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Summary
Summary
In her dazzling new novel-her first in more than a decade-Moore turns her eye on the anxiety and disconnection of post-9/11 America, on the insidiousness of racism, the blind-sidedness of war, and the recklessness thrust on others in the name of love. As the United States begins gearing up for war in the Middle East, twenty-year-old Tassie Keltjin, the Midwestern daughter of a gentleman hill farmer-his Keltjin potatoes are justifiably famous-has come to a university town as a college student, her brain on fire with Chaucer, Sylvia Plath, Simone de Beauvoir. As the year unfolds and she is drawn deeper into each of these lives, her own life back home becomes ever more alien to her: her parents are frailer; her brother, aimless and lost in high school, contemplates joining the military. Tassie finds herself becoming more and more the stranger she felt herself to be, and as life and love unravel dramatically, even shockingly, she is forever changed.
Author Notes
Lorrie Moore was born Marie Lorena Moore on January 13, 1957 in Glen Falls, New York. She was nicknamed Lorrie by her parents. She attended St. Lawrence University and won Seventeen magazine's fiction contest. After graduation, she moved to Manhattan and worked as a paralegal for two years. In 1980 she enrolled in Cornell University's M.F.A. program. After graduation from Cornell she was encouraged by a teacher to contact an agent who sold her collection, Self-Help, which was composed of stories from her master's thesis. Lorrie Moore writes about failing relationships and terminal illness. She is the Delmore Schwartz Professor in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she teaches creative writing. She has also taught at Cornell University. She has written a children's book entitled The Forgotten Helper. She won the 1998 O. Henry Award for her short story People Like That They Are the Only People Here. In 1999 she was given the Irish Times International Fiction Prize for Birds of America. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2006 and in 2010 her novel A Gate at the stairs was a finalist for the Pen/Faulkner Award for fiction.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Moore (Anagrams) knits together the shadow of 9/11 and a young girl's bumpy coming-of-age in this luminous, heart-wrenchingly wry novel-the author's first in 15 years. Tassie Keltjin, 20, a smalltown girl weathering a clumsy college year in "the Athens of the Midwest," is taken on as prospective nanny by brittle Sarah Brink, the proprietor of a pricey restaurant who is desperate to adopt a baby despite her dodgy past. Subsequent "adventures in prospective motherhood" involve a pregnant girl "with scarcely a tooth in her head" and a white birth mother abandoned by her African-American boyfriend-both encounters expose class and racial prejudice to an increasingly less naOve Tassie. In a parallel tale, Tassie lands a lover, enigmatic Reynaldo, who tries to keep certain parts of his life a secret from Tassie. Moore's graceful prose considers serious emotional and political issues with low-key clarity and poignancy, while generous flashes of wit-Tessie the sexual innocent using her roommate's vibrator to stir her chocolate milk-endow this stellar novel with great heart. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Readers of Moore's other works will feel right at home with this one, which recounts a year in the life of college student Tassie Keltgin. Although not completely part of her small Wisconsin farming community (her mother is Jewish, her father grows exotic potatoes), she feels adrift in the college town of Troy. She is hired as a child-care provider by Sarah and Edward Brink-Thornwood, sophisticated transplants from the East Coast who are in the process of adopting a child. The child they end up with is Mary, a biracial two-year-old. Sarah, owner of a high-end restaurant, and Edward, a researcher at the university, are curiously uninvolved parents, and Tassie and Mary are left to their own devices more often than not. Tassie herself is fresh from childhood, as she puts it, her head still stuffed with fairy tales. Through the events of the year, which include sexual initiation, brushes with racism, heartbreaking revelations, and family tragedy, she discovers that the adult world has grim and gruesome fairy tales of its own. Moore serves up disorder and disaster but also humor and a feast of recurring themes the way people use language; the changing of the seasons; food, from mashed bananas for babies to fennel-cured salmon noisettes. The unique vision and exquisite writing cast a spell.--Quinn, Mary Ellen Copyright 2009 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
