Lorrie Moore: A Gate at the Stairs

“It’s the revolution,” Murph liked to say. To her, stadiums were where insurgents were shot, and this caused her to have mixed feelings about living so close, to say nothing of her feelings about the home football games, when curb space was scarce and the parked cars of out-of-towners jammed our streets, their cheers from the stands like a screaming wind through town, the red of their thousands of sweatshirts like an invasion of bright bugs. On Sunday mornings, the day after the games, the sidewalk would be littered with cardboard signs that read I NEED TICKETS.

Murph was now only technically my roommate, since she mostly lived a mile away in a subletted condo with her new boyfriend, a sixth-year senior. I had a tendency to forget about this — looking forward to telling her something, wondering what we might cook up for supper, expecting to see her there, brooding, with her sweater thrown over her shoulders and her sleeves wound round her neck, a look that was elegant on her but on me would have made me appear insane. And then I would come home to realize, once more, that it was just me there. She would leave the telltale jetsam and flotsam, hastily changed clothes, carelessly written notes. Hey, Tass, I drank the last of the milk — sorry. So I was left with the ambivalence of having to pay with aloneness for an apartment I could not alone afford. It was not miserable — often I did not miss her at all. But there was sometimes a quick, sinking ache when I walked in the door and saw she was not there. Twice, however, I’d felt the same sinking feeling when she was.

The porous dry rot of our front steps still held weight — six slim tenants, single file — but every time I climbed them I worried it could be my last: surely the next time my foot would go through and I would have to be pried from the splintery wreckage by a rescue squad phoned by the watchful Kay upstairs. Our landlord, Mr. Wettersten, was classically absentee, though he believed in good boilers and, when school was in session, did not stint with heat, perhaps fearing the lawsuits of parents. You could shower several times a day, or at the last minute: your hair would dry in a snap over the radiators. Sometimes my apartment would so overheat that my fingernails would dry up and crack and break off in my gloves, chips of them stuck in the woolen fingertips. Now, as I unlocked the door and pushed in, the pipes were clanking and letting loose with their small internal explosions; no pipe had ever yet burst, though if the boiler kicked on at night, the quaking could pull you alarmedly from sleep. It was, at times, like living in a factory. Kay, who lived in the largest flat, was middle-aged and the only tenant not a student; she was always in some skirmish with the landlord about the building. “He has no idea what he’s up against, letting this building go the way he has,” Kay said to me once. “When something’s off here I have nothing else to think about. I mean, I have no other life. I can make this my life. He doesn’t appreciate what he’s up against. He’s up against someone with no life.” So we all let Kay manage the troubles of the house. She had been there for more than a decade. Murph sometimes referred to the tenants of the house as the Clutter Family, by which I assumed — I hoped, I prayed — she meant all their clutter.

When I walked across the front room to throw my stuff on the couch, the floorboards, paradoxically worn and tentative, creaked loudly — more so now that all humidity had fled the place. Despite the busy, complaining crackle of pipe and floor, the rooms had a wintry loneliness. Our fireplace, cold and unused, a safety hazard — what hope for comfort without the risk of fiery death? should we risk? yes, I once begged, yes! — we used as a storage nook for CDs. In the corner leaned my electric bass and amp, yearning for a workout, but I ignored them. I had a see-through Dan Armstrong lucite, like Jack Bruce of Cream, and I had contrived to know stray licks not usually played on bass: I knew some Modest Mouse, some Violent Femmes, and some Sleater-Kinney (“Isn’t that the cancer hospital in New York?” my brother once asked me), plus, from the olden days, Jimi Hendrix, “Milestones,” “Barbara Ann,” “Barbara Allen,” “My Favorite Things,” and “Happy Birthday” (as if played by Hendrix but on a bass!). Once, in Dellacrosse, I had agreed to give an actual concert — I played “Blue Bells of Scotland” and wore a kilt. A kilt with a see-through electric guitar! which managed to sound very much like a bagpipe, and because the concert was part of a county fair, they gave me a green ribbon that said Lyric Lass. Everyone at that stupid fair had their head up their hinder as far as I was concerned, including me, and I never played there again.

In the hallway of my apartment the phone machine light was blinking and I pressed Play, turned up the volume, then went on into my bedroom, where I flopped down on my bed, in the icelandic afternoon dusk, door open, to listen to the voices of women, one after another, and their various desires and requests.

First there was Murph’s sister. “Hi, it’s Lynn. You are not there, I know, but call me later when you are.” Then there was my mother. “Hello, Tassie? It’s your mother.” Followed by a bumping, banging hang-up. Had she dropped the phone, or was this just one more example of her strange personal style? Then there was my advisor, who was also Dean of Women. “Yes, this is Dean Andersen looking for Tassie Jane Keltjin.” I kept forgetting our outgoing message contained no indication as to whose phone it was. It simply had Murph screaming (we thought hilariously), “Leave your message after the tone, if you have to! We are so not here !” Dean Andersen’s voice was gentle but forceful, a combination I would spend many hours of my young life attempting to learn, though they would have been better spent on Farsi. “Tassie, could you leave a copy of your spring registration forms in my mailbox in Ellis Hall? Thanks much. I need to officially sign off on them, which I don’t believe I did, though I’m not sure why. Have a great break.” There was a long, uncertain silence preceding the final message. “Yes, hello, this is Sarah Brink phoning for Tassie Keltjin.” There was another long, uncertain silence. I sat straight up to hear if there was anything else. “Could she phone me back sometime this evening? Thank you very much. 357-7649.”

First I phoned my mother. She had no voice mail of any sort, so I let it ring ten times, then hung up. Then I rewound our machine and played the message from Sarah Brink again. What was I frightened of? I wasn’t sure. But I decided to wait until the morning to phone her back. I got into my nightgown, made a grilled cheese sandwich and some mint tea, then took them back into my room, where I consumed them in bed. Ringed by crumbs and grease, newspapers and a book, I eventually fell asleep.

I woke up in a blaze of white sun. I had neglected to pull the shades and it had snowed in the night; the morning rays reflected off the snow on the sills and on the low adjacent roof, setting the room on fire with daylight. I tried not to think about my life. I did not have any good solid plans for it long-term — no bad plans either, no plans at all — and the lostness of that, compared with the clear ambitions of my friends (marriage, children, law school), sometimes shamed me. Other times in my mind I defended such a condition as morally and intellectually superior — my life was open and ready and free — but that did not make it any less lonely. I got up, trudged barefoot across the cold floor, and made a cup of coffee, with a brown plastic Melitta filter and a paper towel, dripping it into a single ceramic mug that said Moose Timber Lodge. Murph had gone there once, for a weekend, with her new BF.