Lorrie Moore - A Gate at the Stairs

Worried that Bonnie had taken her own life, I googled Bonnie Jankling Crowe again, expecting to find, as ever, nothing. I instead found a notice from a Georgia newspaper about someone named Bonnie J. Crowe who had been found murdered in an apartment in Atlanta. No known suspect. No evidence of robbery. Investigation pending. My heart leaped up. Of course! I thought. This would be exactly the sort thing that would happen to poor doomed Bonnie. Here I was worried she was suicidal when in fact getting herself murdered would be more her style.

But how would she have had the money to get to Atlanta? Might she have sold her new gold watch for which she had traded a child and been ushered into a retirement from if not all happiness at least all things Mary? I went on eBay and discovered a gold watch for sale there by someone who went by bonniegreenbay. And how many Bonnie Crowes were there in this world? How many bonniegreenbays? I had to stop. I had discovered too much. I had learned things there was not a test on: I had to get back to my studies. The soundtracks to The Longest Day and Saving Private Ryan played incessantly in my apartment.

On Saturday nights I visited Reynaldo on my own. I no longer wore the water bra — that jig was up, or that jug-jig, as Murph called it. He did not seem to mind my lack of dairiness, as we said of cows. In fact, he seemed enthralled or at least very attentive, and once said he preferred small-breasted girls. (“And you believed him?” a later boyfriend would say to me cruelly.) If the gray dress was not available, I would be forced to make an outfit from all the different black things I owned, which were all a slightly different black: there was the bluish black and the olive black and most oddly the reddish black — all faded or shiny or worn to a hue unique unto itself and impossible to wear with anything else that was black. I would add a silvery swampy sweater, with dangling balls or quartz for earrings, like a third and fourth eye in the dark against my hair. I wore lipstick that made my mouth look bloody. I wore mascara that by morning had collected like soot in the corners of my eyes. I wore an army green jacket that looked unexpected with a fuzzy ivory scarf looped around the collar like the scruff of a chow.

As if adorned for a costume party’s idea of a terrorist, I wore my Egyptian scarab necklace and my Arabian Goddess perfume and a clumsy blue ring made in the backstreets of Karachi. I was politically incorrect. The idea was a surprise attack. Which seemed to work. Often we didn’t talk at all. His arms were soft and strong. His penis was as small and satiny as a trumpet mushroom in Easter basket grass. His mouth slurped carefully as if every part of me were an oyster, his, which made me feel I loved him. He would pull away and look at me happily from above. “You have the long, pettable nose of a horse,” he said, “and a horse’s dark, sweet eyes.” And I thought of all the horses I had seen and how they always seemed to be trying to get their eyes to focus and work together. Their eyes were beautiful but shy and lost, and since they were on opposite sides of their heads like a fish’s, one of them would sometimes rear up in skepticism and fear and just take a hard look at you. I felt nothing like a horse, whose instincts I knew were to run and run. I had mostly in life tried to stand still like a glob of coral so as not to be spotted by sharks. But now I had crawled out onto land and was somehow already a horse.

There was a tender but energetic adhoccery to our sex, the way there is when young people are not embarrassed by their bodies — what they look like and what they want. Kissing was urgent yet careful, luminous and drinklessly drunk. He hovered — quivering, tense, and flight-bound — I bucked, humped, and arced, a dancer in a sea lion suit. Afterward, he would sometimes say, “That was one for the scrapbook!” When I slept in his bed, I slept deeply and long. When I went to the Thornwood-Brinks’ directly from there, I would sometimes walk, sometimes take my Suzuki scooter. Sarah would flee the house with arbitrary explanations: “I don’t want the Mill to become one of those precious little restaurants with everyone so serious in their white jackets like they’re technicians in some sort of lab. Though look at me.” She pointed to her own Marie Curie getup. “I look like a dental hygienist.” This was the sort of snobbery I noticed even among the most compassionate Democrats. I could hardly say I was immune. What was education for, if not to acquire contradictions? At least it looked like that to me. “I mean, Edward works in a lab and he doesn’t even wear a white jacket. Though maybe he should … And yet honestly, some discipline is required in every kitchen. I left a note for you on Emmie. She’s got a tiny bit of a cold and the Tylenol drops and instructions are right there on the counter. Bye!”

She had bought a new attachment for the bicycle, which I would put Mary-Emma in instead of the wagon, and we rode around the park that way, while Mary-Emma sang and hummed herself to sleep, her voice wobbly on the bumps. I would pass the town’s few black and Latino kids fishing in the pond for dinner, and I would think of the absurd disparities of everyone, how Mary-Emma was now a little African-American princess while these poor kids at the pond were the casualties of a new pull-away-and-don’t-look society. Here is where churchlessness had gotten us. Not that far. And so I often admired Reynaldo’s piety. Still, the kids were having fun fishing. But I could see they hadn’t yet caught a thing. Nonetheless, it was spring, and they were young, and even hedge fund managers couldn’t take that away from them.

On Wednesday days when I was with Mary-Emma, the noon whistle would blare and the dogs next door would go barking mad in choral reply, as if saluting some larger king dog. On Wednesday nights, as if echoing this, the house once more filled up with visitors and their remarks. Contentious shards of discussion floated upward like dust shaken from a rug.

“Postracial is a white idea.” This again. It had all begun to sound to me like a spiritually gated community of liberal chat.

“A lot of ideas are white ideas.”

“It’s like postfeminist or postmodern. The word post is put forward by people who have grown bored of the conversation.”

“And the conversation remains unresolved because it’s not resolvable. It’s not that kind of conversation. It’s merely living talk. Whereas you put post in front of it — what is that? It’s saying ‘Shut the hell up. We’re tired and we’re going to sleep now.’ ”

“If you reject religion, you reject blackness.”

“Black culture here is just southern culture moved north, that’s all.”

“Well, that’s not all.”

“Blacks have preserved the South up here — the cooking, the expressions, the accents — better than the southern whites who’ve moved here have.”

“Why is that?”

“Uh — isn’t that obvious?”

“Southern whites who’ve moved north live among the northern whites? And blacks live collected together in segregated neighborhoods?”

“I’m here representing the Pottawatomie, the Oneida, the Chippewa, the Winnebago, and the Ho-Chunk. I am here to tell you we weren’t successfully integrated because we weren’t given real jobs, let alone intimate jobs in your homes and on your property. Only on high bridges and tall office buildings. Your relationship to us from the beginning wasn’t even exploitive. It was homicidal.”

“Dave, sit down. You’re mostly white.”

“Is this the pot calling the kettle black?”

“I think when the pot calls the kettle black the pot is merely expressing its desire for community. It’s also expressing the pot’s habit of calling bullshit on the kettle.”