Lorrie Moore - A Gate at the Stairs

“We may have to continue this some other time,” said Sarah, leaning forward and putting her wine down.

“OK,” I said, still sipping. Noel came into the living room, with his tie-dyed sneakers, bearing a bouquet of daffodils for Sarah. I knew they’d been cut from the previous client’s yard.

“Why, thank you!” she said. “Would you like some wine?”

“OK!” he said, smiling. “It’ll go with my Diet Coke,” he said, laughing nervously.

He seldom picked flowers from Sarah’s garden (for the client after her), though once he had snipped some hydrangea from her shrub and she had warned him to cut from the bottom next time; he’d cut a big blank hole in the bush. She felt poorer people were entitled to do things that rich people weren’t. It was in lieu of a revolution. And less bloody all around. I had heard her say this on one of her Wednesdays.

“We’ll talk later,” she said to me. And I brought my wineglass to the kitchen sink and just dumped it, then went upstairs to check on Mary-Emma.

She was lying there wide awake when I peeked in.

“How are you?”

“You got brown eyes,” she said. “I of brown eyes.”

“That’s right.”

“I want blue eyes like Daddy.”

“No, you don’t. Your eyes are perfect. They need to be brown like mine!”

“OK,” she said. She was at an age where she would awake from a nap and suddenly be an inch taller, or be speaking in whole sentences, or in the grip of bleak and disturbing ideas.

“Wanna go to the park?” I asked.

“YEAH!” she cried out happily.

“First I have to show you: I brought you two Easter fish.” We went downstairs and looked at them. They were still in their take-out containers, so I took a clear glass mixing bowl from the cupboard and poured them in. They swished around and bumped noses. “What should we name them?”

“Juicy!” Mary-Emma exclaimed.

“Juicy?”

“This one’s Juicy. And this one’s, this one’s … Steve!”

“Steve?”

“Yeah. They’re brothers.” She stared at them until she looked a little cross-eyed and bored.

At the park I pushed her on the swing, higher and higher, and when she got off she dashed over to the slide and I gulped anxiously, fearing its dangers, but let her go. It was a fast slide, and from our previous visits I knew that children typically shot out from the flattened scoop of its slippery, sun-heated metal and landed on their faces, their thighs burned. Mary-Emma was no exception, but none of it fazed her. She and another girl had started a little game together, and they giddily took turns on the slide and then tried to make each other laugh at the bottom by assuming outlandish poses. Sometimes one would pretend to be unconscious or dead while the other one forced her back to living, which was indicated by giggles and brought about by tickling or pouring sand onto bare bellies or into hair. Sometimes it seemed to me that children believed death occurred in different forms than adults did, in varying degrees, and that it intersected with life in all kinds of ways that were unofficial. It was adults who felt death exerted a lurid sameness over everyone. Why couldn’t it be as varied as life was? Or at least have its lurid sameness similarly gussied up and disguised?

Afterward, the girl’s mother came over to me. “My Maddie just loves your little girl,” she said to me, shouldering her bag and getting ready to go.

“They do seem to like each other,” I said. I would let her think I was the too-young mother.

“What is her name?”

“Mary-Emma.”

The woman grew awkward but purposeful, in my experience, a bad combo. “Do you think they could get together for a playdate someday?” the woman asked. “Maddie doesn’t have any African-American friends, and I think it would be good for her to have one.” She smiled.

I was stunned into silence but only for a moment. Suddenly all the Wednesday nights I’d ever overheard distilled themselves into a single ventriloquized sentence: “I’m sorry,” I said to the woman, “but Mary-Emma already has a lot of white friends.”

I didn’t wait to examine the woman’s expression or to mitigate it with softened thoughts. I stood and picked up Mary-Emma, canting my hip and nestling her there. I took her home, wheeling the empty stroller in front of me. She did not swing and kick herself away in order to be put down and run ahead. She was tired.

The idea that Mary-Emma would be used like that — to amuse and educate white children, give them an experience, as if she were a hired clown — enraged me, but walking fiercely and pushing the stroller hard over the sidewalk cracks helped work it off. Back at home in the kitchen we fed the fish little pieces of bread, which they nibbled, and which might not have been the ideal food, especially for Juicy, who died within days, though Steve was tough and hung on, unkillable.

In general in the early afternoons I would feed Mary-Emma lunch, put a clean Pull-Up on her, and tuck her in for a nap. I sang her “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” even though it was about joining people in death and planning the afterlife as a jolly place for friends and loved ones. Would this lead to a preoccupation? Was the grammar off? She stared at me wide-eyed while I sang. “Sing it again,” she said after I had sung all the verses I knew.

“Now you take a nap,” I said, “and have a really sweet dream.” I thought I might bring her dirty clothes downstairs to the laundry room in the basement. Usually I tossed them down the laundry chute, but this time, with little else of immediate concern, I decided perhaps to be helpful and do a load of Mary-Emma’s clothes. Sarah had gone out.

But when I got downstairs to the basement (which was carpeted and where Mary-Emma and I sometimes played on rainy days), I noticed there was a light on in the laundry room. I walked in anyway, and there stood a young woman I’d never seen before. She was pretty in the pale, speckled, toadstool way of redheads: enchanting, possibly poisonous, simultaneously prosaic and exotic. She was busying herself with an iron, touching the hot surface with a licked finger, though it did not yet let out a sizzle.

“Oh, hi!” I said. “I didn’t mean to startle you! I’m Tassie.”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m Liza.” I could see that her immediate task was to seal by ironing the new tea bags filled with Sarah’s own tea.

“I look after Mary-Emma.”

“I help out with the laundry and stuff,” she said. She saw that I was holding some clothes. “Here, let me take these — I do all Emmie’s stuff together with Dreft.”

“Oh, OK,” I said. “You’ll see there’s some signs of—” And then just behind her I saw, at the bottom of a foreshortened door that led to some kind of wine closet or pantry a man’s good brown shoes, and pant cuffs, hiding in the shadows. Research into wine had taken a new form. It was like seeing the shoes of the person Dorothy’s house had landed on in Oz. Witch’s feet under the short door, although these shoes took you anywhere but home. “You’ll see some signs of the park. Grass and dirt.”

“No problem,” she replied.

“Sounds good,” I said, and then I turned and left.

——

“I met Liza,” I said to Sarah upstairs when she came in the back door later that afternoon. “The laundry lady.”

“Oh, good,” said Sarah brightly, setting a bag of groceries down on the counter. “Now you’ve met just about everyone — except the guy who shovels and mows.”

“Noelle doesn’t do that?”

“Noel? No.”

“And not Edward.”

“Uh, nhew, not Edward.” She did not look up but just kept pulling grocery items from her bag. Broccolinis and fresh eggs.