A Gate at the Stairs (22 page)

Uh-oh
, as Mary-Emma would say.

“Are you a virgin?” he had asked.

“Yes,” I said. That he couldn’t tell already, that it wasn’t spelled out all over my face and demeanor, thrilled me. To be funny, I rolled my head with a harlot’s abandon and purred, “I am.” I fell back, the way a cooked onion slid apart, in all its layers, when bit.

Later I would come to believe that erotic ties were all a spell, a temporary psychosis, even a kind of violence, or at least they coexisted with these states. I noted that criminals as well as the insane tended to give off a palpable, vibrating allure, a kind of animal magnetism that kept them loved by someone. How else could they survive at all? Someone had to hide them from the authorities! Hence the necessity and prevalence of sex appeal for people who were wild and on the edge.

If only I could have dated someone who was both insane and criminal. If only I could have dated the criminally insane! I could have doubled my fun and entered the purest, highest exhilarating erotic and narcotic trance! and if I’d lived to tell the tale, perhaps come to my senses sooner. I was in a fused condition of ecstasy and retrospective rue almost always, and from the beginning. “I love you,” I would say, and he said nothing at all. But no shame rose in me to rescue or silence me. “I love you,” I said again. And then I added, “Is there an echo in here?”

“There is,” he would say, smiling. His teeth were the color of cream. His gums the pale lox pink of a winter tomato. He wore wrapped around his neck a black-and-white scarf—a print I thought of as Middle Eastern, though it could have been a Navajo tablecloth, for all I knew.

“Yeah, I thought so.” I would tenderly smooth the strands of hair off my own face, myself.

I had told Murph that I had a crush on a South American and while I was out she called from her boyfriend’s one night and sang into the phone machine: “Pedro Pedro bo bedro, banana fanna fo fedro, fee fie mo medro …”

His name was Reynaldo, and as the snow melted, I began to bring Mary-Emma—in her Radio Flyer wagon or in her stroller—on walks to his apartment. To bring him a present—a doughnut or Danish or a hot mocha—I would stop in the market on the way there, in a section of town where there were actual black people shopping (unlike the Wednesday-night rumors of such). Some would look at me, then at Mary-Emma, and then at me again and smile. They seemed to be welcoming me into the community. Some would say hi to Mary-Emma. There were only a few bits of unpleasantness from women. Two black women and one white one scowled at me: I was a tramp. For some black women I clearly had encroached upon their men and produced this baby; besides, what did I know about bringing up an African-American child in this world? (Nothing.) To the white woman I was a whoring girl messing around with anyone. This was all said in looks, so the truth could not be uttered, but I saw again and again what it was simply to walk into a store for a doughnut and have a wordless racial experience.

But mostly black people were smiling and warm to us. Everyone loved a beautiful baby, no matter what.

“Hey, sweetie!” they said. And Mary-Emma would smile or hide her face in her own shoulder.

Once, I thought I saw Sarah’s car following us, but when I turned saw nothing.

When I brought Mary-Emma, Reynaldo and I did not kiss or touch at all in front of her, but often I returned to his place with her after having left his bed for work just that morning, wanting badly to see him again soon and right away. It was neither near nor far—one could get there in twenty-five minutes without much trouble, and when we arrived he was very kind to us both. He loved the doughnuts. He loved that particular mocha coffee. He was taking a photography class and took pictures of us with a new digital camera he had just bought—we said “cheese” in three languages, and then “keys” and then “please,” and when we were not paying attention he would suddenly sneak up and snap our picture from the side. Or freeze us in the frame, I should say. Digital cameras were still new, and seemed magical, as right in the moment he could have you look through the frames and say which picture you wanted. He made me some strong Brazilian morning tea, to last the whole day, and poured juice for Mary-Emma. She poked around and got into things, but he had a real xylophone, which he let her play, with both the soft cotton-dampened mallets and the harder wood ones with their zingier sound, and it all delighted her. She struck hard and with every note turned to look at me with amazement. “Here, let me show you,” Reynaldo would say, and he would take two sticks per hand and bounce them around on what I thought of as a double-decker keyboard. She seemed to love Reynaldo because he was attentive and appreciative, and perhaps because he was brown (the colorblindness of small children was a myth; she noticed difference and sameness, with almost equal interest; there was no “Dilemma of Difference” as my alliteration-loving professors occasionally put it; there was no “Sin of the Same”), but she also loved him because of that xylophone. He played the only American song he knew, a folk one with verse upon verse of wide water and longing and woe, one that ended “… like the summer dew.” And then he was very quiet, saying, “Shouldn’t it be ‘like the summer
does’
?”

