Lorrie Moore - A Gate at the Stairs

“We can’t solve history. We have to work with what’s now.”

“What’s now is my son’s white grandparents who only just now got around to putting him in the will with the other grandchildren. They want to be congratulated left and right. Good God — he’s ten years old. It took them ten years!”

“What’s now is these self-admiring people who say, ‘I don’t care whether a person’s black or green or purple.’ As if black were a nonsense color like green or purple.”

“What’s now is I walk in behind Kwame when we go out to eat and I can see that the hostess is afraid of him — a thirteen-year-old black guy coming into a restaurant. I’m white so they don’t know I’m his mother and am right behind him. They don’t know I’m seeing them. But what I’m seeing is what Kwame experiences all the time. She sees that hooded sweatshirt, she grabs the pager, and then says stiffly, ‘Can I help you?’ Not ‘Here for dinner?’ or ‘Good evening.’ ”

“I’ve got a time machine in the trunk of my car.”

“Oh, I know. And the relatives all love them when they’re little but then when they’re older and don’t look cute to them anymore, look out: they see they have a young black man as a grandson, or an African-American girl full of vim and sass. The sexualized black teenager just so doesn’t work for them.”

“Let me tell you: even the white ones are a shock.”

Laughter.

“Is it racism or racial inexperience?”

“Oh, we’re back to that.”

“Girls have it bad, too.”

“I said girls.”

“Of all colors.”

“And don’t get me started on Islam!”

“And why are we so hateful about black Muslims, for decades these Chicago neighborhoods have been tense about every goddamn mosque and yet we went way out of our way for those honky Bosnian Muslims?”

“ Honky Bosnian Muslims? ”

“Honey, be quiet and just drink.”

“A suffering sweepstakes — now there’s a fool’s game. Who invented the term suffering sweepstakes anyway?”

“People who aren’t suffering. People who find it a spectator sport. Can’t one say ‘Ouch’ without being told to shut up? What ‘suffering sweepstakes’? A sweepstakes involves a prize! Besides, everyone who really is suffering knows someone who is suffering worse. Suffering is relative. Or at least it is with my relatives!”

“Who invented the term suffering succotash ?”

“Here’s a suffering sweepstakes: War was devised to offset the number of women who died in childbirth. The young men killed actually equaled the young women who died. But now it’s all out of whack … so it looks like the old men are plotting to kill the young in order to get all the hot chicks.”

“So that’s why war was invented. To get rid of the competition. Mother Nature had put too much competition in play.”

“And who is doing all this engineering again?”

“ Father Nature.”

“Ah.”

“Nate — as he’s known to his friends.”

“Nate.”

“Yup.”

“Here’s a suffering sweepstakes: Both Black Hawk and Otis Redding died in this county. But Black Hawk gets a bar and a golf course.”

“He was pursued like a rat. He should get a statue.”

“Is there a statue?”

“Is there a statue for Otis?”

“I think there’s a granite bench.”

“A granite bench? He would have preferred a golf course and a bar.”

“A fool’s game.”

“And this pertains to our discussion how?”

“Since when did pertaining pertain?”

“Oh, yes, military recruitment of minorities.”

“The schools are off to begin with. Busing and integration are never done right, and so it’s a fool’s game.”

The fool’s-game person again. Or the fool’s-game person’s brother.

“Look at the schools in this town. The only one that’s not failing black kids is the magnet one where whites are only twenty percent of the school. Now, that’s empowering! Put them in a white school, they are all relegated to the tech courses. They get put in the basement with the vocational teachers. Then they have dropped out by junior year, while the white parents continue to hoard the resources for their gifted and privileged. They want money for stringed instruments! They demand it! They get violins, we get viol ence. Man, you’d better get some money for some black teachers, I say.”

“Plus, the school boards are hiding the real numbers. The figures they offer show only dropout rates from senior year. If you drop out before you’re not in the tally, because you’re going to make them look bad. You’re MIA.”

“So the numbers are a fairy tale.”

“They’re a bad fairy tale.”

“Told by a bad fairy.”

“Oh, I think I know who you mean.”

“Stop!”

“The weird thing is that as fudged numbers go, they are still socially and racially unacceptable.”

There were murmurings and bursts of laughter and indecipherable ebbs and crashes of seeming silence that would suddenly bring forth from a great distance, like the approaching music of Ravel’s Bolero , some new monotonous melody.

“So what are you saying? That nothing short of a revolution will do?”

“Well, maybe.”

“Well, that’s hogwash.”

I had once seen a hog washed. In whey. The hog was Helen, and she really liked it, the slop of the whey, then later a cool hose.

“It is the most unhelpful stance.”

“Darling, maybe it looks unhelpful, but it seems to help others. I mean, someone has to be an idealist.”

“That kind of idealism is cynicism of the most extravagant and ostentatious sort.”

“Everything has to be doable here and now?”

“Everything has to be less stupid.”

One of the biracial girls — Althea — stepped forward toward me with a joke. Her face was lit bright with it. “Why do black people get so tall?”

“Why?”

“Because their knee grows!” she squealed with delight.

“Who told you that?” I asked, and she pointed to one of the white girls in the corner. My having been told this joke was a source of such hilarity that both she and Althea covered their faces with their hands and laughed so hard that I laughed, too.

Reynaldo and I went to movies on campus, ones I deemed romantic date movies, and he would shift his legs around restlessly and joke about the drama’s predictability. “Oh, I knew that they would do that. Of course.”

“How did you know?” I whispered in the theater’s musty dark.

“A call came in on my cell phone.”

And I would squelch a laugh, then minutes later he might say in his intermittent accent, “My cell phone says she turns and walks away right now but then looks quickly over her shoulder.” And of course he would be right. And I would laugh. We would go back to his house and drink tea.

“The first time I used a cell phone I felt so ashamed walking along talking. Talking to no one. Like a mad person. But God when he made this great world put everything in it. He knew what to put in it so we could someday have cell phones.”

“Kiss me,” I would say.

Sometimes we would go to a Palestinian rally, then come home, light little tea lights, and go to bed, candlelight vibrating the room like a handheld camera. He kissed like he’d been kissing for decades. I tried to learn what he knew.

At night he wrapped himself around me, legs and arms, and we slept spooned like that until in sleep one of us had to move a little. Still, we never let our skin pull entirely away from the other. “Do you believe in spiritual mistakes?” he whispered into the dark one night.

“Yes,” I said.

“Do you believe an entire country could embark on a spiritual mistake?”