A Gate at the Stairs Page 8

  Because the apartment was so unusually cold, I made my way to a coffee shop to warm up. During the school year, for study breaks, I alternated between Starbucks with its Orwellian sizing—“tall” means “small”!—and a place near the law school called On What Grounds, where “tall” meant “medium” and which had, in addition to coffee, a variety of teas in glass jars, multicolored confetti as pretty as sachets, though once when I asked for a cup of one, the clerk shouted to someone in the back, “Hey, Sam. Is the lemongrass the one with the larvae?” After that I mostly ordered coffee—at first the espresso, in the tiny doll cups I’d never seen before moving to Troy, and then lattes in glass mugs to warm my hands. They sometimes had cookies, usually chocolate chip or oatmeal raisin, in the singular, it was said, because there was only one raisin or one chip in every cookie. Sometimes I went next door to Baby B Burritos—named after the owner’s child, supposedly, though Baby B was also said to be a kind of acronym: Burritos As Big as Your Bum.” Or so said Murph. There was the pizza and shake shop two blocks down, with its sign in the window: NEVER FEAR, NEVER QUIT, STOP IN. There was also an Indian buffet: ALL YOU CAN EAT FOR A DOLLAR. But if you ate too much and stayed too long, they started showing you slides of their home village, which made you feel pretty awful.

  I had inadvertently left bananas to blacken on the counter over break, and even though I’d wrapped them in plastic, and even though the air was chill, when I came back from Starbucks, the apartment had by then warmed a little—the radiators steamed like trains; had the landlord spotted my return?—and I could see there were fruit flies beginning to flick around the sink. Flour moths fluttered like the tiniest angels from somewhere—who knew? The leftover boxes of cereal? Flour moths but no flour. I grabbed at them midair like a mad person. The Mexican strawberries in the refrigerator had grown the wise and cheery beards of Santa Claus, and some Peruvian pears were cauled with mold. The cream cheese was a tub of dull green clay. In contrast to the few bucolic snowflakes of my visit home, this place seemed a sort of soiled, surreal, shaken-up snow dome of student life, so I turned off the lights. Murph had left hers on in her room, including the neon THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX, which she had saucily, instructionally, hung over her headboard. And so I unplugged it. Then I put on a sweatshirt and long underwear and went to bed, hoping that in the morning the new year would reveal its newness: so far it seemed painted too familiarly in my heart’s old sludge.

  The phone rang early. Sarah’s voice was bright and on. “I’m going to have the taxicab swing by and pick you up at eleven o’clock. We’re flying to Packer City,” she announced.

  “We are?” I was scarcely awake. I was going to have to become a new person biologically just to associate with her.

  “Do you mind? Just pack a little overnight bag, and we’ll be back tomorrow. We just got a phone call about a baby up there, and we’re going to meet with the birth mother.”

  Another birth mother. How long could this go on? And did it matter, as long as Sarah paid me?

  “Good, fine,” I said. I had never been on a plane before. I had never been in a taxicab, but I didn’t dare tell her this.

  I didn’t really have an overnight bag. I had a backpack, and in it I put a nightgown, underwear, and a different shirt. Otherwise, I would wear the same clothes I had on now. I threw in a book—Zen Poems, from a friend from last year who had transferred to a small Buddhist college in California. “So, now you’re going to Zen State,” Murph and I had said, and he gave us the book to reform and silence us. It had poems in it like “The world is a wake / vanishing behind a boat / that has rowed away at dawn.”

  Okay … Let the Buddhists depart the world and subdue their despair. Still, I did not think one necessarily had chosen wisely by leaving the party altogether and going home early to a kind of walking sleep. I preferred the mentally ill witch Sylvia Plath, whose words sought no enlightenment, no solace, whose words sought nothing but the carving of a cry. An artful one from the pitch black.

  Oh, if only she had married Langston Hughes!

