Stiltsville: A Novel (20 page)

Dennis cruised along the shoreline past the mouth of the Miami River, then slowed to a putter. The girls and I sat at the prow, holding on to the boat railing. The
Surrounded Islands
were replicated in the lenses of their sunglasses. It had taken dozens of workers and 2,200 feet of woven polypropylene fabric for the artist to transform eleven small islands in Biscayne Bay into enormous pink flowers. Each tuft of island, as dense with green mangroves as a paintbrush with bristles, wore a wide pink wreath, a horizontal tutu. The
Miami Herald
had run a full-color photo: from above, the islands looked like giant hibiscus blossoms floating in a vast green pool.

From fifty yards away—there were patrol boats milling to make sure we didn’t get too close, like guards in an art museum—I could make out the weave in the pink fabric, water puddling in grooves. The pink undulated and shimmered in the sunlight, fading and brightening. It was like nothing I’d ever imagined. Like so much of Miami, the islands were vain, gaudy, and glorious—and in this way they belonged there, undeniably, and I hoped unrealistically that their pink skirts would stay fastened forever.

It was safe to say Dennis and I were not looking through the same lens. “Slap plastic around some land and call it art,” he said, but he lifted the video camera anyway.

While he filmed, Margo stared from behind her sunglasses. She’d chopped her purple jeans into shorts, but she wouldn’t let me hem them; fringe dangled past her knees. “Why did they put this here?” she said.

“Here in Miami, or here in the bay?” said Dennis, training the camera on her.

She covered her face and spoke through her fingers. “Here in Miami.”

Dennis shrugged. “Who knows why artists do what they do?” he said. “I have only one request of you, dear—never marry an artist. That goes for you, too, Beverly. Just as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor one.” He trailed off, lacking conviction. He spoke in a radio voice. “On this day,” he said, “May seventeenth, nineteen eighty-two, this ordinary American family discovered a scientific phenomenon no human has ever witnessed: flowers as big as yachts.”

He went on, amusing himself and the girls. Maybe the mutant flora had resulted from a spill at Turkey Point, he speculated. Maybe they were spaceships, said Margo, transporting aliens who ate humans for fuel. Beverly laughed. Margo agreed to be interviewed on camera. She used her fist for a microphone. “I’d like to thank my best friend, Carla,” she said. Her hair curved against her face. “If she hadn’t sacrificed her life to the aliens, scientists might never have discovered the location of the mother ship.”

Why Miami? I thought. Because anywhere else, the islands would have seemed garish and bizarre, and Christo would’ve seemed like a loon. Because a century ago, swampland enveloped this shoreline, before developers drained it and built a city from the bog. Because our piece of Florida was invented, not discovered. Like the
Surrounded Islands
, Miami was at once impossible and inspired, like a magic trick practiced for hours, performed in seconds.

The following year, Bette would teach Margo to sail and she would join the Coconut Grove Sailing Club’s junior division and start to bring home trophies. She would get braces and keep them on for two years. For years, her closest friend would be Beverly, followed by a few kids from the club with whom she traveled to regattas on weekends. Shortly after she turned fifteen she would spend a weekend in Sarasota with her sailing club, and her first boyfriend, Dax Medina, would kiss her behind the Days Inn.

We circled one island and moved on to the next. The process was like negotiating a labyrinth—only a segment was visible from any given perspective. “Take us farther out,” I said to Dennis. “I want to see them all at once.”

“Aye, aye,” he said. He eased forward on the throttle and turned us away from shore, and soon the islands spread out in a disorderly line. I stepped up onto the gunwale and rose on my tiptoes, but still the dark water all but swallowed the pink. We would’ve needed an airplane to view the project as a whole; we would’ve needed a mountaintop. Instead, we patched the project together in our minds, like pieces in a colossal, unmanageable puzzle.

