A Gate at the Stairs (20 page)

I took Mary-Emma up toward Wendell Street, which was the only street nearby with actual restaurants and stores and other businesses, probably nine establishments in total. It would have passed for the downtown of a tiny village, and I knew the sidewalks were more cleanly shoveled there. On Wendell we headed through the salted-to-slush ice toward the neighborhood branch of the public library. I would show her the children’s books, and despite Sarah’s preference for baked books, we would sit at a table near the radiator and read. Few people were on the street, but the ones we passed smiled at me, then looked at Mary-Emma and then back at me, their expressions not exactly changed but not exactly the same: upon seeing us together, our story unknown but presumed, an observation and then a thought entered their faces and froze their features in place.

But then a car on the opposite side of the street, full of teenagers, it seemed—I could not tell how old they were—slowed down and looked at us from across the lane. I kept going, headed for the library, but glancing back I noticed that the car had pulled into a side street and was now turning around, coming back down Wendell in the lane closest to me. It pulled up to the curb. A guy with a bright orange mohawk, a big silver ring in his brow, silver studs like cake decorations up the cartiliginous rim of his ear, and a thick black leather jacket that made him look as if he were wearing an expensive chair, leaned out the window. Two other boys were in the backseat—if taciturnity could kill!—and a very ordinary-looking brown-haired girl was at the wheel. I thought the mohawk guy was going to leer at me. Or maybe he would ask to see my breasts or shout that he wanted to put them in his mouth or maybe he would offer to do things with his studded tongue, lick me up, lick me down, suck me head to toe, or maybe he wanted my juicy lips on him or to tell me I had a fat ass but he liked fat asses or that I had a skinny ass but he liked skinny asses and wouldn’t I like to get my skinny ass or my fat one into this fine car with him and his friends so he could do all these fine things? Instead, he glared right at little Mary-Emma and shouted,
“Nigger!”

Never before in my life had I understood so deeply what it meant not to believe one’s ears.

“My-kull!!” exclaimed the girl inside driving. The boys in the back snickered a little, and she swung the car away from the curb. The rear tire spun and flung snow into the wagon, which made Mary-Emma laugh at first and then, when the rock-frozen snow hit her face, made her cry. I hadn’t known any of this was possible in this town. Dellacrosse, perhaps—although I’d never actually heard it there—but here? Here was so proud of itself. Here was so progressive and exemplary. Here was so lockstep lefty. Here was so—white. The only color they knew here was the local one they took on for camouflage and convenience. If this were Salt Lake City, I knew, half the people here would have happily been Mormons. Instead, righteous and complacent and indistinguishable from one another, they were all members of the ACLU and the Freedom from Religion Foundation.

“Fuckers,” I found myself saying. I picked Mary-Emma up just to hold her, letting the wagon roll slightly away and bang into a parking meter. She was so swaddled in her giant slippery snowsuit that I could hardly hang on to her. But I carried her into the coffee shop we happened to be near and sat her on the couch by the gas fireplace and unzipped her snowsuit to warm her there. The log was fake and the fire rolled around it blue and cold as water—an ornamental fountain more than a hearth. Mary-Emma’s hair was damp and pressed to her head. Well, I would get her some hot chocolate. “Foggers,” she said to me, and then we both laughed. “Don’t say that, though,” I added, in warning.

“Oh, my God!” cried Sarah. “Oh, my God, oh, my God. That’s it, that’s it.” She began pacing around the kitchen after I told her what had happened. I did not repeat the actual word that Mykull had said but just used the phrase “the
n
-word.” I was holding Mary-Emma, who was playing with my hair, lifting it up and then letting it fall in my face, laughing when I would blow on it and make it move.

Sarah continued. “My God! Who knew this was possible in this city? At the little folk music festivals in the county parks in summer you see all kinds of mixed-race families. I thought this was the perfect town … OK, not perfect, but I thought this was the best possible situation for Emmie. I thought we would not be letting her down by bringing her here, and now I see my own naïveté.” The finger-raking of her hair, which had become familiar to me, began now with two hands.

“Perhaps if you are black, there is nowhere, really,” I said, thinking of the boy in Sufism, and Sarah just stared at me.

“I’m forming a support group. Don’t laugh.”

But I wasn’t laughing.

