A Gate at the Stairs Read online

  FedExed risotto? I looked in the cupboard, and in addition to a jar of matzo balls that looked like something from high school biology, I saw little jars of organic peas, carrots, and bananas for toddlers. I knew babysitters had a bad reputation for eating baby food, and although I was hungry—a starving college student!—I would try to avoid opening one up right away. Perhaps later. The bananas, I knew, were puddingy and delicious. I had heard of a woman who once, in a pinch, served banana baby food as a dessert, in parfait dishes, at a dinner party in Dellacrosse.

  I stared at those bananas. Since Mary-Emma was going to get FedExed risotto, maybe … I could not resist. Besides, she was old for this food and could eat regular bananas, a bunch of which sat on the counter. I twisted open the top and wolfed it down with a spoon, then rinsed the jar and tossed it into the recycling, which was a clear plastic bag torn to hang on the knob of the back door. Though most things about the house announced themselves with clarity, others I had to figure out.

  From upstairs came a whimper, then a full cry. Sarah hadn’t shown me around the house, so I had to find the staircase myself. There were actually two staircases, side by side, meeting at a windowed landing midway, and then they merged and became one, going the rest of the short way up, where a plastic gate, suction-cupped to the wall, blocked one’s path. I stepped over it with a kind of scissors kick and then made my way toward the cry. I passed a bathroom with walls painted the pale brown of a paper bag; on the sink was an assortment of prescription pills in their vials, as if someone were collecting beads, getting ready to make a necklace. I passed a bedroom with a mission bed that had perhaps failed at its mission, and a cherry dresser that perhaps had not. Atop it was a jewelry box with the phyllo thin drawers of a beekeeper’s hive.

  The baby’s room as promised appeared to be on a higher floor yet, the door to which at first I could not find. The crying was at the west end of the house, but when I opened doors to find a staircase I found only closets. There was a short pause and then full-scale wailing began.

  It was maddening trying to figure out how to get to it. I wandered in and out of the rooms in a low-level panic that prevented me from taking full notice of them, though they seemed both elegantly pastel and cluttered to my darting, searching eye. At the east end of the hall, on the left, I saw an open doorway. I lunged toward it, found yet another stairwell gate locked in place. But the actual wooden door was swung wide open, so I stepped over that gate, too, onto steps thickly carpeted in dull earwax gold. Through a tiny window at another landing, framed in the cross pieces, I could see spiny winter treetops and telephone wire. The staircase wound around, and then there it was, the nursery spread out beneath the eaves. The angled ceilings and walls were painted a pale wheat yellow, like a chablis, and at the windows at either end of the space hung curtains of sheer white over heavy, room-darkening shades. A double nightlight in lurid orange plugged up the electrical socket just to the left of a changing table and dresser. Emmie’s white crib, with its Winnie-the-Pooh bumpers and bedding, was in the far corner, and she was standing, clinging to its rail. In the short time that I’d not seen her, her silky black hair had fallen out and in its stead tight, blondish-brown curls were growing in, the start of an afro, really. It looked almost like a wig. When she saw it was me, her crying momentarily stopped in wonder.

  “Hey, Mary-Emma,” I said, returning her, at least halfway, to her former name. She looked at me, then resumed wailing. But when I went to lift her out of the crib, she was eager, and clung to me and quieted down. She was warm and soft and smelled of powder and pee. I took her to the changing table, where she lay passively. I pulled off her balloon-print trousers and disposable diaper, which was made of a soft, strangely layered paper I’d never seen before and which peeled away from her pink-brown bottom like the paper from poultry giblets. The room was dark from the still-drawn shades, and the air was moist from a humidifier. I fumbled around on the shelf over the changing table for a plastic box of wipes and accidentally knocked it to the floor.

  “Uh-oh!” said Emmie. She already knew both the sound and the language of things going wrong.

