A Gate at the Stairs (35 page)

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said now, shrugging. He beamed anyway. He was no longer a boy; he had become a young man. How had that happened? Nothing I said or knew had I known for very long, and so its roots were spindly and unsteady and the whole thing unsharable. “Don’t be nervous ’bout the service,” I said. It was a line I’d heard in a song somewhere. “You’ll be fine. Oh, and this,” I said more quickly, confidentially, discreetly stuffing a tampon in the side pocket of his duffel.

“Good God, what’s that for?”

“Just—for an emergency. Worse-case scenario: it stanches wounds.”

“Where do you learn this stuff?” asked my brother.

“From movies,” I said. “I’ve told you that before.”

We had brought Blot with us, and Robert knelt down and grabbed the dog’s head. “Good-bye, Blot, you bum,” he said, pulling the dog close and giving him a rub.

My father thrust a wad of bills into Robert’s front jacket pocket. My mother was the most misty-eyed, and my brother, as if to calm and please her, stayed peppy to such an artificial and generous degree that you could see he had no idea what he was doing. Even hoisting his duffel bags, he looked uncertain. My mother leaned in to kiss him and swept her hand through his wavy hair. “Oh, they’re going to shave it all off.”

“Let’s not get maudlin about hair,” warned my dad.

“Sell it to a wig maker!” I said, chucking him on the arm. “Get cash!” I couldn’t help at that moment but recall the time Robert had put Crisco in his front cowlick to tame it. It had frozen on the way to school, before we even got to the corner bus stop. But by midmorning the grease was melting and dripping down his forehead. I tried not to think of other times when he was younger and would absentmindedly pick scabby barleys from his nose. Now was not the time to think of him as a hapless child.

When the bus hissed and rumbled away, my brother’s face still pressed at the tinted window, my mother dabbed at her eyes and could only say, “I’m going to throttle that recruiter.”

“Now, Gail,” said my dad. Then he added, “If you throttle him, how will I get to hear him yelp and groan when I kick him?” This cheered my mother up.

I began working in my father’s baby greens field that very week. My job was to run in front of the shaver, a special attachment on the thresher, which he had contrived himself and which he was amused by and drove proudly like a car, though our field was so small that it was hard for him to make the turn-arounds. I ran ahead of it with fake feather and plastic hawk-wing extensions on my arms, whacking at the greens to scare the mice so they would not get into the mix. (If we had to take the greens to the triple-wash facility, it ate into the profit.) My father had actually designed my outfit for this, partially from a kite we had once brought to the Dellacrosse Kites on Ice festival. The costume had an aquiline-beaked mask and long wings I slipped my arms through, dipping them as I ran, brushing near the ground, beating the leaves, to resemble an actual predator and to encourage rodents to run from the shaver: nobody wanted sliced mice in their salads. At least not this decade.

I trotted, swooped, and shooed. I was the winged creation of my dad, like Icarus. I could feel myself almost flying, the way I flew in dreams: not very high, just running along and then sometimes lifting off just a little so that my stomach moved up into my heart. For a second. Not unlike my Suzuki on a speed bump.

I would also clear the field of rocks; it was at times rocky as a beach, stones rising to the surface from a quarrylike underworld. I collected them in a loader either to repatch the fish hatchery or to sell at the seed shop. The ones they sold at the seed shop were from China. All the way from China! Everything from China, even the rocks! It was not an expression yet,
like coals to Newcastle—like rocks to Dellacrosse—
but it would be soon, said my father, as it was the confounding truth.

In this manner, most often masked and winged, I spent the summer days. Running twenty feet ahead of my dad as he rode the reconfigured thresher, I would run and dip and swoosh and in theory scare off rabbits as well. Mice darted, snakes did their undulating gumshoe. With my dad in the mornings I had worked up a song: “Squirrels and mice and moles better scurry / when I am a hawk in a hurry / when I am a hawk in a hurry with some fringe on top.” Even Miles Davis had liked this tune.

