A Gate at the Stairs (3 page)

“Congratulations,” I murmured now to Sarah. Was that what one said?

Sarah’s face lit up gratefully, as if no one had yet said an encouraging word to her on the matter. “Why, thank you! I have so much work at the restaurant that everyone I mention this to acts peculiar and quiet, so meanly worried for me. They say, ‘Really!’ and then all this tension springs to their mouth. They think I’m too old.”

I accidentally nodded. I had no idea, conversationally, where we were. I searched, as I too often found myself having to do, to find a language, or even an octave, in which to speak. I wondered how old she was.

“I own Le Petit Moulin,” Sarah Brink added.

Le Petit Moulin. I knew of it a little. It was one of those expensive restaurants downtown, every entree freshly hairy with dill, every soup and dessert dripped upon as preciously as a Pollock, filets and cutlets sprinkled with lavender dust once owned by pixies, restaurants to which students never went, except if newly pinned to a fraternity boy or dating an assistant dean or hosting a visit from their concerned suburban parents. I knew Le Petit Moulin served things that sounded like instruments—timbales, quenelles—God only knew what they were. I had once tried to study the menu in the lit window near the entrance, and as I stared at the words, the sting of my own exile had moistened my eyes. It was a restaurant that probably served my father’s potatoes, though my father would not have been able to go in. The lowest price for dinner was twenty-two dollars, the highest, forty-five. Forty-five! You could get an oil-and-water bra for that price!

I fumbled in my bag again for my résumé, and found it folded and bent but handed it to Sarah anyway. I spoke. “My father supplied a few of the restaurants around here. A few years back it was, I think.”

Sarah Brink looked at my résumé. “Are you related to Bo Keltjin—Keltjin potatoes?”

It startled me to hear my father’s potatoes—Kennebecs, Norlands, Pontiacs, Yukon golds, some the size of marbles, some grapefruits, depending on drought and digging times and what the beetles were up to—all summed up and uttered that way right here in her living room. “That’s my dad,” I said.

“Why, I remember your father very well. His Klamath pearls were famous. Also the yellow fingerlings. And his purple Peruvians and Rose Finns were the first to be sold in those little netted berry pints, like jewels. And those new potatoes he called ‘Keltjin duck eggs.’ I had a theory about those.”

I nodded. Returning from his English honeymoon with my mom, my father had actually smuggled a many-eyed jersey royal straight through Chicago customs, and upon returning to Dellacrosse, he’d grown them in pots and troughs in the barn in winter and in the ground in spring and sold them to restaurants as “duck eggs.”

“I’d rush out to the farmers’ market at six a.m. to get them. Come April, I should put those back on the menu.” She was getting dreamy. Still, it was nice to hear my father spoken well of. He was not really respected as a farmer back home: he was a hobbyist, a truck farmer, with no real acreage, just some ducks (who every fall raped one another in a brutal fashion we never got used to), a dog, a tractor, a website (a website, for Christ’s sake!), and two decorative, brockle-headed cows of dubious dairiness. (They were named Bess and Guess, or Milk and Manure, according to my dad, and he would not let them trample the stream banks the way most of the farmers around us did with their cows. I had once milked Bess, carefully cutting my fingernails beforehand, so as not to hurt her; the intimate feel of her lavender-veined and hairy breasts had almost made me puke. “All right, you don’t have to do that again,” my dad had said. What kind of farmer’s daughter was I? I’d leaned my forehead against Bess’s side to steady myself, and the sudden warmth, along with my own queasiness, made me feel I loved her.) We had also once had an ebullient pig named Helen, who would come when you called her name and smiled like a dolphin when you spoke to her. And then we didn’t see her for a few days, and one morning over bacon and eggs, my brother said, “Is this Helen?” I dropped my fork and cried, “This is Helen? Is this Helen?!” and my mother, too, stopped eating and looked hard at my father: “Bo, is this Helen?” The next pig we got we never met and its name was #WK3746. Later we got a sweet but skittish goat named Lucy, who, sometimes along with our dog, Blot, traipsed around the yard, free as a bird.

