“Well, tell us what it is!” her mother cried rather too forcefully, as if she were yanking herself back to the present. But Mr. Goff regarded Diana with almost fairytale adoration. He gathered them close and paged through the encyclopedia until he found it. The wings of the Quetzalcoatlus were webbed forearms and fingers.
Marguerite takes a dinosaur-sized swallow of vodka. In the fearsome illustrations the monsters are all gradations of the same potato color.
There is not enough light to grant much depth of field; in fact it’s as if the light were already being dismantled. Still, there are a few sulfuric weeds in the foreground. They look like shallots. And a quadruped, its dusky, granular hide loose in the leg pits, its forehead collapsed, its eyes crystaled with cataracts.
She’s teaching in fifteen minutes. It won’t take her that long to get to campus, and she pours again, just enough to wet the ice cubes. She stands looking down over the encyclopedia. It suddenly amuses her to speculate that the earth was still flat, in the time of the dinosaurs.
She finds herself crossing the quad in near darkness. Early December, the trees are baskets, leaves extinct, bony branches. Her gait feels stiff and tapping. She’s angular but not athletic, not yet thirty, not yet drunk, her head feels like hardware with which to assemble a headache.
She charts her diagonal for the side entrance of a certain eponymous building. Brick and mortar and beard strings of ivy, broader than twenty trees, she still has two minutes. The double doors at ground level are smoky shatterproof glass-stuff. Even Webb Hall has succumbed to fire codes and handicapped access. Stairs and marble have undergone top-to-bottom demystification, there’s been a frank rearrangement of restrooms. The doors have a bodyish suctioning quality she hasn’t anticipated.
When was the last time she taught aboveground? Her classroom is dark and her eyes feel muddy, stirred up from the bottom. She gropes for the head of the horseshoe of tables; she may as well be hammering out that horseshoe with her headache.
In a moment she’ll hit the light switch. Her headache. In the dark she can better picture her students on their own quad-crossing courses. Jonathan Hughes, racing for a last-minute coffee, salty dew between his narrow, plucky shoulders. She can see him rifling through his backpack, determined to produce his university ID card and reap the fifteen-percent discount. She can even hear the cashier, a local girl wearing doll’s eyelashes, blinking.
To be fair, she has no reason to think Jonathan Hughes is penurious. But it’s perversely pleasing to imagine him stymied by a few pennies. Her schoolgirl crush makes her feel alliterative and necessarily cynical. And combative. She imagines the coffee sloshing over, scalding the roots of his fingers.
Her eyes adjust and she picks a tiny cloud of lint off her black sweater. What is going on around the neck? Something “romantic,” the reason the sweater was on sale, and she grabs the knitted scruff and tries to stretch it away from her headache. She’s pretty sure that psychogarble points to unbecoming neuroses rather than elegant intelligence, but still, she can solve herself backward from where she is now, caught in an academic eddy, the same beach garbage and coleslaw of seaweed drowning and repurposing, insoluble, tidal, endless...from where she is now, right back to her mother’s disappearance. The spring she was eleven, the same spring as the dinosaur encyclopedia.
As a long-suffering graduate student she can’t take herself seriously using a word like “endless;” she can’t really touch any words anymore without turning them into jargon. But even before her mother left her, Marguerite had set herself the private task of beheading love, of undoing love from its original, maternal referent. Once, at the beach club, when she was six or seven, Marguerite watched her mother stagger, laughing and disheveled, from the water. Oh! Her mother had been ploughed into the seabed by a rogue wave, and now she had a sand suit under her bathing suit. Marguerite watched in horror as her mother reached into the stretchy fabric and pulled out the matted sand cakes veined with seaweed.
The classroom clock, ka-chunk, ka-chunk, seems to be clocking her rather than vice versa. She has a love-hate relationship with her teaching persona. It keeps her real, and nervous, and it makes her unreal, a total faker.
They’re all late, every single one of her students. They don’t fear her: she slums her well-bred vowels, she’s one of them, she completely understands their problems.
