A Gate at the Stairs (4 page)

In the sky the light was thin and draining. Dusk was beginning already, although it was only three in the afternoon. The sun set earliest in these days before Christmas—“the shortest days of the year,” which only meant the darkest—and it made for a lonely walk home. My apartment was in one of those old frame houses close to campus, in the student ghetto that abutted the university stadium. It was a corner house, and the first-floor apartment I shared with Murph was to the south, on the left as one walked up the stairs to the porch. Murph’s real name, Elizabeth Murphy Krueger, adorned our mailbox along with mine on an index card in sparkly green glue. Across the street the gray concrete stadium wall rose three times higher than any building around, and it overshadowed the neighborhood in a bleak and brutal way. In spring and fall convening marching bands, with their vibrating tubas and snares, routinely rattled our window-panes. Sun reached our rooms only when directly overhead—in May at noon—or on a winter morning when reflected from some fluke drifts of a snowstorm, or in the afternoon when the angle of its setting caused it to flare briefly through the back windows of the kitchen. When a generous patch of sun appeared on the floor, it was a pleasure just to stand in it. (Was I too old or too young to be getting my pleasure there? I was not the right age, surely.) After a rainstorm, or during a winter thaw, one could walk by the stadium and hear the rush of water running inside from the top seats, dropping down row by row to the bottom, a perfectly graduated waterfall, although, captured and magnified within the concrete construction of the stadium, the sound sometimes rose to a roaring
whoosh
. Often people stopped along the sidewalks to point at the exterior stadium wall and say, “Isn’t the stadium empty? What is that sound?”

“It’s the revolution,” Murph liked to say. To her, stadiums were where insurgents were shot, and this caused her to have mixed feelings about living so close, to say nothing of her feelings about the home football games, when curb space was scarce and the parked cars of out-of-towners jammed our streets, their cheers from the stands like a screaming wind through town, the red of their thousands of sweatshirts like an invasion of bright bugs. On Sunday mornings, the day after the games, the sidewalk would be littered with cardboard signs that read
I NEED TICKETS
.

Murph was now only technically my roommate, since she mostly lived a mile away in a subletted condo with her new boyfriend, a sixth-year senior. I had a tendency to forget about this—looking forward to telling her something, wondering what we might cook up for supper, expecting to see her there, brooding, with her sweater thrown over her shoulders and her sleeves wound round her neck, a look that was elegant on her but on me would have made me appear insane. And then I would come home to realize, once more, that it was just me there. She would leave the telltale jetsam and flotsam, hastily changed clothes, carelessly written notes.
Hey, Tass, I drank the last of the milk—sorry
. So I was left with the ambivalence of having to pay with aloneness for an apartment I could not alone afford. It was not miserable—often I did not miss her at all. But there was sometimes a quick, sinking ache when I walked in the door and saw she was not there. Twice, however, I’d felt the same sinking feeling when she was.

The porous dry rot of our front steps still held weight—six slim tenants, single file—but every time I climbed them I worried it could be my last: surely the next time my foot would go through and I would have to be pried from the splintery wreckage by a rescue squad phoned by the watchful Kay upstairs. Our landlord, Mr. Wettersten, was classically absentee, though he believed in good boilers and, when school was in session, did not stint with heat, perhaps fearing the lawsuits of parents. You could shower several times a day, or at the last minute: your hair would dry in a snap over the radiators. Sometimes my apartment would so overheat that my fingernails would dry up and crack and break off in my gloves, chips of them stuck in the woolen fingertips. Now, as I unlocked the door and pushed in, the pipes were clanking and letting loose with their small internal explosions; no pipe had ever yet burst, though if the boiler kicked on at night, the quaking could pull you alarmedly from sleep. It was, at times, like living in a factory. Kay, who lived in the largest flat, was middle-aged and the only tenant not a student; she was always in some skirmish with the landlord about the building. “He has no idea what he’s up against, letting this building go the way he has,” Kay said to me once. “When something’s off here I have nothing else to think about. I mean, I have no other life. I can make this my life. He doesn’t appreciate what he’s up against. He’s up against someone with no life.” So we all let Kay manage the troubles of the house. She had been there for more than a decade. Murph sometimes referred to the tenants of the house as the Clutter Family, by which I assumed—I hoped, I prayed—she meant all their clutter.

