A Gate at the Stairs (34 page)

“I’m not the one who can tell you,” I said. Then I left as quickly as I could.

For a week I busied myself in a robotic way with tasks, half waiting for the phone to ring—to have it be Sarah or Reynaldo or even more hilariously Mary-Emma, as I missed her. I wanted to hear that all these little nightmares were gone—mistakes had been made!—that a lot had been patched up and swung open and glued back, and can you get over here right this minute, you are needed! But one spring day tumbled after another, identical and dull, and the semester seemed to be closing up shop, indifferent to me. I went on two geology field trips, both times as a quasi zombie. I did my final Dating Rocks research paper: “The Plausible Sufic Geology of Stonehenge.” I was reduced. I was barely there. When misfortune accumulated, I could feel now, it strafed you to the thinness of a nightgown, sheared you to the sheerness of a slip. Light seemed to shine right through your very hands, your blood no longer red: your skin in the breeze billowing, like a jellyfish. Your float through the day had the reality of a trance, triggering distant memories though not actually very many. The passing of time was the lightest of brushes. Life was ungraspable because it would not stay still. It skittered and blew. It was a mound of random trash, even as you moved through the hours like a ghost invited to enjoy a sparkling day at the beach.

Murph was lying on the couch when I came home one night from the library. I spoke to her but there was no answer. I shook her. She was not rousable. She was clammy and bluish in the lips. When I shook her again there was some moaning. Next to her on the coffee table was the now, on my part, long-forgotten plastic bowl of paperwhite tapenade and a box of crackers that had been knocked to the floor beside them.

“Oh, my God!” I shouted to no one, then I phoned 911. While I waited I pushed my fingers into her mouth to see if I could fetch any extraneous mash still in her mouth. There was a gob of it inside her cheek just sitting there and I rinsed my hand of it, then took wet paper towels to the rest of her mouth. Just once I thought I heard her moan. Where was the ipecac?

An ambulance and a fire engine pulled up in no time at all, and Kay came down from upstairs and stood on the porch, gathering her reports. “Are we going to need some crime scene tape?” she asked. “I’ve got a big yellow roll upstairs!” The paramedics were three cute boys whose cuteness I didn’t notice until I conjured them later in memory. They carried tackle boxes of swabs, needles, tubes, and blood pressure cuffs. They took her vital signs and then maneuvered her onto a stretcher.

Her breathing was shallow but not alarmingly so. Still, they took the silver stud out of her nose and stuck an oxygen mask on her. I rode with her in the back of the ambulance, holding her hands, first one and then the other. “Flower bulbs?” asked one of the paramedics. “Well, there’s a first for everything.”

“There
is
, isn’t there?” I said in a suddenly brightened way, for it came to me that she would live and all would be well.

And she did. There was no killing her—she was like an ox combined with a horse combined with a bear combined with a truck; she was like Steve the fish!—and afterward she seemed her same self, but in my statements to the police, and in my new understanding of Sarah’s self-thwarted potential to kill someone—who else but Edward and herself, unless she wanted Liza and the others thrown in—the parsing of these things was like a blade through light, defying all weapons. I had become vague and unknowable to myself in guilt and inaction. Or rather, perhaps, newly known.

The local lakes were already verdant with scum. I failed my Neutral Pelvis final. I simply forgot to go. When I approached my instructor to say, “But my roommate was throwing up blood!” she said, “That line is as old as the hills.” I turned in all my papers and exams. There was not an informed word in them. I had no idea what I was talking about, though here and there I would burst forth with an embarrassing intensity of assertion. I was given Bs.

“Who was that witch you worked for?” asked Murph before she went home to Dubuque for the summer, her stomach pumped, her pulse returned, her courses done.

“She wasn’t a witch.” I sighed. “At least, I don’t think so.” I thought about this some more. “At least, not a very good witch.”

“A good witch at all?”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“Still, I’d like to smack her,” said Murph.

I laughed drily. “God, so would I.”

She touched my arm. “Don’t make your own life your project in your own life: total waste of time. I don’t mean that personally. I mean that for everyone. It was revealed to me as I fell back from the great white light of death.”

I felt nothing but admiration for her. I felt she was a healer. I felt she could read minds. “Do you ever feel certain people are psychic?” I asked. “Like you know someone and secretly feel they are psychic and that they don’t understand this themselves?”

“Yes,” she said.

“You do? You’ve felt this about someone?”

“I feel that about you.”

This seemed so much like a joke that I laughed.

“Really.” She smiled and embraced me. “Have a great summer.” We had given up our lease and neither of us knew what we would do come fall, but it wouldn’t be with each other. We had put almost all of our possessions in storage, which was a metaphor for being twenty, as were so many things.

My father phoned to ask me if I’d like to help him with the farm. He had recently started a three-season-spring-greens angle to his business and needed help with it: I would run out in front of his newfangled thresher-shaver and scare the mice away. My brother was packing up for boot camp at Fort Bliss and would be gone all summer and all harvest. Did I have another job? Was I interested?

I said I thought that would be good exercise and I appreciated the offer. As a coincidence, I told him, my other job was suddenly over. I’d come home on the bus on Monday and we could talk about it more. I had to clean the apartment to get our deposit back.

“You will miss Robert’s graduation if you don’t come sooner. It’s on Sunday.”

“Well, I’ll take the early Sunday bus,” I said.

What had I learned thus far in college? You can exclude the excluded middle, but when you ride through, on your way to a lonely and more certain place, out the window you’ll see everyone you’ve ever known living there.

