A Gate at the Stairs (29 page)

Murph smiled, but what she said next was unsettling. She put her hands tenderly to my face and said, “Look at you! You’re nobody’s sister.”

Outside in the flowerbeds the yellow irises had unfurled in the sun with their lolling nectarine-pit tongues. There was a kind of ticking, humming all around, as if every living thing were contemplating bursting.

“I’m wondering why Emmie has been singing this particular song,” said Sarah, pointedly, in the kitchen. She had her chef’s hat on, the one that wasn’t a conventional toque but a brimless canvas cap.

“A song?”

“‘Prairie Pete, he got cold feet’?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “I made that up.”

“That’s OK,” she said, as if I needed forgiving, which I could see I might.

“I’ve also been singing regular standards with her,” I added hopefully.

“Yes,” she said. “‘I Been Working on the Railroad.’ I’ve heard her sing that. There’s just two things I’m worried about with that: the grammar and the use of slave labor.”

I wasn’t sure I was hearing things correctly. Her sense of humor was still not always explicit or transparent or of a finely honed rhythm, and it sometimes left me not in the same room with it but standing in the hall. The words “You’re serious?” flew out of my mouth.

“Kind of.” She looked right through me. “I’m not sure.” And then she went upstairs, as if to go figure it out. When she came back down she added, “Correct subject-verb agreement is best when children are learning language, so be careful what you sing. It’s an issue when raising kids of color. A simple grammatical matter can hold them back in life. Down the road.”

“Yes,” I said mechanically.

“We are pioneers,” she said to me. “We are doing something important, unprecedented, and unbearably hard.” And then she left again, and I turned away to hide my own teariness behind a door, because I was tired and wasn’t exactly clear what Sarah was talking about.

“Tassa?” came Mary-Emma’s worried voice.

I hauled out all the Scottish airs and mournful Irish drinking songs I knew, full of
yonders, e’ers
, and
lochs
, but there were also a lot of
bonnies
, and when I came to those I feared something terrified entered my face, because Emmie just stared at me, sensing something was up, a rock in the road. I couldn’t tell whether that word resonated with her or not. Still she was always wanting to learn the songs herself. “Bonnie-oh, oh bonnie-hey, nonny-bonnie pretty day.” The phone would ring and I would stop, dead in my tracks. If Sarah were there, she would answer it, and mostly I was relieved to hear her voice. “Quesadilla soup? No, we don’t serve that, that’s our competition … Yes, of course it’s their secret recipe. They have to keep it a secret, since if you knew what was in it you’d never order it again.” But sometimes I would hear her say, “Who is this?” then slam the phone down.

Because Mary-Emma had not only moved from a high chair to a booster seat but had for a month been sleeping in her “big girl bed,” the futon on the floor, I often lay next to her at nap times, reading and singing and sometimes dozing off myself. Sometimes we were awakened by Noel and his vacuum cleaner as he made his way through the house, an iPod lit up in his apron pocket, his headphones blocking all noise. It was the first iPod I’d ever seen, and when the vacuum cleaner wasn’t on I could hear the tinny sound coming out of the earbuds and Noel singing along in a broken and transported way, not hearing his own voice, and so sounding as if he were deaf. Still, I could make out one of the songs he played over and over, a Bonnie Raitt one, “I Can’t Make You Love Me,” the words to which I recognized but didn’t really know. If there were a song called “I
Can
Make You Love Me,” I would have memorized it long ago.

Noel saw me and smiled and turned his vacuum cleaner off. He pulled the earbuds out. I could see his eyes were wet with tears.

“It’s hard to listen to this song,” he said.

“It’s sad,” I agreed.

“My old boyfriend auctioned himself off to it at an AIDS benefit ‘Love Slave’ auction.”

“God, I wish mine had done that! And that was the last you saw of him?” I no longer could understand the world, and so I would only pretend to try.

“Sort of.”

“You broke up?”

“Well, he caught HIV that very night. And died—just last summer.”

“Jesus. I’m sorry.”

“Thanks,” he said.

“I think Bonnie Raitt owes you a new song.”

“Somebody does,” he said.

Easter Monday and no classes, as if it were Canada. I buzzed up on my scooter. The lawns were greening brightly, though the sky remained a furry shade of pearl. Dogs barked next door. As a belated Easter present I had brought Mary-Emma two goldfish, in deli containers. I would find a clear glass bowl to put them in—Sarah seemed to have a hundred.