  I had written on a Post-it, as if to mock my mother’s own list making, my favorite line: “I’m no more your mother / Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow / Effacement at the wind’s hand.” Then I had stuck it—oh yes, oh well—on the frame of my mirror.

  We stand around blankly as walls.

  Motherhood like radar or radiation was radiantly in the air.

  I saw the cab from my window, and when I came down the porch steps the cabbie jumped out and opened up the trunk for my backpack. “Hi,” he said, smiling. How old was he? Thirty? What had he studied? French literature? The cabbies in this town seemed all to have law degrees or PhDs or unfinished dissertations on ancient Greek pottery design or the hegemonic hedges of Versailles. A slightly disputatious animation in his face caused me to take him for a law degree type—there were too many of them here, since law students didn’t have to take the bar exam if they stayed in town, and so the town had long ago begun overflowing with lawyers, many of whom were now at the wheels of city buses, FedEx vans, and taxicabs. I got in the backseat and there was Sarah, beaming. She was wearing not a peacoat but a long shearling one. Perhaps she had gotten it for Christmas. “Another adventure in prospective motherhood!” she exclaimed.

  “Yes,” I said, thinking the phrase sounded like something Murph would say about a careless romantic fling. I found myself wondering again where Sarah’s husband was.

  As if reading my mind, she said, “Edward’s going to try to meet us there. He’s flying back from a conference in L.A., via O’Hare, and if the flight’s on time we should see him at the Green Bay airport. We’ll rent a car and all drive back together.”

  “I’ll get to meet him,” I said stupidly.

  “Yes, of course,” she said. “Or, you can do what a lot of people choose to do: just go through the motions.” She expelled a quick, ambiguous bark of a laugh.

  The cabbie, I believe, hated her already, but when the meter tab came to twenty even, which she gave him, and then when she couldn’t find anything smaller for a tip and dug a quarter out of her pocket apologetically, he handed it back to her. “Ma’am, you need this more than I do.”

  She turned briskly away from him. He popped the trunk without getting out, and we lifted out our own bags and hurried into the airport. “I’m really a good tipper, ordinarily! I really am!” she said. “I’m known for my good tips!” I nodded. I believed her, though she had yet to pay me a dime. I remembered a remark my often frugal father used to make: I only like to be gratuitous when it is absolutely necessary.

  “There are no manners in the Midwest anymore,” Sarah said. “You have to go to the South. And even there it’s getting patchy.”

  At the ticket counter they checked our IDs, Sarah keeping hers a little hidden from me, as if she disliked her picture. She stuck it quickly back into one of the many zippered pockets her burnt umber handbag contained. “This pocketbook has so many compartments, it’s hard to remember where you’ve put things,” she said. “It’s like an intelligence test.” I had only ever heard one other person use the word pocketbook instead of purse: my mother. “But it’s magical. There’s so much room. You can keep loading it up and discover so much you didn’t know was there! It’s like the stream of endless clowns that keeps coming out of the Volkswagen! Still, if I were my own mother? I’d have every zipper labeled.”

  To me, Sarah herself was like a Volkswagen endlessly expelling clowns. “You have a mother?” I said. “I mean, your mother’s alive?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Awesome,” I said, in that peculiar way, I knew, our generation had of finding that everything either “sucked” or was “awesome.” We used awesome the way the British used brilliant: for anything at all. Perhaps, as with the British, it was a kind of antidepressant: inflated rhetoric to keep the sorry truth at bay.

  “My mother and father had a real relationship,” she said.

  “Well, they were
married.”

  “Anyone can get married. They had a relationship!”

  “Do your parents like your restaurant?”

  “My father died before he saw it. But he never liked to eat out. I once took him to a Benihana in New Jersey, but the sizzling hibachi table made him very jumpy. I think it conjured all these memories of the war and the firebombing of Tokyo. After that he refused to eat out with me. He would say, ‘Come see us! Your mother has made a beautiful kugel!’ He was a rich old man scared of the sizzle of a grill.”

  “He was rich?”

