Lorrie Moore - A Gate at the Stairs

The woman at the door, Mrs. McKowen, sighed, as if defeated. “I don’t know why they call them organizations. They are all just a mess.” She widened the aperture between door and doorjamb. “Well, you’re here, so you might as well come on in and see Mary.”

“Mary?” Sarah hadn’t bothered asking about a name — she clearly had her own name picked out and Mary wasn’t it.

“The little girl. You do want to see her, don’t you?”

“Oh, of course. This is my husband, Edward,” Sarah said hurriedly, “and our friend Tassie.” I nodded at Mrs. McKowen and she squinted at me a little, clearly wondering who the hell I could be.

We walked into a living room with yellow walls, a green rug, and a brown plaid couch. The television was blaring morning TV. Brightly colored plastic blocks and inexpensive cloth animals, fuzzy and fresh — a caterpillar and a bumblebee — were scattered on the floor. There was a teenage girl hovering in the back doorway to the unlit kitchen, and she just watched us without saying anything. The baby Mary was dressed in a pale mint green one-piecer, the feet of which had been cut off so she could fit into it. She was too big for such clothing. She was not really a baby at all but looked almost two, yet she was still in a wheeled plastic walker, which was placed in front of the television, which she was watching. Just some crap talk show, it looked like to me—“So you left him because he wouldn’t take his Zoloft?” a well-coiffed woman was asking another on the TV screen — not even a program for children. Mrs. McKowen came in and flicked it off. “Mary, look, you’ve got some visitors!” The little girl turned in her conveyance and gave us a full-lipped smile. Her teeth were tiny white shells. She had silky dark hair, skin that was a mix of biscuit and taupe, and eyes that were black and bright: she looked like a savvy Indian rug merchant. She flung her arms in the air to be lifted. The walker she treated sort of like a little office. And now she wanted out.

“Hey, baby,” said Sarah, picking Mary up, but the child’s feet were caught in the walker’s canvas leg holes and the whole contraption lifted as well, a little disastrously, and Sarah could not untangle Mary’s feet, and Mary began to cry.

“Oh, dear, that thing is caught on her,” said Sarah. I stepped forward to help, and to his credit Edward did, too, and we pulled the walker off the child, but by this point Mary was crying for Mrs. McKowen and wriggling in Sarah’s arms, trying to get away.

“Oh, Mary, come here, child,” said Mrs. McKowen, and she took Mary from Sarah and comforted her. Mrs. McKowen looked back at Sarah drily. “Do you have experience with children?”

“She’s a little old for that thing,” Sarah said, trying not to sound flummoxed.

“Why don’t you all have a seat?” said Mrs. McKowen, and we quickly did. The teenage girl in the shadows remained there. Sarah was next to Mrs. McKowen, who sat the now calm Mary in her lap. Edward sat in a chair near the TV. I noticed that he miscalculated social distances, and it was an impediment to his charm. He was either too close or too far away. Eighteen inches, I read once, was exactly the right distance, but he seemed never there, even metaphorically. Now he was mostly far and still.

“Do you want to say hi to your visitors?” said Mrs. McKowen to the toddler. “You want to go to your new mama?”

“Mama?” said the little girl, and she twisted around toward the teenager still hanging back in the shadows. This sudden attention caused the teenager to disappear entirely. And that’s when it became clear that the teenage girl was the one raising this child. Mrs. McKowen was taking in the support money, and the teenager, who perhaps had no life beyond this faux motherhood, was about to have her heart broken in a new and different way for teenagers. “Mama?” cried Mary again, looking in the direction of the dark kitchen. I guessed that the girl had secretly, quietly encouraged Mary to call her “Mama.”

“Hey, baby?” began Sarah, ingratiatingly, and the little girl looked at Sarah.

Thus began their tentative approaches toward each other. Each was playful and affectionate. Sarah scootched closer and made her fingers crawl like a spider up the little girl’s arm. The little girl smiled and hunched her shoulders up by her ears and said, “Neck,” indicating that she both did and didn’t want to be tickled there, so Sarah both did and didn’t, getting the mix just right. And soon Mary was on Sarah’s lap and playing with her watch and touching her opal earrings and Sarah was making the goofy sounds and talking in the high-pitched agitated and ingratiating voice that adults around babies did naturally if ridiculously because look, see, it worked.

The hovering teenage girl in the doorway seemed to step backwards, into an actual engulfing shadow or perhaps a china closet. This seemed to loosen the tongue of Mrs. McKowen, who began to exhibit that midwesternism of tone that was the opposite of what was typically aimed for even in a city like Troy, where friendly things— Hello, Can I help you? — were said with acerbity and anger in the cadence. Here, as in the country where I grew up, very provocative things were said with an innocuous lilt. Tone was all. Gift wrap was all. Perfect the wrap, and you could put whatever you wanted in the box. You could put firecrackers. You could put dog shit.

“So,” said Mrs. McKowen, “have you met the birth mother?”

“Yes,” said Sarah.

“And you’re sure you want that woman’s child?”

Edward began to cough. “Excuse me — is there a bathroom I might use?”

“Why do you say that about the birth mom?” asked Sarah.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Mrs. McKowen. “I guess, well, the lady’s not the sharpest tool in the shed.

“Washroom’s around the corner,” she said to Edward.

Edward got up, turned the corner, and abandoned us.

“She wants to go back to school,” said Sarah.

“Sikhool,” repeated Mary.

“Yes, school,” cooed Sarah.

“Yes, school,” said Mrs. McKowen, sighing. “She’s always talking about that.”

“You see her often?”

“Well, it’s a requirement of Catholic Social Services that she come here to visit the child once a month. Creates an opportunity for bonding, which they don’t want to be accused of having deprived her of. Also an opportunity for change of heart. Which I don’t see coming about in any complete way.” She paused. “You believe her story about the rape?”

“What rape?”

“Lynette?” called Mrs. McKowen, and her loud voice caused the toddler to burst into tears. “Could you come feed Mary? It’s getting to be on towards lunch.”

The teenage girl stepped out from the shadows and toward the baby, who burst into a watery smile at the sight of her.

“Lynette, this is Sarah and … her people,” she said with a vague wave toward me and toward Edward, who had just returned from his quick pee.

“Hi,” said Lynette, and she picked the baby up and away from Sarah, settling her easily on her blue-jeaned hip, then took her out of the room. That was that.

“She didn’t tell you she was raped?” said Mrs. McKowen. Now that the baby was gone there was a certain force in the question.

“No,” said Sarah.

“Hmm,” said Mrs. McKowen.

“Maybe she wasn’t.”

“Maybe not.”

“Maybe she just wanted an excuse for what she was doing.”

“Maybe. Don’t see how that works, though,” said Mrs. McKowen, who then said no more, and soon she stood, walked to the door, and opened it.

We left, looking for lunch.

“Let’s see, where shall we go? It’s early, so we should miss the crowds.” Sarah turned on the car radio. The radio was on some sort of soul station and was playing a rap song with extreme female moaning in the background. “You gotta do it, roll it, run it, up it, down it. Gotta do it, roll it, run it, rock it …”—a conjugation of every sort. Edward flicked the radio off disdainfully. But Sarah turned it back on. “Sex is the only good thing the world has given them. At least listen to it.”