A Gate at the Stairs (30 page)

But when I got downstairs to the basement (which was carpeted and where Mary-Emma and I sometimes played on rainy days), I noticed there was a light on in the laundry room. I walked in anyway, and there stood a young woman I’d never seen before. She was pretty in the pale, speckled, toadstool way of redheads: enchanting, possibly poisonous, simultaneously prosaic and exotic. She was busying herself with an iron, touching the hot surface with a licked finger, though it did not yet let out a sizzle.

“Oh, hi!” I said. “I didn’t mean to startle you! I’m Tassie.”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m Liza.” I could see that her immediate task was to seal by ironing the new tea bags filled with Sarah’s own tea.

“I look after Mary-Emma.”

“I help out with the laundry and stuff,” she said. She saw that I was holding some clothes. “Here, let me take these—I do all Emmie’s stuff together with Dreft.”

“Oh, OK,” I said. “You’ll see there’s some signs of—” And then just behind her I saw, at the bottom of a foreshortened door that led to some kind of wine closet or pantry a man’s good brown shoes, and pant cuffs, hiding in the shadows. Research into wine had taken a new form. It was like seeing the shoes of the person Dorothy’s house had landed on in Oz. Witch’s feet under the short door, although these shoes took you anywhere but home. “You’ll see some signs of the park. Grass and dirt.”

“No problem,” she replied.

“Sounds good,” I said, and then I turned and left.

“I met Liza,” I said to Sarah upstairs when she came in the back door later that afternoon. “The laundry lady.”

“Oh, good,” said Sarah brightly, setting a bag of groceries down on the counter. “Now you’ve met just about everyone—except the guy who shovels and mows.”

“Noelle doesn’t do that?”

“Noel? No.”

“And not Edward.”

“Uh, nhew, not Edward.” She did not look up but just kept pulling grocery items from her bag. Broccolinis and fresh eggs.

“Mary-Emma’s napping upstairs, so I thought I’d go now.”

“Oh, yes, that’s fine. Can you come on Friday, by any chance?”

I flew home on my Suzuki. There was a final exam in Soundtracks to War Movies, and though I’d listened to
Platoon’s
Adagio for Strings night and day, I still hadn’t watched
The Best Years of Our Lives
, which was required, and which I finally did, under a blanket on the couch. I loved the guy with the hook hands. They didn’t give men hooks anymore. Everything was plastic and digital and disguised. A proper pirate was no longer possible. Hook hands would be useful for playing bass, or for high shelves at home, or for toenail cleaning, and if he, your man, your hook-hand husband, scratched his head with one, no thought he came up with could possibly be dismissable or dumb. Love should be helpful. Love should contribute something.

On Friday Sarah tried again to tell me her secret. The secret of Susan. Susan’s secret. Once again she sat me down with more sauvignon blanc while Mary-Emma was napping.

She began by talking about hair, which lessened my foreboding. “I’m still getting criticized for Emmie’s hair.”

“People don’t like her afro,” I said knowingly.

“Ha! You’ve been informed. Yes. They feel it should be grown long and then braided, even on a child. I guess they feel that she is Rapunzel and will need that hair to escape me, the witch who has adopted her and wants to cut it off.”

“No one could think that.”

“We’ve been confronted with a difficult situation of our own doing,” she said. She poured more SB. “This is very briary,” she said, “this wine.”

“Briary. Yes.” I would have to remember that for the final.

And then she began her story. Or began it again.

They were driving in a car along the turnpike, John, Susan, this new mysterious child, their son, Gabriel, with the name of an angel but obstreperous and four years old, in the backseat. He wanted ice cream now and wailed for it. “Quiet, kiddo,” said John in the front, a little heatedly. But Gabriel began to lean forward in his carseat and plunked John on the head with his fist and grabbed his flipped and capey hair. John shouted in pain.

“Stop that, Gabriel,” said Susan, whoever Susan was. “You’ll cause an accident.” She was caught between these two male energies, one grown and one growing and unformed like a fire. Still, the grown one looked ablaze himself, with the quick sparky burn of an electrical accident. One must let the males of the species have their go at each other, she had once been told. Who had that been? Who had said that?

“No!” shouted Gabriel, and John turned while driving and swatted the child on his knee.

“John,” said Susan in a low warning. Gabriel himself did nothing. He did not cry. Instead he removed one of his own shoes and from the backseat leaned in and hit John over the head with it.

“Hey, stop that! I’m driving! Susan, get him to stop!” Why could she not get him to stop? Trucks roared by in the slush.

“Stop that, Gabriel,” said Susan, twisting back to calm her boy and trying to confiscate the shoe, but the child was focused on Dad. He leaned forward and whacked John on the head again. He was a difficult child. He could be sweet. But then there was this wild part. A loose wire aggravated by close quarters.

“Ow, God. That’s it!” said John. He cranked the wheel and swerved the car onto the shoulder of the highway, putting on his blinkers, crunching along the gravel shoulder, heading toward a scenic view rest area up ahead. Cars honked angrily behind him. He shifted into park and then swung around and undid Gabriel’s carseat restraints. “If you cannot behave in this car, then you cannot be in it. Get out right now!”

“John, we’re on a turnpike!”

“There’s a picnic table up there—he can wait there. We’ve put up with this long enough! Our parents wouldn’t have put up with this!” The refrain of a generation, uttered in bewilderment.

“Our parents wouldn’t have done a lot of things.”

