Lorrie Moore - A Gate at the Stairs

“Mommy!” Mary-Emma repeated happily, and Sarah smiled.

“It’s sort of funny,” I said, shrugging. “Though sad, too.”

“It’s only once a week that we change the menu — why should it be so hard? And then the absenteeism! of the sous-chef alone — not to mention the waitstaff. I’m going to keep all the messages from my voice mail and make a CD of excuses I get from employees: Can’t come in; I’m coughing blood … and I’m going to play it full volume at the end-of-the-year holiday party.”

“Mama,” said Mary-Emma, cooing — wanting, perhaps, Sarah’s leg to go slack.

Sarah continued to pet Mary-Emma’s head, but at the same time she rolled her own neck around. “When I roll my neck around like this,” she said, sort of smiling and sort of not, “I hear the scariest sorts of crunching sounds.”

“That happens to me,” I said.

“Ach,” said Sarah, with her eyes closed. “Every year we do too much with venison and ground cherries. It’s like stuff you’d scrape off your car.”

Once I brought Mary-Emma back from a walk and found Edward there at home, alone, laughing with someone on the phone. When he hung up, he was still in a good mood. “Papa,” Mary-Emma said mirthlessly, but she lifted her arms and he swooped her up into his.

“How’d your day go?” he said to me rather than to her.

“Fine,” I said.

“Fine,” she said. She began unzipping her own jacket. I walked over to help her take it off since Edward was holding her. This caused us to have to maneuver together.

“Things well with you?” Edward said to me warmly.

“Oh, I think so.”

“Lot on your mind?” I didn’t know where this interest in me was coming from. Did I seem gloomy and preoccupied? Out of reach of his charms?

“Oh, I don’t know. There’s classes, of course.” And lest he think I was complaining that work and school were too difficult in combination, I hastened to add, “Plus, my brother’s thinking of joining the military.”

“Oh.”

“I’m hoping he doesn’t”—this was true—“and it’s been on my mind, I guess.” This last was not strictly so, but it should have been. Why wasn’t it?

“It’ll toughen him up, show him one or two things about the world,” said Edward. “What does not kill him will make him stronger,” he added prosaically, needlepoint Nietzsche.

“Yes, but what if it does kill him?”

And here between us passed a look of pale apprehension, some past, some future, the details of which I couldn’t yet know, but each blasting into the room and meeting there, draining the blood from our faces. Only the voice of Mary-Emma—“Papa! Oag cool!”—returned us to the warm crumbs of the present.

“Nietzschean philosophy doesn’t get its hands dirty with that ,” he said, making his way to the freezer. He was suddenly a scientist again. “And neither should you. Philosophers are good at parties but not for cleaning up after. But really: Let me tell you something. Don’t be your brother’s keeper. Don’t worry about brothers. Take it from someone who has a sister. Worry about yourself. The brothers? They’re not really worried about you.”

Schoolwork was alternately tedious and mesmerizing. I took the notes my professors wanted me to. In the library, in the margins of my books, I wrote “nature equals disorder.” I wrote “fate versus free will.” I wrote “modernism as argument against the modern.” I listened endlessly to the music from Schindler’s List. Then The Bridge on the River Kwai. Mostly, however, I was alone in my room with Rumi. Murph continued to stay away, although once she sent me an e-mail that described a long fight she had had with her boyfriend and then the kissing and other acts of contrition that had pasted them back together. Another e-mail I got was from my brother. Dear Sis , it began. Only you could perhaps talk me out of this, if you wanted to, but only if you wanted to, because I’m not sensing anyone having any strong desire with regards to my future except myself and it is this: to do something real. I don’t care what part of the world I end up in as long as it isn’t Delton County.

Then he sent another e-mail that began simply, Please read this new one and ignore previous e-mail , and so I ignored the first but failed to read the new one, seeing nothing dangerously swaggering in anything he’d sent so far.

Spring warmed the air. Light fell from the sky like sugar from a bowl. At night, if I slept at home, without Reynaldo, he would phone. “Are you asleep?” he would always ask.

“No.”

“You sound as if you are. Quick. How many fingers am I holding up?”

He would make me laugh.

Noel, Noel, the toilet bowl. Noelle turned off the vacuum cleaner when he saw me. “It’s finally my birthday,” he said. “Really. I put a patchouli sachet in the vacuum bag for the occasion.”

“Well, happy birthday,” I said, and together with Mary-Emma in my arms sang him “Happy Birthday” in Portuguese. As we finished the last lines—“ muitas felicidades, muitos anos de vida! ”—we sang them with great articulated gusto, as at the concluding ring it reminded me of “Ina Gadda Da Vida.” Clapping began behind us, and I turned.

There were Sarah and Edward. Only Edward was smiling. “Very nice,” said Sarah, looking at me. She was wearing a gold sweater knit in tight roseknots so that her slim arms looked like ears of corn. On her head was her thick cotton chef’s toque. “What language is that?”

“Portuguese,” I said. “I think.”

“Portuguese,” Sarah repeated, nodding her head.

“It’s my birthday,” said Noel, to help me out.

“Yes, well, happy birthday, my dear Noelle!” She kissed him on his cheek and then threw one arm around him and kept it there. I could see he’d been working for her for years.

He pointed at her but looked at me to tell me this: “I love her!”

“Yes, but, darling, you left your Diet Coke in the freezer and it exploded again.” Sarah would not smile. Or rather, she would not smile big.

I turned with Edward and Mary-Emma as we headed back to the kitchen. Edward was shaking his head. “He’s always doing that with the Diet Cokes,” he said.

I went to warm a muffin in the microwave for Mary-Emma, and Edward suddenly stopped my arm. “Look,” he said. “There’s a moth in there.” Without putting the muffin in, he pressed On to see what the moth would do. This penchant for torture, in the guise of curiosity, was the same sick experimentation of certain doctors, of bored boys, of lunatics, and it was in Edward, too. The moth was not singed. Neither did it flutter and combust, as a heartless data-seeker might have predicted. As I myself had predicted. Had I missed my own latent calling as Mad Inept Scientist? The moth did nothing at all, just stuck whole to the plastic wall of the oven. Probably the poor creature had already been dead for some time. I cleaned it out with a paper towel, then warmed Mary-Emma’s snack.

“Well, I wanted to see,” said Edward.

Thoughts of Bonnie preoccupied me. I dreamed of her at night. She was always approaching to say something but then said nothing. She floated. She zoomed. She burst forth from adjacent rooms. There were no doors and then suddenly one would appear and swallow her. She would emerge through a wall. She was always empty-handed. She was gaining weight. Her clothes were the pale gray of plastic copy machines and desktop printers. She would not speak. I couldn’t get her ever to say a word.

At the Thornwood-Brinks’ the phone rang a lot, and when I answered it there was a long pause before the hang-up. Then for a while the phone calls seemed to cease.