Stiltsville: A Novel (19 page)

This had always been a cross-the-bridge-when-we-come-to-it issue, and here we were. It seemed as if Margo had just turned eleven—though she’d really turned eleven six months earlier—but her classmates were twelve and thirteen. She’d skipped a year of school, of development, of everything. Fourth grade was simultaneously one year and two grades in the past. For the purposes of this conversation, Margo wasn’t eleven at all. The math was confounding.

“Once you start,” I said, “you never get to stop.” After a certain point, I wanted to tell her, your whole life will be like this—more or less the same forever, the same sadnesses and joys returning again and again. But Margo did not need to know that her mother had difficulty distinguishing between the trivial and the all-encompassing, that a person could so easily sidestep from shaving to despair.

Margo’s eyes were clear, her face still and serious. “I know,” she said, and in that moment I believed she did.

“Not today,” I said, and though she scowled, I suspected she was relieved. “Wear pants and take your pj’s—no one will know.”

“When?”

“When you turn twelve,” I said. I almost said, “When you’re home from camp,” but I remembered that Margo wasn’t returning to summer camp. She was going to take tennis lessons at the Youth Center instead, then she and I would drive up and spend a week in Georgia with my mother, who wanted to teach Margo to knit and take her strawberry picking, and then in August we were planning a road trip to Washington, D.C. Dennis wanted Margo to see the Capitol.

“A birthday present?”

“Sure thing,” I said, thinking, Just you wait. The stubble burn, the red bumps, the never-ending chore. “I wanted to tell you something.”

Her arms dropped. “What?”

I spoke carefully. “One reason your father and I believed you should move ahead a year was because you’re more mature than most girls your age. Physically, I mean.”

She avoided my eyes. “OK.”

“So even though I don’t want you to start shaving your legs so young, I’m happy that your new friends are so mature, because I think you probably feel more comfortable with them.”

“Dad told me all that.”

“He did?”

She turned toward the closet. She dressed in the red velveteen pants and a white top, and then we called for Dennis and grabbed Trisha’s gift from the dining room table and got into the car. Dennis hummed along with the radio as we drove, and Margo’s voice piped up from the backseat to join his. “Bye-bye Miss American Pie,” she sang, at first softly and then louder. “Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry . . .” By the time we reached the Weintraub house, Margo was singing high and strong, like someone excited about what the world had to offer.

T
here were boys, of course. Judy and her boyfriend took a bottle of wine into the master suite and closed the door, and the girls—eleven of them, enough for an entire soccer team—called the boys on the phone to give the all-clear. They met in an empty lot three doors down and stood shoulder to shoulder so the boys could kiss them one by one, snaking down the line. There was a boy there who was not cool, and had been invited only because he was older and had a history of sneaking the car keys from his father without being caught. This boy, Devon, had acne and bad breath and when he reached Margo in the line, Trisha pushed Margo from behind and Devon grabbed her breasts and when she twisted free the girls called her a prude and Trisha said she should never have invited her, but she’d wanted someone for Devon since he’d offered to drive the boys. After a while the boys wandered off. The girls were worried about getting into trouble if Judy found out they’d left the house, so they went back to Trisha’s bedroom. The room had a sitting area with a fluffy white area rug and a private bathroom with lavender walls and white trim. The girls changed into pajamas and laid out their sleeping bags—Margo’s was blaze-orange and thick as a mattress, a relic from our family’s early camping days—and talked about the boys. And then some of the boys were back, throwing stones at Trisha’s window. Trisha went to the window and hushed them, then whispered in another girl’s ear. The girl giggled and whispered to another girl, who whispered to another. When the whispering reached Margo, she was horrified to learn the plan: they were going to line up at the picture window in the living room and moon the boys on the count of three. She trudged out to the living room with the pack, and for the second time that night they all lined up, facing away from the window. Trisha counted to three but after Margo pulled down her pants, she looked up to discover that no other girl had gone through with it, and instead they were shrieking and pointing at her. She heard muffled male laughter, too, punctuated by catcalls and swear words. Back in the lavender bathroom, she tried to hold it together before sneaking out to call us from the telephone in the kitchen.

