Stiltsville: A Novel - By Susanna Daniel Page 0,56

was rarely my responsibility, and it sounded forced. I tried again: “It’s going to be fine.” If he couldn’t believe it, I wasn’t sure I could.

“I was thinking something.”

“What?”

“Used to be,” he said, “she had twelve years of school, total, before we sent her off.”

I inhaled sharply. How could I not have considered this? We’d robbed ourselves of an entire year of Margo. “I’ve been thinking maybe fifth grade was the best year that never happened.”

“Right,” he said. From inside I heard Margo calling for me.

“Come see what she got,” I said to Dennis.

“I saw plenty,” he said, but he rose anyway, and stretched up on the balls of his feet, pointing his long arms toward the sky, and when he came down again he put one arm around me, and we went inside. The next week, I drove Margo to the front entrance of Sunset School, where Carla was waiting for her. They stood on the sidewalk, admiring each other’s outfits—Margo had worn the red velveteen pants, despite the muggy weather—and then Carla walked in one direction, and Margo walked in the other.

Dennis and I were late for parent-teacher night because Marse and Margo and I had spent the afternoon on Marse’s boat and lost track of time. Dennis and I snapped at each other in the car, and I was flustered upon arriving at the school gates, where a student handed us name tags and a schedule. According to the schedule, our evening would follow the design of our daughter’s day: ten minutes in each of her classes. I studied the schedule as we walked toward her homeroom, then looked across the courtyard at the elementary school building. There, our other selves headed to the fifth-grade classroom, where we would have drunk coffee from Styrofoam cups and chatted with parents whose faces were familiar but whose names we’d forgotten. The fifth-grade teacher would have taken me by the elbow and told me that Margo was doing marvelously, that she had many dear friends, and that her scores were top-notch. We would have popped our heads into the fourth-grade classroom and waved hello to Mr. Oxley. Margo might have felt the same nostalgia. In the month since school had started she’d been spending a lot of time on her schoolwork and in the backyard on a blanket with sunscreen and a book. From what I gathered, she had not made new friends.

Dennis was bored by the time the homeroom bell clanged. He slouched like a kid in his chair. Margo’s English teacher was a handsome, dimpled young man named Mr. Lopez, and her social studies teacher, Mrs. Gonzalez, wore tinted glasses and chunky brass bracelets that clattered when she moved. Mrs. Gonzalez’s class was starting a unit on the Constitution; she explained that every student would be required to write a report about an article or an amendment. “Finally, something useful,” said Dennis as we shuffled with the other parents to Margo’s science class. Our group finished back in homeroom for refreshments, and Dennis and I stood in the corner while the other parents shook the teacher’s hand and filed out. Margo’s homeroom teacher was Mrs. Madansky, a short bony woman with spiky yellow hair. “Can we leave?” said Dennis to me. Cookie crumbs dotted his lips and he licked them off.

“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