A Gate at the Stairs

by Lorrie Moore

  “Yes.”

  “Do you believe an entire country could be a spiritual mistake?”

  “Yes.”

  And though he continued never to express a single word of love for me, not in any of his several languages, I could not take a hint. Let the hint be written across the heavens in skywriting done by several planes—I was dense. Even skywriting, well, it wasn’t always certain: it might not cover the whole sky, or some breeze might smudge it, so who could really say for sure what it said? EVEN SKYWRITING WOULDN’T HAVE WORKED! Several years later, I would wonder why I had thought my feelings for this man were anything but a raw, thrilling, vigilant infatuation. But I still had called them love. I was in love. I had learned the Portuguese and the Arabic for love, but all for naught. At night in his apartment bedroom, with only the little red eyes of his stereo and phone and laser printer to light up the dark, he told me in a sighing way how I was his only friend, how he had just moved here in January after his business in New York fell apart—a delivery business that took things to and from New Jersey and Queens in a white van painted NO PACKAGE TOO SMALL. After 9/11, his van could no longer make it through the tunnels and bridges in a timely fashion. As a brown man, he was constantly pulled aside and fleeced for drugs. One by one, he lost clients. Packages did not arrive quickly enough. And by December he had sold the panel truck to a white man and with the money was registering online for classes out here. “I thought I would go back to school a little.”

  I liked the way he said “a little.” “Why out here?” I asked him.

  “Good question!” he said. Some friends in New York had recommended it. “Besides, there are no tunnels for everyone to be terrified of.”

  “No, no terrorism. What you have to worry about here is—corn mold!”

  “You are a farmer’s daughter,” he said.

  “Did you have any green card issues, running that business?”

  “Green card?”

  Neither one of us really knew how that worked.

  “Immigration status and all that.”

  “Oh, no. No problem there. How do you think Mohamed Atta got in? It’s easy. Hasta la vista, baby.”

  “I wonder if Mohamed Atta ever said ‘Hasta la vista,’” I said now.

  “Oh, I’m sure he did,” Reynaldo said quite seriously.

  And then he would turn me over and begin to massage me, his fingers made of some kind of steel, and like the cracker and digger used to splay open a lobster his hands dug in. The muscles of my back and neck and legs slid apart, and even my feet seemed to spread like the bones of a fan. When I would reciprocate he would say, “Take your long guitar nails and scratch my back,” and so I would.

  “Where does it itch?” I would ask.

  “Uh, yes, over there.”

  “Don’t do that there-over-there thing. You’ve gotta say up, down, left, or right.”

  “Copy,” he said, and then, “Yeah, right there, right in there, a little back and over …”

  “See, no, don’t do that back-and-over stuff.”

  “I said ‘right.’”

  “But not the directional right. I’m not a psychic. The itch travels. But the—”

  “—witch does not?”

  “Yeah, the witch does not …”

  “Ah, but she is lovely.”

  Most everything was beyond words, in a plateau of pleasure and pain that lifted out the tongue and stomped it on the floor.

  On the other hand, for him I seemed just a diversion. After lovemaking he would turn on his back and stretch and proclaim his relaxation.

  “Relaxed? You just feel relaxed—that’s it?”

  “Oh, no,” he said, turning to look at me. “I also see fireworks and Jesus flying by in a cape and all that.”

  “Good!” I would let him mock me. I would find any time, any moment, any excuse to get on my Suzuki and zoom over to him. I would go bareheaded, letting my hair whip stick-straight in the wind. I had stopped wearing my helmet in all things, though I would sometimes don a muslin headscarf to keep my hair out of my teeth, and would walk into his apartment wearing it. He thought I’d called it “Muslim” rather than “muslin.” He would place his hands on my head as if he were blessing me. “You could have my child,” he would whisper, and I would hum and nod and say “OK.” But it was Mary-Emma, whom I already loved, whom I would imagine us having, we would have her, and love her, her giggle, her smile, her caramel skin. And sometimes it was true: the three of us would go out together, and we were like a family. If he had loved me, or even if he’d just have said so, I would have died of happiness. But it didn’t happen. So I didn’t die of happiness. Words for a tombstone: SHE DIDN’T DIE OF HAPPINESS.

