Margot

by Jillian Cantor

  I take a seat in the last row, quite close to the exit, and where I can see everyone else who might come into the theater.

  It is cold, and I pull my black sweater tight across my chest, hanging on to my arms to warm up before digging my hand into the carton of popcorn. The corn is warm and salty and buttery, and I chew it, and I chew it. My chewing is loud, though, of course, there is no one else here to complain.

  The lights dim, and the curtain rises. The screen is black at first, and there is an overture, the heavy sound of trumpets, then strings, which I imagine the director felt was both serious and emotional all at once. Oh, the drama—the overture seems to go on forever. I wish the movie would just start already.

  Finally, there is a picture. A sea of clouds, awash with seagulls as the actors’ names play across the screen, the i in Millie’s name dotted with an upside-down teardrop. I roll my eyes, just the way my sister always did. There is a note that scenes were filmed in the annex thanks to the city of Amsterdam, and something clenches in my chest so hard I cannot breathe. I am not prepared for this part, to see it again. I did not know they filmed there, at the actual spot where we once lived.

  The movie begins: a man is standing there on the Prinsengracht. Oh, the Prinsengracht. Just the way it was, just the way I remember. The canal, then the street right beside it with the beautiful, old, linked, brick, multistoried buildings. I reach my hand out, as if the Prinsengracht is close enough for me to touch it. Home.

  Up on the big screen, the man turns, and I realize he is supposed to be Pim, returned from the war. He bears a likeness to Pim, but only distantly, some long-lost cousin we never even knew. The man enters the office, then climbs the steps to the annex, and he wraps himself in a scarf he finds—whose it is supposed to be I am not sure. Mother’s, maybe? Though she had nothing of the sort. Then the woman who is supposed to be Miep enters, reaches for a book on some sort of shelf—the diary, I assume, and says it has been there the whole time, where my sister left it.

  I shake my head, and bite my lip, to suppress the urge to yell out, No, no, that is not where she left it. It was on the floor. In Peter’s room. It fell from her hands as they carried her out. She never kept it on a bookshelf! She hid it away, in her mattress, just like I did with mine.

  But then I see her—Millie Perkins—and I forget about the book for the moment. She bounces into a room, into the annex. The place is familiar, but the people, they are all wrong. Millie, she is nearly laughable. She is a woman, not a girl. She is a model, slim and graceful and filled with infallible beauty. She is way too old to be my sister, way too polished. But wait, where is Margot? Oh, there I am, somewhere off in the background, like a second-class citizen. At least I am attractive, more so than in real life.

  I chew my popcorn, throwing it in handfuls in my mouth. It tastes so good, buttery and salty and warm. I eat, and I watch the screen as if in a trance. My eyes cannot let go of these people and their story. I do not know them. This story, it is filled with so much danger and romance and hope. Why is there so much ridiculous hope?

  You’re all going to die, I want to shout at the screen, all of you.

  You will be stripped and shaven and broken and tattooed. Fleas will dance off your body like sparks, and the air will become a film that suffocates you until you can no longer breathe. Stop smiling, Millie. Honestly. The annex is not that beautiful. The world is not that beautiful. My sister, she understood that.

  And then there is Peter. Oh, Peter. He is not at all as handsome as I remember him being in real life. He is the one to which the silver screen does no justice. The movie is in black and white, and so there are no eyes blue enough to be the sea. He is strangely goofy, making eyes at Millie Perkins like a dummy as she chases after Mouschi.

  When I see them together, I laugh a little, and I dig into the popcorn. My hand scrapes the bottom of the cardboard carton. I chew louder, and I need a napkin, but I am not about to stand up to walk back to the concession stand to get one.

  Margot is quiet. So quiet. She barely says a word the entire time, as if she spent two years of her life a mute in the background, not at all the kind of girl who would kiss Peter, in his room, in the darkness. No, in the movie she is the kind of girl who, one night, after she has been ill, blurts out at the dinner table that she wishes everything would end already. I hear these words come out of her mouth, and I start laughing. I am laughing and laughing so hard, that then I am crying. The screen is blurry; it is hard to see, to focus. The strangers on the screen swim in front of my eyes.

  Then Millie and Peter stand in front of the window, where the sky tumbles, large and beautiful. They hold on to each other, just the way the book said they did. There are sirens so loud and so obvious—movie sirens—from the street below. Then the screech of brakes, and Millie and Peter, they cling to each other so hard, so fast, their lips meeting. And Margot, she is nowhere to be found.

  I close my eyes, and then I am holding on to him on the divan.

  Peter? My sister stands there, saying his name.

  There were no sirens. Just quiet one moment, my sister’s voice, then banging on the annex door.

  On the big screen, the music swirls. The lovers embrace and are still kissing with deep movie-star passion, just as Shelby said.

  I stand up quickly, forgetting about the popcorn, and the carton tumbles, spilling kernels to the sticky floor.

  I know what happens next. And I cannot watch anymore.

  I run through the front of the theater, and I hit the street, where the sunlight is too bright and burns my eyes. I squint as I run back toward Ludlow Street, the stupid poem we wrote for Pim playing itself in my head. Only suddenly I cannot remember the order of it at all.

