I would worship in the temple of your body / With the lights on?
Every. Single. Time.
After some minutes, Frankie stood, went back to Margot’s room, and put the tattered note back into the tattered pocket. She added the jeans to the dirty clothes in the basket, set the cycle, left it all in the wash.
The girls sat on the edge of the fountain. During school, kids called Margot and Marissa M&M, which they accepted without complaint, neither admitting the small relief in having even this dumb rationale for being constantly confused for the other. Marissa kept watch, and Margot propped herself back on one arm, occasionally dipping her free hand into the cool, dirty water. The coins winked up at her through the slow ripple, silver and bronze and moss. At every lull in pedestrians, she sank her hand to the bottom, fingers scrabbling against mildew-slick tile, and swiped up a handful of them. She kept only the quarters. The girls chatted while they fished.
You and Drew make up yet? / Forget him. I’ve moved on. And Margot had. She had realized early on that evidence of her own desirability was almost all she needed to be turned on, and when Drew had figured it out, she’d lost it to him earlier that year, after they’d hit the one-month mark. But she wasn’t sentimental. She knew what they’d had was common, and men had been looking at Margot since she was six years old, so she could recognize it when she saw it. There was always someone else. Sometimes, someone better.
Arm in arm, their pockets jangling, the girls strolled to the ice cream shop and bought two giant waffle cones, one blueberry cheesecake and the other strawberry. The parlor boy, dull-eyed and monosyllabic, didn’t comment on the wet change or its chlorine smell. He made minimum wage, gave free cones to his friends and girls he thought might date him; they weren’t the first to exchange fountain money for goods and services. Marissa ate her cone guiltily, wolfing it down to make the evidence disappear, but Margot relished hers, eating with a spoon, letting the ice cream melt on her tongue.
After her father had left, leaning over her bed to kiss her good-bye as if she were a child, Margot decided she would no longer feel sorry for anything. He coming back? Marissa had asked when Margot described the scene. Probably. She didn’t think they’d get divorced; that wasn’t her father’s style. He liked to demonstrate, to make examples. Margot thought he was just punishing Frankie, not so much for the betrayal itself as for his own limited imagination that she could betray him. I hope he doesn’t, she’d said, and at the time had meant it.
She was punishing Frankie, too, but not for what her mother thought. Margot didn’t care about the local gossip, the word infidelity traded among the old neighbor ladies like it was foreign currency, like their own husbands hadn’t been creeping around on them since just after the marriage certificate was signed. Like they’d never thought about stepping out themselves. They gathered to pierce Frankie with their eyes whenever they could—another’s shame being the truest spectator sport—and wonder aloud how a woman getting so large in the middle could keep a first man, let alone catch a second. “That poor child,” they’d whispered loud enough for Margot to hear, “living in a broken home.” She didn’t care about that either.
Margot was mad because her mother had chickened out, hadn’t actually slept with the other man, and because Frankie had told her husband about the little that had happened when no one would otherwise have known. Her mother had let herself be shamed, like a bad pet, her eyes cast down in response to the neighbors’ satisfied viciousness, and now she followed after Margot constantly, ready to lick the floor beneath her feet. Despite her new vow, it was hardest not to feel sorry for Frankie, but Margot was getting better at it. After all, her mother had done this to herself.
She remembered, once, when Frankie made them squid ink pasta during one of her wistful moods, going to five different markets for the ingredients, spending hours in the kitchen, steam curling her hair, the pots and pans heaped gluey in the sink. As they sat down to dinner, her father accepted his plate in silence, then made a comment he must have felt confident he could pass off as light: “Wouldn’t it have been easier to make a salad?” Her mother had not replied, but left half her plate unfinished. Margot had been disgusted with her father, and with Frankie for allowing it. Disgusted with herself because she sometimes agreed with him.
In all of this, Margot was mostly mad that her mother had wanted something and didn’t take it, and the consequences were the same.
