A Gate at the Stairs (18 page)

Once Mary-Emma was changed and sprinkled piney and dry with some silky herbal rice starch, I carried her downstairs, stepping awkwardly over the plastic baby gates. I found myself saying “Wheeeee!” and “Upsy-oopsy.” Mary-Emma just looked at me with neutral interest. It was a look I’d forgotten and never saw anymore in grown people. But it was the best. It was fantastically engaged: scholarly, unjudging, and angelic. We stood on the landing, deciding which staircase to descend. “Which one?” I asked her. “This one?” Ah, once more: the uncertainty of the adult world. And she thrust out her arm and pointed toward the one that led to the kitchen. She knew her way around already, or was at least acting like it for purposes of displaying authority. I seemed to have little authority whatsoever but to be instead her happy maidservant. The tinier the child, the more you were the servant, I knew. Older children were more subservient, less queenly and demanding.

In the kitchen I sat Mary-Emma on the counter, then stupidly turned away for a second to open a cupboard door. Sitting there, she started to twist, and I lunged and caught her just as she was sliding off the shiny granite toward the floor. Her face seemed to smile and sob at the same time, a look that said
That may be fun for some people but not for me
, and I placed her securely on my hip, feeling the biceps in my arm already beginning to strengthen and my jutted hip on its way to socket stress and limpage.

“Let’s get you a snack. How does that sound?” I scanned the cupboard shelves. Had I eaten the best and sweetest of the baby food already myself?

“Oag cool,” she said, pointing at the freezer.

“Yes, it’s cool in there,” I said, still scanning the shelves. I looked in the refrigerator, where there were several bottles of water from Fiji. This was the first time I’d seen water from Fiji but not the last. I didn’t believe it was real. Selling water from Fiji seemed like a trick for the gullible, like bottled Alpine air at a carnival.

Mary-Emma’s legs began to kick, and her heel in my thigh was a soft spur. Would I not please giddyap? “Oag cool!” she repeated, still pointing.

I opened the freezer door and saw, amid the ice cube trays, chilling vodka, a plastic file folder, and a pound of ground coffee, what she wanted: frozen yogurt pops.

“Ah, OK,” I said, and pulled them out. I set her on the floor and then sat there myself and we both ate blackberry frozen yogurt pops and were happy. “Hmm, delicious,” I said.

“Dishes,” she repeated, creamy lavender all around her mouth, giving her the appearance of a struggling drag queen.

What a miracle food was. In case I had given her too much, I buried the wrappers in the trash.

When Sarah returned, Mary-Emma rushed to her and grabbed her around the leg. Sarah massaged her head. I provided a report, much of which I’d actually written out on notebook paper, with the times of Mary-Emma’s waking up and eating and playing. “She loves that frozen yogurt,” I said. “Hope it’s OK: I gave her, uh, a couple.”

“Oh, yes, that’s fine. I just hope they continue to make them! When I was little Dannon made this delicious prune yogurt that came in a waxy brown eight-ounce container. Well, now they don’t make any of those things. Completely gone. Although I was in Paris last year and found some there.”

I nodded, trying to imagine the very particular sadness of a vanished childhood yogurt now found only in France. It was a very special sort of sadness, individual, and in its inability to induce sympathy, in its tuneless spark, it bypassed poetry and entered science. I tried not to think of my one excursion to Whole Foods, over a year ago, where I found myself paralyzed by all the special food for special people, whose special murmurings seemed to be saying, “Out of my way! I want a Tofurkey!”

I could feel my tiredness most when I at last lay down. But first I walked home through the dark afternoon. Although the season had already rounded the corner and was on its move toward longer days, the sun still did not make it very high, but just kind of scooted along the side of the sky, pale and sheepish, like something ill, and darkness came over the town early and caused everyone just to give up on their days by four o’clock. The low snowbanks were whiskery with specks of black.

