Stiltsville: A Novel (9 page)

Back in the kitchen, there was some discussion of who should be the one to make the announcement. Benjamin volunteered, then Gloria, then Grady—it was as if they were fighting for the unpleasant task, attempting to revive the good manners one expects on a wedding day. But Gloria was a mess—it was clear she’d been crying—and Grady seemed unable to leave her side, even to refill her glass, which I was called on to do a third time. In the end, it was Dennis who stepped onto the back deck and tapped a spoon against a glass to get the crowd’s attention. The rest of us huddled behind him. Fifty pairs of stylish couples and the odd single (including Marse, whom I’d spotted standing with Dennis’s friend Paul) peppered the lawn and the limestone patio, and in a moment all eyes were on Dennis. He held on to the wooden deck railing as he spoke. His voice shook. “Good afternoon,” he said, then cleared his throat and raised his voice. “We are so pleased all of you could make it here today to celebrate with our family.” He paused. It seemed, from his first sentence, that he was going to make a very different speech. “I love my sister,” he said. “I know you love her, too. But let’s face it, she’s an odd duck. And that’s part of what we love about her.” There was some nervous chuckling. “We want you to stay and eat and enjoy the afternoon, please. But I’m sorry to say there is not going to be a wedding.” A gentle gasp passed through the crowd. Benjamin’s parents, who were standing by the swimming pool, clutched each other and his mother put her hand to her mouth. Dennis raised his glass. “To love and friendship,” he said. “In all its forms.”

Dennis and I left the backyard together and walked around the side of the house, out of view, and once we were alone, he bent and put his hands on his knees. “You did great,” I said, and he said, “I thought I was going to vomit. I could kill Bette.” But when he rose up again, he was smiling. “I never said it would be dull, did I?” he said. I laughed, and then he started laughing. He took his keys from his pocket and pulled me toward the front of the house, then stopped: his car was buried several deep in the driveway. He took my hand and we weaved through the cars until we reached the far side of the driveway, and then we ducked under a ficus and emerged onto the neighbor’s lawn.

“Should we leave your parents?” I said.

“They’re fine. They’ll host.” He loosened his tie, and, not letting go of my hand, pulled me up to the neighbor’s front door. When a man answered, Dennis said, “I’m sorry to bother you, Mr. Costakis, but I was wondering if I might borrow a car.”

“Your sister’s on the lam, is she?” said Mr. Costakis. I guessed that he’d been spying and had seen her flee from the house. He chewed tobacco and ran a hand through his slick gray hair. “I should drop by for some grub.”

“Yes, it’s all very amusing,” said Dennis.

Mr. Costakis handed Dennis his keys. “Bring it back with a full tank,” he said, then extended a hand to me. “I’ve heard about you. You’ve taken a bite of our boy’s heart.”

I blushed. “Nice to meet you.”

We drove away then, and with the windows down I could hear the noise from Dennis’s family’s backyard, and from that distance it sounded no different from your average party, with glasses clinking and conversations humming. “Where are we going?” I said to Dennis.

“Wherever we want. ” He reached for my hand and brought it to his lips. He seemed content, driving through the early evening in a strange car. We took the highway north to Rickenbacker Causeway, then paid the toll and crossed onto Virginia Key, past the windsurfers off the narrow strip of beach, past the line of palm trees that shaded the sand, then over a second bridge onto Key Biscayne. We drove to the far tip of the key, then turned around and drove back. The sun was starting to set over downtown, and the buildings—the city seemed large to me then, though it would double in breadth and height and population during the time I lived there—reflected the pink-orange light. The water was dark blue, spitting whitecaps in the wind, and as we left the causeway behind I breathed deeply, inhaling the smell of the ocean. We wound down Bayshore Drive past Vizcaya, where we’d spent a magical night under the stars soon after meeting—it seemed a long time ago, even then—past Mercy Hospital, where almost every room had a bay view, past the coral rock houses of Coconut Grove and Biscayne Bay Yacht Club, where Dennis’s parents were members and one day we would be, and past Scotty’s and Dinner Key Marina and Dennis’s old elementary school. I had learned my way around, but I didn’t know how or when it had happened.

