Stiltsville

by Susanna Daniel

  “The thing about going away for college,” I said to Margo, “is that you can start over, be whoever you want to be.”

  “Who else would she want to be?” said Dennis.

  “I just mean you can make new friends without all the history mucking it up.”

  Margo nodded solemnly. The sixth grade had left wounds—she was a skittish friend, slow to bond. Over the years she’d let go of early friendships just when I’d sensed that they were growing, as if afraid of what might happen next. And she’d never become preoccupied with romance or heartbreak or drama the way other girls had. Her only boyfriend in high school had been Peter—every so often, during her junior and senior years, he had come to the house after school and stayed for dinner, or picked her up on a Saturday morning for a day at the beach. For a few days he’d be in her conversation or plans. But then weeks later I’d realize I hadn’t seen him and he hadn’t called. It had been three years since Margo had asked me to take her to get birth control pills—a task I’d completed with surprisingly few tears—and since that time Peter was the only boy who had come to the house alone, without a group. I used to try to get her to talk about him, but she would just say banal, complimentary things like “He’s a very kind person” or “It’s not serious, but he’s a good friend.” From what I could tell, this was true: he was a nice person. When he’d left for Davidson, Margo had seemed genuinely happy for him and not at all possessive. There had been no pretense that I could surmise that they would not date other people while he was away. But during her two years at the University of Miami, Margo had made few new friends and hadn’t dated at all.

  “We need to get a move on,” I said. Margo’s eyes were pink and swollen. Dennis looked as if he’d forgotten where we needed to be. “Wash your face,” I said to Margo. I kissed her warm forehead before she left the room.

  “I hope we did the right thing, encouraging her to transfer,” said Dennis.

  “I was just thinking that.” The Oriental rug beneath our feet was threadbare and faded; we’d bought it new on vacation in Asheville a decade earlier. I told Dennis about the tennis team. “But it starts Saturday morning,” I said, “so I’d like to go before we get on the road.”

  Dennis held tight to the belief that road trips begin before dawn. Practice started at eight a.m.; I promised we would be on the road by eleven. He nodded and rubbed his face. Margo returned, wearing fresh makeup—a little too much, considering Gloria’s distaste for young ladies with painted faces, but I stayed quiet. “Kiddo,” said Dennis, “your mother has something to do Saturday morning, so we’re going to leave a little later.”

  “Good,” said Margo.

  “We can spend tomorrow night at Stiltsville. We’ll swing home in the morning and pick up Mom and get on the road.”

  I was reminded of one reason I didn’t take up activities: because then I missed things. “As long as you’re packed,” I said.

  “I shouldn’t take so much anyway,” she said.

  “I thought the last time at Stiltsville was the last time,” I said. We’d skied and Dennis and Margo had fished off the dock. It had been five years since the state of Florida had declared Biscayne Bay a national monument and began pushing for an end to private ownership of the stilt houses. Marcus Beck, a trial lawyer, had negotiated a deal guaranteeing that current residents could keep our houses until the year 1999—after that, Stiltsville would belong to the state. Since the decision, we’d gone out every possible weekend.

  “There’s no last time,” said Dennis.

  We’d never had a graduation party for Margo—at the time, she had been so glum about her plans that a party had seemed inappropriate—so when they heard she was transferring, Grady and Gloria had seized on the idea of throwing a farewell party. The theme of the barbecue—BON VOYAGE—was printed grandly on a banner that hung over the backyard patio. Gloria had staked tiki torches around the pool; they smelled powerfully of citronella. Grady had made rum punch, and Gloria ladled it into crystal goblets. The party was for their close friends, mainly, and a few of ours. My mother had wanted to come but had planned a cruise with friends the same weekend, so she’d called Margo to schedule a time when she could visit during the fall semester and take her out for a proper meal, as she put it. Grady and Gloria’s friends were spry, seemingly unhindered by age, and they wore expensive clothes; the ladies looked as if they’d just come from getting their hair set. They were warm and doted on Margo and seemed genuinely interested in her plans for the future, which left me wondering if they’d never met a grandchild before.

