“This is not a bad time for it, developmentally speaking. The skills in the sixth grade are advanced, yes, but it’s not a complete departure from fifth-grade material,” said Mr. Oxley. “We have a student who advances almost every year.”
“Any serial killers in the bunch?” Dennis said.
Not knowing Dennis—not knowing that he was rarely entirely serious or entirely joking—Mr. Oxley was cautious. “Not that I know of,” he said. Dennis threw up his hands, and his knees banged the underside of his desk. Mr. Oxley addressed me: “The concentration in the fifth-grade reading unit is comprehension—a skill Margo has evidently mastered.”
“Mastered?” said Dennis.
Margo was, at that time, ten years old. When we browsed in the young adult shelves at the public library, Margo’s choices, which Mr. Oxley went on to praise, mystified me. She was less interested in fourth-grade subjects—wizards and time machines and magical dolphins—than in broken homes and runaways and romance. But it became obvious as Mr. Oxley spoke that the suggestion of promoting Margo was not solely, or even mostly, based on academics. “There’s also the matter of Margo’s physical maturity,” he said. “I’m a little concerned about her comfort level in the fifth-grade classroom.” Dennis and I stared at him, slow to catch on. Mr. Oxley cleared his throat. “In other words, if you agree, this might be an opportunity to more closely match her physical development to that of her classmates.”
Then I understood, before he’d explained to Dennis, who looked bewildered. Margo had been the tallest person in the fourth grade. Her height and, as Mr. Oxley put it, “advanced development” (meaning bra size, as far as I could figure, and maybe leg hair), distinguished her. It seems that in order to have had this conversation with a teacher, Margo must have been freakish, but photographs reassure me: she was taller than her friends, yes, but not excessively so. She wore oversize shirts and slouched, and she smiled a lot—people looked at her face.
“Holy hell,” said Dennis. “Margo’s too tall for the fifth grade?”
Outside, Margo finished her hand-puppet conversation and Carla cracked up. In the past year, Margo had become very talkative, almost nervously so, and very sensitive. She had started to put a lot of pressure on herself. Her dentist had fitted her with a retainer to use while sleeping so she didn’t wear down her molars grinding her teeth. I checked on her sometimes in the night, and each time her eyelids fluttered a lot but she didn’t seem to be grinding. When Dennis had mentioned the retainer to his mother, she’d recommended a psychotherapist. Sixth grade, I thought, could hurt her confidence. It could do damage. But the scales tipped when I considered that if she skipped the fifth grade, she would no longer be the most buxom girl in her class. Give her a classroom full of girls tossing their hair and applying lip gloss, I thought. Give her a few friends whose T-shirts reveal the lump of a bra strap on each shoulder.
Dennis knocked on my desk. “We have some parenting to do here.”
Mr. Oxley smiled diplomatically. “It’s not our decision, but it’s possible Margo might feel more comfortable around classmates who are as far along as she is, physically speaking.”
“I was just thinking the same thing,” I said, and Dennis shot me a look.
Mr. Oxley said, “The older girls take health education classes. They spend a week learning about reproductive health and menstruation.” His manner was that of a man who’d practiced not tripping over certain words. “Has Margo gotten her period?”
I wasn’t easily flustered—with girlfriends, I could talk about PMS or sex or pregnancy—but in that classroom, beside the model Metro Rails, I floundered. “She—” I stammered. “Last summer, at sleepaway camp—”
Dennis started laughing. He knew the story: she’d had some spotting, so a counselor gave her a sanitary pad and explained how to use it, and Margo was so embarrassed that she’d pretended to be sick during swim time for three days. But the spotting went away as quickly as it had come, so the camp counselor explained about the hymen and said she’d probably torn it horseback riding. Margo had chronicled the whole icky affair in a letter marked FOR MOM’S EYES ONLY. When I got to the part about horseback riding, I was so relieved that I cried.
The real deal had arrived four months later, in the bathroom before school. I’d declared it a mental health day and we’d fixed a picnic lunch and gone to Dennis’s parents’ house to lie by the pool.
