When I got home, Dennis and Margo were on the front steps, drinking orange juice out of the carton. They looked windblown and relaxed. “How was it?” said Margo.
“Like riding a bike,” I said as I went up the steps past them.
Margo’s things took up the trunk and half the backseat, and she wanted to drive, so I spent the trip wedged in back beside a portable television and a box of framed photos. Margo turned the air conditioner on high, but it was a tiny trickle in the heat. The turnpike offered a bleached, changeless journey unbroken into parts. Almost every billboard we passed advertised a men’s club called Café Risqué. I’d heard somewhere of girls stripping to put themselves through college and wondered how many university students worked there. “Margo,” I said. I tapped her shoulder until she turned to face me. “If you need money, just ask us. We’ll give it to you. Don’t strip for it.”
This was very amusing to both Dennis and Margo, and once they started laughing they couldn’t stop, so I settled back in my seat, thinking: they don’t realize what can happen. I had the feeling that very soon there would be a tear in the fabric of my life, an enormous divide. On one side would be the time I moved through and things I did and the people I saw, and on the other side would be a great expanse of black time where Margo lived her life, and she and I would move parallel to each other like cars in different lanes, allowing only passing glimpses. I had to remind myself that, strangely enough, this was the way it was meant to go. They grow up, they move away.
It was still hot but the sun had waned as we navigated through campus to the dated, boxy Rawlings Hall, where Margo would live for the summer semester with a roommate assigned by the university. We parked and Dennis and Margo headed toward an entrance, but I stayed behind. There were two other cars in the drive, both open with boxes and bags inside. When Dennis and Margo came out of the building, blinking in the sunlight, Dennis handed me paperwork. “Room 105,” he said. “First floor—only one flight of stairs.”
“No elevator?” I said.
“No elevator, no air-conditioning.”
“That’s not possible,” I said. My blouse stuck to my back.
Dennis and Margo exchanged a look. “We will not melt,” said Margo.
Her room was divided symmetrically, and the two sides looked like before-and-after photos: one side was bare, with a thin mattress on a metal bed frame and an empty desk and gaping dark closet. The other side looked as if it had been staged for a photo shoot: the bed was covered with a pink plaid duvet and white dust ruffle—it hadn’t occurred to me to buy Margo a dust ruffle—and there was a neat stack of glossy textbooks on the desk. I opened a box and started to unpack, and Dennis and Margo shuffled out to get another batch of things from the car. Margo’s new twin-size comforter, a gift from Gloria, was sky blue with white clouds on it. I made the bed with great precision, thinking it might be a long time before Margo had neatly pressed sheets again. If this is all I do, I’ll do it right, I thought. Dennis and Margo came back and left again, and I dug through the boxes until I found a bright red-and-pink tapestry Margo had packed; I spread it over the desk and placed a notebook on top of it. I put a handful of pens in a ceramic mug with the logo of Margo’s old camp on it. I unrolled Margo’s SAVE THE MANATEES poster and when she came back upstairs asked her where she wanted it.
She gestured toward the bare wall above the desk and looked around, at the neatly made bed and the colorful desk. “I like that,” she said quietly.
I taped the corners of the poster to the wall. “Does this look straight?” I said, but when I looked over my shoulder she was looking away, at the other side of the room, the anonymous side, and she didn’t answer.
Dennis lay on the bed while we futzed. Margo lined up her shoes—sneakers and flip-flops, primarily—at the bottom of her closet. There was a knock at Margo’s door, and when I turned around, there stood a boy about Margo’s height, completely bald, with large blue eyes and a wide, expressive mouth. He wore a T-shirt covered with streaks of paint. “Margo, is it?” he said, reaching out to shake her hand. He introduced himself as Joshua, her resident adviser. He explained where his room was located and invited Margo to call on him if she needed anything.
“Alopecia,” said Dennis after Joshua had left.
“I think that’s just the style,” I said.
“No, that’s alopecia, I can tell,” said Dennis, and Margo shushed us.
