A Gate at the Stairs (7 page)

My mother was now smoking. “Should I make breakfast?” she asked again. My father, who’d been too tired to talk last night, said, “Yeah! Make breakfast! Robert and I want to sit Tassie down and make her tell us about college.”

“Yeah, right,” said Robert. He padded out of the kitchen. “I’m taking a shower,” he called back, claiming our one bathroom.

“Sooo …” My dad smiled at me. “How’s college?”

“Oh, OK,” I said inarticulately, but I figured all my dad really needed to hear was positive things in a tempered tone he could trust. My mother was heating up oil and had taken the cold bowl of latke mixture out and peeled the Saran Wrap off the top. I started to help her, molding handfuls into plump mounds, the oil and egg white slimy in my hands.

“Any boyfriends?” My father’s eyebrows went up and down, dismissively, mockingly, letting me know I need not answer. My mother gave him a look anyway. “Bo.” She said his name like that to warn him of trespass. She claimed to call him Robert in private, never liking his family nickname but needing within the house to distinquish between Robert junior and senior.

I liked my dad. Nothing he did ever bothered me, not even his recent drinking, which didn’t usually begin until late afternoon anyway. Still, my unblaming affection had not kept me from feeling the occasional shame of him. “Your father’s a farmer? What does he farm?” acquaintances back in Troy would sometimes ask. In Dellacrosse he was barely considered a farmer at all. “Nothing,” I would sometimes reply. “He farms nothing. Dadaist agriculture.”

“Oh, I get it,” an East Coast boy with a glass boot of beer might say, or a girl with narrow dark-framed glasses like the Nana Mouskouri of my mother’s old LPs.

I’m not sure where this small, slightly thrashing, not quite deforming shame had come from. Somehow I had learned it, perhaps even at Dellacrosse Central, where having a father-farmer should have been no shame at all, and wasn’t, despite my father’s miniature operation. People knew his produce was coveted. And among the kids the more obscene jokes were saved for the ginseng farmers. But I remember once in seventh grade, our homeroom teacher had gone around the class and asked us what our fathers did. When she got to Eileen Reilly, Eileen turned red and said, “I would rather not say.” This astounded me, for her father was a handsome, charming salesman at Home Savings Shoes on Main Street—Stan the Shoe Man, my mother affectionately called him. But his daughter had absorbed some disappointment—his, or her mother’s—and did not want to speak of how he earned his living.

Perhaps that was the moment I learned this as a source of personal shame, or observed the possibility of it.

“So your classes then,” said my father. “Sit down on this lovely Christmas morning and tell your old dad about the ones you took and the ones you’re going to take when you go back. How did that philosophy class go?”

“Did you know that Alexander the Great left all his money to Aristotle?” I asked brightly.

“That’s how he got his name,” said my father. “Aristotle gave it to him! Before that he was just Alexander the Fine.”

“Bo! Sheesh.” My mother shook her head.

A sizzling sound came from the griddle, where she was pouring oil. We had an old-style stove, with the griddle built in. You had to clean it with rags and paper towels, or pry it out with a barbecue fork and go at it with steel wool and water. The hot latke mix steaming into the air now smelled good to me and helped cover up the kitchen’s perennially faint reek of mice. My mother was stirring regular pancake batter as well.

“It’s OK to sit while you help,” said my mother to me, “but remember these latkes aren’t hamburgers. Don’t cup them into thick shapes.”

I ignored her and continued with my fat latkes and my dad.

“Next term?” he asked.

“I’ve registered for another literature survey—Brit Lit from 1830 to 1930—Intro to Sufism, Intro to Wine Tasting, a music appreciation course titled Soundtracks to War Movies, and a geology course called Dating Rocks.” The Sufism did not throw him.

“Dating rocks?”

“I need to learn!” I said, laughing.

“Don’t let them kiss you,” he said, not smiling. The random assortment of my courses lacked the sound of serious direction. I’d left out my PE requirement, which I was filling with a double-listed humanities and Pilates course called The Perverse Body/The Neutral Pelvis. I didn’t want to provoke him.

Still, I murmured, as if in self-pity, “They don’t kiss. That’s why they’re called rocks.”

“Wine tasting?” He raised his eyebrows. It had the sound of a father not getting his money’s worth.