When I walked across the front room to throw my stuff on the couch, the floorboards, paradoxically worn and tentative, creaked loudly—more so now that all humidity had fled the place. Despite the busy, complaining crackle of pipe and floor, the rooms had a wintry loneliness. Our fireplace, cold and unused, a safety hazard—what hope for comfort without the risk of fiery death? should we risk? yes, I once begged, yes!—we used as a storage nook for CDs. In the corner leaned my electric bass and amp, yearning for a workout, but I ignored them. I had a see-through Dan Armstrong lucite, like Jack Bruce of Cream, and I had contrived to know stray licks not usually played on bass: I knew some Modest Mouse, some Violent Femmes, and some Sleater-Kinney (“Isn’t that the cancer hospital in New York?” my brother once asked me), plus, from the olden days, Jimi Hendrix, “Milestones,” “Barbara Ann,” “Barbara Allen,” “My Favorite Things,” and “Happy Birthday” (as if played by Hendrix but on a bass!). Once, in Dellacrosse, I had agreed to give an actual concert—I played “Blue Bells of Scotland” and wore a kilt. A kilt with a see-through electric guitar! which managed to sound very much like a bagpipe, and because the concert was part of a county fair, they gave me a green ribbon that said
Lyric Lass
. Everyone at that stupid fair had their head up their hinder as far as I was concerned, including me, and I never played there again.

In the hallway of my apartment the phone machine light was blinking and I pressed Play, turned up the volume, then went on into my bedroom, where I flopped down on my bed, in the icelandic afternoon dusk, door open, to listen to the voices of women, one after another, and their various desires and requests.

First there was Murph’s sister. “Hi, it’s Lynn. You are not there, I know, but call me later when you are.” Then there was my mother. “Hello, Tassie? It’s your mother.” Followed by a bumping, banging hang-up. Had she dropped the phone, or was this just one more example of her strange personal style? Then there was my advisor, who was also Dean of Women. “Yes, this is Dean Andersen looking for Tassie Jane Keltjin.” I kept forgetting our outgoing message contained no indication as to whose phone it was. It simply had Murph screaming (we thought hilariously), “Leave your message after the tone, if you have to! We are
so not here
!” Dean Andersen’s voice was gentle but forceful, a combination I would spend many hours of my young life attempting to learn, though they would have been better spent on Farsi. “Tassie, could you leave a copy of your spring registration forms in my mailbox in Ellis Hall? Thanks much. I need to officially sign off on them, which I don’t believe I did, though I’m not sure why. Have a great break.” There was a long, uncertain silence preceding the final message. “Yes, hello, this is Sarah Brink phoning for Tassie Keltjin.” There was another long, uncertain silence. I sat straight up to hear if there was anything else. “Could she phone me back sometime this evening? Thank you very much. 357-7649.”

First I phoned my mother. She had no voice mail of any sort, so I let it ring ten times, then hung up. Then I rewound our machine and played the message from Sarah Brink again. What was I frightened of? I wasn’t sure. But I decided to wait until the morning to phone her back. I got into my nightgown, made a grilled cheese sandwich and some mint tea, then took them back into my room, where I consumed them in bed. Ringed by crumbs and grease, newspapers and a book, I eventually fell asleep.

I woke up in a blaze of white sun. I had neglected to pull the shades and it had snowed in the night; the morning rays reflected off the snow on the sills and on the low adjacent roof, setting the room on fire with daylight. I tried not to think about my life. I did not have any good solid plans for it long-term—no bad plans either, no plans at all—and the lostness of that, compared with the clear ambitions of my friends (marriage, children, law school), sometimes shamed me. Other times in my mind I defended such a condition as morally and intellectually superior—my life was open and ready and free—but that did not make it any less lonely. I got up, trudged barefoot across the cold floor, and made a cup of coffee, with a brown plastic Melitta filter and a paper towel, dripping it into a single ceramic mug that said
Moose Timber Lodge
. Murph had gone there once, for a weekend, with her new BF.

The phone rang again before I’d had time to let the coffee kick in and give me words to say; nonetheless, I picked up the receiver.

“Hi, is this Tassie?” said the newly familiar voice.

