"A Gate at the Stairs" by Lorrie Moore

College student and nannie Tassie Keltjin begins an account of her twentieth year by noting the "cold came late [the previous] fall and the songbirds were caught off guard"(3). "Suckered into staying," she observes "multitudes of robins pecking at the frozen ground" at the start of the first week of winter weather. Then, "at the end...startlingly, the birds had disappeared." She tellingly remarks, "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"(3). Tassie aims to not be so suckered.

Set immediately after 9/11, Lorrie Moore's,"A Gate at the Stairs," tells of Tassie's coming-of-age in a time of despair. It details the painful education of a girl who starts out seeming awful smart and knowing. Tassie is of her time and age: untrusting, possessed of an angry humor that delights in shocking, and constantly testing for authenticity. The birds who stayed and died were suckered. They lost their focus, they lost touch with something bird. Unable or unwilling to read the signs, they were unable to act when the time came to act. Tassie fears the passing of time; adulthood looms like the winter from her perspective. Observing her boss, Sarah Brink, a confused, tired, middle-aged woman caught in a dead marriage, she wonders,"how a nice attractive girl...became a lonely woman." Early on, she muses, "after a childhood of hungering to be an adult, my hunger had passed. Unexpected fates had begun to catch my notice"(36)."

Yet, for all her bravado and tough-talk, it is clear her edge is begotten of fear. Moore does a wonderful job of letting that fear subtly glint at us through the chinks in Tassie's expressed armor. For all her seeming and her knowing, Tassie senses her inexperience and it worries her. She has little confidence her past has prepared her for the future. Tassie is wary of her amusingly grumpy and depressed mother: "my mother's capacity for happiness was a small soup bone salting a large pot"(19). Yet, her mother has provided some education. Tassie views her her mother is a woman suffering an unexpected fate; according to Tassie, her mother married her father "thinking she was marrying a college president's son but got a hobby farmer instead, yet she had followed him...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"(54-55).

On the shore of this lake lies Tassie's rural Wisconsin hometown of Dellacosse. For Tassie, going from tiny, backward Dellacosse to the university town of Troy (a thinly disguised, Madison, Wi.) was akin to transporting an aborigine's from a cave to the modern world. She marvels, "Nothing had really prepared me...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"(4).

Yet, while it might be tempting to compare hick Dellacosse to hip Troy, Tassie fails to find either place redeeming. While Troy is home to bloviating, pompous fakes, while visiting Dellacosse over Christmas break, she finds "everyone I knew there....hicks who pretended to mean well, or rubes with some plan up their sleeve"(68). Yet, even Tassie realizes she rests on stereotypes. Dellacosse keeps clear but makes space for Tassie's slightly off-center father, a kind of a quasi-hippy, truck farmer. Plus, there's change and Troy is gradually moving to Dellacosse. Nearby her father's farm, a new development of huge homes is being built. In the process, a lot of trees are coming down; according to Tassie's sassy-smart-cynical mother, the new residents "don't like trees because squirrels climb up them and get in their attic and chew on the exercise equipment no longer in use"(46).

Tassie's mother loves neither Dellacosse or Troy. Speaking of Dellacosse, she declares, "Why don't they just name this town what it is: Buttfuck, U.S.A!" (66) and thinks of her neighbors as "'schnooks and okey-dokes'"(68). Yet, for all her antipathy to the backward ways of her rural neighbors, Tassie's mom is dismissive and suspicious of Troy. Hearing of Tassie's new yuppie employers, she brands them [fineschmeckers]. Troy is fake. Tassie's mom has taught her to be on guard against the fake, and most especially, to beware of it's close cousin, the fancy. Tassie recalls as a girl going out to dinner with her mom and drinking women without her mother's permission. Her mother reprimands her, but "instead of objecting that I was underage, she'd said, 'Oh, fancy, fancy'"(64).

While keeping a healthy fear of the fancy and fake, Tassie clearly hopes to escape Dellacosse. She suspects that people who are trying to better themselves are accused and dismissed as fancy and fake. However, while she fears the shaping effects of her roots, she fears the education at the U will at best give her a surface gloss. She confesses, "Education had not entirely elevated my concerns in life. It had probably not even assisted my analyses of these concerns, though that was the most I could hope for. I was too fresh from childhood. Subconsciously my deepest brain still a cupboard of fairy tales, I suppose I believed that if a pretty woman was no longer pretty she had done something bad to deserve it"(37). For all her insecurities, Tassie is a fairly savvy twenty year old.

