A Gate at the Stairs Read online

  “In winter my brother and I actually used to shoot them out of pipes, with firecrackers,” I added, now in total free association. “Potato guns. It was a big pastime for us when we were young. With cold-storage potatoes from the root cellar and some PVC pipe. We would arrange little armies and have battles.”

  Now it was Sarah’s turn for randomness. “When I was your age I did a semester abroad in France and I stayed with a family there. I said to the daughter Marie-Jeanne, who was in my grade, ‘It’s interesting that in French-Canadian French one says “patate” but in France one says “pommes de terres,” ’ and she said, ‘Oh, we say “patate.” ’ But when I mentioned this later to her father? He grew very stern and said, ‘Marie-Jeanne said “patate”? She must never say “patate”!’”

  I laughed, not knowing quite why but feeling I was close to knowing. A distant memory flew to my head: a note passed to me from a mean boy in seventh grade. Laugh less, it commanded.

  Sarah smiled. “Your father seemed like a nice man. I don’t remember your mom.”

  “She hardly ever came into Troy.”

  “Really?”

  “Well, sometimes she came to the market with her snapdragons. And gladioluses. People here called them ‘gladioli,’ which annoyed her.”

  “Yes,” said Sarah, smiling. “I don’t like that either.” We were in polite, gratuitous agreement mode.

  I continued. “She grew flowers, bunched them together with rubber bands. They were like a dollar a bunch.” Actually, my mother took some pride in these flowers and fertilized them with mulched lakeweed. My father, however, took even greater pride in his potatoes and would never have used the lakeweed. Too many heavy metals, he said. “A rock band once crashed their plane into that lake,” he joked, and though a plane had indeed crashed, the band was technically R&B. Still, it was true about the water: murky at best from gypsum mining up north.

  It was strange to think of this woman Sarah knowing my father.

  “Did you ever travel into town with them?” she asked.

  I fidgeted a bit. Having to draw on my past like this was not what I had expected, and summoning it, making it come to me, was like coaxing a reluctant thing. “Not very often. I think once or twice my brother and I went with them and we just ran around the place annoying people. Another time I remember sitting under my parents’ rickety sales table reading a book. There might have been a another time when I just stayed in the truck.” Or maybe that was Milwaukee. I couldn’t recall.

  “Are they still farming? I just don’t see him at the morning market anymore.”

  “Oh, not too much,” I said. “They sold off a lot of the farm to some Amish people and now they’re quasi retired.” I loved to say quasi. I was saying it now a lot, instead of sort of, or kind of, and it had become a tic. “I am quasi ready to go,” I would announce. Or, “I’m feeling a bit quasi today.” Murph called me Quasimodo. Or Kami-quasi. Or wild and quasi girl.

  “Or quasi something,” I added. What my father really was was not quasi retired but quasi drunk. He was not old, but he acted old—nutty old. To amuse himself he often took to driving his combine down the county roads to deliberately slow up traffic. “I had them backed up seventeen deep,” he once boasted to my mom.

  “Seventeen’s a mob,” said my mother. “You’d better be careful.”

  “How old’s your dad now?” asked Sarah Brink.

  “Forty-five.”

  “Forty-five! Why, I’m forty-five. That means I’m old enough to be your …” She took a breath, still processing her own amazement.

  “To be my dad?” I said.

  A joke. I did not mean for this to imply some lack of femininity on her part. If it wasn’t a successful joke, then it was instead a compliment, for I didn’t want, even in my imagination, even for a second, to conflate this sophisticated woman with my mother, a woman so frugal and clueless that she had once given me—to have! to know! to wear!—her stretch black lace underwear that had shrunk in the dryer, though I was only ten.

  Sarah Brink laughed, a quasi laugh, a socially constructed laugh—a collection of predetermined notes, like the chimes of a doorbell.

  “So here’s the job description,” she said when the laugh was through.

