A Gate at the Stairs Read online

  Instead of being angry, Sarah looked happier than I had ever seen her in my brief acquaintance with her. Something in her face softened and relaxed, and a youthful light went on behind every part of it. Despite everything, she was in love with him. I had not seen love very much, and it was hard for my midwestern girl’s mind to imagine being in love with a guy this flamboyantly self-involved and, well, old. He could have been fifty or even fifty-four. But Sarah went over to him, clasped his face in her hands, and smooched him on the lips. He patted her on the back as if to calm her down. His deep eyes, his charming smile—I could not then and there see any of it. This was love, I supposed, and eventually I would come to know it. Someday it would choose me and I would come to understand its spell, for long stretches and short, two times, maybe three, and then quite probably it would choose me never again.

  “The cab headed out of the airport and got halfway to Pulaski,” Edward was saying, “before the driver realized he was headed in the wrong direction.”

  “Here we say ‘Plasky,’” Roberta said quickly.

  “Came back through something called Allouez—how do you say that?”

  Many of the original French traders seemed to have had such an adversarial relationship to nature, especially water, that everything they named took on their gloom: Death’s Door, Waves’ Grave, or Devil’s Lake, all lovely vacation spots translated from the French. Even in Delton County “the lake of God,” du Dieu, was known by the locals as Lake Doo-doo. By comparison, “Allouez” seemed welcoming, though perhaps sarcastic.

  “Alwez,” she said, as if it weren’t French at all.

  “Edward Thornwood,” he said, thrusting out his hand at her.

  “Edward. Edward. Yes. Edward. I’m Roberta,” she said, clearly trying to emphasize that this was a first-name-only situation. Could the revelation of his last name be a deal-breaker? Would the birth mother in a change of heart later remember it, track him down, take her baby back? I tried to live cautiously—or eventually learned to try to live—in a spirit of regret prevention, and I could not see how Bonnie could accomplish such a thing in this situation. Regret—operatic, oceanic, fathomless—seemed to stretch before her in every direction. No matter which path she took, regret would stain her feet and scratch her arms and rain down on her, lightlessly and lifelong. It had already begun.

  Sarah introduced Edward to everyone again, once more as just “Edward,” perhaps to help erase the memory of his uttered last name, and he focused his bright gaze and kind words—so wonderful to meet you, I know this is a complicated time—on me. This caused visible consternation in Bonnie, who began to look even sadder and more distant, for it was clear Edward thought I was the birth mother and that I was the one who needed to be charmed. Bonnie desired and required the focus of this meeting, if not this entire day, to be on her. Could she not be the star even for that long, just once, given everything, giving everything away as she was doing?

  “Edward, Bonnie here is the birth mother,” said Sarah.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, nodding toward her but failing to summon the same energy he had had for me. I wondered if being mistaken twice now for a possible mother portended something not so sparkling for my future.

  “Care for some more coffee?” asked Suzanne. She lifted the pot and toasted his cup with it.

  “No, thanks,” he said. And then we all chatted some more. Edward was a researcher—no longer associated with a university. He did research on eye cancer.

  “How did you get interested in eyes?” asked Roberta brightly.

  “Well,” said Edward, seated on the loveseat with Sarah. He gave a look of innocent, empirical glee. “At first I was interested in breasts.”

  “How very unusual,” said Roberta.

  I let out a small amused hoot—a mistake.

  Bonnie simply stared at him.

  “But there is a kind of eye cancer in mice that benefits greatly from a chemical that’s in grapes and red wine, actually—it’s called resveratrol—and I got interested in that. Of course no big pharmaceutical company is interested because it’s a natural product and not patentable, and the big companies control the research grants—”

  “But you have some outside interest,” said Roberta to the rescue. These birth mothers wanted rich, rich, rich. They wanted to know their babies would have all the things they hadn’t. And the babies would. They were cute; they would be fine. The person who most needed adopting, it seemed to me, was Bonnie.