  Gloria had specified on the invitation—which had a drawing of a girl at the prow of a cruise ship, waving to shore—that gifts would not be welcome, but Margo had a few checks thrust into her hand anyway; and Gloria’s bridge partner, Eleanor Everest, presented her with a small brass-handled hammer with a bow around its neck. “It’s seven tools in one,” she said, demonstrating how the handle unscrewed to reveal a screwdriver, which in turn unscrewed to reveal a smaller screwdriver, and so on. “My granddaughters are very handy,” she said. I could see Margo wondering when she would ever use such a thing, but I could also see that this gift would remain among my daughter’s possessions for many years.

  Marse gave Margo an expensive portable radio for her dorm room and a gift certificate to a hair salon in Gainesville. Bette gave her a large woven floor pillow, and Bette’s girlfriend Suzanne, a real estate agent who spent part of the evening smoking marijuana around the side of the house, gave her a Dr. Seuss book. Bette promised to visit Margo that semester, to take her off campus to do some shopping, and Marse hugged her and told her not to party too hard, but not to neglect to party at all. Then Marse and Bette and I took the gifts into the kitchen and stood watching from inside. Bette took off her large dangling earrings and Marse stepped out of her heels. Their faces were reflected in the kitchen windows, superimposed over the backyard. Marse, who had recently taken up with a boat salesman named Ted, wore a string of expensive-looking pearls. Bette’s hair was whiter and shorter than ever, a silver swim cap. She’d never colored it. I’d begun highlighting mine when I’d turned forty. One morning I’d been backing out of the driveway, and when I’d looked in the rearview mirror I’d seen one unmistakable silver strand rising above the rest. I’d turned off the ignition and gone inside to call my salon.

  “How are you handling all this?” said Marse to me.

  “I’m completely unprepared,” I said.

  “Better buck up,” said Bette. “I hear it gets worse before it gets better.”

  Later, Grady gave a toast thanking everyone for coming and telling Margo how proud he was. “You are thoughtful and smart and gracious,” he said, choking up. “And we love you.” When his speech was through, he and I stood watching the party from the far side of the swimming pool. Margo was across the water from us, making conversation with a woman from Grady and Gloria’s church. Her dark wavy hair reached past her shoulders and she bit her bottom lip in concentration, as she had a habit of doing. She’d been asked a dozen times what she planned to major in, and each time the answer was different: political science and history, then political science and art history, then art history and biology. I’d even heard her say that she wanted to take dance classes.

  “Ah, the nest,” Grady said, clinking my glass with his beer can.

  “Empty,” I said.

  In the torchlight I saw, as I often did, the shadow of Dennis in Grady’s curly mop of hair, mostly gray now, and the scattering of freckles across his nose. I hadn’t allowed myself to think much beyond the coming weekend, when Dennis and I would leave Margo in Gainesville. I hadn’t thought about returning to an empty house. Two years earlier, I’d left my position at the bank for a part-time job as the bookkeeper at a small medical practice in downtown Coral Gables—I thought now that maybe I would take on more hours, keep busier.

  Grady said, “Of course Bette stayed home, but she wasn’t around much. Dennis was off in the dorms and came home on t
he weekends. It was quiet. We didn’t know quite what to do with ourselves. Gloria started with the bridge club then, and she’s still at it. I started fishing more.”

  “Dennis has been running a lot,” I said. He’d been getting up before dawn, then returning to make a big breakfast before heading to work. He’d done this two or three times a week for six months.

  “Go with him,” said Grady. “You might like it.”

  I’d gone twice, and both times I’d felt a little sick from the early hour, and Dennis had to slow down when I cramped. “I joined a tennis team,” I said.

  “Now that’s something,” said Grady. He put an arm around my shoulders. “My granddaughter is moving away from home. I’m an old man.”

  “You are not,” I said. He was sixty-eight that year, but he looked much younger in the red-gold light of the tiki torches. His hair was thick and tousled, and his face was flushed.

  Gloria came up behind us and slipped an arm around Grady’s waist, then took a long drag from her cigarette and blew a thin line of smoke over the pool. “My lovely,” said Grady.