I'm aware of one - one - reader who doesn't care for Lorrie Moore, and even that one seems a little apologetic about it. "Too . . . punny," my friend explains, resorting to a pun as though hypnotized by the very tendency that sets off his resistance. For others, Moore may be, exactly, the most irresistible contemporary American writer: brainy, humane, unpretentious and warm; seemingly effortlessly lyrical; Lily-Tomlin-funny. Most of all, Moore is capable of enlisting not just our sympathies but our sorrows. Her last book, the 1998 story collection "Birds of America," included the unforgettable baby-with-cancer story "People Like That Are the Only People Here," a breathtakingly dark overture to a decade's silence - as if the Beatles had exited on "A Day in the Life." For many readers, the fact that Moore has now relieved an 11-year publishing hiatus is reason enough to start Google-mapping a route to the nearest surviving bookstore. If American fiction writers largely find themselves sorted tediously into the category of "natural" at either the short or the long form, regardless of the extent of their commitment to both, then Moore - justly celebrated for her three story collections - has surely been counted as a miniaturist. This book should spell the end of that. "A Gate at the Stairs" is more expansive than either of her two previous novels, the slender, Nabokovian "Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?" and the structurally dizzy novel-as-set-of-variations "Anagrams." It's also a novel that brandishes some "big" material: racism, war, etc. - albeit in Moore's resolutely insouciant key. THE novel's protagonist and narrator, Tassie Keltjin, is a student at a Midwestern college mecca, daughter of a boutique potato cultivator, who finds work as the nanny-in-waiting for a brainy couple awkwardly on the verge of adoption. This ambiguous assignment takes the foreground in a tale ranging over Tassie's home life and love life - the nest she's just departed and the nest she's hoping to flutter into. Moore's class diagnostics are so exact she can make us feel the uneasiness not only between town and country in a single landlocked state, but between different types of farmers on neighboring plots. The book is also set in the autumn of 2001, a fact Moore has the patience to barely deploy for 200 pages, and then only with a deft sleight of hand that will make readers reflect on the ways so many other treatments of this (unfinished) passage in American life have resembled heart surgery performed with a croquet mallet. In a 2005 interview, Moore made an allusion to this "post-9/11" aspect of the work that grew into this novel: "I'm . . . interested in the way that the workings of governments and elected officials intrude upon the lives and minds of people who feel generally safe from the immediate effects of such workings." The delicacy of this remark fails to disguise its clarity of purpose, and, as it happens, distant international affairs are by no means the only source of "intrusion" in "A Gate at the Stairs." Moore's continuing interest in how power imbalances make themselves felt in human encounters fastens here on the Kafka-worthy bureaucracy of adoption agencies and foster homes. Combined with her immaculately tender portrayals of young children, so real you want to pass around their snapshots, this aspect of her novel will do such things to your heart that you may find yourself wishing for the surgeon with the croquet mallet, just for mercy. Moore's cast is sneaky-large (she's like an athlete you keep wanting to call sneaky-fast, or sneaky-tough). Any of Tassie's relationships - like that with her adoption-seeking employer Sarah Brink, or her vivid goof of a younger brother, or her exotic first love interest, Reynaldo (whom she meets in "Intro to Sufism") - may seem this book's essential one, at least while it assumes center stage. But the novel's real essence is its sinuous roving spotlight, in which each character and element is embraced in Tassie's wondering and exact sensibility, as when with her brother she revisits a childhood haunt: "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.' . . . 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." As for the puns, they seem to me less an eagerness to entertain than a true writerly obsession. Moore is an equal-opportunity japester: heroes and villains both crack wise with Chandleresque vivacity, so you can't use cleverness as a moral index. The wrinkly recursiveness of her language seems lodged at the layer of consciousness itself, where Moore demands readers' attention to the innate thingliness of words. This includes not only their plastic capacity as puns, and the oddnesses residing in the names for food, foliage and products - for instance, the fact that probably no bachelor ever wore the flowers called "bachelor buttons," or that a fabric's neutral hue can be awarded names as various as pigeon, parmesan, platinum or pebble - but also their potential use as deliberate