Lorrie Moore - A Gate at the Stairs

“I’m not sure,” I said. “Garlic?” I knew people always lied about their perfumes and claimed it was soap, as if it were vanity to attempt more. Actually, I sometimes after showers dabbed on a kind of aromatic oil that Murph had given me for my birthday, a slim bottle called Arabian Princess. In the current world situation it seemed unwise to advertise this, in case I was mistaken for the mascot of Osama bin Laden, though I was pretty sure Murph had simply got it at the food co-op.

“Well, if you find out, let me know.”

“I think it’s from the co-op,” I said.

“Really? Well, I’ll sniff around there then.” Sarah picked Mary-Emma up and nuzzled her. “How was skating?”

“Good,” I said.

“Good!” repeated Mary-Emma.

“See how she’s really chattering and opening up!” said Sarah, giving her a kiss on the head. “She is, after all, two.”

“Good!” cried Mary-Emma again, and then she leaned out of Sarah’s arms to come back to me.

“Oh, you want to go to Tassie, do you?” said Sarah, and she let her go, passing Mary-Emma to me, some maternal hurt scurrying to hide behind her thin-as-a-piano-string smile. “You’ll really have to tell me the name of that perfume you’ve got on, if you remember it,” she said, sighing. “Otherwise, I could be arrested at the co-op for loitering.” Something was wrong — perhaps it was Sarah’s tight mouth: a choking wire that had somehow garroted me. I could not speak. A whole minute of silence passed between us. “Well,” she said finally, “I should let you go.” And she took back Mary-Emma, who began to squirm and fuss.

Classes began in a deep cold spell, a high of one-below for the week. This was more like the winter weather of memory. Cold burst into the room from a mere open kitchen drawer, forks and knives piled like icicles. Our landlord’s generous heat was nothing in the face of this. The stem of the doorknobs on the front door conducted the cold from outside so that even the inside knob froze the hand. Cold air seeped through the slits of the electrical sockets. Clothing pulled from the closet was chilly, and in the basement laundry room of our apartment house clothes that did not dry completely in the dryer emerged white with frost. A glass of water put on the nightstand at night might be ice by morning. One looked out through the window, when one could, through pointed icicles that were like the incisors of a shark; it was as if one were living in the cold, dead mouth of a very mean snowman. Kay, the woman upstairs who had no life, decided as an experiment to throw boiling water off the upstairs back porch. She let us know by paper notice slid under our doors that this would happen at eleven a.m. on Monday, and so the rest of us gathered and watched it hit the air in silence and come down as slow, quiet steam and slush. We’d been told it would turn instantly to pellets midair, but perhaps something in the water — chlorine, or the salts of the water softener — kept it from doing that. On the street, the wind was so bitter, it seemed to bypass cold and become heat. Breathing burned the nostrils. Cars on every block wheezed and gagged and would not start. The combination of the cold weather and dry indoor heating had caused the longer nails on my picking hand to weaken, crack, and break beneath the quick, stabbing the pink hammy skin below, so that my fingers bled and I had to bandage them before I went out.

And then it warmed just enough for a blizzard, followed by another, as if the prairie were in a hiccup. Winds howled in the chimneys and under eaves, knocking ice blocks from the roof. And then when the air was finally still, a stupor descended, induced by accumulated snowdrifts, which were banked against the sides of houses like a comforter thrown over to calm an agitated dog. There was in the air a cold resignation good for reading.

My Intro to Sufism was taught by a self-described “Ottomanist,” which made me think of someone lying back with his feet up on a padded footstool, with a remote, in autumn. He looked charmingly rattled and had his arm in a sling. He was Irish, and he spoke in the airy r ’s and staccato of County Brokencanencork, as Murph liked to refer to the entire country of her forebears. “For those of you who are in any way concerned about my teaching the class,” said the professor, “believe me: I know more about this topic than anyone in this department. And for those of you concerned about my teaching while on painkillers for my arm, believe me: I also know more about teaching while high than anyone else in this department.”

I sat next to a tall, handsome brown-skinned boy, who smiled at me and then sent me a note, as if we were in high school. What am I doing in this class? he wrote. I am Brazilian. What are you?

I didn’t know what I was in this particular context. I wrote back on his sheet of paper, I am a quasi Jew. What am I doing here?

I don’t know , he wrote back.

In capital letters I wrote, WHAT IS THE BEST WAY TO KILL MYSELF? WOULD A PEN TO THE NECK BE QUICK? Then passed it back.

He read it and beamed, smothering a laugh that brought forth a slight snort. The professor, who was speaking, looked glancingly in our direction and then away. The boy next to me wrote in all capital letters: YOU DEFINITELY SHOULD NOT BE IN THIS CLASS.

I’m not sure what Sufism is , I wrote back. I slid him the paper.

I’M NOT SURE WHAT WINTER IS , he wrote once more in all caps.

Welcome , I scrawled. Usually it’s not this warm —a reversal of the old local joke. Usually it’s not this cold , we used to say to visitors during a midwinter thaw.

WHAT???!!!!! he wrote with great energy.

I feel that mysticism isn’t really happening here in this course , I wrote.

IT ISN’T.

Are you quasi mystic? I wrote.

I’M PESSI-MYSTIC , he wrote back, AND OPTI-MYSTIC. BOTH.

After class, I went home and with my earphones on picked around on my electric bass, pressing my fingers into the steel strings, toughening my calluses. I loved “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” which I referred to as “Mozart.” I played and sang aloud over and over again the line “How I wonder what you are,” which without any audible accompaniment, to Kay-with-no-life upstairs, I knew sounded like the mad howling of a simultaneously sexed-up and brutally injured alley cat. She had already told me this. Honoring the classics, I apparently nonetheless sounded undone in agony. When I felt finished, when I felt expressed and spent, I found an old pack of Murph’s Marlboros and smoked one in front of the bathroom mirror, blowing the smoke up and out, and turning my head slowly this way and that as I did. In the dim lights I did not look so bad.

Sarah and I made one trip to the courthouse, to pick up copies of the provisional adoption papers from the judge’s office. After six months they would be signed and Mary-Emma would officially be Sarah’s. And Edward’s. Until then she was in their foster care. On our way in we passed a bench in the corridor on which sat a row of young boys awaiting hearings of various sorts. Some of the boys were as young as nine. They were all black. We carried Mary-Emma past them and they all looked at her and she at them, everyone entranced and baffled. In the judge’s office the clerk and envelope were waiting for us. Sarah took the envelope with a smile. “Is this your other daughter?” the clerk said of me.

“Twenty’s a cute age,” Sarah said to me later in the car home.

Once she and Edward asked me to stay overnight, like a bona fide nanny, and I said OK. They were going to have a date night together and would be out late, so my just staying over would be the most civilized thing. This worry about civilization seemed tardy for just about everyone. “Sure,” I said.