Stiltsville: A Novel (14 page)

1982

O
n a Saturday evening in February of Margo’s sixth-grade year, Dennis and I drove her to a slumber party in a gated community called CocoPlum, ten minutes from our house by car. The hostess was a girl named Trisha Weintraub, whom I’d met only once. Trisha was a year ahead of Margo in school. When we drove up, her mother, Judy, was sitting on the terra-cotta porch with her boyfriend, drinking white wine. Judy’s boyfriend wore a loose linen shirt unbuttoned to his sternum, and Judy wore hammered gold earrings and an embroidered caftan. When I complimented her on the top, she told me she’d brought it back from Lima, where she’d been on retreat. Dennis asked the pertinent questions: How many girls were sleeping over? Was Trisha excited to be turning thirteen? (Margo was still only eleven.) Did Judy have our number, in case? Would any boys be dropping by? (He managed to slip this last one in jokingly; if I’d asked, I would have seemed uptight.) Judy didn’t say anything about it, but I assumed that she’d heard Dennis was unemployed. All the ladies must have heard—it was exactly the kind of thing that got around.

Margo hopped from one foot to the other while the adults spoke, waiting to be released. When we ran out of small talk, I kissed my child good-bye. She thanked Judy for the invitation, and Judy cupped her chin and said, “
Qué
linda
.” It was a trend in certain circles, I’d noticed, to learn just enough Spanish to drop some into casual conversation, but not enough to have a discussion with the housekeeper. I handed Margo Trisha’s birthday gift—a pricey blow-up pool float with a layer of reflective coating for even tanning—and she ducked through the oversize front door. I glimpsed Trisha and a marble staircase and heard a shriek from inside. Dennis and I said good-bye to Judy and her boyfriend and spent the following hours in a dark bar and grill on the Miami River, drinking beer and eating popcorn in lieu of ordering a meal.

At two a.m., Margo called and begged us to pick her up. We drove there in our bathrobes and found her waiting alone on the dark porch, shivering in her denim jacket. She was barely coherent; we couldn’t get anything out of her until she’d swallowed some water and—this was Dennis’s idea—half an inch of whiskey. After she’d calmed down, she explained what had happened and told us very solemnly that she was never going back to school, then fell asleep against Dennis’s shoulder on the living room sofa. He didn’t move until light started to stream in through the blinds and Margo stirred.

W
hat happened at the Weintraub home that night was the direct result of a meeting Dennis and I’d had eight months earlier, at the end of the previous school term, with Margo’s fourth-grade teacher. Mr. Oxley was a lanky blond man with a thick white mustache and western-style blue jeans. He was older than most of the other teachers by a decade, and had the habit of winking at the close of a conversation. After Back to School night that year, Dennis had commented that Mr. Oxley had clammy hands, and Margo had said, “Mr. Oxley would never say that about you,” and requested an apology on her teacher’s behalf, which Dennis had provided. Mr. Oxley inspired in my daughter—and in her friends, from what I could tell—kindness and respect. His was a well-mannered class.

We met with Mr. Oxley in the fourth-grade classroom at Sunset Elementary, where Margo had been a student since kindergarten. Dennis and I sat in the front row of student desks. I fit snugly in mine, but Dennis’s knees chafed the underside of his, and his elbows extended over each side. He fidgeted, knocking around. Behind him, cluttering the low shelves along one wall of the room, were two dozen models of Miami’s proposed new public transportation system, the Metro Rail. The television news had been filled for months with sketches of the new system, which, upon completion four years later, would end up costing the city $215 million. Margo’s model was wedged in the middle: cars fashioned from orange juice containers and tinfoil, pillars from balsa wood, and grass from sticky green felt. The project had taken us the lion’s share of a weekend the month before. Blue ribbons—for participation—hung on sickly gold strings from most of the projects, including Margo’s. The red-ribboned winner was partially obscured, but I could see that the railway was made from toothpicks. I started to care, but then all at once I didn’t. While we’d worked on the model, a lock of Margo’s brown hair had dipped into the jar of glue, and we’d ended up over the kitchen sink, giggling and soapy. This is where Dennis had found us when he’d arrived home from fishing. We’d thought his raccoon-eyed sunburn was unbearably funny, and he’d put on a Kenny Rogers record, moved the half-finished model off the breakfast table, and laid down newspaper so he could teach Margo how to gut a fish.

