Lorrie Moore - A Gate at the Stairs

“Kind of.” She looked right through me. “I’m not sure.” And then she went upstairs, as if to go figure it out. When she came back down she added, “Correct subject-verb agreement is best when children are learning language, so be careful what you sing. It’s an issue when raising kids of color. A simple grammatical matter can hold them back in life. Down the road.”

“Yes,” I said mechanically.

“We are pioneers,” she said to me. “We are doing something important, unprecedented, and unbearably hard.” And then she left again, and I turned away to hide my own teariness behind a door, because I was tired and wasn’t exactly clear what Sarah was talking about.

“Tassa?” came Mary-Emma’s worried voice.

I hauled out all the Scottish airs and mournful Irish drinking songs I knew, full of yonder s, e’er s, and loch s, but there were also a lot of bonnie s, and when I came to those I feared something terrified entered my face, because Mary-Emma just stared at me, sensing something was up, a rock in the road. I couldn’t tell whether that word resonated with her or not. Still she was always wanting to learn the songs herself. “Bonnie-oh, oh bonnie-hey, nonny-bonnie pretty day.” The phone would ring and I would stop, dead in my tracks. If Sarah were there, she would answer it, and mostly I was relieved to hear her voice. “Quesadilla soup? No, we don’t serve that, that’s our competition … Yes, of course it’s their secret recipe. They have to keep it a secret, since if you knew what was in it you’d never order it again.” But sometimes I would hear her say, “Who is this?” then slam the phone down.

Because Mary-Emma had not only moved from a high chair to a booster seat but had for a month been sleeping in her “big girl bed,” the futon on the floor, I often lay next to her at nap times, reading and singing and sometimes dozing off myself. Sometimes we were awakened by Noel and his vacuum cleaner as he made his way through the house, an iPod lit up in his apron pocket, his headphones blocking all noise. It was the first iPod I’d ever seen, and when the vacuum cleaner wasn’t on I could hear the tinny sound coming out of the earbuds and Noel singing along in a broken and transported way, not hearing his own voice, and so sounding as if he were deaf. Still, I could make out one of the songs he played over and over, a Bonnie Raitt one, “I Can’t Make You Love Me,” the words to which I recognized but didn’t really know. If there were a song called “I Can Make You Love Me,” I would have memorized it long ago.

Noel saw me and smiled and turned his vacuum cleaner off. He pulled the earbuds out. I could see his eyes were wet with tears.

“It’s hard to listen to this song,” he said.

“It’s sad,” I agreed.

“My old boyfriend auctioned himself off to it at an AIDS benefit ‘Love Slave’ auction.”

“God, I wish mine had done that! And that was the last you saw of him?” I no longer could understand the world, and so I would only pretend to try.

“Sort of.”

“You broke up?”

“Well, he caught HIV that very night. And died — just last summer.”

“Jesus. I’m sorry.”

“Thanks,” he said.

“I think Bonnie Raitt owes you a new song.”

“Somebody does,” he said.

Easter Monday and no classes, as if it were Canada. I buzzed up on my scooter. The lawns were greening brightly, though the sky remained a furry shade of pearl. Dogs barked next door. As a belated Easter present I had brought Mary-Emma two goldfish, in deli containers. I would find a clear glass bowl to put them in — Sarah seemed to have a hundred.

Inside the Thornwood-Brink house there was holiday detritus: a three-foot chocolate bunny, a Brio train set. There were actual eggs that Sarah had boiled in different colored teas to make an elaborate marbling. They were all piled together in a single flax basket.

“I see you put all your eggs in one basket,” I said, I thought wittily, but she didn’t hear me.

“Emmie’s asleep,” said Sarah. “Even that Suzuki of yours didn’t wake her.”

“Oops,” I said. “Sorry.” Possibly I was getting used to her oblique and random reprimands. I put the fish on the table.

“Those are cute,” Sarah said. “I promise not to entertain any thoughts about seasoning them.” She was at the kitchen counter, mashing the bulbs from the Christmas paperwhites into a bowl, forming a paste. “I thought I should tell you about something.” She stopped for a second from her work. “Something that is happening.” Even in her stillness she looked busy and tense. “But you know? Let’s have a glass of SB.” SB was sauvignon blanc. I knew that now. A month ago I would have thought she was referring to the Super Bowl, or an SB vintage Gibson guitar, or her very own initials. “I’ve got a bottle in the fridge. It’s been a good long time and so it’s chilled to the center of its little bones. Yum.”

She stopped the flower bulb mashing. “Let’s go sit in the living room.” She brought the wine, a Screwpull, and two wineglasses, and we sat on the pillow-ticking sofas, the same as we had when I’d first interviewed with her.

“We mustn’t tell Edward we drank white and not red,” she said. “Are you underage?” she asked.

“Under what?” I said, smiling and sipping, and Sarah just waved her hand through the air. “Well, if you drink more than one, don’t get back on that scooter.”

“One’s good. I’m good with one.”

She sipped from her glass and rolled the SB around on her front teeth. “I like a wine that’s oaky.”

“Oaky and … just a little dokey,” I said. I was learning nothing very serious about wines but after a single sip of one was clearly willing to say anything.

Too preoccupied to smile, she seemed on the brink of something. Not for nothing were people named what they were named.

“There are things that are happening and I feel you should know,” she said. Her face bore a look I’d seen before: it was one of bravado laced with doom, like fat in meat.

An uh-oh feeling overtook me. I gulped at my SB.

“But first you should know that there’s an unfortunate backstory. Which I’ll have to tell you. But you must understand: it was years ago and we were different people then.” She fell back in a sunken way against the cushions, while I leaned forward from mine.

“You and Edward?” I asked, swallowing more wine, which was grassy and cool. I never knew anymore whom people meant when they said “we.” College had done that to me. In Dellacrosse, I had always known whom people were referring to. I also didn’t really know what people meant when they said of themselves that they were “different people then.” It seemed a piece of emotional sci-fi that a small town would not have allowed. Whaddya mean, you were a different person? Don’t give me that hoodoo! I’ve known you since you were knee-high to a coot!

“Edward and I,” she said. “We were living out east, in Massachusetts. We were named Susan and John and we had a son.”

Was I shocked? I couldn’t even tell anymore. No one, it seemed, was who they said they were.

“Are you startled?” She raised her eyebrows, waiting for me to say something.

“Are you serious?” is what I chose. It seemed one could just say Are you serious? for the rest of existence and it would never be unjustified and would always have to be answered and so would keep the conversation going.

“Susan and John.” She shook her head.

“Were those your middle names?”

She paused. “In a way.”

She was about to go on when we heard Noel at the back door, with his stabbing, fidgeting key in the lock and his clanking pails and mops.