Stiltsville

by Susanna Daniel

  “In a minute.”

  “Did you see that Lopez guy’s earring?”

  “Don’t be provincial.”

  Finally, Mrs. Madansky headed our way with an outstretched hand. “Margo’s parents,” she said. “I was hoping we’d get a chance to chat.”

  “So were we,” said Dennis, and his forward-leaning stance gave him away: he thought Mrs. Madansky was a dish. His taste was, in my opinion, rather banal.

  She gestured to an empty circle of desks and we sat down. The group was thinning out; a few people touched her shoulder to say quick good-byes. “First,” she said, “I think you should know that I’ve been keeping an eye on Margo from the start of the year.”

  “And?” said Dennis.

  She pinched her lips in concentration, as if choosing her words. “She’s doing well. But so far my impression is that she—well, she’s high-strung, if you know what I mean.”

  “Sure,” said Dennis.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” I said.

  Mrs. Madansky met my eye, and I felt a shudder of enmity. I know her best, I wanted to say whenever a teacher chose an adjective for Margo. I’d heard garrulous, precocious, outgoing, sensitive, mature, and—this from her second-grade teacher, whom I did not care for—prideful. Presumptuous, I wanted to say in response. Demanding, obtuse, restrictive. I was not a mother who believed her daughter was flawless—on the contrary, I thought Margo sparkled with faults, bubbled with imperfections. She talked too loudly and too much; she was stubborn, unpredictable, and moody. She had personality.

  “If I may ask,” said Mrs. Madansky. “What time does Margo get to bed at night?”

  “Eight-thirty or nine,” said Dennis.

  “Does she fall asleep easily?”

  “Not always,” said Dennis. “I’ve been having trouble sleeping, and sometimes she sits up with me.”

  This was news to me.

  Mrs. Madansky said, “How often?”

  “Twice a week, maybe three times. It’s a phase.”

  I said, “Has she been sleeping in class?”

  “No, no,” said Mrs. Madansky. “She’s very alert. Too alert. She raises her hand every time a question is asked.” She took a breath. “Even when she doesn’t know the answer.”

  “She’s eager,” I said. “She’s proving herself.”

  Mrs. Madansky cocked her head. “She’s tense,” she said. “And getting more so. I’m recommending that she spend an hour a week with the school counselor, Mr. Callahan.”

  “But she’s trying to fit in,” Dennis said.

  I agreed, absolutely. It would take a dozen shopping excursions, I thought, to fix that smear on her reputation: school counselors were not cool.

  “She can meet with him during her elective period,” said Mrs. Madansky. “We can be discreet.”

  “We’ll think about it,” I said.

  “Margo is probably reluctant to worry you,” she continued in her calm, teacherly tone. She looked at Dennis as she said it, but the comment pierced me.

  On the way home, on the verge of anger fueled mostly by pride, I asked Dennis why he hadn’t told me about Margo’s sleeplessness. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I figured you’d stop sleeping, too. We’d wander the house at all hours, a family of ghosts.”

  Carla’s parents had skipped parent-teacher night, and Margo had eaten dinner at their house, so we stopped to pick her up on the way home. While she gathered her things, Carla’s mother, Sylvia, stooped to speak to us through the car window. “I’ve been meaning to ask you,” she said. “How did you manage to get Margo into the sixth grade?”

  Dennis looked as weary as I felt. “It’s a long story,” he said.

  “We have some news,” Sylvia said. “We’re moving to Massachusetts.”

  “Oh, no,” I said. Weeks earlier, their house had been burglarized and Margo had told us that Carla’s parents thought Miami was becoming too dangerous. Margo had wanted to know if this was true. “We have an alarm system,” Dennis had told her. He didn’t mention that we rarely used it. “You don’t have to worry.”

  “We close in December,” said Sylvia. “Do you want to tell Margo?”

  Dennis nodded and started the car as Margo scooted into the back-seat. Sylvia backed away, waving.

  “Did you meet Mr. Lopez?” said Margo to me.

  “Cute!” I said.

  “Take a number,” said Margo.