uncommunication: "'Sounds good,' I sang out into the dark of the car. Sounds good, that same Midwestern girl's slightly frightened reply. It appeared to clinch a deal, and was meant to sound the same as the more soldierly Good to go, except it was promiseless - mere affirmative description." FINALLY, this book plumbs deep because it is anchored deep, in a system of natural imagery as tightly organized as that in a cycle of poems like Ted Hughes's "Crow." The motif is birth, gestation and burial, a seed or fetus uncovering its nature in secrecy, a coffin being offered to the earth. The motif declares itself upfront in Tassie's father's potatoes, which like sleeper cells grow clustered in darkness and then, unearthed, assume names: Klamath pearls, yellow fingerlings, purple Peruvians and Rose Finns. In "A Gate at the Stairs" it is not just potatoes that adapt for the world behind assumed names, but babies and grown-ups too. Great writers usually present us with mysteries, but the mystery Lorrie Moore presents consists of appearing genial, joshing and earnest at once - unmysterious, in other words, yet still great. She's a discomfiting, sometimes even rageful writer, lurking in the disguise of an endearing one. On finishing "A Gate at the Stairs" I turned to the reader nearest to me and made her swear to read it immediately (well, the dog was between us, but she doesn't read much, and none of what I recommend). I might even urge it on my dissenting friend. Jonathan Lethem's eighth novel, "Chronic City," will be published in October. Moore's heroes and villains both crack wise. In her fiction, cleverness can't be used as a moral index.
Guardian Review
"And what if," wonders 20-year-old Tassie Keltjin, taking her first plane journey, "oxygen deprivation in the cabin caused one to think in idle spirals and desperate verbal coils like this for the rest of one's life?" This anxiety - experienced as mild unease, casually expressed - underpins much of Lorrie Moore's scintillating and horrifying new novel, which veers between an appalled recognition of our hopelessness in the face of slowly unfolding events and a quietly amused understanding of our determination to translate our incompetence into a language that can help us bear them. Tassie has come to the midwestern university town of Troy from the even more insular town of Dellacrosse, primed for rapture "like the priest-child of a Colombian tribe I'd read about in Cultural Anthropology" but left with the bathetic sense that her childhood had produced "only me". Semi-engaged by her classes - Intro to Sufism, Soundtracks to War Movies and a Pilates module entitled "The Perverse Body/The Neutral Pelvis" - she mooches around town, collecting fortune cookies from the Chinese meals that she has never before tasted, dating unsatisfactorily and being deliciously scandalised by her outre room-mate. Moore's narrative begins in the months immediately after 9/11, a catastrophe so "near and far" that Tassie can only liken her bemused scrutiny of it to that of a crowd craning its collective neck to make sense of the Mona Lisa Unfocused, lonely, imperilled by the constant possibility of drift, Tassie is nonetheless impressively smart, intuitive and resistant to the deceitful accommodations of the grown-ups she still sees as a separate tribe ("I was not especially used to speaking to adults," she confides). When she is taken on by Sarah and Edward as a putative babysitter for a yet-to-exist child - her new employers are only partway through the adoption process - she is immediately attuned to the dissonances and silences in their domestic set-up, and instinctively aware of the combination of brokenness and strength that powers their progress through the series of dingy diners and "creepy old hotels" that, they hope, will deliver them a child. "In general," Tassie tells us, "my face had the kind of smooth, round stupidity that did not prompt the world's study," and reflects that "such hiddenness was not without its advantages, its egotisms, its grief-fed grandiosities". But from behind her smooth face, Tassie witnesses everything. Eventually, Sarah and Edward take charge of a mixed-race daughter - variously Mary, Mary-Emma or Emmie, depending on the needs and fantasies of the adults most recently given jurisdiction over her - and almost immediately abandon her to Tassie's care. Sarah, a modish restaurateur whose auburn appearance is so brightly burnished that "she looked like a highly controlled oxidation experiment", takes care to have risotto Fedexed to her new child, but instructs Tassie to call 911, rather than her, in case of an emergency; the largely absent Edward heaves into view mainly to conduct a little low-level lechery. The minefield of adoption - spooling bureaucracy, a downtrodden birth mother who may or may not have been raped, the laws dictating that adoptive parents may buy that