“Well, maybe they were right. Get out!” he shouted at Gabriel, who looked only a little stunned. Suddenly the little boy was compliant. He clicked the handle and quickly got out, pushing the door shut as hard as he could. He began walking toward the picnic area, with his one shoe. No one was there and the tables were covered with the same sooty spring snow that had become slush on the road.

“Oh, God, now look what’s happened,” said Susan. “I’m getting out with him.” She turned to gather her bag from the backseat. The car began rolling slightly.

“I can’t believe he did what he was told for once!”

“John, he has one shoe on. Turn into this rest area right now.” She felt around in the back for her bag and perhaps the other shoe. Where was it?

“I can’t stop here, apparently. I’ve either got to get completely off the shoulder or …”

Trucks blared their angry elephant sound behind him.

“You must. Stop. Here.”

“I’m trying,” he said, but when he pulled the car ahead he overshot the rest stop turn and there was only a steep ditch to drive into unless one got back on the road. Someone blared a horn behind them, and now the pressure of the honking traffic caused him instead to feel he had to merge, and when he drove the car forward to avoid the ditch, he studied the vehicles in his rearview mirror, then pulled quickly into traffic.

“What are you doing?!” Susan’s voice was a gaspy shriek.

“I couldn’t get back in the lane and make that turn both.”

“Slow down and pull over! I’m getting out.”

“How can I do that here? I can’t without causing an accident. Just wait,” he said. “Bear with me here.” He sped up instead. He seemed to think that speeding up would be better, to get the whole thing over with faster. “We’re going to have to be a little inventive! Though I’ve heard of someone who did something like this.”

“Like what?!
Let me out!” She undid her own seat belt and turned around again in her seat. A whimpering sound was forming at the back of her throat.

“Don’t worry. It will be a kind of time-out for Gabriel,” he said, now appearing a little panicked and checking his rearview mirror again. What was a time-out? Was time literally stopped while everything else continued without it? People were pulled out of time? But not by Einstein. This was done by people who were the opposite of Einstein. “He needs to understand one or two things about the world, and perhaps this will help. We’ll get off at the next exit and circle back and pick him up.” The circle tour of manhood. John’s face was starting to tighten with anguish, the grip of regret. “Bear with me. We’re going to improvise a bit.” Susan saw Gabriel in her side-view mirror, receding to something tiny until the road’s turn took him out of her vision entirely.

At this juncture something exploded like a gunshot in the kitchen—Noel’s forgotten can of Coke—and we both jumped. Liza came up from the basement with a basket of clothes. Even though I had met her only once before, now she seemed to be everywhere.

“I’ll bet it’s that damn Coke can of Noel’s,” Sarah said, opening the freezer and seeing brown frozen droplets sprayed all over it.

Sarah sighed. “Liza, would you like a little wine?”

“Oh, yeah,” she said, and she listed out loud what was still in the washer and what was still in the dryer and what was hanging and what was folded, what was still wrinkled and what was pressed. I was full of apprehension. “Tassie,” added Sarah, starting to write Liza a check, “we’ll talk later.”

“Sounds good,” I said, and left quickly. As I did, a FedEx deliveryman had stepped up to the porch with an overnight package—probably risotto!

I rode home on my Suzuki, climbed into bed, and tried to read for my literature class:
“Dog in the manger!” I said; for I knew she secretly wanted him … Deep into some of Madame’s secrets I had entered—I know not how … I know not whence …
I pulled the sheet over my head. “You OK?” shouted Murph from where she sat at her computer.

“No,” I replied, but in our apartment this did not make the least impression.

There was actually only one more Wednesday. The usual sparkiness of the notes had a fizzled edge, like the jagged dissolution of a warming orchestra that had suddenly decided not to play The chorus was dominated by a new woman’s voice, someone whose diction was as clipped and quick as an auctioneer’s.

“The only black people you know went to Yale.”

“Yeah, all the white people she knows went to Yale as well.”

“Whitest person in the world is Dick Gephardt—have you ever noticed that? He has no eyebrows! He’s translucent!”

“He wasn’t graphic enough to become president!”

“See or be seen.”

“Did you say, ‘From sea to shining sea’?”

“Now we’re doing deafness?”

“What?”

“Deafness jokes. I love them.”

“And don’t get me started about Islam!”

Once again, the don’t-get-me-started-about-Islam guy. Was he fishing? Was he a spy? It was hard to listen from two flights up and follow when the kids I was supervising were after me to sing “Knick-knack-paddy-whack-give-your-dog-a-bone”—the alternative words to the Barney love song, which they found exotic and hilarious.

“We should all work in soup kitchens.”

“Why I
do
work in a soup kitchen. I am raising an African-American child in the twenty-first century.”

“Here’s what else we should do: little windmills in our yards, solar panels on our roofs …”

“And wooden shoes!”

“I have faith in this new generation.”

“Not I! They are all sleepwalking!”

“Have you noticed that the biracial kids all find each other? They are emerging as their own group.”

“They call themselves ‘mixed,’ not biracial.”

“For the kids, having a black mother is more prestigious. So many of these mixed kids have white mothers, and so even they’ve formed
their own
group. That’s what Jazmyn tells me.”

“We’re so busy telling young people about the world, we forget there are ways they know more than we do.”

“Yeah, no, I agree. These students are the best of both worlds. They are serious grown-ups, principled and worldly and gentle in ways we weren’t. And adorable, in a way they won’t be in ten years.”

“I know what you mean! You want to eat them right up. Get your lips on their chests. There’s nothing wrong either with using a knife and fork.”