A Gate at the Stairs (13 page)

“Of course,” lied Sarah, who leaned in generously to pat Bonnie’s hand. Because I was closer, I threw my arms around Bonnie. I don’t know what came over me. But it seemed we all were a team. A team of rescuers and destroyers both, and I was in on it and had to do my part. Bonnie briefly went to bury her face in my shoulder, then pulled herself together and sat back up. Sarah gave us an astonished look.

“Well, Bonnie,” said Roberta, “shall you and I go back into my office and discuss things?”

“Yes,” said Bonnie. They got up and closed the inner door behind them, leaving the three of us standing with Suzanne, who added, “I’ve seen a lot of heavy stuff in this room,” and then busied herself with file folders.

“If this wallpaper could speak,” said Edward. He studied it quizzically. “Or maybe it already can.”

“This wallpaper wouldn’t speak,” Suzanne said, glancing up at it. “It would bite.”

We sat back down and flipped through magazines.
Adoption Choice, The Adopted Child
, and
Sports Illustrated
. One for the dads. I looked at an article in
Time
about baby boomers and their lonely work habits and aging pets.

In ten minutes Roberta and Bonnie reemerged. “I have some wonderful news!” said Roberta. “Bonnie has decided she would like you to be the parents of her baby.”

This ceremony of approval was a charade—everything had been decided before we got here—and as with all charades it was wanly ebullient, necessary, and thin.

“Oh, that’s wonderful,” said Sarah, and she rushed forward and put her arms around Bonnie. This threw Bonnie off balance a little, and she grabbed the back of the sofa to steady herself. Edward as well stepped forward and gave Bonnie a hug, to which she responded stiffly. But then Bonnie turned to me, and by this time she may have warmed to the idea of hugging, or to the idea of me, because she stepped forward and threw herself upon me again, her silent tears dampening my shoulder. Her back heaved slightly—just once—and then she stood straight.

“Well, we’ll be in touch, I suppose,” said Bonnie hopefully, while her face wore a look of devastation and dashed vanity. Her moment in the spotlight was coming to a close—the spotlight itself was dimming and she was slowly stepping backwards.

“The annual Christmas card,” said Sarah. “I’ll send you one every Christmas with all the news.”

“And pictures,” said Bonnie in a low, stern voice she hadn’t spoken in before. “I want pictures of her.”

Sarah said, “Of course. I’ll send photos.” She gave Bonnie a final hug and murmured loudly enough for us to hear, “Be happy.”

“Yes,” said Bonnie tonelessly. She turned toward me one last time and I then, too, gave her a final hug. Bonnie whispered in my ear,
“You
be happy.”

And then she seemed to be disappearing like an apparition. Through the darkening afternoon window one could hear the scrape of a plow outside in the street, but inside was where it was snowing. It was snowing in here in this room and it was all piled up around Bonnie, falling on her head, piled up on her shoulders. Of course it was only a bluff, the large, imposing dirigible of her, and now she had just spluttered to nothing. She was something flat and far and stuck to the wall. I wanted to take her with me, to go to her and lead her out with us. Where would she go? What home could she possibly have? Suddenly we were all going our separate ways. We were to meet Roberta tomorrow at the foster home and there meet the child. I waved to Bonnie, a kind of queen’s wave I hoped she’d construe as friendship, but no movement came from her at all.

A kind of stunned trio, Sarah, Edward, and I stepped outside into this town of … what? A tundra of closing mills, pro ball, anxious Catholicism. The late-afternoon air of our exhalations hung in brief clouds before us. The thought balloon of my own breath said,
How have I found myself here?
It was not a theological question. It was one of transportation and neurology.

“Let’s go seek a fish fry,” said Sarah, and happily took Edward’s arm.

“Let’s do,” said Edward, sounding to my ear like a southern gent in a corny old film.

We piled into the Ford Escort, no longer by the black car and with only one small silver scratch, and drove around a little haphazardly, passing the stadium, whereupon Sarah said, “So here’s where all the Catholics gather and pray for the Packers to win.” We wound up at a supper club called Lombardino’s, which over the bar had a sign that read
BETTER TO OUTLIVE AN ELF THAN OUTDRINK A DWARF.
There were drawings of Vince Lombardi on the napkins and placemats and even the teacups; to my surprise, I had to tell Sarah and Edward what a supper club even was.