  That week I called the school to give permission for Margo to meet with the school counselor. Margo stomped to her room when we told her, but within two weeks—looking back it seemed she sloughed off old traits and grew new ones overnight—she was saying, “Mr. Callahan says I’m a fast learner,” and, “Mr. Callahan didn’t like social studies and history when he was in sixth grade, but he liked English. I’m the opposite.”

  “You don’t like English?” I said.

  She shrugged. “History’s better.”

  When Dennis and I were in bed, I said, “I think the counselor thing is working out.”

  He turned to me. “There’s something you don’t know,” he said seriously. I braced myself. “Mr. Callahan,” he said, “is cute.”

  Now that I knew about Margo’s insomnia, I often woke in the middle of the night to find that Dennis was not in bed. Some nights I crept silently to the end of the hallway until I heard the murmur of the television or the scrape of a chair on the kitchen tile. I stood in the dark in my nightgown, my heart beating fast and loud, my breath cloudy on the hallway mirror. From what I could tell, Dennis did most of the talking. Margo—if she slept at all it was early, beginning at bedtime and stretching to one or two a.m.—interrupted in brief fragments. Compared with Dennis’s gruff murmur, her voice was high and uncertain, a threadbare sound. She sounded, in the drowsy fog of early morning, as if she’d wilted and faded, and I ached to think we’d caused that change. But Dennis was a dedicated comic, and every so often Margo’s laugh rose, and my heart unclenched. Most mornings, I found two glasses, empty but for a film of milk, in the kitchen sink.

  Despite all the signs—the sleeplessness, the difficulty concentrating, and several unusually aggressive plays on the soccer field, one of which caused her to sit out the rest of the game—it was a surprise when, weeks later, Margo admitted (first to Bette while spending the night at her house, then to Mr. Callahan in one of their sessions, then to Dennis in the early morning hours, then to me in the car) that she did not like school. She did not like haughty Mrs. Madansky (my word), or the snotty girls in her class (her word). Mr. Lopez was OK, but he picked on her. Bette told her, unhelpfully, that her teachers sounded narrow-minded, and Dennis told her she seemed overly concerned with whether or not her teachers liked her. “Of course I want them to like me,” she said, her voice shaking, and Dennis had no response. He was a person who truly didn’t care about that kind of thing; it was marvelous, certainly, but also mystifying.

  Margo decided she’d chosen the wrong elective—French—so she switched to Spanish, but she’d missed too much to catch up. To make matters worse, Florida was experiencing one of the coldest winters in history, and Margo owned only old sweaters and ski coats—too small and out of fashion. I took her shopping, but she said nothing was right. She ended up sobbing in the dressing room and we left empty-handed. I had trouble understanding the nature of her anxiety—mostly social, mostly academic, or equally both? Did she have no friends at all, or did she dislike the few friends she’d made? Once or twice a week someone named Beverly called the house and Margo chatted with her on the kitchen telephone, but Margo spent the rest of her free time with Carla, whose days in Miami were numbered. The girls did homework together at our dining room table, their dissimilar textbooks faced off like warring factions.

  “They think I’m a snob,” Margo told me when I prodded her about her social life. Her voice was unsteady. We were curled up together on the living room sofa under a blanket. Margo was wearing a pair of Dennis’s ski socks and my long underwear. Dennis sat on the floor, p
olishing his good shoes for no reason: he hadn’t had an interview in two weeks. There was a chill in the air that we couldn’t cut without lighting a fire or turning on the heater, but we were out of wood, and every time I wandered near the heater controls, Dennis perked up and said, “Really? It’s not so bad. Put on some socks.”

  “Who thinks you’re a snob?” I said.

  She took a moment to answer. “This girl laughed at me in social studies.”

  “Why?”

  “I had something on my notebook. She saw it and told Melanie.”

  “What was on your notebook?”

  “Just a drawing, Mom.”

  “What kind of drawing?”

  “A stupid rainbow. They think I’m a baby.”

  “A baby and a snob?”

  She nodded, sniffling.

  “Define your terms,” said Dennis. “What’s a snob?”