“I’m going to use the very mechanisms of this town against it—this goddamn self-satisfied town that …”

“That drinks its own bathwater!” I said, borrowing a Dellacrosse expression for Troy. It was a metaphor and not a metaphor and is what the outlying areas of the state all felt: that Troy was a piece of smug, liberal, recycling, civic-minded monkey masturbation. That it was gestural, trying to make itself feel good—which in Dellacrosse meant “better than everyone else.” That it wasn’t real.
That
was the true crime. Its lack of reality. Whatever that meant. Also, once a year some rural girl came to Troy for the weekend, drank too much, and ended up raped and beaten to death in some apartment or park.

Sarah looked at me with sudden searching concentration. It was a look I was coming to know and it was one I felt inside of me often, a feeling of aghast but childlike scrutiny: it said,
Why are there more space aliens on this planet than there used to be? Or are we the space aliens and are the human beings, uh-oh, coming back?

“Yes,” she said slowly, then picked up speed as if snapping herself out of a daze. “Well, I guess all towns sort of drink their own bathwater. But they don’t all have cruelty-free tofu! I’m going to get a support group going, and I’m going to bring families of color into this home, and we are going to discuss things and pool our strengths and share our stories and plot our collective actions and all that shit. Would you supervise the children?”

“What children?” I knew that the owner of the Moroccan restaurant on Wendell had children. Would they come? Last October someone had shot up the restaurant sign with actual bullets, then ripped it off and rebolted it upside down.

“The hypothetical children. The ostensible children. The imagined children. That kind.” She smiled.

“Sure,” I said.

“Tassa hair up ’n’ down,” said Mary-Emma, still playing with it as if it were silky string.

And so the weekly meetings got their start. Every Wednesday evening I would be upstairs with the children: Mary-Emma, two four-year-olds named Isaiah and Eli, a five-year-old named Althea, and a girl named Tika, who was eight and who sometimes helped me with the little ones and other times just sat in a corner and read
Harry Potter
. Often other families would make an appearance: an Ethiopian doctor and her sons, a seventh-grade boy named Clarence and a fourth-grader named Kaz. There was an Adilia, a Kwame, and more. They were mostly “of color,” as was said by all the adults downstairs, a range of shades from light to dark, though most of the parents downstairs, I noted, were white. Most were the transracial, biracial, multiracial families Sarah and Edward knew thus far in Troy, and probably more would be recruited. Upstairs I built Lego forts with the kids, or thought up little hiding games or wrestled or sang. Their voices were boisterous and fun and, being kids, they had their own words: “Nanana-booboo, you can’t catch me,” they would tease one another. The way in which the play-taunts of children resembled the calls and cries of animals was interesting to me. Only once did Sarah summon me downstairs to help her make a quick emergency dessert for the group: we microwaved the peach baby food and spooned it as hot puree over ice cream. “We used to eat this in Dellacrosse all the time,” I said, changing the facts slightly.

“Really!” said Sarah.

“Yes. Sort of. It was better than some old raisin cream pie—pudding and pits we called that pie.”

“Pits?”

“My mom always bought cheap raisins with the stems still on and poking out.” I continued dripping the hot peach liquid on the little scoops of ice cream, which had been dug out of the carton with a melon baller. Naked, they looked ready for ping-pong.

Everyone, except the children, exclaimed over the dessert’s deliciousness.

“You can just eat the ice cream,” I told the kids upstairs.

And amid the shared stories of public school biases and gang statistics and the strange comments of acquaintances, remarks would waft up through two floors, out of interest and earshot for the kids, but if I strained I could hear.

“… and I walked into the school for the conference and there was the teacher shaking Kaz and banging his head against the wall …”

“… institutionalized bigotry can subtly convince you of its rightness. With its absurdity removed, its evil can compel …”

“And even the adults pat her hair as if it’s the funniest thing they’d ever seen on a mammal … and of course available for public patting, like a goat in a zoo …”

“There’s a great woman on the south side who does hair …”

“Of course homework is just a measure of the home! And so the kids of color will always fall behind …”

“The African-American peer group is the strongest and the Asian-American is the weakest—that is, Asian-American parents have power that African-American parents do not.”