mother an expensive watch but not pay for her education - resolves into a welter of support groups and platitudes, each of them sounding as if "it had the sharp edge of a weird lie poking into it". Sarah, assuring Tassie of her central importance to the family, explains that she must "be there with us for everything, from the very first day"; as time goes on, however, it begins to seem that what she wants is an alibi, not a childminder. But Tassie is also still a child, happy to feed Emmie on yogurt pops and to bundle her along on trips to see her newly acquired boyfriend, Reynaldo. Moore also makes subtle, painful capital out of Tassie's quietly distressing relationship with her own parents, her detached, otherworldly Jewish mother and her father, a Lutheran "hobbyist" farmer. Frequently mistaken for Emmie's mother, she also plays the part of Sarah and Edward's daughter, aiming to please them with jokes and wisecracks, dispelling their worry with a cheery midwestern "sounds good!". Part of Moore's purpose is to demonstrate how few of us can make good parents, or good children, how quickly our efforts are turned in on themselves, and yet how inescapable we find our situations. The family unit, however ad hoc, becomes "a team of rescuers and destroyers both", Tassie thinks, "and I was in on it and had to do my part". But Moore goes beyond the specifics of the adoption business, or of racial integration in contemporary American society, and beyond the particularities of her characters' lives and idiosyncrasies. As its plot unfolds - vast, previously unknown slices of history slowly come into view, terrible disasters strike - A Gate at the Stairs also focuses on the slow workings of consequence and the attendant inevitability of regret. Having begun in semi-satirical vein, beguiling us with those idle spirals and verbal coils and neatly slotting us into a more or less standard coming-of-age story, Moore appears to revel in the outlandishness of the tragedies that she visits on her creations, and to dare the reader to take issue with the wilful waywardness of her vision. At times, her gamble comes to feel dangerously close to clumsiness, and at times she momentarily loses control. But there is something so uncompromising about her prose - so resistant to the allure of the neatly tied end or the hastily smoothed awkwardness - that it is, in the end, the raggedness of the narrative that is its greatest strength. "Life was unendurable," Tassie concludes, "and yet everywhere it was endured". The author's commitment to depicting that daily impossibility resonates through the verbal facility and tongue-in-cheek levity of her writing. It's difficult to imagine Moore, one of the most talented miniaturists of her generation, writing a work much bleaker than this; but it is also hard to imagine one much truer. To order A Gate at the Stairs for pounds 15.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846. Caption: article-moore.1 Unfocused, lonely, imperilled by the constant possibility of drift, [Tassie] is nonetheless impressively smart, intuitive and resistant to the deceitful accommodations of the grown-ups she still sees as a separate tribe ("I was not especially used to speaking to adults," she confides). When she is taken on by Sarah and Edward as a putative babysitter for a yet-to-exist child - her new employers are only partway through the adoption process - she is immediately attuned to the dissonances and silences in their domestic set-up, and instinctively aware of the combination of brokenness and strength that powers their progress through the series of dingy diners and "creepy old hotels" that, they hope, will deliver them a child. "In general," Tassie tells us, "my face had the kind of smooth, round stupidity that did not prompt the world's study," and reflects that "such hiddenness was not without its advantages, its egotisms, its grief-fed grandiosities". But from behind her smooth face, Tassie witnesses everything. Tassie is also still a child, happy to feed Emmie on yogurt pops and to bundle her along on trips to see her newly acquired boyfriend, Reynaldo. [Lorrie Moore] also makes subtle, painful capital out of Tassie's quietly distressing relationship with her own parents, her detached, otherworldly Jewish mother and her father, a Lutheran "hobbyist" farmer. Frequently mistaken for Emmie's mother, she also plays the part of Sarah and Edward's daughter, aiming to please them with jokes and wisecracks, dispelling their worry with a cheery midwestern "sounds good!". Part of Moore's purpose is to demonstrate how few of us can make good parents, or good children, how quickly our efforts are turned in on themselves, and yet how inescapable we find our situations. The family unit, however ad hoc, becomes "a team of rescuers and destroyers both", Tassie thinks, "and I was in on it and had to do my part". - Alex Clark.