  Walking home, I passed a squirrel that had been hit by a car. Its soft, scarlet guts spilled out of its mouth, as if in a dialogue balloon, and the wind gently blew the fur of its tail, as if it were still alive. I tried to remember everything Sarah Brink had said to me. It was a mile home to my apartment, so I replayed long snippets of her voice, though the cold air was the sort that bullied a walker into mental muteness. This is an incredibly important position for us, even if we are hiring at the last minute. If we hire you, we would like you to be there with us for everything, from the very first day. We would like you to feel like part of our family, since of course you will be part of it. I tried to think of who Sarah Brink reminded me of, though I was sure it wasn’t anyone I’d actually met. Probably she reminded me of a character from a television show I’d watched years before. But not the star. Definitely not the star. More like the star’s neatnik roommate or the star’s kooky cousin from Cleveland. I knew, even once she had a baby, she would never be able to shake the Auntie Mame quality from her mothering. There were worse things, I supposed.

  In the sky the light was thin and draining. Dusk was beginning already, although it was only three in the afternoon. The sun set earliest in these days before Christmas—“the shortest days of the year,” which only meant the darkest—and it made for a lonely walk home. My apartment was in one of those old frame houses close to campus, in the student ghetto that abutted the university stadium. It was a corner house, and the first-floor apartment I shared with Murph was to the south, on the left as one walked up the stairs to the porch. Murph’s real name, Elizabeth Murphy Krueger, adorned our mailbox along with mine on an index card in sparkly green glue. Across the street the gray concrete stadium wall rose three times higher than any building around, and it overshadowed the neighborhood in a bleak and brutal way. In spring and fall convening marching bands, with their vibrating tubas and snares, routinely rattled our window-panes. Sun reached our rooms only when directly overhead—in May at noon—or on a winter morning when reflected from some fluke drifts of a snowstorm, or in the afternoon when the angle of its setting caused it to flare briefly through the back windows of the kitchen. When a generous patch of sun appeared on the floor, it was a pleasure just to stand in it. (Was I too old or too young to be getting my pleasure there? I was not the right age, surely.) After a rainstorm, or during a winter thaw, one could walk by the stadium and hear the rush of water running inside from the top seats, dropping down row by row to the bottom, a perfectly graduated waterfall, although, captured and magnified within the concrete construction of the stadium, the sound sometimes rose to a roaring whoosh. Often people stopped along the sidewalks to point at the exterior stadium wall and say, “Isn’t the stadium empty? What is that sound?”

  “It’s the revolution,” Murph liked to say. To her, stadiums were where insurgents were shot, and this caused her to have mixed feelings about living so close, to say nothing of her feelings about the home football games, when curb space was scarce and the parked cars of out-of-towners jammed our streets, their cheers from the stands like a screaming wind through town, the red of their thousands of sweatshirts like an invasion of bright bugs. On Sunday mornings, the day after the games, the sidewalk would be littered with cardboard signs that read I NEED TICKETS.

  Murph was now only technically my roommate, since she mostly lived a mile away in a subletted condo with her new boyfriend, a sixth-year senior. I had a tendency to forget about this—looking forward to telling her something, wondering what we might cook up for supper, expecting to see her there, brooding, with her sweater thrown over her shoulders and her sleeves wound round her neck, a look that was elegant on her but on me would have made me appear insane. And then I would come home to realize, once more, that
it was just me there. She would leave the telltale jetsam and flotsam, hastily changed clothes, carelessly written notes. Hey, Tass, I drank the last of the milk—sorry. So I was left with the ambivalence of having to pay with aloneness for an apartment I could not alone afford. It was not miserable—often I did not miss her at all. But there was sometimes a quick, sinking ache when I walked in the door and saw she was not there. Twice, however, I’d felt the same sinking feeling when she was.

  The porous dry rot of our front steps still held weight—six slim tenants, single file—but every time I climbed them I worried it could be my last: surely the next time my foot would go through and I would have to be pried from the splintery wreckage by a rescue squad phoned by the watchful Kay upstairs. Our landlord, Mr. Wettersten, was classically absentee, though he believed in good boilers and, when school was in session, did not stint with heat, perhaps fearing the lawsuits of parents. You could shower several times a day, or at the last minute: your hair would dry in a snap over the radiators. Sometimes my apartment would so overheat that my fingernails would dry up and crack and break off in my gloves, chips of them stuck in the woolen fingertips. Now, as I unlocked the door and pushed in, the pipes were clanking and letting loose with their small internal explosions; no pipe had ever yet burst, though if the boiler kicked on at night, the quaking could pull you alarmedly from sleep. It was, at times, like living in a factory. Kay, who lived in the largest flat, was middle-aged and the only tenant not a student; she was always in some skirmish with the landlord about the building. “He has no idea what he’s up against, letting this building go the way he has,” Kay said to me once. “When something’s off here I have nothing else to think about. I mean, I have no other life. I can make this my life. He doesn’t appreciate what he’s up against. He’s up against someone with no life.” So we all let Kay manage the troubles of the house. She had been there for more than a decade. Murph sometimes referred to the tenants of the house as the Clutter Family, by which I assumed—I hoped, I prayed—she meant all their clutter.

