Lorrie Moore - A Gate at the Stairs

As did things with food.

As for the clothing depicted in these pages, I was at a bored loss. It seemed uncool to spend that much money to look like an experimental cake. What would be cool was something different: more murderous, and not depictable. From what I could see, the best look would involve not just something new, but something with insouciant jewelry and ominous leather goods denouncing something old that lay deep within yourself and others. Probably I would never accomplish this. Without explicit instruction I had no feel or instinct, at least not for the new part. I felt, however, that if called upon, I could do the other part — denunciation — but privately. Privately part cool, since I partook of denouncing (silently, violently) all the time.

For several days I let drift take over me. I turned on my computer and aimlessly roamed the Internet. I would click this and then that and pretty soon I was looking at stock car racing or Demi Moore’s bare pre-op breasts. A billion ads for herbal remedies and computer security systems flew onto the screen. I took on-screen Oscar quizzes. I googled old friends from elementary school. Nothing. I googled Lynette McKowen. Nothing. I googled Bonnie Jankling Crowe, whose full name I now knew — illegally. Nothing again. I went back to Demi Moore’s bare pre-op breasts and wondered about the half-life of regret.

When I went to bed at night I suffered my first bout of insomnia. This is what death would be like, I feared: not sleep but insomnia. To sleep no more, as I had learned in Pre-1700 British Drama. I had never feared insomnia before — like prison, wouldn’t it just give you more time to read? I’d always been able to sleep. But now I lay there, fretful as a Bartók quartet. My mind wandered through the night hours uneasily, and it was indeed like prison: when the sky began to lighten, I was in disbelief and filled with terrible, buzzing tiredness.

Once I woke with the feeling that I had actually died in the night. I awoke with a sense that during ostensible sleep I had encountered not just life’s brevity but its speed! and its noise and its irrelevance and its close. How we glamorized our lives! our bodies! which were nothing more than — potatoes! with a potato’s flat eyes and pale pink snappable roots. I lay there in bed in a peaceful form of depression. In another town, one less antagonistic toward religion, this mood — pre-prayer, pre-God, pre-conversion — might have been assigned some spiritual significance. But for people in Troy, God was mind-clutter: a cross between a billboard, a charlatan, a hamburger, and a fairy king. I had always thought God was part of a sensible if credulous denial of death, one that made life doable. How could that be wicked? Why bother criticizing that? Why disparage the crutches of the lame? Why vainly imagine one’s own gait unhobbled? Besides, religion gave us swearing. Before Christianity, what was there? “By Jove”? But life in Troy was to be taken without any lucky charms of any sort. It was neo-reformation. The walls of my winter room seemed a silvery, quilted satin, like the interior of a coffin. I began to feel there was no such thing as wisdom. Only lack of wisdom.

Finally, Sarah phoned. “Tassie, how are you — it’s been days!”

“Days and nights,” I said stupidly.

“I’ll say,” she said. “Poor Emmie sobbed for two nights. She’d wake up at three in the morning and just cry and cry, poor thing. She would look out into the dark of her new room and just not know where she was. I would just take her and rock her back to sleep. But now I think she does understand and she seems to have settled right in. I am wondering whether you are free this afternoon? It’s time for me to check back in on my maniac restaurant and see how it’s doing.”

“Is Emmie her name now?” This seemed strange.

Sarah paused. “Well, we found ourselves using her initials right away — M.E. — and before we knew it, well, there we were with Emmie. It suits her, I think.”

“Does she still respond to Mary?” I asked, having no common sense.

“Well, I don’t really know,” said Sarah.

I did not mind the walk to their house. I walked briskly for the first time in days. The stadium in its arc was like a frozen tidal wave outside my apartment. The cold knocked the sleepiness from my head as well as my days-long, tortured hallucination of deep existential vision. The sky was partly clear, with ballooning clouds floating absurdly above, as if for a party that had yet to begin. Low on the horizon there were different clouds, like old plowed snow at the end of a street. I was like every kid who had grown up in the country, allowing the weather — good or bad — to describe life for me: its mocking, its magic, its contradictions, its moody grip. Why not? One was helpless before everything.

In the front of the house the gate at the stairs was still broken. I slipped through and on up to the porch. When I rang the doorbell no one came, and so I knocked with my knuckles on the glass pane of the thick wood door. Sarah opened it dressed in the Madame Curie look I soon learned she favored: a white lab-style coat and black tights. Her matte red lipstick lent a kind of movie version air of Madame: hard crimson elegance in the riverbed cracks of her lips. She didn’t want to look like the other chefs in town, with their country-hippie garb, scarves, and flowery print shirts. A restaurant was a science, she would tell me, not a square dance. Perhaps that was where she got it wrong.

“Here, come try this,” she said, leading me into the kitchen. The appliances there were of the mammoth stainless steel variety that one did not yet see in Dellacrosse except in the back rooms of feed stores and supermarkets. The cold gray metal of the stove and refrigerator I knew was supposed to be chic, but I preferred the old avocado green of home (not yet a song). On the gleaming stove was a skillet of a paler metal, like white gold. In it were some silvered leaves. She picked one out with her fingers and presented it. I placed it in my mouth, where it seemed to melt slightly and then not, hanging on with a woody toughness. The flavors were a mix of candy store and forest.

“What is it?” I asked, still chewing.

“Caramelized sage.” She looked at me hopefully.

“Awesome,” I said, and meant the word in its every meaning.

Sarah beamed. “There’s a direct path between earth and heaven, and that is caramel,” she said. “Add a few grains of hand-raked Norman sea salt — and voilà!”

So this is what Americans were busying themselves with in Normandy now that it had been liberated from the Nazis: hand-raking the sea salt. Soldiers’ tears shipped thousands of miles and sprinkled on a fried leaf. Look D-Day in the eye and tell it that!

“Delicious. Am I the first customer?”

“You are,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“Mind?—”

“Oops — and I forgot about these.” She opened the oven and with a terry-cloth potholder took out a couple of picture books. “These are from the library. I baked them to get rid of the germs. I always do that with library books. I’m told you can microwave the germs out, but I don’t completely trust that.”

I looked at the titles: Lentil and Make Way for Ducklings.

“I love these books … these were my favorites growing up. When I opened my first restaurant in Boston I called it Make Way for Duckling.” Here she shrugged. “It was not a success,” she said ruefully.

“Perhaps you should have gone with Lentil,” I suggested.

She smiled. “Actually, I did. I tried that one next.”

“Oh,” I said, a little startled. “Well, how about Blueberries for Sal?”

“You don’t want to know,” she said.