Stiltsville

by Susanna Daniel

  “It’s just fine,” said Bette. “Come for a visit. We have a very nice guest room.” She topped off her own glass, then Marse’s and mine. In the time since she’d moved, this was as much as she’d revealed to any of us: Santa Fe was fine, the house was fine, Suzanne was fine. It had been rough for Suzanne to break into the real estate business, but things had been picking up. They took long walks in the dry heat with their dog. I scrutinized each conversation for some hint that she might move back but didn’t find one. She did not seem overjoyed with her new life, but she did seem settled.

  “Do you miss home?” I said to her.

  She squinted, as if considering the question. “You know what I don’t miss? Dating.”

  “I can imagine,” said Marse.

  “Do you miss us?” I said.

  “What a silly question,” Bette said. For a moment no one spoke and I wondered, ever so briefly, if it was silly at all. Then she said, “It’s like I moved away from my heart,” and I had to turn away.

  When I’d composed myself, I stood up and started toward the door—it was time to lend Margo a hand—but then I turned back. My two friends looked at me, Bette in her suit and Marse in her low-cut dress. Their faces were as familiar to me as my own. I said, “Maybe it will be just fine.”

  “It just might be,” said Bette.

  “She has good role models,” said Marse. “It makes a difference.”

  “Thank you for saying that,” I said.

  That evening, I accepted the good wishes of our friends with a bright smile, and was surprised to feel a swell of optimism as Margo said her vows. Of course I hoped for her sake that the marriage would last, but I also hoped something more personal—more selfish, I should say: that Margo would come, through marriage, to understand Dennis and me in ways she never had before. I hoped Margo would learn that the cement of a marriage never really dries, and she would apply that understanding to her parents, and value the work we’d done to survive.

  The city of Coral Gables had closed the canal to private traffic—we’d found neon notices stuck to the front door and the boat console—so we’d resigned ourselves to not knowing the fate of Stiltsville until the canal cleared or the telephones worked. Several times a day, helicopters beat overhead and a marine patrol boat cruised by the house, dragging a net glutted with debris.

  “They’re looking for something,” said Dennis about the marine patrol. We were in the backyard, taking an ax to Mr. Costakis’s royal palm. Dennis was clumsy with the ax; he had a hard time hitting the same spot twice.

  “They’re cleaning up,” I said.

  The cruiser puttered away. “No,” he said. “They’re searching.”

  “For what?”

  “What else?” said Dennis. “A person.”

  This seemed unlikely to me. I took the ax from Dennis and hoisted it over my shoulder. “Here comes that dark side of yours,” I said. I brought down the ax.

  “I’m tired,” said Dennis. His shoulders sagged and his face was red. He sat down suddenly—or did he fall? I replay it in my mind, the slow bend of his knees, the arm reaching out.

  “What’s wrong?” I said.

  “Nothing. Just the heat.”

  I crouched beside him, surrounded by a dozen chunks of royal palm. “This is not our job,” I said, meaning Mr. Costakis’s tree.

  “That doesn’t matter.” He stared at his shoes, then looked up at the canal. “If the stilt house is gone, I don’t want to rebuild.”

  “Why not?”

  “All that work, just for a few more years—doesn’t it make you tired?”

  “Are we getting old?”

  “No way.” He stood. “Spring chicks.” But his steps toward the swimming pool were sluggish and wooden.

  Businesses were closed, including Dennis’s firm. Grady and Gloria had fled to Vero Beach to stay with friends. There had been looting—we saw footage on the portable television—and a curfew was in effect for all of Dade County. We stayed home, playing cards and taking walks and living off food we’d stockpiled: deli meat and eggs and fruit and bottled water, all nestled in squat white coolers. Every day, the National Guard passed through our neighborhood, heading south. We raised hands to them as they passed. Down in Homestead, the Red Cross built a tent city for the newly homeless. Our neighborhood felt to me like an island refuge—like Stiltsville, in a way—isolated from a continent of disaster and disaster relief. Our block buzzed with people working in their yards, grateful that their troubles were limited to landscaping, broken windows, a few irksome leaks. Marse stopped by once or twice when she could manage it. She lived in a condo on Biscayne Boulevard downtown, and in her neighborhood the phones were working and the roads had been cleared, but the lobby of her building had been transformed into a command station for the National Guard. Every morning, she spent an hour helping them field calls.

