Lorrie Moore - A Gate at the Stairs

“Someday he will!”

“Stop! I mean, that is just the most antique and ridiculous analogy! I think he said something completely random like ‘rabbit.’ And afterward she came out to me with this worried look and said he was learning disabled and we would have to put him in special ed. He was five years old!”

“They track them early, for funding purposes. They need the numbers to be high enough for hiring. So the black kids take it in the teeth.”

“The internal segregation of even integrated schools is famous.”

“They have no concrete agenda other than that?”

“It’s pretty much a crock.”

I had seen quite a few crocks in my life — some of them moldering in barns, some cracked, some of them beautiful. All of them empty. I couldn’t remember a one that had had anything in it.

“It sure does give you a sense of what it is to be African-American in this world.”

“Well, yes and no.”

“Thank you.”

“Sorry to bring up hair again: Someone mentioned someone before, a woman who can do black hair? I need an address. I’m getting grief for Emmie’s afro.”

“Yeah, she should have some braids!”

“Elva down on South Elm can — she is cool and loves the kids. On Christmas she goes down to the homeless shelters and gives everyone free haircuts, black or white.”

“Is this Sarah Vaughan on the stereo?”

“Sure is.”

“Man, listen to her scat.”

“And you say you don’t believe in such a thing as black culture.”

“I don’t.”

“Ever heard Julie Andrews scat?”

“I don’t believe in gay culture or white culture or female culture or any of that. It’s just so …”

“Dream world, baby.”

“Ever heard Julie Andrews at all?”

“Hey, you don’t need blue eyes if you got blue earrings.”

I didn’t know what they were talking about most of the time. But sometimes, in recalling certain remarks, the context would clarify them. Certain phrases, like a dusting of sand, would float across my mind and heat to a sort of glass. I’d seen scat! And now here it was as an admirable thing.

“Vaughan takes ‘Autumn Leaves’ and turns it into Finnegans Wake. ”

“Is that your argument?”

“Yeah. Kind of an Irish one: over beer. I am drinking beer.”

“When we were in France, the French customs officials looked at us in a bewildered way. ‘But look,’ they said, as if they were pointing out something we had failed to notice. ‘You are white and your son is black — how can this be?’ As if it defied science or as if we had never regarded our own skin color before. And I had to say in English, and in anger, ‘This is what an American family looks like!’ ”

“The rest of the world doesn’t understand the ungovernable diversity of this country.”

“Diversity made even more extreme by capitalism.”

“And by Karl Rove. I was once in a restaurant and saw Karl Rove sitting across the room. For five minutes I thought: I could take this steak knife and walk over there and change history. Right now. ”

“And?”

“Well, as you can see I chose to stay a free woman. Would anyone care for a timbale?”

“Is there meat in them?”

“Oh, stop already with the meat. She’s become an actual member of PETA.”

“Not yet.”

“No. That’s good. Though I give them ten years and you watch: they’ll win the Nobel Peace Prize. Last year I gave them fifteen years, but I think the climate is changing very quickly in their favor. The rationale will be that humane treatment of animals can only mean more humane treatment of people.”

“I have a problem with these animal rights people.”

“Yeah, me, too. They instantly start comparing animals to black people. They say, ‘We did the same thing to black people.’ And you say, ‘But they were people.’ And they say, ‘Yes, we know that now, but that’s not what they were saying then.’ And you say, ‘Well, many people were saying it then. And no one now, that I know of, is saying a cow is a person.’ ”

“A species-ist!”

“There are Austrians saying that chimpanzees are people.”

“And don’t get me started with the primate research. There is such eagerness to lump black people with apes. Beasts of any kind.”

“That’s done even to the Jews.”

“Well, Austrians …”

“What do you mean, ‘even’?”

“I mean nothing. I meant even chickens. I’ve heard the PETA people compare what goes on with chickens to what went on with the Jews.”

“Well, how else are you going to make them sit still in their nests and do your taxes if you don’t cut their legs off?”

“Your sense of humor is too dark.”

“Don’t say ‘dark.’ It’s racist.”

“Have you noticed that when people say ‘I’m not racist’ you instantly know they are?”

“It’s like those completely unself-aware men who say, ‘I am not sexist,’ and you want to say, ‘Darling! Of course you are!’ ”

“I wish people would get it straight and say ‘birth parent’ and not ‘biological parent.’ Everybody’s biological.”

“That’s in part what’s too bad about everybody.”

“And I don’t like the use of the word adoption for animals. The humane societies use it all the time, but it’s confusing to children who are adopted.”

“I once heard I. B. Singer speak of the holocaust of chickens.”

“And now there’s that other one, Peter Singer.”

“Are you sure you don’t mean Pete Seeger?”

“The ethicist who says kill the deformed babies but don’t eat meat.”

“Oh, he’s a horse’s patoot.”

I had seen a horse’s patoot. I had seen plenty of them, and the large swatch of tail that like a creature unto itself swept the flies away.

“Too many Singers.”

“Now we’re back to Sarah Vaughan. Yes. I’ll have a timbale.”

I’d seen a crock. I’d seen a horse’s patoot. It was a timbale that I’d never seen.

“Too many Sarahs.”

“No such thing!”

“Too many timbales. Please! Have another one.”

“There’s the argument that people are so cruel to one another that until we take care of that we’ll never get square with animals.”

“And then, as I was saying, there’s the argument that humanitarian practices with animals will cause us to improve our relationship with people. We’ll say, ‘Wait a minute: We don’t even do this to animals. Why are we doing it to people?’ ”

“Sometimes it doesn’t matter where you begin.”

“Is that really what the moral ethicists are saying now?”

“I don’t know about them all. My field is actually dairy science.”

“Their argument is that unless an animal is expressing all his native animalness, he is being cruelly used and his life is unworthy. You would think that would then cause them to see death as a mercy. But the death is not the issue. It’s the life.”

“I would think the actual killing is the issue — how is it to be done?”

And here I thought I heard Sarah’s voice. “How to kill chickens: Enough to feed the planet? I mean, have we learned nothing from the Holocaust? Can’t we just round them up and gas them?”

More laughter all around. “That would express the Jewishness of the chickens — or do I mean the chickenness of the Jews?”

“That’s why we got Israel, baby. We’re not chicken anymore.”

“This is such bullshit. Even humans don’t get to express the fullness of their native humanness. You think the homeless person sleeping in his windowless car is expressing his humanness? And yet everyone breezes by and carries on. It makes bullshit of our finest intentions.”

I had seen bullshit. I had seen chickens run after it and eat it warm.