A Gate at the Stairs (6 page)

“You live near the stadium, right?” asked Sarah. We were already back in Troy. She swung the car down Campus Avenue toward the tiny street, Brickhurst, where I lived. The neighborhoods near the university were already mostly empty for the Christmas holidays, but in houses that were not student housing, frequently there were lights strung along the soffits and the brightened gutters seemed to shout cheerily, “WE are here! WE ARE HERE!”

“I’m at 201 Brickhurst,” I said.

“Brickhurst?” I suspected she was one of these out-of-staters who’d moved here a while back but had only a pieced-together knowledge of the town, a mind map assembled on a strictly need-to-know basis. But she was there in less than a minute.

She put the car in park. She patted me on the shoulder, then let her hand run down my coat sleeve. “Thanks,” she said. “Phone me when you get back into town after Christmas.” Her face looked fantastically sad.

“OK,” I said, not knowing what else to say. “Sounds good.” It was the midwestern girl’s reply to everything.

II

C
hristmas morning I slept in late. So did my younger brother, who had picked me up at the Dellacrosse bus station the night before, driving my father’s truck, the one with
EAT POTATOES AND LOVE LONGER
emblazoned on the back. He’d stood waiting in the parking lot for me to get off the bus, sporting his cheap brown parka and no hat, seeming glad to see me, as if he had something to share, though I didn’t really expect anything: my brother rarely shared. He helped with my suitcase and with my electric bass (which I’d brought with me), sticking both in the back of the truck, and he refrained from his usual remark about only boys playing bass. The electric guitar had been invented fifty miles from here! I was always ready to counter, to no particular person at all, as Robert himself was as steeped in the local myths about Les Paul as I was. I also had an acoustic upright bass at home in my bedroom, with a satchel full of bows attached to its belly. It looked like a fat abandoned archer in the corner, a quiver full of arrows gathering dust. “Ole Bob,” Robert called it, lumping it in with him and my dad. “At least you’re not lugging Ole Bob.”

Robert, it had often seemed to me, failed to apply himself—musically or academically. Perhaps having an older sister had stymied him a little. He knew I was quietly nuts about my guitar. The Jewish part of us both sort of understood that to worship God was to siphon off the worship of doodads—and we loved doodads (my instruments were insured up the wazoo)—but it didn’t always work that way: sometimes God adhered to something material and physical and earthly, and then all was a little misty for the holder and beholder of the doodad. But my brother was nice to me about it all; in fact, when I thought back to our many years together, he was, essentially, always nice to me, though he did gun the engine a little wildly as we pulled out of the parking lot. To his friends he was known as Gunny, a name my parents hated.

On the ride back to the house he told me how he was doing, though I had to ask two times. Sometimes a stammer came over him, which made him hesitant to speak at all—I’m sure he felt that the slightly choked and garbled voice did not accurately reflect his mind, though who knows, maybe it did. Sometimes you could see him trying to pick up speed when he spoke, velocity smoothing things over and getting him to the end sooner. Gunny, indeed.

On the bus I’d eaten nothing but some supermarket sushi, half a plastic tray of which was still in my purse, and hunger made me a more eager listener. Every word seemed a morsel. He was in his last year in high school and hated it. He had gotten four Fs and a D this past semester. His face showed no dismay in the relating of this. Apparently my father, not always one for helpfully stern parenting, had stared at the report card and said, “Well, Robert, what can I say. Four Fs and a D: it looks like you’re spending too much time on one course!” My brother chuckled drily, telling the story. Then we both fell silent, driving slowly toward home, the dark trees going by us with their branches set in the soft mush of the night sky like wrens’ feet or a spiky brooch in a cotton-bedded box. We passed the First Methodist Church and its spotlit plywood crèche, where the expressions of the dozing sheep were the least imbecilic in the scene. A sign out front advertised the title of the Christmas sermon:
LOVE YOUR ENEMIES; YOU MADE THEM.
We passed the Vanmares’ old farmhouse, where they had decorated the front yard again in a completely random holiday fashion: silhouettes of penguins, palm trees, geese, and candy canes all lit up as if they were long-lost friends at a gathering. Still, I was not immune to other people’s responses to Christmas, their whatnot compositions, whether it was art or just exuberance. Whimsy and fuss could still rivet me.

I got out my sushi and began to snack. “Want some?” I asked Robert.

“No way,” he said.