Then the lights come on, and Jonathan Hughes is smiling at her curiously from the doorway. “Hey,” he says, and she feels instantly flattered. He has poreless skin any girl would die for, freckles like cocoa powder, dark brown eyes with liquid centers—that’s her crush talking. He comes bearing coffee, and wow, he’s holding a paper cup out to his professor. He must have crossed the quad double-fisted. Look at you, she wants to say. His back is straight and he reminds her of a prescient five-year-old, pretending his bathrobe is an overcoat.
“It’s b-black,” he apologizes. Prescient because she knows him now, in the future of his childhood? “And b-b-bad.” He smiles. That bit of a stutter must have charmed his mother.
He’s also a graduate student—in creative writing. She knows his work for her class does double duty, and she finds his writing sort of unmanned. Undisciplined would be a more politic description. But she can’t actually fail another grad student. They share the same birth year, she and Jonathan. He takes his shoes off as a condition of being seated, and she has, on several occasions, run into his empty shoes under the table. He’s a month older.
Despite herself her spirits lift in his presence. The rest of the students stagger in and it’s Jonathan who greets them. He is brimming with emotional intelligence, he flirts out of the goodness of his heart, he really does make people feel better. She watches him slip out of his ponytail. She’s WASPy about the long hair. The elastic band hangs off his narrow wrist and suddenly it startles her to imagine him choosing a packet from the beauty aisle.
She crosses the quad again, now in total darkness. The trees are marionettes of the dark sky, sloe-eyed, possibly bulky with blood, and Marguerite forces herself not to panic. She’s an inveterate interleaver of nature descriptions, afraid of the dark, and it’s true that seasons matter as much as countries, even continents, in New England. Lines drawn in the sand, lines—prints, maybe—in the snow, the life-organizing principle of her mother’s disappearance.
A different season: a bloom of an evening.
Petal-colored light, chambray surf, Marguerite’s skin, and her mother’s, sticky with saltwater.
There she goes, she’s eleven, up the beach toward the clambake, red-faced clubbies in bleach-white trousers, her mother, she presumes, watching.
In Marguerite’s mind’s eye there’s a sailboat with spiderweb lines, its boom rolled like a rug, rotting inevitably in the rocking water. There’s her aunt Margaret—wading among clubhounds, rectangular head like a woodcutter icon, deep lines around her mouth, she already knows why her niece and namesake’s eyes are a little wild.
Honeysuckle, beach plum, purple loosestrife. Horsetail full of ground glass that it pulled from somewhere. Was the air full of shards? Was the soil? Mr. Goff was just beginning to develop a stoop at the time her mother left her.
The lights are blazing in the vestibule of the department office. Two lean grad students are stooping into their mailboxes, and Marguerite slips in to clear hers of proliferating memos.
Ridiculous to drive, since her apartment is barely two miles off campus, but she really hates walking at night. She resents the inherent melodrama of it. Her car is as cold as a meat locker. She’s not sure whether it’s a good thing she’ll be home before the heat comes on, before the car even registers it’s being driven. She pulls into the large gravel parking lot behind her building, a staging area for student beaters and a couple of rust-hewn dumpsters. The recycling bins are lacy with mini plastic water bottles. Before the windshield fogs up she can see the moon disc sliding between clouds like dirt clods, the blue flame of the moon pushing tree silhouettes out of their velvet
boxes. She locks the car behind her—she hates the few moments between locked car and locked apartment.
But no one is waiting to slit her throat at the dark door of her building, and she almost laughs out loud, imagining a kind of dinosaur rapist. She turns on the overhead light in her kitchen and smells coffee. Who’s the idiot. More than half a cup, the milk on the surface like albino algae. No wonder she felt short-changed all day. Now she splashes it against stainless steel. Time for a vodka, thank you very much; she cracks a couple of ice cubes, the other half of a lemon. She doesn’t mind the seeds. Sometimes they serve as her dinner. She sits down with her drink and the dinosaur encyclopedia. Wasn’t this where she left herself less than three hours ago? How about that. Another deep pour. It really is sort of an amazing story. The way her mother—she turns a page over. Precursor life forms locked in rocks that were once the mud banks of a foul-smelling organ of water.