  A marine patrolman knocked on the back door a week after the hurricane. It was early, and Margo and Stuart were asleep. The patrolman apologized for disturbing us and said he was opening the canal to traffic. Dennis invited him in. “Did you find anything?” he said.

  “Still looking,” said the man.

  I could tell by the way they spoke that they’d met. Probably out back, when Dennis was working in the yard. They shook hands and Dennis closed the door.

  “What was that about?” I said.

  Dennis looked at me.

  “What?” I said.

  “Let’s take the boat out now. Let’s get it over with.”

  “Is that what you want?” I said.

  Dennis stared out the window, then nodded. “I’ll get the kids,” he said.

  I stood in the hallway as Dennis knocked on Margo’s bedroom door. “Rise and shine,” he said loudly. In the kitchen, with the patrolman, I hadn’t been shy about my prebreakfast ensemble—one of Dennis’s old button-downs and slippers—but in the hallway, I felt exposed. Around Margo alone, I’d always been casual. Too casual, perhaps—she was constantly telling me to button the next higher button or tighten the cord on my bathrobe. I wanted to dash to my dresser and pull on a pair of shorts, but Margo’s bed creaked and feet slapped the floor, and the door opened. There stood Stuart, rubbing his face. “Morning,” he said, a throaty croak.

  Behind him, Margo shifted under the bedsheets, revealing the pale underside of her upper arm. Dennis faced away from the doorway. “Swimsuits,” he said.

  “Pardon?” said Stuart.

  It was a game Dennis and Margo played: she had to guess a destination from a list of clues. Margo usually resisted playing, but it was the kind of game in which one automatically participates; even as she declined to answer aloud, her mind took guesses. In a sleepy voice, she said, “Where are we going?”

  “Swimsuits and towels,” said Dennis.

  Stuart went to a duffel bag and pulled out a pair of blue swim trunks. “Swimsuit, check,” he said to Dennis. To me, he said, “Towels?”

  “In the laundry room,” I said.

  “Towels in the laundry room,” said Stuart. “Check.”

  Margo stirred until we could see her face. “Just tell us where we’re going,” she said.

  We looked at her—me over Dennis’s shoulder and Dennis over Stuart’s and Stuart over his own. I felt a chill pass through my husband as he realized she was naked beneath the sheets. It is one thing to hide from one’s child the indignities of middle age, the sagging and emissions and diminished libido and hot flashes. But for a parent to witness a grown child’s sexuality—how were we meant to respond? Dennis kept his eyes on Stuart. “Sunscreen,” he said.

  Stuart turned and scanned the room, then took a bottle of lotion from the dresser. “Sunscreen, check,” he said. It was just right, this playing-along. But I confess that every time I felt myself warm to Stuart, the impulse fled as soon as I recognized it.

  “The beach,” guessed Margo.

  “You’re warm,” Dennis said.

  “What else?” said Stuart.

  “Su
nglasses,” Dennis said. “Snorkeling gear.”

  Margo sat up, clutching the sheet to her chest, and Dennis shifted backward. “The boat?” she said. Her hair was a mess. She was lovely. “Really?”

  “We leave in fifteen minutes,” said Dennis.

  We shut ourselves inside our bedroom. I took off my shirt, feeling the muggy air on my breasts. Dennis stepped into shorts and eased his hands into the pockets. He was lean and tan from a summer of half days at the office, afternoons spent jogging or boating. Before the wedding, we’d spent a long weekend at Stiltsville, and he’d worked out an exercise routine in which we swam laps around the house in the morning, then stretched and did sit-ups on the dock in the evening. He liked activity and goals—this was the same man who used to swim to the Becks’ house and back when he could have used the boat—whereas I was content to lie in the hammock on the porch, reading or watching the sky darken over the skyline. “This is strange,” he said.

  I thought of Stiltsville, likely gone, and Margo, married. “I know,” I said. “I can hardly think.”

  He looked at me. “What? I’m talking about this.” He motioned to his chest. He wore a Hawaiian shirt with the buttons undone.

  “What is it?” I said, but then I saw: he was trying to button his shirt, but the fingers of his left hand trembled. “Oh, baby,” I said. “Let me.” I buttoned his shirt and pressed myself to his chest. His heart beat against my forehead. “It will be OK.”