“Where have you been?” asked Sarah.

“What do you mean?” There was something in her voice I’d not really heard before. I wondered if this was her restaurant voice. Not as sharp as the coulis-and-quenelles voice. But perhaps a beef-cheek-and-parsnip-gnocchi voice.

“I was driving home and I saw you on Maple Avenue coming from what seemed quite far away. And Edward told me he’s seen you headed the other way, fast as can be, Emmie in the stroller and you just zipping along God knows where to.”

“I’m sorry. Should I not take her for walks?”

I’d never felt accused before. Perhaps I had never
been
accused before. I had, however, never been responsible for very much before, not really, and had little practice in having my actions observed and found lacking. Well, once, in ninth grade, I had tried out for cheerleading. But could that even count? When I went to fly into the air with one knee up, one leg back, one hand on my hip—a stag jump, it was called—I’d come down in a heap and the observing was quickly over.

Sarah’s voice softened. “Oh, of course you should.” And then she seemed to let go of the topic entirely—just let it drop and skitter—and so I didn’t say any more on the matter right then.

With my new money—Sarah had already given me a raise—I bought a used Suzuki 125 motor scooter, which I kept on the front porch and rode to classes or to Reynaldo’s, and a bedside reading lamp I ordered from a catalog. The catalog showed a man sleeping peacefully while his model-wife read a book in soft but focused light. In real life, however, the light was so intense that that same man would have had to wear sunglasses. He would have had to set up a little pup tent on his side of the bed. The lamplight was as bright as the noon sun, and as I studied next to him, Reynaldo could not sleep. Yet another pretty picture of love I’d not questioned, just bought. I turned off the light and fell behind in my reading.

It seemed now that the town had started to throw off the monochromatic winter to reveal its bright lunatic pajamas beneath. Though the robins had not yet reappeared, cardinals were whistling their mating songs. The remaining snowbanks were made dingy with rain. Only once did a late light snowfall blanket the town with a deathly quiet—a quick reminder before the winter left for good—an
amuse-bouche
, a
mignardise
, a
déjà vu
, a
je reviens:
I had dropped French long ago.
Au printemps!
The evaporating snow left the sky a lurid yellow at night. The streetlights shone off the remaining drifts, and for a few days all remained milky and low.

But soon again the journey from crocus to daffodil to peony resumed. Flowers that intended to impress only bugs had accidentally enchanted not just me. Gardens began to emerge. Every third day there was a hot lemony sun, with the lawns starting to green from rain and melted snow. The fraternity boys started to wear shorts and the siberian violets blued the yards. Still, you could sometimes see, in a shady north corner, a small black-flecked pile of snow so solid and condensed it could not melt. It was as if it had changed, biochemically, into a new substance, like the silica on Mars that was the tag end of some water or other.

Wavy thickened tulip leaves had burst the beds and flopped down, still forming their tight bullety pods, but at an angle (only the largest tulips stayed straight, I said to Reynaldo, when kissing him; beneath him at night I was being taken to places so high and starry, I feared I was taking years off my life, the way astronauts are said not to live especially long). The early tulips were caught in leafy show, the petals still prayers sealed in a leprechaun’s clutch. St. Patrick’s Day came and went without even a single green beer to drink. My days were too busy and full, and without Murph—who seemed to have completely vanished except for the waxy smell of her unclean hairbrush still sitting there in the bathroom, along with her black dental floss and soap and an assortment of other items—what was the point of green beer?