“We’re from the East,” said Edward. “They don’t have them out there.”

“They don’t?” This seemed unimaginable to me.

“I mean, there are steak houses, but they’re not the same. We love supper clubs but without really knowing what constitutes one. We kind of get it, but we always like to hear the exact definition from someone who grew up out here,” said Sarah.

Always. Out here
. So this was a thing they did, a tourist’s game. “Well, a supper club is just, well, it’s got these carrots and radishes in a glass of ice like this,” I began lamely, with no words coming, just a sense of the obvious. It was like describing my arms. “And there’s always steak, and fish on Fridays, and fried potatoes of some sort. There’s whiskey sours and Bloody Marys and Chubby Marys, and supper, but there’s no real club. I mean, there aren’t members or anything.”

“What’s a Chubby Mary?” This was Edward and Sarah practically simultaneously.

“It’s a Bloody Mary with a chub sticking out of it.”

“A chub?”

“A fish. It’s dead. It’s small. At first you see its head just poking up through the ice cubes, but believe me, the whole thing is there.”

Edward and Sarah were sitting across the table from me, grinning as if I were the most adorable child. My face heated up in response to what I felt was mockery. For a second I wanted to stab myself.

“They’re probably in the back, giving everything a quick parboil then tanning it with a torch,” said Sarah.

“Sarah thinks nothing is really cooked anymore, just toned with a butane lighter.”

“Sometimes that’s true.” Sarah shrugged.

“We often blowtorched the weeds at home by hand,” I said. “But that’s organic weed control—not cooking.”

“No, it’s not. Cooking.” Sarah smiled briefly again as if I were still just the cutest thing but no longer what she was looking for in this job.

Edward took his wineglass and toasted Sarah. “Happy birthday,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“It’s your birthday?” I asked.

“Yes, well, in all the rush of events, who can even care!”

I was tempted to ask how old she was, but then I remembered I already knew. Instead I said, “So, you’re a Capricorn!”

“Yeah,” she said tiredly.

“Like Jesus!” I said. Having a Jewish mother, I was still inclined to think of Jesus not as the messiah but as, like, a celebrity.

“And like Richard Nixon,” she sighed, but then smiled. “Capricorns are a little boring. But they’re steady. And they work very hard, aiming for the highest thing.” She drank from her birthday wine. “They toil purposefully and loyally and then people just turn on them and destroy them.”

“And tomorrow’s our anniversary,” said Edward.

“That’s right. But we never celebrate it.”

“Well, it’s a little on the heels of your birthday, but we celebrate it.”

“We do?”

“Sure,” said Edward, smiling. “Don’t you remember? Every year on that day you put on a black armband and then I go looking for you and find you on top of some bell tower with a bag of chips and some Diet Coke and a rifle.”

Sarah turned to me. They were in performance. They were performing their marriage at me. “There’s a lot of pressure having a birthday and an anniversary so close together. It’s a stressor.” She raised her glass in a toast. “What does that elf and dwarf sign mean?” she asked. I was now the official translator.

“I have no idea.” Perhaps they would suddenly, brutally, fire me.

When the bill came, Edward reached for his wallet but couldn’t find it. “I must have left my wallet in the car,” he said.

Sarah was already pulling out a credit card. “You should get one of those waist-belt change purses,” she said to him.

“Too much like a colostomy bag,” said Edward. They both looked amused, and for a freak minute I believed they were perfect for each other, a feeling I would never have again.

“Should I pay for mine?” I asked awkwardly.

“Absolutely not,” said Sarah, signing for the bill, not looking up.

The next morning I awoke in my own suite—the Presidential Suite, it was named—to Sarah’s phone call.

“We’re off to see the baby,” she said. “Would you like to
go with
, as you real midwesterners say?”

Was this perfunctory politeness—or perfunctory rudeness? Was I supposed to decline and let them have their appropriately private meeting? Or would declining get me fired, as it might suggest that the baby was of no real interest to me? I had come this far with them—it seemed I had to say yes. It was a decision made in the dry terror of cluelessness. Why was I never quick to understand? At the end of a transaction, for instance, when a store clerk handed me my purchase and said, “Have a good one,” I always caught myself wondering,
A good WHAT?