She was disappointed by the encyclopedia, and ashamed of her disappointment. The book wasn’t even new, she noted. Her mother had leaned in and ruffled the pages, but Marguerite immediately disdained the expressiveness in the dinosaurs’ pointy faces, heads too small for the engorged, epic bodies. The way her mother—she finishes the thought—disappeared on her. Another drink and she imagines time as a number line and the dinosaurs abandoning the zero and marching left, into the negative numbers.
2
But it would be sentimental to say that the Goffs were like grandparents. She had her own, on her father’s side, who regularly sent a driver to fetch her. Mr. Bucci, Grandfather Webb’s driver, lived in Middletown with his wife and three grown children. Marguerite knew their names, but she had never met them. The back of Mr. Bucci’s neck was creased in diamonds and she used to wonder if there was a snake that had the same markings.
Her father died in the blur of her infant weeks (not her own blur, but her mother’s), and Marguerite had always believed her mother’s reticence on the subject was her way of preserving sadness. Marguerite was told she cried for him; how awful it would have been if she hadn’t.
“You cried for everything,” her grandmother added, a great fan of her own dry humor.
Her grandparents’ sadness at the death of their son was expressed formally, unflaggingly, and, from the moment Marguerite was out of diapers (Grandmother Webb claimed never to have changed one), in the organization of Saturday excursions.
Tradition was an exercise. Mr. Bucci would squire Marguerite to her grandparents’; from there, Grandfather Webb manned the wheel. The pride he took in stocking the boot of the car with plaid wool blankets and “utility sweaters,” milk chocolate bars and canned seltzer!
“Chin up, Marguerite,” Grandfather Webb would say, handing out an old green V-neck. (He himself had a long chin, and a jaw like a drawbridge.) The sweater came with elbow patches, and the sandwiches were skinny. Marguerite had yet to classify the kind of frugality that redeemed the embarrassment of riches. But she was indeed a child respectful out of embarrassment. She would admit neither her breast buds, when they finally fleshed, nor her hunger for another sandwich.
The excursions took them to the Webbs’ alma mater, all sheltering elms, fresh lawn, and contemporary sculptures on loan from major museums. Marguerite watched her grandmother turn stiffly away when faculty toddlers were lifted up to the stone saddles. Or to the beach club, where her grandfather would gin up while her grandmother peacocked the premises and Marguerite was let loose among cousins. Even then, Marguerite thought of herself as half Newport mansion, and slightly tainted by the other half. Her “good grandparents,” as they used to wryly call themselves, were patronizingly cheerful about it.
Once or twice a year the three of them took the toy train to Green Animals and lunched beneath an arbor: the boxwood giraffe resembled a small dinosaur, with a path trod bare around it. Her mother always looked slightly different when they returned, as if a season had changed their absence...
She was seven or eight when her grandmother caught her delivering a certain premeditated line to a playmate; she must have been allowed to bring a friend along on one of the excursions.
“My father,” declared Marguerite, “was the father I never had.” Where had she learned to be grandiose—and maudlin? No sooner were the words out than she was aware of Grandmother Webb behind her. It was a bracing and blowy winter day; they were out on the boardwalk at the beach club. Marguerite felt, in a flicker of self-defense, that she had been carried away by the weather.
And all at once she understood that she was equally inconstant. Offering up her father’s ashes! They would blow away, she imagined her grandmother saying, and then Marguerite would be doubly fatherless.
Friendless was what she’d be when her grandmother finished with her. What distress already, as if there’d been a betrayal, when her playmate discovered they were getting in the car with grandparents. You had to speak up, everyone older than mothers was deaf, but it was also necessary to maintain a deathly quiet. A little girl at either end of a backseat so long and plungingly soft it could have accommodated ten of them, even punched as they were into stiff winter jackets: Marguerite’s friend braved the earsplitting rustle of her parka when she crawled all the way across to whisper acutely, “Where’s your mother?”
But in the treacherous moment that followed Marguerite’s declaration, Grandmother Webb surprised her. She let the playmate wither under her gaze before she divulged, ever so evenly, “Your father, Mah-gret, died in Bermuda.” The queen of the commanding pause. “They had separated,” she added. She seemed utterly unmoved by the information. Marguerite waited for more but her grandmother simply turned and pointed herself toward the clubhouse.