  Pim, Pim, you are so dim. You like to do things on a whim. Your hair is gray; your world is grim. You are dead to me now, my dear sweet Pim.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  PIM AND I, WE NEVER FOUGHT THE WAY MY SISTER AND MY mother did. We never yelled or screamed harsh words at each other. I did not write angry things about him in my diary the way my sister did about my mother.

  It was just that we all knew, all of us. My sister belonged to our father, and I belonged to my mother. We were split that way, two and two, and we always had been. Sometimes I wondered if it was by default, if Father would’ve paid more attention to me if given the chance. Was Mother only mine because she and my sister could not get along? But now, afterward, I have come to understand that could not have been it entirely.

  Peter did not love his parents, not the way I loved mine. Sometimes he fought with them, but not like Joshua and Ezra do, or even like my mother and my sister did, when fire exploded between them, sparks of love and hate and passion falling into one. Mostly, they ignored each other. And Peter seethed, quietly.

  “What about our parents?” I asked Peter once, in his room in the annex, in the middle of the night. “What will happen to them when we go to America.” I thought about Mother and Pim, about the way she had begun to cling to him in the annex, holding on to his arm with her thin fingers in a way she had never done on the Merwedeplein.

  We were together all the time, every second, every day. For two years. I didn’t even have the capacity to imagine it then, this person I have now become without them. But Peter simply shrugged, as if he could imagine life without them. I remembered his story about bringing Mouschi into the annex, how he felt his parents didn’t care about him. “They gave you life,” I reminded him.

  He frowned at me, and reached across the bed for his cat. “Not everyone is a good parent like yours.” He paused. “Not every father is smart and kind the way yours is, Margot.” He stroked Mouschi’s fur roughly with his fingertips. “You know why I never talked to you at school, really?” he asked.

  “Why?” I murmured. But I was thinking that the Lyceum felt so far away, like something in a dream. School. Books. Teachers. Walking through the halls with s
hoes and a light step, and an easy sense of contentment. Had I ever really done those things? Had I ever existed in a life, really and truly of my own, outside the confines of this annex on the Prinsengracht?

  “You had so much,” he was saying. “And you took it all for granted. You thought everyone had what you did.”

  “And you could tell that, without ever having talked to me?” I could not keep the annoyance from my voice.

  “Yes,” he said. “You did well in school. Everybody loved you there. All the teachers. Your home on the Merwedeplein was so large and nice. And your father always lit up when he talked about you and your sister.”

  “How do you know all this?” I asked him. I had no idea where Peter lived before the annex, or how his father had talked about him. I’d seen him before at school. I’d noticed him and his blue, blue eyes. But we’d never spoken. I’d never thought much about him before the annex.

  “I just do,” he said. “You and your sister, you never understood how lucky you are.”

  “You don’t know everything,” I told him, standing up. It was the middle of the night, and the moonlight cast an eerie slant on Mouschi’s face, lighting his eyes yellow until they were glowing. I felt as if my own face was glowing hot, under Peter’s words, the idea that somehow I was spoiled, like my sister. That I did not appreciate the things I had, or that I just assumed that everyone’s parents loved them the way Pim and Mother loved us.

  “Come on. Sit back down,” Peter whispered.

  “I don’t think so,” I huffed. “I think I’ll go back to my room tonight.”

  “Margot,” he called after me, gently. But I was already tiptoeing out, down the stairs, to my cot in my parents’ room, where Pim’s gentle snore rattled in his chest and Mother gasped quietly in her sleep.

  I lay on the cot for a long while, with my eyes open, wondering if Peter was right, if I never understood it, everything I had. Everything I would eventually lose.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  IN THE TWO AND A HALF WEEKS SINCE EZRA’S COLLAPSE, Joshua has been to the office only twice. I have been in every day, since Joshua called me at home the morning after and asked me to please come in to work, at least until he knew where things stood with his father. And so I understood, I had not quit my job at all, but only ridden down in an elevator and then back up. Still, for some reason I have felt different sitting at my desk. But maybe that is just because Joshua’s office has remained mostly empty, only darkness clouding his glass window.

  Each morning when he has not come in, Joshua has been phoning in, presumably from the hospital, with instructions. And Shelby and I have been rescheduling appointments, pushing back courthouse meetings, and, at Joshua’s request, handing Ezra’s most pressing cases over to other lawyers in the firm.

  His voice on the phone is solid and cool, all business, nothing else. And the two times I have seen him, when he has come in, Joshua has not looked at me, in the eyes, not even for a second. He has walked off the elevator, in casual brown spring pants and a short-sleeved plaid button-down shirt. He is a different man without the suit and the tie. Younger and larger all at once. He seems to take up more space somehow, now that his father is not around. His voice booms a little louder. And he has run into his office, past my desk, without so much as a look.