The woman Tassie refers to as "no longer pretty" is Sarah Brink, a middle-age woman who hires Tassie after a perfunctory interview to nanny for a baby she and her husband have yet to adopt. Lonely, in a dead marriage, Sarah loses/expresses herself in running her business, a fine restaurant, Le Moulin Rouge. Self-expression is a key for Sarah, and her fellow Trojans. While the folks in this novel have trouble communicating, it is not for want of expressing themselves.

Everyone in the novel finds Sarah's adopting a child staggeringly misguided. Sarah views the child as an ingredient that might be easily added to save the failed stew of her marriage. It hardly bears mentioning, Sarah's plan is an obvious longshot on Sarah's part. Her distant, womanizing husband Edward can hardly be bothered when Sarah asks him to look over the child's medical history. When they finally take possession of their daughter, Mary-Emma, he waxes, poetic, "The futures a little different now. We've now got a horse in the race"(118). They bring the horse-baby home and fittingly prop her "in the middle of the dining room table, next to two candlesticks, a Stengel sugar bowl, and some salt and pepper shakers." But, a family can't be cooked up. Sarah exclaims, "'Now what?'" and Tassie suggests the three of them would have burst into laughter but for the sleeping baby.

From the beginning, Sarah appears a self-obsessed, stereotypical yuppie. Tassie is both fascinated, repelled, and often confused by her. Recalling an early conversation with Sarah, Tassie recalls she had "no idea, conversationally, where we were"(16). For all her confusion, Tassie is on to Sarah, even if she never directly says so. On the one hand, there's really no need; Tassie's keen eye captures her failings in fine detail and there are enough folks who are more than willing to openly call Sarah's bluff, ranging from her bemused employees to an angry teen mom who Sarah and Tassie 'interview.'

Everybody can see Sarah is a bit of a jerk, yet Tassie sticks with her from a mix of motives. From their initial encounters, Tassie senses Sarah may prove a real education, a role model (if in a negative fashion), the sort of education that the U can never supply. Sarah disappoints as a teacher, and yet through her experience with Sarah, Tassie comes to things worth knowing. She comes to suspect their may be no pathway or expression of motherhood, or love for that matter, that lies outside of the routine and often mundane tasks associated with caring for another's body. Abstract love. She comes to realize that love is never guaranteed.

Beyond the education Sarah may supply, Tassie also rather poignantly looks to Sarah, Edward and the baby they adopt, Mary-Emma, as a potential family. While she loves her own family back in Delacosse, Tassie is a bit ashamed of them. Like many children, the idea of adoption, of assembling one's loved ones through "choice," seems appealing to her on first thought. When Sarah suggests during the interview that she wants Tassie to "feel like part of the family, since of course you will be part of it"(24), the words stick with Tassie. She is after family, and following Sarah's lead, wonders if it can't be gained by fiat, wishing it so. A family that delivers the love without the shame has obvious appeal to most college age kids.

Yet, the Brinks don't really manage to answer the loneliness Tassie feels. Shortly after she starts as a nanny, Tassie falls into a rather one-sided "romantic" relationship with a young student, Reynaldo, whom she meets in a class on Sufism. Tassie believes he is from Brazil. Reynaldo provides her a great deal of happiness, for a time. Much of that is owing to Tassie's efforts and to her choosing to be blind to his quirks/failings. Tassie learns that love is easily a self-willed madness/fantasy.

The story of Tassie's romance ends up turning out in an odd, slightly over-the-top fashion. Reynaldo is not an exchange student from Brazil. Instead, he proves to be either a real, legitimate terrorist sleeper cooling his heels in the Midwest or a confused middle-Eastern exchange student who suddenly fancies himself one. Tassie is shocked at first, but is open about the blindness that hastened her path to romance.

Tassie is afforded little time to mourn the loss of her love. Shortly afterward, like Reynaldo, the Brinks prove to be other than they seem. Mercifully, they don't prove to be terrorists, neither bona fide or wannabe. Instead, their "sin," their crime and tragedy, is of a more mundane and tragic variety and comes about through inaction, their foibles and weaknesses.

We discover that Sarah is in part sought to adopt in order to resolve a previous loss of a child. The Brinks had a son, Gabriel, who died in large measure as a result of their rather small moral failings (temper, selfishness, impatience, carelessness) and negligence. When her son's life is in danger, Sarah fails to act with an instinctual protectiveness; indecisive and afraid of Edward's anger, she fails to act with urgency.

The Brinks failed to inform the adoption agency of this episode. By the time Sarah gets around to telling Tassie all this, Mary-Emma's adoption is on the brink of being cancelled. Sarah relates all this to Tassie during the course of a number of interrupted heart-to-hearts offered over wine.