My dad was chastened down at the Farm & Fleet for having only a few of the props. His farm was a mere kitchen garden that had gotten slightly out of hand—and only slightly. And he had painted his barn not the cheap, blood-camouflaging red of the country (which against the green fields and shrubs reminded my mother too much of Christmas) but blue and white like the sky, the silliness of which was spoken of often in the county feed shops. (Though these colors pleased my mother, I supposed, with their reminders of Hanukkah and Israel, though she professed to despise both. My mother’s capacity for happiness was a small soup bone salting a large pot.) Plus, our farmhouse was too fancy by local standards—cream city brick mixed in with chicago to form a pattern of gold and dusky rose, with the mansard roof of an affluent farmer, though my father wasn’t one. The dentals on the soffits my father sometimes painted brown or orange or sometimes a lurid violet—he altered their color every other summer. What was he, “some pillow biter from the Minnesota Ballet”? He sometimes pretended to be deaf and carried on with his own sense of humor and purpose. He had added a family room by hand, in the green way, the first in the county, and he mixed his own earthen plaster and hand-troweled it onto some wired bales of hay stuffed between the beams. The neighbors were not impressed: “I’ll be damned. Bo’s gone and built a mud and straw hut and he’s attached it to his damn house.” The sills were limestone, but reconstituted, and so they were just poured in. He was seldom deterred. He loved his old blue dairy barn with its rusty pails never thrown away and its adjacent stream that could still cool milk and which ran down to a small fish hatchery. He had a woodlot and few tillable fields. It was simple hill farming, really, but to the locals he seemed a vaguely contemptuous character, very out-of-town. His idiosyncracies appeared to others to go beyond issues of social authenticity and got into questions of God and man and existence. My father tried not to use hybrid seeds—wouldn’t even plant burpless cukes—and so his lettuce bolted early. Perhaps this seemed hilarious—along with the low acreage, even lower attendance at church suppers and county fairs, plus an eccentric spouse of indeterminate ethnicity who slept too late for a farmer’s wife and did not keep herself busy enough with chores. (My mother laid full-length mirrors on their sides in the back of the flowerbeds to double the look if not the actual volume of her gardening.) Worse than farming out of a book, my father seemed to be farming out of a magazine article: the ginseng farmers were held in higher esteem. Still, he would try to ingratiate himself—plant a small field of decoy soy to enliven the soil and lure the pests over from the neighbors’ alfalfa, help them out a little. He rotated crops, not just for soil but in a fun game to confuse the enemy: if one year one put wheat in where the potatoes were and put the potatoes where the soy was, one seldom got borers. Or, one got bored borers—incapable of the excitement required to track down a snack. Our soil looked chocolatey and had structure, like wine, whereas the Atrazined dirt of our neighbors was often a sad heap of dry gray clods. My dad was local and green and organic and correctly slow but had years ago refused to be bought up by any of the organic cooperatives who were buying up the old truck farms. This just isolated him further. He was known as a Tofu Tom, or Bo the Tofu Prince, or sometimes just “Bofu,” even though he grew potatoes.

“Yeah, his potatoes have a rep—at least in certain places,” I hastened to add. “Even my mother admires them, and she is hard to please. She once said they were ‘heaven-sent’ and used to call them
pommes de terres de l’air.”
Now I was just plain talking too much.

“That’s funny,” said Sarah.

“Yeah. She felt no name existed that accurately described them.”

“She was probably right. That’s interesting.”

I feared Sarah was one of those women who instead of laughing said, “That’s funny,” or instead of smiling said, “That’s interesting,” or instead of saying, “You are a stupid blithering idiot,” said, “Well, I think it’s a little more complicated than that.” I never knew what to do around such people, especially the ones who after you spoke liked to say, enigmatically, “I see.” Usually I just went mute.

“You know, Joan of Arc’s father grew potatoes,” Sarah now said. “It was in her father’s potato fields that she first heard voices. There’re some legendary potatoes for you.”

“I can understand that. I’ve heard voices myself in my father’s fields,” I said. “But it’s usually just my brother’s boom box clamped on the back of his tractor.”

Sarah nodded. I could not make her laugh. Probably I was just not funny. “Does your father ever grow yams?” she asked.

Yams! With their little rat tails and their scandalous place in contemporary art, about which I’d read just last year. “No,” I said. I feared, as interviews went, I was in freefall. I wasn’t sure why either of us was saying what we were saying. “Potatoes are grown from the eyes of other potatoes,” I said, apropos of God knows what.

“Yes.” Sarah looked at me searchingly.

“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.