“Yes,” I said now. The thick drapes at the windows were outlined in sun. I pulled them open with the plastic rod and the morning burned in—clear and ablaze above a snowy parking lot. The ceiling I could see now bore a maize maze of water stains, and the walls of the room had bullet holes in them. The Presidential Suite! Well, I supposed, even presidents got shot. The wallpaper peeled in triangles at the seams, like the shoulder of a dress dropped to show a whore’s plaster skin. There was a fake thermostat, one of those thermostats to nowhere.

“Can you meet us in the lobby in thirty minutes?” Sarah asked doubtfully.

“Of course.” I looked over at the in-room coffeemaker and wondered how it worked.

As soon as I saw them in the lobby, I realized my mistake. They were looking at their watches, holding hands, then looking at their watches again. Their glance up at me was quick, perfunctory, and when I got into the car and sat in the back like their sullen teenage daughter I could see that this was not an outing I should be on. Edward started to light up a cigarette, and Sarah swatted it away.

“Afraid of secondhand smoke? There’s conflicting science on that,” he said.

Sarah gave him a look but said nothing. From my awkward place in the backseat I remembered a headline from the student paper. “You know what they say about secondhand smoke,” I said. I was a girl still finding her jokey party voice and borrowing from others’.

“What?” said Sarah.

“Leads to secondhand coolness.”

Edward turned in his seat to look at me. I had pleased him with this stupidity, and he was getting a better look at me to see who I was today.

“Did you have a good breakfast?” he asked.

“I did,” I lied.

“Sometimes that’s all it takes,” he said, turning back around, and I studied his hair-cape some more, its weird, warm flip.

The foster home we pulled up to was in a working-class subdivision. The foster family’s name was McKowen, and on their garage was a big letter
M
in bright green plastic.

“Are you ready to scootch?” Edward asked Sarah.

“I so am,” she said.

Edward twisted back toward me. “That’s Sarah’s idea of the quintessential mom word:
scootch
. Scootch over. Scootch in. Everybody’s gotta scootch and the moms are the scootch directors.”

“That’s right,” said Sarah.

“I can kind of see that,” I said, sounding doubtful rather than agreeable as I’d intended. Sarah turned the car off, checked her reflection quickly in the rearview mirror, scrutinizing her teeth in case they were dotted like dice with the scorched remnants of breakfast, then opened her door. The driveway was shoveled, and we all scootched out. The slam of our doors all in a row made me think of a squad car pulling up and the cops hopping out and going cautiously for their guns. Sarah was first to the porch, eager and businessy, and rang the bell. Edward and I were still trailing behind her like the rookies. She was already standing with the storm door propped open against her shoulder. She was loosening her scarf. When the white wooden door of the McKowens’ opened, she removed her hat, which had pom-poms on its ties. She quickly, unnecessarily poofed up her hair. “Hi, I’m Sarah Brink,” she said, and thrust out her hand. “We’re here to see the baby?”

The woman who answered the door was large and blond and seemed to have a bit of a limp as if one hip were stiff, though all she was doing to suggest this was shifting her weight in the doorway. “Nobody told us anyone was coming,” she said tersely.

“Roberta Marshall said she made the appointment,” said Sarah as we pulled up behind her.

“Who’s that?”

“She’s with Adoption Option?”

“No, we’re a foster family for Catholic Social Services, and no one has called us about this at all.”

“Oh, dear.” Sarah turned and looked at Edward, her eyes welling a little. I was getting this strange kidnapper feeling and wanted either to run for it, clear to Canada, or to bust in there and grab somebody. I hadn’t eaten breakfast, and I had to calm my mind.

Everyone stood there breathing and no one knew what to do at all. The woman in the doorway was studying us closely. I wondered what we looked like to her. Overeducated, well-preserved liberal types from Troy with their college-age daughter. Or some kinky ménage à trois. Also from Troy. To the rest of the state, Troy was the city from which all kink and pretentious evil sprang. I often thought of it that way myself.

The woman at the door, Mrs. McKowen, sighed, as if defeated. “I don’t know why they call them organizations. They are all just a mess.” She widened the aperture between door and doorjamb. “Well, you’re here, so you might as well come on in and see Mary.”