Kirkus Review
In How Fiction Works, the tutorial by the New Yorker critic and Harvard professor, James Wood writes, "Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life. And so on and on." Contemporary fiction has produced few noticers with a better eye and more engaging voice than Tassie Keltjin, the narrator of Lorrie Moore's deceptively powerful A Gate at the Stairs. For much of Moore's first novel in 15 yearsher short stories have established her as something of a Stateside Alice MunroTassie's eye and ear are pretty much all there is to the book. And they are more than enough, for the 20-year-old college student makes for good company. Perceptive, with a self-deprecating sense of humor, she lulls the reader into not taking the matter-of-fact events of Tassie's life too seriously, until that life darkens through a series of events that even the best noticers might not have predicted. Because her ostensible roommate now lives with a boyfriend, we get to know Tassie very wellas a fully fleshed character rather than a typeand spend a lot of time inside her head. She splits her year between the university community more liberal than the rest of the Midwest and the rural Wisconsin town where her father is considered more of a "hobbyist" farmer than a real one. "What kind of farmer's daughter was I?" she asks. A virgin, but more from lack of opportunity than moral compunction (she compares her dating experiences to an invisible electric fence for dogs), and a bass player, both electric and stand-up. Singing along to her instrument, she describes "trying to find the midway place between melody and rhythmwas this searching not the very journey of life?" Explains Moore of her protagonist, "Once I had the character and voice of Tassie I felt I was on my way. She would be the observer of several worlds that were both familiar and not familiar to herInitially I began in the third person and it was much more of a ghost story and there were a lot of sisters and, well, it was a false start." It's hard to imagine this novel working in the third person, because we need to see Tassie's life through her eyes. As she learns some crucial lessons outside the classroom, the reader learns as well to be a better noticer. Tassie's instincts are sound, but her comic innocence takes a tragic turn, as she falls into her first serious romance, finds a job as nanny for an adopted, biracial baby and suffers some aftershocks from 9/11 a long way from Manhattan. The enrichment of such complications makes this one of the year's best novels, yet it is Tassie's eye that makes us better readers of life. And so on and on. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Midwesterner Tassie Keltjin learns hard lessons about lying, life, and love during her first year of college in Moore's long-awaited third novel, following Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (1994) and featuring her signature juxtapositions and wordplay. Actress Mia Barron, recipient of a 2003 Publishers Weekly Listen Up Award, narrates this character-driven bildungsroman, perfectly delivering Tassie's thoughtful and wry musings. Recommended for public libraries; possibly of interest to precocious teens as well as adults. ["The challenge for readers is to reconcile the beautiful sharpness of (Moore's) language with two wildly improbable plot threads," read the review of the Knopf hc, LJ 8/09.-Ed.]-Carly Wiggins, formerly with Allen Cty. P.L., Fort Wayne, IN (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
I The cold came late that fall and the songbirds were caught off guard. By the time the snow and wind began in earnest, too many had been suckered into staying, and instead of flying south, instead of already having flown south, they were huddled in people's yards, their feathers puffed for some modicum of warmth. I was looking for a job. I was a student and needed babysitting work, and so I would walk from interview to interview in these attractive but wintry neighborhoods, the eerie multitudes of robins pecking at the frozen ground, dun-gray and stricken--though what bird in the best of circumstances does not look a little stricken--until at last, late in my search, at the end of a week, startlingly, the birds had disappeared. I did not want to think about what had happened to them. Or rather, that is an expression--of politeness, a false promise of delicacy--for in fact I wondered about them all the time: imagining them dead, in stunning heaps in some killing cornfield outside of town, or dropped from the sky in twos and threes for miles down along the Illinois state line. I was looking in December for work that would begin at the start of the January term. I'd finished my exams and was answering ads from the student job board, ones for "childcare provider." I liked children--I did!