Lorrie Moore - A Gate at the Stairs

From upstairs came a whimper, then a full cry. Sarah hadn’t shown me around the house, so I had to find the staircase myself. There were actually two staircases, side by side, meeting at a windowed landing midway, and then they merged and became one, going the rest of the short way up, where a plastic gate, suction-cupped to the wall, blocked one’s path. I stepped over it with a kind of scissors kick and then made my way toward the cry. I passed a bathroom with walls painted the pale brown of a paper bag; on the sink was an assortment of prescription pills in their vials, as if someone were collecting beads, getting ready to make a necklace. I passed a bedroom with a mission bed that had perhaps failed at its mission, and a cherry dresser that perhaps had not. Atop it was a jewelry box with the phyllo thin drawers of a beekeeper’s hive.

The baby’s room as promised appeared to be on a higher floor yet, the door to which at first I could not find. The crying was at the west end of the house, but when I opened doors to find a staircase I found only closets. There was a short pause and then full-scale wailing began.

It was maddening trying to figure out how to get to it. I wandered in and out of the rooms in a low-level panic that prevented me from taking full notice of them, though they seemed both elegantly pastel and cluttered to my darting, searching eye. At the east end of the hall, on the left, I saw an open doorway. I lunged toward it, found yet another stairwell gate locked in place. But the actual wooden door was swung wide open, so I stepped over that gate, too, onto steps thickly carpeted in dull earwax gold. Through a tiny window at another landing, framed in the cross pieces, I could see spiny winter treetops and telephone wire. The staircase wound around, and then there it was, the nursery spread out beneath the eaves. The angled ceilings and walls were painted a pale wheat yellow, like a chablis, and at the windows at either end of the space hung curtains of sheer white over heavy, room-darkening shades. A double nightlight in lurid orange plugged up the electrical socket just to the left of a changing table and dresser. Emmie’s white crib, with its Winnie-the-Pooh bumpers and bedding, was in the far corner, and she was standing, clinging to its rail. In the short time that I’d not seen her, her silky black hair had fallen out and in its stead tight, blondish-brown curls were growing in, the start of an afro, really. It looked almost like a wig. When she saw it was me, her crying momentarily stopped in wonder.

“Hey, Mary-Emma,” I said, returning her, at least halfway, to her former name. She looked at me, then resumed wailing. But when I went to lift her out of the crib, she was eager, and clung to me and quieted down. She was warm and soft and smelled of powder and pee. I took her to the changing table, where she lay passively. I pulled off her balloon-print trousers and disposable diaper, which was made of a soft, strangely layered paper I’d never seen before and which peeled away from her pink-brown bottom like the paper from poultry giblets. The room was dark from the still-drawn shades, and the air was moist from a humidifier. I fumbled around on the shelf over the changing table for a plastic box of wipes and accidentally knocked it to the floor.

“Uh-oh!” said Emmie. She already knew both the sound and the language of things going wrong.

“It’s OK,” I said. The wipes were in a heater, and so the falling was loud. Luckily none of the wipes came out and the heater light stayed on, so I assumed nothing was broken. Heated wipes! I know my own mother would be appalled by such things. As a baby, I would have gotten the chilly wipes of winter, or frozen dabs with unheated cotton balls, or a quick tepid washcloth, if I was lucky. My mother probably soothed my diaper rash with ice cubes from her soda glass. Still, I did not feel sorry for myself. I felt sorry for Mary-Emma and all she was going through, every day waking up to something new. Though maybe that was what childhood was. But I couldn’t quite recall that being the case for me. And perhaps she would grow up with a sense that incompetence was all around her, and it was entirely possible I would be instrumental in that. She would grow up with love, but no sense that the people who loved her knew what they were doing — the opposite of my childhood — and so she would become suspicious of people, suspicious of love and the worth of it. Which in the end, well, would be a lot like me. So perhaps it didn’t matter what happened to you as a girl: you ended up the same.

Once Mary-Emma was changed and sprinkled piney and dry with some silky herbal rice starch, I carried her downstairs, stepping awkwardly over the plastic baby gates. I found myself saying “Wheeeee!” and “Upsy-oopsy.” Mary-Emma just looked at me with neutral interest. It was a look I’d forgotten and never saw anymore in grown people. But it was the best. It was fantastically engaged: scholarly, unjudging, and angelic. We stood on the landing, deciding which staircase to descend. “Which one?” I asked her. “This one?” Ah, once more: the uncertainty of the adult world. And she thrust out her arm and pointed toward the one that led to the kitchen. She knew her way around already, or was at least acting like it for purposes of displaying authority. I seemed to have little authority whatsoever but to be instead her happy maidservant. The tinier the child, the more you were the servant, I knew. Older children were more subservient, less queenly and demanding.

In the kitchen I sat Mary-Emma on the counter, then stupidly turned away for a second to open a cupboard door. Sitting there, she started to twist, and I lunged and caught her just as she was sliding off the shiny granite toward the floor. Her face seemed to smile and sob at the same time, a look that said That may be fun for some people but not for me , and I placed her securely on my hip, feeling the biceps in my arm already beginning to strengthen and my jutted hip on its way to socket stress and limpage.

“Let’s get you a snack. How does that sound?” I scanned the cupboard shelves. Had I eaten the best and sweetest of the baby food already myself?

“Oag cool,” she said, pointing at the freezer.

“Yes, it’s cool in there,” I said, still scanning the shelves. I looked in the refrigerator, where there were several bottles of water from Fiji. This was the first time I’d seen water from Fiji but not the last. I didn’t believe it was real. Selling water from Fiji seemed like a trick for the gullible, like bottled Alpine air at a carnival.

Mary-Emma’s legs began to kick, and her heel in my thigh was a soft spur. Would I not please giddyap? “Oag cool!” she repeated, still pointing.

I opened the freezer door and saw, amid the ice cube trays, chilling vodka, a plastic file folder, and a pound of ground coffee, what she wanted: frozen yogurt pops.

“Ah, OK,” I said, and pulled them out. I set her on the floor and then sat there myself and we both ate blackberry frozen yogurt pops and were happy. “Hmm, delicious,” I said.

“Dishes,” she repeated, creamy lavender all around her mouth, giving her the appearance of a struggling drag queen.

What a miracle food was. In case I had given her too much, I buried the wrappers in the trash.

When Sarah returned, Mary-Emma rushed to her and grabbed her around the leg. Sarah massaged her head. I provided a report, much of which I’d actually written out on notebook paper, with the times of Mary-Emma’s waking up and eating and playing. “She loves that frozen yogurt,” I said. “Hope it’s OK: I gave her, uh, a couple.”

“Oh, yes, that’s fine. I just hope they continue to make them! When I was little Dannon made this delicious prune yogurt that came in a waxy brown eight-ounce container. Well, now they don’t make any of those things. Completely gone. Although I was in Paris last year and found some there.”