Lorrie Moore - A Gate at the Stairs

Sarah switched ears, making it harder for me to hear, but then switched back and slowed to let a convoy of trucks pass. I could hear Letitia. “If this doesn’t work out with Amber, there are babies on the international market. We’ve had a lot of luck with South America. Paraguay has opened up again, and other countries, too. And they’re not all brown there, either. There’s been a lot of German influence, and some of these kids are beautiful, very blond, or blue-eyed, or both.”

“Well, thanks for the info,” said Sarah brusquely. “Get back to me on Amber.” Letitia then said something I couldn’t make out, and Sarah said quickly, “Gotta run — there’s an ice patch ahead,” and snapped the phone shut.

“The babies of Nazis,” Sarah said, shaking her head. “They’re hawking Nazi babies. Racially superior. Unbelievable.” She raked her fingers yet again through the bright desert grass of her hair. I didn’t ask her how a tiny baby could be a Nazi. What did I know? Maybe it could. “Blue eyes!” she cried. “The human race has really come a long way!” She shook her head again, this time with a horsey, nasal exhalation of disgust. “I knew someone in cooking school who was a blue-eyed Jew. He said his sperm was in great demand at the local sperm bank and he was making a lot of spare cash. He was at first a funny story and then a kind of expression we all used: ‘Gettin’ over like a blue-eyed Jew in a sperm bank.’ ”

“Yeah,” I said dopily.

“You may be too young to know this yet, but eventually you will look around and notice: Nazis always have the last laugh. ”

Then we were wordless through the towns of Terre Noire and Fond du Marais, places named both whimsically and fearfully by French fur traders, before the subsequent flattened pronunciations by Scandinavian farmers made the names even more absurd: “Turn Ore” and “Fondue Morass.” “You’ll find I say about eighty-nine percent of what’s on my mind,” Sarah said. “For the other eleven percent? I use a sauna.” She put a CD in the car player. “Bach’s first French suite. Do you know it?”

After some clicking and static, it began, stately and sad. “I think so,” I said, not sure at all. My friends had already begun to lie, to bluff a sophistication they felt that at the end of the ten-second bluff they would authentically possess. But I was not only less inclined this way but less skilled. “Maybe not, though,” I added. Then, “Wait, it’s ringing a bell.”

“Oh, it’s the most beautiful thing,” she said. “Especially with this pianist.” It was someone humming along with the light dirge of the Bach. Later I would own every loopy Glenn Gould recording available, but there in the car with Sarah was the first time I’d ever heard him play. The piece was like an elegant interrogation made of tangled yarn, a query from a well-dressed man in a casket, not yet dead. It proceeded slowly, like a careful equation, and then not: if x = y, if major = minor, if death equals part of life and life part of death, then what is the sum of the infinite notes of this one phrase? It asked, answered, reasked, its moody asking a refinement of reluctance or dislike. I had never heard a melody quite like it.

“You live near the stadium, right?” asked Sarah. We were already back in Troy. She swung the car down Campus Avenue toward the tiny street, Brickhurst, where I lived. The neighborhoods near the university were already mostly empty for the Christmas holidays, but in houses that were not student housing, frequently there were lights strung along the soffits and the brightened gutters seemed to shout cheerily, “WE are here! WE ARE HERE!”

“I’m at 201 Brickhurst,” I said.

“Brickhurst?” I suspected she was one of these out-of-staters who’d moved here a while back but had only a pieced-together knowledge of the town, a mind map assembled on a strictly need-to-know basis. But she was there in less than a minute.

She put the car in park. She patted me on the shoulder, then let her hand run down my coat sleeve. “Thanks,” she said. “Phone me when you get back into town after Christmas.” Her face looked fantastically sad.

“OK,” I said, not knowing what else to say. “Sounds good.” It was the midwestern girl’s reply to everything.

Christmas morning I slept in late. So did my younger brother, who had picked me up at the Dellacrosse bus station the night before, driving my father’s truck, the one with EAT POTATOES AND LOVE LONGER emblazoned on the back. He’d stood waiting in the parking lot for me to get off the bus, sporting his cheap brown parka and no hat, seeming glad to see me, as if he had something to share, though I didn’t really expect anything: my brother rarely shared. He helped with my suitcase and with my electric bass (which I’d brought with me), sticking both in the back of the truck, and he refrained from his usual remark about only boys playing bass. The electric guitar had been invented fifty miles from here! I was always ready to counter, to no particular person at all, as Robert himself was as steeped in the local myths about Les Paul as I was. I also had an acoustic upright bass at home in my bedroom, with a satchel full of bows attached to its belly. It looked like a fat abandoned archer in the corner, a quiver full of arrows gathering dust. “Ole Bob,” Robert called it, lumping it in with him and my dad. “At least you’re not lugging Ole Bob.”

Robert, it had often seemed to me, failed to apply himself — musically or academically. Perhaps having an older sister had stymied him a little. He knew I was quietly nuts about my guitar. The Jewish part of us both sort of understood that to worship God was to siphon off the worship of doodads — and we loved doodads (my instruments were insured up the wazoo) — but it didn’t always work that way: sometimes God adhered to something material and physical and earthly, and then all was a little misty for the holder and beholder of the doodad. But my brother was nice to me about it all; in fact, when I thought back to our many years together, he was, essentially, always nice to me, though he did gun the engine a little wildly as we pulled out of the parking lot. To his friends he was known as Gunny, a name my parents hated.

On the ride back to the house he told me how he was doing, though I had to ask two times. Sometimes a stammer came over him, which made him hesitant to speak at all — I’m sure he felt that the slightly choked and garbled voice did not accurately reflect his mind, though who knows, maybe it did. Sometimes you could see him trying to pick up speed when he spoke, velocity smoothing things over and getting him to the end sooner. Gunny, indeed.

On the bus I’d eaten nothing but some supermarket sushi, half a plastic tray of which was still in my purse, and hunger made me a more eager listener. Every word seemed a morsel. He was in his last year in high school and hated it. He had gotten four Fs and a D this past semester. His face showed no dismay in the relating of this. Apparently my father, not always one for helpfully stern parenting, had stared at the report card and said, “Well, Robert, what can I say. Four Fs and a D: it looks like you’re spending too much time on one course!” My brother chuckled drily, telling the story. Then we both fell silent, driving slowly toward home, the dark trees going by us with their branches set in the soft mush of the night sky like wrens’ feet or a spiky brooch in a cotton-bedded box. We passed the First Methodist Church and its spotlit plywood crèche, where the expressions of the dozing sheep were the least imbecilic in the scene. A sign out front advertised the title of the Christmas sermon: LOVE YOUR ENEMIES; YOU MADE THEM. We passed the Vanmares’ old farmhouse, where they had decorated the front yard again in a completely random holiday fashion: silhouettes of penguins, palm trees, geese, and candy canes all lit up as if they were long-lost friends at a gathering. Still, I was not immune to other people’s responses to Christmas, their whatnot compositions, whether it was art or just exuberance. Whimsy and fuss could still rivet me.