A Gate at the Stairs
By Lorrie Moore
Knopf
Copyright © 2009
Lorrie Moore
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-375-40928-8
Chapter One
The cold came late that fall and the songbirds were caught off guard. By the
time the snow and wind began in earnest, too many had been suckered into
staying, and instead of flying south, instead of already having flown south,
they were huddled in people's yards, their feathers puffed for some modicum of
warmth. I was looking for a job. I was a student and needed babysitting work,
and so I would walk from interview to interview in these attractive but wintry
neighborhoods, the eerie multitudes of robins pecking at the frozen ground,
dun-gray and stricken-though what bird in the best of circumstances does not
look a little stricken-until at last, late in my search, at the end of a week,
startlingly, the birds had disappeared. I did not want to think about what had
happened to them. Or rather, that is an expression-of politeness, a false
promise of delicacy-for in fact I wondered about them all the time: imagining
them dead, in stunning heaps in some killing cornfield outside of town, or
dropped from the sky in twos and threes for miles down along the Illinois state
line.
I was looking in December for work that would begin at the start of the January
term. I'd finished my exams and was answering ads from the student job board,
ones for "childcare provider." I liked children-I did!-or rather, I liked them
OK. They were sometimes interesting. I admired their stamina and candor. And I
was good with them in that I could make funny faces at the babies and with the
older children teach them card tricks and speak in the theatrically sarcastic
tones that disarmed and enthralled them. But I was not especially skilled at
minding children for long spells; I grew bored, perhaps like my own mother.
After I spent too much time playing their games, my mind grew peckish and longed
to lose itself in some book I had in my backpack. I was ever hopeful of early
bedtimes and long naps.
I had come from Dellacrosse Central, from a small farm on the old Perryville
Road, to this university town of Troy, "the Athens of the Midwest," as if from a
cave, like the priest-child of a Colombian tribe I'd read of in Cultural
Anthropology, a boy made mystical by being kept in the dark for the bulk of his
childhood and allowed only stories-no experience-of the outside world. Once
brought out into light, he would be in a perpetual, holy condition of
bedazzlement and wonder; no story would ever have been equal to the thing
itself. And so it was with me. Nothing had really prepared me. Not the college
piggy bank in the dining room, the savings bonds from my grandparents, or the
used set of World Book encyclopedias with their beautiful color charts of
international wheat production and photographs of presidential birthplaces. The
flat green world of my parents' hogless, horseless farm-its dullness, its flies,
its quiet ripped open daily by the fumes and whining of machinery-twisted away
and left me with a brilliant city life of books and films and witty friends.
Someone had turned on the lights. Someone had led me out of the cave-of
Perryville Road. My brain was on fire with Chaucer, Sylvia Plath, Simone de
Beauvoir. Twice a week a young professor named Thad, dressed in jeans and a tie,
stood before a lecture hall of stunned farm kids like me and spoke thrillingly
of Henry James's masturbation of the comma. I was riveted. I had never before
seen a man wear jeans with a tie.
The ancient cave, of course, had produced a mystic; my childhood had produced
only me.
In the corridors students argued over Bach, Beck, Balkanization, bacterial
warfare. Kids said things to me like "You're from the country. Is it true that
if you eat a bear's liver you'll die?" They asked, "Ever know someone who did
you-know-what with a cow?" Or "Is it an actual fact that pigs won't eat
bananas?" What I did know was that a goat will not really consume a tin can: a
goat just liked to lick the paste on the label. But no one ever asked me that.
From our perspective that semester, the events of September-we did not yet call
them 9/11-seemed both near and far. Marching poli-sci majors chanted on the
quads and the pedestrian malls, "The chickens have come home to roost! The
chickens have come home to roost!" When I could contemplate them at all-the
chickens, the roosting-it was as if in a craning crowd, through glass, the way I
knew (from Art History) people stared at the Mona Lisa in the Louvre: La
Gioconda! its very name like a snake, its sly, tight smile encased at a distance
but studied for portentous flickers. It was, like September itself, a cat's
mouth full of canaries. My roommate, Murph-a nose-pierced, hinky-toothed blonde
from Dubuque, who used black soap and black dental floss and whose quick
opinions were impressively harsh (she pronounced Dubuque "Du-ba-cue") and who
once terrified her English teachers by saying the character she admired most in
all of literature was Dick Hickock in In Cold Blood-had met her boyfriend on
September tenth and when she woke up at his place, she'd phoned me, in horror
and happiness, the television blaring. "I know, I know," she said, her voice
shrugging into the phone. "It was a terrible price to pay for love, but it had
to be done."
I raised my voice to a mock shout. "You sick slut! People were killed. All you
think about is your own pleasure." Then we fell into a kind of
hysteria-frightened, guilty, hopeless laughter I have never actually witnessed
in women over thirty.
"Well," I sighed, realizing I might not be seeing her all that much from then on
in, "I hope there's just hanky-no panky."
"Nah," she said. "With panky there's always tears, and it ruins the hanky." I
would miss her.
Though the movie theaters closed for two nights, and for a week even our yoga
teacher put up an American flag and sat in front of it, in a lotus position,
eyes closed, saying, "Let us now breathe deeply in honor of our great country"
(I looked around frantically, never getting the breathing right), mostly our
conversations slid back shockingly, resiliently, to other topics: backup singers
for Aretha Franklin, or which Korean-owned restaurant had the best Chinese food.