When he was done laughing, Dennis said, “She’s had it for a little while.” He covered my hand with his own. I felt bad for him, crammed into the little desk. I felt grateful for him.
“I can’t say with certainty that this is the best thing for your daughter,” said Mr. Oxley. “We just want to make you aware that promotion is an option.”
I was sorry he wouldn’t be Margo’s sixth-grade teacher, and her seventh-grade teacher, and so on. He went on to discuss Margo’s math skills, which though adequate had not developed at the rate of her reading or her body. Tutoring was an option. During this part of the conversation, I daydreamed of stepping out of the classroom to join my daughter in the sunlight.
Dennis had given notice in January of that year, while we were still paying off Christmas. On the evening of his last day of work, I’d found him in the backyard, sitting in one of the scooped rubber swings of Margo’s jungle gym. It was raining lightly. His shoes and socks and necktie lay on the grass and his shirt was unbuttoned to the middle of his chest. His hair rose from his head at odd angles, as if he’d rubbed it around without smoothing it back into place. The sight of my husband disheveled was not rare, but the sight of him downhearted was. My impulse was to return to the house. I’m not proud of it, but there’s something about weakness—even momentary weakness—that hardens my heart. Get up, I wanted to say. Occupy yourself. We’re having fillet of sole for dinner. Dennis lifted his arms, palms out. A different man might have meant, Why me? But I knew that Dennis, who had never liked practicing law, not even right out of school, meant, What now? On the bright side, there were a dozen possibilities; on the downside, there were a dozen possibilities. We’d hoped Dennis would have a new job before the old one ended, but the search had taken longer than we’d anticipated, so we were poised to subsist on his year-end bonus and our meager savings, crossing our fingers. Dennis’s mother had recommended that I take a position as a teller at the bank where his father worked. She’d made the recommendation even though she and I both knew she disapproved. I found the gesture touching. I hadn’t held a job since moving to Miami.
I sat in the swing beside Dennis. Water soaked through the seat of my slacks. He said, “Babe, I have some concerns.”
“I know you do.”
He’d dug the sandpit himself. He’d carved away the grass and dry black dirt and shoveled in fifty gallons of glinting white sand. He’d secured each knuckle of the jungle gym with epoxy. Now, he wiped rain from his face and pushed against the ground to start swinging. I watched his back as he rose. The rain had soaked through the fabric of his button-down, and through it I could see the outline of his undershirt. When he drew back, I could see the round caps of his knees through his wet trousers, and the delicate bluish hollows of his pale ankles. As for his face, it wasn’t grim exactly, but I could tell he was thinking hard and trying not to think, and that he was glad I was there, sitting next to him in the rain, and that he hoped I’d swing, so there wouldn’t be any pressure to tell the story of the day. So I swung a little, but ended up circling above the pit, toeing the sand to keep out of Dennis’s way.
It had been a decade since he’d left the house for his first day of work as an attorney. I’d checked him for wrinkles and kissed him good-bye. “Are you nervous?” I’d said. He’d shaken his head. “A means to an end,” he’d said, and rolled his eyes. Then he was off, and we’d fallen into a routine. And still sometimes when he came through the door at the end of the day, I saw him unshoulder his work and take on the life he meant to live. A different man could not have done it, that shrugging away of work car
es, day after day. When women I knew complained about their overworked, overtired, overstressed husbands, I thought of energetic, unworried, distractible Dennis—Dennis, who would never fulfill his potential or win an award or retire early, Dennis the underachiever—and I understood that we were lucky. He was home by five almost every day, he never worked weekends, and sometimes he left the office in the afternoon and went to the marina to tinker with the boat engines—we now owned a twin-outboard sports fisherman—or came home to share a sandwich with me and water the alamanda bushes in the side yard, then retied his tie and returned to the office.