  “Oh, yes. There’s some interest,” he added quickly. He could take a lawyer’s cues as quickly as Sarah. “But it’s not like I’ve invented a killer robot or anything as glamorous as that.” There was silence, so he continued. “Unfortunately, artificial intelligence is very artificial. In my opinion.”

  Sarah piped up awkwardly. “Here we are with my professional kitchen and his lab and despite all that chemistry our bodies could never get anything cooked up between us.” There it was again: adopted kid as default kid. In nervous ingratiation Sarah had crossed some line—of privacy and sensitivity, perhaps even of honesty—though I didn’t know it then. Edward gave her a sharp look. Nonetheless, Sarah continued. “Not a green thumb in the house,” she said. “Even invasive species won’t grow in my garden. I have the shyest vinca in the world.”

  What did it mean to have the shyest vinca in the world? It seemed sad but perhaps necessary, like the retirement of an aged ballerina.

  Bonnie began to shift in her seat and even her expressionlessness began to recede into the distance so that yet greater expressionlessness could take its place.

  “Bonnie, do you have any questions?”

  Then the sudden attention to her, which she had earlier seemed to want, startled her. Her face went red with heat. Perhaps there was in fact a chemical found in nature that could prevent eye cancer, cancer of the tear ducts, though I doubted it. I could see her eyes start to redden as well, and soon bright water was shining across them like sunlight with no sun. Her hands moved slowly to her hair. The full force of what she was doing was slowly coming to her once again.

  “I am only a hospital aide right now.” She did not say the word bedpan, but she didn’t have to. “I would like to go back to school.”

  “We can help you with that,” said Sarah.

  “Uh, actually, that’s not allowed in this state,” said Roberta. “But certain smaller gifts might be.”

  “I mean, we could help—in other ways. Advice and things.” Sarah was both pathetic and game. You had to hand it to her.

  “I just want the best for my little girl,” Bonnie said firmly. “Will you raise her Catholic?”

  “Of course,” lied Sarah, who leaned in generously to pat Bonnie’s hand. Because I was closer, I threw my arms around Bonnie. I don’t know what came over me. But it seemed we all were a team. A team of rescuers and destroyers both, and I was in on it and had to do my part. Bonnie briefly went to bury her face in my shoulder, then pulled herself together and sat back up. Sarah gave us an astonished look.

  “Well, Bonnie,” said Roberta, “shall you and I go back into my office and discuss things?”

  “Yes,” said Bonnie. They got up and closed the inner door behind them, leaving the three of us standing with Suzanne, who added, “I’ve seen a lot of heavy stuff in this room,” and then busied herself with file folders.

  “If this wallpaper could speak,” said Edward. He studied it quizzically. “Or maybe it already can.”

  “This wallpaper wouldn’t speak,” Suzanne said, glancing up at it. “It would bite.”

  We sat back down and flipped through magazines. Adoption Choice, The Adopted Child, and Sports Illustrated. One for the dads. I looked at an article in Time about baby boomers and their lonely work habits and aging pets.

  In ten minutes Roberta and Bonnie reemerged. “I have some wonderful news!” said Roberta. “Bonnie has decided she would like you to be the parents of her baby.”

  This ceremony of approval was a charade—everything had
been decided before we got here—and as with all charades it was wanly ebullient, necessary, and thin.

  “Oh, that’s wonderful,” said Sarah, and she rushed forward and put her arms around Bonnie. This threw Bonnie off balance a little, and she grabbed the back of the sofa to steady herself. Edward as well stepped forward and gave Bonnie a hug, to which she responded stiffly. But then Bonnie turned to me, and by this time she may have warmed to the idea of hugging, or to the idea of me, because she stepped forward and threw herself upon me again, her silent tears dampening my shoulder. Her back heaved slightly—just once—and then she stood straight.

  “Well, we’ll be in touch, I suppose,” said Bonnie hopefully, while her face wore a look of devastation and dashed vanity. Her moment in the spotlight was coming to a close—the spotlight itself was dimming and she was slowly stepping backwards.