  Her lip quivered and she wiped away a tear. It occurred to me that this was all very adult, this choking on tears, this swallowing of sorrow. “A snob is someone who thinks she’s better than everyone else,” she said.

  “That’s not you,” said Dennis.

  Margo hiccuped. “I don’t think it is.”

  I said, “Why do you think they think that?”

  “They won’t talk to me. They talk about me.”

  I said, “What else do they say?”

  “Who cares?” said Dennis. He stopped polishing. “Trust me, you’re not a snob. I’ve known snobs, and they’re nothing like you.”

  “I don’t know what to do,” she said.

  “Screw them,” he said.

  “Dennis,” I said.

  “Margo, school is your job. You get up in the morning, you go, you get your work done. I know this Spanish thing is messing you up, so I say focus on that. Once you’ve got it licked, concentrate on something else. It’s like I always tell your mother—you can’t worry about everything at the same time.”

  Margo nodded and her tears stopped, but I could feel her shivering in the warm space between our bodies.

  The temperature continued to drop. A low frond from the king palm in our backyard shriveled and crashed to the ground. Margo spent an hour in the yard, crunching the grass under her boots. I borrowed electric blankets from Dennis’s parents and ordered a purple parka from a catalog for Margo. Every day, I wore Dennis’s flannel fishing jacket over my normal clothes. One weeknight, Marse came over with firewood and ingredients for s’mores and we sat in chairs in front of the fireplace with our sticks out. “It’s OK if it burns a little,” Marse told Margo. “Sometimes that’s the best part.” Marse told stories about her awkward years. Once, she’d told a friend she liked a boy, and that friend had spread it all around school. Once she’d gotten her period while wearing white pants, and had to walk home in the middle of the day to change. The episodes hadn’t been particularly mortifying, but I think the stories made Margo feel better.

  One night I woke to Dennis’s hand on my shoulder, his soft voice saying my name. He and Margo stood beside the bed in sweaters and blue jeans. “We made coffee,” said Margo.

  The windows were black. “What’s going on?” I said.

  Her voice was excited. “Dad has a surprise for us.”

  I dressed and poured coffee into a thermos, then mixed hot chocolate for Margo and put muffins into a paper bag. We loaded into the front seat of the car, with Margo in the middle. It was two o’clock in the morning. Dennis headed north on the highway and drove for an hour, then took the Okefenokee exit and headed east. Margo rested her head on his shoulder. Orange groves stuttered by on both sides, dusty with moonlight. Every half mile or so, a bright light flashed through the trees. Dennis pulled onto the shoulder of the road and turned off the engine. The headlights died. “Listen,” he said. I heard the flutter of citrus bugs and the croak of cicadas, wind in the thick black groves. Then there was a popping sound in the distance.

  “What was that?” I said.

  Dennis stepped out of the car and crossed the road. “Come on,” he said, then vanished down a dark seam between the trees.

  The air in the grove smelled of ripe and rotten fruit. Fallen oranges pocked the ground and tree branches scattered the moonlight. Dennis’s figure ahead of us was shadowy and nebulous. Another muted pop sounded, then another. The noises resembled shots from miniature guns. Margo and I hustled to keep up, but Dennis moved fast; I tracked the sound of his movement. My pulse quickened. It was a school night—was my husband nuts?

  “Turn left,” called Dennis. He was at least twenty yards off. We crossed into the next row of trees and a light appeared ahead. “Still with me?” he said. His voice and the light came from the same place.

  “This is freaky, Dad,” called Margo. She sounded happy.

  As we neared the light, I saw that it came from a flood lamp attached to a picker nestled in the high branches of a tree. In the basket of the picker was a man holding a bucket of oranges in one hand. Dennis had taken off his sweater and held it in front of him.

  “I forgot to bring a bag,” said Dennis as we caught up. In the scope of the lamplight it looked like daytime. The man above us wore a red plaid jacket and heavy leather gloves. Dennis called up to him. “Got a few to spare?”

  “Who’s catching?” called the man in the picker.

