Lorrie Moore - A Gate at the Stairs

I guessed that only at the last possible minute did the soul in a determined fashion flee the dying flesh. Who could blame it for its reluctance? We loved our lives more than we ever knew, and at the end felt the bounty of them, as one would say in church, felt even the richness of their missed opportunities, or just understood that they were more than we had realized during the living of them and a lot to give up. Sometimes I imagined that just before oblivion, as one lay dying, one got to have a brief farewell meeting with friends: one last dream drink in a cozy spot of the mind. Even sputtering hardware, before its final burning out, gave back its pleasures as best it could. There was a song! And wasn’t this a compelling trade, sensation for spirit and vice versa? This exchange was lifelong and perhaps heightened at death: the thirsty draped about the bubbler for a drop. These were the sorts of notions that had been raised in all my classes, and we had chased them round and round like dogs maddened by their tails.

When I went into Robert’s old bedroom with my mother, to help her put his clothes in boxes for Goodwill, I lifted his winter coat off its hanger and a bat flew out the cuff and out of the room to nowhere we could find. That was the last life any of his clothes ever had, at our house at any rate.

The holidays of fall had all merged like a suburban megalopolis. Halloween had bled into Thanksgiving, which had already become pre-Christmas, just as Kenosha had become Racine had become Milwaukee. Pumpkins had wreaths! Hunting season began on Veterans Day, and men who had never once been in the military dressed themselves in the bright color of circus lollipops and prowled the fallow farms for deer. Sex workers, whose high season was the hunting one, temporarily set up shop in a rented storefront on County H called Dance, Drink, and Din-Din, right smack next to Home Dollar. My birthday came, and because I was at last of drinking age, my father bought champagne and he and my mother proposed a toast. “To our sweet and lovely Tassie,” said my dad. “Twenty-one! Time flies so fast, I have to lie down just thinking about it.”

I’d read once of a French geologist who had confined himself in a dark cave for sixty-one days, though when he emerged, he thought it had been only forty-five. Time flew! No matter what.

“At least we got one of you out of childhood,” added my mother.

“Gail,” my father warned her.

“Sorry,” she said. Her face had become round and bloated. Mourning had widened instead of thinned her. Perhaps it was the calming pharmaceuticals she’d recently been prescribed. She now, behind her large glasses, had the double-triple face of the middle-aged, her most forward face, the one she used to have, framed again in yet another oval of flesh, a cameo of meat. In fact, fat had settled in around the entirety of her. Instead of going on a diet, she said, she would stick a wick in her belly and burn it off for Hanukkah.

I googled the other Tassie Keltjin again, to see if something was being done to honor her increasingly distant memory, and if not, to see if people were even a little bit sorry that she had died. Perhaps they would be. Perhaps they should be. “If the universe is big enough, everything that can happen will happen, so that if we could look out far enough we would eventually discover an exact replica of ourselves.” This I had read in the paper. In the Science Times. It was like a cosmic version of the infinite number of monkeys who given an infinite amount of time ultimately write Hamlet. Which in evolutionary terms was a scientific fact. When you thought about it.

The other Tassie Keltjin was still dead and it was no big deal to anyone. No one was doing squat.

After Thanksgiving, I went back to Troy. My father had begun experimenting with winter spinach grown in a propane-heated hoop hut. This kind of spinach — thick, tender, grown slowly — was in demand in Evanston and Chicago, where he hoped to sell it in time for Christmas. He smiled and said he hardly needed me, that I should get back to school before I turned into a damn fool.

There were days I felt hard, bittersweet, strong. People died, but then if you forgot they had died, even for a minute, they could achieve a kind of immortality; that is, they kept on living, even though they were dead. My Suzuki back in storage, I walked everywhere. The gothic spires of campus seemed defiant thrusts at God, or poles for the stripping saints. Haughty Fatigue! The zoology quad, which we cerebrally called “the hippocampus,” was now being ripped up for some sort of construction and there were cranes and backhoes and concrete barriers to walk around. At the kiosks near the union I stopped regularly to read the film society posters.

I found an apartment, one with a girl named Amanda Prague, who’d grown up in Pardeeville, Wazeeka, and Mukwanago, and she was, she announced, as if needing to get this out of the way, a quarter African-American, a quarter Oneida, a quarter Czech, a quarter Irish.

“That’s a lot of quarters,” I said.

“Sure is,” she said, nodding and shrugging. She needed a roommate, since the one she’d started with in September had gone home midsemester with mono. “You seem quiet,” she said. “If you want it, it’s yours.” So I signed on, wrote down her phone number for my own, and moved a few items into her empty room, which had a bed, a dresser, and a lamp. I added a quilt, a pen, and a clipboard: What else did I need? I would wait until later to ease her into the idea of my bass guitar. The storage bin a mile away still held not just the Suzuki but also the xylophone. I would stay mum about these as well, for now, though perhaps by March I’d be riding my scooter once more, like other girls I’d seen: helmetless and serene, with the angelic hypnotized look of the already dead, as traffic veered all around.

——

Yet again, another December, and I found myself looking for a job. The low matte sky was like a black-and-white photo of a sky. Which made it seem strange rather than familiar; its strangeness was not made friendlier by its resemblance to a photograph. A vast and depthless sky should not resemble a photograph any more than it should resemble a rug. With the exception of occasional thoughts like this? I was hanging on. I had a new résumé printed up, and in addition to the Schultzes and the Pitskys back home I added the Thornwood-Brinks to my list of references. I did not rule out some dubious employment choices: a want ad that read Tap into Collective Wisdom, Make $ by Predicting Future Events; another asking for human subjects for a pharmaceutical company drug trial; or a position as the new “Bad Girl,” whom a guy could hire to write love letters to him so he could leave them around the house to make his girlfriend jealous. I also applied for a job that involved pretending to have certain physical symptoms, for labs and clinics involving medical students and doctors in training. “Describe some vague abdominal pain,” a man in a white lab coat commanded me.

“It’s sharp for a few seconds and then it kind of goes splat and hovers for a little while behind my right rib — before it glides slowly, diffusely south.”

The man was silent. “Is there nausea?”

I was surprised by his question. Perhaps I was doing well at this. “No. Well, yes. Sometimes.”

“Do you have acting experience?”

“I feel like I do now,” I said. But I was not called back.

One day, with a propelling pang, I ambled toward downtown. Along the lake, the slick black scalps of the water signaled a coming storm. I walked past Sarah’s old restaurant and saw that although it was closed, no one else had yet taken it over. There was a padlock on the door. The sign reading LE PETIT MOULIN was still in place, though the last three letters of Petit had been pried off — no doubt to hang on a dorm room wall somewhere. In the window the cheeses Sarah used to display beneath their glass covers were still there but were now curling, blueing, browning: the grana and govarti, the cocoa cardona. No one had put them away. The twelve-year-old cheddar, which on a good day was like sugared gold, was now cracked and snowy with mold. The white pasty goat cheeses had yellowed and greened. The restaurant had been closed up in a rush, and no one, not one person all fall, had cleared out the window. I stared at these decaying cheeses as if they were living things, dying unfed in a zoo, which in a way they were. They were misshapen and yet on display, a person’s collapse and sorrow concretized behind glass. Negligence in the restaurant world! I thought I saw in one of the goat cheeses the teeth marks of a rat. No doubt in this town someone had already written a letter to the editor about it.