Mr. Oxley ushered a pair of boys out of the back of the room. When he’d called the house, I’d worried that Margo was in trouble for talking too much—this was the complaint we’d heard most often. On the contrary: it seemed he was suggesting that we consider promoting Margo to the sixth grade after the fourth, thereby allowing her to skip fifth grade entirely.

“Altogether?” said Dennis.

Mr. Oxley nodded. I could see that we amused him—because we were stuffed into the little desks, maybe, or because Dennis was there with me, a house-husband. I admit that I was proud of Margo. But Dennis, who years later when Margo applied to colleges would tell her to discriminate not by rankings but by how she was treated when visiting, was immune to this kind of smug satisfaction. He said, “Are other kids skipping?” and Mr. Oxley shook his head. Dennis looked at me. “She’ll leave all her friends,” he said.

She’ll make new ones, I thought. At that moment, I could see Margo through the vertical blinds of the classroom: she was standing in the courtyard with her best friend, Carla, using her hands as puppets. One hand opened to talk, then shut as the other yammered on. I’d embroidered a red rose on the front pocket of Margo’s jeans, and it wiggled as she moved.

“This is not a bad time for it, developmentally speaking. The skills in the sixth grade are advanced, yes, but it’s not a complete departure from fifth-grade material,” said Mr. Oxley. “We have a student who advances almost every year.”

“Any serial killers in the bunch?” Dennis said.

Not knowing Dennis—not knowing that he was rarely entirely serious or entirely joking—Mr. Oxley was cautious. “Not that I know of,” he said. Dennis threw up his hands, and his knees banged the underside of his desk. Mr. Oxley addressed me: “The concentration in the fifth-grade reading unit is comprehension—a skill Margo has evidently mastered.”

“Mastered?
” said Dennis.

Margo was, at that time, ten years old. When we browsed in the young adult shelves at the public library, Margo’s choices, which Mr. Oxley went on to praise, mystified me. She was less interested in fourth-grade subjects—wizards and time machines and magical dolphins—than in broken homes and runaways and romance. But it became obvious as Mr. Oxley spoke that the suggestion of promoting Margo was not solely, or even mostly, based on academics. “There’s also the matter of Margo’s physical maturity,” he said. “I’m a little concerned about her comfort level in the fifth-grade classroom.” Dennis and I stared at him, slow to catch on. Mr. Oxley cleared his throat. “In other words, if you agree, this might be an opportunity to more closely match her physical development to that of her classmates.”

Then I understood, before he’d explained to Dennis, who looked bewildered. Margo had been the tallest person in the fourth grade. Her height and, as Mr. Oxley put it, “advanced development” (meaning bra size, as far as I could figure, and maybe leg hair), distinguished her. It seems that in order to have had this conversation with a teacher, Margo must have been freakish, but photographs reassure me: she was taller than her friends, yes, but not excessively so. She wore oversize shirts and slouched, and she smiled a lot—people looked at her face.

“Holy hell,” said Dennis. “Margo’s too tall for the fifth grade?”

Outside, Margo finished her hand-puppet conversation and Carla cracked up. In the past year, Margo had become very talkative, almost nervously so, and very sensitive. She had started to put a lot of pressure on herself. Her dentist had fitted her with a retainer to use while sleeping so she didn’t wear down her molars grinding her teeth. I checked on her sometimes in the night, and each time her eyelids fluttered a lot but she didn’t seem to be grinding. When Dennis had mentioned the retainer to his mother, she’d recommended a psychotherapist. Sixth grade, I thought, could hurt her confidence. It could do damage. But the scales tipped when I considered that if she skipped the fifth grade, she would no longer be the most buxom girl in her class. Give her a classroom full of girls tossing their hair and applying lip gloss, I thought. Give her a few friends whose T-shirts reveal the lump of a bra strap on each shoulder.

Dennis knocked on my desk. “We have some parenting to do here.”