  “Well, sort of. Is your dad rich?” Her eyebrows arced and her eyes bugged out. We were in a dialogue that was about something other than what we were saying. At least I hoped so.

  “People thought we were, but we weren’t,” I said. Actually, I wasn’t sure. I repeated the conventional wisdom. “Farmers aren’t rich. They have land but no money.” Actually, my father didn’t even have that much land. He had once stood on the porch and flung his arms out and said, “Someday, kids, all this will be yours.” But his knuckles had hit the porch supports. Even the porch wasn’t that big.

  “Farmers are rich when they die,” I added.

  “I suppose,” said Sarah. “I never think of anyone as rich when they die. I think of dead as about as poor as you can get.”

  “Gate two, upstairs,” said the woman at the counter, handing us our boarding passes, and since we only had carry-on bags, we went directly upstairs, except that Sarah, seeing that no people were on the down escalator, decided to try to go up it. “Watch this,” she said to me. “This is how you get a little exercise before getting on a plane.” And she ran quickly up the moving steps, using it like a treadmill, and waving goofily to me from the middle, as if she were Lucille Ball. “Ma’am, that’s the wrong escalator,” said someone on the other side, going up, and then because it was taking Sarah so long to get to the top, someone else came riding up and said, “Do you know you’re going up the down side?” No one understood what she was doing, and so no one smiled.

  “Exercise!” exclaimed Sarah. This burst of eccentricity in her I could see was familiar to herself, and unresisted. Such self-permission I don’t believe I’d ever witnessed before in almost anyone of any age. I myself went up the up escalator and watched as, still holding her carry-on bag, her shearling coat lifting behind her, she took the flying gazellelike leap necessary to get off the descending stairs, and which if her timing had been even a moment different could easily have left her maimed. That all this failed to draw the notice of anyone in security was a relief.

  “Not too bad for an old gal, eh?” said Sarah, breathlessly grinning and pink in the cheeks. I made a smile of some kind—I have no idea what kind—and we then moved quickly to the elaborately cordoned security line, where a beefy, bloat-faced man took our nail clippers and Sarah’s tweezers. “A girl just can’t groom anymore!” she said to me. I chuckled to please her. She had an anxious energy swimming around her, which laughter—hers, anyone’s—seemed to dispel.

  As for me, tension gripped my neck. I couldn’t distinguish my own fears of flying from my general disorientation regarding this sudden trip. The plane was small, only a fifty-seater, hardly a hijacking target, and from my window seat the gray pieces of the wing seemed fitted together both randomly and intricately, like the plumage of a goose. The handles on the emergency exit doors were grizzled, crooked, and beat. Was this good luck? The January day was blue, sun sparkling off the evergreens, the air clear as a bell; it was state-of-the-art light, as noon in January sometimes could be: not rich but pale and cleansing as lemon wine. Watching from the plane window, I saw dozens of planes negotiating the small grid of runways: a bee dance of near collision and narrow escape. Oh, where, oh, where was the nectar? There was just the busy dance and commerce of a hive. Robert’s word—and true.

  Then suddenly we were taking off, racing down the runway and lifting into the air like a carnival ride, the plane with a seabird’s wobble. It seemed to me like a ride you’d spend extra tickets on at the state fair. I felt the lift in my gut and the plane tipping side to side, finding itself. For a split second I darkly imagined all the workers at Boeing or wherever this puddle-jumper had been made (Brazil! I would later find out) as carnies, toothless and tattooed. Beneath us the ground shot away—if the world vanished like the wake behind a boat rowing away at dawn, would that really be such a bad thing? The twenty-five minutes of farmland between Troy and Green Bay became a snow-splotched checkerboard of drained olive, khaki, gold-gray, and nut brown—not unlike the roasted bean display, green to french roast, that Starbucks had set up near the register, and which I sometimes found myself staring at as if the displays were glass vats of pistachios or M&M’s or gumballs one might get from a machine if one only had the right change.