1990

W
hen the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables underwent renovations, Margo was one of several high school volunteers who ended up on scaffolding along the tower, applying a coat of the hotel’s signature terra-cotta color. Her photograph appeared in the “Neighbors” section of the
Miami Herald
: a black-and-white close-up of my daughter wearing a rolled bandanna on her forehead, a paint streak along one cheek. Three years later, I visited the Biltmore to use a guest pass given to me by Dennis’s parents, who were members of the golf club. I spent an hour swimming in the pool where Esther Williams had performed, backstroking past the soaring colonnades, and in the locker room afterward, I noticed a flyer tacked on a bulletin board amid news of support groups and housecleaning services. The flyer advertised the Biltmore tennis center’s newest team, the Top Forties. I knew immediately, though there were no other clues, that the title meant the team was composed of people who had reached middle age. I was forty-seven years old, and alert to the attendant afflictions: empty-nest syndrome loomed, midlife crisis itched, menopause dogged. Though I had not played tennis with any regularity since high school, I knew before I’d finished getting dressed that I would join the team. I crossed the parking lot and climbed the tennis center’s exterior staircase, walked through the lounge past a row of windows overlooking the courts, and knocked on a door marked OFFICE. On the other side of the door was a tall, dark-haired man in tennis whites. His name was Jack. So began the summer of 1990—the summer of tennis.

After I handed over a check for $200, which committed me to the team for one twelve-week season, I left the tennis center and stood on the sidewalk outside the fence that enclosed the courts. The air smelled of gardenias and was filled with the hollow popping sound of balls hitting rackets, and I was suddenly, overwhelmingly satisfied with myself. Not until I arrived home and was unloading groceries from the car did I remember that the following Saturday—the day of the team’s first practice—was already consumed by one principal activity, an activity to which I’d given surprisingly little consideration: this was the day when we would pack up the station wagon, drive north for six hours, and drop off my daughter at her new college.

A
fter returning from the Biltmore, I went to the garage to look for my old tennis racket, and it was there that Dennis found me half an hour later, elbow-deep in a box marked ATLANTA, a porcelain-faced doll in one hand and my old wooden Wilson in the other. He gave me a look but didn’t ask any questions. “Is she all packed?” he said.

“I doubt it.” I turned off the garage light and followed Dennis back into the kitchen. He was just in from work, slightly sweaty; I could smell the dry cleaning of his suit. That evening, Dennis’s parents were throwing a farewell barbecue for Margo, and as usual it would be a struggle not to arrive late. I took my old racket down the hallway and knocked on Margo’s door. “We’re leaving in half an hour,” I called. There was no answer. I knocked again and opened the door. Margo stood on the far side of her bed, sorting through a heap of clothes and shoes. She was tan and freckled from a month spent fishing with Dennis in the early mornings, and from driving our car around with the sunroof open. She looked up. “I heard you,” she said. She gestured toward the pile on the bed. “I have no system.”

Why hadn’t I made certain she was packed before now? “I’ll help you tonight, after the party.”

She pointed at the racket in my hand. “What’s that?”

“Nothing. A tennis racket. There’s a team at the Biltmore.”

She looked dubious. I hadn’t been one for joining teams in her lifetime. “Is Marse joining, too?”

It hadn’t occurred to me to rally Marse, but I didn’t think it would be her cup of tea. She’d started teaching aerobics at her health club. I’d gone to a few classes and left exhausted, with a bruised ego. “No, just me,” I said.

“Nobody uses wooden rackets anymore, Mom.”

It always surprised me when my daughter seemed to think I noticed nothing. “I know that,” I said, “but this is what I have.” I picked up a pair of old gym shorts from the pile on her bed. They were printed with the insignia of her high school. “I don’t think you’ll need these,” I said. “Or this.” I picked up a straw hat she had not worn in years. I separated the gym shorts and the straw hat and a fringed leather jacket from the heap.

“I guess not,” she said.

“You need to get dressed.”