“School is white. And school is female. So it’s the boys of color who have the hardest time, and if they’re not into sports the gangs will lure them in …”

“I guess we sort of knew that already, but still.”

“It’s all so unfair.”

“Where are the reparations for slavery, or for the Indians, who got some of the money back, just not a lot of the land.”

“I don’t think the casinos count.”

“Oh, baby, they count.”

“You know, there are people in our department sitting on piles of inherited money who object to a black person making five thousand dollars more than they do. ‘It’s the principle,’ they say, and you just don’t know where to begin with that one.”

“You know, the Jews got reparations from the Nazis, but who got the actual money? Well-to-do Jewish grandchildren who hardly need it at all. In Ohio and Brazil there are grandchildren of Nazis who are truly destitute …”

“All right, where are we now? How did we get onto this?”

“What?”

“Would anyone like more wine?”

“At this point we could use a little gin …”

“Well, even the Indians got a few casinos—”

“We discussed that already—”

“But no one in Africa or here ever received reparations from anyone …”

“Is that true?”

“Sonya Weidner’s working on that—aren’t you, Sonya?”

“Well, the Jews are working on that.”

“Really?”

“How the hell should I know?”

The nonverbal sounds were like wind—coming in rushes and then falling back. There were bursts of sinus explosions, which were what laughter was in winter, followed by low rumbles of sighing and dismay. There was the pouring of wine and the eating of hors d’oeuvres while trying to speak.

“Racial blindness is a white idea.” This would be Sarah.

“How dare we think of ourselves as a social experiment?”

“How dare we not?”

“How dare we use our children to try to feel good about ourselves!”

“How dare we not?”

“I’m in despair.”

“Despair is mistaking a small world for a large one and a large one for a small.”

“I’m sure that’s what I’m doing.”

There was a cawing sound that could have been a pack of dogs or geese returning or simply the radiators starting up.

“Let’s face it: we’re all living in a bubble of some sort—of every sort.”

“Look at the way banks are making loans these days. No matter how many times people watch
It’s a Wonderful Life
, they still don’t get it!”

The opinions downstairs were put forth with such emphasis and confidence, it all sounded like an orchestra made up entirely of percussion: timpani and cymbals and the bass notes of a piano. Even a snare drum would sound stuttery, feathery, and hesitant by comparison.

“You and your academic diversity! Diversity is a distraction.”

“Not in the Amazon, it ain’t. It’s glue. It’s the interlock of the interlocking pieces.”

“The Amazon! Is that where we are? Look, the whole agenda, like feminism, or affirmative action, is decorative. Without a restructuring of the class system, the whole diversity thing is a folly.”

“Oh, I see! A communist! A revolutionary who wants to challenge simple college admissions diversity as being unrealistic as a mechanism of social change. I love this. Let me come to your dacha next week and I’ll explain everything …”

“Another false dichotomy. Don’t you agree, Edward? Mo’s just setting up a false dichotomy? It doesn’t have to be diversity or socialism, affirmative action or class equality. One is easier to do, granted, and doesn’t cost anything.”

“It costs! In terms of diversion and resources, it all costs!”

“That’s a load of crap!”

I had once seen a load of crap. It was carried to our house in Don Edenhaus’s truck and dumped right at our barn for composting into fertilizer.

“You are one of those right-wingers who puts on the Halloween costume of a socialist so you can infiltrate the left and get them to listen to your criticism—but I’m not listening …”

I turned toward my charges and said as if in mimicry: “Ladies and gentlemen, we are pleased to present ‘It’s Time to Shut UP!’ starring me!”

“And starring me!” laughed the little girl named Tika.

“And me!” copied Mary-Emma, and we all staggered around the room with our hands over our mouths.

In our sequestered nursery behind and above the baby gate at the stairs, there was scarcely an argument. Sometimes there were squabbles involving Legos, which Mary-Emma was too young for and would stick in her mouth. One of the parents, well intentioned, always brought them. Once, Mary-Emma, initially delighted and gracious about other children in her room, fell into a heap of sorrow and rage over a stuffed talking Elmo. And once someone called someone else a “dingbat,” but it was a word so unfamiliar to everyone, including the speaker, that no one’s feelings got hurt. Mostly they all played nicely, even if they brought more energy into the room than either Mary-Emma or I was used to. Sometimes they asked me questions.