Lorrie Moore - A Gate at the Stairs

When I arrived for their Saturday-night date, Sarah said to me, “Don’t be afraid to rock Emma against your bare skin. Breast to cheek, belly to belly. I do it all the time. It soothes adopted children who haven’t been genuinely nursed.”

“OK,” I said.

“It’s a good thing you’re not actually nursing,” Edward said to Sarah. “You’d probably try to make a cheese.”

Sarah rolled her eyes. “He keeps thinking I’d make some boutique cheese!”

After they left, Mary-Emma and I spent the evening watching so many different toddler videos — baby songs and train stories — that she beamed with happiness every time the FBI warning came on at the start of a new cassette. I made cookies. I did my animal imitations. I gave her a bath and in the bathroom tried some of Sarah’s wrinkle tonic on my own chapped cheeks and then rubbed the extra into Mary-Emma’s knees, which were dusky and dry. There were also jars of cream made from Andean snails and lotions from Japanese sake; we stuck our fingers in and smoothed the little dollops into our arms.

And though she was too old, when her bedtime arrived, I lifted my shirt and bralessly rocked her to sleep in the upholstered glider in her room, both of us falling asleep there. When I snapped awake, there was a figure in the doorway: Edward. I pulled my shirt down groggily.

“We’re back,” he said quietly.

“Should I go home?” I asked.

“Not at all,” he said. “Make yourself at home in the guest room downstairs. Good night.”

And I placed Mary-Emma in her crib and crawled off downstairs to the second floor to sleep in my underwear. Edward again appeared in the doorway there. “All went well?” he asked, smiling.

“Yes,” I said, from under the covers.

“Well, good.” There was a long silence with a slowly fading smile in it — his. “Well, good night, then,” he said. Handsome is as handsome does , my mother used to say. Dashing dashes.

“Good night.” And when he left I got up and pressed the door tightly shut.

In the morning Mary-Emma dashed to all our rooms, newly, wordily singing, “Time-for-to-get-up my daddy. Time-for-to-get-up my mama. Time-for-to-get-up my Tassa.” Sarah made pancakes and we poured syrup on everything, even into our coffee. For stray minutes we seemed like a family, laughing and chewing. I felt included. We were all in this together.

But family life sometimes had a vortex, like weather. It could be like a tornado in a quiet zigzag: get close enough and you might see within it a spinning eighteen-wheeler and a woman.

“Thank you for our date night,” Sarah said to me when I left. Her face looked tired and drawn. With every new word or phrase Mary-Emma learned, one seemed subtracted from Sarah.

On the weekday mornings that I walked to the Thornwood-Brinks’ the sharp air turned my cheeks to meat — on one of Sarah’s menus lying on the counter I had once seen the phrase “beef cheeks”; maybe this was how they were made! My nose dripped profusely when I stopped at curbs and crosswalks. But when I kept moving — the snow so cold it squeaked like Styrofoam beneath my boots — single clear drops, like baubles, collected just inside my nostrils and dangled pendulously until I dabbed at them with a gray carnation of Kleenex that had died long ago in my pocket, never to wake again. Moreover, the dabbing caused the tissue to disintegrate further, and soon it was little more than crumpled, powdery ice against my nose. My too-thin socks, also, left my feet cold even in good boots. Why was it that here in Troy country girls had the thin cotton socks (from Home Dollar) and the suburban girls had the thick ones (J. Crew or L.L.Bean)? Was it that we just had bigger feet and no room in our shoes? Or did we not think of the weather as something separate from us, although we should have? Perhaps we accepted the weather as being us, weren’t terrified of it, carried around all its severity and storminess inside us, as a kind of defeatedness. Our outer veneer was thin and meek and weak — futility! — and part of our defeat. Our inner giving up, self-designed to simplify life, matched the outer, and left us merely dazed. Thus, the socks. And thus other things.

Edward was sitting alone at the kitchen table when I came in. His hands were pushed inside the green sweater sleeves of each opposite arm, like those of a girl trying to stay warm, but his hair — its mix of old road snow and smoke — gave him the steely look of the wise elder. The contradiction — the hair, the girlish hands-up-the-sleeves — was unusual to my eye, and if you studied it, perhaps some conclusions could be reached about the nature of his character, but I didn’t then appraise it with any purpose, and the look of him just seemed to produce a slightly odd and comic swirl of hybridity. On the sides his hair was receding and thinning, something you noticed more after a haircut, which I could see he’d recently had. The balding of men! I had once seen a documentary that traced the lives of ten boys from the age of seven on, and with every installment more and more scalp emerged on the subjects; the film, intended to examine the struggles of masculinity and social class, was one long glacial retreat of hair.

“Well, hello,” he said. “You come bearing a lovely warm perfume!”

The heat of the house quickly thawed every part of me but my toes.

“You’re not at the lab today?” I asked, listening not for his answer but upward, for any sound of Mary-Emma. I thought I heard a repeated bleating sound that could simply have been a plastic smoke alarm with a low battery.

“I was waiting for you,” he said.

“For me?”

“Waiting for you to get here so I could leave.” His hands came out of his sleeves.

“Am I late?”

“Not really,” he said. His expression was mysterious: a stern, amused indifference. The look of maverick science, perhaps! I knew the Mayo Clinic was showing some interest in his work. “Sarah’s working down at the Mill, as we say. She’ll be back at six. She thought even though it’s cold that you might bundle Emmie up and take her for a walk in the wagon. You’ll see there’s a red wagon on the front porch, which may work better than that stroller on the ice.”

“Yes, I saw the wagon coming in.”

“Good,” he said, fixing me with his gaze.

For a moment I was forced to study him back. His nose, bony and beakish in profile, was wider and tuberous when looked at straight on. His eyes were trying to do something with mine, but I wasn’t sure what. He seemed too old for our eyes to be doing anything. Not only had the years eaten their way into his hairdo, two prints of scalp astride a central silvery lock, but it seemed he had darkened the roots, perhaps with the shoe polish I’d seen at the bathroom sink upstairs. His shoes were always brown. Like Sarah’s, his hair was a production, of nature and art: it was as if his face had washed up on his head, like a tide, and left its mark, and then some artistic boy had come along to the same beach with a little paint.

“Sarah believes that babies should be aired,” he said finally. “She also believes in forcing hats on babies even when they’re screaming against it. She believes in doing this because they look so cute that way and we want a lot of cute pictures. Apparently.” He sighed. “And so we just shove the hats on.”

“Beauty is painful, as the supermodels say.”

“Right!”

The alarmlike bleating was intensifying. “Is that Mary-Emma?” I asked.

“Yes, that is. I’ll leave her to you.”

I went up to find her and behind me heard the back door shut, the car start and rumble out of the driveway and away.

Obviously I didn’t know how long she’d been crying. But her face was puffy and swollen, her cheeks fever-bright. The hot stink of diaper was in the air; she would need to be changed. “Hey, baby!” I chirped, and she swung her arms up to be lifted out of the huge crib.