Hidden Valley Road - Inside the Mind of an American Family - Robert Kolker Page 0,94

for a much older supplier—a guy who leered at her a lot but never made a move on her. With an old Kent School boyfriend, she saw as many as fifty Grateful Dead shows, all around the country, most of them while drenched in coke and acid. Margaret wanted to feel strong and capable and independent. But some part of her was waiting to be rescued—to keep her from ever having to engage directly with anything deeper.

Why do I even go home? My mind feels like it’s going to wind up so much that it won’t ever stop spinning. I cannot understand or cope with my brothers, especially Matt, Peter, Joe and Donald. I’m in tears right now because I can’t handle any of it….Life is merely the permanent roots your family knots around you. My family depresses me, they hinder my progress in many ways. I’m stuck with insanities that no one should have to go through life trying to ignore….

Margaret’s diary, April 3, 1983

That summer, Margaret was out east following the Dead when she found herself swept off her feet in a way she only had dreamed. Chris had been an upperclassman at Skidmore when Margaret was there and had noticed her then. In college he’d been known as Hot Knives—the name for a technique in which you take a piece of hash and smash it between two red-hot knives, and then inhale the smoke. When Chris saw her again now, at a party in Connecticut, he made his move.

Chris was a few years older than she was, with an aggressive, nimble intellect. His father was an oil executive, and Chris was a fixture at his family’s yacht club, racing Laser-class sailboats in championships around the world. He paid to fly Margaret out to Maine in August to see him again. They went boating to the islands off Georgetown and Boothbay, drank Bloody Marys and blueberry daiquiris, ate lobster, and brought nineteen more of them back to Connecticut, where he introduced her to his parents. The next day, they sped into Manhattan in his BMW for shopping at Saks Fifth Avenue and Bloomingdale’s. To Margaret, Chris wasn’t just another guy. He was an entirely new narrative.

I never thought I’d meet a man with so much to offer, and the outrageous part is he wants to share it with me.

August 31, 1983

She went back again in September. He flew out to see her in Colorado in October, and again on Thanksgiving. And on New Year’s Eve, they were together again in Manhattan, dressed brilliantly, ringing in the new year at the Rainbow Room. They both were half-done-in by champagne and coke and pot when, in the first moments of 1984, Chris leaned in toward her, conspiratorially.

“Can you keep a secret?”

“Yeah.”

“Will you marry me?”

* * *

—

“YOU’RE NOT GETTING married to this guy. That’s ridiculous.”

This was Wylie, a classmate of Margaret’s in Boulder, another love interest, or at least he hoped to be. While Chris was a competitive sailor, Wylie spent the warmer months painting houses. Wylie was level-headed and soft-spoken, usually. But this news, and the ring on Margaret’s finger, took him by surprise.

But she was serious. No one was taking care of her anymore—not her family, not the Garys. Chris was ready. Trips to Germany and Crete and Egypt were all planned out.

Lindsay got it. She might have been the only other person on the planet who really knew what Margaret was running from. This was her sister’s chance to have a new family.

Mimi and Don approved, too. Aware of Chris’s family’s wealth, they mortgaged their house to host the finest wedding they could manage. Mimi made all the dresses herself from an Oscar de la Renta pattern, pink silk with ruffles around the bottom and top.

They set a date for August. All Margaret needed to do now was navigate a path through her brothers—all nine of them—to the altar without a scene.

* * *

—

IN THE MONTHS before the wedding, Peter was arrested in Vail for soliciting funds on the street for