Inside the Thornwood-Brink house there was holiday detritus: a three-foot chocolate bunny, a Brio train set. There were actual eggs that Sarah had boiled in different colored teas to make an elaborate marbling. They were all piled together in a single flax basket.

“I see you put all your eggs in one basket,” I said, I thought wittily, but she didn’t hear me.

“Emmie’s asleep,” said Sarah. “Even that Suzuki of yours didn’t wake her.”

“Oops,” I said. “Sorry.” Possibly I was getting used to her oblique and random reprimands. I put the fish on the table.

“Those are cute,” Sarah said. “I promise not to entertain any thoughts about seasoning them.” She was at the kitchen counter, mashing the bulbs from the Christmas paperwhites into a bowl, forming a paste. “I thought I should tell you about something.” She stopped for a second from her work. “Something that is happening.” Even in her stillness she looked busy and tense. “But you know? Let’s have a glass of SB.” SB was sauvignon blanc. I knew that now. A month ago I would have thought she was referring to the Super Bowl, or an SB vintage Gibson guitar, or her very own initials. “I’ve got a bottle in the fridge. It’s been a good long time and so it’s chilled to the center of its little bones. Yum.”

She stopped the flower bulb mashing. “Let’s go sit in the living room.” She brought the wine, a Screwpull, and two wineglasses, and we sat on the pillow-ticking sofas, the same as we had when I’d first interviewed with her.

“We mustn’t tell Edward we drank white and not red,” she said. “Are you underage?” she asked.

“Under what?” I said, smiling and sipping, and Sarah just waved her hand through the air. “Well, if you drink more than one, don’t get back on that scooter.”

“One’s good. I’m good with one.”

She sipped from her glass and rolled the SB around on her front teeth. “I like a wine that’s oaky.”

“Oaky and … just a little dokey,” I said. I was learning nothing very serious about wines but after a single sip of one was clearly willing to say anything.

Too preoccupied to smile, she seemed on the brink of something. Not for nothing were people named what they were named.

“There are things that are happening and I feel you should know,” she said. Her face bore a look I’d seen before: it was one of bravado laced with doom, like fat in meat.

An
uh-oh
feeling overtook me. I gulped at my SB.

“But first you should know that there’s an unfortunate backstory. Which I’ll have to tell you. But you must understand: it was years ago and we were different people then.” She fell back in a sunken way against the cushions, while I leaned forward from mine.

“You and Edward?” I asked, swallowing more wine, which was grassy and cool. I never knew anymore whom people meant when they said “we.” College had done that to me. In Dellacrosse, I had always known whom people were referring to. I also didn’t really know what people meant when they said of themselves that they were “different people then.” It seemed a piece of emotional sci-fi that a small town would not have allowed.
Whaddya mean, you were a different person? Don’t give me that hoodoo! I’ve known you since you were knee-high to a coot!

“Edward and I,” she said. “We were living out east, in Massachusetts. We were named Susan and John and we had a son.”

Was I shocked? I couldn’t even tell anymore. No one, it seemed, was who they said they were.

“Are you startled?” She raised her eyebrows, waiting for me to say something.

“Are you serious?” is what I chose. It seemed one could just say
Are you serious?
for the rest of existence and it would never be unjustified and would always have to be answered and so would keep the conversation going.

“Susan and John.” She shook her head.

“Were those your middle names?”

She paused. “In a way.”

She was about to go on when we heard Noel at the back door, with his stabbing, fidgeting key in the lock and his clanking pails and mops.

“We may have to continue this some other time,” said Sarah, leaning forward and putting her wine down.

“OK,” I said, still sipping. Noel came into the living room, with his tie-dyed sneakers, bearing a bouquet of daffodils for Sarah. I knew they’d been cut from the previous client’s yard.

“Why, thank you!” she said. “Would you like some wine?”

“OK!” he said, smiling. “It’ll go with my Diet Coke,” he said, laughing nervously.

He seldom picked flowers from Sarah’s garden (for the client after her), though once he had snipped some hydrangea from her shrub and she had warned him to cut from the bottom next time; he’d cut a big blank hole in the bush. She felt poorer people were entitled to do things that rich people weren’t. It was in lieu of a revolution. And less bloody all around. I had heard her say this on one of her Wednesdays.

