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