I couldn’t think of a single job that Dennis would truly love. And while I accepted the close boundaries of my own ambition, I was nonetheless a little unnerved by the same lack in my husband; I thought one of us should be setting an example. As I sat beside him, holding tight to the reins of the swing as he pumped away, I found myself warding off annoyance by recalling the things I appreciated about him: he loved to wake up early and go running, and as a result I never had to make the coffee. He spent money lavishly on things he enjoyed, like fishing equipment and gifts for me and Margo, and meagerly on things he didn’t, like his own clothes and generic-brand deck shoes. He still wore his hair as long as he had worn it when I’d met him, so it hung half an inch over his ears.
Beyond the jungle gym, light from Margo’s bedroom bled into the evening. She crossed the room and lingered out of view, then crossed again. Fourth grade was in full swing and sixth grade was still in the hazy long distance. I didn’t know when her bedroom door had started being closed as much as it was open, or when I’d stopped knowing what she did when she was alone. I considered tiptoeing to the window and peering in, then watching as she danced alone to a cassette on the yellow shag rug, or as she dragged the telephone in from the hallway and shut its cord in the door hinges, or as she read a book with one hand in a bag of pretzels.
Dennis’s swing rose as high as he could make it go. He tucked his legs under when he dropped so they wouldn’t hit the ground, and then pumped them out when he rose. “It’s not fucking long enough,” he said. “We need one of these for adults.”
“I don’t think they make them,” I said.
“Goddamn kid swings,” he muttered, and then I’m not sure if he let go or if his hands slipped on the wet chains, but all of a sudden he was in the air and then on the ground, clutching his ankle. By the time I reached him, he was sobbing.
During the last week of fourth grade, Dennis and Margo and I sat down at the kitchen table for a family meeting. I’d cleaned up from dinner and Margo was freshly showered. Dennis had been scanning the classifieds and eating blackberries over the sink. When we were seated, Dennis clasped his hands. He started by explaining our meeting with Mr. Oxley to Margo, who interrupted to remind me that Elise Martinez, our neighbor for years until her family moved, had skipped second grade. She fidgeted until Dennis was finished. “But my friends,” she said. She scratched at the table with a fingernail.
Dennis got up from the table and came back with a steno pad. He drew three rectangles and labeled them FOURTH GRADE, FIFTH GRADE, and SIXTH GRADE. Beside the rectangles, he drew a stick figure in a skirt and labeled it MARGO. Beside the figure, he drew a question mark. “The way I see it,” he said, “we’ll fill these boxes with pros and cons, and whichever has the most pros wins.”
I said, “Fourth grade isn’t an option.”
“It’s the standard by which all other grades are measured,” Dennis said.
I said, “Mr. Oxley thinks you might be a little too mature for the fifth grade, sweetheart.”
“Except he pronounces it matoor,” said Dennis, and Margo giggled.
“I like Mr. Oxley,” said Margo.
“Me too,” I said.
“Me too,” said Dennis, and in the fourth-grade box he wrote: MR. OXLEY.
“I don’t think sixth-graders take art class,” said Margo.
NO ART CLASS, wrote Dennis in the sixth-grade box.
I said, “They have health education in the sixth grade,” and Margo made a face. Dennis pointed out that she’d be in a different class from her friends, and Margo nodded solemnly. FRIENDS, wrote Dennis in the fifth-grade box. Margo pointed out that sixth-graders were allowed to take two elective classes per term. SHOP & HOME-EC, wrote Dennis, and she said she’d prefer to take gymnastics.
“Sixth-grade boys are cuter,” she said, which came as a surprise. This was true, from what I’d observed. CUTE BOYS, wrote Dennis with difficulty. Margo said, “Graduation.”
Dennis was always less reluctant than I to show ignorance. “Meaning what?” he said.
“There’s no ceremony for the sixth-graders,” said Margo.
There were plenty of times when I wasn’t certain what Margo was talking about—music bands, for example, or slang, or comic book characters. For an instant, I thought this was one of those times, but then I remembered the most significant difference between fifth and sixth grades: although they were both located on the same campus, one was elementary school, and the other, as of a school board decision two years earlier, was middle school.
“You’ll miss graduation,” I said, and Margo said, “Obviously.”