  “Isn’t this a success?” said Gloria. “Margo’s charming.”

  “We were just discussing the empty nest,” said Grady.

  “You should travel,” said Gloria. “Go on an archaeological dig in Egypt. They teach you everything you need to know.”

  In twenty years, Grady and Gloria had never seemed to understand that their means were not our means: we could not afford to travel, at least not to Egypt. To say this aloud would have ruined their vision of us, not to mention the conversation.

  Across the swimming pool, Margo had started what seemed to be a serious conversation with Ed Everest, Eleanor’s husband. Margo was using her hands to make a point, and he was nodding and asking questions. The torchlight accentuated her planes and contours—her fit upper arms, her collarbone and jawline, the dark waves of her hair. I had no idea what my daughter would have to discuss with Ed Everest, who was the pastor at Grady and Gloria’s church, but Margo had a way with adults and always had, even when she was a little girl and had sat quietly with clear, wise eyes at our dinner parties, answering questions in complete sentences and offering to help me clear the plates. I suppose as an only child she’d had little choice in the matter. After a moment, Ed laughed heartily, and Margo put out her hand to shake, and the success of the interaction, the maturity of it, struck a chord in me, and I felt a little dizzy.

  That night, Margo took my car to meet girlfriends, and at three a.m. I awoke to the still house, my heart pounding. I was certain that when I opened the door to her bedroom I would see an empty bed, but I was wrong: Margo was sleeping heavily with an arm across her forehead. She’d done more packing after getting home: there was a row of three suitcases just inside the room, facing the door like eager dogs waiting for it to open.

  Dennis woke Margo early the next morning, and after an hour they departed with only a large tote of food and a change of clothes each. I went through the house straightening up, and in Margo’s room I made the bed—she would not sleep there again before we left—and cleaned her little bathroom. I took her suitcases to the car, then returned for two boxes of books she’d packed up that morning. I stood a long time in her closet, then spotted four shoeboxes on the highest shelf: all were filled with paper confetti, which Dennis and Margo and I had made when Margo was fourteen. Dennis had come home with half a dozen reams of multicolored office paper his firm was going to throw out—I have no idea why; perhaps it had been ordered mistakenly—and Margo had decided that instead of wasting it we should make confetti, which one day we would use to celebrate something. The next day, Dennis had brought home three-hole-punch gizmos, and after dinner every night that week we’d sat at the breakfast table and made confetti. One shoebox was filled with pastel pink and green confetti, another with yellow and orange, another with baby blue and red, and another with all the colors, which Margo had called tutti-frutti. When I removed the lids from the boxes, several pieces floated up and onto Margo’s bedspread. I got a large freezer bag and filled it with the tutti-frutti, then returned the boxes to their shelf and swept up the leftover confetti with my hand.

  Later I drove to the department store and bought Margo a red bathrobe and matching slippers. I was struck with a momentary sense of regret that I had not thought of this earlier, so I might have had the bathrobe monogrammed. I added matching towels and left, having spent more than I should have. On the way home, I stopped at a sporting goods store in South Miami and looked at tennis rackets. I didn’t care about the aluminum or the lighter weight, but it seemed to me that an oversize head was a wonderful idea. A salesman told me it improved play by enlarging the so-called sweet spot. I left with only a can of tennis balls and that evening, after leaving the new bathrobe and slippers on Margo’s bed, I popped open the can, letting loose a cloud of thick canned air that smelled of spray paint and rubber, and I took my old wooden racket outside to hit against the garage door. It was a clear, quiet evening. Fireflies darted around the gardenias in the side yard, and the air smelled of key limes and barbecue. The next-door neighbors waved as they went out, and then the street was empty. I aimed for the flat parts of the garage door and tried to avoid the beveled paneling, which skewed the ball in the wrong direction and sent me running after it. After a while I managed to hit many more than I missed. I was sweating and felt a blister starting to form on my palm. I kept it up until the ball was difficult to discern in the blue evening, and when I stepped up onto the porch I was surprised to find myself winded and my legs aching a little, as they did after Dennis and I swam laps around the stilt house.