  My arms rose, palms cupped. The man tossed an orange and I caught it, then placed it in Dennis’s sweater. I worried briefly about stretching the fabric, but then the man threw another orange, then another. When we’d collected half a dozen, Dennis knotted the sweater sleeves and slung the bundle over one shoulder. I took off my own sweater and Margo stepped up. “Here,” she called. I watched her in the grainy light, the lines and angles of her. She took a little hop every time she reached for a falling orange. Her hair swung. Her expression shifted from intent to ecstatic. The load in my arms grew heavy. From deeper in the grove, another shot rang out. “What is that?” I asked Dennis.

  “Had enough?” said the man in the picker.

  “Thank you kindly,” called Dennis, and the man waved. To Margo, Dennis said, “That sound is the fruit—it’s bursting.”

  “The oranges are breaking?” she said.

  “They have to,” said Dennis. “It’s too cold for them.”

  We walked a little, shivering in cold air, and Dennis explained that the man in the picker was spraying the oranges with water. The water would freeze on the peels and the reaction would release the tiniest germ of heat, enough to keep some of the fruit alive. Dennis led us back to the road, and on the way I listened for bursting oranges and peered through the grove to spot other flood lamps, other pickers. The sound came every minute or so, always from a different direction, and I glimpsed half a dozen more lights. The grove was a galaxy, the flood lamps and explosions stars and celestial events. My family steered through space, linked, until we reached the highway. To Dennis, I said, “How did you know?” He smiled at me but didn’t answer. He seemed to regard fatherhood and husbandhood the way a magician regards magic: the delight is in the mystery. His father had probably brought him to beg for free oranges the last time the crops froze. By the time Margo became an adult, there would be fences to keep us out.

  We put the oranges in the car trunk. I figured I would make marmalade and no one would eat it. I would make orange-chocolate-chip cookies and Margo would say she preferred the regular kind. It didn’t matter. On the way home, Margo’s cheeks were pink in the brightening light. She chatted for a while about the orange groves, then grew quiet. After a long silence, she said, “When Carla moves, I won’t have a best friend.”

  “You’ll make a new one,” I said. “Or two or four.”

  “Mighty Margo,” said Dennis. “Many people will love you.”

  This time she cried almost without sound. We’d made a mistake in pushing her ahead—of this, I was certain. I’d let pride influence me. Shamefully, though, I felt a little grateful for the mistake, because my daughter needed me, and I knew she wouldn’t ne
ed me in the same way for much longer. Still, I couldn’t shake the image of Margo sitting in Mrs. Madansky’s class, raising her hand again and again.

  In mid-December of that year—Margo had been a sixth-grader for three months—a dozen Dade County police officers chased down and fatally beat a thirty-three-year-old black insurance agent named Arthur McDuffie. They said McDuffie had rolled through a red light on his motorcycle while giving a cop the finger, and that he’d kicked one of the officers, who in turn cracked McDuffie’s skull open—these were the prosecutor’s words—like an egg.

  Mrs. Madansky sent home a typed letter addressed to all sixth-grade parents. “Dear Mom and Dad,” read the note, “your son/daughter’s class will study Current Events this term. Students are required to bring a news article to class every Monday/Wednesday or Tuesday/Thursday.” On our copy, the second pair of days was circled in red pen. “Please supervise your child’s choices to make sure they are appropriate. Parents have expressed concern that certain local events might cause students to become upset.”

  At the dinner table, over lasagna, Dennis tore up the note and tossed it theatrically over one shoulder. “Your teacher is an idiot,” he said to Margo.

  “Dennis!” I said. “She’s being cautious.”

  “She’s being a coward.” To Margo, he said, “Something horrible happened and people are going to remember it for a long time.”

  “The police killed a black man,” she said.

  “Right,” said Dennis, “and now people have to face the fact that Miami isn’t so much a melting pot as, I don’t know . . . ”

  “Potpourri,” I said.

  “Why did they kill him?” said Margo.

  “We don’t know exactly why,” said Dennis. “But people feel so strongly about Mr. McDuffie’s death that a judge moved the trial all the way to Tampa.”

  “What will happen to the police officers?” said Margo.