I said, “They’ll be punished.”
“In Tampa?” Dennis said to me. His jaw tightened. “No, they won’t.”
After dinner, Dennis spread a newspaper on our bed and pored over it, trying to find an article for Margo to take to school. There was no use telling him this was her assignment. “Here’s one,” he said. He called for Margo and a minute later she appeared, wearing a Dolphins jersey and white ankle socks. Dennis tore out the article and Margo read it while I got ready for bed. When she’d gone back to her room, I asked him what they’d chosen.
“That fisherman who drowned in his nets,” he said.
I stared at him. “How is that any better?”
“She’s going to show the kids how to signal an airplane from water.”
“You’re using Margo to teach Mrs. Madansky a lesson.”
“Which one was Mrs. Madansky?” said Dennis. He walked to the full-length mirror that hung from the back of the closet door. “I look older.”
Dennis had become very focused. He either went on an interview or made phone calls every afternoon. Marse had begged him to interview with her firm, but he’d declined. I’d taken on more hours at the bank. We owed his parents so much money I thought we’d never be able to pay it back.
“You look tired, not older,” I said.
“Same difference,” he said, borrowing an expression from Margo.
He came to bed and laid his head on my thigh. I took off my bifocals. Dennis worried sporadically, in consuming fits, while I worried consistently at a moderate intensity, so it was rare for a new concern to spiral me into full-blown panic. I thought of his advice to Margo about school. “List the things you’re most anxious about,” I said, “and we’ll cross off the last two.”
He paused. “I’m nervous about the possibility of homelessness and poverty.”
“Ours, though? Not generally.”
“Ours, yes.”
“What else?”
“I’m worried that I won’t find a job—”
“You’ll find a job.”
“Assuming I do, there’s no guarantee I’ll like it any better than the last one.” This was true. “And I’m concerned that our daughter doesn’t have any friends.”
Truthfully, in those moments, Dennis did look older. “Anything else?”
“I don’t know.” He didn’t speak for a long moment. “I wonder if maybe Miami isn’t the best place for us.”
I sat up, knocking away his head.
“You’ve never thought about moving?” he said.
“Of course I have.” In fact, I’d thought of it a few times in recent years, as Miami had started to change. I’d noticed that on the bay there were more large flashy powerboats, and on land there were more luxury cars and new houses with security gates and surveillance systems—and I’d heard on the news that there were now more banks per capita in Miami than anywhere else in the country, and more cash in those banks than anywhere else. These seemed signs of something ominous. The summer before, in broad daylight, men in an armored van had pulled up to a liquor store at Dadeland mall and shot up the place, and since then, one could scarcely turn on the the news without hearing about the cocaine cowboys. More than once I’d heard the joke that in Miami one could always find work as a tail gunner on a bread truck. But although we saw the changes happening around us, they barely affected my family. We were insulated by where we lived and the circles we moved in. To this day, I’ve never seen cocaine in real life.
“It’s last on the list,” I said. “Cross it off.”
“Let’s talk about it,” said Dennis.
“We can talk about it, but we’re not going to do it,” I said. “Cross it off. You take the job thing, and I’ll worry about Margo. If you get tired, we can switch.”
Margo and I also negotiated over the next month. It was an unspoken negotiation. She’d taken Dennis’s advice, and Dennis had taken mine, and they seemed to be trudging along with their respective duties—the sixth grade, the job search—without sliding into despair. Meanwhile, I was experiencing a surge of energy: I prepared lavish breakfasts and hemmed old skirts to a more fashionable length. I devoured novels while Dennis made phone calls or Margo studied. I engineered inexpensive weekend activities: the zoo, the science museum, the beach. When I picked Margo up from school, she walked from the gate to my car without speaking to anyone. Weekends, she helped out behind the counter at Bette’s dive shop. We went out on the boat with Grady and Gloria, and Margo sat chewing bubble gum at the stern, flipping through magazines. Marse took her shopping at the outlet mall in Boca Raton, and she came home with a pair of designer sunglasses and sneakers with silver laces. Gloria told her that adjusting to change takes time, and Bette told her that very often other people stink. Soccer season was finished, and Carla’s family had moved away.
Our negotiation was this: if she could avoid becoming terribly unhappy, and she continued talking to Mr. Callahan once a week, then I would not nag her about school and friends and whether her life was improving.
One afternoon, she came to the car after school with Trisha Weintraub in tow. She introduced us and said that Trisha needed a ride, and they climbed into the backseat. I started the car and pulled out of the lot without knowing where I was going. Trisha wore tight blue jeans and a sweatshirt with a wide neck that revealed a flesh-colored bra strap. She usually rode home with her best friend Melanie’s mom, she explained, but that day Melanie had left school early with the flu. Trisha directed me through the gates of CocoPlum to the stucco house with the terra-cotta porch. “See ya,” she said to Margo as she scooted out of the car. “Don’t forget to ask.” She slammed the door.
I waited to drive away until Trisha was inside. I tried to meet Margo’s eyes in the rearview mirror, but she was studying her fingernails. “Ask what?” I said.
“Trisha’s birthday is Saturday. She’s having a sleepover.”
“You can go. What time does it start?”
She shrugged, so I asked about the school day, and then she chatted a little about the softball unit in gym class. We arrived home, and together we walked into the house and found Dennis standing in the kitchen in his boxer shorts, drinking milk from the carton. “Enough,” I said. “You need to find a job.” I was mostly joking.
“Done,” he said, spreading his arms. “I start Monday.”
He’d been hired by a small firm that specialized in immigration and admiralty law. It was law, yes, and there was less money in it than in other areas of practice, but it was a close-knit and casual office, and he believed he could be happy there. Over the years, this would prove true.
We celebrated by going out to an Italian restaurant on Miracle Mile. “Patience is a virtue,” said Dennis, raising his glass. “Right, Margo?”
“I was invited to a sleepover,” she said uncertainly.
“Well done!” said Dennis. We toasted.
That Saturday afternoon, Margo came into the living room, where Dennis was watching basketball and I was reading the newspaper. “Mom,” she said. She gestured for me to get up. I put down the paper and followed her to her bedroom.
“All packed?” I said.
It had been almost a year since Margo had attended a sleepover. She looked miserable. She slumped on her bed, her hands wedged between her knees. Through my mind flashed a memory of her standing on the sidewalk outside Mr. Oxley’s classroom, looking confident and charming, and my gut clenched. “I have a problem,” she said.
I tried to sound capable and maternal. “Let’s try and solve it.”
She looked around the room, avoiding my eyes. I knelt in front of her. “What’s wrong?”
Her arms looped around my neck and her head found my shoulder. I felt the hard chill of an earring on my skin. “Trisha shaves her legs,” she said. “And so does Melanie, but she won’t be there tonight because she’s still sick. Beverly Jovanovich does, too, and Sonia Rodriguez.”
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.
There 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.
Margo 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.
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