Dennis had gotten the name of a fish place just outside town, so we got back into the car to go for dinner. This was something he did—he tracked down hole-in-the-wall restaurants and planned ahead to visit them when traveling, and sometimes he bought their T-shirts. Afterward, when we dropped Margo off at her dorm, the light was on in her room, and the next day at breakfast, she told us about her roommate, Diana. Diana was from Chipley, a town in the Panhandle that I’d never heard of. Since Diana hadn’t brought a stereo and Margo hadn’t brought a hair dryer, they’d agreed to share. I could tell by Margo’s description that they wouldn’t be friends but they would get along. After breakfast we crossed a main quad dotted with date palms and bicycle racks and half-clothed girls tanning on blankets, and we toured the gym, which was humid and busy with kids who seemed, for the most part, very serious about the business of getting fit. Outside, there was an empty track. I mentioned that I hoped Margo would run in this bright, public spot instead of along back streets.
“Mother, you worry too much,” she said.
“That’s true, babe,” said Dennis.
We continued on to the student union, a clean, chilly place peppered with egglike orange chairs and recycling bins. We were stalled by an enthusiastic young man at the summer orientation table; he gave Margo a packet and led her through it piece by piece. When she told him she was a transfer student, he rushed her away to get a student ID, and Dennis and I sat down in the orange chairs. Lack of enthusiasm for sports was not, I gathered, common at the University of Florida. Everywhere I turned I saw a cartoonish orange alligator emblazoned on a T-shirt, a sign, a duffel bag. Dennis read from a brochure, then looked at me. “This is the ninth-largest school in the country,” he said.
“She’ll be swallowed whole,” I said.
Margo returned and we left the air-conditioning to wander through campus. Gainesville, I realized with difficulty, would become Margo’s home, filled with places she liked to go hiking and neighborhoods she preferred over other neighborhoods. We walked her up to her room and lingered at the door. Diana was out. Dennis kept it light. “You can still hightail it home with us, pronto,” he said. “We’ll flatten that bald boy if he tries to stop us.” Margo laughed and remained, for that moment, clear-eyed.
“Wait here,” I said, and slipped past them into the room. I fished in my purse for the freezer bag of confetti and sprinkled a bit on Margo’s bedspread, and a little more on her desk. Then I stepped out and told her I was proud of her and hugged her good-bye. I kept my tears in the back of my throat, and on the long drive home Dennis and I tried to make conversation, but it didn’t come. The car felt so empty that when we spoke I almost expected to hear an echo.
After we returned from Gainesville, I fell into a routine of driving over to the Biltmore most evenings after supper to hit against the backboard. This was in addition to twice-weekly practices and a match every other weekend. To my surprise, I did not find reasons not to go to practice—in fact, I stayed late more often than not to hit with other members of the team. Also to my surprise, I quickly became a better player. The games I played took on an air of serious competition—I was truly heartened when I won, truly disheartened when I was defeated. I lost ten pounds. My legs took on a firmer shape, and all that time outdoors gave me a deep tan, with sock lines. Every so often when I missed a shot that I should have made, I cursed under my breath. “Easy,” Jack would say. “Next time, Frances.”
Another player who took the team seriously was Jane. After only a few practices in, as I watched her lunge for a shot near the net and grimace when s
he didn’t make it, I realized how I knew her. She had aged, and her hair was shorter with more prominent streaks of gray, but Jane was Bette’s ex-girlfriend—her first girlfriend, the one with whom she had gone diving all those years before. Jane had been married then, but now she wore no wedding ring. She wore almost no jewelry at all, only small gold posts in her ears. There was something distinguished about her features, something noble. I could see, vaguely, what had attracted Bette.
“You’ll never guess who plays tennis with me,” I said to Dennis one evening when we were getting ready for bed. But when I told him, he didn’t remember Jane. At that time, Suzanne was living in Bette’s house in Coconut Grove. They’d found an abandoned black lab puppy and were devoted to him; every night they took him for a three-mile walk. Bette had sold her dive shop to a franchise and spent her days sailing or tending her backyard. When Dennis and I visited, they served curry and good wine. They listened to folk music I knew I’d like if only I knew more about it. They had season tickets to the opera. Suzanne was a real estate agent and drove a Porsche and wore fine, draping tunics and wide-legged pants. They spoke German together—Suzanne’s father had been in the service and her family had lived briefly in Hamburg—and Bette had taught Suzanne to scuba-dive.