  When I walked across the front room to throw my stuff on the couch, the floorboards, paradoxically worn and tentative, creaked loudly—more so now that all humidity had fled the place. Despite the busy, complaining crackle of pipe and floor, the rooms had a wintry loneliness. Our fireplace, cold and unused, a safety hazard—what hope for comfort without the risk of fiery death? should we risk? yes, I once begged, yes!—we used as a storage nook for CDs. In the corner leaned my electric bass and amp, yearning for a workout, but I ignored them. I had a see-through Dan Armstrong lucite, like Jack Bruce of Cream, and I had contrived to know stray licks not usually played on bass: I knew some Modest Mouse, some Violent Femmes, and some Sleater-Kinney (“Isn’t that the cancer hospital in New York?” my brother once asked me), plus, from the olden days, Jimi Hendrix, “Milestones,” “Barbara Ann,” “Barbara Allen,” “My Favorite Things,” and “Happy Birthday” (as if played by Hendrix but on a bass!). Once, in Dellacrosse, I had agreed to give an actual concert—I played “Blue Bells of Scotland” and wore a kilt. A kilt with a see-through electric guitar! which managed to sound very much like a bagpipe, and because the concert was part of a county fair, they gave me a green ribbon that said Lyric Lass. Everyone at that stupid fair had their head up their hinder as far as I was concerned, including me, and I never played there again.

  In the hallway of my apartment the phone machine light was blinking and I pressed Play, turned up the volume, then went on into my bedroom, where I flopped down on my bed, in the icelandic afternoon dusk, door open, to listen to the voices of women, one after another, and their various desires and requests.

  First there was Murph’s sister. “Hi, it’s Lynn. You are not there, I know, but call me later when you are.” Then there was my mother. “Hello, Tassie? It’s your mother.” Followed by a bumping, banging hang-up. Had she dropped the phone, or was this just one more example of her strange personal style? Then there was my advisor, who was also Dean of Women. “Yes, this is Dean Andersen looking for Tassie Jane Keltjin.” I kept forgetting our outgoing message contained no indication as to whose phone it was. It simply had Murph screaming (we thought hilariously), “Leave your message after the tone, if you have to! We are so not here!” Dean Andersen’s voice was gentle but forceful, a combination I would spend many hours of my young life attempting to learn, though they would have been better spent on Farsi. “Tassie, could you leave a copy of your spring registration forms in my mailbox in Ellis Hall? Thanks much. I need to officially sign off on them, which I don’t believe I did, though I’m not sure why. Have a great break.” There was a long, uncertain silence preceding the final message. “Yes, hello, this is Sarah Brink phoning for Tassie Keltjin.” There was another long, uncertain silence. I sat straight up to hear if there was anything else. “Could she phone me back sometime this evening? Thank you very much. 357-7649.”

  First I phoned my mother. She had no voice mail of any sort, so I let it ring ten times, then hung up. Then I rewound our machine and played the message from Sarah Brink again. What was I frightened of? I wasn’t sure. But I decided to wait until the morning to phone her back. I got into my nightgown, made a grilled cheese sandwich and some mint tea, then took them back into my room, where I consumed them in bed. Ringed by crumbs and grease, newspapers and a book, I eventually fell asleep.

  I woke up in a blaze of white sun. I had neglected to pull the shades and it had snowed in the night; the morning rays reflected off the snow on the sills and on the low adjacent roof, setting the room on fire with daylight. I tried not to think about my life. I did not have any good solid plans for it long-term—no bad plans either, no plans at all—and the lostness of that, compared with the clear ambitions of my friends (marriage, children, law school), sometimes shamed me. Other times in my mind I defended such a condition as morally and intellectually superior—my life was open and ready and free—but that did not make it any less lonely. I got up, trudged barefoot across the cold floor, and made a cup of coffee, with a brown plastic Melitta filter and a paper towel, dripping it into a single ceramic mug that said Moose Timber Lodge. Murph had gone there once, for a weekend, with her new BF.

