apparently there are different packages, depending on how long you sign up for. A recruiter came to our high school.”

  “A recruiter came to your high school? Is that legal?”

  Robert snorted. “It is at Dellacrosse Central.”

  “Sheesh,” I said.

  “Yeah, when I bring the whole thing up Mom gets upset. She’s threatening to phone the recruiter at his house in Beaver Dam and give him a piece of her mind.”

  “It’s amazing she has a piece left. But it’s true—I believe she does.”

  “What does she want me to do? Go to DDD?”

  “I hope not.”

  The Dellacrosse Diesel Driving School was the hellish Plan B—Plan D, it was jokingly referred to—for all the kids who’d bombed out in their courses. “I’ve been taking yoga for PE credit,” he said.

  “Really?” Things changed so fast, it whipped your head around. Yoga had entered the corridors of Dellacrosse Central High, but so had the army recruiters.

  “Yeah. Deep breathing: a triumph of me over me.”

  “Oh-ho. You have your own personal and hygienic mat?”

  “I do.”

  Here he looked up at me with great earnestness, his eyes asking me to hear him in the deepest way I knew how. “And I sit there in the dark gym,” he said, “and just think. Signing up for the army seems the only thing. It’s either that or diesel driving school.”

  “But it’s not really peacetime. There’s Afghanistan,” I said. These faraway countries that had intruded on our consciousness seemed odd to me. It seemed one thing sixty years ago to go over and fight for France, a country we had heard of, but what did it mean now to fight in or at—there was no preposition … for?—a place like Afghanistan? To their credit, students in Troy were eager to find out, and the Intro to Islam course had filled up for spring semester, which was why I was stuck with the more narrow, and reputedly fluffier, Intro to Sufism. We would read Rumi and Doris Lessing.

  “Afghanistan’s over.”

  “It is?” I’d been studying for finals.

  “I dunno.” He skittered a stone again. “Yeah, I think so.”

  “What happened? Did we win?”

  “I dunno.” He laughed. “I guess so.”

  “Yeah, well, soldiers without a war get bored and sometimes they get stationed in hot, edgy places and start to want one. They don’t know why they’re there otherwise. And if one doesn’t come they just start shooting the sky and then each other.”

  “How do you know so much?”

  “Movies.”

  “Ha!” Then he added solemnly, too solemnly, “If I don’t come back, you know, alive, don’t let them bury me in some big-ass coffin. I don’t want to take up space.”

  “Well,” I said, “I guess that’s why you’re taking yoga: so we’ll be able to squeeze you into a pretzel box! We’ll all declare, ‘Oh, he would have wanted it this way!’”

  “Thanks.” He smiled.

  “I’m not sure I like the idea of enduring freedom.”

  “How about letting freedom ring?”

  “Even that. Shouldn’t freedom just be free? Why do you have to let it do anything? That suggests it’s kind of locked up and then being sprung on people.”

  “You like college, don’t you?”

  Aloft in the trees, the squirrel nests, hidden all summer, sat exposed like tumors—composed of the flesh of the trees but still jealous and other. “Quasi sort of. Did you do any hunting this year?” He had never been an enthusiastic hunter. How would he manage in the military?

  “Nah.”

  “No animal population control?” The ostensible reason for hunting always made me snort.

  “No, actually this year I’ve been part of a program that does deer-condom distribution.”

  “Excellent!” I was working on a laugh that was more than my usual pleased grunt, but all I had right now was a kind of blast that culminated in a bleat.

  We continued walking on the edge of the icy road, past a stand of birches that in the distance looked like my mother’s cigarettes stubbed out in the dirt, barely smoked. My brother’s boy’s life seemed lonely and hard to me. He still had one snaggletooth that poked out of his smile. This was because there had been only enough orthodontia money for one of us, so it went to the daughter, whose looks would matter (wasted on me! a smileless girl I felt sure no man would ever desire—not deeply). I got the braces. He got the chores. The expectations that he help my dad around the farm were so much greater than any that had been laid upon me, and so I could see his life was a little harder than mine, though he was a good-looking boy, bright in a general way, and with many friends. As a young kid his plans were entrepreneurial. Once, years ago, he’d drawn up a design for a hotel chain, and believing his greatest competitor would be the Holiday Inn, he decided to name it in an opposing, competitive spirit: Normal Night Out. The Normal Night Out Hotel.

  He had, however, the same loneliness in him that I did, though he had always been my mother’s favorite. Where had that gotten him? My mother’s love was useless.

  We pushed past the gate at the far end of our property and walked down one of the old half-frozen cow paths terraced slightly with old roots and stones to form steps. A small fly buzzed past my ear, then vanished. I had never seen a fly before at Christmas, and I swatted at it, feeling, as we had been taught to feel in Art 102, the surrealism of two familiar things placed unexpectedly side by side. That would be the future.

  We hiked down past the copse of sycamore and oak (as children, animating some dormant urban fear, we had witlessly shrieked, “The copse! The copse!” and raced through the underbrush, thrilled by our own concocted, dreadless terror). Now Robert and I weaved among the piss elms toward the old fish hatchery, which in winters of the past we would have skated on; it was a former nineteenth-century mill pond that had long ago lost its falls, though the old paddle wheel still leaned against a tree, coated with squirrel shucks. Sometimes we’d tobogganed down the snowy trail all the way to the hatchery, where now there was no snow at all, just the matted hard grass and dirt and the dried, icing stalks of angelica and milkweed and bee balm. My brother liked to fish at t
he hatchery sometimes, even in winter, sometimes even in the stream, even if the fish were really now just trash fish, and even though it was stupid to ice fish in a stream. But summers down this path I had always liked, and when the gnats weren’t bad I had sometimes accompanied him, sat in the waist-high widgeon grass beside him, the place pink with coneflowers, telling him the plot of, say, a Sam Peckinpah movie I’d never seen but had read about once in a syndicated article in the Dellacrosse Sunday Star. Crickets the size of your thumb would sing their sweet monotony from the brush. Sometimes there was a butterfly so perfect and beautiful, it was like a party barrette you wanted to clip in your hair. Above and around us green leaves would flash wet with sunsetting light. In this verdant cove I recounted the entire plot of Straw Dogs.

  But bugs were the thing that drove us back. Flies as big as raping ducks! we used to say. Mosquitoes with tiger-striped bodies and the feathery beards of an iris, their wings and legs the dun wisps of an unbarbered boy, their spindly legs the tendrils of an orchid, the blades of a gnome’s sleigh. Their awfulness and flight obsessed me, concentrated my revulsion: suspended like mobiles, or diving like jets, they were sinisterly contrapted; they craved color; they were caught in the saddest animal script there was. Once I whacked Robert’s back, seeing a giant one there, and killed five, all bloody beneath his shirt.

  Now we stood at the cold stream’s edge, tossing a stone in and listening for its plonk and plummet. I wanted to say, “Remember the time …” But too often when we compared stories from our childhood, they didn’t match. I would speak of a trip or a meal or a visit from a cousin and of something that had happened during it, and Robert would look at me as if I were speaking of the adventures of some Albanian rock band. So I stayed quiet with him. It is something that people who have been children together can effortlessly do. It is sometimes preferable to the talk, which is also effortless.

  We found more stones and tossed them. “A stone can’t drown,” said my brother finally. “It’s already drowned.”

  “You been reading poetry?” I smiled at him.