--or rather, I liked them OK. They were sometimes interesting. I admired their stamina and candor. And I was good with them in that I could make funny faces at the babies and with the older children teach them card tricks and speak in the theatrically sarcastic tones that disarmed and en?thralled them. But I was not especially skilled at minding children for long spells; I grew bored, perhaps like my own mother. After I spent too much time playing their games, my mind grew peckish and longed to lose itself in some book I had in my backpack. I was ever hopeful of early bedtimes and long naps. I had come from Dellacrosse Central, from a small farm on the old Perryville Road, to this university town of Troy, "the Athens of the Midwest," as if from a cave, like the priest-child of a Colombian tribe I'd read of in Cultural Anthropology, a boy made mystical by being kept in the dark for the bulk of his childhood and allowed only stories--no experience--of the outside world. Once brought out into light, he would be in a perpetual, holy condition of bedazzlement and wonder; no story would ever have been equal to the thing itself. And so it was with me. Nothing had really prepared me. Not the college piggy bank in the dining room, the savings bonds from my grandparents, or the used set of World Book encyclopedias with their beautiful color charts of international wheat production and photographs of presidential birthplaces. The flat green world of my parents' hogless, horseless farm--its dullness, its flies, its quiet ripped open daily by the fumes and whining of machinery--twisted away and left me with a brilliant city life of books and films and witty friends. Someone had turned on the lights. Someone had led me out of the cave--of Perryville Road. My brain was on fire with Chaucer, Sylvia Plath, Simone de Beauvoir. Twice a week a young professor named Thad, dressed in jeans and a tie, stood before a lecture hall of stunned farm kids like me and spoke thrillingly of Henry James's masturbation of the comma. I was riveted. I had never before seen a man wear jeans with a tie. The ancient cave, of course, had produced a mystic; my childhood had produced only me. In the corridors students argued over Bach, Beck, Balkanization, bacterial warfare. Kids said things to me like "You're from the country. Is it true that if you eat a bear's liver you'll die?" They asked, "Ever know someone who did you-know-what with a cow?" Or "Is it an actual fact that pigs won't eat bananas?" What I did know was that a goat will not really consume a tin can: a goat just liked to lick the paste on the label. But no one ever asked me that. From our perspective that semester, the events of September--we did not yet call them 9/11--seemed both near and far. Marching poli-sci majors chanted on the quads and the pedestrian malls, "The chickens have come home to roost! The chickens have come home to roost!" When I could contemplate them at all--the chickens, the roosting--it was as if in a craning crowd, through glass, the way I knew (from Art History) people stared at the Mona Lisa in the Louvre: La Gioconda! its very name like a snake, its sly, tight smile encased at a distance but studied for portentous flickers. It was, like September itself, a cat's mouth full of canaries. My roommate, Murph--a nose-pierced, hinky-toothed blonde from Dubuque, who used black soap and black dental floss and whose quick opinions were impressively harsh (she pronounced Dubuque "Du-ba-cue") and who once terrified her English teachers by saying the character she admired most in all of literature was Dick Hickock in In Cold Blood--had met her boyfriend on September tenth and when she woke up at his place, she'd phoned me, in horror and happiness, the television blaring. "I know, I know," she said, her voice shrugging into the phone. "It was a terrible price to pay for love, but it had to be done." I raised my voice to a mock shout. "You sick slut! People were killed. All you think about is your own pleasure." Then we fell into a kind of hysteria--frightened, guilty, hopeless laughter I have never actually witnessed in women over thirty. "Well," I sighed, realizing I might not be seeing her all that much from then on in, "I hope there's just hanky--no panky." "Nah," she said. "With panky there's always tears, and it ruins the hanky." I would miss her. Though the movie theaters closed for two nights, and for a week even our yoga teacher put up an American flag and sat in front of it, in a lotus position, eyes closed, saying, "Let us now breathe deeply in