“I need a gut course, to make the others go better,” I said. “I didn’t really have one this past semester, and things were too intense.”

“But aren’t you underage?”

“Technically, I guess. But it’s for a course, so I guess they let you.”

“Will you make dean’s list again?” asked my mother.

“Possibly,” I said.

“Well, you have to be careful which dean,” said my father. “You don’t want to get on the wrong list!”

“Besides, I’m going to be working next semester.”

“You got a job?”

“You got a job?”

“Is there an echo in here?” I said.

“Well, tell us,” said my mother. “Don’t just sass us to death.”

“It hasn’t really begun. It’s a babysitting job. But there isn’t a baby yet.”

“Oh, yes, one of those,” said my father, amused.

“What do you mean, no baby yet?” asked my mother, who looked puzzled. My father was grinning ear to ear, as if to say,
Now here’s a how-de-do
.

“There
will be
one. Or should be. In January,” I explained.

“The mother’s pregnant?”

“Well, the birth mother is pregnant, and the woman I’m working for is going to adopt the kid.”

There was silence all around, even from my dad, as if this were a situation to be considered for all its various and deep sadnesses.

“It’s a good thing,” I added. “This girl—she could never be a good mother. And the lady who’s hiring me? She’s kind of neat. She’s nice and pretty and she owns a fancy restaurant in town.”

“That’s why she needs you,” said my mother, concerned. “She’s too busy for a child.”

I was about to try to defend Sarah when my father asked with unfeigned interest, “What restaurant?”

“Le Petit Moulin,” I said.

My mother turned and made a knowing face. “A
fineschmecker
running a place for other
fineschmeckers.”

My father smiled broadly. “Oh, I remember her. Very nice woman.” My mother turned her back to us, flipping the flapjacks and throwing the latkes into hot oil, refusing to let go of her skepticism regarding the whole matter. My father continued. “She would come and check out those potatoes as if they were diamonds. But she would sometimes take the ones with a bit of rot in them anyway, knowing that once the rot part was cut out the rest of the potato would be sweeter than most. Smart lady.”

“Why can’t she have her own children?” asked my mother, continuing in her doubt.

“Mom, I don’t know. I can’t ask. I hardly know her.”

“What about her husband?”

“What
about
her husband?”

“Who is he?”

It was a little surprising even to me that I knew so little about him. “I think he’s probably a professor of some sort, but I’m not sure.”

“Hmph,” said my mother. “Academics.” Now she was muttering. “They all shoot from the hip. And the hip is always in the chair.”

“What did you say?” asked my father.

“Nothing,” said my mother. “Keeping a safe distance never keeps one from having an opinion, is all. Having no dog in the race doesn’t keep people from having extremely large cats.” Then she added, “Pull your seat up to the table. The food is ready.”

My father had more of a sense of humor than my mother. “Just because I’m hard of hearing,” he said to her now, smiling, “doesn’t mean you’re not mumbling!” Yet it was his sense of adventure she had had to sign on for long ago, good-naturedly, and in reluctant love, and he had taken her on something of a journey, out here to the country, to this farm. But she had been game. At least at first.

“Oh, well, someday maybe
I’ll
open a restaurant,” she said now, sighing brightly, which seemed about as happy as she got—a sigh with some light in it. She then added a remark that typified the sort that filled me with loathing for her. “You know, with the new year approaching, I’ve come to realize I’ve done nothing these past decades but devote my energies to the interests of others. So, soon? I’m going to start focusing on myself.”

“Well, before you get started, darling,” said my father, “could you please pass the syrup?”