My strolls with Mary-Emma kept me alert to gardens and the softness of the air. The hyacinths, with their gravity-defying construction—fat botanical bumblebees with their look-Mom-I’m-flying paraphysics, which in the presence of actual gravity showed the botch of this ambition—soon bloomed and tipped. Clumps of daffodils huddled near trees, and spring phlox pinkened the hills of the park. What in June would be weeds and brush were now forsythia and the starry purple spikes of bachelor buttons (surely never worn by any bachelor ever). If I went up alleyways to better view other people’s backyards, and if I didn’t pay too much attention to the motley assemblages of trash cans, the alleys seemed like Irish lanes, or at least pictures I’d seen of country roads in Kerry. I’d contemplate the surreal dangle of the bleeding hearts or the columbine with their tiny eccentric lanterns in the most hardscrabble places—close to warm concrete—sprouting skyward and groundward simultaneously. If no one was looking I’d pick one for Mary-Emma. As with a snapdragon blossom you could turn one into a little talking puppet. There was a delicate hinge like a jaw, which you could squeeze open and shut. You could do little mocking imitations of your mother in the truck at the farmer’s market. You didn’t even need to be sitting in an actual truck to do it.

“Look, Mary-Emma!” And she would. It was a beautiful thing, having a little girl in tow. Why hadn’t my own mother known? Perhaps there was too much winter permanently in our veins.

Mary-Emma would point toward the street sewers, seeing a raccoon scuttle in. “Cartoons down there!” she exclaimed.

Dwarf irises, bearded irises, and the first mosquitoes emerged simultaneously, each with their subtly striped gray-violet plumage. Where were the bearded dwarves to add semantic meat to the flowerbeds? Well, some yards did have ceramic gnomes in their yards à la Germany.

The strengthening light sparkled in the trees’ new leaves, and the thick bosomy smell of lilacs floated in waves across our various paths. The humid spice of honeysuckle hung over the garbage cans. I even met the threesome next door, who finally emerged after winter, looking very beautiful. The woman—I remembered her name was Catherine—smiled at Mary-Emma. And Mary-Emma did not smile back but hid behind my leg.

“She never says hi to me,” said the woman, Catherine. The two men had continued on ahead. “I hope it’s not because I’m white!”

I stared at this crazy, Satie-playing woman. “A lot of people she knows are white,” I did not say, “including her parents,” and so I said nothing but just watched as she trotted up ahead to be with her men.

In the Thornwood-Brink flowerbeds were the strangest blooms of all: tall leafless stalks crowned by purple floreted globes. They looked like probes, or sentries, or gaslights, or wands, the handsome goons of the garden. Alium, they were called, and in actuality were giant mutant chives. Their bulbs were like onions, and squirrel-proof, and they were supposed to be a kind of accent flower, but Sarah had planted them thickly all around the house in a kind of fierce, orchardlike fence, as if to enhance TV reception.

“Look at this!” exclaimed Sarah at the front door, pulling a printed sheet of paper from her mailbox. “The plant nazis are back! Apparently I have buckthorn and nipplewort in my yard and they would like me to get rid of them pronto! You know, the thing with plant nazis is that they
start
with the plants …”

The dogs next door were wild with their games. In the sky the returning geese were winging over, their honking alto bark like the complaining squawk of a cart.

“Last year they were after me about the nap of the lawn! They said I was mowing in the wrong direction and it disrupted the look of the neighborhood to have the blades of grass bent in a slightly different direction in one of the yards! I was mowing this way”—and here she tipped her whole body—“when I should be mowing thattaway.” She tipped her body back the other direction. Indignation gave her a dancer’s energy. And the warming weather caused her nervous thinness to emerge from beneath her usual thick sweaters.