A Gate at the Stairs Page 5

  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.

  I got out my sushi and began to snack. “Want some?” I asked Robert.

  “No way,” he said.

  We passed the Drift Inn, which had lost its D and become the Rift Inn. The parking lot at Buck Rub Bowling was jammed for some knockerheimer tournament. We drove right down the main street of Dellacrosse, which was lined with single-story storefronts and diagonal parking out front. Squeezed in side by side were Larry’s Resale Shop, Terry’s Taxidermy (formerly Dick’s Deergutting), and Walt’s Worms, all of which we sailed right past. Chewing, I concentrated my stare, as if I were in fact the stranger I felt myself to be, studying the metal rickrack of the bridge across Wahapa Creek. We passed the road to the township dump and at the turnoff the dump-tender’s cabin, which the tender had outfitted proudly and spectacularly with items gleaned from the dump itself. A large glittery reindeer with broken-off antlers sat atop his roof.

  Putting away my sushi, I said, “If you eat a bear’s liver, will you die?”

  Robert laughed. “I have no idea.” Then he added, “I do know that if you’re a squirrel you should stay away from hot electrical boxes or you will get so electrocuted that your teeth will fuse together.” And he pointed this gruesome thing out to me, on the power line that edged our road, close to our own gravel driveway.

  “How’s Mom?” I asked before we entered the house. The truck lights in the driveway would have already signaled our arrival.

  “Mom’s a little emo. In other words, just the same,” he said, grabbing my bag and bass again for me the way the college boys rarely did. My parents had raised a nice farm boy, though I wondered if they knew this. It had not been their conscious, active intent. I went to follow him, but he signaled that I should walk ahead. I climbed the porch stairs and rapped on the aluminum storm door, then opened it and shouted hello. My mother was never one for Christmas Eve, and so coming home for the holidays I was often greeted like a neighbor stopping by on Sunday after church, a neighbor she saw all the time but did not want to be unkind to.

  “Oh,” she said. “Hi there.” This year there was the smell of baking ginger in the air. The house struck me once more with its warm neglect and elegant poverty—the Hitchcock chairs that were beat up, uncared for, never treated as special antiques but as serviceable items that had to earn their existence on this planet the hard way: at our house, a kind of hard-knocks house for furniture.

  My mother had sprung for eggnog, and a little brandy, and although my father had already gone to bed she and Robert and I sat up for twenty minutes or so, with a coffee log burning low in the fireplace and a plate of gingersnaps on the mantel before we were all too tired to pretend. The coffee log was a favorite of my mother’s, though to me it smelled less like coffee and more like a burning shoe. “I’d light the menorah,” said my mother, “but remember what happened last year with the curtains catching on fire.” The curtains had gone up in a blaze and we had thrown a punch bowl of eggnog on them to douse the flames, and the eggnog had sizzled and cooked into the fabric until the whole house smelled like a diner omelet.

  “That’s OK,” I said. “I’ll light the menorah tomorrow for you.” Though I would forget to do it. Every year it was my job to clean it, scrape off the previous year’s wax with pins and a fork, so perhaps my forgetting was convenient.

  “Thanks, honey,” said my mom, who never called me “honey.” Almost never. The television was on, murmuring low and flashing its colors. My mother flicked it off with annoyance. “A grinch who stole Christmas?” she said. “With all that’s going on in the world we should have to deal with that?”

  In the morning my brother and I came downstairs within ten minutes of each other. The Christmas tree this year—or Hanukkah hemlock, as my mother still called it—was a pre-lit affair ordered online. The McLellans’ Christmas tree farm had recently gone out of business and my parents had resorted to an environmentally sound plastic pine from Hammacher Schlemmer. Ornaments like blue fish and beribboned, clove-studded oranges were clustered in the middle. Old dangly earrings that had lost their mates were hung on the more delicate branches. My mother had placed at the top a large tinselly Star of David, angled rakishly, like a geometry problem. Possibly, in late-morning light, this was just how all irony presented itself.

  My parents were at the kitchen table eating cold cereal but offering to make us latkes with applesauce or regular pancakes or both, both being a holiday tradition. “I chopped the potatoes and onions up yesterday,” said my mom. Soon, I knew, she would get a skillet of oil going, or fire up the stove griddle, and the house would fill with slick oniony air, like the greasy spoon on Main Street, permeating our clothes and hair.

  “Thanks, maybe later?” I said with the question mark our generation believed meant politeness but which baffled our parents. Outside the morning was bright. I liked the holy, rejoicing look of it: the many gray Christmases of my childhood had depressed me. And apparently not just me: one year the holiday card my mother sent out was an October photo of my brother and me, with a caption that read The children. In some dead leaves.

