A Gate at the Stairs (2 page)

“Moderately?” I queried. She rarely called me by my name, Tassie. She called me Doll, Dolly, Dollylah, or Tassalah.

“I wasn’t going to worry and interfere with you.” She was the only Jewish woman I’d ever known who felt like that. But she was a Jewish woman married to a Lutheran farmer named Bo and perhaps because of that had the same indifferent reserve the mothers of my friends had. Halfway through my childhood I came to guess that she was practically blind as well. It was the only explanation for the thick glasses she failed often even to find. Or for the kaleidoscope of blood vessels burst, petunia-like, in her eyes, scarlet blasting into the white from mere eyestrain, or a careless swipe with her hand. It explained the strange way she never quite looked at me when we were speaking, staring at a table or down at a tile of a floor, as if halfheartedly plotting its disinfection while my scarcely controlled rage flew from my mouth in sentences I hoped would be, perhaps not then but perhaps later, like knives to her brain.

“Will you be in town for Christmas break?” the mothers asked.

I sipped at the tea. “No, I’m going home. But I will be back in January.”

“When in January?”

I gave them my references and a written summary of my experience. My experience was not all that much—just the Pitskys and the Schultzes back home. But as experience, too, I had once, as part of a class project on human reproduction, carried around for an entire week a sack of flour the exact weight and feel of an infant. I’d swaddled it and cuddled it and placed it in safe, cushioned places for naps, but once, when no one was looking, I stuffed it in my backpack with a lot of sharp pens, and it got stabbed. My books, powdery white the rest of the term, became a joke in the class. I left this off my résumé, however.

But the rest I’d typed up. To gild the lily-livered, as my dad sometimes said, I was wearing what the department stores called “a career jacket,” and perhaps the women liked the professionalism of that. They were professionals themselves. Two were lawyers, one was a journalist, one was a doctor, one a high school teacher. Where were the husbands? “Oh, at work,” the women all said vaguely. All except the journalist, who said, “Good question!”

The last house was a gray stucco prairie house with a chimney cloaked in dead ivy. I had passed the house earlier in the week—it was on a corner lot and I’d seen so many birds there. Now there was just a flat expanse of white. Around the whiteness was a low wood Qual Line fence, and when I pushed open its gate it slipped a little; one of its hinges was loose and missing a nail. I had to lift the gate to relatch it. This maneuver, one I’d performed any number of times in my life, gave me a certain satisfaction—of tidiness, of restoration, of magic me!—when in fact it should have communicated itself as something else: someone’s ill-disguised decrepitude, items not cared for properly but fixed repeatedly in a make-do fashion, needful things having gotten away from their caregiver. Soon the entire gate would have to be held together with a bungee cord, the way my father once fixed a door in our barn.

Two slate steps led, in an odd mismatch of rock, downward to a flagstone walk, all of which, as well as the grass, wore a light dusting of snow—I laid the first footprints of the day; perhaps the front door was seldom used. Some desiccated mums were still in pots on the porch. Ice frosted the crisp heads of the flowers. Leaning against the house were a shovel and a rake, and shoved into the corner two phone books still in shrink-wrap.

The woman of the house opened the door. She was pale and compact, no sags or pouches, linen skin tight across the bone. The hollows of her cheeks were powdered darkly, as if with the pollen of a tiger lily. Her hair was cropped short and dyed the fashionable bright auburn of a ladybug. Her earrings were buttons of deepest orange, her leggings mahogany, her sweater rust-colored, and her lips maroonish brown. She looked like a highly controlled oxidation experiment. “Come in,” she said, and I entered, mutely at first and then, as always, apologetically, as if I were late, though I wasn’t. At that time in my life I was never late. Only a year later would I suddenly have difficulty hanging on to any sense of time, leaving friends sitting, invariably, for a half hour here or there. Time would waft past me undetectably or absurdly—laughably when I could laugh—in quantities I was incapable of measuring or obeying.

But that year, when I was twenty, I was as punctual as a priest. Were priests punctual? Cave-raised, divinely dazed, I believed them to be.

The woman closed the heavy oak door behind me, and I stamped my feet on the braided rug I was standing on, to shake off the snow. I started then to take off my shoes. “Oh, you don’t have to take off your shoes,” she said. “There’s too much of that prissy Japanese stuff going on in this town. Bring in the mud.” She smiled—big, theatrical, a little crazy. I had forgotten her name and was hoping she’d say it soon; if she didn’t, she might not say it at all.

