Lorrie Moore - A Gate at the Stairs

“Tassa,” she said, as if reminding herself. She was needy and sweet. Her new life story, beginning here, would perhaps be a triumphant one. And when I picked her up and held her, she seemed something so very lovely and uncorrupted — no matter what terrible tale she had actually been plucked from.

Pulled steadily, the wagon bumped along the icy walk to Mary-Emma’s great glee. “Whoops-a-daisy,” I would say — the wagon would tilt and then fall back, or get stuck in a rut and need a sudden tug that would knock her back hilariously. She would giggle and exaggerate her own falling, leaning every which way in her new puffy pink snowsuit, a small drip of clear mucus appearing at her nose, which she would fetch with her tongue. If we stayed out too long her face would be chapped and as red as a radish. Even with her darkening skin. These kinds of details I was learning. When it seemed too cold I would look for inside venues. Up on the main street of the neighborhood I would take her to a supermarket that had handicapped access and let her race up the ramps, play with the electric doors, attempt hide-and-seek in the aisles. Or I would stop at the mattress store, wheel her in, and look over the place, the real idea being to let her run around and jump from bed to bed while I discussed springs and firmness with the salesman. He would sometimes look worried, seeing her leaping around. “Do you mind if she does that?” I asked hopefully.

“Oh, no,” he would say, but with a slightly sickened look on his face as out of the corner of our eyes we watched her bouncing and flopping and squealing.

Because the upcoming March Democratic primary was , in effect, the general election — since no Republican had been elected to city government, perhaps ever — the city plows spent much time in the weeks before the primary clearing the streets. In Dellacrosse we might have gotten some summer road repair in time for the fall showdown — PHIL POTT FOR CORONER (Dickens lives!) — since there the Republicans had a prayer. But here in progressive Troy, apparently, mass seduction by the incumbent had to happen early, and so the mayor resorted to assiduous snowplowing. The plows seemed to come from everywhere, with their front shovels angled like petrified fish lips. The scraping of metal on ice and then on the street surface itself set a steady metallic treble line to the low rumble of the trucks. In consideration of the spring soil and grass, Troy had also bought a truck that instead of salting the roads sweetened them with beet-sugar brine, and its drip along the streets looked like the trail of a sad thing with bad kidneys.

I took Mary-Emma up toward Wendell Street, which was the only street nearby with actual restaurants and stores and other businesses, probably nine establishments in total. It would have passed for the downtown of a tiny village, and I knew the sidewalks were more cleanly shoveled there. On Wendell we headed through the salted-to-slush ice toward the neighborhood branch of the public library. I would show her the children’s books, and despite Sarah’s preference for baked books, we would sit at a table near the radiator and read. Few people were on the street, but the ones we passed smiled at me, then looked at Mary-Emma and then back at me, their expressions not exactly changed but not exactly the same: upon seeing us together, our story unknown but presumed, an observation and then a thought entered their faces and froze their features in place.

But then a car on the opposite side of the street, full of teenagers, it seemed — I could not tell how old they were — slowed down and looked at us from across the lane. I kept going, headed for the library, but glancing back I noticed that the car had pulled into a side street and was now turning around, coming back down Wendell in the lane closest to me. It pulled up to the curb. A guy with a bright orange mohawk, a big silver ring in his brow, silver studs like cake decorations up the cartiliginous rim of his ear, and a thick black leather jacket that made him look as if he were wearing an expensive chair, leaned out the window. Two other boys were in the backseat — if taciturnity could kill! — and a very ordinary-looking brown-haired girl was at the wheel. I thought the mohawk guy was going to leer at me. Or maybe he would ask to see my breasts or shout that he wanted to put them in his mouth or maybe he would offer to do things with his studded tongue, lick me up, lick me down, suck me head to toe, or maybe he wanted my juicy lips on him or to tell me I had a fat ass but he liked fat asses or that I had a skinny ass but he liked skinny asses and wouldn’t I like to get my skinny ass or my fat one into this fine car with him and his friends so he could do all these fine things? Instead, he glared right at little Mary-Emma and shouted, “ Nigger! ”

Never before in my life had I understood so deeply what it meant not to believe one’s ears.

“My-kull!!” exclaimed the girl inside driving. The boys in the back snickered a little, and she swung the car away from the curb. The rear tire spun and flung snow into the wagon, which made Mary-Emma laugh at first and then, when the rock-frozen snow hit her face, made her cry. I hadn’t known any of this was possible in this town. Dellacrosse, perhaps — although I’d never actually heard it there — but here? Here was so proud of itself. Here was so progressive and exemplary. Here was so lockstep lefty. Here was so — white. The only color they knew here was the local one they took on for camouflage and convenience. If this were Salt Lake City, I knew, half the people here would have happily been Mormons. Instead, righteous and complacent and indistinguishable from one another, they were all members of the ACLU and the Freedom from Religion Foundation.

“Fuckers,” I found myself saying. I picked Mary-Emma up just to hold her, letting the wagon roll slightly away and bang into a parking meter. She was so swaddled in her giant slippery snowsuit that I could hardly hang on to her. But I carried her into the coffee shop we happened to be near and sat her on the couch by the gas fireplace and unzipped her snowsuit to warm her there. The log was fake and the fire rolled around it blue and cold as water — an ornamental fountain more than a hearth. Mary-Emma’s hair was damp and pressed to her head. Well, I would get her some hot chocolate. “Foggers,” she said to me, and then we both laughed. “Don’t say that, though,” I added, in warning.

“Oh, my God!” cried Sarah. “Oh, my God, oh, my God. That’s it, that’s it.” She began pacing around the kitchen after I told her what had happened. I did not repeat the actual word that My-kull had said but just used the phrase “the n -word.” I was holding Mary-Emma, who was playing with my hair, lifting it up and then letting it fall in my face, laughing when I would blow on it and make it move.

Sarah continued. “My God! Who knew this was possible in this city? At the little folk music festivals in the county parks in summer you see all kinds of mixed-race families. I thought this was the perfect town … OK, not perfect, but I thought this was the best possible situation for Emmie. I thought we would not be letting her down by bringing her here, and now I see my own naïveté.” The finger-raking of her hair, which had become familiar to me, began now with two hands.

“Perhaps if you are black, there is nowhere, really,” I said, thinking of the boy in Sufism, and Sarah just stared at me.

“I’m forming a support group. Don’t laugh.”

But I wasn’t laughing.

“I’m going to use the very mechanisms of this town against it — this goddamn self-satisfied town that …”

“That drinks its own bathwater!” I said, borrowing a Dellacrosse expression for Troy. It was a metaphor and not a metaphor and is what the outlying areas of the state all felt: that Troy was a piece of smug, liberal, recycling, civic-minded monkey masturbation. That it was gestural, trying to make itself feel good — which in Dellacrosse meant “better than everyone else.” That it wasn’t real. That was the true crime. Its lack of reality. Whatever that meant. Also, once a year some rural girl came to Troy for the weekend, drank too much, and ended up raped and beaten to death in some apartment or park.