  The light covering of snow on the fields out back and in the yard between the barn and the house was already melting in the morning sun. Ochre grass was poking through in patches. Beyond, the incline part of the acreage—which my father had sold off last year “for a pretty penny, or, maybe not pretty exactly, but a penny with a great personality”—had been resold by the Amish to others and was already being developed into something called Highland Estates. The weather was so warm that construction had continued into December. There were two yellow backhoes jutting into the sky. The houses were going to be huge, my mother said, with treeless lots and phony gazebos and turrets and patios to look back at us in mutual rebuke.

  “They don’t like trees because squirrels climb up them and get in their attic and chew on the exercise equipment no longer in use. Now, without trees? The squirrels’ll head elsewhere and the attic will fill up with moths and moles.” It made one secretly grateful for the Amish, who did not do this, but unfairly annoyed with them when they sold to people who did. Still, mostly the Amish were buying up farms as is, and holding services in their parlors, though it was bitterly said in Dellacrosse that their wagons and trotting horses chipped and dinged the roa
ds, and that their houses were declared churches in order to stay off the tax rolls and that they bred like rabbits and dressed like bats.

  “Watching the snow melt?” I asked my brother.

  “Yeah, I mean, what the hell kind of weather is this?” asked Robert, continuing to look outside at the sky. Clouds were starting to balloon there, as if a party were getting ready to begin.

  “Your language,” said my mother.

  “My language is English,” said my brother.

  “It’s beginning to look nothing like Christmas,” I sang. “Everywhere I go.”

  “Nice voice,” said my brother, sounding sincere, which surprised me. But then he added, under his breath, “Blah, blah, fuckin’ blah.”

  “Conversation inside needs brightening,” I tried singing again, “because the climate change is frightening!”

  “Global warming,” said my father. “They’ve found prickly pear cactus as far north as the Hottomowac River. And even the Costco has taken to putting fake spray frost on their windows this year.”

  I tightened my bathrobe. It was nice to have my father here. Often during past holidays he had been too busy supplying the high-end restaurants in Chicago with their gourmet vegetables—not just cold-storage potatoes but little purple eggplants and shallots; supplying them over the holidays meant driving the truck all the way to Illinois in the snow, and he could never make it back in time for dinner. The local farming, like art, had always catered to the rich in one way or another. The dairy farm down the road, I knew, kept the county’s doctors and lawyers and ministers as private customers, selling them their best premium butter. The rest of the butter—known as Dellacrosse grease—went wherever. And the local cheesemakers were in some strange condition of reversal. One of the old cheese factories had gone under and become a school. And one of the old schools had become a cheese factory. But an artisan cheese factory, done with syringes of mites and vegetarian rennet. This was the kind of cheese factory that had the best chance of making it—food for yuppies—like my father’s dainty potatoes, arranged by hue in purple net bags. These cheesemakers gave their cheeses eccentric names like Unplugged and Washed Midget: wacked food for wacked people, my brother said disdainfully. The producers of conventional cheese were busy with the governor trying to find niche marketing in Japan.

  In the morning sunshine my parents looked cleansed of their reinforcing farm dirt. They looked translucent and a little frailer than they had even in the fall, when the black potato muck beneath their nails and the mud on their shoes and clothing seemed to anchor them to the earth. Now they could—and might—ascend in a shaft of light, for all I knew. I scarcely recognized them, as if they were only slightly animate in their holographic shimmer. In the past their soil had warmed and defined them. Now they were like figurines made not even of glass but of translucent sugar. I felt hearty and fleshy and bloody by comparison, feeling the thick heated meat of myself even in my bathrobe. We were all in our bathrobes, which struck me as funny. Probably we would all get dressed before opening presents, bowls of Fiddle Faddle on the coffee table. The presents I was giving this year were merely three-by-five cards with drawings of the items I had intended to give but had had no time to get and so would get later. This was something of a traditional joke. This year I had drawn them all pictures of sports cars, a cruel spin on the tradition, since it meant I had given it very little thought and was probably getting them nothing. I even ran out of three-by-five cards and for my brother’s used a four-by-six, with a larger drawing of a larger car—and so a larger jokey lie. Arguably, it was better than that unfortunate year when I was twelve and too old for such a thing but had nonetheless wrapped a candy box jammed full of puppy poop from our dog, Blot, and given it to Robert, with a little tag that said MMMMMM … good. Merry Christmas from Blot. “Look what the dog-do did,” I said at the time, studying his reaction. Which remained one of quiet perplexity.

  My mother was now smoking. “Should I make breakfast?” she asked again. My father, who’d been too tired to talk last night, said, “Yeah! Make breakfast! Robert and I want to sit Tassie down and make her tell us about college.”

  “Yeah, right,” said Robert. He padded out of the kitchen. “I’m taking a shower,” he called back, claiming our one bathroom.

  “Sooo …” My dad smiled at me. “How’s college?”