In my apartment the radiators hissed and the windows were frosted deep into the mullions from the steam that hit them and froze. In my room I kicked off my boots and my socks came with them, my toes sore and as knobbed as Chinese ginger. Who knew life with a baby would be so draining? On the night table sat some mint tea that had been steeping there since morning, stone cold and medicinally brown. I sipped a little, its soggy bag falling against my mouth; then I gargled and drank the rest. I got out my translucent Plexi bass, like an answer to ice itself, and put on my headphones and plucked a little Metallica, a little Modest Mouse, plus a nothing bass part for “Angel from Montgomery,” and a bit of “Rock-a-Bye Baby.” I lay on the floor again and tried to sing like Ndegeocello. I made up a meandering tune that sounded like a bullfrog gulping his pain. In my mind an organist struck electric chords at expected intervals. Expected by me, at least. I felt I knew how to sing along, which most bass players, busy trying to find the midway place between melody and rhythm—was this searching not the very journey of life?—wouldn’t have bothered trying. Nonetheless, I was told I looked funny doing it—a bass face to beat the band, someone once said—so I rarely did it in front of anyone. What girl was not reluctant to be ugly? Still, I had started to experience the silence of this apartment as a sorrow, and singing helped, though only so much. I fell asleep with my clothes on, randomly sprawled on the bed as if a tornado had hit and lifted me up, then dropped me down and moved on, bored.

The next day at the Thornwood-Brinks’ I took Mary-Emma ice-skating. I put her in her snowsuit, stuffed her into the stroller, and wheeled her down over the bumpy ice to the little neighborhood park, where there was a small flooded lagoon off the lake that the city had cleared for skating. There had not been a lot of very cold days, and a truck that had driven out onto the lake proper had fallen through, so the lake itself was closed except for a small racing pen. But people were allowed to skate on the flooded lagoon and were doing so.

In the warm-up house I rented us both some skates—Sarah had left a twenty on the counter for this—and then we stepped out onto the nicked and bumpily formed ice. I propped Mary-Emma up, bracing her with my legs, and scooted her around. It was all new to her and she laughed like it was a joke. Her skates were double-bladed, and when I let her go she could glide a little on her own but then made off with a choppy step just running artlessly across the lagoon until she would hit a yellowish carbuncle in the ice and fall forward, her snowsuit cushioning her landing. She would then lie there staring into the cracks of the ice; beneath it were wavy weeds and lily pads frozen cloudily in place as if in a botanical glass paperweight. “Fish!” she cried to me, and I went over and she was poking with her mitten at the ice, believing the flora to be fauna. “Well, kinda,” I said. She was happy, the sun was shining, and she got up again and took off in her choppy gait. She had great spirit for this sport—it seemed to come naturally to her—and then I remembered her birth mother, who had spent her Saturdays skating with the nuns, and I thought,
Well, of course
. She had inherited Bonnie’s ability to skate. And now this is what Bonnie would miss: someone to skate with who wasn’t doing it out of charity. Someone she could teach to skate. It seemed, momentarily, a loss like several limbs. I watched Mary-Emma tear across the rink then fall forward again. She just lay there, staring into the ice, mesmerized.

“Well, the sous-chef totally botched the
mignardises,”
said Sarah when I got home, “but that I should have expected. Hey, baby,” she said to Mary-Emma, and lifted her quickly up. Sarah was still wearing her white chef’s coat, which was now smudged with brown grease. There was a cut on her hand and two burns on her arms. “In everything I do there seems to be some part missing. I’m discovering that it is almost impossible to be a mother and also do anything of value outside the house. But that
almost
is key, and I’m living in the oxygenated heart of that word.” Her face brightened. “These bumper stickers that say
EVERY MOTHER IS A WORKING MOTHER
are bullshit. Propaganda of the affluent. And an insult to actual working moms with jobs. I’ve taken to tearing them off when I see them!”

“Tossa,” said Mary-Emma, pointing happily at me.

“Did you get a snack?” Sarah asked us both in a high chirpy voice.

“We got some cider with whipped cream in the warm-up hut,” I said.

“Cider with whipped cream?” Sarah looked aghast.

“Oh, was that a bad idea?”

“I’ve just never heard of cider and whipped cream,” said Sarah. “I mean, really, I’m a food person but—cider and whipped cream? My God—what a thing to do to cider!”

“It’s pretty common around here.” I shrugged. I had grown up squirting whipped cream on hot cider; was it a perversion of some sort? Frankly, that wouldn’t have surprised me.

“Dairy with everything, I guess. I’m going to put all my dessert cheeses in the front window at Le Petit Moulin. Lure them in with dairy, then give them … sauteed ground cherry!” This was the light, flighty side of Sarah. “Or perhaps a little sherry,” she added.