Could this happen to her one day, some man make her small inside her own body? Margot posed the question to Marissa, who remained tight-lipped on the subject of Frankie. They had made it a fast rule not to talk about each other’s mothers, only listen. This mandate would serve them well, rewarding each girl with the other’s loyalty long after their high school years. Margot finished her cone, and Marissa said, kindly and with knowing, Enough moping.
They browsed the stores, trying on outfits they knew they wouldn’t buy, fingering the cheap fabrics with reverence for who they could become once wearing them. Margot left clothes in heaps in the corners of the dressing rooms, all off their hangers and twisted inside out. In one well-lit stall, she ignored the plastic sign that proclaimed all garments must be tried on over underwear, and pulled on a teal leopard-print thong. She strutted around the small space, a distance of two long-legged strides, in just the underwear and a beauty pageant smile. She twirled in place until she thunked down, dizzy, among the crocheted halters, denim cutoffs, and hippie skirts like white wilted flowers. She was of that special age where she knew both nothing and everything, and no matter where or at whom she looked, she saw her own reflection glimmering back like a skim of oil. She could be anyone, still.
Margot pressed the fabric hard between her legs so that some of herself remained, then peeled the underwear off and dressed, and, once outside, threw them back into the plastic bin with the rest of the animal skins—the tigers, the giraffes, the diamond-backed boas. She bought a bracelet that resembled a Slinky and a dollar lip gloss in a small, clear tube. Cupcake, it was called, and went on wet and pink. At the food court, Margot stuffed herself so that later that night, the two of them alone, she could push her mother’s meal around the plate.
After she called Frankie to pick them up and Marissa went to the bathroom to pee and change her tampon, Margot leaned against the bank of pay phones and stuck her hands deep into her pockets, trying to look unbothered and attractively aloof. She knew a girl was vulnerable alone. The stolen quarters tapped against her fingers. She had two left, enough for one more call.
She inserted the coins into the slot and dialed the number she had looked up in the phone book and memorized lying on her bed one slow Saturday night. On the third ring, the wife answered, her voice like a slant of light, full of dust and gorgeous for it. “Hello?” the wife said, and Margot, as usual, said nothing, only held the phone tightly against her ear to catch the woman’s breathing and imagine the blue-white beginnings of her teeth. Each tick of silence before the inevitable dial tone was almost a religious experience, confirming to Margot that she herself existed, and afterward, once she’d hung up, a soft yowling place inside of her would quiet.
The spring heat swelled and shimmered, conjuring all manner of kindred sticky things—lemonade, pine sap, swarms of early gnats. Female arachnids spread huge in the bushes, waiting for prey or for mates that might fulfill both needs. Mother and daughter caged around each other, and Frankie found herself listening in on Margot’s calls: someone on Senior Yearbook Committee was “a little bitch”; the latest boyfriend was the newest ex; Margot’s AP English teacher kept apple snails named for the three Musketeers; she wished she had bigger breasts and slimmer thighs; her father promised to come home soon. Information revealed itself to Frankie in slow, sure ways. But it was never the specific thing Frankie wanted to know.
In the weeks since its discovery, the note entered Frankie’s consciousness while she pretended not to examine Margot, while she cooked and mi
ssed her husband’s calls and as she lay in bed alone, damp against the sheets. Was that the most romantic thing a person had ever said to her daughter and had it worked itself inside of her? Had she let the boy worship? Days later, when Frankie relented and answered her husband’s calls, he was sobbing, or performing it, unused to things not proceeding by his script. He said, “You should be begging me back. You were unfaithful,” and that was true, but in the loss of herself, Frankie had time to ponder other wonders—like where had that faith funneled to and why did people deal with it so blindly? Why, following creeds of country, God, or capitalism, did no one ever bother to look beyond the words? The other man sometimes dashed across Frankie’s thoughts, important only in the way he’d made her feel. He’d been younger. Smaller than her, but able to handle her weight; he’d confessed to enjoying it. And though she hadn’t slept with the man, she had liked knowing that she could. He’d taken Frankie in as she lay upon the quilt of the hotel bed as if splayed in a web, wholly pleasing to his eight eyes, unconcerned she might devour him.