  Wednesday nights Sarah’s group still congregated and the remarks once again quickly wafted upward toward the attic nursery. The laundry chute conducted them even more than the staircase: maybe the words just climbed the stairs themselves, not even halting on the landings. The voices were alternately operatic, vaudevillean, sybillant, and tedious. Sometimes what sounded like singing was mockery. Sometimes what sounded like mockery was a request for food. Sometimes comments sounded seasick, or shopworn, or shot down, or like a station on the radio.

  “The healthcare system and the school system and social security have to have means testing. It has to be the reverse of the way it’s been: poor people in, rich people out.”

  “This whole racial blindness thing. These people who insist they don’t notice what color other people are. These parents who come to pick up their kids at daycare and pretend they’ve never noticed Jared’s skin. I wanna say, ‘Honey, if you’re racially blind like you say, that’s something of a handicap. Let me give you a cane! You’ll notice, by the way, that it’s white. Or maybe, since you’re colorblind, you won’t.’”

  “The phrase race card, as in ‘playing the race card,’ where did that come from?”

  “O.J.”

  “Before that, I think.”

  “Race card—what the hell does that even mean? Another white idea.”

  “Hey, as I said, we white people had a lot of bright ideas.”

  “A black person can’t accuse a white person of playing the race card, as the white race card is played every day.”

  “In fact, it’s not really even a card. It’s more like a deck.”

  “It’s more like the whole game.”

  “Do you know Alta?”

  “She’s an awful fake poet. Oops—did I say that?”

  “I do feel I know a whole lot about her body just by reading her work.”

  “Oh, her work is so fake, that’s not even her body.”

  “A poet with a body double.”

  “I would like a body double—just for grocery shopping.”

  “Do you get those looks in the aisles when you’re with your kid? That look that says I see you’ve been messing around with colored people—we hope you’re paying cash.”

  “I think I know what you mean.”

  “The suspiciousness.”

  “And the suspiciousness of religion, too. I find that antiblack.”

  “Don’t get me started on Islam.” It was the don’t-get-me-started-on-Islam person.

  “What is the purpose of busing? They bus in the poor black kids and then segregate them anyway, sticking them in the basement, in the shop classes.”

  “Were you here last week? Or was it longer ago that we were already talking about that?”

  “When I first brought Kaz in to have him tested, to see whether he should be entering school as a first-grader or a kindergartner? And I sat outside the room listening while this lady gave him some crazy-ass test that went ‘Foot is to shoe as blank is to muff.’ He was five years old! How’s he supposed to know what a muff is?”

  “Someday he will!”

  “Stop! I mean, that is just the most antique and ridiculous analogy! I think he said something completely random like ‘rabbit.’ And afterward she came out to me with this worried look and said he was le
arning disabled and we would have to put him in special ed. He was five years old!”

  “They track them early, for funding purposes. They need the numbers to be high enough for hiring. So the black kids take it in the teeth.”

  “The internal segregation of even integrated schools is famous.”

  “They have no concrete agenda other than that?”

  “It’s pretty much a crock.”

  I had seen quite a few crocks in my life—some of them moldering in barns, some cracked, some of them beautiful. All of them empty. I couldn’t remember a one that had had anything in it.

  “It sure does give you a sense of what it is to be African-American in this world.”

  “Well, yes and no.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Sorry to bring up hair again: Someone mentioned someone before, a woman who can do black hair? I need an address. I’m getting grief for Emmie’s afro.”

  “Yeah, she should have some braids!”

  “Elva down on South Elm can—she is cool and loves the kids. On Christmas she goes down to the homeless shelters and gives everyone free haircuts, black or white.”