  The boat engines sputtered and smoked when they started. I handled the lines, and Stuart and Margo perched at the bow, their legs dangling over the water. Our wake lapped at the low stone walls that edged the waterway, where an occasional heron stood blinking at us, unperturbed. We cleared the mouth of the canal and the bay unfurled. Normally, Dennis would accelerate beyond the channel markers, but today he downshifted into neutral and we stood facing the miniature boxes that dotted the horizon. Our stilt house had stood seventh from the right. We counted under our breath: one, two, three houses remained, all west of where ours had been. The house was gone. From a distance, the breach seemed neat and deliberate, as if God had plucked our stilt house from its stem. I could only imagine how violent the destruction had been, and ached to think of it as I’d ached to think of Margo being teased or scratched when she was a child. Warm, wet winds ricocheting through our kitchen, living room, bedrooms. Floors buckling and mirrors fracturing into shards.

  Dennis brought down a palm on the console, sounding a hollow thud. “Goddamn it,” he said.

  “Dad?” Margo started toward him, but he held out a hand.

  “Sit down,” he said. “We’re moving.” He shifted the boat into gear. I held on to my visor and turned away from Stiltsville, then watched the shore recede. To the east, the Cape Florida lighthouse stood at the tip of Key Biscayne, the sole structure on a beach darkened with debris. I imagined pieces of our stilt house stranded there—shutters or dock planks or even the hurricane tracking map that had hung in the kitchen, its little red and blue magnets scattered across the bay floor.

  The boat slowed as we entered the channel. We passed one of the remaining stilt houses and waved to a man who stood on a ladder on the dock, boarding up a window. He raised one arm, a lonesome hello. Two other houses were missing dock planks and sections of roof. We passed slowly by, wayfarers through a ghost town.

  Dennis had steered his way to that plot of watery land a thousand times. He could have done it blind. When he cut the engines, the boat drifted to a stop in front of four pilings that rose, slanting, from the water, no dock between them and no house behind. Dennis looped the bowline around a piling and I stood beside him at the starboard gunwale, staring into the sunlit water. I could see a few girders and joists embedded in the sand and some planks of wood, and that was about it.

  Eighty yards east, where the Becks’ house had stood, there was a dock but no house. To the west, our hermit neighbor’s house had vanished entirely. My mind rested on the hermit: Where had he gone? Had someone entreated him inland? Dennis leaned over the gunwale and knocked on a piling. He turned to Margo. “Your grandfather built that house,” he said. His voice shook. “These pilings are buried fifteen feet into the bedrock.” He pushed against one and the boat carried us away, then jerked on its line.

  When Margo was six, she’d sneaked down the stilt house stairs and slipped off the dock. Dennis had heard her cry out and jumped from the porch into the water, then swam frantically until she was in his arms. I wondered if she remembered. Once she was old enough to drive the boat, she’d spent time at the stilt house without Dennis and me; probably it was those days she remembered instead, friends and boys and sunshine. “I’m getting in the water,” said Margo. She retrieved a snorkel and mask for herself and one of each for Dennis, but when she handed them over, he just put them down. I felt his sadness blanketing my own, and it was difficult to breathe.

  “There’s nothing to look at down there.” To me, he said, “What’s for lunch?”

  “Egg salad sandwiches,” I said.

  “How do we know until we look?” said Margo. She stepped onto the bow and untied the drawstring of her shorts, then kicked the shorts to the deck. She stood in her turquoise two-piece, our colorful and curvaceous bowsprit, then stepped over the railing and dove into the water.

  “You should go,” I said to Dennis.

  “I’m hungry.”

  “Me, too,” said Stuart.

  “Eat later,” I said. “Go.”

  Margo swam beyond the pilings and over the scattered debris. Her snorkel branched into the air and her rump crested the surface; she kicked her pale heels. I handed Dennis the mask and he put it on and sat on the transom, the snorkel dangling.

  “What are you waiting for?” I said.

  He shrugged.

  I thought of him teaching Margo to ski, to ride a bike. “Want me to push you?”

  “Not really.”

  Stuart spoke up. “Want me to go with you?”

  “Sure,” Dennis said.