Before I'd come to Troy, I had never had Chinese food. But now, two blocks from
my apartment, next to a shoe repair shop, was a place called the Peking Café
where I went as often as I could for the Buddha's Delight. At the cash register
small boxes of broken fortune cookies were sold at discount. "Only cookie
broken," promised the sign, "not fortune." I vowed to buy a box one day to see
what guidance-obscure or mystical or mercenary but Confucian!-might be had in
bulk. Meanwhile, I collected them singly, one per every cookie that came at the
end atop my check, briskly, efficiently, before I'd even finished eating.
Perhaps I ate too slowly. I'd grown up on Friday fish fries and green beans in
butter (for years, my mother had told me, margarine, considered a foreign
food, could be purchased only across state lines, at "oleo" stands hastily
erected along the highway-park here for parkay read the signs-just past the
Illinois governor's welcome billboard, farmers muttering that only Jews bought
there). And so now these odd Chinese vegetables-fungal and gnomic in their brown
sauce-had the power for me of an adventure or a rite, a statement to be savored.
Back in Dellacrosse the dining was divided into "Casual," which meant you ate it
standing up or took it away, and the high end, which was called "Sit-Down
Dining." At the Wie Haus Family Restaurant, where we went for sit-down, the
seats were red leatherette and the walls were gemütlichkeit and paneled,
decorated with framed deep kitsch, wide-eyed shepherdesses and jesters. The
breakfast menus read "Guten Morgen." Sauces were called "gravy." And the dinner
menu featured cheese curd meatloaf and steak "cooked to your likeness." On
Fridays there were fish fries or boils for which they served "lawyers" (burbot
or eelpout), so-called because their hearts were in their butts. (They were
fished from the local lake where all the picnic spots had trash cans that read
no fish guts.) On Sundays there was not only marshmallow and maraschino cherry
salad and something called "Grandma Jell-O," but "prime rib with au jus," a
precise knowledge of French-or English or even food coloring-not being the
restaurant's strong point. A la carte meant soup or salad; dinner meant soup and
salad. The Roquefort on the salad was called by the waitstaff "Rockford
dressing." The house wine-red, white, or pink-all bore the requisite bouquet of
rose, soap, and graphite, a whiff of hay, a hint of hooterville, though the menu
remained mute about all this, sticking to straightforward declarations of hue.
Light ale and dunkel were served. For dessert there was usually a gluckschmerz
pie, with the fluffy look and heft of a small snowbank. After any meal,
sleepiness ensued.
Now, however, away and on my own, seduced and salted by brown sauce, I felt
myself thinning and alive. The Asian owners let me linger over my books and stay
as long as I wanted to: "Take your tie! No lush!" they said kindly as they
sprayed the neighboring tables with disinfectant. I ate mango and papaya and
nudged the stringy parts out of my teeth with a cinnamon toothpick. I had one
elegantly folded cookie-a short paper nerve baked in an ear. I had a handleless
cup of hot, stale tea, poured and reheated from a pail stored in the
restaurant's walk-in refrigerator.
I would tug the paper slip from the stiff clutches of the cookie and save it for
a bookmark. All my books had fortunes protruding like tiny tails from their
pages. You are the crispy noodle in the salad of life. You are the master of
your own destiny. Murph had always added the phrase "in bed" to any fortune
cookie fortune, so in my mind I read them that way, too: You are the master of
your own destiny. In bed. Well, that was true. Debt is a seductive liar. In bed.
Or the less-well-translated Your fate will blossom like a bloom.
Or the sly, wise guy: A refreshing change is in your future.
Sometimes, as a better joke, I added though NOT in bed.
You will soon make money. Or: Wealth is a wise woman's man.
Though NOT in bed.
And so I needed a job. I had donated my plasma several times for cash, but the
last time I had tried the clinic had turned me away, saying my plasma was cloudy
from my having eaten cheese the night before. Cloudy Plasma! I would be the bass
guitarist! It was so hard not to eat cheese! Even the whipped and spreadable
kind we derisively called "cram cheese" (because it could be used for sealing
windows and caulking tile) had a certain soothing allure. I looked daily at the
employment listings. Childcare was in demand: I turned in my final papers and
answered the ads.
One forty-ish pregnant woman after another hung up my coat, sat me in her living
room, then waddled out to the kitchen, got my tea, and waddled back in,
clutching her back, slopping tea onto the saucer, and asking me questions. "What
would you do if our little baby started crying and wouldn't stop?" "Are you
available evenings?" "What do you think of as a useful educational activity for
a small child?" I had no idea. I had never seen so many pregnant women in such a
short period of time-five in all. It alarmed me. They did not look radiant. They
looked reddened with high blood pressure and frightened. "I would put him in a
stroller and take him for a walk," I said. I knew my own mother had never asked
such questions of anyone. "Dolly," she said to me once, "as long as the place
was moderately fire resistant, I'd deposit you anywhere."
"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 out of 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.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Gate at the Stairs
by Lorrie Moore
Copyright © 2009 by Lorrie Moore .
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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