  “The annual Christmas card,” said Sarah. “I’ll send you one every Christmas with all the news.”

  “And pictures,” said Bonnie in a low, stern voice she hadn’t spoken in before. “I want pictures of her.”

  Sarah said, “Of course. I’ll send photos.” She gave Bonnie a final hug and murmured loudly enough for us to hear, “Be happy.”

  “Yes,” said Bonnie tonelessly. She turned toward me one last time and I then, too, gave her a final hug. Bonnie whispered in my ear, “You be happy.”

  And then she seemed to be disappearing like an apparition. Through the darkening afternoon window one could hear the scrape of a plow outside in the street, but inside was where it was snowing. It was snowing in here in this room and it was all piled up around Bonnie, falling on her head, piled up on her shoulders. Of course it was only a bluff, the large, imposing dirigible of her, and now she had just spluttered to nothing. She was something flat and far and stuck to the wall. I wanted to take her with me, to go to her and lead her out with us. Where would she go? What home could she possibly have? Suddenly we were all going our separate ways. We were to meet Roberta tomorrow at the foster home and there meet the child. I waved to Bonnie, a kind of queen’s wave I hoped she’d construe as friendship, but no movement came from her at all.

  A kind of stunned trio, Sarah, Edward, and I stepped outside into this town of … what? A tundra of closing mills, pro ball, anxious Catholicism. The late-afternoon air of our exhalations hung in brief clouds before us. The thought balloon of my own breath said, How have I found myself here? It was not a theological question. It was one of transportation and neurology.

  “Let’s go seek a fish fry,” said Sarah, and happily took Edward’s arm.

  “Let’s do,” said Edward, sounding to my ear like a southern gent in a corny old film.

  We piled into the Ford Escort, no longer by the black car and with only one small silver scratch, and drove around a little haphazardly, passing the stadium, whereupon Sarah said, “So here’s where all the Catholics gather and pray for the Packers to win.” We wound up at a supper club called Lombardino’s, which over the bar had a sign that read BETTER TO OUTLIVE AN ELF THAN OUTDRINK A DWARF. There were drawings of Vince Lombardi on the napkins and placemats and even the teacups; to my surprise, I had to tell Sarah and Edward what a supper club even was.

  “We’re from the East,” said Edward. “They don’t have them out there.”

  “They don’t?” This seemed unimaginable to me.

  “I mean, there are steak houses, but they’re not the same. We love supper clubs but without really knowing what constitutes one. We kind of get it, but we always like to hear the exact definition from someone who grew up out here,” said Sarah.

  Always. Out here. So this was a thing they did, a tourist’s game. “Well, a supper club is just, well, it’s got these carrots and radishes in a glass of ice like this,” I began lamely, with no words coming, just a sense of the obvious. It was like describing my arms. “And there’s always steak, and fish on Fridays, and fried potatoes of some sort. There’s whiskey sours and Bloody Marys and Chubby Marys, and supper, but there’s no real club. I mean, there aren’t members or anything.”

  “What’s a Chubby Mary?” This was Edward and Sarah practically simultaneously.

  “It’s a Bloody Mary with a chub sticking out of it.”

  “A chub?”

  “A fish. It’s dead. It’s small. At first you see its head just poking up through the ice cubes, but believe me, the whole thing is there.”

  Edward and Sarah were sitting across the table from me, grinning as if I were the most adorable child. My face heated up in response to what I felt was mockery. For a second I wanted to stab myself.

  “They’re probably in the back, giving everything a quick parboil then tanning it with a torch,” said Sarah.

  “Sarah thinks nothing is really cooked anymore, just toned with a butane lighter.”

  “Sometimes that’s true.” Sarah shrugged.

  “We often blowtorched the weeds at home by hand,” I said. “But that’s organic weed control—not cooking.”

  “No, it’s not. Cooking.” Sarah smiled briefly again as if I were still just the cutest thing but no longer what she was looking for in this job.

  Edward took his wineglass and toasted Sarah. “Happy birthday,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  “It’s your birthday?” I asked.