We passed the Drift Inn, which had lost its
D
and become the Rift Inn. The parking lot at Buck Rub Bowling was jammed for some knockerheimer tournament. We drove right down the main street of Dellacrosse, which was lined with single-story storefronts and diagonal parking out front. Squeezed in side by side were Larry’s Resale Shop, Terry’s Taxidermy (formerly Dick’s Deergutting), and Walt’s Worms, all of which we sailed right past. Chewing, I concentrated my stare, as if I were in fact the stranger I felt myself to be, studying the metal rickrack of the bridge across Wahapa Creek. We passed the road to the township dump and at the turnoff the dump-tender’s cabin, which the tender had outfitted proudly and spectacularly with items gleaned from the dump itself. A large glittery reindeer with broken-off antlers sat atop his roof.

Putting away my sushi, I said, “If you eat a bear’s liver, will you die?”

Robert laughed. “I have no idea.” Then he added, “I do know that if you’re a squirrel you should stay away from hot electrical boxes or you will get so electrocuted that your teeth will fuse together.” And he pointed this gruesome thing out to me, on the power line that edged our road, close to our own gravel driveway.

“How’s Mom?” I asked before we entered the house. The truck lights in the driveway would have already signaled our arrival.

“Mom’s a little emo. In other words, just the same,” he said, grabbing my bag and bass again for me the way the college boys rarely did. My parents had raised a nice farm boy, though I wondered if they knew this. It had not been their conscious, active intent. I went to follow him, but he signaled that I should walk ahead. I climbed the porch stairs and rapped on the aluminum storm door, then opened it and shouted hello. My mother was never one for Christmas Eve, and so coming home for the holidays I was often greeted like a neighbor stopping by on Sunday after church, a neighbor she saw all the time but did not want to be unkind to.

“Oh,” she said. “Hi there.” This year there was the smell of baking ginger in the air. The house struck me once more with its warm neglect and elegant poverty—the Hitchcock chairs that were beat up, uncared for, never treated as special antiques but as serviceable items that had to earn their existence on this planet the hard way: at our house, a kind of hard-knocks house for furniture.

My mother had sprung for eggnog, and a little brandy, and although my father had already gone to bed she and Robert and I sat up for twenty minutes or so, with a coffee log burning low in the fireplace and a plate of gingersnaps on the mantel before we were all too tired to pretend. The coffee log was a favorite of my mother’s, though to me it smelled less like coffee and more like a burning shoe. “I’d light the menorah,” said my mother, “but remember what happened last year with the curtains catching on fire.” The curtains had gone up in a blaze and we had thrown a punch bowl of eggnog on them to douse the flames, and the eggnog had sizzled and cooked into the fabric until the whole house smelled like a diner omelet.

“That’s OK,” I said. “I’ll light the menorah tomorrow for you.” Though I would forget to do it. Every year it was my job to clean it, scrape off the previous year’s wax with pins and a fork, so perhaps my forgetting was convenient.

“Thanks, honey,” said my mom, who never called me “honey.” Almost never. The television was on, murmuring low and flashing its colors. My mother flicked it off with annoyance. “A grinch who stole Christmas?” she said. “With all that’s going on in the world we should have to deal with
that
?”

In the morning my brother and I came downstairs within ten minutes of each other. The Christmas tree this year—or Hanukkah hemlock, as my mother still called it—was a pre-lit affair ordered online. The McLellans’ Christmas tree farm had recently gone out of business and my parents had resorted to an environmentally sound plastic pine from Hammacher Schlemmer. Ornaments like blue fish and beribboned, clove-studded oranges were clustered in the middle. Old dangly earrings that had lost their mates were hung on the more delicate branches. My mother had placed at the top a large tinselly Star of David, angled rakishly, like a geometry problem. Possibly, in late-morning light, this was just how all irony presented itself.

My parents were at the kitchen table eating cold cereal but offering to make us latkes with applesauce or regular pancakes or both, both being a holiday tradition. “I chopped the potatoes and onions up yesterday,” said my mom. Soon, I knew, she would get a skillet of oil going, or fire up the stove griddle, and the house would fill with slick oniony air, like the greasy spoon on Main Street, permeating our clothes and hair.

“Thanks, maybe later?” I said with the question mark our generation believed meant politeness but which baffled our parents. Outside the morning was bright. I liked the holy, rejoicing look of it: the many gray Christmases of my childhood had depressed me. And apparently not just me: one year the holiday card my mother sent out was an October photo of my brother and me, with a caption that read
The children. In some dead leaves
.

