A Gate at the Stairs Read Online Free PDF Page A

under my parents’ rickety sales table reading a book. There might have been a another time when I just stayed in the truck.” Or maybe that was Milwaukee. I couldn’t recall.
    “Are they still farming? I just don’t see him at the morning market anymore.”
    “Oh, not too much,” I said. “They sold off a lot of the farm to some Amish people and now they’re quasi retired.” I loved to say quasi . I was saying it now a lot, instead of sort of , or kind of , and it had become a tic. “I am quasi ready to go,” I would announce. Or, “I’m feeling a bit quasi today.” Murph called me Quasimodo. Or Kami-quasi. Or wild and quasi girl.
    “Or quasi something,” I added. What my father really was was not quasi retired but quasi drunk. He was not old, but he acted old—nutty old. To amuse himself he often took to driving his combine down the county roads to deliberately slow up traffic. “I had them backed up seventeen deep,” he once boasted to my mom.
    “Seventeen’s a mob,” said my mother. “You’d better be careful.”
    “How old’s your dad now?” asked Sarah Brink.
    “Forty-five.”
    “Forty-five! Why, I’m forty-five. That means I’m old enough to be your …” She took a breath, still processing her own amazement.
    “To be my dad?” I said.
    A joke. I did not mean for this to imply some lack of femininity on her part. If it wasn’t a successful joke, then it was instead a compliment, for I didn’t want, even in my imagination, even for a second, to conflate this sophisticated woman with my mother, a woman so frugal and clueless that she had once given me—to have! to know! to wear!—her stretch black lace underwear that had shrunk in the dryer, though I was only ten.
    Sarah Brink laughed, a quasi laugh, a socially constructed laugh—a collection of predetermined notes, like the chimes of a doorbell.
    “So here’s the job description,” she said when the laugh was through.
    Walking home, I passed a squirrel that had been hit by a car. Its soft, scarlet guts spilled out of its mouth, as if in a dialogue balloon, and the wind gently blew the fur of its tail, as if it were still alive. I tried to remember everything Sarah Brink had said to me. It was a mile home to my apartment, so I replayed long snippets of her voice, though the cold air was the sort that bullied a walker into mental muteness. This is an incredibly important position for us, even if we are hiring at the last minute. If we hire you, we would like you to be there with us for everything, from the very first day. We would like you to feel like part of our family, since of course you will be part of it . I tried to think of who Sarah Brink reminded me of, though I was sure it wasn’t anyone I’d actually met. Probably she reminded me of a character from a television show I’d watched years before. But not the star. Definitely not the star. More like the star’s neatnik roommate or the star’s kooky cousin from Cleveland. I knew, even once she had a baby, she would never be able to shake the Auntie Mame quality from her mothering. There were worse things, I supposed.
    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