  “Yes, well, in all the rush of events, who can even care!”

  I was tempted to ask how old she was, but then I remembered I already knew. Instead I said, “So, you’re a Capricorn!”

  “Yeah,” she said tiredly.

  “Like Jesus!” I said. Having a Jewish mother, I was still inclined to think of Jesus not as the messiah but as, like, a celebrity.

  “And like Richard Nixon,” she sighed, but then smiled. “Capricorns are a little boring. But they’re steady. And they work very hard, aiming for the highest thing.” She drank from her birthday wine. “They toil purposefully and loyally and then people just turn on them and destroy them.”

  “And tomorrow’s our anniversary,” said Edward.

  “That’s right. But we never celebrate it.”

  “Well, it’s a little on the heels of your birthday, but we celebrate it.”

  “We do?”

  “Sure,” said Edward, smiling. “Don’t you remember? Every year on that day you put on a black armband and then I go looking for you and find you on top of some bell tower with a bag of chips and some Diet Coke and a rifle.”

  Sarah turned to me. They were in performance. They were performing their marriage at me. “There’s a lot of pressure having a birthday and an anniversary so close together. It’s a stressor.” She raised her glass in a toast. “What does that elf and dwarf sign mean?” she asked. I was now the official translator.

  “I have no idea.” Perhaps they would suddenly, brutally, fire me.

  When the bill came, Edward reached for his wallet but couldn’t find it. “I must have left my wallet in the car,” he said.

  Sarah was already pulling out a credit card. “You should get one of those waist-belt change purses,” she said to him.

  “Too much like a colostomy bag,” said Edward. They both looked amused, and for a freak minute I believed they were perfect for each other, a feeling I would never have again.

  “Should I pay for mine?” I asked awkwardly.

  “Absolutely not,” said Sarah, signing for the bill, not looking up.

  The next morning I awoke in my own suite—the Presidential Suite, it was named—to Sarah’s phone call.

  “We’re off to see the baby,” she said. “Would you like to go with, as you real midwesterners say?”

  Was this perfunctory politeness—or perfunctory rudeness? Was I supposed to decline and let them have their appropriately private meeting? Or would declining get me fired, as it might suggest that the baby was of no real interest to me? I had come this far with them—it seemed I had to say yes. It was a decision made in the dry terror of cluelessness. Why was I never quick to understand? At the end of a trans
action, for instance, when a store clerk handed me my purchase and said, “Have a good one,” I always caught myself wondering, A good WHAT?

  “Yes,” I said now. The thick drapes at the windows were outlined in sun. I pulled them open with the plastic rod and the morning burned in—clear and ablaze above a snowy parking lot. The ceiling I could see now bore a maize maze of water stains, and the walls of the room had bullet holes in them. The Presidential Suite! Well, I supposed, even presidents got shot. The wallpaper peeled in triangles at the seams, like the shoulder of a dress dropped to show a whore’s plaster skin. There was a fake thermostat, one of those thermostats to nowhere.

  “Can you meet us in the lobby in thirty minutes?” Sarah asked doubtfully.

  “Of course.” I looked over at the in-room coffeemaker and wondered how it worked.

  As soon as I saw them in the lobby, I realized my mistake. They were looking at their watches, holding hands, then looking at their watches again. Their glance up at me was quick, perfunctory, and when I got into the car and sat in the back like their sullen teenage daughter I could see that this was not an outing I should be on. Edward started to light up a cigarette, and Sarah swatted it away.

  “Afraid of secondhand smoke? There’s conflicting science on that,” he said.

  Sarah gave him a look but said nothing. From my awkward place in the backseat I remembered a headline from the student paper. “You know what they say about secondhand smoke,” I said. I was a girl still finding her jokey party voice and borrowing from others’.

  “What?” said Sarah.

  “Leads to secondhand coolness.”

  Edward turned in his seat to look at me. I had pleased him with this stupidity, and he was getting a better look at me to see who I was today.