Lorrie Moore - A Gate at the Stairs

“What?

“You just rammed into me a little and stepped on my toe.”

“Sorry. I’m sure our car rental agreement covers it.”

“Yeah,” said Sarah, sighing. “Darling, remember when we murdered someone and American Express took care of everything?”

That same joke! But Edward wasn’t smiling. A shadow passed between them. A sepia tinge came over Sarah’s eyes. A horse-drawn sled jingled its harness bells off in the distance: this town would turn winter into a holiday if it killed them. “The family that sleighs together stays together,” Sarah murmured to me. Or, that is what I thought I heard, though there was no levity in her voice. She took one hand briefly away from Mary to squeeze mine in reassurance. Or in promise. Or in regret. Or in happy hope. Or else in some secret pact that involved a little bit of everything.

Julie came back bearing a white plastic trash bag, which she jammed into the backseat with me, Sarah, and baby Mary. She got in the front, with Edward, and came with us, as she technically, as of the moment, was the custodial parent.

Edward was fussing with the heater. “A car that controlled the outside weather as well — now, that would be climate control,” he was saying.

“Hey, baby,” Sarah kept murmuring. “Hey, baby, baby.” She turned to me and in a stage whisper said, “You know at my age, your estrogen starts dwindling and you cannot speak to anyone in a civil voice. But then a baby comes along and look how one speaks.”

Civil, but not civil ized.

“All the irritation is borne away,” she added.

For now , I thought, like a scary dummy in one of those horror films in which the ventriloquist goes mad.

“I’d like to keep Mary as her name—”

“Mary,” said Mary, brightening at the sound of her own name. It was the only name around her that stayed constant. There were now once again all these new names of new people for her to learn.

“But I’m going to add Emma to it. I’ve always loved the name Emma.” I could see in Sarah’s face the look of a chef taking charge of her own kitchen.

“Mary-Emma?” asked Julie from the front seat, her voice one of professionally maintained neutrality — barely.

“Yes, Mary-Emma,” said Sarah dreamily. “And then Bertha, after my grandmother: Mary-Emma Bertha Thornwood-Brink. I’m afraid she’s going to be one of those children with too many names.” I knew them from my freshman year: the trainlike names that were like a bulletin board of parental indecision, obligation, genetic pride, misplaced creativity, and politics of every sort. Even Murph had a legal name so long that her great-uncle was stuck in there somewhere. Sarah was massaging Mary-Emma’s hand. Mary-Emma was dozing off in the car — she’d had an intense day already. “Oh, I suppose people will think we should name her Maya or Leontyne or Zora, something that honors the heritage of black women. And of course I will educate her in all of that. But I love the name Emma.”

“As long as we don’t name her Condoleezza,” said Edward from the front seat, “I will be a happy man.”

“Mary-Emma,” said Julie, staring straight ahead through the windshield and offering no further comment. A navy blue dusk was descending on us, although it was only four in the afternoon. “You take a right up here,” she said, directing Edward.

“Thanks,” he said, flashing Julie a smile that seemed to beg her for connection.

Sarah from the back noticed and yet didn’t. There was a long period of wordlessness in which she was just lightly, protectively petting the sleeping arm of sweet-faced Mary-Emma. Finally Sarah said out loud, to no one in particular, “I wonder if there are any Hitlers in the phone book.”

Back in the Adoption Option office, there were small stacks of papers to sign. Roberta greeted us heartily, admired the baby, then took Julie only slightly aside.

“How’d things go with the McKowens?”

“A scene at the door, I’m afraid.”

“I was worried about that. They’d left some angry messages on the answering machine. Well, they have no parental rights. I don’t know what they think they’re doing.”

“They’d just had her so long, they’d grown attached, I think,” said Julie. She was still holding the white plastic bag. She handed it to me. “Here is Mary’s stuff. Or Mary-Emma’s. Excuse me. The McKowens had Christmas with her, and they got her some things. Clothes in general belong to the foster-care system. Except the ones the child is wearing.”

“We bought some at Sears. Do we sign here?” Sarah turned to ask both Suzanne and Roberta.

“Here,” Edward said, indicating, and they resumed their reading and signing. And then the strangest: they were writing checks, separate checks.

“Edward and I are splitting this down the middle,” said Sarah. She was scribbling something on a scrap of paper, doing the arithmetic. “We like things to be even between us.” She paused, then murmured, “Though usually they’re not even — just odd.” No one laughed. “Oh, well.”

“The legal fee is billed into the total, but you’ll receive a separate receipt for that in the mail.” Roberta, too, looked with surprise at the separate checkbooks. “The payment for foster care is also included.”

Sarah was directing Edward: “Nine thousand one hundred twenty-seven and fifty cents,” she said quietly, but it might as well have been shouted from the rooftop.

“Does Bonnie get nothing?” asked Edward.

“You can get her a watch,” said Roberta. “No money. That’s illegal in this state.”

Sarah put her hand on Edward’s arm. “We’ll get her a really nice watch,” she said.

I peered inside the plastic trash bag. It was amazing to me that you could still be the tiniest thing and have stuff. On the other hand, it also amazed me that there was so little of it, and so it seemed sad that a human being was going through the world accumulating all this needless crap and yet also pathetic that this was all she had. She herself neither knew nor cared, I was sure. Inside the bag there was a stuffed yellow caterpillar, a green blanket, some plastic blocks with letters on them, a cardboard animal alphabet puzzle, a stuffed monkey in a little denim leisure suit.

“Congratulations,” said Roberta. “You have yourself a beautiful baby.”

“And no drugs ,” added Suzanne in a kind of happy hiss. “That’s excellent.”

In the rental car on the way home back to Troy, Sarah sat vigilantly in the back next to Mary-Emma, who was soundly asleep in the carseat Edward and Sarah had purchased at Sears, along with clothes, during my nap. “Well, we’ve done it,” said Edward. “The future’s going to be a little different now. We’ve now got a horse in the race.”

There was a long pause, our tires hitting the gray slosh of the road. For driving, a January thaw was always preferable to actual ice, but when it was over things froze more treacherously than before. And in its melting and condensing the roadside snow turned to clumps reminiscent of black-spotted cauliflower. Better never to have thawed. “I once went to the track,” mused Sarah. “I was eleven and I went with my uncle, who came with all these statistics on the horses — a stack of papers the size of a phone book. He was poring over them, figuring out which horse to bet on, and I said, ‘Uncle Joe, look, there’s a horse named Laredo and I have a dog named Laredo.’ And my uncle just looked at me and put his papers away and said, ‘OK, let’s bet on that one.’ And so we did.”

“Did it win?” I asked from the front seat. Edward seemed already to know this story. He continued along the bleak winter road. What was it — was it Doppler radar? — that involved the difference in pitch between the leading end and the trailing end of the reverberation? I had taken a physics course last year with a short unit on sonar.