  “Is this Sarah Vaughan on the stereo?”

  “Sure is.”

  “Man, listen to her scat.”

  “And you say you don’t believe in such a thing as black culture.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Ever heard Julie Andrews scat?”

  “I don’t believe in gay culture or white culture or female culture or any of that. It’s just so …”

  “Dream world, baby.”

  “Ever heard Julie Andrews at all?”

  “Hey, you don’t need blue eyes if you got blue earrings.”

  I didn’t know what they were talking about most of the time. But sometimes, in recalling certain remarks, the context would clarify them. Certain phrases, like a dusting of sand, would float across my mind and heat to a sort of glass. I’d seen scat! And now here it was as an admirable thing.

  “Vaughan takes ‘Autumn Leaves’ and turns it into Finnegans Wake.”

  “Is that your argument?”

  “Yeah. Kind of an Irish one: over beer. I am drinking beer.”

  “When we were in France, the French customs officials looked at us in a bewildered way. ‘But look,’ they said, as if they were pointing out something we had failed to notice. ‘You are white and your son is black—how can this be?’ As if it defied science or as if we had never regarded our own skin color before. And I had to say in English, and in anger, ‘This is what an American family looks like!’”

  “The rest of the world doesn’t understand the ungovernable diversity of this country.”

  “Diversity made even more extreme by capitalism.”

  “And by Karl Rove. I was once in a restaurant and saw Karl Rove sitting across the room. For five minutes I thought: I could take this steak knife and walk over there and change history. Right now.”

  “And?”

  “Well, as you can see I chose to stay a free woman. Would anyone care for a timbale?”

  “Is there meat in them?”

  “Oh, stop already with the meat. She’s become an actual member of PETA.”

  “Not yet.”

  “No. That’s good. Though I give them ten years and you watch: they’ll win the Nobel Peace Prize. Last year I gave them fifteen years, but I think the climate is changing very quickly in their favor. The rationale will be that humane treatment of animals can only mean more humane treatment of people.”

  “I have a problem with these animal rights people.”

  “Yeah, me, too. They instantly start comparing animals to black people. They say, ‘We did the same thing to black people.’ And you say, ‘But they were people.’ And they say, ‘Yes, we know that now, but that’s not what they were saying then.’ And you say, ‘Well, many people were saying it then. And no one now, that I know of, is saying a cow is a person.’”

  “A species-ist!”

  “There are Austrians saying that chimpanzees are people.”

  “And don’t get me started with the primate research. There is such eagerness to lump black people with apes. Beasts of any kind.”

  “That’s done even to the Jews.”

  “Well, Austrians …”

  “What do you mean, ‘even’?”

  “I mean nothing. I meant even chickens. I’ve heard the PETA people compare what goes on with chickens to what went on with the Jews.”

  “Well, how else are you going to make them sit still in their nests and do your taxes if you don’t cut their legs off?”

  “Your sense of humor is too dark.”

  “Don’t say ‘dark.’ It’s racist.”

  “Have you noticed that when people say ‘I’m not racist’ you instantly know they are?”

  “It’s like those completely unself-aware men who say, ‘I am not sexist,’ and you want to say, ‘Darling! Of course you are!’”

  “I wish people would get it straight and say ‘birth parent’ and not ‘biological parent.’ Everybody’s biological.”

  “That’s in part what’s too bad about everybody.”

  “And I don’t like the use of the word adoption for animals. The humane societies use it all the time, but it’s confusing to chldren who are adopted.”

  “I once heard I. B. Singer speak of the holocaust of chickens.”

  “And now there’s that other one, Peter Singer.”

  “Are you sure you don’t mean Pete Seeger?”

  “The ethicist who says kill the deformed babies but don’t eat meat.”

  “Oh, he’s a horse’s patoot.”

  I had seen a horse’s patoot. I had seen plenty of them, and the large swatch of tail that like a creature unto itself swept the flies away.

