Lorrie Moore - A Gate at the Stairs

“Sometimes that’s true.” Sarah shrugged.

“We often blowtorched the weeds at home by hand,” I said. “But that’s organic weed control — not cooking.”

“No, it’s not. Cooking.” Sarah smiled briefly again as if I were still just the cutest thing but no longer what she was looking for in this job.

Edward took his wineglass and toasted Sarah. “Happy birthday,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“It’s your birthday?” I asked.

“Yes, well, in all the rush of events, who can even care!”

I was tempted to ask how old she was, but then I remembered I already knew. Instead I said, “So, you’re a Capricorn!”

“Yeah,” she said tiredly.

“Like Jesus!” I said. Having a Jewish mother, I was still inclined to think of Jesus not as the messiah but as, like, a celebrity.

“And like Richard Nixon,” she sighed, but then smiled. “Capricorns are a little boring. But they’re steady. And they work very hard, aiming for the highest thing.” She drank from her birthday wine. “They toil purposefully and loyally and then people just turn on them and destroy them.”

“And tomorrow’s our anniversary,” said Edward.

“That’s right. But we never celebrate it.”

“Well, it’s a little on the heels of your birthday, but we celebrate it.”

“We do?”

“Sure,” said Edward, smiling. “Don’t you remember? Every year on that day you put on a black armband and then I go looking for you and find you on top of some bell tower with a bag of chips and some Diet Coke and a rifle.”

Sarah turned to me. They were in performance. They were performing their marriage at me. “There’s a lot of pressure having a birthday and an anniversary so close together. It’s a stressor.” She raised her glass in a toast. “What does that elf and dwarf sign mean?” she asked. I was now the official translator.

“I have no idea.” Perhaps they would suddenly, brutally, fire me.

When the bill came, Edward reached for his wallet but couldn’t find it. “I must have left my wallet in the car,” he said.

Sarah was already pulling out a credit card. “You should get one of those waist-belt change purses,” she said to him.

“Too much like a colostomy bag,” said Edward. They both looked amused, and for a freak minute I believed they were perfect for each other, a feeling I would never have again.

“Should I pay for mine?” I asked awkwardly.

“Absolutely not,” said Sarah, signing for the bill, not looking up.

The next morning I awoke in my own suite — the Presidential Suite, it was named — to Sarah’s phone call.

“We’re off to see the baby,” she said. “Would you like to go with , as you real midwesterners say?”

Was this perfunctory politeness — or perfunctory rudeness? Was I supposed to decline and let them have their appropriately private meeting? Or would declining get me fired, as it might suggest that the baby was of no real interest to me? I had come this far with them — it seemed I had to say yes. It was a decision made in the dry terror of cluelessness. Why was I never quick to understand? At the end of a transaction, for instance, when a store clerk handed me my purchase and said, “Have a good one,” I always caught myself wondering, A good WHAT?

“Yes,” I said now. The thick drapes at the windows were outlined in sun. I pulled them open with the plastic rod and the morning burned in — clear and ablaze above a snowy parking lot. The ceiling I could see now bore a maize maze of water stains, and the walls of the room had bullet holes in them. The Presidential Suite! Well, I supposed, even presidents got shot. The wallpaper peeled in triangles at the seams, like the shoulder of a dress dropped to show a whore’s plaster skin. There was a fake thermostat, one of those thermostats to nowhere.

“Can you meet us in the lobby in thirty minutes?” Sarah asked doubtfully.

“Of course.” I looked over at the in-room coffeemaker and wondered how it worked.

As soon as I saw them in the lobby, I realized my mistake. They were looking at their watches, holding hands, then looking at their watches again. Their glance up at me was quick, perfunctory, and when I got into the car and sat in the back like their sullen teenage daughter I could see that this was not an outing I should be on. Edward started to light up a cigarette, and Sarah swatted it away.

“Afraid of secondhand smoke? There’s conflicting science on that,” he said.

Sarah gave him a look but said nothing. From my awkward place in the backseat I remembered a headline from the student paper. “You know what they say about secondhand smoke,” I said. I was a girl still finding her jokey party voice and borrowing from others’.

“What?” said Sarah.

“Leads to secondhand coolness.”

Edward turned in his seat to look at me. I had pleased him with this stupidity, and he was getting a better look at me to see who I was today.

“Did you have a good breakfast?” he asked.

“I did,” I lied.

“Sometimes that’s all it takes,” he said, turning back around, and I studied his hair-cape some more, its weird, warm flip.

The foster home we pulled up to was in a working-class subdivision. The foster family’s name was McKowen, and on their garage was a big letter M in bright green plastic.

“Are you ready to scootch?” Edward asked Sarah.

“I so am,” she said.

Edward twisted back toward me. “That’s Sarah’s idea of the quintessential mom word: scootch. Scootch over. Scootch in. Everybody’s gotta scootch and the moms are the scootch directors.”

“That’s right,” said Sarah.

“I can kind of see that,” I said, sounding doubtful rather than agreeable as I’d intended. Sarah turned the car off, checked her reflection quickly in the rearview mirror, scrutinizing her teeth in case they were dotted like dice with the scorched remnants of breakfast, then opened her door. The driveway was shoveled, and we all scootched out. The slam of our doors all in a row made me think of a squad car pulling up and the cops hopping out and going cautiously for their guns. Sarah was first to the porch, eager and businessy, and rang the bell. Edward and I were still trailing behind her like the rookies. She was already standing with the storm door propped open against her shoulder. She was loosening her scarf. When the white wooden door of the McKowens’ opened, she removed her hat, which had pom-poms on its ties. She quickly, unnecessarily poofed up her hair. “Hi, I’m Sarah Brink,” she said, and thrust out her hand. “We’re here to see the baby?”

The woman who answered the door was large and blond and seemed to have a bit of a limp as if one hip were stiff, though all she was doing to suggest this was shifting her weight in the doorway. “Nobody told us anyone was coming,” she said tersely.

“Roberta Marshall said she made the appointment,” said Sarah as we pulled up behind her.

“Who’s that?”

“She’s with Adoption Option?”

“No, we’re a foster family for Catholic Social Services, and no one has called us about this at all.”

“Oh, dear.” Sarah turned and looked at Edward, her eyes welling a little. I was getting this strange kidnapper feeling and wanted either to run for it, clear to Canada, or to bust in there and grab somebody. I hadn’t eaten breakfast, and I had to calm my mind.

Everyone stood there breathing and no one knew what to do at all. The woman in the doorway was studying us closely. I wondered what we looked like to her. Overeducated, well-preserved liberal types from Troy with their college-age daughter. Or some kinky ménage à trois. Also from Troy. To the rest of the state, Troy was the city from which all kink and pretentious evil sprang. I often thought of it that way myself.