Tassie is stunned by Sarah's revealation. Rather than contest the matter with the adoption agency and have their past come back to haunt them in their new home town, Sarah has decided to forego the adoption and give up the baby. Tassie is appalled by Sarah's action. Sarah argues that when their pasts come to light, the girl they adopted will be shunned. If they fight for her, Sarah's certain, "when she is old enough, she will hate us"(249). Sarah rather abjectly and somewhat disingenously claims "love is not enough"(245).

In her disappointment, Tassie reveals the extent of the hopes she'd placed in the Brinks. Hearing of their awful actions, Tassie confesses her admiration and disappointment at once:"[the Brinks] had gone from a couple who would be different, who would be better than anyone, who were determined to be better than most, to a couple who would be different because they were worse"(242). Tassie also realizes that she had been intoxicated by them and had grown blind, and, with a literal empty wineglass in her hand, resolves "I was now at the bottom of my wineglass"(243).

Losing Mary-Emma, losing the Brink's, proves traumatic. At a point earlier, Tassie praises Sylvia Plath, preferring her to a collection of Zen poetry. For Tassie:"[Plath's] words sought no enlightenment, no solace...sought nothing but the carving of a cry"(74). When loss and tragedy strike her, Tassie carves a cry, eloquently recalling the weeks afterward: "I was reduced. I was barely there. When misfortune accumulated, I could feel now, it strafed you to the thinness of a nightgown, sheared you to the sheerness of a slip....Life was ungraspable because it would not stay still. I skittered and blew. It was a mound of random trash, even as you moved through the hours like a ghost invited to enjoy a sparkling day at the beach"(260).

Yet, Tassie typically shies away from judgement, despite (maybe because) the Brinks are ripe for it. Refreshingly, her mercy rises from a humility; certainty belongs to those who weren't there. She claims to have gleaned this wisdom from school: "You can exclude the excluded middle, but when you ride through, on your way to a lonely and certain place, out the window you'll see everyone you've ever known living there"(263).

Tassie offers this truth with a dose of mocking irony. Events will wring some of the irony out of Tassie. In Moore's book, events seem to conspire and come at the characters with a fierceness that brings to mind classical notions of fate and fortune. Something seems to wish to punish Tassie till she comes to this truth with a bit more conviction. Misfortune hasn't finished accumulating; the largest stone is yet to drop on her, and she will come to know with her heart what she knows with her head.

After school lets out, Tassie returns home for the summer to alien Dellacosse only to see her brother off to the army and Afghanistan. Tassie's summer is a quiet and dull one at the start. Initially, it promises recuperation. She works for her dad in his fields, running in front of his tractor in a bird outfit to scare away the mice so they don't get into the harvest. To clean the reapings of mice remains is apparently expensive.

Tassie clearly gets a kick out of what is undeniably one of the stranger summer jobs I've ever encountered in or out of a book. The image of the despairing Tassie as a bird, never able to get off the ground, is a touching one. She recounts, "I trotted, swooped, and shooed. I was the winged creation of my dad, like Icarus. I could feel myself almost flying, like in my dreams"(270).

Her relish of these moments is defining. She delights in the fantasy flight without ever relinquishing the knowledge that it's not to be. And, she's content with that; she rest on what is and can be counted on and does not find it wanting. She is able to dream with two feet firmly planted. She's from Dellacosse in this regard. She sees nothing in despair: "Let the bhuddists depart the world and subdue their despair...I did not think one necessarily had chosen wisely by leaving the party altogether and going home early to a kind of walking sleep"(74).

And, even if she chose to sleep, tragedy would wake her. Shortly after leaving for Afghanistan, her brother is killed in combat. Tassie is again decimated, and this time feels guilty. Her brother had sent Tassie an email soliciting her advice on joining the military, promising to follow whatever she recommended. She archived the email and never read it. In effect, while not directly responsible for his death, her negligence and a certain laziness could be read as contributory. She ends up in a place similar to Sarah's position.

Yet, she survives the loss, and comes to an awareness of her weakness and failings. Tassie does not come to wisdom after experience. Indeed, her experience leads her to be wary of the notion of wisdom. Instead, experience increases her awareness. She learns honesty is a better tool than certainty. She declares, "Love and virtue-their self-conviction was an astonishing thing: a sham pantomime of wishes, a dream that made actual, detecable, dreamable dreams as real as rock"(317). In our heads, in our thoughts, we can imagine and order the world as we wish. And, we will and we must. Tassie will and she must. But while she may do so, another part of her will know that all her thinking and wishing won't make it necessarily so. Inevitabley, winged Icarus-like with love and virtue, we will crash back down to earth and ourselves.