Lorrie Moore - A Gate at the Stairs

“And of course, she would hope you would have the child confirmed as well, when the time came.”

“We could do that. We could definitely do that,” Sarah said agreeably.

“Were you raised Catholic?” asked Amber.

“Uh, well, no, but my cousins were,” said Sarah, as if this solved everything.

Letitia, nervous about the sticky parts of a deal, said cheerily, “The birth father is white. I did mention that to you, didn’t I?”

Sarah said nothing, her face momentarily inscrutable. She picked up a lone cold french fry the waitress had yet to clear and began to chew.

Letitia continued. “Tall and good-looking, like Amber.”

Amber smiled happily. “We broke up,” she said, shrugging.

“Do you have a picture of him, though? To show Sarah?” Letitia was selling the idea of the handsome white boy-dad.

“I don’t think I ever had a damn picture of him,” said Amber, shaking her head. Now she looked at me, grinning. “Except in my mind. My mind’s a regular exhibition.” The phrase was oddly reminiscent of the Mussorgsky we’d just listened to in the car. And her mouth, with its few and crooked teeth, bits of shell awash on a reef of gum, seemed a curious home for her voice, which was slowly surprising, with its intelligence and humor. There was a lull now. Amber suddenly leaned back, physically uncomfortable. “So, where’s your husband?” she asked Sarah.

I examined Sarah’s face for the stiffened look of the accused. “He’s, oh, he’s at a meeting his lab is having with the university. I run my own restaurant in town, so I can make up my own schedule as far as meetings go. But, well, he’s at the beck and call of others — at least today he is.”

“Do you think you really have time for a baby, owning a restaurant and all?” Amber was not shy. If she had been shy, not one of us would be at Perkins right now.

Sarah refused to be flustered. She’d heard remarks of this sort a dozen times. But before she could speak, Letitia spoke for her. “That’s why Tassie is here. Tassie’s the backup. But Sarah will always be around. She’ll be the mom. And she can do a lot of her work right out of the house — isn’t that right, Sarah?”

What work could Sarah do from the house? Yell at Meeska about the coulis?

“Absolutely,” Sarah said. “Oh, I forgot. I brought you a present, Amber.” She took a CD from her purse. “It’s a mixed CD of my favorite classical music.”

Amber took it and stashed it in her bag with the most fleeting of glances. Perhaps she’d had a slew of these lunches as a means of collecting goodies, which she would later sell on eBay. “And I have a present for you, too,” she said, and handed Sarah a foil-wrapped pat of butter she plucked from the bowl on the table. “It’s wrapped!” Amber said, smiling wickedly. The CD hadn’t been. A scalding boldness gripped Amber’s face, then a kind of guilt, then drifty blankness, like songs off a jukebox list, flipped through unchosen.

“Thanks!” said Sarah gamely. You had to hand it to her. She opened up the butter and applied it to her mouth like lip gloss. “Prevents chapped lips.”

“You’re welcome,” said Amber.

When we all walked out to the parking lot, the probation officer followed. The American flag was flapping noisily next to the Perkins sign; the air was picking up wind and snow. The probation officer walked to his car and got in but did not start it. Amber’s face was completely lit up. I saw that she was fantastically in love with him. She was not concentrating on any of us, and something about this provoked Sarah.

“Well,” she said, studying Amber with an artificial smile.

“Yes, well,” said Amber.

“All right then,” said Letitia.

“Can I give you some advice, Amber?” Sarah asked, standing there, as Letitia clutched Amber even tighter. Letitia was ecstatic to have a white birth mother in tow, one with a little white bun in the oven, and did not want a rival agency to get ahold of her. Or so Sarah would say later. The windbreakered parole officer gave a wave and drove off.

“What?” Amber said to Sarah, but to me she smiled and said, “He was definitely following me.”

“When I was your age, I had some rebellious ideas,” Sarah continued her unsolicited advice to Amber. “I got in trouble now and again, here and there, but I realized it was because I was doing things I wasn’t any good at. Look at this.” She tapped Amber’s electronic bracelet with a gloved index finger. “You’re eighteen. Don’t sell drugs. You’re no good at it. Do something you’re good at.”