  “It’s OK,” I said. The wipes were in a heater, and so the falling was loud. Luckily none of the wipes came out and the heater light stayed on, so I assumed nothing was broken. Heated wipes! I know my own mother would be appalled by such things. As a baby, I would have gotten the chilly wipes of winter, or frozen dabs with unheated cotton balls, or a quick tepid washcloth, if I was lucky. My mother probably soothed my diaper rash with ice cubes from her soda glass. Still, I did not feel sorry for myself. I felt sorry for Mary-Emma and all she was going through, every day waking up to something new. Though maybe that was what childhood was. But I couldn’t quite recall that being the case for me. And perhaps she would grow up with a sense that incompetence was all around her, and it was entirely possible I would be instrumental in that. She would grow up with love, but no sense that the people who loved her knew what they were doing—the opposite of my childhood—and so she would become suspicious of people, suspicious of love and the worth of it. Which in the end, well, would be a lot like me. So perhaps it didn’t matter what happened to you as a girl: you ended up the same.

  Once Mary-Emma was changed and sprinkled piney and dry with some silky herbal rice starch, I carried her downstairs, stepping awkwardly over the plastic baby gates. I found myself saying “Wheeeee!” and “Upsy-oopsy.” Mary-Emma just looked at me with neutral interest. It was a look I’d forgotten and never saw anymore in grown people. But it was the best. It was fantastically engaged: scholarly, unjudging, and angelic. We stood on the landing, deciding which staircase to descend. “Which one?” I asked her. “This one?” Ah, once more: the uncertainty of the adult world. And she thrust out her arm and pointed toward the one that led to the kitchen. She knew her way around already, or was at least acting like it for purposes of displaying authority. I seemed to have little authority whatsoever but to be instead her happy maidservant. The tinier the child, the more you were the servant, I knew. Older children were more subservient, less queenly and demanding.

  In the kitchen I sat Mary-Emma on the counter, then stupidly turned away for a second to open a cupboard door. Sitting there, she started to twist, and I lunged and caught her just as she was sliding off the shiny granite toward the floor. Her face seemed to smile and sob at the same time, a look that said That may be fun for some people but not for me, and I placed her securely on my hip, feeling the biceps in my arm already beginning to strengthen and my jutted hip on its way to socket stress and limpage.

  “Let’s get you a snack. How does that sound?” I scanned the cupboard shelves. Had I eaten the best and sweetest of the baby food already myself?

  “Oag cool,” she said, pointing at the freezer.

  “Yes, it’s cool in there,” I said, still scanning the shelves. I looked in the refrigerator, where there were several bottles of water from Fiji. This was the first time I’d seen water from Fiji but not the last. I didn’t believe it was real. Selling water from Fiji seemed like a trick for the gullible, like bottled Alpine air at a carnival.

  Mary-Emma’s legs began to kick, and her heel in my thigh was a soft spur. Would I not please giddyap? “Oag cool!” she repeated, still pointing.

  I opened the freezer door and saw, amid the ice cube trays, chilling vodka, a plastic file folder, and a pound of ground coffee, what she wanted: frozen yogurt pops.

  “Ah, OK,” I said, and pulled them out. I set her on the floor and then sat there myself and we both ate blackberry frozen yogurt pops and were happy. “Hmm, delicious,” I said.

  “Dishes,” she repeated, creamy lavender all around her mouth, giving her the appearance of a struggling drag queen.

  What a miracle food was. In case I had given her too much, I buried the wrappers in the trash.

  When Sarah returned, Mary-Emma rushed to her and grabbed her around the leg. Sarah massaged her head. I provided a report, much of which I’d actually written ou
t on notebook paper, with the times of Mary-Emma’s waking up and eating and playing. “She loves that frozen yogurt,” I said. “Hope it’s OK: I gave her, uh, a couple.”

  “Oh, yes, that’s fine. I just hope they continue to make them! When I was little Dannon made this delicious prune yogurt that came in a waxy brown eight-ounce container. Well, now they don’t make any of those things. Completely gone. Although I was in Paris last year and found some there.”

  I nodded, trying to imagine the very particular sadness of a vanished childhood yogurt now found only in France. It was a very special sort of sadness, individual, and in its inability to induce sympathy, in its tuneless spark, it bypassed poetry and entered science. I tried not to think of my one excursion to Whole Foods, over a year ago, where I found myself paralyzed by all the special food for special people, whose special murmurings seemed to be saying, “Out of my way! I want a Tofurkey!”

