A Gate at the Stairs Read online

  “I’ve just been thinking.”

  “A dangerous thing.”

  “A little goes a long way.”

  “A little’s a dangerous thing. But so is a lot. And so is none.” I paused. “It’s all a minefield.”

  “Are you high?” asked my brother.

  I almost skipped a stone. It wanted to. I could feel it, the desire of the stone. “If only,” I sighed. I threw a stone way out left past the old fish hatchery, toward the tennis meadow. There was actually an old tennis court on our property, built by the original owners of the house. It had long been broken up with reedy weeds, had reverted almost completely to ad hoc prairie, though if one walked through there were still cracked pieces of concrete underfoot and on opposite sides two old chipped white posts for a net. In my lifetime no one had ever played tennis here. It seemed a ghostly glimpse of an old affluence that once protected the place, a counter to the signs of the old poverty—outhouses and stick pumps—that underlay most of the farms and houses nearby.

  I threw another stone. And at that we headed back to the house. New snow fell silently through the sky until an updraft whistled in and caused the flakes to go up, as in a shaken-up snow dome. Robert had worked as a camp counselor for part of the previous summer and now began to sing. “‘I know a song that gets on everybody’s nerves, everybody’s nerves, everybody’s nerves. I know a song that gets on everybody’s nerves, and this is how it goes: I know a song that gets on everybody’s nerves …’” We arrived back home damp and pink looking in the vestibule mirror, though the mirror was petaled with my mother’s reminder Post-its, which made our faces look momentarily like flowers in a kids’ play. My mother had baked a noodle kugel and instead of turkey had made a Christmas brisket, and we all sat down to eat. She brought the hot brisket in on a platter from the kitchen and, standing behind me, swooped it onto the table, barely missing my head. “Duck,” she ordered me as she did this, and I let my head fall to one side.

  “What is that?” asked my brother.

  I stared at him hopelessly.

  “You’re the son of a Jewish mother,” said my dad, “and you don’t recognize brisket?”

  “I do recognize brisket,” he said. “But I thought she said it was duck.”

  It was our one big family laugh. The brisket itself, made with ketchup and one too many onion soup packets—perhaps my mother had not seen that she’d already put one in—was salty and not her best. We all piled condiments on top—cranberry sauce and a vegan relish we called “cornfield caviar”—then we drank a lot of water the rest of the night.

  At home in Dellacrosse my place in the world of college and Troy and incipient adulthood dissolved and I became an unseemly collection of jostling former selves. Snarkiness streaked through my voice, or sullenness drove me behind a closed door for hours at a time. When afternoon came, I tried to go for little walks—one should always get out of the house by two p.m., my mother once advised—and I would sometimes take Blot, though once we ran into the garbage truck still trawling the roads. Blot hated the garbage truck, feeling, I think, that the men were taking away things that rightfully belonged to him, if not to all dogs in general. He barked wildly as if he were saying, You bastards, we’re going to find out where you live and come take all your garbage and see how you like that! I was often back by two-thirty, returning to my room until dinner. I would come down, not helping my mother, and find a foaming stew pot, vesuvial and overflowing, because with her bad eyesight she had put baking soda in it instead of cornstarch, or once, I discovered, she had made little salads and put them in the ceramic dog dishes.

  “Mom, these are the dog dishes,” I said, pointing out the little dog heads printed on them.

  Indignation tensed the muscles of her face, but she said nothing.

  Once she shouted up to me and I had to come down and see what was the matter.

  “You and your fancy food,” she said. She had taken the sushi I’d brought home on the bus and left it on the counter, then accidentally knocked the wasabi onto the floor. Whereupon Blot had automatically lapped it up and, startled by the sensation, which he construed only as pain and heat, began to howl and tear up and run around the house. He attacked his water dish so urgently that it too fell over, and so I took him outside, where he ate snow—what little there was—and drank from a puddle. It took him an hour to settle down. The remark about fancy food, however, lingered longer. I had once gone out to dinner with my mother and ordered cabernet sauvignon, and instead of objecting that I was underage, she’d said, “Oh, fancy, fancy.”