Almost always, on good days at least, I was a joiner.

“That should make them merry,” I said, accidentally uttering the name that seemed never uttered in this house except by me.

“Or cause some hari-kari!”

Sarah smiled and bounced Mary-Emma while she spoke: “Very, very, very.” Which again rhymed with the name she clearly hoped to bury. Mary.

“Tossa!” cried Mary-Emma again, leaning toward me.

Sarah looked vaguely troubled. “What perfume are you wearing?” she asked me. “You smell so good.” She set Mary-Emma down, and Mary-Emma came running at me and then at Sarah, in a kind of game, back and forth.

“Perfume?” I was overheated from skating and had not yet taken off my coat; I wasn’t sure she was correctly identifying the odor—if there even was one. Bodily attention of any sort from others I wasn’t used to, and it made me want to run and hide.

“You smell so nice—what is it?” She looked at me hopefully, her eyebrows arced with inquiry. She pushed her hand through her hair. Its brightness seemed to have disappeared, and it seemed now a flat, tannic hue. When she raked her hand through it, I could see that it was thinning; beneath the cat’s-cradle crisscross of her part, she had a kind of comb-over thing going on, elaborate zigzagging layers at the top to hide the scalp bursting through. Age was burning the edge of her hairline, and when her hand flicked through the strands, before they fell back in decoration, her forehead protruded shiny and round as an apple.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “Garlic?” I knew people always lied about their perfumes and claimed it was soap, as if it were vanity to attempt more. Actually, I sometimes after showers dabbed on a kind of aromatic oil that Murph had given me for my birthday, a slim bottle called Arabian Princess. In the current world situation it seemed unwise to advertise this, in case I was mistaken for the mascot of Osama bin Laden, though I was pretty sure Murph had simply got it at the food co-op.

“Well, if you find out, let me know.”

“I think it’s from the co-op,” I said.

“Really? Well, I’ll sniff around there then.” Sarah picked Mary-Emma up and nuzzled her. “How was skating?”

“Good,” I said.

“Good!” repeated Mary-Emma.

“See how she’s really chattering and opening up!” said Sarah, giving her a kiss on the head. “She is, after all, two.”

“Good!” cried Mary-Emma again, and then she leaned out of Sarah’s arms to come back to me.

“Oh, you want to go to Tassie, do you?” said Sarah, and she let her go, passing Mary-Emma to me, some maternal hurt scurrying to hide behind her thin-as-a-piano-string smile. “You’ll really have to tell me the name of that perfume you’ve got on, if you remember it,” she said, sighing. “Otherwise, I could be arrested at the co-op for loitering.” Something was wrong—perhaps it was Sarah’s tight mouth: a choking wire that had somehow garroted me. I could not speak. A whole minute of silence passed between us. “Well,” she said finally, “I should let you go.” And she took back Mary-Emma, who began to squirm and fuss.

Classes began in a deep cold spell, a high of one-below for the week. This was more like the winter weather of memory. Cold burst into the room from a mere open kitchen drawer, forks and knives piled like icicles. Our landlord’s generous heat was nothing in the face of this. The stem of the doorknobs on the front door conducted the cold from outside so that even the inside knob froze the hand. Cold air seeped through the slits of the electrical sockets. Clothing pulled from the closet was chilly, and in the basement laundry room of our apartment house clothes that did not dry completely in the dryer emerged white with frost. A glass of water put on the nightstand at night might be ice by morning. One looked out through the window, when one could, through pointed icicles that were like the incisors of a shark; it was as if one were living in the cold, dead mouth of a very mean snowman. Kay, the woman upstairs who had no life, decided as an experiment to throw boiling water off the upstairs back porch. She let us know by paper notice slid under our doors that this would happen at eleven a.m. on Monday, and so the rest of us gathered and watched it hit the air in silence and come down as slow, quiet steam and slush. We’d been told it would turn instantly to pellets midair, but perhaps something in the water—chlorine, or the salts of the water softener—kept it from doing that. On the street, the wind was so bitter, it seemed to bypass cold and become heat. Breathing burned the nostrils. Cars on every block wheezed and gagged and would not start. The combination of the cold weather and dry indoor heating had caused the longer nails on my picking hand to weaken, crack, and break beneath the quick, stabbing the pink hammy skin below, so that my fingers bled and I had to bandage them before I went out.