Free A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

leafless trees looked frail and surprised. The sudden downpour eliminated practically all the snow on the ground, and because the drainage on the county roads was so poor, they filled like canals with water, just sitting there glistening, ready to turn to ice when the temperature dipped later in the afternoon. Which it did.
    Our actual Christmas ceremonies for the day, outside of breakfast, had been so painfully casual—no hamentashen, no pfeffer-nüsse, no kringle from Racine—that I wondered why we had bothered. Perhaps my mother, the keeper of ritual, had lost interest in this ostensibly Christian custom now that we had grown, and my father didn’t really know how to take over. Where was the turkey, its yankable heart in a baggie jammed up its butt? On the other hand, my mother had given me a carefully wrapped present of a pearl necklace and watched, teary-eyed, as I opened it. “Every woman should have a pearl necklace,” she said. “When I was your age I got one.” From my father, I knew. And now, with no man in my life, even though I was only twenty, she would be the one to bestow this artifact of womanhood, this rite of passage, this gyno-noose, upon me. That I might in fact never have an occasion to wear such a thing or that I might look like the worst sort of Republican doing so probably never occurred to her. I think she saw it as a kind of ticket off the farm and out into the world, wherever that was.
    “Thanks, Mom,” I said, and kissed her cheek, which was simultaneously powdery and damp. I thrust the velveteen box of pearls high, as if making a toast. “Here’s to Jesus,” I said.
    My mom looked at me from a great and concerned distance. Their present to Robert was a handheld instant star and constellation identifier.
    Another flurry of thunderclouds passed by overhead and hail came pounding down on our roof, and down the chimney, crackling in the fireplace as if to mock the sound of fire and then bouncing out from the hearth onto the wood floor. It was as if I had unstrung my mother’s pearls and just flung them around.
    Afterward we sat around and watched TV. Only once do I remember our going to church on Christmas—the Norwegian Lutheran church in town. My father had cast his WASP eye around at the stained-glass windows and their bright, jellied scenes and designs, and then murmured, perhaps recalling his churchier past or struggling against some ancestral Puritan pride, “I think that’s an original Koshkonong window. Or, wait a minute, let me see, maybe it’s not—” and my mother had whispered in a fond hiss, “Let’s face it, Bo: You know nothing about the goyim.”
    “There’s lots of strange weather all around the country,” my dad said now, sitting down to join us.
    “What do you mean?” I asked, a little frightened. Like a child, I still trusted him to know all.
    “Well, there are a lot of storms in odd places and high winds”—he slowed down to subdue his own dark report—“and eerie calms …”
    “Eerie calms?” I asked.
    “There’s a pregnant pause outside Kenosha that’s scaring the pants off ’em.”
    “Dad!” And I laughed, to please him.
    At four o’clock, with the sun just about set, my brother and I went outside for a walk, and we slid around with our shoes on the new ice. It had been sunny enough before noon so that my mother had put laundry out, and now in the light wind it billowed from her clotheslines, snapping the ice from its threads like the sails of an arctic whale ship. How many Christmases had we ever been out without boots? Not many.
    “How are Mom and Dad doing?” I asked my brother.
    “Oh, OK, I guess,” Robert said. “They still go at each other tooth and nail, but I’ve learned not to pay too much attention. It’s really all nothing. And better than when they turn their attention to me. Yikes!”
    “They after you about school?”
    “Oh, yeah.” He skittered a stone across the ice with his shoe. “I screwed up a question on a