  I could feel my tiredness most when I at last lay down. But first I walked home through the dark afternoon. Although the season had already rounded the corner and was on its move toward longer days, the sun still did not make it very high, but just kind of scooted along the side of the sky, pale and sheepish, like something ill, and darkness came over the town early and caused everyone just to give up on their days by four o’clock. The low snowbanks were whiskery with specks of black.

  In my apartment the radiators hissed and the windows were frosted deep into the mullions from the steam that hit them and froze. In my room I kicked off my boots and my socks came with them, my toes sore and as knobbed as Chinese ginger. Who knew life with a baby would be so draining? On the night table sat some mint tea that had been steeping there since morning, stone cold and medicinally brown. I sipped a little, its soggy bag falling against my mouth; then I gargled and drank the rest. I got out my translucent Plexi bass, like an answer to ice itself, and put on my headphones and plucked a little Metallica, a little Modest Mouse, plus a nothing bass part for “Angel from Montgomery,” and a bit of “Rock-a-Bye Baby.” I lay on the floor again and tried to sing like Ndegeocello. I made up a meandering tune that sounded like a bullfrog gulping his pain. In my mind an organist struck electric chords at expected intervals. Expected by me, at least. I felt I knew how to sing along, which most bass players, busy trying to find the midway place between melody and rhythm—was this searching not the very journey of life?—wouldn’t have bothered trying. Nonetheless, I was told I looked funny doing it—a bass face to beat the band, someone once said—so I rarely did it in front of anyone. What girl was not reluctant to be ugly? Still, I had started to experience the silence of this apartment as a sorrow, and singing helped, though only so much. I fell asleep with my clothes on, randomly sprawled on the bed as if a tornado had hit and lifted me up, then dropped me down and moved on, bored.

  The next day at the Thornwood-Brinks’ I took Mary-Emma ice-skating. I put her in her snowsuit, stuffed her into the stroller, and wheeled her down over the bumpy ice to the little neighborhood park, where there was a small flooded lagoon off the lake that the city had cleared for skating. There had not been a lot of very cold days, and a truck that had driven out onto the lake proper had fallen through, so the lake itself was closed except for a small racing pen. But people were allowed to skate on the flooded lagoon and were doing so.

  In the warm-up house I rented us both some skates—Sarah had left a twenty on the counter for this—and then we stepped out onto the nicked and bumpily formed ice. I propped Mary-Emma up, bracing her with my legs, and scooted her around. It was all new to her and she laughed like it was a joke. Her skates were double-bladed, and when I let her go she could glide a little on her own but then made off with a choppy step just running artlessly across the lagoon until she would hit a yellowish carbuncle in the ice and fall forward, her snowsuit cushioning her landing. She would then lie there staring into the cracks of the ice; beneath it were wavy weeds and lily pads frozen cloudily in place as if in a botanical glass paperweight. “Fish!” she cried to me, and I went over and she was poking with her mitten at the ice, believing the flora to be fauna. “Well, kinda,” I said. She was happy, the sun was shining, and she got up again and took off in her choppy gait. She had great spirit for this sport—it seemed to come naturally to her—and then I remembered her birth mother, who had spent her Saturdays skating with the nuns, and I thought, Well, of course. She had inherited Bonnie’s ability to skate. And now this is what Bonnie would miss: someone to skate with who wasn’t doing it out of charity. Someone she could teach to skate. It seemed, momentarily, a loss like several limbs. I watched Mary-Emma tear across the rink then fall forward again. She just lay there, staring into the ice, mesmerized.

  “Well, the sous-chef totally botched the mignardises,” said Sarah when I got home, “but that I should have expected. Hey, baby,” she said to Mary-Emma, and lifted her quickly up. Sarah was still wearing her white chef’s coat, which was now smudged with brown grease. There was a cut on her hand and two burns on her arms. “In everything I do there seems to be some part missing. I’m discovering that it is almost impossible to be a mother and also do anything of value outside the house. But that almost is key, and I’m living in the oxygenated heart of that word.” Her face brightened. “These bumper stickers that say EVERY MOTHER IS A WORKING MOTHER are bullshit. Propaganda of the affluent. And an insult to actual working moms with jobs. I’ve taken to tearing them off when I see them!”