My father worried that I might be getting too good at this task and scaring off all the real predators that would help keep the rodent population down.

“Hey, that’s life in the the-ay-ter!” I said. The whole soundtrack to
Oklahoma
played in my head. The sun burned. There was a bright golden haze on all meadows. The sky shone as blue as forget-me-nots, and often the smudged thumbprint of a morning moon hung suspended above. The air before noon was soft, with the coppery smell of dirt. We would mostly work early, and then evenings, when things (me, the lettuce) were cooler. Midday I spent resting and reading, drinking cold lemonade and Coke out of Ball jars that had lost their tops. Sometimes in the afternoon there were thunderstorms so sky-crackingly violent it was like life on another planet entirely. The storms seemed different from the ones of my childhood. These were sky-wide and tree toppling, moving across the state with the fury of marauders—pelting rain and wind that could switch the current of a creek—and then afterward, total calm in the air, sparkle and breeze, as if nothing had happened at all.

Although I avoided most community picnics—I had never liked sitting on the ground with a paper plate while flies bit your legs, or sitting squeezed in at an old picnic table on a bench that gave you splinters—on the Fourth of July I went with my parents to the county baseball field to watch the fireworks. As this was the first fireworks display since 9/11, the county had rented a metal detector and we all had to walk through, the daylilies, in Packer green and gold, in bloom to either side of us.

“As if Al Qaeda has ever even heard of Dellacrosse,” said my father once we were seated. “I guess absolutely everyone wants to be on the map. No matter what map it is.”

“It’s a form of terrorism
not
to bomb this town,” I said. My father gave me a look.

“Keep your voices down, you two,” said my mother. She had brought snacks of lemon frosting sandwiched between graham crackers, a favorite of my childhood, and when we were seated she passed the little Tupperware box back and forth to my father and me.

Once the sun set completely, its murky rose stretched taffylike across the horizon, the air grew cooler, and the show began. Like the operation of a rocket ship, the fireworks were staged to burst at designated points across the sky. Peonies and chrysanthemums bloomed forth from spasms and explosions. Were we having fun? Dripping sparkle sizzled and dissipated, then resumed; the deathly silence before each burst began to fill me with dread. Screeches, whistles, booms: the barium green and copper blue held too many intimations of war. We were a glum trio, my parents and I, our necks nonetheless arced and our heads dropped back onto the flattened hoods of our sweatshirts, watching all this lit-up drizzle. Our snack was gone. We had eaten the whole container’s worth.

Would it have been so bad to have remained a colony of England? I wondered fiercely with every bang. Would it have been so terrible if every dessert was called a pudding even if it was a cake, to grow up saying “in hospital,” to lose a few articles, to spell
gray
with an
e
, to resprinkle the
r
’s, to have an idle king, an idle queen, and put all the car steering wheels on the right? Well, perhaps the steering wheels would be worth fighting for. Perhaps our Founding Fathers had had an intimation of that one.

“There was a lot of smallpox in the eighteenth century,” I said on the way home, squeezed between my parents in the front of the truck.

“There sure was,” said my dad. “But they started the inoculations around the time of the war, I think.”

“Well, we can celebrate that, at least,” said my mother. “Sometimes I think it might not have been so awful to be English.”

“Oh, my God—I was just thinking the same thing!”

“Tories in the lorry!” exclaimed my dad.

“Well, how awful could it be? England looks great in pictures. You went there on your honeymoon!”

“We would have been colonists,” said my dad.

“So? Would we have had to wear big scarlet
Cs
around our necks?”

My father leaned past me to say to my mother, “You send a kid to college, and look what you get.”

“Corinne Carlten wears a big gold
C
around
willingly,”
I said.

“How is Corinne these days?” asked my mother.

“I really wouldn’t know,” I said, and then fell silent. Every exchange with my parents ended up in some boring place I didn’t want to be.

