A Gate at the Stairs

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Authors: Lorrie Moore
way!’”
    “Thanks.” He smiled.
    “I’m not sure I like the idea of enduring freedom.”
    “How about letting freedom ring?”
    “Even that. Shouldn’t freedom just be free? Why do you have to let it do anything? That suggests it’s kind of locked up and then being sprung on people.”
    “You like college, don’t you?”
    Aloft in the trees, the squirrel nests, hidden all summer, sat exposed like tumors—composed of the flesh of the trees but still jealous and other. “Quasi sort of. Did you do any hunting this year?” He had never been an enthusiastic hunter. How would he manage in the military?
    “Nah.”
    “No animal population control?” The ostensible reason for hunting always made me snort.
    “No, actually this year I’ve been part of a program that does deer-condom distribution.”
    “Excellent!” I was working on a laugh that was more than my usual pleased grunt, but all I had right now was a kind of blast that culminated in a bleat.
    We continued walking on the edge of the icy road, past a stand of birches that in the distance looked like my mother’s cigarettes stubbed out in the dirt, barely smoked. My brother’s boy’s life seemed lonely and hard to me. He still had one snaggletooth that poked out of his smile. This was because there had been only enough orthodontia money for one of us, so it went to the daughter, whose looks would matter (wasted on me! a smileless girl I felt sure no man would ever desire—not deeply). I got the braces. He got the chores. The expectations that he help my dad around the farm were so much greater than any that had been laid upon me, and so I could see his life was a little harder than mine, though he was a good-looking boy, bright in a general way, and with many friends. As a young kid his plans were entrepreneurial. Once, years ago, he’d drawn up a design for a hotel chain, and believing his greatest competitor would be the Holiday Inn, he decided to name it in an opposing, competitive spirit: Normal Night Out. The Normal Night Out Hotel.
    He had, however, the same loneliness in him that I did, though he had always been my mother’s favorite. Where had that gotten him? My mother’s love was useless.
    We pushed past the gate at the far end of our property and walked down one of the old half-frozen cow paths terraced slightly with old roots and stones to form steps. A small fly buzzed past my ear, then vanished. I had never seen a fly before at Christmas, and I swatted at it, feeling, as we had been taught to feel in Art 102, the surrealism of two familiar things placed unexpectedly side by side. That would be the future.
    We hiked down past the copse of sycamore and oak (as children, animating some dormant urban fear, we had witlessly shrieked, “The copse! The copse!” and raced through the underbrush, thrilled by our own concocted, dreadless terror). Now Robert and I weaved among the piss elms toward the old fish hatchery, which in winters of the past we would have skated on; it was a former nineteenth-century mill pond that had long ago lost its falls, though the old paddle wheel still leaned against a tree, coated with squirrel shucks. Sometimes we’d tobogganed down the snowy trail all the way to the hatchery, where now there was no snow at all, just the matted hard grass and dirt and the dried, icing stalks of angelica and milkweed and bee balm. My brother liked to fish at the hatchery sometimes, even in winter, sometimes even in the stream, even if the fish were really now just trash fish, and even though it was stupid to ice fish in a stream. But summers down this path I had always liked, and 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

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