Jane tended to outplay the rest of the team, along with Rodrigo. His wife, Twyla, was one of three women on the team who knew each other socially, all of whom were a little on the bawdy side and very pretty in the blond, well-coiffed way of many Coral Gables women. They wore tennis skirts with grosgrain ribbon waistbands and matching tops. One morning they passed me on the stairs as I went up to the lounge for an iced tea—I knew they liked to congregate there after practice, usually with mimosas—and Twyla said, “Oops, it’s the teacher’s pet,” and sidestepped to let me pass.
“Ha,” I said. “Hardly.”
Jack was sitting in a leather club chair by the windows; I sat next to him with my iced tea. “You’re hustling out there,” he said. He clicked his glass against mine. It wasn’t the first time he’d let me know I was doing well. That morning, in fact, I’d gotten several points off Jane, though she’d mentioned afterward that she’d been up late with her sick cat. Jack gestured toward my racket. “You need an upgrade,” he said. “It’s time, Frances.”
I’d mentioned to Dennis that I needed a new racket, and he’d told me to go ahead and buy one, for goodness’ sake—he didn’t like it when I pinched pennies—but I’d been holding off. Jack took my racket and pressed his palm against the strings. Physically, there was much about him that reminded me of Dennis: the scattered gray in his hair, the freckles on his arms, the light-colored eyes. But Jack was larger in size, broader and taller, and his hair was black. His eyes were a little close-set. He crossed his legs when he sat down, which was a move with just enough femininity to enhance his masculinity. When he did this—as when he put his hand flat against my back while I was serving, or when he stood at the sidelines with his sunglasses on and his clipboard against his chest, watching me and interjecting a coaching point every so often—I felt a distinct longing.
“I know,” I said to Jack, and took my racket back.
“Tell you what,” he said. “Why don’t you try out a few? See what you like, and I’ll buy it here with my discount.”
My face got hot. “I can’t let you do that.”
“Don’t be so sensitive, Frances.”
I was caught off guard. It was an intimate thing to say, and his tone was disarming. I thought of my clothes—there was nothing wrong with them, nothing shoddy. In fact, my clean white tennis skirts were both new, and I’d been wearing the diamond earrings Dennis had given me on our fifteenth anniversary, because they stayed out of the way and looked sporty when I had my hair pulled back. I thought also of my car, which was in good shape, the better of our two. “Of course you’re right,” I said, gathering my things to leave. Jack stood, too, and we walked out together.
“Well,” I said as we walked. “What do you recommend?”
“You should try out a few, see what suits you.”
“They’ll let me do that?”
“They have to. Everyone’s different. Spend some time with each. Don’t forget to show your left shoulder on your forehand.”
“I’ll try to get to it this week,” I said.
“Why don’t I go with you?”
We reached my car and I opened the door. “I’ll be fine,” I said. “Really, I’ll get a new racket. I promise.” I slid into the driver’s seat, and when I did my skirt pulled high on my thighs—thighs that had, along with my waistline, tightened a bit in the past weeks. He stood in the door with his hand on the hood. I caught a whiff of his scent—sweaty but clean, with a ghost of the cologne he’d applied that morning. “Frances—”
“No, you’re absolutely right,” I said. It had been years since I’d blushed, and now it seemed I couldn’t stop. I looked at my watch without registering the time.
“You don’t want company? I’m a professional.”
I shook my head. “I’ll figure it out.”
He shut my door and leaned down to talk through the window. “I know I’m pushy,” he said.
“You are pushy,” I said. “I needed a push.”
He stepped away, and I sat still for a moment. In my peripheral vision Jack walked across the parking lot toward the tennis center, and his figure diminishing in the distance had the power of a person standing squarely in my vision, staring me straight on. That night after dinner, I brought three rented rackets back to the Biltmore to hit against the backboard, and within half an hour had decided which one I would buy.
