Lorrie Moore - A Gate at the Stairs

“Did you leave that Suzuki of yours back in Troy?” inserted my father as we were driving off.

“Yes. I did.”

“Too bad!” said my brother. The topic of the lost e-mail had too much regret and belatedness attached to it and was no fun. Unlike the motorbike. “I wanted to see you buzz around the ceremony this afternoon. It would cause a sensation!”

“That’s just what I want to do.” I stared out the window of the truck. Irrigation sprinklers like the skeletons of brontosauruses were sprawled across the farm fields.

At home I had to help my mother dress, in the room she called “the store.” Here she would stack up boxes of apparel that she had mail-ordered but not tried on to see whether she would keep them or send them back. When she was ready she would go through and open them one by one, but until then they stayed in the store — which was in essence a kind of mail room.

“Gail?” my dad called up for my mom.

“We’re in the store!” she called back, and I helped her try on something I thought would be fine, and then yanked the tags off for her. “Send the rest back,” I said. “But wait — what is this?” There was a beautiful black hat with a feather sticking straight up and a sash dangling down the side.

“That’s not for a graduation.”

“No, it’s not. Unless you’re the one graduating: then you could flip the sash as you walked across the stage and blow a whistle with the feather between your thumbs.”

“It’s for something, though,” she said, holding it with more affection than was seemly. “I don’t know what yet.”

“A party from fifty years ago, maybe.”

“Hey, around here? There are a lot of those. And you still can’t wear a hat like this.”

“Where did you get it?”

“Oh, online somewhere. What does the box say?”

I tried it on myself.

“Very nice,” said my mother. “Perhaps I should give it to you.”

“Yes, perhaps you should!” I laughed. “I could wear it to all my classes!” I placed it back in the hatbox, which smelled of cedar and insecticide.

The graduation was inside the gymnasium due to a forecast of rain, and in the middle the tornado siren went off and we all just stayed put. Personally, I felt this sound effect was suited to the occasion. The girls all wore high heels beneath their black graduation gowns and wobbled across the stage with great uncertainty, except one who strode quickly, then slipped and almost fell. I didn’t know any of them. Pinned to their chests they wore large white peonies that looked like the heads of angora cats. The boys pumped their fists in the air at the slightest inside joke. When Robert walked across the stage to grasp his diploma, the principal, good-naturedly, pretended to hold it back, but Robert smiled, and so did the principal, who patted him on the back, gave him the thing, and sent him on his way. He was liked, I could see that. People really liked Robert. In the crowd his posse called out “Gunny!” and “Gunny, got your gun?” and that’s when the full implications of his going off to the army really hit me. Why hadn’t I given it sufficient thought before now? Well, that was an easy one to answer, but still. It was not an excuse.

When the tornado siren stopped, we stepped outside and there was sunshine everywhere. It was the season of white flowers; to go with the girls’ peonies the school grounds were edged with bridal wreath and daisies. Only one dark rain cloud was left in the sky, like an evil genie, and it was making a hasty retreat in the breeze.

My brother left for the ironically named Fort Bliss the very next day. We took him to the bus station and said good-bye. We gave him little presents. A rabbit’s foot key chain. A tortoiseshell toothbrush. I gave him a copy of poems by Rumi and a three-by-five card that said Here’s a reply to your forgotten e-mail: don’t forget to write! , which, in case it sounded like sisterly snottiness, caused me to throw my arms around him and hug him hard. “You put the soul in soldier ,” I whispered to him. “Just don’t get one of those flag tattoos.”

He pulled away from my embrace. “Why not?” he asked, and I could see he was desperate for the knowledge and reasoning behind anything. I could see he felt shorthanded, underequipped, factually and otherwise. Just the night before he had said, “Afghanistan has provinces? Like Canada?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said now, shrugging. He beamed anyway. He was no longer a boy; he had become a young man. How had that happened? Nothing I said or knew had I known for very long, and so its roots were spindly and unsteady and the whole thing unsharable. “Don’t be nervous ’bout the service,” I said. It was a line I’d heard in a song somewhere. “You’ll be fine. Oh, and this,” I said more quickly, confidentially, discreetly stuffing a tampon in the side pocket of his duffel.

“Good God, what’s that for?”

“Just — for an emergency. Worse-case scenario: it stanches wounds.”

“Where do you learn this stuff?” asked my brother.

“From movies,” I said. “I’ve told you that before.”

We had brought Blot with us, and Robert knelt down and grabbed the dog’s head. “Good-bye, Blot, you bum,” he said, pulling the dog close and giving him a rub.

My father thrust a wad of bills into Robert’s front jacket pocket. My mother was the most misty-eyed, and my brother, as if to calm and please her, stayed peppy to such an artificial and generous degree that you could see he had no idea what he was doing. Even hoisting his duffel bags, he looked uncertain. My mother leaned in to kiss him and swept her hand through his wavy hair. “Oh, they’re going to shave it all off.”

“Let’s not get maudlin about hair,” warned my dad.

“Sell it to a wig maker!” I said, chucking him on the arm. “Get cash!” I couldn’t help at that moment but recall the time Robert had put Crisco in his front cowlick to tame it. It had frozen on the way to school, before we even got to the corner bus stop. But by midmorning the grease was melting and dripping down his forehead. I tried not to think of other times when he was younger and would absentmindedly pick scabby barleys from his nose. Now was not the time to think of him as a hapless child.

When the bus hissed and rumbled away, my brother’s face still pressed at the tinted window, my mother dabbed at her eyes and could only say, “I’m going to throttle that recruiter.”

“Now, Gail,” said my dad. Then he added, “If you throttle him, how will I get to hear him yelp and groan when I kick him?” This cheered my mother up.

I began working in my father’s baby greens field that very week. My job was to run in front of the shaver, a special attachment on the thresher, which he had contrived himself and which he was amused by and drove proudly like a car, though our field was so small that it was hard for him to make the turn-arounds. I ran ahead of it with fake feather and plastic hawk-wing extensions on my arms, whacking at the greens to scare the mice so they would not get into the mix. (If we had to take the greens to the triple-wash facility, it ate into the profit.) My father had actually designed my outfit for this, partially from a kite we had once brought to the Dellacrosse Kites on Ice festival. The costume had an aquiline-beaked mask and long wings I slipped my arms through, dipping them as I ran, brushing near the ground, beating the leaves, to resemble an actual predator and to encourage rodents to run from the shaver: nobody wanted sliced mice in their salads. At least not this decade.

I trotted, swooped, and shooed. I was the winged creation of my dad, like Icarus. I could feel myself almost flying, the way I flew in dreams: not very high, just running along and then sometimes lifting off just a little so that my stomach moved up into my heart. For a second. Not unlike my Suzuki on a speed bump.