Lorrie Moore - A Gate at the Stairs

Here Sarah leaned forward and put her hand on my cheek, which reminded me of Murph. Why were people doing this all of a sudden? “Of course, Emmie has you. That’s been nice.” The hand came down and her gaze turned away. She seemed to be speaking to no one in particular. “So I didn’t name her Maya or Kadira or Tywalla: I named her Emmie. Was that so wrong?” I could see she felt under some critical eye, as she had from the beginning. “You know what my neighbor across the street said to me? ‘I always see the babysitter with the baby, but I don’t see you.’ Day and night, I’m down working at the Mill.”

Where were effective, urgent words when the world most required them? I felt I needed to persist. But it was like all bad dreams: the dreamer, even while dreaming, thinks, What is going on here? What am I supposed to do? In pleasant dreams, equally strangely, one always seemed to know.

She continued. “Women chew up their lives trying to heal themselves from the bad arrangements they’ve made with men; all this healing is not attractive. It’s boring.” And then she added, “Anything that does not throw a young black person into despair is all for the good. Unfortunately, I don’t qualify as that. I officially don’t qualify.”

“Nothing’s ideal. You are her real mother now,” I said boldly.

“You’re not getting it!” she said sharply, her face flushed with exasperation. “We have been caught in our own home cooking.”

“Home cooking?”

She sighed. “That’s restaurantese for throwing something back in the pot when it has fallen on the floor. Deceit. It means deceit. Even if by some miracle we challenge the agency and win, we will have a public story. Emmie will be shunned!”

“No, no, that’s not possible.”

“Yes!” she said as if I were an infuriating dimwit. “We all will be spoken of! And when Emmie is old enough, she will hate us.”

Perhaps I’d become like the teenage McKowen daughter we’d all glimpsed at Mary-Emma’s first foster home. Perhaps I was clinging to something that wasn’t mine to love. Perhaps I was treasuring love that wasn’t mine to treasure. My hands were twisting at each other in a way that my mother used to yell at me for. When I was young she would just lean over and swat them.

Sarah grabbed the glasses and I followed her back into the kitchen.

The people in this house, I felt, and I included myself, were like characters each from a different grim and gruesome fairy tale. None of us was in the same story. We were all grotesques, and self-riveted, but in separate narratives, and so our interactions seemed weird and richly meaningless, like the characters in a Tennessee Williams play, with their bursting, unimportant, but spellbindingly mad speeches. Only Mary-Emma seemed immune, undeviant, not part of that, though she was, and had her own soliloquies to be sure, and would have them up ahead in life — how not?

Sarah opened the refrigerator, which lit her up again. “The whole thing fills me with terrible thoughts. I suppose I should manage a better philosophical stance. Certainly the French would! They would have the proper comedic perspective.” And here she paused. “Of course, they also have jokes that end ‘And then the baby fell down the stairs.’ ” She had sealed her rooty puree into a Rubbermaid bowl, the puree I’d seen her chopping many days ago already. She was no longer thinking it should be stashed here.

“Please,” she said, handing it to me. “Don’t eat this. Just keep it in the back of your refrigerator at home. I’ll ask for it again, but I don’t want it lingering around here right now. Not with the kids coming Wednesdays.”

“What is it?” I asked. There would be no more Wednesdays. I already felt that.

“It’s, um, a kind of poisonous paste that, well, gets stains out. Just don’t get it confused with parsnip tapenade.”

“What’s it made of?”

“It’s … nothing. But don’t mix it up with food.”

Then I realized it was that paperwhite puree I had just seen her mincing, mashing the bulbs with a cheese slicer and a pestle.

“Does it work? In the laundry?” I asked. Meekness returned to cover me and blur my sight like a veil.

“Supposedly,” she said, with mystery and evasion. “Perhaps someday I’ll have Liza try it on some stains. If you keep it cool and moist and scrub it in with a brush it’s supposed to work. Take it home with you, please, just for now. I’ll ask for it back later. But here, take it.” And she thrust the sealed plastic container at me. I took it. Put it in my backpack. It reminded me of tales I’d read of people carrying yeasts in damp handkerchiefs from Europe — a break with one world and a beginning in another, where one would culture and grow things from the old. Or perhaps one could kill someone instantly with this. Or cure a wart. I didn’t know its uses, really, but obligingly took it anyway, back to my house, where perhaps I would grow a whole new life with it, or clean a rug, or do nothing.

Tragedies, I was coming to realize through my daily studies in the humanities both in and out of the classroom, were a luxury. They were constructions of an affluent society, full of sorrow and truth but without moral function. Stories of the vanquishing of the spirit expressed and underscored a certain societal spirit to spare. The weakening of the soul, the story of downfall and failed overcoming — trains missed, letters not received, pride flaring, the demolition of one’s own offspring, who were then served up in stews — this was awe-inspiring, wounding entertainment told uselessly and in comfort at tables full of love and money. Where life was meagerer, where the tables were only half full, the comic triumph of the poor was the useful demi-lie. Jokes were needed. And then the baby fell down the stairs. This could be funny! Especially in a place and time where worse things happened. It wasn’t that suffering was a sweepstakes, but it certainly was relative. For understanding and for perspective, suffering required a butcher’s weighing. And to ease the suffering of the listener, things had better be funny. Though they weren’t always. And this is how, sometimes, stories failed us: Not that funny. Or worse, not funny in the least.

I forgot about the container in the fridge. As with the wasabi at Christmas, I was careless with takeout. Things mounted in the refrigerator and the sink as Murph and I let a life of spring rains, warming air, romantic dissolution, and pointless essay writing make further mincemeat of domesticity. I got panicked and tried to combine the work of several classes: “Sufic Perspectives of Brontë’s Exfoliating Narrative” or “Meeting at Shiraz: Sufic Perspectives on Pinot Noir.” I was having a lot of ostensibly Sufic perspectives. “The Sufic Hymn of The Dirty Dozen. ” “The Sufic Quiet of the Western Front.” “Sufic Mrs. Miniver.” I had memorized the whistling theme from The Bridge on the River Kwai , but this did me no good, as I was never asked to whistle it. Crusty dishes accumulated in the sink, as did a low level of dingy water that would not drain. Half-finished cups of coffee sat on bookcase shelves, with flies floating on top. When my papers were returned, question marks appeared in all my margins.

When not working, Murph was going on the Internet, slowly becoming obsessed with astrology. Wanting to see herself outlined in twinkling stars or hoping to bring the heavens at last into fruitful play here on earth, or so it sounded to me, she would say that sun signs were people alone on a mountaintop. They were warm and attracted money and should surround themselves in the colors of wood. The planets whooshed in and out of her conversation. The stars were fire or water or earth or air and contained advice and secrets that would put a box of fortune cookies to shame. When I said, “But how could the positions of the stars and planets have anything to do with our lives down here?” she would just look at me, wounded but portentous. “How could they not?” she replied.