Lorrie Moore - A Gate at the Stairs

I rode home on my Suzuki, climbed into bed, and tried to read for my literature class: “ Dog in the manger!” I said; for I knew she secretly wanted him … Deep into some of Madame’s secrets I had entered — I know not how … I know not whence … I pulled the sheet over my head. “You OK?” shouted Murph from where she sat at her computer.

“No,” I replied, but in our apartment this did not make the least impression.

There was actually only one more Wednesday. The usual sparkiness of the notes had a fizzled edge, like the jagged dissolution of a warming orchestra that had suddenly decided not to play. The chorus was dominated by a new woman’s voice, someone whose diction was as clipped and quick as an auctioneer’s.

“The only black people you know went to Yale.”

“Yeah, all the white people she knows went to Yale as well.”

“Whitest person in the world is Dick Gephardt — have you ever noticed that? He has no eyebrows! He’s translucent!”

“He wasn’t graphic enough to become president!”

“See or be seen.”

“Did you say, ‘From sea to shining sea’?”

“Now we’re doing deafness?”

“What?”

“Deafness jokes. I love them.”

“And don’t get me started about Islam!”

Once again, the don’t-get-me-started-about-Islam guy. Was he fishing? Was he a spy? It was hard to listen from two flights up and follow when the kids I was supervising were after me to sing “Knick-knack-paddy-whack-give-your-dog-a-bone”—the alternative words to the Barney love song, which they found exotic and hilarious.

“We should all work in soup kitchens.”

“Why I do work in a soup kitchen. I am raising an African-American child in the twenty-first century.”

“Here’s what else we should do: little windmills in our yards, solar panels on our roofs …”

“And wooden shoes!”

“I have faith in this new generation.”

“Not I! They are all sleepwalking!”

“Have you noticed that the biracial kids all find each other? They are emerging as their own group.”

“They call themselves ‘mixed,’ not biracial.”

“For the kids, having a black mother is more prestigious. So many of these mixed kids have white mothers, and so even they’ve formed their own group. That’s what Jazmyn tells me.”

“We’re so busy telling young people about the world, we forget there are ways they know more than we do.”

“Yeah, no, I agree. These students are the best of both worlds. They are serious grown-ups, principled and worldly and gentle in ways we weren’t. And adorable, in a way they won’t be in ten years.”

“I know what you mean! You want to eat them right up. Get your lips on their chests. There’s nothing wrong either with using a knife and fork.”

“The hazards of a college town.”

“Would anyone care for a beer, or are you all drinking wine?”

“I’m worried about all the precious culture that comes now from nowhere: that is, it comes from trust-funded children’s book authors. ‘The Adventures of Asparagus Alley’ and such things. Adults are living increasingly as children: completely in their imaginations. Reading Harry Potter while every newspaper in the country goes out of business. They know so little that is real.”

“Yes, you’ve mentioned this before.”

“Sorry. I guess I need more people to talk to.”

“When a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, did it really fall? I realize that’s not how the expression goes …”

“If a tree falls in the woods and there’s no one there, that’s lucky. That’s how the saying should go.”

“What?”

“We’re doing deafness jokes again ?”

“What?”

Deafness, somebody’s, was no doubt the reason I had ever been able to hear these people at all. From two flights up, I had often not known exactly what I was hearing, but still the sounds rose, in various key signatures and tempos. The acoustics of the house had always been odd. Remarks were suddenly loud, bursting up through the air vents and the stairwells and laundry chute, or suddenly quiet. Was this just the human mouth, or was it the mind as well? Back to the woods: If two things fall in the forest and make the same sound, which is the tree?

“What’s most galling is the way school integration is used to educate whites, not blacks, to give whites an experience of race rather than blacks an experience of algebra.”

“The one black principal we have in this town has banned hats.”

“Soon the mooning, herniating jeans. In a way? I hope so.”

“When you are white and you adopt a black child, don’t you feel yourself pulled down a notch socially?”

“In terms of how you are treated and the new concerns you face?”

“All the things we’ve been talking about from the beginning. Everyone has stories.”

At eight the parents arrived upstairs to fetch their kids, their teeth dingy with zinfandel, their lips etched and scabby with it. Most kids ran to their parents with great energy, though some, engaged with a puzzle in the corner, refused even to look up. Once again, I loved the way the black mothers would come upstairs and grab their kids, just pull their oldest son’s head to their breasts and say “Hey, baby!” There had only ever been a few black fathers on Wednesdays, but again they, too, were physical, pulling their boys close with an embrace. Some of the parents tried to give me extra money, as a tip, and though I didn’t feel comfortable taking it, I couldn’t make my lips form the words to refuse them. On her way out one girl, Adilia, said to her sister, “You just don’t think you’re living unless you’re tormenting somebody, do you?” Her father turned to me and said, “Sometimes these people we believe are children are actually midgets.”

I waved, like the widowed aunt seeing everyone off at the train station. I leaned over and pressed Mary-Emma’s head to my chest. I said good night.

I went home and googled the n -word, opening up a sewer that went on forever.

——

For the final installment of her dread tale Sarah should have switched to red wine. Not just for the color but for the fortifying warmth. Instead she had a greenish SB she said was not just briary but also loamy. “It is painful, appalling, really, to have to tell you all of this, though you’ll see, there are reasons,” she said. “It’s not that we are not what we seem. Though I suppose our names once being something else might make you think otherwise.”

“Yes.” How could it not? “But hey, what’s in a name?” I said. One could always find suitable moments for Shakespeare.

She put her wineglass down, placed her hands on her brow, and then let her fingers spread upward through her hair. “I can’t remember where I was.”

Where would she plunge in? Sometimes one is swimming in a lake and aims for a slant of light, only to discover it is brightly colored scum.

“You were in the car,” I said. And then I wanted to clap my hands over my ears but failed to do so.

“Yes. It was of course a nightmare,” Sarah said. She shook her left wrist a little, staring at her watch, as if she were reading a magazine. “I just pulled this watch so quickly out of the jewelry box, an earring got stuck on it.” And she showed me some gobbledy-gook metal tangle on her watchband. The surrealism in this house was like a poltergeist.

“We were in the car,” she agreed, and suddenly stood up and paced around the room while she spoke.

Susan grabbed his arm. “John! He’s only four! What are you doing?” While John was speeding up, time was beginning to slow down.

John shook his arm away. “Let me drive! You’re going to get us into an accident!” He had already exited and was negotiating the cloverleaf that got him back on the highway going the other way. “Look, he’s still there: I can see him,” he said.