“I am dressed.” She moved out from behind the bed so I could see her. She wore a long patchwork skirt that she’d bought in Coconut Grove, a white peasant top, and a wide leather belt. “Should I take this?” She held up a stuffed dolphin she’d had since childhood. I remembered buying it for her at the Seaquarium gift shop. “Or this?” She pulled a Miami Hurricanes baseball cap from the pile; Dennis had given it to her the first time he’d taken her to a baseball game. I looked at the faintly dirty cap, which evoked a whole afternoon’s memory, and I wondered which was preferable: clinging sentimentally to the unending stream of items that flow through our lives, or letting them go as if they had no relationship to memory, no status.

“Don’t take them,” I said.

“What if I want them?”

“Then I’ll send them.”

“You won’t throw things out? I think you’re going to throw things out.”

“I promise,” I said. I made a mental note: do not throw things out.

In my bedroom, I pulled on a sundress and briefly worried that Dennis’s mother would think we had not dressed up enough. When I was ready, I found Dennis and Margo in the living room. Margo was in Dennis’s arms, crying. “What’s going on?” I said.

Over Margo’s shoulder, Dennis said, “She’s sad.”

Margo said something into Dennis’s shirt, which was not yet buttoned. His hair was wet and uncombed. “What?” I said.

“I don’t want to go,” she repeated.

“Margo, your grandmother’s worked hard. She’s invited all her friends—”

“No!” she said. “I don’t want to move away.” She cried harder.

It was a situation we alone seemed to face. Margo had graduated from high school two years earlier, and at that time all her friends had been itching to get away. And maybe if she’d been accepted at one of her top choices—Chapel Hill or University of Virginia—Margo would have been itching as well. She’d applied to six colleges, and her school counselor had seemed to think that with one or two she was reaching, but the others were within the realm of possibility. “You never know,” the counselor had told me. “Margo is very bright, yes, but her grades are not stellar. In that situation they’ll be looking for something extra.” She’d left unsaid the fact that there was no obvious something extra. Margo had been a reporter on the newspaper staff and in the chorus of a few school plays, but she hadn’t really committed herself to anything. She’d floated from activity to activity, competent but uninspired. When she’d given up competitive sailing, she’d said it was because the regattas monopolized all her weekends. When would she get to Stiltsville? she’d said. Dennis had been proud.

We’d taken a road trip in the spring of her junior year. We packed a cooler and three small suitcases and looped through the dreary, damp eastern seaboard. We hit the Carolina schools, then the University of Virginia, then the D.C. schools, then the Boston schools. On the way back we spent a night with my mother, then stopped in Hilton Head, where Dennis played a very expensive round of golf. We sidetracked to the camp where Margo had gone for three summers. The grounds were closed. The air was cool and smelled of wet clay and spruce. We stepped over a chain that crossed the main camp road, and Margo led us to a cluster of one-room wooden cabins with rickety screen doors. We stepped inside the cabin where Margo had been assigned her last year of camp, when she was eleven years old. The room was claustrophobic. The bunks had no mattresses—they were in storage for the season—and there was a sink in one corner with rust stains in its bowl. Margo walked to one of the top bunks. “This was mine,” she said, and I pictured her there, writing letters on the stationery we’d sent with her, her hair wet from swim time. We’d left the cabin and wandered through the campgrounds, past the locked dining hall and the still waterfront, until we were spotted by a groundskeeper, who asked us kindly to leave.

As it turned out, Margo had been accepted only at the University of Miami, her safety option, and had continued to live at home because of the school’s high cost. Beverly Jovanovich had gone to Swarthmore, and Margo’s on-again, off-again boyfriend, Peter Sanchez, a tall boy who wore tortoiseshell eyeglasses and had excellent manners, had gone to Davidson. For two years we’d encouraged Margo to transfer so that she could move away, too, but when the time came she’d lacked the heart to repeat the entire application process, so she’d applied only to the University of Florida. She’d been excited, at first—she’d talked about decorating her dorm room and eating in the dining hall. But in time her excitement had morphed into anxiety. Then she’d been informed by the school that before starting her junior year, she needed to take a summer class to satisfy a math requirement. So not only was she now moving away—which I simultaneously wanted for her and did not want at all—but she was leaving at the start of the summer instead of at the end. What did it matter, though, really? Those extra weekends together, luxuriating in free time with Margo, would have been merely a stall, and soon enough we would have found ourselves in the same position we were in now: packing her up, driving her away.