  “Oh, OK,” I said inarticulately, but I figured all my dad really needed to hear was positive things in a tempered tone he could trust. My mother was heating up oil and had taken the cold bowl of latke mixture out and peeled the Saran Wrap off the top. I started to help her, molding handfuls into plump mounds, the oil and egg white slimy in my hands.

  “Any boyfriends?” My father’s eyebrows went up and down, dismissively, mockingly, letting me know I need not answer. My mother gave him a look anyway. “Bo.” She said his name like that to warn him of trespass. She claimed to call him Robert in private, never liking his family nickname but needing within the house to distinquish between Robert junior and senior.

  I liked my dad. Nothing he did ever bothered me, not even his recent drinking, which didn’t usually begin until late afternoon anyway. Still, my unblaming affection had not kept me from feeling the occasional shame of him. “Your father’s a farmer? What does he farm?” acquaintances back in Troy would sometimes ask. In Dellacrosse he was barely considered a farmer at all. “Nothing,” I would sometimes reply. “He farms nothing. Dadaist agriculture.”

  “Oh, I get it,” an East Coast boy with a glass boot of beer might say, or a girl with narrow dark-framed glasses like the Nana Mouskouri of my mother’s old LPs.

  I’m not sure where this small, slightly thrashing, not quite deforming shame had come from. Somehow I had learned it, perhaps even at Dellacrosse Central, where having a father-farmer should have been no shame at all, and wasn’t, despite my father’s miniature operation. People knew his produce was coveted. And among the kids the more obscene jokes were saved for the ginseng farmers. But I remember once in seventh grade, our homeroom teacher had gone around the class and asked us what our fathers did. When she got to Eileen Reilly, Eileen turned red and said, “I would rather not say.” This astounded me, for her father was a handsome, charming salesman at Home Savings Shoes on Main Street—Stan the Shoe Man, my mother affectionately called him. But his daughter had absorbed some disappointment—his, or her mother’s—and did not want to speak of how he earned his living.

  Perhaps that was the moment I learned this as a source of personal shame, or observed the possibility of it.

  “So your classes then,” said my father. “Sit down on this lovely Christmas morning and tell your old dad about the ones you took and the ones you’re going to take when you go back. How did that philosophy class go?”

  “Did you know that Alexander the Great left all his money to Aristotle?” I asked brightly.

  “That’s how he got his name,” said my father. “Aristotle gave it to him! Before that he was just Alexander the Fine.”

  “Bo! Sheesh.” My mother shook her head.

  A sizzling sound came from the griddle, where she was pouring oil. We had an old-style stove, with the griddle built in. You had to clean it with rags and paper towels, or pry it out with a barbecue fork and go at it with steel wool and water. The hot latke mix steaming into the air now smelled good to me and helped cover up the kitchen’s perennially faint reek of mice. My mother was stirring regular pancake batter as well.

  “It’s OK to sit while you help,” said my mother to me, “but remember these latkes aren’t hamburgers. Don’t cup them into thick shapes.”

  I ignored her and continued with my fat latkes and my dad.

  “Next term?” he asked.

  “I’ve registered for another literature survey—Brit Lit from 1830 to 1930—Intro to Sufism, Intro to Wine Tasting, a music appreciation course titled Soundtracks to War Movies, and a geology course called Dating Rocks.” The Sufism did not throw him.

  “Dating rocks?”r />
  “I need to learn!” I said, laughing.

  “Don’t let them kiss you,” he said, not smiling. The random assortment of my courses lacked the sound of serious direction. I’d left out my PE requirement, which I was filling with a double-listed humanities and Pilates course called The Perverse Body/The Neutral Pelvis. I didn’t want to provoke him.

  Still, I murmured, as if in self-pity, “They don’t kiss. That’s why they’re called rocks.”

  “Wine tasting?” He raised his eyebrows. It had the sound of a father not getting his money’s worth.

  “I need a gut course, to make the others go better,” I said. “I didn’t really have one this past semester, and things were too intense.”

  “But aren’t you underage?”

  “Technically, I guess. But it’s for a course, so I guess they let you.”

  “Will you make dean’s list again?” asked my mother.

  “Possibly,” I said.

  “Well, you have to be careful which dean,” said my father. “You don’t want to get on the wrong list!”

  “Besides, I’m going to be working next semester.”

  “You got a job?”

  “You got a job?”

  “Is there an echo in here?” I said.

  “Well, tell us,” said my mother. “Don’t just sass us to death.”

  “It hasn’t really begun. It’s a babysitting job. But there isn’t a baby yet.”

  “Oh, yes, one of those,” said my father, amused.

  “What do you mean, no baby yet?” asked my mother, who looked puzzled. My father was grinning ear to ear, as if to say, Now here’s a how-de-do.

  “There will be one. Or should be. In January,” I explained.

  “The mother’s pregnant?”