“We’ll talk later,” she said to me. And I brought my wineglass to the kitchen sink and just dumped it, then went upstairs to check on Mary-Emma.

She was lying there wide awake when I peeked in.

“How are you?”

“You got brown eyes,” she said. “I of brown eyes.”

“That’s right.”

“I want blue eyes like Daddy.”

“No, you don’t. Your eyes are perfect. They need to be brown like mine!”

“OK,” she said. She was at an age where she would awake from a nap and suddenly be an inch taller, or be speaking in whole sentences, or in the grip of bleak and disturbing ideas.

“Wanna go to the park?” I asked.

“YEAH!” she cried out happily.

“First I have to show you: I brought you two Easter fish.” We went downstairs and looked at them. They were still in their takeout containers, so I took a clear glass mixing bowl from the cupboard and poured them in. They swished around and bumped noses. “What should we name them?”

“Juicy!” Mary-Emma exclaimed.

“Juicy?”

“This one’s Juicy. And this one’s, this one’s … Steve!”

“Steve?”

“Yeah. They’re brothers.” She stared at them until she looked a little cross-eyed and bored.

At the park I pushed her on the swing, higher and higher, and when she got off she dashed over to the slide and I gulped anxiously, fearing its dangers, but let her go. It was a fast slide, and from our previous visits I knew that children typically shot out from the flattened scoop of its slippery, sun-heated metal and landed on their faces, their thighs burned. Mary-Emma was no exception, but none of it fazed her. She and another girl had started a little game together, and they giddily took turns on the slide and then tried to make each other laugh at the bottom by assuming outlandish poses. Sometimes one would pretend to be unconscious or dead while the other one forced her back to living, which was indicated by giggles and brought about by tickling or pouring sand onto bare bellies or into hair. Sometimes it seemed to me that children believed death occurred in different forms than adults did, in varying degrees, and that it intersected with life in all kinds of ways that were unofficial. It was adults who felt death exerted a lurid sameness over everyone. Why couldn’t it be as varied as life was? Or at least have its lurid sameness similarly gussied up and disguised?

Afterward, the girl’s mother came over to me. “My Maddie just loves your little girl,” she said to me, shouldering her bag and getting ready to go.

“They do seem to like each other,” I said. I would let her think I was the too-young mother.

“What is her name?”

“Mary-Emma.”

The woman grew awkward but purposeful, in my experience, a bad combo. “Do you think they could get together for a playdate someday?” the woman asked. “Maddie doesn’t have any African-American friends, and I think it would be good for her to have one.” She smiled.

I was stunned into silence but only for a moment. Suddenly all the Wednesday nights I’d ever overheard distilled themselves into a single ventriloquized sentence: “I’m sorry,” I said to the woman, “but Mary-Emma already has a lot of white friends.”

I didn’t wait to examine the woman’s expression or to mitigate it with softened thoughts. I stood and picked up Mary-Emma, canting my hip and nestling her there. I took her home, wheeling the empty stroller in front of me. She did not swing and kick herself away in order to be put down and run ahead. She was tired.

The idea that Mary-Emma would be used like that—to amuse and educate white children, give them an experience, as if she were a hired clown—enraged me, but walking fiercely and pushing the stroller hard over the sidewalk cracks helped work it off. Back at home in the kitchen we fed the fish little pieces of bread, which they nibbled at, and which might not have been the ideal food, especially for Juicy, who died within days, though Steve was tough and hung on, unkillable.

In general in the early afternoons I would feed Mary-Emma lunch, put a clean Pull-Up on her, and tuck her in for a nap. I sang her “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” even though it was about joining people in death and planning the afterlife as a jolly place for friends and loved ones. Would this lead to a preoccupation? Was the grammar off? She stared at me wide-eyed while I sang. “Sing it again,” she said after I had sung all the verses I knew.

“Now you take a nap,” I said, “and have a really sweet dream.” I thought I might bring her dirty clothes downstairs to the laundry room in the basement. Usually I tossed them down the laundry chute, but this time, with little else of immediate concern, I decided perhaps to be helpful and do a load of Mary-Emma’s clothes. Sarah had gone out.