Once when I was a kid my father planted ten acres of corn and rye and then midsummer plowed just the rye, making a graphic ribbon effect through the rolling fields. “This would be best seen by air,” said my dad. The whole reason he had become a farmer is that he thought it would be fun. And so he hired a guy from Minneapolis to take an aerial photo of it, and we stuck it up on the fridge with little spud magnets. It looked beautiful—the gold of the mown rye striping the green corn and both undulating through like a performing pair of lovebird dolphins. This, I pretended, was a picture of my parents’ marriage. My mother had thought she was marrying a college president’s son but got a hobby farmer instead, yet she’d followed him. She stayed with him wherever the hell it was they were going. She was like a stickleback fish caught inland as the glacier retreated and the rivers—the only access to the sea—disappeared. She would have to make do, in this landlocked lake of love. I knew, as she had mentioned it, that she’d thought there’d be money—he’d grown up in a house with columns—but she hadn’t realized there was none: the house was owned by the college. Even when she and my father came to Dellacrosse and bought our old brick house, with its falling-apart shed and barn but its flowerbeds gorgeous with pansies and impatiens, she didn’t understand that those particular flowers were annuals, and so she waited for them to return the next year, feeling dashed and betrayed when they didn’t. Another mirage! But eventually she learned to plant her own. And for a while she was a pro. Until she got too tired. That was when she installed mirrors in the flowerbeds, slowly learning the art of mirage herself.

After our late breakfast the winds picked up, and soon there was a thunderstorm, the sky yellowish and the clouds filled with the crunch and rip of lightning. The leafless trees looked frail and surprised. The sudden downpour eliminated practically all the snow on the ground, and because the drainage on the county roads was so poor, they filled like canals with water, just sitting there glistening, ready to turn to ice when the temperature dipped later in the afternoon. Which it did.

Our actual Christmas ceremonies for the day, outside of breakfast, had been so painfully casual—no hamentashen, no pfeffer-nüsse, no kringle from Racine—that I wondered why we had bothered. Perhaps my mother, the keeper of ritual, had lost interest in this ostensibly Christian custom now that we had grown, and my father didn’t really know how to take over. Where was the turkey, its yankable heart in a baggie jammed up its butt? On the other hand, my mother had given me a carefully wrapped present of a pearl necklace and watched, teary-eyed, as I opened it. “Every woman should have a pearl necklace,” she said. “When I was your age I got one.” From my father, I knew. And now, with no man in my life, even though I was only twenty, she would be the one to bestow this artifact of womanhood, this rite of passage, this gyno-noose, upon me. That I might in fact never have an occasion to wear such a thing or that I might look like the worst sort of Republican doing so probably never occurred to her. I think she saw it as a kind of ticket off the farm and out into the world, wherever
that
was.

“Thanks, Mom,” I said, and kissed her cheek, which was simultaneously powdery and damp. I thrust the velveteen box of pearls high, as if making a toast. “Here’s to Jesus,” I said.

My mom looked at me from a great and concerned distance. Their present to Robert was a handheld instant star and constellation identifier.

Another flurry of thunderclouds passed by overhead and hail came pounding down on our roof, and down the chimney, crackling in the fireplace as if to mock the sound of fire and then bouncing out from the hearth onto the wood floor. It was as if I had unstrung my mother’s pearls and just flung them around.

Afterward we sat around and watched TV. Only once do I remember our going to church on Christmas—the Norwegian Lutheran church in town. My father had cast his WASP eye around at the stained-glass windows and their bright, jellied scenes and designs, and then murmured, perhaps recalling his churchier past or struggling against some ancestral Puritan pride, “I think that’s an original Koshkonong window. Or, wait a minute, let me see, maybe it’s not—” and my mother had whispered in a fond hiss, “Let’s face it, Bo: You know nothing about the goyim.”

“There’s lots of strange weather all around the country,” my dad said now, sitting down to join us.

“What do you mean?” I asked, a little frightened. Like a child, I still trusted him to know all.

“Well, there are a lot of storms in odd places and high winds”—he slowed down to subdue his own dark report—“and eerie calms …”

“Eerie calms?” I asked.

“There’s a pregnant pause outside Kenosha that’s scaring the pants off ’em.”

“Dad!” And I laughed, to please him.

At four o’clock, with the sun just about set, my brother and I went outside for a walk, and we slid around with our shoes on the new ice. It had been sunny enough before noon so that my mother had put laundry out, and now in the light wind it billowed from her clotheslines, snapping the ice from its threads like the sails of an arctic whale ship. How many Christmases had we ever been out without boots? Not many.

“How are Mom and Dad
doing?”
I asked my brother.

“Oh, OK, I guess,” Robert said. “They still go at each other tooth and nail, but I’ve learned not to pay too much attention. It’s really all nothing. And better than when they turn their attention to me. Yikes!”