I had also learned that in literature—perhaps as in life—one had to speak not of what the author intended but of what a story intended for itself. The creator was inconvenient—God was dead. But the creation itself had a personality and hopes and its own desires and plans and little winks and dance steps and collaged intent. In this way Jacques Derrida overlapped with Walt Disney. The story itself had feet and a mouth, could walk and talk and speak of its own yearnings!

I learned that there had been many ice ages. That they came and went. I learned there were no mammals original to New Zealand. I learned that space was not just adrift with cold, flammable rocks. Here and there a creature was riding one, despite the Sufic spinning of the rock. The spores of lightless life were everywhere. I think I learned that.

VI

M
y brother and my father picked me up at the bus station, figuring I’d have a lot of stuff. Robert was wearing his graduation gown but carrying his cap.

“Well, you don’t have that much,” said my father, puzzled.

“I put a lot in storage,” I said. I tugged at Robert’s gown. “Hey, congratulations.”

“It’s more of an accomplishment than you may realize,” he said, abashed.

“What time is the ceremony?”

“Not until two.”

“And you put on that gown already?”

“You bet.”

“We have already taken a thousand pictures,” mused my dad.

“You didn’t answer my e-mail,” said my brother.

“What e-mail?” I asked.

“The last one I sent you!”

“You told me to ignore it.”

“No, not that one. The one after that!”

I was slowly remembering that I had archived it for later.

“Is your address still bassface-at-isp-dot-com?” he continued.

I always believed my e-mail address was clever and hip until I heard it said aloud. “It is. Jeez, I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened.” I would change the subject. “How are you?”

“Great!”

“Really? Nobody’s great!”

“Well, it’s not great with a capital
G
. It’s actually
g-r-a-t-e
. That may not be so good.”

“No, it may not be. How did that happen?”

“I got grated on a curb.”

“Ha! Did he ever,” said my dad.

“Did you just make that up?” I asked my brother.

“No,” he said, smiling and climbing into the truck. “I’ve been working on it for weeks.”

“Weeks?”

“Well, not weeks. Months, actually.” He was working hard to sound
upbeat
and had landed on
bizarrely merry
.

“Did you leave that Suzuki of yours back in Troy?” inserted my father as we were driving off.

“Yes. I did.”

“Too bad!” said my brother. The topic of the lost e-mail had too much regret and belatedness attached to it and was no fun. Unlike the motorbike. “I wanted to see you buzz around the ceremony this afternoon. It would cause a sensation!”

“That’s just what I want to do.” I stared out the window of the truck. Irrigation sprinklers like the skeletons of brontosauruses were sprawled across the farm fields.

At home I had to help my mother dress, in the room she called “the store.” Here she would stack up boxes of apparel that she had mail-ordered but not tried on to see whether she would keep them or send them back. When she was ready she would go through and open them one by one, but until then they stayed in the store—which was in essence a kind of mail room.

“Gail?” my dad called up for my mom.

“We’re in the store!” she called back, and I helped her try on something I thought would be fine, and then yanked the tags off for her. “Send the rest back,” I said. “But wait—what is this?” There was a beautiful black hat with a feather sticking straight up and a sash dangling down the side.

“That’s not for a graduation.”

“No, it’s not. Unless you’re the one graduating: then you could flip the sash as you walked across the stage and blow a whistle with the feather between your thumbs.”

“It’s for something, though,” she said, holding it with more affection than was seemly. “I don’t know what yet.”

“A party from fifty years ago, maybe.”

“Hey, around here? There are a lot of those. And you still can’t wear a hat like this.”

“Where did you get it?”

“Oh, online somewhere. What does the box say?”

I tried it on myself.

“Very nice,” said my mother. “Perhaps I should give it to you.”

“Yes, perhaps you should!” I laughed. “I could wear it to all my classes!” I placed it back in the hatbox, which smelled of cedar and insecticide.

The graduation was inside the gymnasium due to a forecast of rain, and in the middle the tornado siren went off and we all just stayed put. Personally, I felt this sound effect was suited to the occasion. The girls all wore high heels beneath their black graduation gowns and wobbled across the stage with great uncertainty, except one who strode quickly, then slipped and almost fell. I didn’t know any of them. Pinned to their chests they wore large white peonies that looked like the heads of angora cats. The boys pumped their fists in the air at the slightest inside joke. When Robert walked across the stage to grasp his diploma, the principal, good-naturedly, pretended to hold it back, but Robert smiled, and so did the principal, who patted him on the back, gave him the thing, and sent him on his way. He was liked, I could see that. People really liked Robert. In the crowd his posse called out “Gunny!” and “Gunny, got your gun?” and that’s when the full implications of his going off to the army really hit me. Why hadn’t I given it sufficient thought before now? Well, that was an easy one to answer, but still. It was not an excuse.

When the tornado siren stopped, we stepped outside and there was sunshine everywhere. It was the season of white flowers; to go with the girls’ peonies the school grounds were edged with bridal wreath and daisies. Only one dark rain cloud was left in the sky, like an evil genie, and it was making a hasty retreat in the breeze.

My brother left for the ironically named Fort Bliss the very next day. We took him to the bus station and said good-bye. We gave him little presents. A rabbit’s foot key chain. A tortoiseshell toothbrush. I gave him a copy of poems by Rumi and a three-by-five card that said
Here’s a reply to your forgotten e-mail: don’t forget to write!
, which, in case it sounded like sisterly snottiness, caused me to throw my arms around him and hug him hard. “You put the
soul
in
soldier,”
I whispered to him. “Just don’t get one of those flag tattoos.”

He pulled away from my embrace. “Why not?” he asked, and I could see he was desperate for the knowledge and reasoning behind anything. I could see he felt shorthanded, underequipped, factually and otherwise. Just the night before he had said, “Afghanistan has provinces? Like Canada?”