A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore Read Free Book Online Page A

processes, whatever they were. She also had a third bumper sticker that said BORN FINE THE FIRST TIME —though cell phones and Christianity were going to be the very things to bring her a child. Her fourth was no more promising: BEHIND EVERY SUCCESSFUL WOMAN IS HERSELF .
    I don’t know why I could hear so clearly—perhaps Sarah was a little deaf and had the volume on everything turned up high.
    “Sarah, hi, it’s Letitia,” I heard.
    “Hi, Letitia.” I believed I wasn’t supposed to listen, so I looked out the window at the bleak snowy landscape; the sun was low and feeble, dissolving whitely like a lemon drop. Each town we passed through had a Dairy Queen, with customers lined up, even in winter. When I looked back at Sarah I saw her powdered, thinning skin like a crepe, with the same light freckles as a crepe, her gnarly-knuckled hand, arthritic from chopping herbs, going through her spiky russet hair, knocking back her scarf. How did her stand-up hair defy not just gravity but even the additional weight of a scarf? Why did my own hair always lie flat, defeated by atmospheric physics of all sorts, unimproved even by the most widely advertised of sticky gels? 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. I had a young girl’s belief that this kind of negative aging would never come to me. Death would come to me—I knew this from reading British poetry. But the drying, hunching, blanching, hobbling, fading, fattening, thinning, slowing? I would just not let that happen to moi .
    Sarah switched ears, making it harder for me to hear, but then switched back and slowed to let a convoy of trucks pass. I could hear Letitia. “If this doesn’t work out with Amber, there are babies on the international market. We’ve had a lot of luck with South America. Paraguay has opened up again, and other countries, too. And they’re not all brown there, either. There’s been a lot of German influence, and some of these kids are beautiful, very blond, or blue-eyed, or both.”
    “Well, thanks for the info,” said Sarah brusquely. “Get back to me on Amber.” Letitia then said something I couldn’t make out, and Sarah said quickly, “Gotta run—there’s an ice patch ahead,” and snapped the phone shut.
    “The babies of Nazis,” Sarah said, shaking her head. “They’re hawking Nazi babies. Racially superior. Unbelievable.” She raked her fingers yet again through the bright desert grass of her hair. I didn’t ask her how a tiny baby could be a Nazi. What did I know? Maybe it could. “Blue eyes!” she cried. “The human race has really come a long way!” She shook her head again, this time with a horsey, nasal exhalation of disgust. “I knew someone in cooking school who was a blue-eyed Jew. He said his sperm was in great demand at the local sperm bank and he was making a lot of spare cash. He was at first a funny story and then a kind of expression we all used: ‘Gettin’ over like a blue-eyed Jew in a sperm bank.’”
    “Yeah,” I said dopily.
    “You may be too young to know this yet, but eventually you will look around and notice: Nazis always have the last laugh.”
    Then we were wordless through the towns of Terre Noire and Fond du Marais, places named both whimsically and fearfully by French fur traders, before the subsequent flattened pronunciations by Scandinavian farmers made the names even more absurd: “Turn Ore” and “Fondue Morass.” “You’ll find I say about eighty-nine percent of what’s on my mind,” Sarah said. “For the other eleven percent? I use a sauna.” She put a CD in the car player. “Bach’s first French suite. Do you know it?”
    After some clicking