with green mangroves as a paintbrush with bristles, wore a wide pink wreath, a horizontal tutu. The Miami Herald had run a full-color photo: from above, the islands looked like giant hibiscus blossoms floating in a vast green pool.
From fifty yards away—there were patrol boats milling to make sure we didn’t get too close, like guards in an art museum—I could make out the weave in the pink fabric, water puddling in grooves. The pink undulated and shimmered in the sunlight, fading and brightening. It was like nothing I’d ever imagined. Like so much of Miami, the islands were vain, gaudy, and glorious—and in this way they belonged there, undeniably, and I hoped unrealistically that their pink skirts would stay fastened forever.
It was safe to say Dennis and I were not looking through the same lens. “Slap plastic around some land and call it art,” he said, but he lifted the video camera anyway.
While he filmed, Margo stared from behind her sunglasses. She’d chopped her purple jeans into shorts, but she wouldn’t let me hem them; fringe dangled past her knees. “Why did they put this here?” she said.
“Here in Miami, or here in the bay?” said Dennis, training the camera on her.
She covered her face and spoke through her fingers. “Here in Miami.”
Dennis shrugged. “Who knows why artists do what they do?” he said. “I have only one request of you, dear—never marry an artist. That goes for you, too, Beverly. Just as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor one.” He trailed off, lacking conviction. He spoke in a radio voice. “On this day,” he said, “May seventeenth, nineteen eighty-two, this ordinary American family discovered a scientific phenomenon no human has ever witnessed: flowers as big as yachts.”
He went on, amusing himself and the girls. Maybe the mutant flora had resulted from a spill at Turkey Point, he speculated. Maybe they were spaceships, said Margo, transporting aliens who ate humans for fuel. Beverly laughed. Margo agreed to be interviewed on camera. She used her fist for a microphone. “I’d like to thank my best friend, Carla,” she said. Her hair curved against her face. “If she hadn’t sacrificed her life to the aliens, scientists might never have discovered the location of the mother ship.”
Why Miami? I thought. Because anywhere else, the islands would have seemed garish and bizarre, and Christo would’ve seemed like a loon. Because a century ago, swampland enveloped this shoreline, before developers drained it and built a city from the bog. Because our piece of Florida was invented, not discovered. Like the Surrounded Islands, Miami was at once impossible and inspired, like a magic trick practiced for hours, performed in seconds.
The following year, Bette would teach Margo to sail and she would join the Coconut Grove Sailing Club’s junior division and start to bring home trophies. She would get braces and keep them on for two years. For years, her closest friend would be Beverly, followed by a few kids from the club with whom she traveled to regattas on weekends. Shortly after she turned fifteen she would spend a weekend in Sarasota with her sailing club, and her first boyfriend, Dax Medina, would kiss her behind the Days Inn.
We circled one island and moved on to the next. The process was like negotiating a labyrinth—only a segment was visible from any given perspective. “Take us farther out,” I said to Dennis. “I want to see them all at once.”
“Aye, aye,” he said. He eased forward on the throttle and turned us away from shore, and soon the islands spread out in a disorderly line. I stepped up onto the gunwale and rose on my tiptoes, but still the dark water all but swallowed the pink. We would’ve needed an airplane to view the project as a whole; we would’ve needed a mountaintop. Instead, we patched the project together in our minds, like pieces in a colossal, unmanageable puzzle.
1990
When the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables underwent renovations, Margo was one of several high school volunteers who ended up on scaffolding along the tower, applying a coat of the hotel’s signature terra-cotta color. Her photograph appeared in the “Neighbors” section of the Miami Herald: a black-and-white close-up of my daughter wearing a rolled bandanna on her forehead, a paint streak along one cheek. Three years later, I visited the Biltmore to use a guest pass given to me by Dennis’s parents, who were members of the golf club. I