Sunset School comprised two large buildings, one for kindergarten through fifth grade, and the other for grades six through eight. Grades nine through twelve, which didn’t yet concern us, were located in a different place entirely. If Margo skipped the fifth grade, not only would she occupy a different desk in a different classroom—she’d cross into a new world order. This was not a minor distinction.
“They have lockers at middle school,” I said.
LOCKERS, wrote Dennis.
“They have different teachers for every subject,” said Margo.
DIFF. TEACHERS, Dennis wrote.
“They don’t have to walk single file in the hall,” said Margo.
Dennis wrote, NO SINGLE FILE. Then, in the fifth-grade box, he wrote, SINGLE FILE.
“I’ll go,” said Margo.
I marveled at her flexibility. “You don’t have to,” I said.
Dennis put down the pencil. “Why don’t you sleep on it?”
Margo bit her lip. “No. It’s OK.” She put her arms around his neck. When she drew back, she hugged me, too, then picked up the steno pad with the boxes all filled in. She tore off the top sheet and folded it as small and tight as a matchbook, then slipped it into her back pocket and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “Can I have ice cream?” she said.
Two weeks later, Margo left in a van full of local kids for Camp Cherokee in southern Georgia, where she’d spent a month every summer since she was eight. In July, Dennis and I drove up to Atlanta to spend the weekend with my mother—we met my father and Luanne, whom we’d seen only occasionally over the years, for breakfast—and on the way home we visited Margo at camp on her birthday. We took her out for barbecue and she and Dennis went through ten packets of Wet Wipes each. Camp was only half over and already she was tan and hollow-cheeked, with a newly chipped molar. She explained that she’d been doing backward somersaults in the shallow part of the lake, one after the other without coming up for air, and then the back of her head had hit the metal swim ladder. She’d believed she’d been rolling in place, when really she’d been traveling. As soon as her head had hit, she’d felt something sharp roll over her tongue. She’d stood up and spat into her hand, then presented the shard to her counselor. I wondered why we hadn’t been notified. Dennis sighed—thinking, I assume, of the dentist bill.
“On land,” said Margo, “when I do a somersault, I roll about this far.” She spread her arms. “But I thought that in water, I’d stay in place. Wouldn’t you think I’d stay in place?”
“Like laundry in a machine,” said Dennis, nodding.
Margo shrugged. “I guess not.”
Usually when we drove up for her birthday—as we had done three summers running—Margo begged to stay at camp for another two-week session. We’d always refuse
d. A month was already too much time without her, in my opinion, and Dennis always wanted to spend a week at Stiltsville as a family before school started. Not to mention that camp was expensive. But on the drive up, I’d told Dennis I thought we should let her stay this year. “What on earth for?” he’d said. “Are we feeling guilty?” I didn’t answer. “I guess we are,” he’d said.
I resisted the impulse to wipe a smear of barbecue from Margo’s chin. “Aren’t you going to ask to stay at camp?” I said.
She put a finger in her mouth and felt around. “Look,” she said, pulling apart her lips. The broken tooth looked like the craggy face of a mountain.
“We’ll get it fixed when you’re home,” I said.
“I don’t want to stay this year,” Margo said.
“Good,” said Dennis.
“Why not?” I said.
Margo shrugged. Her shrug had become something of a default reaction, a prelude to the preteen years. She’d also assumed the habit of thinking before answering. “It’s fun, but it’s not that fun,” she said. “You know?”
“Sure,” said Dennis. “More Margo for us.”
That night, in what must have been the crummiest motel room between Tallahassee and Panama City, I cried. Dennis was only moderately sympathetic—he’d long since dubbed our annual camp visit the Trail of Tears. He lay with his head propped on a stack of flat pillows, watching the weather report flashing on the television. “She’s changed,” I said.
Dennis nodded.
“She’ll miss graduation,” I said.
“Big deal.”
“She would’ve received an award.” Best Citizenship, I thought, or Best Spelling.
“Are we having second thoughts?”
“No,” I said. I cried harder. “But she would’ve gotten a new dress, and I would’ve fixed her hair.”
“Frances—”
Stiltsville Page 12
