A Gate at the Stairs (8 page)

“They after you about school?”

“Oh, yeah.” He skittered a stone across the ice with his shoe. “I screwed up a question on a test and got sent to the principal’s.”

“What do you mean?”

“I said Gandhi was a deer.”

“A deer?”

“I got Gandhi mixed up with Bambi.”

“What?” He was bright, so he came to things quickly without patience. He tended to blurt. If he hit a blank spot he just said something fast. And it was sometimes absurd. He had once said
asteroids
instead of
hemorrhoids
, which made me bury my face in my arms.

“I don’t know—words remind me of other words. Like the word
hostage
makes me think
of sausage
. I don’t know why. I just hate all that shit, I’m telling you. But don’t worry, I’m not going to go postal or anything.” We were scooting along inefficiently, hardly lifting our feet so as not to slip. “My grades aren’t good enough, and college applications have to be in first of the month. I may just join the military.”

“Why?” Alarm struck a note in my throat.

“It’s peacetime. I’m not going to get killed or nothing—”

“Anything.”

“Anything. Two years and the government’ll pay for some of college, and Mom and Dad’ll be off my back.”

“The government will only pay for some of it?”

“Well, apparently there are different packages, depending on how long you sign up for. A recruiter came to our high school.”

“A recruiter came to your high school? Is that legal?”

Robert snorted. “It is at Dellacrosse Central.”

“Sheesh,” I said.

“Yeah, when I bring the whole thing up Mom gets upset. She’s threatening to phone the recruiter at his house in Beaver Dam and give him a piece of her mind.”

“It’s amazing she has a piece left. But it’s true—I believe she does.”

“What does she want me to do? Go to DDD?”

“I hope not.”

The Dellacrosse Diesel Driving School was the hellish Plan B—Plan D, it was jokingly referred to—for all the kids who’d bombed out in their courses. “I’ve been taking yoga for PE credit,” he said.

“Really?” Things changed so fast, it whipped your head around. Yoga had entered the corridors of Dellacrosse Central High, but so had the army recruiters.

“Yeah. Deep breathing: a triumph of me over me.”

“Oh-ho. You have your own personal and hygienic mat?”

“I do.”

Here he looked up at me with great earnestness, his eyes asking me to hear him in the deepest way I knew how. “And I sit there in the dark gym,” he said, “and just think. Signing up for the army seems the only thing. It’s either that or diesel driving school.”

“But it’s not really peacetime. There’s Afghanistan,” I said. These faraway countries that had intruded on our consciousness seemed odd to me. It seemed one thing sixty years ago to go over and fight for France, a country we had heard of, but what did it mean now to fight in or at—there was no preposition … for?—a place like Afghanistan? To their credit, students in Troy were eager to find out, and the Intro to Islam course had filled up for spring semester, which was why I was stuck with the more narrow, and reputedly fluffier, Intro to Sufism. We would read Rumi and Doris Lessing.

“Afghanistan’s over.”

“It is?” I’d been studying for finals.

“I dunno.” He skittered a stone again. “Yeah, I think so.”

“What happened? Did we win?”

“I dunno.” He laughed. “I guess so.”

“Yeah, well, soldiers without a war get bored and sometimes they get stationed in hot, edgy places and start to want one. They don’t know why they’re there otherwise. And if one doesn’t come they just start shooting the sky and then each other.”

“How do you know so much?”

“Movies.”

“Ha!” Then he added solemnly, too solemnly, “If I don’t come back, you know, alive, don’t let them bury me in some big-ass coffin. I don’t want to take up space.”

“Well,” I said, “I guess that’s why you’re taking yoga: so we’ll be able to squeeze you into a pretzel box! We’ll all declare, ‘Oh, he would have wanted it this way!’”

“Thanks.” He smiled.

“I’m not sure I like the idea of
enduring
freedom.”

“How about letting freedom ring?”

“Even that. Shouldn’t freedom just be free? Why do you have to let it do anything? That suggests it’s kind of locked up and then being sprung on people.”

“You like college, don’t you?”

Aloft in the trees, the squirrel nests, hidden all summer, sat exposed like tumors—composed of the flesh of the trees but still jealous and other. “Quasi sort of. Did you do any hunting this year?” He had never been an enthusiastic hunter. How would he manage in the military?