  I read, flopped across my bed in my old room, its pink walls and white trim a comforting peppermint candy womb, as snow at last did begin to pile up outside. Occasionally lightning flashed again in the middle of a blizzard. What planet was this? The sky purpled, and roaring bursts of light seemed briefly to set fire to the snow as if it were the dusty landscape of a moon. Tree branches clawed into the soggy wool of the sky. I remained the nerdy college girl under siege of the weather, my days full of books that were rabbit holes of escape. Christmas music from the radio downstairs, playing through all twelve days of it, wafted up: “Rejoice, rejoice,” sounded like “Read Joyce, read Joyce”—and so I did, getting a head start on my Brit Lit. “Emmanuel …” I made my way through The Critique of Pure Reason. Some days grew so bland and barren, I found myself perusing Horace, though between books I would open up my electric bass, put on the headphones, and make up little riffs for an hour or so, experimenting with the reverb. It always amazed me what a mere four strings could do. I had started with cello when very young, and then descended. Ole Bob sat in the corner, winking, I believed. Playing a guitar was so much less effort. Like a girl taking a pee. One didn’t even have to stand. One could lie on the floor and just go at it with one finger like James Jamerson’s magic claw. One could pretend to be Jaco Pastorius in Weather Report—especially in this weather. Here would be my report! Or Jaco on “Hejira.” Here would be my Hejira! Or Meshell Ndegeocello, whose low voice I could imitate but not well.

  The days ended, then started over again, like dull redos. The heat kicked on; the heat kicked off.

  I made no attempt to see my few friends left from high school, who when I conjured them in my mind seemed dull and thickened strangers. In the fall I had written a note to one, my friend Krystal Bunberry, who for no real reason (but unwitting prophecy) we used to call Krystal Berry Bun; her father had worked his whole life in the toilet paper factory and on retirement received not only a free lifetime supply of toilet paper but a diagnosis of colon cancer. He then received a colostomy as well. “Rusty drainpipe removal” it was called by Krystal herself. She had written me to see if I needed any toilet paper—they now of course were giving it away. And so I had written her with my condolences, even though her father hadn’t actually died. The previous year I had been in one of my friends’ weddings, Marianne Sturch’s; she had worn a sequined, strapless wedding gown, and left her bridesmaids to wear brightly flowered dresses fit for a kind of pornographic milkmaid: low-cut and laced up the midriff with a sort of shoelace. “What Scarlett O’Hara might have done with a shower curtain, if she were trying to snag a plumber,” said my mother, who perceived the loud ugliness of the dress even through the fog of her bad eyesight. Our shoes were white patent leather, what Marianne called “pattin’ leather,” though I was never sure whether this was on purpose or not. Not just the outfits but the entire wedding in a rental hall at the Ramada felt tawdry and embarrassing; thirty minutes in, I found I never wanted to marry. The bride carried what looked to be a cord of pink and gold gladioluses but were really only three scepterlike stems in yellow and peach; reminded of my mother, I was woozy, seeing them. After that, I couldn’t muster the energy to phone Marianne—she and her husband, Brendan Brezna, went to Orlando and Cancun for their honeymoon, a busy five-days, four-nights package with a cruise—and our paths, especially with my staying in the house like a shut-in when I came home, failed to cross.

  E
veryone here seemed a stranger, if not an outright alien. Before I was born, the town of Dellacrosse had been preposterously named Little Spread Eagle, after a local Indian warrior hunted down like a dog by government militiamen and turned first into the name of a golf course, then a motor lodge, then finally a town—everything about the place had been a kind of jokey curse from the start. When the village councilmen changed it to Dellacrosse, they also decided to try to remarket it as an extraterrestrial tourist site. Rumors of spaceships in the outlying cornfields and fiery brassy things floating through the night sky and even one or two probings of overweight Little Spread Eagle housewives (or the occasional passing-through truck driver) by strange creatures in black helped create the possibility of a mystique. It caused Dellacrosse to become the self-declared “Extraterrestrial Capital of the World.” (“Not another anal probing,” my mother took to saying, reading the Dellacrosse Courier. Or once, rather angrily to my father, “Why don’t they just name this town what it is: Buttfuck, USA!” “Gail!” chided my father. “Get a grip!”) Little paper alien heads were fastened to the streetlights on Main Street, and people sold Venusian vanilla sundaes with Mars Bar crumbles. At first it was hoped that people would come from all over the country and camp out and stay put to try to see the spaceships and aliens that might appear in the roadside parks and fields outside town. The burst of commerce and national publicity lasted less than a year and then it vanished, like the spaceships and aliens themselves. People said the council had packed everything up in a rocket and sent it back to its planet, leaving some strays behind.