  “Too many Singers.”

  “Now we’re back to Sarah Vaughan. Yes. I’ll have a timbale.”

  I’d seen a crock. I’d seen a horse’s patoot. It was a timbale that I’d never seen.

  “Too many Sarahs.”

  “No such thing!”

  “Too many timbales. Please! Have another one.”

  “There’s the argument that people are so cruel to one another that until we take care of that we’ll never get square with animals.”

  “And then, as I was saying, there’s the argument that humanitarian practices with animals will cause us to improve our relationship with people. We’ll say, ‘Wait a minute: We don’t even do this to animals. Why are we doing it to people?’”

  “Sometimes it doesn’t matter where you begin.”

  “Is that really what the moral ethicists are saying now?”

  “I don’t know about them all. My field is actually dairy science.”

  “Their argument is that unless an animal is expressing all his native animalness, he is being cruelly used and his life is unworthy. You would think that would then cause them to see death as a mercy. But the death is not the issue. It’s the life.”

  “I would think the actual killing is the issue—how is it to be done?”

  And here I thought I heard Sarah’s voice. “How to kill chickens: Enough to feed the planet? I mean, have we learned nothing from the Holocaust? Can’t we just round them up and gas them?”

  More laughter all around. “That would express the Jewishness of the chickens—or do I mean the chickenness of the Jews?”

  “That’s why we got Israel, baby. We’re not chicken anymore.”

  “This is such bullshit. Even humans don’t get to express the fullness of their native humanness. You think the homeless person sleeping in his windowless car is expressing his humanness? And yet everyone breezes by and carries on. It makes bullshit of our finest intentions.”

  I had seen bullshit. I had seen chickens run after it and eat it warm.

  “All I know is, gee whiz, you water your plant! A plant you would water! A deformed child no?”

  “Would anyone like some water? Is your wine OK?”

  “No, it�
�s not OK! I need another one!”

  “I thought we were supposed to be talking about interracial families.”

  “Sonya won’t stay on subject.”

  I had once seen a comedy sketch in which a host chloroformed a dinner guest to keep him from saying one more word.

  “Everything’s genetic! It seems there’s a gene for everything! Sad but true, or maybe not so sad.”

  “Or maybe not so true.”

  “All I know is that our son has the jock gene. And he is adopted—obviously. Not one person in our extended family has this gene. We go to all his games and he’s like a Greek god out there, and we are in the stands looking like the peanut vendors.”

  I could hear Edward’s voice. Proximity to science and scientists and academics had caused him to speak in a kind of mimicry of professors. He would use the phrase if you will. A lot. “Let’s call it recombinant rehydration, if you will.” And Sarah’s voice would pounce. “Edward. Let me give you a pointer: Lose the if you wills.”

  There was a long pause. “I would rather throw sand in my eyes.”

  Some merriness. Most of the voices I never really recognized.

  “Just kidding.”

  “What melting pot? It doesn’t really melt all the stuff you put in the pot. There is DWB, driving while black, and there’s DWJ, driving while Jewish. Guess which gets you pulled over and searched?”

  “I’m not that well read on the subject.”

  “Perhaps you are not that well read.”

  “Anyone who’s read all of Proust plus The Man Without Qualities is bound to be missing a few other titles.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “You know those automobile window shades to prevent baby sunburn? Did we need one? Of course! But he argued no—Edward, you did! You argued with me!”

  “Because she’s not white?”

  “Here is my security system: me. A black man in the house. It scares away everyone.”

  The soft weight of feet on the carpeted steps. I looked up from my place on the floor with Mary-Emma. A woman appeared in the doorway, brown, tall, slender, her hair in neatly braided dreads, her head looked like a pot of vines, her figure stylishly offset with dark and bright. No one said “Mama” and ran to her. Not one child claimed her. Only two even looked up. Edward appeared behind her and touched her arm and she turned. Then they both receded, stepped back, disappeared.