Frankie wanted to caution her daughter, there were things worth more than words. Instead, she asked, “How’s French going?” unable to tamp her curiosity down. Margot lifted back into her body—that temple—and flicked her eyes, and in the gesture Frankie could sense her daughter’s delight. Margot was pleased. She knew her mother was listening at doors, and felt gratified in refusing to let her in. She said, “I’m not taking French,” and battened the wall between them.
For Yearbook, Margot solicited her mother for pickups three times during the school week and every other Saturday as the year came to an end. She and nine other seniors rearranged the desks in the English classroom and brainstormed over special features and superlatives; on how to insert their own cliques into the pages as much as possible without arousing suspicion. Margot would usually have found these activities beneath her, the organization and teamwork required too taxing, but under Mr. Klein’s direction, she found herself up to the task—spearheading better layouts, nixing overplayed ideas and corny catchphrases, keeping things in line. Margot liked the power of bending other kids to her will, pleased that this hadn’t even been her thing but she had made it so. She liked that Mr. Klein liked it.
He was maybe in his late thirties, but well before the time he would go to seed, his angular face covered in a blond scruff that contrasted with the academic parting of his curls. He sometimes wore waistcoats to teach, dark blue and double-breasted, and Margot overheard boys calling him queer. But Mr. Klein was a romantic, a writer working on his manuscript and dreaming of Paris, the place, he’d told her, where all serious writers must go. Margot had recognized the look in him early. Knew if she wanted, she could take this, too. She started returning his gaze.
His daughter was a freshman, and sometimes hung around their yearbook meetings while she waited for her father to drive them home. The entire time, she’d sigh conspicuously and pretend to be busy playing with her Nano Baby whenever he attempted to address her. Margot enjoyed studying her, when she could, to separate Mr. Klein’s features so she might understand the wife’s. She wanted the daughter to like her, to want to befriend her, though she knew Mr. Klein wouldn’t want it. During regular school hours, Margot sometimes lingered near the girl’s locker, working up the nerve to start a conversation, and one day caught her as she vented to a friend about her mother.
“She thinks I’m too young to go to Prom this year, can you fucking imagine?”
“That’s all they ever say!” her friend agreed.
Mr. Klein’s daughter slammed her locker door. “She really is the worst. Just because she was too lame to get invited to Prom as a freshman, she wants to ruin it for me.”
This made Margot feel tender toward the girl, having just been of that powerless age, and she thought, maybe this was a way in; she could commiserate, give the younger girl some hope. Margot stepped closer, clearing her throat, and both girls turned to her with their eyebrows raised. “It does get easier,” Margot said, deepening her voice into what she hoped was a mature but appealing tone. “You know, with your mother—” but the look the daughter gave, one of bald disdain, cut across her before she could say anything of use.
“Do I know you?” the girl asked, and laughed with her friend, and after that, Margot refused to acknowledge the daughter. She told Marissa, sagely, you could only help those that would help themselves. Of course, Mr. Klein never spoke to Margot about his daughter directly, but whenever she was alluded to, Margot tacked on “little idiot” in her head.
After their second-to-last yearbook meeting, Mr. Klein followed the students out of the building to the place their parents would pick them up. The other kids, mostly girls, chattered nonstop, excited about their progress, Prom, and the Grad Bash trip to Disney, concerned with only high school things. He shuffled along with his hands in his pockets, dawdling, encouraging Margot to do the same. When he spoke, he directed his voice slightly up and away from her, as if conversing with the clouds. “It isn’t you, calling my house?”
Margot shot him one of the looks she’d lately been reserving for Frankie. “Of course not,” she said, both embarrassed and offended. “Do you think I’m a child?” The beat of silence was tight. “I wouldn’t call.”