  The strays I felt were my own friends, who were now like martians to me. They guzzled brandy straight from the bottle, drank TheraFlu recreationally like toddies on weekends (though, truth be told, I still did that myself). They wore T-shirts that said DELLACROSSE: IT’S JUST THE TICKET, since the place had now acquired some notoriety as a speed trap. Prepositions mystified. Almost everyone said “on” accident instead of “by.” They said “I’m bored of that” or “Wanna come with?” They pronounced “milk” to rhyme with “elk” and “milieu” as “miloo,” as in skip to my loo—when they said it at all. And they used tenses like “I’d been gonna.” As in, “I’d been gonna to do that but then I never got around toot.” It was the hypothetical conditional past, time and intention carved so obliquely and fine that I could only almost comprehend it, until, like Einstein’s theory of relativity, which also sometimes flashed cometlike into my view, it whooshed away again, beyond my grasp. “I’d been gonna to do that” seemed to live in some isolated corner of the grammatical time-space continuum where the language spoken was a kind of Navajo or old, old French. It was part of a language with tenses so countrified and bizarrely conceived, I’m sure there was one that meant “Hell yes, if I had a time machine!” People here would narrate an ordinary event entirely in the past perfect: “I’d been driving to the store, and I’d gotten out, and she’d come up to me and I had said …” It never reached any other tense. All was back-story. All was preamble. The past was severed prologue and was never uttered to be anything but. Who else on earth spoke like this? They would look at the tattoo on my ankle, a peace sign, and, withholding judgment but also intelligence, say, “Well, that’s different.” They’d say the same thing about my electric bass. Or even the acoustic one—That’s different!—and in saying it made the same glottal stop that they made pronouncing “mitten” and “kitten.”

  And they’d grown fat, especially the boys, it was said, from air-conditioning. There were no more hot summer spaces to take away their appetites and sweat them thin—the diners, the houses, even the tractors, were newly air-conditioned inside. It was increasingly difficult to recognize people. I began to think of everyone I knew there in the derisive terms my mother sometimes used—“schnooks and okey-dokes”—meaning hicks who pretended to mean well, or rubes with some plan up their sleeve. To me, they had taken on a repellent creatureliness, like ancient monsters that were thought to live in deep northern lakes, or like the dinosaurs rumored still to be roaming the vast interior of Africa, the world having rushed forward into the future without them. And so, I imagined, when the glacier had retreated it had trapped the resident driftless knuckleheads of Dellacrosse, whom time forgot. Or else they all were the dimmerwits from outer space who’d forgotten to get back on the spaceship and so the ship had left without them. Deliberately! Dellacrosse had the aspect of having been left behind by many ships. It seemed the outer space of outer space.

  Added to this was my own tuned-in sense of the uncanny. When I was younger, odd strangers were said to be roaming the streets, perhaps space aliens looking for natural resources. Or were they tourists looking for space aliens or aliens looking for abandoned colonists and ancestors? Perhaps nothing had been a hoax after all. Perhaps body snatchers or the undead or creatures from another planet were really, truly attempting to walk among us here in town. My old friends from high school seemed proof enough: ominous androids who’d perhaps been hatched from young humans but who now were just inadequate and unattractive impersonations hoping to pass as actual people. They would loiter for a while on this planet, until they were summoned home, where they would be decoded and tossed in a junk heap, their zombie-cookie faces eventually devoid even of their faultily assigned facial expressions, their boring experience all stored on subcutaneous data-processing chips.

  We are not alone. But, hell, we sure wish we were.