I suggested we head to the Hungry Sailor, a dark bar in downtown Coconut Grove where Marse and Bette and I had found ourselves many nights among a crowd of regulars, under walls ringed with colored Christmas lights. We parked, and Dennis led me up to the rooftop, where patio tables were scattered on tar matting overlooking Grand Avenue. Dennis ordered a round of margaritas and looked down on the crowded street. A rickshaw passed, carrying a tourist couple who hooted with laughter as the driver dipped and circled to entertain them. On the corner, a woman with a high Afro handed out fliers, and down the block a group of kids sat in a circle on a cement patio. Dennis took my hand and sighed. “Good Lord, my sister,” he said. I saw that he cared enough about his sister not to care much about the ruined wedding.

The margaritas were tangy and cold. I let my shoes drop and propped my feet on the low wall of the rooftop, and I held Dennis’s hand. The sun went down, and it grew a little chilly. Dennis put his coat around my shoulders and ordered another round. It seemed we were celebrating after all. Dennis pointed below us, to a mannequin in the window of a lingerie shop across the street—but then I saw that she wasn’t a mannequin at all. She was a live person, wearing red bikini underwear and a lacy pink robe, her legs tucked beneath her in a white wicker love seat, her chin propped on one hand. “What a job!” I said.

“Boring as hell,” said Dennis.

“Some people love to be watched.”

Dennis was looking at me. “When it’s our turn, you won’t run.”

“No,” I said. I knew that all I had to do was turn and meet his eyes. I knew that if I did this, he would sink to one knee and take off his college ring and slide it onto my finger, where it would feel as heavy as a stone. But maybe because we were living a stolen evening, an evening allotted for another activity entirely, or because my love for him raged so wildly that I felt it throbbing in my teeth and pressing against my lungs, I did nothing but sip my drink. After a while, the model’s shift ended. She stood and stretched and tied her robe around her waist, yawned, and walked into the fluorescent innards of the store.

Looking back, it seems that the whole episode, from meeting Dennis to marrying him, went by in a blink. When Dennis did propose—kneeling, on the stilt house dock where we’d met—I believed my love for him was strong. Now, though, I know it was a blip, a farce. A thousand times, my love might have dampened instead of swelled. I had no idea then what would happen to my love, what nourishment it would receive, how mighty it would grow. I thought: I love him. And so, as if it were the only answer I could give, the only answer available to me, I said yes.

W
e married in Atlanta, in the Baptist church I’d attended as a child. I wore an empire-waist gown with lacy cap sleeves and satin Mary Janes with chunky heels. I was so stunningly, stupidly happy that I remember little outside of what is frozen in photographs: Dennis’s grip over mine as we cut the three-tiered cake; my mother spreading my veil and my father pumping Dennis’s hand; Grady extending his arm in a toast; me posing on the chapel steps with my mother on one side and Bette and Marse on the other. Back in Miami, Dennis’s parents threw us a reception at their yacht club, and then Dennis and I spent a week in the Keys, hopping from island to island in his father’s boat and camping on shallow beaches. One night we woke to the sight of hundreds of glowing anemones drifting by. In the morning, dozens had washed ashore and lay sickly at the foot of our tent. Dennis gave me a book of Wallace Stevens poems with certain pages dog-eared, and sometimes we read the poems to each other before falling asleep.

Dennis graduated from law school and passed the bar exam and was hired by a firm downtown. With inheritance from his grandmother, we bought our own home in Coral Gables, a three-bedroom ranch with a large backyard and a ponytail palm in one corner. We culled spare furniture from Dennis’s parents’ garage and secondhand stores, and hung paintings I’d made during college. Within the year I was pregnant. We had a little girl and named her Margo, ostensibly after Dennis’s maternal grandmother but in truth because I loved the name: I thought it was earthy and wise and unmistakably South Floridian, a tropical name for reasons I couldn’t explain. Margo was a fleshy, contemplative baby with Dennis’s blue-green eyes and my pointy-tipped ears. My mother took the train down and stayed a month in our guest room, and during the day we took turns changing Margo and giving her long, warm baths. We sat on a blanket in the backyard and made plans for her future: my mother predicted she would be a stunning beauty, possibly a fashion model, and I predicted she would be a career woman with expensive handbags and a busy social calendar. We told her there had never been a sweeter baby. After my mother returned to Atlanta, it was, oddly, Grady who took time off to help me while Dennis was at work. He brought groceries and held the baby so I could shower, and stepped out to light a pipe when I opened my blouse to breast-feed. While I nursed Margo, she looked up at me as if she didn’t quite know who I was, but she was willing to accept my love anyway, to give me the benefit of the doubt. When she was sleepy, she blinked in a slow-motion way that reminded me of a sloth I’d seen in a nature show on television. Instead of dividing, the focus I’d previously reserved for Dennis multiplied; in the early months of Margo’s life I found myself stunned at my luck. I’d found a person to love, and together we’d made another person to love. It was simultaneously exactly what I’d wanted and more than I could have asked for myself.