“Nah.”

“No animal population control?” The ostensible reason for hunting always made me snort.

“No, actually this year I’ve been part of a program that does deer-condom distribution.”

“Excellent!” I was working on a laugh that was more than my usual pleased grunt, but all I had right now was a kind of blast that culminated in a bleat.

We continued walking on the edge of the icy road, past a stand of birches that in the distance looked like my mother’s cigarettes stubbed out in the dirt, barely smoked. My brother’s boy’s life seemed lonely and hard to me. He still had one snaggletooth that poked out of his smile. This was because there had been only enough orthodontia money for one of us, so it went to the daughter, whose looks would matter (wasted on me! a smileless girl I felt sure no man would ever desire—not deeply). I got the braces. He got the chores. The expectations that he help my dad around the farm were so much greater than any that had been laid upon me, and so I could see his life was a little harder than mine, though he was a good-looking boy, bright in a general way, and with many friends. As a young kid his plans were entrepreneurial. Once, years ago, he’d drawn up a design for a hotel chain, and believing his greatest competitor would be the Holiday Inn, he decided to name it in an opposing, competitive spirit: Normal Night Out. The Normal Night Out Hotel.

He had, however, the same loneliness in him that I did, though he had always been my mother’s favorite. Where had that gotten him? My mother’s love was useless.

We pushed past the gate at the far end of our property and walked down one of the old half-frozen cow paths terraced slightly with old roots and stones to form steps. A small fly buzzed past my ear, then vanished. I had never seen a fly before at Christmas, and I swatted at it, feeling, as we had been taught to feel in Art 102, the surrealism of two familiar things placed unexpectedly side by side. That would be the future.

We hiked down past the copse of sycamore and oak (as children, animating some dormant urban fear, we had witlessly shrieked, “The copse! The copse!” and raced through the underbrush, thrilled by our own concocted, dreadless terror). Now Robert and I weaved among the piss elms toward the old fish hatchery, which in winters of the past we would have skated on; it was a former nineteenth-century mill pond that had long ago lost its falls, though the old paddle wheel still leaned against a tree, coated with squirrel shucks. Sometimes we’d tobogganed down the snowy trail all the way to the hatchery, where now there was no snow at all, just the matted hard grass and dirt and the dried, icing stalks of angelica and milkweed and bee balm. My brother liked to fish at the hatchery sometimes, even in winter, sometimes even in the stream, even if the fish were really now just trash fish, and even though it was stupid to ice fish in a stream. But summers down this path I had always liked, and when the gnats weren’t bad I had sometimes accompanied him, sat in the waist-high widgeon grass beside him, the place pink with coneflowers, telling him the plot of, say, a Sam Peckinpah movie I’d never seen but had read about once in a syndicated article in the
Dellacrosse Sunday Star
. Crickets the size of your thumb would sing their sweet monotony from the brush. Sometimes there was a butterfly so perfect and beautiful, it was like a party barrette you wanted to clip in your hair. Above and around us green leaves would flash wet with sunsetting light. In this verdant cove I recounted the entire plot of
Straw Dogs
.

But bugs were the thing that drove us back.
Flies as big as raping ducks!
we used to say. Mosquitoes with tiger-striped bodies and the feathery beards of an iris, their wings and legs the dun wisps of an unbarbered boy, their spindly legs the tendrils of an orchid, the blades of a gnome’s sleigh. Their awfulness and flight obsessed me, concentrated my revulsion: suspended like mobiles, or diving like jets, they were sinisterly contrapted; they craved color; they were caught in the saddest animal script there was. Once I whacked Robert’s back, seeing a giant one there, and killed five, all bloody beneath his shirt.

Now we stood at the cold stream’s edge, tossing a stone in and listening for its
plonk
and plummet. I wanted to say, “Remember the time …” But too often when we compared stories from our childhood, they didn’t match. I would speak of a trip or a meal or a visit from a cousin and of something that had happened during it, and Robert would look at me as if I were speaking of the adventures of some Albanian rock band. So I stayed quiet with him. It is something that people who have been children together can effortlessly do. It is sometimes preferable to the talk, which is also effortless.

We found more stones and tossed them. “A stone can’t drown,” said my brother finally. “It’s already drowned.”

“You been reading poetry?” I smiled at him.

“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.”