  I was capable of little homicides like this. My mind, when I came home to Dellacrosse, became full of them. Which in its own way enlivened the town for me, the way an obituary briefly brings back the dead. It was a hopping town, people exclaimed in what was a community joke, because everyone’s toes had got cut off from frostbite! But that was the least of it for a town full of graduates of the Dellacrosse Diesel Driving School, for a town that was just one of a thousand forgotten poppy seeds scattered across the state map. Scorched grains of cornmeal on the bottom of a pizza. A thousand black holes. Pinpricks with little names. On New Year’s Eve I stayed in the house rather than accompany my brother up the road to join the rowdy group of neighbors who had gathered at Perryville and County M. I didn’t want to hear a single voice say, “Hi, Tassie, how’s college?” Or “You’ve been reading? Whatcha been reading?”

  “Why, I’ve been reading Horace!”

  The fireworks every year grew more explosive and raucous, beginning days before New Year’s Eve, and every year they were still legal. I could hear the whistle and pop of them, the metallic shower of pellets. They were no longer the fireworks of my childhood—simple ladyfinger firecrackers jammed like sausages into tangerines or dried goat bladders that had been hung on the Christmas trees, then yanked off and lobbed, loaded, across the field in a kind of snowball fight. (One did this with one’s friends to destroy the enemy. Who was the enemy? One’s friends. Who else would you want to see jump as a tangerine exploded at their feet?) As the winters grew less cold and white, the fireworks grew fancier. They now had evolved from homely grenades that could give you no more than a small blistery burn to cherry bombs and M-80s, weapons-grade devices used most often in military training. Last year the detritus of one had set a marsh on fire—in winter.

  Outside, the lulls between explosions were accompanied by both children and grown men banging on tin pots and whooping. These were people who would be snowmobiling if only there were snow. If the lake were frozen they would drive their pickups out on it and go bar to bar, parked on the ice all night. They would be ice fishing from their shanties—“I got a hole out there dug!”—and they would be mumbling their taciturn joy over tip-ups and fish bites. But now there was just another round of heart-stuttering booms, the rat-a-tat-tat of war made jolly—but not for me. Oh, where was Ira Gershwin when you needed him for a real song, a country protest song, not just some whiny piano-bar lament? One year, I feared, someone would take the occasion to slyly shoot an actual gun, without notice, and I just hoped it wouldn’t be me. That was a bleak, wintry jo
ke I told myself. And my brother. But still.

  Late on the afternoon of New Year’s Day, Sarah Brink called my house. My mother answered, said, “Yes, she’s here,” then handed me the receiver.

  “Hi, Tassie,” Sarah said, sounding breathless. “Just calling to see if there’s any chance you’re coming back into town a little early.”

  I looked out the window at the purpling patina of the snow. My father and brother were in the next room, talking about snowblowers. “Like when?” I asked.

  “Oh, say …” She stopped not for consideration but for nerve, it seemed, and dragging out the words like that made them sound like the beginning of the national anthem. “I hate to sound pushy. But like by the third?”

  “Of January?”

  And then she laughed, and I laughed, and we were both sort of laughing at each other and at ourselves in a confusing manner, having no facial expressions to assist.

  III

  I took the bus back the next day, on the second. Having been, as my brother used to say, “crowded as a beehive” on my way out of town, the bus during winter break was now empty and clean and morose. In Troy at dusk, the isolated patches of gray snow were like dryer lint. The heat in my building had not been turned off—that would freeze the pipes—but had been cranked down to a chill fifty-five. Generous when the students were there, the landlord knew they had gone home and did not warm the house as amply. Not just for Kay. In my absence the floorboards had readjusted and acquired new creaks. When I stepped into my own living room, it felt like someone else’s house. There was some frost creeping up the panes of my windows, on the inside, and Murph’s long-bequeathed vibrator/immersible blender still sat on the counter. (She had purchased it at a shop called A Woman’s Touch, where I’d gone with her when she went to look for one. “Come on, come with,” she’d implored. My mind had been trying to be open to such an object but kept slamming shut. “A woman’s touch?” I’d asked her as we walked in. “Isn’t what we want a man’s touch?” The place had been a tiny chapel to the penis, phallic devices of all makes and creeds, on display like shoes in a shoe store though without the bannicks and special chairs needed to be properly fitted. Two large, cheerful women behind the counter who installed batteries and would wrap and deliver in plain brown wrapping, if desired, smiled and asked us to be sure to let them know if they could help. All this had at first amused then oppressed me. For days, however, I thought about going back alone and having one of the more welcoming, less motorized versions—pink and pliable—sent to me in the mail.)