M
argo spent Sunday in her room and refused to eat. I called Judy Weintraub, who said that she would have a long talk with her daughter about sneaking out. I was too exhausted to ask for more. I called Bette and asked her to come over. “I’ll be there in a jiff,” she said, and I said, “What would we do without you?” She brought cookies and went into Margo’s room with glasses of milk. I knew Bette would advise Margo in ways I couldn’t; she would call the girls nasty names and brainstorm pranks. Her advice would be irresponsible—retribution, humiliation, that sort of thing—but her wicked outrage would make Margo feel better, and while she talked she would wink in a way that told Margo she wasn’t completely serious. When Bette came out of Margo’s bedroom, closing the door softly behind her, we convened in the kitchen and she poured two glasses of wine. “Those little devils,” she said. “Did you do that kind of thing at her age?”

“I was too shy to do things like that.”

“I was just like this Trisha. I was horrible, and then at some point I had no friends.”

“I don’t believe you,” I said.

She smiled. “I would have eaten you for breakfast. You poor thing.”

I started to cry, and she put an arm around me and we drank more wine. After she left, I debated for a long time about calling the home of Beverly Jovanovich, whom Margo had mentioned during her retelling of the events and who, according to Margo, had told Trisha to lay off when it was clear she had my daughter in her sights. I decided it could hardly make things worse. “I want to thank you for standing up for Margo last night,” I said to her when she came to the phone.

“OK,” said Beverly.

“What’s it going to be like tomorrow?”

“Trisha was pretty mad she left,” Beverly said. I started to tell her what I thought about that, but held my tongue. “I think it’s kind of hard for Margo,” she said. “Sixth grade is tough.”

“I’m starting to realize that.”

“Seventh is way better,” she said. I had to believe her. There was no other option.

Monday morning Dennis hemmed and hawed about calling in sick on his first day at the new job—he’d seized on the idea of taking Margo to Stiltsville to help her feel better—but I forced him out of the house. He told Margo he loved her through her locked bedroom door. Before getting into his car he said to me, “If we did the wrong thing, why not just put her back where she belongs?”

“Because she doesn’t belong there anymore,” I told him.

After he left I stood outside Margo’s room for a long time, weighing the options. I looked at my watch and calculated that homeroom was already over. I called my supervisor at the bank and asked him to find someone to cover for me for the rest of the week. I called Sunset School and asked firmly to speak to the principal, who listened to my story and promised that he would ask sixth- and seventh-grade teachers to do their best to check this kind of bullying behavior, as he put it. I called Mr. Callahan, the school counselor, and he recommended increasing Margo’s sessions to twice a week. He also recommended, strongly, that I bring her to school right away. I called Dennis’s mother and left a message asking if we could come for dinner that week; we hadn’t seen her and Grady in a while and I thought it would be good for Margo, and for me. I knocked on Margo’s door and told her to get dressed for school. “If you can do this,” I said through the door, “you can do anything.” When she came out, her eyes were red and her face was still. She didn’t argue. In the car I handed her a tube of lip gloss and she put it on compliantly. I touched her hair before she opened the car door. “This sucks,” she said.

“No swearing,” I said. “It does suck. It sucks very badly.”

She hesitated, one foot on the ground outside. The school was imposing and inanimate, as if arrested in time. There was no one outside, no movement beyond the frosted windows. Then after a minute, a man emerged from the school office, folding a piece of paper. He walked to his car and got in. A woman crossed the courtyard toward the gym. Margo adjusted her backpack and stepped out of the car and closed the door behind her, waving quickly, then walked toward the school without looking back.