  Without Joshua in the office, I find myself daydreaming at my desk and thinking again about Mrs. Pelt and Eleanor. What if I was wrong? I wonder. What if she was not Mrs. Pelt at all, but just a friend with a pink Cadillac who liked to visit? She hadn’t told me her name. But she had implied that she’d chosen the house somehow. Maybe she owns it and Peter rents it from her? Maybe she is just the landlady? But no matter how many what-ifs fall in my brain, none of them feel true or right, and yet even though Joshua is not here, I cannot bring myself to leave early, to go back there again. Every time I think of it, I am stopped by that image from the movie, the two of them kissing by the window as sirens blare in the background. It is a fake image, but still, when I reimagine it, over and over again in my head, my mind does not picture their movie faces, but their real ones.

  “Margie,” Shelby whispers across the desk one afternoon, interrupting my thoughts. I look up, and she is pulling her pack of Kents from her satchel. She holds them toward me. I shake my head. In Ezra’s absence, now, all the girls have begun taking their smokes at their desks. I wonder if it is the changing times, the brink of a new decade, as Shelby says, or if it is just that Joshua was not the only one in the office who was afraid of Ezra’s wrath. The air feels more still in here, calmer somehow, without Ezra, even though it is now tinged with a steady haze of smoke.

  Now Shelby lights her smoke and then smiles at me. “We’ve set a date for the wedding,” she says.

  “Oh?” I say, because in the midst of everything else, I have nearly forgotten about Shelby’s wedding, about the pink bridesmaids’ dresses she and Peg found.

  “Saturday November twenty-first,” she tells me, inhaling her smoke, then exhaling.

  November. It will be cold, and thus we will most probably wear long-sleeved dresses. But Saturday, my day of rest. I hope it will be after sunset. Before I have a chance to ask her anything, she divulges all the details: the Rittenhouse. At 7 P.M. “It’s a little ritzy, but Ron wants only the best for me, and so does my father—”

  “Shelby,” I say, interrupting her, and she taps her smoke in the empty coffee cup and looks up. “Are you sure?”

  “Am I sure?” She laughs. “Wouldn’t you want a wedding at the Rittenhouse, Margie?”

  “I would want a marriage,” I tell her.

  “A marriage?”

  “A partnership with someone who loves me and respects me.” We will go to America, Peter said. We will be married. We will no longer be Jews. We will change our names. Become the Pelts. And all the while was he really kissing my sister by the window? Did he make it to America only to marry a redhead?

  “Ron does love and respect me,” she says, an edge of annoyance to her voice.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, because I did not mean to offend her. “I just want you to be happy.”

  She smiles at me. “I am happy. Have you ever seen me happier?”

  The truth of it is, sitting there, tapping her smoke into her coffee cup, she looks a bit more nervous than I am used to seeing her, as if she too is hiding. But I wonder in Shelby’s case if she is hiding from herself. “Just ask him about the hussy,” I whisper across the desks. “It will be better to know the truth now than later.”

  “Oh, for goodness’ sakes, Margie. You’re a fine one to talk. Look at you, you’re such a prude, sitting there in the heat, in your sweater.”

  I avert my eyes back to my typewriter, and Shelby and I don’t say a word to each other for the rest of the day.

  It is the end of May by the time Ezra is released from the hospital, but even then, he does not come back to work.

  “He’s recuperating in Margate,” Shelby tells me one morning, on a day when the temperature is predicted to hit ninety degrees, and I am dressed in my gray dress with the thinnest black cotton sweater I own, which is already, even in the morning, suffocating. Shelby and I have barely spoken since the other day when I pressed her to talk to Ron, so at first I am surprised she is talking to me.

  “So Ezra is getting better, then?” I ask her.

  She shrugs. “Joshua said recuperating, so yes, I think he is.”

  “Joshua told you?” I ask.

  She nods. “He called me at home this morning to let me know he was moving his father down to Margate. And that he would be in for a full day of work tomorrow.”

  “He called you at home?” I ask, wondering why her and not me. And also, how silly I have been, to believe that his calling me, at home, meant something. Something other than work.

  “Oh, Margie,” Shelby says.

  “What?” I ask her.

  S
he looks at me for a moment, as if there is something more she wants to say, but then she seems to think better of it because she shakes her head. “Nothing,” she finally says. “Just forget it.”

  “You’re still angry with me?” I ask her.

  “No, Margie. It’s just . . . You’re worried about me, that’s why you want me to talk to Ron, right?” I nod. “Well, I worry about you too. Joshua will never see you the way you see him. He’s your boss, and besides that, he’s with Penny. And besides that, he’s Jewish, and he’s a lawyer. And you’re . . . you.”

  I feel my cheeks turning hot, and my brow is already sweating from the heat, but I feel it turning hotter. I cannot work without you, Margie.

  You’re you, Shelby said. And yet she has no idea, none in the slightest, what that even means.

  The elevator dings open, and just then Joshua steps off. He is dressed in his most handsome tailored black suit with a green-and-white-striped tie. He clutches tightly to his black leather attaché and walks, with a purpose, in my direction. It was not so long ago, I think, that we were walking off together, in the other direction. But, also, it feels like it has been forever. You’re you, Shelby said.

  “Margie.” Joshua taps his hand on the side of my desk, then removes his hat and places it atop the rack. “Can I see you in my office?”

  Shelby is most likely raising her eyebrows at me, but I do not turn to see. I stand and follow behind Joshua inside his office without even giving her a second glance.