  I was early for the first practice. I asked in the pro shop and was directed to a court on the far end of the property. Jack stood at the baseline, serving one ball after another over the net. Each hit the opposite fence with a heavy thud. I stood watching his form—the light toss, the full range of his swing, the powerful follow-through. His legs were long and thick. If I’d been trying to receive those serves, I thought, they would have knocked the racket right out of my hand.

  I stood on the sideline, under a gazebo between the courts, until he noticed me. “Frances, right?” he said. He motioned to my racket in my hand. “That’s a relic.”

  I smiled and nodded, a little flattered that he had remembered my name. A man and two women—twins—came through the gate onto the court. Jack marked down their names on a clipboard and asked the man—Rodrigo—to collect the balls on the court using a red wire hopper. Rodrigo jogged off and one of the twins put out her hand for me to shake. Her name was Twyla. Another woman came through the gate and approached the gazebo—she had short gray hair and prominent cheekbones, and she was familiar to me but I couldn’t place her—and within ten minutes there were two dozen players assembled around Jack in the gazebo. I shook a few hands but there were too many people. I wondered if the group would thin out as the weeks passed.

  Jack explained how the team would work: he would pair us up to get a sense of our game, then at the next practice he’d assign us a practice partner. Each practice would start with half an hour of hitting, then continue with drills for an hour and a half. “I encourage you to stay afterward to play matches,” he said, “and it’s mandatory—this is not negotiable—to play at least one full match per week.” He looked down at his clipboard, then up at me. “Frances,” he said. “Beginner, right?”

  “Definitely,” I said.

  “You two”—he pointed at Twyla—“take court three. Show me what you’ve got.”

  We walked together across one court and onto another. “I’m not much for taking orders,” said Twyla.

  “He’s just being coachy,” I said.

  “Take it easy on me,” she said. We separated at the net and when I turned around, Twyla said, “Ready?” and I nodded. She bounced the ball once, then hit it far over my head. I raised a ball to signal that I would start the next one. I dropped it and hit it and was pleased to see it sail elegantly away from me, a
nd bounce a few yards in front of her. She swung at it and missed. It went like this for another fifteen minutes—she served out and either missed mine or hit them into the net. It was humid and bright; my sunglasses kept sliding down my nose, and after only a few minutes my racket started to feel heavy. I began to run for Twyla’s balls even when they were going out. I caught them in midair and swung hard to get them all the way back to her baseline—this at least kept the ball in play for a moment more. Soon Jack blew his whistle from our sideline, and Twyla looked over at him mid-swing, and missed the ball. “You,” he said to her, “court four. Swap with Jane.”

  She trudged off and Jack walked over to me. “You need more of a challenge,” he said. “Jane might be out of your league, but she’ll bring out your best.”

  “I’m not sure about all this,” I said.

  Jack smiled. There was a tiny chip in his front tooth, and it looked like he hadn’t shaved that morning. The hair on his arms was thick and dark. “You have a lot of power but not a lot of control,” he said. “Let’s see your serve.”

  I stepped to the baseline and pointed my feet the way I remembered I should, then tossed the ball and slammed it into the net.

  “Don’t chase your toss,” he said, then came up behind me and positioned my arm. I tossed several times without swinging, and then when I served the ball went long. He said, “We’re just taking stock here, don’t worry.”

  Jane—this was the woman I knew from somewhere—jogged over in white shorts and a pink polo. She tapped the net with her racket and moved into position. “Ready?” she said, and before I could respond, she jackhammered a serve over the net. It flew past me.

  “Good luck,” said Jack as he moved off the court.

  I did my best to return Jane’s shots but they were streamlined and swift. After hitting against her for fifteen minutes, I was demoralized, but then we ran drills as a group and I managed well enough. By the end of the practice I was sweating through my shirt. Still, there was something calming about the tennis center itself, about simply passing a couple of hours on the groomed clay courts, leaving marks in the clay with each lunge and turn. Over the mesh-lined fences rose the tops of wide banyan trees along the golf course, like gentle monsters keeping watch. I simply wasn’t used to spending time outside other than at Stiltsville. I had missed it.