Lorrie Moore - A Gate at the Stairs

But soon again the journey from crocus to daffodil to peony resumed. Flowers that intended to impress only bugs had accidentally enchanted not just me. Gardens began to emerge. Every third day there was a hot lemony sun, with the lawns starting to green from rain and melted snow. The fraternity boys started to wear shorts and the siberian violets blued the yards. Still, you could sometimes see, in a shady north corner, a small black-flecked pile of snow so solid and condensed it could not melt. It was as if it had changed, biochemically, into a new substance, like the silica on Mars that was the tag end of some water or other.

Wavy thickened tulip leaves had burst the beds and flopped down, still forming their tight bullety pods, but at an angle (only the largest tulips stayed straight, I said to Reynaldo, when kissing him; beneath him at night I was being taken to places so high and starry, I feared I was taking years off my life, the way astronauts are said not to live especially long). The early tulips were caught in leafy show, the petals still prayers sealed in a leprechaun’s clutch. St. Patrick’s Day came and went without even a single green beer to drink. My days were too busy and full, and without Murph — who seemed to have completely vanished except for the waxy smell of her unclean hairbrush still sitting there in the bathroom, along with her black dental floss and soap and an assortment of other items — what was the point of green beer?

My strolls with Mary-Emma kept me alert to gardens and the softness of the air. The hyacinths, with their gravity-defying construction — fat botanical bumblebees with their look-Mom-I’m-flying paraphysics, which in the presence of actual gravity showed the botch of this ambition — soon bloomed and tipped. Clumps of daffodils huddled near trees, and spring phlox pinkened the hills of the park. What in June would be weeds and brush were now forsythia and the starry purple spikes of bachelor buttons (surely never worn by any bachelor ever). If I went up alleyways to better view other people’s backyards, and if I didn’t pay too much attention to the motley assemblages of trash cans, the alleys seemed like Irish lanes, or at least pictures I’d seen of country roads in Kerry. I’d contemplate the surreal dangle of the bleeding hearts or the columbine with their tiny eccentric lanterns in the most hardscrabble places — close to warm concrete — sprouting skyward and groundward simultaneously. If no one was looking I’d pick one for Mary-Emma. As with a snapdragon blossom you could turn one into a little talking puppet. There was a delicate hinge like a jaw, which you could squeeze open and shut. You could do little mocking imitations of your mother in the truck at the farmer’s market. You didn’t even need to be sitting in an actual truck to do it.

“Look, Mary-Emma!” And she would. It was a beautiful thing, having a little girl in tow. Why hadn’t my own mother known? Perhaps there was too much winter permanently in our veins.

Mary-Emma would point toward the street sewers, seeing a raccoon scuttle in. “Cartoons down there!” she exclaimed.

Dwarf irises, bearded irises, and the first mosquitoes emerged simultaneously, each with their subtly striped gray-violet plumage. Where were the bearded dwarves to add semantic meat to the flowerbeds? Well, some yards did have ceramic gnomes in their yards à la Germany.

The strengthening light sparkled in the trees’ new leaves, and the thick bosomy smell of lilacs floated in waves across our various paths. The humid spice of honeysuckle hung over the garbage cans. I even met the threesome next door, who finally emerged after winter, looking very beautiful. The woman — I remembered her name was Catherine — smiled at Mary-Emma. And Mary-Emma did not smile back but hid behind my leg.

“She never says hi to me,” said the woman, Catherine. The two men had continued on ahead. “I hope it’s not because I’m white!”

I stared at this crazy, Satie-playing woman. “A lot of people she knows are white,” I did not say, “including her parents,” and so I said nothing but just watched as she trotted up ahead to be with her men.

In the Thornwood-Brink flowerbeds were the strangest blooms of all: tall leafless stalks crowned by purple floreted globes. They looked like probes, or sentries, or gaslights, or wands, the handsome goons of the garden. Allium, they were called, and in actuality were giant mutant chives. Their bulbs were like onions, and squirrel-proof, and they were supposed to be a kind of accent flower, but Sarah had planted them thickly all around the house in a kind of fierce, orchardlike fence, as if to enhance TV reception.

“Look at this!” exclaimed Sarah at the front door, pulling a printed sheet of paper from her mailbox. “The plant nazis are back! Apparently I have buckthorn and nipplewort in my yard and they would like me to get rid of them pronto! You know, the thing with plant nazis is that they start with the plants …”

The dogs next door were wild with their games. In the sky the returning geese were winging over, their honking alto bark like the complaining squawk of a cart.

“Last year they were after me about the nap of the lawn! They said I was mowing in the wrong direction and it disrupted the look of the neighborhood to have the blades of grass bent in a slightly different direction in one of the yards! I was mowing this way”—and here she tipped her whole body—“when I should be mowing thattaway.” She tipped her body back the other direction. Indignation gave her a dancer’s energy. And the warming weather caused her nervous thinness to emerge from beneath her usual thick sweaters.

One of the pictures Reynaldo took of Mary-Emma that I liked best showed her looking upward at the camera in hope and joy, and I took it to Kinko’s and had it blown up and then I went to Walgreens with Mary-Emma herself in tow and bought a shiny red made-in-China frame. The African-American cashier looked quickly at me and then at Mary-Emma and said, “You should braid her hair. No black girl’s worn an afro since 1972.” Then she handed me my receipt without looking at me. I took the purchase back to Sarah’s, put the photo, which was in my backpack, into the frame, and then propped the whole thing on the dining room table as a gift. I could hear Sarah on the phone in the kitchen, working out the wording details on this week’s menu. “ ‘Sheathed in bacon’? I don’t think so. It sounds — well, I don’t need to tell you what it sounds like. And look at that chicken again: there are too many adjectives in front of it. It’s like we’re trying to hide something.”

“Whossat?” I whispered to Mary-Emma, pointing at the dining room wall, toward the sound of Sarah’s voice.

“Mama,” she said, smiling.

“And whossat?” I pointed at the picture of her on the table.

“Emmie!” she said, excited.

“That’s right,” I said, and I danced her around the living room. The windows were open and we could hear the dogs yapping and chasing each other next door. When I spun and stopped I then saw Sarah just standing there in the dining room. Oddly, I could smell her: she was wearing my perfume.

“Who took this?” she said, indicating the photograph on the table.

I was taken aback, as if struck by a mechanical hand belonging to no one. “A friend. I thought you might like it.” Sharp heat plucked and pinched at my eyes. I had only wanted to please and surprise her, but now I felt suddenly very tired. I glanced at the photo again, to try to see it from her point of view, and noticed that in it Mary-Emma was sitting on Reynaldo’s prayer rug. I hoped it looked like a yoga mat.

“What friend?” she said, looking stern and troubled.

“A friend of mine,” I said stupidly, as I was now afraid and unsure. At this point Sarah seemed to lose concentration. Out front a car was idling high but driving by slow, the bass of its stereo deep in a rap song, vibrating and loud. It was a local hit, one recorded here, and it went “Out of Troy! Black Boy! You show your indignation, you end up on probation!”