They changed drivers at Marguerite’s grandparents’. Mr. Bucci was well versed in waiting. They dropped Marguerite’s playmate off in Jamestown and the little girl’s father strolled out, poorly concealing his lust for the old Bentley. Mr. Bucci was always obliging.
The girl’s mother invited Marguerite in and pulled out a chair for her in the over-lit kitchen. Even the curtains were too bright, like angel wings in a crèche scene in a church parking lot.
Angel wings. Marguerite cringes.
She knows she would have declined the hot chocolate, although she longed to watch the tiny marshmallows dissolving. She was never a familiar child.
She starts again, with a mandate to be terse, but then verging on sententious: There is no such monster as a normal family; even a normal family is a monster. A la Tolstoy.
Marguerite’s “ground-floor rear” is a one-bedroom peninsula in the parking lot. The building is a cabbage patch of eleven ungainly, irregular apartments. The doors are oyster shells of old paint, the windowsills have hundred-year-old dirt under their fingernails. There’s a variation on a theme of rooflines: dormers, a turret, a couple of additions, and a clutch of cement chimneys. The street is wide and treeless, a chute to the traffic lights and shopping center at the bottom. Marguerite always seems to leave and return on the downhill, traveling in a circle.
There’s a funeral home and a YMCA and a laundromat and Chinese takeout, but no pedestrian bustle. The landlords are an old Portuguese couple who live in an urban-agrarian oasis in North Providence. One year they invited Marguerite for the grape harvest.
Of the inside of her apartment, suffice to say that the bathtub is criminally shallow, or else manufactured for renters, who are somehow always smaller in spirit.
Saturday, she’s been reading and taking notes all day and she feels at once jumpy and fallow. The last time she looked up, she could see the gold and platinum trees in the unbuilt lot behind her building. Now, a dirty window, and behind it another glass plate of darkness. She’s in sweatpants and two gray sweaters.
Just last week, walking down her block in the early evening, a couple of boys had risen up out of nowhere. They faced off against her, laughing soundlessly at her—she was so afraid her ears stopped working. She unshoveled her wallet before they even asked her, or, as she imagined, gunned her
down for it.
In fact, she’d hurled the wallet to the moon-white sidewalk. Seen stars before one of them lunged at her, playing to her fears, playacting. His fists flew around her face and she could feel the air drum they created.
She tells herself this is the reason she’s been going a little heavy on a certain fire water. She pours again and drinks between the ice cubes. She has another problem, which is that she’s not rushing to get to her grandmother’s Christmas party. Every year, her ritual of attending includes baroque contemplation of breaking with tradition. If she charted it, she’d find that every year she arrives a quarter hour later. She closes her eyes. She sees her grandmother, the Christmas party bully, statuesque out of sheer haughtiness, mouth twisted to greet a pair of lesser mortals. She can almost touch her grandmother’s bouffant of chestnut hair, as if she, Marguerite, were the professional who sets it once a week, charged with making sure it adds to Mrs. Webb’s already intimidating height another two inches.
She can hear her grandmother’s greeting voice like one of those stock-market graphs, jagged with exorbitant wealth or shoeless poverty. Grandmother Webb, commandeering the dark and twinkling drive, “Has my granddaughter...” She has always scorned the French version in favor of her very own Mah-gret. She survived cancer in her early forties and has refused dessert since the day she received her diagnosis. Suddenly it occurs to Marguerite that her grandmother has never disclosed the body part afflicted.
But she’ll be more than fifteen minutes off from last year if she doesn’t hurry. Another tipple, slug, whatever, Grandfather Webb calls it spring water. A cranberry silk blouse with cloth-covered buttons, and rather droopy black velvet trousers. She may resemble a medieval prince in pajamas.
Despite Grandmother Webb’s character of restraint, she would adore it if Marguerite arrived early—say, for lunch—with a cocktail dress in plastic. If Marguerite freshened up in one of the boudoirs, borrowed a necklace. Grandmother Webb is perennially appalled that Marguerite drives in her “assemblage.” She isn’t at all embarrassed to use fake French. She finds the French ridiculous.
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