Sarah meant this tough-love speech compassionately, I could see, but Amber’s face flushed with insult, then hardened. “That’s what I’m trying to do,” she said indignantly, and tore herself from Letitia’s grip, walked over to what was apparently Letitia’s car, and got in on the passenger’s side.

Baby, it’s scold outside , Murph would have said if she were there.

“We’ll talk later,” Letitia called to Sarah, waving good-bye and hurrying off to Amber. Perkins’s flag was whipping loudly in the snowy wind.

“Well,” said Sarah as we both got into her car. “That was, for all intents and purposes, a complete disaster.”

She started up the engine. “You know?” she continued. “I always do the wrong thing. I do the wrong thing so much that the times I actually do the right thing stand out so brightly in my memory that I forget I always do the wrong thing.”

We rode home mostly in silence, Sarah offering me gum, then cough drops, both of which I took, thanking her. When I glanced over at her, driving without her sunglasses, her scarf wrapped now around her head like a babushka, she seemed watery, far away, lost in thought, and I wondered how a nice, attractive girl — for I’d thought I had glimpsed on the way up the girl I imagined she once was, her face still and thoughtful, her hair in the sun ablaze with light — how a girl like that became a lonely woman with a yarny shmatte on her head, became this, whatever it was. After a childhood of hungering to be an adult, my hunger had passed. Unexpected fates had begun to catch my notice. These middle-aged women seemed very tired to me, as if hope had been wrung out of them and replaced with a deathly, walking sort of sleep.

Sarah’s cell phone played the beginning to “Eine kleine Nachtmusik,” its vigorous twang not unlike a harpsichord at all, and so not completely offensive to the spirit of Mozart, who perhaps did not, like so many of his colleagues, have to roll about as much in his grave since the advent of electronic things.

Sarah pulled the phone from her bag and slowed the car slightly while she did. “Excuse me,” she said to me. “Yeah?” she said into the phone. All this despite the bumper sticker on her car that read PERHAPS YOU WOULD DRIVE BETTER WITH THAT CELL PHONE SHOVED UP YOUR ASS. She also had one that said, IF GOD SPEAKS THROUGH BURNING BUSHES, LET’S BURN BUSH AND LISTEN TO WHAT GOD SAYS. It was interesting to me that such a woman, one with such rhetorical violence adhered to her car, had gotten past the adoption agency’s screening processes, whatever they were. She also had a third bumper sticker that said BORN FINE THE FIRST TIME — though cell phones and Christianity were going to be the very things to bring her a child. Her fourth was no more promising: BEHIND EVERY SUCCESSFUL WOMAN IS HERSELF.

I don’t know why I could hear so clearly — perhaps Sarah was a little deaf and had the volume on everything turned up high.

“Sarah, hi, it’s Letitia,” I heard.

“Hi, Letitia.” I believed I wasn’t supposed to listen, so I looked out the window at the bleak snowy landscape; the sun was low and feeble, dissolving whitely like a lemon drop. Each town we passed through had a Dairy Queen, with customers lined up, even in winter. When I looked back at Sarah I saw her powdered, thinning skin like a crepe, with the same light freckles as a crepe, her gnarly-knuckled hand, arthritic from chopping herbs, going through her spiky russet hair, knocking back her scarf. How did her stand-up hair defy not just gravity but even the additional weight of a scarf? Why did my own hair always lie flat, defeated by atmospheric physics of all sorts, unimproved even by the most widely advertised of sticky gels? Education had not entirely elevated my concerns in life. It had probably not even assisted my analyses of these concerns, though that was the most I could hope for. I was too fresh from childhood. Subconsciously, my deepest brain still a cupboard of fairy tales, I suppose I believed that if a pretty woman was no longer pretty she had done something bad to deserve it. I had a young girl’s belief that this kind of negative aging would never come to me. Death would come to me — I knew this from reading British poetry. But the drying, hunching, blanching, hobbling, fading, fattening, thinning, slowing? I would just not let that happen to moi.