“Yes, it is.” I frantically gulped at my coffee. What time was it? Too soon for calls.

“This is Sarah Brink. Did I wake you up? I’m sorry. I’m calling too early, aren’t I?”

“Oh, no,” I said, lest she think I was a shiftless bum. Better a lying sack of shit.

“I didn’t know whether I’d left a message on the correct machine or not. And I wanted to get back to you as soon as possible before you accepted an offer from someone else.” Little did she know. “I’ve talked it over with my husband and we’d like to offer you the job.”

Could she even have called the references I’d listed? Had there been enough time to?

“Oh, thank you,” I said.

“We’ll start you at ten dollars an hour, with the possibility of raises down the line.”

“OK.” I sipped at the coffee, trying to wake my brain. Let the coffee speak!

“The problem is this. The job starts today.”

“Today?” I sipped again.

“Yes, I’m sorry. We are going to Kronenkee to meet the birth mother and we’d like you to come with us.”

“Yes, well, I think that would be OK.”

“So you accept the position?”

“Yes, I guess I do.”

“You do? You can’t know how happy you’ve made me.”

“Really?” I asked, all the while wondering,
Where’s the new employee’s first-day orientation meeting? Where is the “You’ve Picked a Great Place to Work” PowerPoint presentation?
The coffee was kicking in, but not helpfully.

“Oh, yes, really,” she said. “Can you be here by noon?”

The appointment with the birth mother was for two p.m. at the Perkins restaurant in Kronenkee, a town an hour away with a part-German, part-Indian name that I’d always assumed meant “wampum.” The social worker who ran the adoption agency was supposed to meet us there with the birth mother, and everyone would cheerfully assess one another. I had walked the half hour to Sarah Brink’s house and then waited twenty minutes while she scrambled around doing things, making quick phone calls to the restaurant—“Meeska, the Concord coulis has got to be more than grape jam!”—or searching madly for her sunglasses (“I hate that snow glare on those two-lane roads”), all the while apologizing to me from the next room. In the car, on our way up, I sat next to her in the front seat, since her husband, Edward, whom, strangely, I still hadn’t met, couldn’t get out of some meeting or other and had apparently told Sarah to go ahead without him.

“Marriage,” Sarah sighed. As if I had any idea what that meant. Yet it did seem odd that he wasn’t with her, and odder still that I seemed to be going in his stead.

But I nodded. “He must be busy,” I said, giving Edward the benefit of the doubt, though I was beginning to think Edward might be, well, an asshole. I looked sideways at Sarah, who was hatless, with a long cranberry scarf coiled twice about her neck. The sun caught the shiny artifice of her hair as well as the stray tufts of white lint on her peacoat. Still, especially with the sunglasses in winter—something I had seldom seen before—she looked glamorous. I was not especially used to speaking to adults, so I felt comfortable just being quiet with her, and soon she turned on the classical music station and we listened to Mussorgsky’s
Pictures at an Exhibition
and
Night on Bald Mountain
for the entire ride. “They’ve told me the birth mother is very beautiful,” said Sarah, at one point. And I said nothing, not knowing what to say.

We waited in the second booth in at Perkins, Sarah and I sitting on the same side, to leave the seat opposite fully open for the two people we were waiting for. Sarah ordered coffee for us both and I sat looking over the plasticized Perkins menu, with its little pictures of golden french fries laid out on frilly, verdant lettuce next to tomato slices the size of small clocks. What would I order? There was the Bread Bowl Salad, the Heartland Omelette, and various “bottomless” beverages, for the greedy and thirsty—I feared I was both. Sarah ordered Perkins’s Bottomless Pot of Coffee, for the entire table, and the waitress went away to bring it.

“Oh, look, here they are,” murmured Sarah, and I looked up to see a heavily made-up middle-aged woman in a deep pink parka holding the arm of a girl probably my age, maybe younger, who was very pregnant, very pretty, and when she smiled at us, even from that distance, I could see she had scarcely a tooth in her head. We stood and moved toward them. The girl wore an electronic bracelet on her wrist, but was clearly unembarrassed by this because she energetically thrust her hand out from her sleeve in greeting. I shook it. “Hi,” she said to me. I wondered what she had done, and why the bracelet was not around her ankle instead. Perhaps she had been very, very bad and had both.