  The phone rang again before I’d had time to let the coffee kick in and give me words to say; nonetheless, I picked up the receiver.

  “Hi, is this Tassie?” said the newly familiar voice.

  “Yes, it is.” I frantically gulped at my coffee. What time was it? Too soon for calls.

  “This is Sarah Brink. Did I wake you up? I’m sorry. I’m calling too early, aren’t I?”

  “Oh, no,” I said, lest she think I was a shiftless bum. Better a lying sack of shit.

  “I didn’t know whether I’d left a message on the correct machine or not. And I wanted to get back to you as soon as possible before you accepted an offer from someone else.” Little did she know. “I’ve talked it over with my husband and we’d like to offer you the job.”

  Could she even have called the references I’d listed? Had there been enough time to?

  “Oh, thank you,” I said.

  “We’ll start you at ten dollars an hour, with the possibility of raises down the line.”

  “OK.” I sipped at the coffee, trying to wake my brain. Let the coffee speak!

  “The problem is this. The job starts today.”

  “Today?” I sipped again.

  “Yes, I’m sorry. We are going to Kronenkee to meet the birth mother and we’d like you to come with us.”

  “Yes, well, I think that would be OK.”

  “So you accept the position?”

  “Yes, I guess I do.”

  “You do? You can’t know how happy you’ve made me.”

  “Really?” I asked, all the while wondering, Where’s the new employee’s first-day orientation meeting? Where is the “You’ve Picked a Great Place to Work” PowerPoint presentation? The coffee was kicking in, but not helpfully.

  “Oh, yes, really,” she said. “Can you be h
ere by noon?”

  The appointment with the birth mother was for two p.m. at the Perkins restaurant in Kronenkee, a town an hour away with a part-German, part-Indian name that I’d always assumed meant “wampum.” The social worker who ran the adoption agency was supposed to meet us there with the birth mother, and everyone would cheerfully assess one another. I had walked the half hour to Sarah Brink’s house and then waited twenty minutes while she scrambled around doing things, making quick phone calls to the restaurant—“Meeska, the Concord coulis has got to be more than grape jam!”—or searching madly for her sunglasses (“I hate that snow glare on those two-lane roads”), all the while apologizing to me from the next room. In the car, on our way up, I sat next to her in the front seat, since her husband, Edward, whom, strangely, I still hadn’t met, couldn’t get out of some meeting or other and had apparently told Sarah to go ahead without him.

  “Marriage,” Sarah sighed. As if I had any idea what that meant. Yet it did seem odd that he wasn’t with her, and odder still that I seemed to be going in his stead.

  But I nodded. “He must be busy,” I said, giving Edward the benefit of the doubt, though I was beginning to think Edward might be, well, an asshole. I looked sideways at Sarah, who was hatless, with a long cranberry scarf coiled twice about her neck. The sun caught the shiny artifice of her hair as well as the stray tufts of white lint on her peacoat. Still, especially with the sunglasses in winter—something I had seldom seen before—she looked glamorous. I was not especially used to speaking to adults, so I felt comfortable just being quiet with her, and soon she turned on the classical music station and we listened to Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and Night on Bald Mountain for the entire ride. “They’ve told me the birth mother is very beautiful,” said Sarah, at one point. And I said nothing, not knowing what to say.

  We waited in the second booth in at Perkins, Sarah and I sitting on the same side, to leave the seat opposite fully open for the two people we were waiting for. Sarah ordered coffee for us both and I sat looking over the plasticized Perkins menu, with its little pictures of golden french fries laid out on frilly, verdant lettuce next to tomato slices the size of small clocks. What would I order? There was the Bread Bowl Salad, the Heartland Omelette, and various “bottomless” beverages, for the greedy and thirsty—I feared I was both. Sarah ordered Perkins’s Bottomless Pot of Coffee, for the entire table, and the waitress went away to bring it.