Mr. Oxley smiled diplomatically. “It’s not our decision, but it’s possible Margo might feel more comfortable around classmates who are as far along as she is, physically speaking.”

“I was just thinking the same thing,” I said, and Dennis shot me a look.

Mr. Oxley said, “The older girls take health education classes. They spend a week learning about reproductive health and menstruation.” His manner was that of a man who’d practiced not tripping over certain words. “Has Margo gotten her period?”

I wasn’t easily flustered—with girlfriends, I could talk about PMS or sex or pregnancy—but in that classroom, beside the model Metro Rails, I floundered. “She—” I stammered. “Last summer, at sleepaway camp—”

Dennis started laughing. He knew the story: she’d had some spotting, so a counselor gave her a sanitary pad and explained how to use it, and Margo was so embarrassed that she’d pretended to be sick during swim time for three days. But the spotting went away as quickly as it had come, so the camp counselor explained about the hymen and said she’d probably torn it horseback riding. Margo had chronicled the whole icky affair in a letter marked FOR MOM’S EYES ONLY. When I got to the part about horseback riding, I was so relieved that I cried.

The real deal had arrived four months later, in the bathroom before school. I’d declared it a mental health day and we’d fixed a picnic lunch and gone to Dennis’s parents’ house to lie by the pool.

When he was done laughing, Dennis said, “She’s had it for a little while.” He covered my hand with his own. I felt bad for him, crammed into the little desk. I felt grateful for him.

“I can’t say with certainty that this is the best thing for your daughter,” said Mr. Oxley. “We just want to make you aware that promotion is an option.”

I was sorry he wouldn’t be Margo’s sixth-grade teacher, and her seventh-grade teacher, and so on. He went on to discuss Margo’s math skills, which though adequate had not developed at the rate of her reading or her body. Tutoring was an option. During this part of the conversation, I daydreamed of stepping out of the classroom to join my daughter in the sunlight.

D
ennis had given notice in January of that year, while we were still paying off Christmas. On the evening of his last day of work, I’d found him in the backyard, sitting in one of the scooped rubber swings of Margo’s jungle gym. It was raining lightly. His shoes and socks and necktie lay on the grass and his shirt was unbuttoned to the middle of his chest. His hair rose from his head at odd angles, as if he’d rubbed it around without smoothing it back into place. The sight of my husband disheveled was not rare, but the sight of him downhearted was
.
My impulse was to return to the house. I’m not proud of it, but there’s something about weakness—even momentary weakness—that hardens my heart. Get up, I wanted to say. Occupy yourself. We’re having fillet of sole for dinner. Dennis lifted his arms, palms out. A different man might have meant, Why me? But I knew that Dennis, who had never liked practicing law, not even right out of school, meant, What now? On the bright side, there were a dozen possibilities; on the downside, there were a dozen possibilities. We’d hoped Dennis would have a new job before the old one ended, but the search had taken longer than we’d anticipated, so we were poised to subsist on his year-end bonus and our meager savings, crossing our fingers. Dennis’s mother had recommended that I take a position as a teller at the bank where his father worked. She’d made the recommendation even though she and I both knew she disapproved. I found the gesture touching. I hadn’t held a job since moving to Miami.

I sat in the swing beside Dennis. Water soaked through the seat of my slacks. He said, “Babe, I have some concerns.”

“I know you do.”

He’d dug the sandpit himself. He’d carved away the grass and dry black dirt and shoveled in fifty gallons of glinting white sand. He’d secured each knuckle of the jungle gym with epoxy. Now, he wiped rain from his face and pushed against the ground to start swinging. I watched his back as he rose. The rain had soaked through the fabric of his button-down, and through it I could see the outline of his undershirt. When he drew back, I could see the round caps of his knees through his wet trousers, and the delicate bluish hollows of his pale ankles. As for his face, it wasn’t grim exactly, but I could tell he was thinking hard and trying not to think, and that he was glad I was there, sitting next to him in the rain, and that he hoped I’d swing, so there wouldn’t be any pressure to tell the story of the day. So I swung a little, but ended up circling above the pit, toeing the sand to keep out of Dennis’s way.