Lorrie Moore - A Gate at the Stairs

Sarah looked at me with sudden searching concentration. It was a look I was coming to know and it was one I felt inside of me often, a feeling of aghast but childlike scrutiny: it said, Why are there more space aliens on this planet than there used to be? Or are we the space aliens and are the human beings, uh-oh, coming back?

“Yes,” she said slowly, then picked up speed as if snapping herself out of a daze. “Well, I guess all towns sort of drink their own bathwater. But they don’t all have cruelty-free tofu! I’m going to get a support group going, and I’m going to bring families of color into this home, and we are going to discuss things and pool our strengths and share our stories and plot our collective actions and all that shit. Would you supervise the children?”

“What children?” I knew that the owner of the Moroccan restaurant on Wendell had children. Would they come? Last October someone had shot up the restaurant sign with actual bullets, then ripped it off and rebolted it upside down.

“The hypothetical children. The ostensible children. The imagined children. That kind.” She smiled.

“Sure,” I said.

“Tassa hair up ’n’ down,” said Mary-Emma, still playing with it as if it were silky string.

And so the weekly meetings got their start. Every Wednesday evening I would be upstairs with the children: Mary-Emma, two four-year-olds named Isaiah and Eli, a five-year-old named Althea, and a girl named Tika, who was eight and who sometimes helped me with the little ones and other times just sat in a corner and read Harry Potter. Often other families would make an appearance: an Ethiopian doctor and her sons, a seventh-grade boy named Clarence and a fourth-grader named Kaz. There was an Adilia, a Kwame, and more. They were mostly “of color,” as was said by all the adults downstairs, a range of shades from light to dark, though most of the parents downstairs, I noted, were white. Most were the transracial, biracial, multiracial families Sarah and Edward knew thus far in Troy, and probably more would be recruited. Upstairs I built Lego forts with the kids, or thought up little hiding games or wrestled or sang. Their voices were boisterous and fun and, being kids, they had their own words: “Nanana-booboo, you can’t catch me,” they would tease one another. The way in which the play-taunts of children resembled the calls and cries of animals was interesting to me. Only once did Sarah summon me downstairs to help her make a quick emergency dessert for the group: we microwaved the peach baby food and spooned it as hot puree over ice cream. “We used to eat this in Dellacrosse all the time,” I said, changing the facts slightly.

“Really!” said Sarah.

“Yes. Sort of. It was better than some old raisin cream pie — pudding and pits we called that pie.”

“Pits?”

“My mom always bought cheap raisins with the stems still on and poking out.” I continued dripping the hot peach liquid on the little scoops of ice cream, which had been dug out of the carton with a melon baller. Naked, they looked ready for ping-pong.

Everyone, except the children, exclaimed over the dessert’s deliciousness.

“You can just eat the ice cream,” I told the kids upstairs.

And amid the shared stories of public school biases and gang statistics and the strange comments of acquaintances, remarks would waft up through two floors, out of interest and earshot for the kids, but if I strained I could hear.

“… and I walked into the school for the conference and there was the teacher shaking Kaz and banging his head against the wall …”

“… institutionalized bigotry can subtly convince you of its rightness. With its absurdity removed, its evil can compel …”

“And even the adults pat her hair as if it’s the funniest thing they’d ever seen on a mammal … and of course available for public patting, like a goat in a zoo …”

“There’s a great woman on the south side who does hair …”

“Of course homework is just a measure of the home! And so the kids of color will always fall behind …”

“The African-American peer group is the strongest and the Asian-American is the weakest — that is, Asian-American parents have power that African-American parents do not.”

“School is white. And school is female. So it’s the boys of color who have the hardest time, and if they’re not into sports the gangs will lure them in …”

“I guess we sort of knew that already, but still.”

“It’s all so unfair.”

“Where are the reparations for slavery, or for the Indians, who got some of the money back, just not a lot of the land.”

“I don’t think the casinos count.”

“Oh, baby, they count.”

“You know, there are people in our department sitting on piles of inherited money who object to a black person making five thousand dollars more than they do. ‘It’s the principle,’ they say, and you just don’t know where to begin with that one.”

“You know, the Jews got reparations from the Nazis, but who got the actual money? Well-to-do Jewish grandchildren who hardly need it at all. In Ohio and Brazil there are grandchildren of Nazis who are truly destitute …”

“All right, where are we now? How did we get onto this?”

“What?”

“Would anyone like more wine?”

“At this point we could use a little gin …”

“Well, even the Indians got a few casinos—”

“We discussed that already—”

“But no one in Africa or here ever received reparations from anyone …”

“Is that true?”

“Sonya Weidner’s working on that — aren’t you, Sonya?”

“Well, the Jews are working on that.”

“Really?”

“How the hell should I know?”

The nonverbal sounds were like wind — coming in rushes and then falling back. There were bursts of sinus explosions, which were what laughter was in winter, followed by low rumbles of sighing and dismay. There was the pouring of wine and the eating of hors d’oeuvres while trying to speak.

“Racial blindness is a white idea.” This would be Sarah.

“How dare we think of ourselves as a social experiment?”

“How dare we not?”

“How dare we use our children to try to feel good about ourselves!”

“How dare we not?”

“I’m in despair.”

“Despair is mistaking a small world for a large one and a large one for a small.”

“I’m sure that’s what I’m doing.”

There was a cawing sound that could have been a pack of dogs or geese returning or simply the radiators starting up.

“Let’s face it: we’re all living in a bubble of some sort — of every sort.”

“Look at the way banks are making loans these days. No matter how many times people watch It’s a Wonderful Life , they still don’t get it!”

The opinions downstairs were put forth with such emphasis and confidence, it all sounded like an orchestra made up entirely of percussion: timpani and cymbals and the bass notes of a piano. Even a snare drum would sound stuttery, feathery, and hesitant by comparison.

“You and your academic diversity! Diversity is a distraction.”

“Not in the Amazon, it ain’t. It’s glue. It’s the interlock of the interlocking pieces.”

“The Amazon! Is that where we are? Look, the whole agenda, like feminism, or affirmative action, is decorative. Without a restructuring of the class system, the whole diversity thing is a folly.”

“Oh, I see! A communist! A revolutionary who wants to challenge simple college admissions diversity as being unrealistic as a mechanism of social change. I love this. Let me come to your dacha next week and I’ll explain everything …”

“Another false dichotomy. Don’t you agree, Edward? Mo’s just setting up a false dichotomy? It doesn’t have to be diversity or socialism, affirmative action or class equality. One is easier to do, granted, and doesn’t cost anything.”