“And how about Krystal Bunberry, since her dad got sick and all.”

“Dunno,” I said. “She was nice to send that toilet paper, though!”

“If we were still English,” said my father, “we’d be drinking more and driving on the wrong side of the road—pretty much what people do on the Fourth of July anyway.”

“I don’t like all the words in our national anthem,” my mother said. She had given up on me and my friends as a topic of conversation. “‘Bombs bursting in air.’ What kind of song is that to sing? When sung in large crowds, everyone takes a deep breath and it sounds like ‘bombs bursting in
hair
.’”

“Hush,” said my father.

Then we all looked out at the road. The high crucifixes of phone and electric poles, in line on either side, multiplied and shrinking in the distance almost to a vanishing point, made me think of the final scene of
Spartacus
.

“Think the corn’s knee high?” asked my mom, and soon our truck lights swung and shone onto our own driveway and we were home.

I watched movies that I rented from Farm & Fleet. They weren’t very good; Farm & Fleet was new to it, and the selection was small, though we never actually used the phrase
slim pickins
at our house; it would have been bad luck. Like placing your pocket-book on the floor or your hat on the bed. But I was watching a lot of Jennifer Aniston movies and documentaries about Brazil and Argentina. I would return them the very next day. Sometimes I would drive around, taking the long way back. It was lovely summer weather, and the shoulders of the county trunks were bruised blue with chicory, then snowy with Queen Anne’s lace, for a while mixing, making a kind of weed gingham along the roadsides. Prairie grass flowers had been replanted in places and in others had never left: meadow rose, Turk’s cap, lady slipper, laurel.

My mother had taken slightly to her bed. Mrs. Miniver she wasn’t. The plants in her mirrored flowerbeds had crept out into the lawn itself, which was soon waist high in weeds, fuzzy and humid, which for ten days in mid-July revealed themselves to be not just sneezeweed but nightshade and phlox. A field of purple. A riot of violet—balloon flowers, foxglove, and sage. It was a weird and beautiful joke that her flower garden had never looked this good before. The hollyhocks stood bright and straight and as high as the windows, with only the slightest of lists. Ghettos of echinacea appeared, and fuchsia-hued tobacco and yarrow, as if it had all made a deliberate decision to do so. Only the unpruned hydrangeas missed her and had begun early their self-cannibalizing tinge to green; lit to the gills with chlorophyll, barren and virginal both, their branches drooped into the dirt with robust pustules of cream and lime. Only in their bowed and defeated eating of the soil did my mother’s absence show. Ordinarily she would never have allowed this.

Sometimes in the afternoon, upstairs in my room and still with my hawk outfit on, I would get out Ole Upright Bob, the double bass, dust him off, his bow quiver clipped at the tail beneath the bridge, like a scrotum, and we would rustle up a tune. There was a kind of buoyancy in making these four low strings sing something that was not a dirge. It was a demanding instrument, the stand-up bass—by comparison, my guitar, with its buttery, mushy fingerings, was a toy—and sometimes I just played it with open strings, Miles’s “Nardis,” which was basic, and which spelled
starry
backwards in Latin, or something, and which I loved, and which didn’t take a lot out of me. I had once, in the state music tryouts, played a solo from a double bass concerto by Sergei Koussevitzky, who in 1930 had been on the cover of
Time
magazine. That’s about all I knew about him. But either I wasn’t that good or the sight of a girl standing beside this huge wooden creature, grabbing its neck and stroking its gut, pulling the music out of the strings by force, made them ill at ease, and I was not selected. The faces of the panel listening were the very embodiment of skepticism made flesh, as if they were all saying
Get a load of this!
, and I had never experienced the weaponry of such expressions before. Subsequently, I drifted away from classical entirely, needing to leave behind the memory of that event. It was an aspect of childhood adults forgot to think about when they encouraged their children to try new things.