honor of our great country" (I looked around frantically, never getting the breathing right), mostly our conversations slid back shockingly, resiliently, to other topics: backup singers for Aretha Franklin, or which Korean-owned restaurant had the best Chinese food. Before I'd come to Troy, I had never had Chinese food. But now, two blocks from my apartment, next to a shoe repair shop, was a place called the Peking Café where I went as often as I could for the Buddha's Delight. At the cash register small boxes of broken fortune cookies were sold at discount. "Only cookie broken," promised the sign, "not fortune." I vowed to buy a box one day to see what guidance--obscure or mystical or mercenary but Confucian!--might be had in bulk. Meanwhile, I collected them singly, one per every cookie that came at the end atop my check, briskly, efficiently, before I'd even finished eating. Perhaps I ate too slowly. I'd grown up on Friday fish fries and green beans in butter (for years, my mother had told me, mar- garine, considered a foreign food, could be purchased only across state lines, at "oleo" stands hastily erected along the highway--park here for parkay read the signs--just past the Illinois governor's welcome billboard, farmers muttering that only Jews bought there). And so now these odd Chinese vegetables--fungal and gnomic in their brown sauce--had the power for me of an adventure or a rite, a statement to be savored. Back in Dellacrosse the dining was divided into "Casual," which meant you ate it standing up or took it away, and the high end, which was called "Sit-Down Dining." At the Wie Haus Family Restaurant, where we went for sit-down, the seats were red leatherette and the walls were gemütlichkeit and paneled, decorated with framed deep kitsch, wide-eyed shepherdesses and jesters. The breakfast menus read "Guten Morgen." Sauces were called "gravy." And the dinner menu featured cheese curd meatloaf and steak "cooked to your likeness." On Fridays there were fish fries or boils for which they served "lawyers" (burbot or eelpout), so-called because their hearts were in their butts. (They were fished from the local lake where all the picnic spots had trash cans that read no fish guts.) On Sundays there was not only marshmallow and maraschino cherry salad and something called "Grandma Jell-O," but "prime rib with au jus," a precise knowledge of French--or English or even food coloring--not being the restaurant's strong point. A la carte meant soup or salad; dinner meant soup and salad. The Roquefort on the salad was called by the waitstaff "Rockford dressing." The house wine--red, white, or pink--all bore the requisite bouquet of rose, soap, and graphite, a whiff of hay, a hint of hooterville, though the menu remained mute about all this, sticking to straightforward declarations of hue. Light ale and dunkel were served. For dessert there was usually a gluckschmerz pie, with the fluffy look and heft of a small snowbank. After any meal, sleepiness ensued. Now, however, away and on my own, seduced and salted by brown sauce, I felt myself thinning and alive. The Asian owners let me linger over my books and stay as long as I wanted to: "Take your tie! No lush!" they said kindly as they sprayed the neighboring tables with disinfectant. I ate mango and papaya and nudged the stringy parts out of my teeth with a cinnamon toothpick. I had one elegantly folded cookie--a short paper nerve baked in an ear. I had a handleless cup of hot, stale tea, poured and reheated from a pail stored in the restaurant's walk-in refrigerator. I would tug the paper slip from the stiff clutches of the cookie and save it for a bookmark. All my books had fortunes protruding like tiny tails from their pages. You are the crispy noodle in the salad of life. You are the master of your own destiny. Murph had always added the phrase "in bed" to any fortune cookie fortune, so in my mind I read them that way, too: You are the master of your own destiny. In bed. Well, that was true. Debt is a seductive liar. In bed. Or the less-well-translated Your fate will blossom like a bloom. Or the sly, wise guy: A refreshing change is in your future. Sometimes, as a better joke, I added though NOT in bed. You will soon make money. Or: Wealth is a wise woman's man. Though NOT in bed. And so I needed a job. I had donated my plasma several times for cash, but the last time I had tried the clinic had turned me away, saying my plasma was cloudy from my having eaten cheese the night before. Cloudy Plasma! I would be the bass guitarist! It was so hard not to eat cheese! Even the whipped and spreadable kind we derisively called "cram cheese" (because it could be used for sealing windows