The good news was that since they were not in the same classes, Margo didn’t see Trisha that day until the last class let out and she was pulling books from her locker, at which point, she reported, Trisha walked up, called her a snitch, and kept walking. As Margo left school, Beverly came up and said she liked her sneakers and they walked the rest of the way to the parking lot, where I was waiting in the same spot I’d taken that morning, as if I’d never left.

That night we tie-dyed T-shirts for ourselves and for Carla, who had called to tell Margo she hated her new school in Massachusetts. This made Margo feel better—though not, as she put it, in a mean way—and the next morning we drove back to school and Margo took a deep breath and got out of the car again. We did this again the next day and the next. I took Margo to the hardware store and let her choose a paint color for her bedroom—she chose scarlet—and the three of us moved everything out of the room, painted the walls and let them dry, then moved everything back. While we painted, Dennis tried to explain to Margo what maritime law was all about, and she asked questions and told him she was happy he was happy. That Saturday Margo went to a movie with Beverly, and soon after that she started smiling again. I woke up in the middle of the night several times, but every time Dennis was asleep beside me, and Margo was asleep in her bed.

We’d been unlucky and now it seemed we might become lucky again. Sometimes I think the guiding principles of good parenting are luck and circumstance. And sometimes when I’m feeling pompous I think there is no such thing as luck, that Margo’s strength comes from our steerage. The night she fled Trisha Weintraub’s house, I’d told her while she cried that no one should have the power to make her feel bad or ugly or embarrassed, that she was the one to decide who could hurt her feelings and who could not. I was just filling the air, of course; she knew well enough that this wasn’t true. I hoped, however, that at some point she’d learn what is true: that although we like to believe we are our own little islands, capable of protecting ourselves as well as sheltering and welcoming others, this is never really the case. Still, we must behave as if it is, and hope that we can withstand the wills of other people more often than we cannot.

I
n mid-May of that year—a month before the end of sixth grade—an all-white jury in the McDuffie case acquitted the accused officers of all thirteen counts after less than three hours of deliberation. Riots broke out in three Miami neighborhoods—black neighborhoods—immediately after the verdict was read. From Stiltsville, we could see smoke rising over the city, and when we got home, South Bayshore was a ghost town. Dennis took the long way to work to avoid the rioting, and when he was home he walked around the house checking the locks on the doors. Although we lived only a five-minute drive from some of the violence, we were shielded from it. Two miles from our house, at a stoplight in a rougher part of Coconut Grove, a white man was dragged from his car and beaten. Governor Graham summoned 3,500 National Guard troops to Miami. Fifteen people were killed, hundreds were injured. Our television stayed on all the time, tuned in to the frequent news alerts. On the third day of rioting, with the troops in place, along with a curfew and a ban on liquor and gun sales, the violence started to abate. On television, the cameras focused on dark empty storefronts with broken windows, on alleys where small fires still burned. Journalists shoved microphones in the faces of crying black women who shook their heads in disbelief. The federal government declared Miami a disaster area and allotted funds for rebuilding.

Shortly after the trial verdict, Margo spent the night at the Jovanovich house, and when she got home, she said, “Beverly’s dad says those people are just destroying their own neighborhoods,” and Dennis said, “Margo, we don’t say
those people
in this house. If you want to talk about black people”—a few years later he would adopt the term
African-Americans—
“then say
black people
. And they’re angry. This isn’t a conspiracy, it’s a riot. This is what rioting is.”

A few days later, Dennis and I took Margo and Beverly out on the boat to see Christo’s
Surrounded Islands
in Biscayne Bay. The day was bright and blue, and the girls chatted at the stern about a classmate’s new haircut and what to wear to so-and-so’s birthday party. Having crossed off his job search, Dennis and I had agreed to talk, at some point, about the possibility of leaving Miami. It had seemed that the riots would make this talk more urgent, but they hadn’t. To Dennis, this was what parenting was about: teaching our daughter how to think about these events. If we moved somewhere smaller, somewhere less messy—what would Margo learn?