“Good,” he said, smiling now in a way her father might, when he thought he had convinced her that one of his ideas was actually her own. “We have to be careful.” He let his hand briefly brush the curve of her hip—why did only she have to be careful—before clapping them together and addressing the larger group. “Excellent work today, team! At our dinner, we’ll toast to all your hard work.”
Frankie, parked at the curb, watched her daughter drift toward her, Margot’s slender body tense, familiar in its anger. The teacher threw a hand up in greeting as they approached.
“You must be Mrs.—”
“Just Frankie, please. Nice to meet you.”
“Of course! Charmed. Your daughter is a pleasure to teach, very bright.” He clapped his hands again—a nervous tic, it seemed—and stepped back. “Well, good work, clochette! Don’t forget, we’ll meet here at 3 pm on Saturday for dinner preparations,” and with that, he flashed a last smile at Frankie and bounded away.
Margot slung her bag into the backseat. “Like I don’t have anything else to do with my time,” she grumbled, as she climbed into the front and buckled her seat belt, but Frankie was stuck on the phrase that slid from the man’s mouth, easy as a lie. She knew about the dinner; one week earlier, Margot had asked if her mother would provide a dish—something French.
“Clochette?” Frankie asked, and Margot was too distracted to be sarcastic.
“It means ‘little bell.’ He nicknames everyone in Yearbook. ‘Team-building,’ he says.” Her daughter rolled her eyes, and with the venom of that gesture—the gravity Frankie had discerned between Margot’s body and the teacher’s—something awful began to tick inside of her.
“Is . . . everyone’s nickname like that?” She didn’t know how to ask something like this; didn’t want to have to ask it.
Margot looked at her mother like she wished she’d disappear. “Mom, why would everyone’s nickname be like that? It defeats the purpose.” She looked out the window, toward the school, toward him. “No. That one’s just for me.”
The French dish and the French word. The note. Everything Frankie had wanted to know clicked alarmingly into place. And with it a luminous fury. A helplessness. She saw her daughter vanished, swallowed up by all that she could not prove.
Full up on righteousness and smoke, Frankie now steps from her car and walks up the street in the midmorning light toward the teacher’s house, his door a somber blue that even she cannot love. For the moment, she is nothing but a creature of time, suspended in the motion of her body, no thought beyond the knocking.
The door opens, and Frankie must adjust her gaze. Instead of a polished wife, she finds a daughter,
amber-eyed and suspicious, no older, Frankie guesses, than fourteen. Her hair is dark and shining and slick as wine. “Can I help you?” she says, though it’s clear she’d rather not.
Frankie is not prepared for this. “I’m a friend of your mother’s,” she hears herself saying, an explanation that doesn’t satisfy the girl. The daughter hesitates and then narrows her eyes, something sly glowing behind them, something a little cruel that Frankie can recognize. “She’s not home,” she says. “What’s your name?” And Frankie, startled into honesty by the girl’s authority, tells her.
“Francesca.”
The girl shifts from behind the door. “Wait . . . I know who you are,” she says, and Frankie is relieved that someone might tell her. “You’re that girl’s mother,” and here her lip curls, “from the nerd club. The little pet.” She tilts her head, stares Frankie head to toe. “What do you want?”
Frankie knew what she wanted, and that she couldn’t have it without severe risk. She wanted to protect her daughter, who would deny, deny, deny—who would hate her; who would soon be eighteen and would leave. She wanted the teacher dead, she wanted everyone—his wife and his daughter, the whole city—to know what he’d done, and she wanted to call her own husband to tell him, finally, that her mistake had not been the affair but her inability to admit she no longer loved him.
“Oh,” the daughter says. In Frankie’s silence, she has come to her own conclusion, and confirmation ebbs across her face. “You’re the one who calls.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Don’t pretend,” the girl says, and Frankie understands what this daughter believes—that she is her father’s distraction, French-worship in her name. The mother is out shopping with the teacher, helping him prepare for the celebration dinner—real china, sparkling cider—and they’ll be back soon. “I guess you might as well come in?” She steps back, and Frankie hesitates for just a moment before she goes inside.
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