and caulking tile) had a certain soothing allure. I looked daily at the employment listings. Childcare was in demand: I turned in my final papers and answered the ads. One forty-ish pregnant woman after another hung up my coat, sat me in her living room, then waddled out to the kitchen, got my tea, and waddled back in, clutching her back, slopping tea onto the saucer, and asking me questions. "What would you do if our little baby started crying and wouldn't stop?" "Are you available evenings?" "What do you think of as a useful educational activity for a small child?" I had no idea. I had never seen so many pregnant women in such a short period of time--five in all. It alarmed me. They did not look radiant. They looked reddened with high blood pressure and frightened. "I would put him in a stroller and take him for a walk," I said. I knew my own mother had never asked such questions of anyone. "Dolly," she said to me once, "as long as the place was moderately fire resistant, I'd deposit you anywhere." "Moderately?" I queried. She rarely called me by my name, Tassie. She called me Doll, Dolly, Dollylah, or Tassalah. "I wasn't going to worry and interfere with you." She was the only Jewish woman I'd ever known who felt like that. But she was a Jewish woman married to a Lutheran farmer named Bo and perhaps because of that had the same indifferent reserve the mothers of my friends had. Halfway through my childhood I came to guess that she was practically blind as well. It was the only explanation for the thick glasses she failed often even to find. Or for the kaleidoscope of blood vessels burst, petunia-like, in her eyes, scarlet blasting into the white from mere eyestrain, or a careless swipe with her hand. It explained the strange way she never quite looked at me when we were speaking, staring at a table or down at a tile of a floor, as if halfheartedly plotting its disinfection while my scarcely controlled rage flew from my mouth in sentences I hoped would be, perhaps not then but perhaps later, like knives to her brain. "Will you be in town for Christmas break?" the mothers asked. I sipped at the tea. "No, I'm going home. But I will be back in January." "When in January?" I gave them my references and a written summary of my experience. My experience was not all that much--just the Pitskys and the Schultzes back home. But as experience, too, I had once, as part of a class project on human reproduction, carried around for an entire week a sack of flour the exact weight and feel of an infant. I'd swaddled it and cuddled it and placed it in safe, cushioned places for naps, but once, when no one was looking, I stuffed it in my backpack with a lot of sharp pens, and it got stabbed. My books, powdery white the rest of the term, became a joke in the class. I left this out of my résumé, however. But the rest I'd typed up. To gild the lily-livered, as my dad sometimes said, I was wearing what the department stores called "a career jacket," and perhaps the women liked the profession?alism of that. They were professionals themselves. Two were lawyers, one was a journalist, one was a doctor, one a high school teacher. Where were the husbands? "Oh, at work," the women all said vaguely. All except the journalist, who said, "Good question!" The last house was a gray stucco prairie house with a chimney cloaked in dead ivy. I had passed the house earlier in the week--it was on a corner lot and I'd seen so many birds there. Now there was just a flat expanse of white. Around the whiteness was a low wood Qual Line fence, and when I pushed open its gate it slipped a little; one of its hinges was loose and missing a nail. I had to lift the gate to relatch it. This maneuver, one I'd performed any number of times in my life, gave me a certain satisfaction--of tidiness, of restoration, of magic me!--when in fact it should have communicated itself as something else: someone's ill-disguised decrepitude, items not cared for properly but fixed repeatedly in a make-do fashion, needful things having gotten away from their caregiver. Soon the entire gate would have to be held together with a bungee cord, the way my father once fixed a door in our barn. Two slate steps led, in an odd mismatch of rock, downward to a flagstone walk, all of which, as well as the grass, wore a light dusting of snow--I laid the first footprints of the day; perhaps the front door was seldom used. Some desiccated mums were still in pots on the porch. Ice frosted the crisp heads of the flowers. Leaning against the house were a shovel and a rake, and shoved into the corner two phone books still in shrink-wrap. Excerpted from A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