“I’m Tassie Keltjin,” I said, thrusting out my hand.

She took it and then studied my face. “Yes,” she said slowly, absently, unnervingly scrutinizing each of my eyes. Her gaze made a slow, observing circle around my nose and mouth. “I’m Sarah Brink,” she said finally. I was not used to being looked at close up, not used to the thing I was looking at looking back. Certainly my own mother had never done such looking, and in general my face had the kind of smooth, round stupidity that did not prompt the world’s study. I had always felt as hidden as the hull in a berry, as secret and fetal as the curled fortune in a cookie, and such hiddenness was not without its advantages, its egotisms, its grief-fed grandiosities.

“Here, let me take your coat,” Sarah Brink said finally, and only then, as she lifted it off me and headed across the foyer to hang it on a hat rack, did I see that she was as thin as a pin, not pregnant at all.

She led me into the living room, stopping at the large back window first. I followed her, tried to do what she did. In the yard most of a large oak tree split by lightning had been hacked and stacked by the garage for winter firewood. Near its old stump another tree—tenuous, young, with the look of a swizzle stick—had been planted, trussed, and braced. But Sarah was not studying the trees. “Oh, for the love of God, look at these poor dogs,” she said. We stood there, watching. The dogs next door were being kept in the yard by an invisible electric fence. One of them, a German shepherd, understood the fence, but the other one, a little terrier, did not. The German shepherd would get a game of chase going around the yard and lead the terrier right to the electrified border and then stop short, leaving the terrier to barrel on ahead into the electricity. The stunned terrier would then come racing back, shrieking with pain. This amused the German shepherd, who continued to do this, and the shocked terrier, desperate for play, would forget, and get started again, and barrel on into the electricity again, yowling. “This has been going on for weeks,” said Sarah.

“Reminds me of dating,” I said, and Sarah spun her head, to size me up again. I could see now that she was at least two inches taller than I was; I could peer up her nostrils, the weave of tiny hairs like the crisscross of branches seen from the base of a tree. She smiled, which pushed her cheeks out and made the blush beneath them look shadowy and wrong. Heat flew to my face. Dating? What did I know of it? My roommate, Murph, had done all the dating and had essentially abandoned me so that she could now sleep every night with this new guy she’d met. She had bequeathed me her vibrator, a strange swirling, buzzing thing that when switched to high gyrated in the air like someone’s bored thick finger going
whoop-dee-doo
. Whose penis could this possibly resemble? Someone who had worked in a circus, perhaps! Maybe Burt Lancaster’s in
Trapeze
. I kept the thing on the kitchen counter where Murph had left it for me and occasionally I used it to stir my chocolate milk. I
had
once actually gone out on a date—last year—and I had prepared for it by falling into a trance in a lingerie store and buying a forty-five-dollar black Taiwanese bra padded with oil and water pouches, articulated with wire, lifelike to the touch, a complete bosom entirely on its own, independent of any wearer, and which when fastened to my particular chest looked like a dark animal strapped there to nurse. I was filled with a pleasing floating feeling while wearing it; I felt heated and sacrificial, and so I imagined it improved my chances in the world, my own actual bust having been left (I once joked) on a plinth in the basement of the Dellacrosse library, the better to free my spine for erect walking.

All that preparation was the futile preening of a fly: my poor date cleared his throat and told me he was gay. We lay there together on my bed, only partially disrobed, our black underwear misadvertising our experience. His back was full of rosy pimples: “bacne,” he’d called it. I rubbed my fingertips across it, a kind of Braille, its message one of creaturely energy and worry. “Queer as Dick’s hatband,” he announced into the room, candor—or a pretense to candor—being the cheapest and most efficient assault on hope (a hope, I had to admit, that had, to use my dad’s expression, gilded its own lily-liver and become an expectation). “Dick’s hatband?” I’d repeated, staring at the ceiling. I had no idea what that meant. I thought mutely and appallingly of the band on a hat that Dick Hickock might wear. We’d stayed up for an hour after his confession, both of us trembling and teary, and then got up and for some reason decided to make a cake. We had wanted to have sex but ended up baking a cake? “I really, really like you so much,” I said when the cake was done, and when he said nothing in reply, a hard, stubborn silence entered the room and reverberated as if it were a sound. I said awkwardly, “Is there an echo in here?”