When Dennis was home, we took long walks with Margo in her stroller, and on the weekends we put her in a life vest and went to the beach, or out on Grady’s boat, or to Stiltsville, where I held tightly to her and stepped carefully, fearful of falling with her into the water. She clung to Dennis’s chest as he walked the flats and giggled maniacally when he dunked her. She got sunburned and the pediatrician reminded me sternly about sunscreen—the only bottle we owned back then sat on a shelf in the downstairs stilt house bathroom, crusty at the neck and watery with time and disuse. She and I spent hours together in the hammock downstairs, napping and reading, sweaty locks of hair plastered to her forehead. She took her first teetering steps in the stilt house living room, from Dennis’s lap to mine. After that, the stilt house became a kind of disaster area for a time, where I was called on to be ever-vigilant as she darted in each direction, small enough to fit through the porch railing or steps, clumsy enough to slip from the dock. Dennis and I had talked briefly about putting up netting or fencing, but with so many hazardous surfaces—the entire downstairs, the wraparound porch, the T-shape dock—it wasn’t feasible. Instead, Dennis started teaching her to swim when she was just ten months old. When she was two, she spent hours on his lap as he fished off the dock, clapping each time he reeled in a fish. When she was almost three, Marse bought her an orange bikini with yellow polka dots and she wore it every day of the summer, refusing every other garment in her closet. When she was four, she and Bette put on elaborate performances on the porch, wherein Margo played a pirate or schoolteacher, and Bette played a damsel in distress or an insubordinate student, and by the end of the day they were both sweating through their T-shirts and glassy-eyed with exhaustion.

Those early years of Margo’s life, of our marriage, were uncomplicated to a degree that I’ve never experienced again. But every so often, during this period, I would find Dennis sitting in front of a bottle of beer at the kitchen table, or alone on the porch at Stiltsville, and when I asked him what was wrong he would say simply that he did not like his job. I suppose if we had let it, this could have become the ruling discontent in our home. But he was not the kind of man who took to moping, and for years this was a back-burner issue, a low-grade nuisance.

We tried for a time to have a second child, and then when Margo was three I miscarried, and then eight months later I miscarried again, and then five months later, again. It was a terrible time. I felt as if our lives had been put on hold; the future darkened. It’s incredible to realize that one can’t have children simply by taking the usual steps. Doctors couldn’t seem to help, and I might have become bitter in the face of this fact, as so many people do, but later in my life I would need to trust doctors, to be guided by them, so I am glad this wasn’t the case. Then, some months after the third miscarriage, I chaperoned Margo’s kindergarten class on a field trip to the Everglades, and we were walking in the early evening down a swampy path when our guide pointed to an owl perched on a high branch, and Margo’s freckled face when she searched the sky for a glimpse of the creature was so open, so full of joy, that I decided (or I realized, I’m not sure which) I didn’t need more children. Dennis had wanted a noisier household—this was difficult, knowing how he wanted it—but eventually he followed my lead. I concentrated on Margo, our marvel, and the sadness of losing the pregnancies ebbed over time, and I thanked God for her.

As for my new hometown, I’d fallen quickly and surely in love with it. I loved to drive through the dense neighborhoods with my car windows down and smell the rotting sweetness of a ripening mango tree. I loved to eavesdrop on the loud conversations of the ladies at the deli counter, ferreting out select phrases using the lazy Spanish I’d acquired over the years. I loved the lychees and star fruit that fell into my yard over the neighbor’s fence, and I loved the bright bougainvillea that dropped its papery pink petals onto my lawn. I loved the rusty barges loaded with stolen bicycles that plodded down the Miami River and out to sea. I loved the half-dozen chilly February nights, all the windows in the house open and the fireplace going. I loved the limestone and the coral rock, the fountains and the ocean and the winding blue canals. I loved the giant banyans and the dense wet mangroves and the gumbo-limbo trees and the many-sized, many-shaped palms. I loved the pelicans and manatees and stone crabs and storms and even the thick, damp summers.