Lorrie Moore - A Gate at the Stairs

“Did it win?” I squeaked out again into the sharp silence of the car — but no one said anything. Edward was a scientist and so was used to heading straight into the unanswering darkness with his climate-controlled car. Snow began to fall. Large snowflakes in a lazy swirl, the flutter of ballerinas down a spiral staircase — a classic snowfall, one for the movies, one to bag and sell. For driving, however, it was a scary fairyland. Still, it was hypnotic to watch, and soon a great fatigue came over me, and after some time I thought I heard Edward say something and then Sarah’s voice say very quietly, “Well, all sex is a form of rape. One could argue.” And then she added, “Please, in this weather, don’t drive with one hand.” I looked out the window and saw a white convertible sailing past us with the bumper sticker GUILT SUCKS: HAVE SOME FUN! The driver was a little white-haired lady hunched scowlingly over the wheel. “Did you hear me?” asked Sarah, and Edward’s middle-aged face turned slightly, tensed with an adolescent’s wordless hate. He appeared to continue to steer with his right hand lightly holding the bottom of the steering wheel, his other hand shoved defiantly and absurdly in his pocket. At Sarah’s request I turned on the radio, which filled the car with a soft murmur. “How many teams with a dome for their home field have won the Super Bowl?” it was saying. “And now here is Luigi Boccherini’s ‘Festival in C’!” We passed through the marshland village of Luck, whose municipal welcome sign read YOU’RE IN LUCK. And though on leaving I spied no sign saying NOW OUT OF LUCK, every aspect of it soon was implied. Edward had taken a wrong turn, and we had to turn around and go back through the town. YOU’RE IN LUCK another sign again said, and I imagined a horror movie wherein we never found our way out of this town, and kept driving back into it again, its greeting a maddening taunt.

Eventually, I must have fallen asleep, and when I awoke there was an achy pinch in my neck. The car engine was off and we were in front of Edward and Sarah’s house. “It’s good to come in the front door with a new baby,” Sarah was saying to Edward. “There’s a superstition about bringing a baby in the back. Plus, it’s politically incorrect.”

“There’s not a soul around,” said Edward. I looked at my watch: midnight. I was feeling like a sleepwalker, needed at this point only for whatever I could help carry into the house from the car, and so I found myself lugging Mary-Emma’s plastic trash bag of cheap plush toys as well as a grocery bag of miscellaneous snacks for the car, which had neglected to announce themselves — Ritz crackers, Nutri-Grain bars, a plastic six-pack of flavored water — and so were entirely unopened. The carseat Mary-Emma was in was a newfangled double one, with an interior upright seat set within another, and so the insert could be lifted out with Mary-Emma still in it. Edward managed the awkward weight of this with just a little tug, and Mary-Emma stirred only slightly while Sarah clawed in her bag for the house keys. We pushed in past the gate, Edward fussing with the broken hinge, and stepped carefully down the steps then back up the porch stairs to the front door. Everything in this January night possessed a lunar stillness and a lunar thrill. You could see the earth from here!

Inside the house Sarah headed for the dining room, turning on two small lamps as she went. Edward placed the sleeping Mary-Emma on the table, still in her seat, her snowsuited legs and arms dangling off, her chin sunk into her collar. She’d had a big day, whether she knew it or not.

“Well,” said Sarah, looking at her.

“Yes, well,” said Edward.

Sarah was still wearing her yarn cap with the earflaps and the dangling pom-pom ties, and she took the right pom-pom and tossed it around her head like a tether ball. It made a muffled cable-knit thwack against her head. “Now what?” she said.

We all might have burst into hysterical laughter, and we probably would have if a sleeping child weren’t propped in the middle of the dining room table, next to two candlesticks, a Stangl sugar bowl, and some salt and pepper shakers. Adoption, I could see, was a lot like childbirth: Here she is! everyone exclaimed. And you looked and saw a pickled piglet and felt nothing, not realizing it would be the only time you would ever feel nothing again. A baby destroyed a life and thereby became the very best thing in it. Though to sit gloriously and triumphantly in ruins may not be such a big trick.

“Well, I should take Tassie home, is what,” said Edward.

“And leave me here all alone?” Sarah said in mock terror, still in her goofy hat. “You must be joking.” She clutched his sleeve.

“ You must be joking,” said Edward.

“I am. I’m joking,” said Sarah.

Sort of , I thought. And then she said it herself.

“Sort of.” She smiled. There was a flash of mutual disgust between them.

Then Edward drove me back to my apartment. “Thank you for helping us on this very complex mission.”

“You’re very welcome,” I said. What else was there to say?

“We’ll see you in a couple of days. I’m sure Sarah will phone very soon.”

“Sounds good,” I sang out into the dark of the car. Sounds good , that same midwestern girl’s slightly frightened reply. It appeared to clinch a deal, and was meant to sound the same as the more soldierly Good to go , except it was promiseless — mere affirmative description. It got you away, out the door. Once again.

Classes did not start until the following week. But nonetheless I could feel the semester winding itself up as if with the hand crank of a Gatling gun, readying itself for unleashing. The spring semester! It was both aptly and inaptly named. Since it had not yet officially begun, I slept until noon, then woke and made a sad little breakfast of poor man’s baklava: a large biscuit of shredded wheat with honey poured over and chopped peanuts sprinkled on top. The kitchen was still in its state of neglect. More strawberries in the refrigerator, which it seemed I had only just bought, had once again withered, turned this time the turquoise-gray of a copper roof. The bread, too, had a powdery blue mold that would have made a lovely eyeshadow for a showgirl — perhaps one who also needed the penicillin. The heel end of another loaf, weeks old, was sitting on the counter in a plastic bag with what looked like a snake inside: a coil of mold with orange and black markings. It was the Frugal Girls’ Museum of Modern Art.

The landlord had returned to not stinting too badly on the heat. Happiness. In the mail a check came from Sarah for three hundred dollars — it seemed both too much and too little, but I did not actually bother to calculate the hours and what the pay should have come to. I went to the bank and deposited the check and took back a hundred of it in twenties to spend on new books and food. I sat in my apartment with the most inane sorts of magazines, all left there by Murph, which I read with an avidity and dementia typically brought on by hair salons and winter. “Four Things Men Find Hot.” I could never find all four — they were seldom listed numerically or in a conspicuous place. Once you had the magazine open, you had to dig around among the ads (which was their ploy), trying to find them scattered there, and even when you did they were always in slight disguise. Clearly no one at any of these magazines knew for sure what men found hot, though they were hoping you would believe they did. Or maybe everyone at these New York City magazines knew only gay men, and so the things they knew that men found hot they were afraid to actually tell their readers.

Surprise seemed a theme.