  There was a mask for Stuart but no snorkel. The men sat side by side on the gunwale, then counted to three and pushed off. I opened a diet soda and watched them swim. Margo and Dennis kept their heads down as they kicked around, but Stuart kept righting himself to breathe. Once when he came up for air, he called out, “Frances.”

  I looked up. “What?”

  He lifted a hand and waved. “Come in.”

  I shook my head.

  “Why not?”

  “I’m fixing lunch,” I yelled, though I was finished.

  “Spooky down here,” he called, then lowered his face to the water. I didn’t want to go in—someone needed to stay on the boat, near the life preservers—but I gleaned a certain satisfaction from the invitation. I lay on the gunwale, a boat fender my pillow. The sky was vast and blue, and the site felt lonely and remote. It was a treasure, this sense of isolation. How would we achieve it, if we didn’t rebuild? Many of our friends had bought cabins in the Carolinas, but we didn’t have the money for that, and it wasn’t the same. Over the years, Grady and Gloria had used the house less and less, and rarely stayed overnight; the decision about what to do now would be up to us.

  Dennis hauled himself onto the transom, arms shaking with exertion. I brought him a towel and we sat at the stern, eating halves of the same sandwich. “I think we should rebuild,” I said.

  He looked at me. “We’ve got ten percent of what we’d need here, at the most.” He stared down the channel, toward the houses that remained. “Let’s let it go. Can we let go?”

  It would be only five years before our lease ran out, permanently, no matter what we did. And Dennis had never seemed so certain to me, or so weary, so I didn’t argue. Margo and Stuart climbed aboard, and after we were done eating, we made our way back down the empty channel.

  Stuart came downstairs one morning while I was drinking my coffee at the kitchen counter. He said, “Margo would sleep until noon if I let her,” and I said, “Since she was a teenager.”
He filled a mug from the carafe and stirred in creamer. The spoon clinked against the sides of the mug. Dennis was in the backyard, shoveling my rose plants—dead, every one of them—into a wheelbarrow. When he bent at the waist, I could see the faint, ridged trail of his spinal column under his T-shirt. Come here, I wanted to say. I wanted to say it all the time, whenever he was more than a room’s width away from me. Come here, sit down.

  “Is Dennis OK?” said Stuart. “He seems tired.”

  “He is. We all are.”

  Stuart nodded. “The house on the water meant a lot to him. To you, too, I imagine.”

  “Memories,” I said. I thought of telling him that when Margo was ten she’d spent an entire weekend lying in the stilt house hammock, reading The Grapes of Wrath from start to finish. Then, during a storm that had rattled the shutters and left foamy puddles on the porch, she’d written her book report at the kitchen table. Years later, she and Beverly had spent the afternoon slinging water balloons at a sailboat from the upstairs porch. You should have seen it, I wanted to say to Stuart, how the balloon punched the sail—thwack—leaving a wrinkle that filled with breeze, causing the boat to heel. You should have seen how the balloon slipped down the fabric and burst on the deck, and the captain hollered and the girls ducked into the house, leaving Dennis to gesture apologies. You should have been around a few years later, I wanted to tell him, when Margo and Dennis took up studying survival tactics. They’d quote to each other from camping manuals and field guides: “You can tell a manta ray from two sharks swimming side by side because the ray’s fins will submerge at the same time,” she’d read to him. Then, he’d read to her. “To survive one must overcome the need for comfort and maintain the will to live.” Once, she and Dennis had spent an entire evening on the stilt house porch discussing what to do when lost at sea, how to tell which fish are poisonous and how to catch and kill the ones that aren’t, how to bail the boat and check the wind.

  Oh, let her tell him, I thought.

  The night before, in bed, Dennis had remarked that Stuart seemed more self-confident than most short men. The comment struck me as both sensitive and callous—Dennis was tall, and so it seemed indelicate of him to comment on another man’s stature—and I wondered if Dennis was as good a sport as he seemed. We spoke regularly but obliquely of Stuart, the way we would come to speak of the hurricane: by listing each feature, struggling toward perspective. It continued to unsettle me that my daughter had become engaged to a man I’d never met. Did Margo not consider my opinion worth gathering? My mother had met Dennis during our courtship; I hadn’t asked for her blessing, exactly, but I had given her the opportunity to speak her mind. I worried not only that Margo did not want to hear what I had to say on the subject, but that she simply didn’t care. This wasn’t Stuart’s fault, of course, but it felt like it was.