  “Tossa,” said Mary-Emma, pointing happily at me.

  “Did you get a snack?” Sarah asked us both in a high chirpy voice.

  “We got some cider with whipped cream in the warm-up hut,” I said.

  “Cider with whipped cream?” Sarah looked aghast.

  “Oh, was that a bad idea?”

  “I’ve just never heard of cider and whipped cream,” said Sarah. “I mean, really, I’m a food person but—cider and whipped cream? My God—what a thing to do to cider!”

  “It’s pretty common around here.” I shrugged. I had grown up squirting whipped cream on hot cider; was it a perversion of some sort? Frankly, that wouldn’t have surprised me.

  “Dairy with everything, I guess. I’m going to put all my dessert cheeses in the front window at Le Petit Moulin. Lure them in with dairy, then give them … sauteed ground cherry!” This was the light, flighty side of Sarah. “Or perhaps a little sherry,” she added.

  Almost always, on good days at least, I was a joiner.

  “That should make them merry,” I said, accidentally uttering the name that seemed never uttered in this house except by me.

  “Or cause some hari-kari!”

  Sarah smiled and bounced Mary-Emma while she spoke: “Very, very, very.” Which again rhymed with the name she clearly hoped to bury. Mary.

  “Tossa!” cried Mary-Emma again, leaning toward me.

  Sarah looked vaguely troubled. “What perfume are you wearing?” she asked me. “You smell so good.” She set Mary-Emma down, and Mary-Emma came running at me and then at Sarah, in a kind of game, back and forth.

  “Perfume?” I was overheated from skating and had not yet taken off my coat; I wasn’t sure she was correctly identifying the odor—if there even was one. Bodily attention of any sort from others I wasn’t used to, and it made me want to run and hide.

  “You smell so nice—what is it?” She looked at me hopefully, her eyebrows arced with inquiry. She pushed her hand through her hair. Its brightness seemed to have disappeared, and it seemed now a flat, tannic hue. When she raked her hand through it, I could see that it was thinning; beneath the cat’s-cradle crisscross of her part, she had a kind of comb-over thing going on, elaborate zigzagging layers at the top to hide the scalp bursting through. Age was burning the edge of her hairline, and when her hand flicked through the strands, before they fell back in decoration, her forehead protruded shiny and round as an apple.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “Garlic?” I knew people always lied about their perfumes and claimed it was soap, as if
it were vanity to attempt more. Actually, I sometimes after showers dabbed on a kind of aromatic oil that Murph had given me for my birthday, a slim bottle called Arabian Princess. In the current world situation it seemed unwise to advertise this, in case I was mistaken for the mascot of Osama bin Laden, though I was pretty sure Murph had simply got it at the food co-op.

  “Well, if you find out, let me know.”

  “I think it’s from the co-op,” I said.

  “Really? Well, I’ll sniff around there then.” Sarah picked Mary-Emma up and nuzzled her. “How was skating?”

  “Good,” I said.

  “Good!” repeated Mary-Emma.

  “See how she’s really chattering and opening up!” said Sarah, giving her a kiss on the head. “She is, after all, two.”

  “Good!” cried Mary-Emma again, and then she leaned out of Sarah’s arms to come back to me.

  “Oh, you want to go to Tassie, do you?” said Sarah, and she let her go, passing Mary-Emma to me, some maternal hurt scurrying to hide behind her thin-as-a-piano-string smile. “You’ll really have to tell me the name of that perfume you’ve got on, if you remember it,” she said, sighing. “Otherwise, I could be arrested at the co-op for loitering.” Something was wrong—perhaps it was Sarah’s tight mouth: a choking wire that had somehow garroted me. I could not speak. A whole minute of silence passed between us. “Well,” she said finally, “I should let you go.” And she took back Mary-Emma, who began to squirm and fuss.