And he looked at me pitifully and said, “Well, I wish there were, but there’s not.” Then he went into the bathroom and came out wearing all my makeup, which for some reason made me believe he had lied about being gay. “You know,” I said, testing him, but mostly pleading, “if you concentrated you could be straight. I’m sure of it. Just relax, close your eyes once in a while, and just do it. Heterosexuality—well, it takes a lot of concentration!” I said, a begging sound in my voice. “It takes a lot for everybody!”

“It may take more than I have,” he said. I made him coffee—he asked for cream, and then cold cream and then paper towels—and then he left, taking a slice of warm cake with him. I never saw him again, except once, briefly, from across the street when I was walking to class. He had shaved his head and was wearing thick violet boots and no raincoat in the rain. He walked in a bouncy zigzag movement, as if avoiding sniper fire. He was with a woman who was more than six feet tall and had an Adam’s apple the size of a small swallowed fist. A long scarf—whose was it? I couldn’t tell; at points it seemed to belong to them both—flew exuberantly behind them like the tail of a kite.

Now Sarah turned back to the window. “The neighbors just put in that invisible fence,” she said. “In November. I’m sure it causes MS or something.”

“Who are they?” I asked. “The neighbors, I mean.” I would show some anthropological interest in the neighborhood. No one I’d interviewed with had yet called me back. Perhaps they’d desired a lively take-charge type and I’d seemed dull, slow to get involved. It had started to worry me that if I wasn’t careful my meekness could become a habit, a tic, something hardwired that my mannerisms would continue to express throughout my life regardless of my efforts—the way a drunk who, though on the wagon, still staggers and slurs like a drunk.

“The neighbors?” Sarah Brink’s face brightened artificially, her eyes wide. Her voice went flat and stagey. “Well, in that there dog house there’s Catherine Welbourne and her husband, Stuart,
and
Stuart’s lover, Michael Batt. The Welbournes and the Batts. Who could make up these names?”

“So—Michael’s gay?” I said, perhaps now showing too much interest.

“Well, yes,” said Sarah. “Much is made of Michael’s being gay. ‘Michael’s gay,’ the neighbors whisper, ‘Michael’s gay. Michael’s gay,’ Well, yes, Michael’s gay. But of course the thing is,
Stuart’s
gay.” Sarah’s eyes looked merry and bright—the frantic but pleased cheap sparkle of Christmas dreck.

I cleared my throat. “And what does Catherine think of all this?” I ventured. I tried to smile.

“Catherine.” Sarah sighed and moved away from the window. “Catherine, Catherine. Well, Catherine spends a lot of time in her room, listening to Erik Satie. The beard, poor thing, is always the last to know. But look.” She wanted to change the subject now, get down to business. “Have a seat. Here’s the deal.” She motioned with an arm tossed suddenly out in a spasm. “Childcare,” she seemed to begin, but then stopped, as if that were sufficient.

I sat down on a small sofa that was upholstered in a kind of pillow ticking.
Childcare
, like
healthcare
, had become one word. I would become a dispenser of it. I opened my backpack and began fumbling through it, looking for a copy of my résumé. Sarah sat across from me on another pillow-ticking sofa, the very brightness of her looking as if it might stain the cushions. She twisted her legs up and around each other in such a way that the lower half of one gave the illusion of jutting out of the upper half of the other, as if she had the backwards knees of a crane. She began clearing her throat, so I stopped fumbling and set the backpack aside.

“Already the winter air is getting to me,” she said. She turned and coughed again loudly, in that parched fashion that doctors call “unproductive.” She patted her flat stomach. “Here’s the deal,” she said again. “We are adopting.”

“Adopting?”

“A baby. We are adopting a baby in two weeks. That’s why we’re advertising for a sitter. We’d like to line someone up ahead of time for some regular hours.”

I didn’t know anything about adoption. I’d known only one adopted girl when I was growing up, Becky Sussluch, spoiled and beautiful and at sixteen having an affair with a mussed and handsome student teacher that I myself had a crush on. In general I thought of adoption much as I thought of most things in life: uneasily. Adoption seemed both a cruel joke and a lovely daydream—a nice way of avoiding the blood and pain of giving birth, or, from a child’s perspective, a realized fantasy of your parents not really being your parents. Your genes could thrust one arm in the air and pump up and down.
Yes!
You were not actually related to
Them!
Strangely, at the stamp machine at the post office, I had recently bought the newly issued adoption postage stamps—
Adopt a Child, Build a Family, Create a World
—and gleefully adhered them to my letters home to my mother. It was a form of malice I felt entitled to. It was quiet and deniable.