The light covering of snow on the fields out back and in the yard between the barn and the house was already melting in the morning sun. Ochre grass was poking through in patches. Beyond, the incline part of the acreage—which my father had sold off last year “for a pretty penny, or, maybe not pretty exactly, but a penny with a great personality”—had been resold by the Amish to others and was already being developed into something called Highland Estates. The weather was so warm that construction had continued into December. There were two yellow backhoes jutting into the sky. The houses were going to be huge, my mother said, with treeless lots and phony gazebos and turrets and patios to look back at us in mutual rebuke.

“They don’t like trees because squirrels climb up them and get in their attic and chew on the exercise equipment no longer in use. Now, without trees? The squirrels’ll head elsewhere and the attic will fill up with moths and moles.” It made one secretly grateful for the Amish, who did not do this, but unfairly annoyed with them when they sold to people who did. Still, mostly the Amish were buying up farms as is, and holding services in their parlors, though it was bitterly said in Dellacrosse that their wagons and trotting horses chipped and dinged the roads, and that their houses were declared churches in order to stay off the tax rolls and that they bred like rabbits and dressed like bats.

“Watching the snow melt?” I asked my brother.

“Yeah, I mean, what the hell kind of weather is this?” asked Robert, continuing to look outside at the sky. Clouds were starting to balloon there, as if a party were getting ready to begin.

“Your language,” said my mother.

“My language is English,” said my brother.

“It’s beginning to look nothing like Christmas,” I sang. “Everywhere I go.”

“Nice voice,” said my brother, sounding sincere, which surprised me. But then he added, under his breath, “Blah, blah, fuckin’ blah.”

“Conversation inside needs brightening,” I tried singing again, “because the climate change is frightening!”

“Global warming,” said my father. “They’ve found prickly pear cactus as far north as the Hottomowac River. And even the Costco has taken to putting fake spray frost on their windows this year.”

I tightened my bathrobe. It was nice to have my father here. Often during past holidays he had been too busy supplying the high-end restaurants in Chicago with their gourmet vegetables—not just cold-storage potatoes but little purple eggplants and shallots; supplying them over the holidays meant driving the truck all the way to Illinois in the snow, and he could never make it back in time for dinner. The local farming, like art, had always catered to the rich in one way or another. The dairy farm down the road, I knew, kept the county’s doctors and lawyers and ministers as private customers, selling them their best premium butter. The rest of the butter—known as Dellacrosse grease—went wherever. And the local cheesemakers were in some strange condition of reversal. One of the old cheese factories had gone under and become a school. And one of the old schools had become a cheese factory. But an
artisan
cheese factory, done with syringes of mites and vegetarian rennet. This was the kind of cheese factory that had the best chance of making it—food for yuppies—like my father’s dainty potatoes, arranged by hue in purple net bags. These cheesemakers gave their cheeses eccentric names like Unplugged and Washed Midget: wacked food for wacked people, my brother said disdainfully. The producers of conventional cheese were busy with the governor trying to find niche marketing in Japan.

In the morning sunshine my parents looked cleansed of their reinforcing farm dirt. They looked translucent and a little frailer than they had even in the fall, when the black potato muck beneath their nails and the mud on their shoes and clothing seemed to anchor them to the earth. Now they could—and might—ascend in a shaft of light, for all I knew. I scarcely recognized them, as if they were only slightly animate in their holographic shimmer. In the past their soil had warmed and defined them. Now they were like figurines made not even of glass but of translucent sugar. I felt hearty and fleshy and bloody by comparison, feeling the thick heated meat of myself even in my bathrobe. We were all in our bathrobes, which struck me as funny. Probably we would all get dressed before opening presents, bowls of Fiddle Faddle on the coffee table. The presents I was giving this year were merely three-by-five cards with drawings of the items I had intended to give but had had no time to get and so would get later. This was something of a traditional joke. This year I had drawn them all pictures of sports cars, a cruel spin on the tradition, since it meant I had given it very little thought and was probably getting them nothing. I even ran out of three-by-five cards and for my brother’s used a four-by-six, with a larger drawing of a larger car—and so a larger jokey lie. Arguably, it was better than that unfortunate year when I was twelve and too old for such a thing but had nonetheless wrapped a candy box jammed full of puppy poop from our dog, Blot, and given it to Robert, with a little tag that said
MMMMMM … good. Merry Christmas from Blot
. “Look what the dog-do did,” I said at the time, studying his reaction. Which remained one of quiet perplexity.