  The right change. I thought of this phrase now and its meaning for Sarah. Her desire for a baby. Her undertipping of the cabbie. I had yet to see her get ahold of the right change.

  Contents may shift during the flight, we had been told. Would that be good or bad? And what about the discontents? Would they please shift, too? And what if oxygen deprivation in the cabin caused one to think in idle spirals and desperate verbal coils like this for the rest of one’s life? Below us moved the continued squares of greens and browns that Rothko never got to. The ground mottled with mud and snow, broken occasionally by the shiny shoe print of a lake. Beneath us was a tone of ochre that when the sun hit looked like a vellum lamp.

  “So, here’s the story about this birth mom,” Sarah said softly, for privacy, though the plane engine was loud and I had to ask her to repeat things. Birth mom. It was one of those faux-friendly terms invented by the adoption business itself. I studied the intricate construction of the plane wing as she spoke. One had to fix one’s gaze somehow. Apparently this birth mother had been working with Catholic Social Services, who had been looking to place her baby daughter, but when too many months had gone by and the family they had found suddenly backed out (they had prayed and their God had told them no; “their God,” emphasized Sarah, “no one else’s. Everything’s been privatized, even the Creator”), the birth mother switched agencies, and the one she hired had been in touch with Letitia Gherlich, with whom we’d had lunch at Perkins. They had a fee-splitting arrangement.

  What about Amber?

  Amber was no longer in the picture, apparently, having violated her parole, and not having liked any of the prospective parents well enough. She was considering keeping her baby.

  “I kind of liked Amber,” I said—a mistake.

  Sarah’s face became a polished stone. “Amber was a coke addict and a meth-head. Both,” she said. Amber was past tense. We were covering her inanimate face in the white sheet of was. Only her bare feet were sticking out, an ankle monitor brightly in place, perhaps one tiny toe wiggling good-bye: I had kind of liked her.

  The new birth mother in Green Bay was named Bonnie and was apparently in her late twenties. A grown-up! Her baby was well over a year old, possibly two, already languishing in foster homes. “And after we pay them both a visit, we may see why, though I think I already know.”

  I was quiet. The plane was now descending and my ears were closing from the pressure. Everything she said seemed to be coming to me from under water.

  “The baby’s black,” she said. “Part black. And nobody wants her. People would rather go to China! All the way to China before they would take in a black kid from their own state.”

  When I was a child the only black kids I ever saw were indeed in Green Bay. I would see them when we went there to shop: children of the professional football players who lived in big suburban houses and were said to move every three years, when their dads got injured or traded. “I warn my kids not to bother getting to know them,” clerks said openly in the stores. “They’re just going to move.” This was how bigotry got conducted among people who swore they weren’t prejudiced at all.

  “I’m sure that’s what it is with this baby,�
�� said Sarah. “Race.”

  I wondered whether the birth father might be a Green Bay Packer. That would be cool. When I was a freshman there was a girl in my dorm named Rachel. Because her dad was black and her mom was white, her friends called her Inter-Rachel. She would always laugh.

  The plane bumped down, and I swallowed hard to open my ears and settle my stomach. I dug some chewing gum out of my backpack. I hadn’t eaten very much and that, combined with my slight queasiness, had surely given me bad breath.

  Out in the airport we looked for Edward, but he wasn’t there. Sarah asked about the flight from Chicago, but it had arrived fifteen minutes ago and all passengers had already deplaned. “Maybe he’s at the baggage carousel,” she said, and I traipsed after her. We circled the luggage belts and wandered over to the Hertz counter, where Sarah filled out the forms for renting a car, and then we waited near the men’s room. He just wasn’t there. I thought the men’s room should also have a big yellow sign that said HERTZ.

  Sarah sank against the wall, beneath the sign that did not say HERTZ but instead the restroom one that said MEN. Her eyes were starting to mist. She closed them, and when she opened them again she shook her head and sighed. “This,” she said, “is why God invented the fetal position.”

  I was starting to admire her. Or at least I was fearing her less.