“Margo,” I said, pulling her from Dennis to face me. “This is a whole new ball game. New people, new classes. You’ll like the dorms. No mother hovering all the time.”

Margo scowled. Was this an adult, I thought, prepared to go off and live on her own?

“Your mother’s right,” said Dennis. “Free at last.”

“I guess,” she said. I wondered how often, over the course of her life, she would desire something only to feel ambivalent once she got it. I thought of a young woman in Margo’s high school class, a girl with grades worthy of the Ivy League, who had gone to the University of Florida because her father had given her the choice between an out-of-state education and a new convertible. Somehow, a reporter for Florida Public Radio had gotten wind of the story and the parents had agreed to be interviewed on the air. Callers had phoned in to rail against the family’s values and praise the benefits of an excellent education. The father had said—very reasonably, I thought—that one does not have to be a plane ride away from one’s family to read books.

“The thing about going away for college,” I said to Margo, “is that you can start over, be whoever you want to be.”

“Who else would she want to be?” said Dennis.

“I just mean you can make new friends without all the history mucking it up.”

Margo nodded solemnly. The sixth grade had left wounds—she was a skittish friend, slow to bond. Over the years she’d let go of early friendships just when I’d sensed that they were growing, as if afraid of what might happen next. And she’d never become preoccupied with romance or heartbreak or drama the way other girls had. Her only boyfriend in high school had been Peter—every so often, during her junior and senior years, he had come to the house after school and stayed for dinner, or picked her up on a Saturday morning for a day at the beach. For a few days he’d be in her conversation or plans. But then weeks later I’d realize I hadn’t seen him and he hadn’t called. It had been three years since Margo had asked me to take her to get birth control pills—a task I’d completed with surprisingly few tears—and since that time Peter was the only boy who had come to the house alone, without a group. I used to try to get her to talk about him, but she would just say banal, complimentary things like “He’s a very kind person” or “It’s not serious, but he’s a good friend.” From what I could tell, this was true: he was a nice person. When he’d left for Davidson, Margo had seemed genuinely happy for him and not at all possessive. There had been no pretense that I could surmise that they would not date other people while he was away. But during her two years at the University of Miami, Margo had made few new friends and hadn’t dated at all.

“We need to get a move on,” I said. Margo’s eyes were pink and swollen. Dennis looked as if he’d forgotten where we needed to be. “Wash your face,” I said to Margo. I kissed her warm forehead before she left the room.

“I hope we did the right thing, encouraging her to transfer,” said Dennis.

“I was just thinking that.” The Oriental rug beneath our feet was threadbare and faded; we’d bought it new on vacation in Asheville a decade earlier. I told Dennis about the tennis team. “But it starts Saturday morning,” I said, “so I’d like to go before we get on the road.”

Dennis held tight to the belief that road trips begin before dawn. Practice started at eight a.m.; I promised we would be on the road by eleven. He nodded and rubbed his face. Margo returned, wearing fresh makeup—a little too much, considering Gloria’s distaste for young ladies with painted faces, but I stayed quiet. “Kiddo,” said Dennis, “your mother has something to do Saturday morning, so we’re going to leave a little later.”

“Good,” said Margo.

“We can spend tomorrow night at Stiltsville. We’ll swing home in the morning and pick up Mom and get on the road.”

I was reminded of one reason I didn’t take up activities: because then I missed things. “As long as you’re packed,” I said.