Margo came home for July Fourth weekend, and we went to Stiltsville to watch the fireworks over the skyline. From the porch we could see several small pockets of them sweeping from downtown to the Everglades. When Dennis stepped inside for a moment, Margo turned to me. “I have a request,” she said. In the reflection of her eyes, tiny blooms of red and white light burst and fell. Her hair was damp and kinky from the saltwater and she smelled of coconut oil.
Her request was this: when the fall semester started, she wanted to move out of the dorms and into an apartment complex off campus. “It’s only a couple of blocks away,” she said. “It’s practically student housing—they pair you up if you don’t have a roommate.”
“What’s the rent?” I said.
“It’s about the same.”
Dennis returned to the porch and sat in the rocking chair between me and Margo. “Margo wants to live off campus,” I said.
“What’s this?” he said.
“It’s not so different from the dorms,” she said. “Except I’d have a kitchen and no adviser.”
“How is Joshua?” I said.
“He’s fine.” She touched her cheek. “I went out with him.”
“Alopecia?” said Dennis.
“Yes, Dad. We saw a play. His friend was in it.”
“Are you going to see him again?” I said.
“No.”
It was clear to me that this was disappointing.
“Why not?” said Dennis. “Is it because of his hair?”
“Of course not,” she said. “I think he’s cute.”
“Then why not?”
Margo started to speak, then stopped. The bursting of the fireworks reached us in waves, a second after their lights had started to fade. “Because he doesn’t like me,” she said.
Dennis waved a hand. “Other fish. Where did this apartment idea come from?”
I assumed the two topics were at least loosely linked, but Dennis didn’t need to know that.
“I know some people who live there,” she said.
“You wouldn’t need a car?” said Dennis.
Margo shook her head. “Tons of people do it. Especially upperclassmen. There’s not enough room in the dorms for everyone.”
“But it’s only your first year away from home,” I said. “Can’t this wait?”
Margo ignored me and explained the costs:
the rent was a little more expensive, but she wouldn’t have to buy the university’s meal plan, which would make up the difference.
“You’ll cook?” said Dennis.
“Sure,” said Margo. She had never cooked much, but I didn’t see any reason why she couldn’t start.
“We’ll think about it,” said Dennis. “And sweetheart, don’t worry about the boy.”
Kathleen Beck’s twin daughters attended the University of Florida. I had the notion that I might call Kathleen—whose husband, Marcus, had recently left her for his high school sweetheart—and ask her if she’d heard anything about living off campus, or about the apartments where Margo wanted to live. Margo went inside to brush her teeth and Dennis and I ferried the mattresses from the bunk room to the porch, and while I was tucking the sheets under the corners, fighting a bit with the rising wind, Dennis said, “I’m not inclined to go along on this one.”
I remember it so clearly, with an ache in my gut: he was not inclined. And because I was the mother, I felt the nudge to fill in for her. I said, “The dorms don’t really seem to suit her.”
“Who knows what suits her?” he said. He was exasperated. No matter what we provided for Margo, it seemed, there was always something more she wanted. Kathleen Beck would be no help: her daughters were willowy, complacent things. He said, “It just seems like I’m constantly having to shift my expectations.”
“Parenthood,” I said. “If you don’t want her to do it, then she won’t.”
“It’s fine,” he said. “If you think it’s fine, it’s fine.”
“I think it’s probably fine,” I said, and when Margo returned to the porch, I shuffled away to the mattress nearest the outside railing and Dennis went inside to sleep in the big bedroom. The water beneath us slapped against the pilings. I asked Margo to remind me of the name of the apartment building where she wanted to live. She answered: Williamsburg Village Apartments. I remember thinking that this was a bland, nondescript name that I would likely forget. Moreover, I did forget, and a month later when she moved in (without us, with the assistance of a friend who owned a truck) I asked for the name again. And every time I forwarded mail or addressed an envelope for Dennis, who had a habit of cutting out newspaper articles and sending them to her with a greeting scribbled along one side, I had to work to recall it.
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