Stiltsville: A Novel - By Susanna Daniel Page 0,63
I think you probably feel more comfortable with them.”
“Dad told me all that.”
“He did?”
She turned toward the closet. She dressed in the red velveteen pants and a white top, and then we called for Dennis and grabbed Trisha’s gift from the dining room table and got into the car. Dennis hummed along with the radio as we drove, and Margo’s voice piped up from the backseat to join his. “Bye-bye Miss American Pie,” she sang, at first softly and then louder. “Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry . . .” By the time we reached the Weintraub house, Margo was singing high and strong, like someone excited about what the world had to offer.
There were boys, of course. Judy and her boyfriend took a bottle of wine into the master suite and closed the door, and the girls—eleven of them, enough for an entire soccer team—called the boys on the phone to give the all-clear. They met in an empty lot three doors down and stood shoulder to shoulder so the boys could kiss them one by one, snaking down the line. There was a boy there who was not cool, and had been invited only because he was older and had a history of sneaking the car keys from his father without being caught. This boy, Devon, had acne and bad breath and when he reached Margo in the line, Trisha pushed Margo from behind and Devon grabbed her breasts and when she twisted free the girls called her a prude and Trisha said she should never have invited her, but she’d wanted someone for Devon since he’d offered to drive the boys. After a while the boys wandered off. The girls were worried about getting into trouble if Judy found out they’d left the house, so they went back to Trisha’s bedroom. The room had a sitting area with a fluffy white area rug and a private bathroom with lavender walls and white trim. The girls changed into pajamas and laid out their sleeping bags—Margo’s was blaze-orange and thick as a mattress, a relic from our family’s early camping days—and talked about the boys. And then some of the boys were back, throwing stones at Trisha’s window. Trisha went to the window and hushed them, then whispered in another girl’s ear. The girl giggled and whispered to another girl, who whispered to another. When the whispering reached Margo, she was horrified to learn the plan: they were going to line up at the picture window in the living room and moon the boys on the count of three. She trudged out to the living room with the pack, and for the second time that night they all lined up, facing away from the window. Trisha counted to three but after Margo pulled down her pants, she looked up to discover that no other girl had gone through with it, and instead they were shrieking and pointing at her. She heard muffled male laughter, too, punctuated by catcalls and swear words. Back in the lavender bathroom, she tried to hold it together before sneaking out to call us from the telephone in the kitchen.
Margo spent Sunday in her room and refused to eat. I called Judy Weintraub, who said that she would have a long talk with her daughter about sneaking out. I was too exhausted to ask for more. I called Bette and asked her to come over. “I’ll be there in a jiff,” she said, and I said, “What would we do without you?” She brought cookies and went into Margo’s room with glasses of milk. I knew Bette would advise Margo in ways I couldn’t; she would call the girls nasty names and brainstorm pranks. Her advice would be irresponsible—retribution, humiliation, that sort of thing—but her wicked outrage would make Margo feel better, and while she talked she would wink in a way that told Margo she wasn’t completely serious. When Bette came out of Margo’s bedroom, closing the door softly behind her, we convened in the kitchen and she poured two glasses of wine. “Those little devils,” she said. “Did you do that kind of thing at her age?”
“I was too shy to do things like that.”
“I was just like this Trisha. I was horrible, and then at some point I had no friends.”
“I don’t believe you,” I said.
She smiled. “I would have eaten you for breakfast. You poor thing.”