Stiltsville: A Novel - By Susanna Daniel Page 0,68

this?” She held up a stuffed dolphin she’d had since childhood. I remembered buying it for her at the Seaquarium gift shop. “Or this?” She pulled a Miami Hurricanes baseball cap from the pile; Dennis had given it to her the first time he’d taken her to a baseball game. I looked at the faintly dirty cap, which evoked a whole afternoon’s memory, and I wondered which was preferable: clinging sentimentally to the unending stream of items that flow through our lives, or letting them go as if they had no relationship to memory, no status.

“Don’t take them,” I said.

“What if I want them?”

“Then I’ll send them.”

“You won’t throw things out? I think you’re going to throw things out.”

“I promise,” I said. I made a mental note: do not throw things out.

In my bedroom, I pulled on a sundress and briefly worried that Dennis’s mother would think we had not dressed up enough. When I was ready, I found Dennis and Margo in the living room. Margo was in Dennis’s arms, crying. “What’s going on?” I said.

Over Margo’s shoulder, Dennis said, “She’s sad.”

Margo said something into Dennis’s shirt, which was not yet buttoned. His hair was wet and uncombed. “What?” I said.

“I don’t want to go,” she repeated.

“Margo, your grandmother’s worked hard. She’s invited all her friends—”

“No!” she said. “I don’t want to move away.” She cried harder.

It was a situation we alone seemed to face. Margo had graduated from high school two years earlier, and at that time all her friends had been itching to get away. And maybe if she’d been accepted at one of her top choices—Chapel Hill or University of Virginia—Margo would have been itching as well. She’d applied to six colleges, and her school counselor had seemed to think that with one or two she was reaching, but the others were within the realm of possibility. “You never know,” the counselor had told me. “Margo is very bright, yes, but her grades are not stellar. In that situation they’ll be looking for something extra.” She’d left unsaid the fact that there was no obvious something extra. Margo had been a reporter on the newspaper staff and in the chorus of a few school plays, but she hadn’t really committed herself to anything. She’d floated from activity to activity, competent but uninspired. When she’d given up competitive sailing, she’d said it was because the regattas monopolized all her weekends. When would she get to Stiltsville? she’d said. Dennis had been proud.

We’d taken a road trip in the spring of her junior year. We packed a cooler and three small suitcases and looped through the dreary, damp eastern seaboard. We hit the Carolina schools, then the University of Virginia, then the D.C. schools, then the Boston schools. On the way back we spent a night with my mother, then stopped in Hilton Head, where Dennis played a very expensive round of golf. We sidetracked to the camp where Margo had gone for three summers. The grounds were closed. The air was cool and smelled of wet clay and spruce. We stepped over a chain that crossed the main camp road, and Margo led us to a cluster of one-room wooden cabins with rickety screen doors. We stepped inside the cabin where Margo had been assigned her last year of camp, when she was eleven years old. The room was claustrophobic. The bunks had no mattresses—they were in storage for the season—and there was a sink in one corner with rust stains in its bowl. Margo walked to one of the top bunks. “This was mine,” she said, and I pictured her there, writing letters on the stationery we’d sent with her, her hair wet from swim time. We’d left the cabin and wandered through the campgrounds, past the locked dining hall and the still waterfront, until we were spotted by a groundskeeper, who asked us kindly to leave.

As it turned out, Margo had been accepted only at the University of Miami, her safety option, and had continued to live at home because of the school’s high cost. Beverly Jovanovich had gone to Swarthmore, and Margo’s on-again, off-again boyfriend, Peter Sanchez, a tall boy who wore tortoiseshell eyeglasses and had excellent manners, had gone to Davidson. For two years we’d encouraged Margo to transfer so that she could move away, too, but when the time came she’d lacked the heart to repeat the entire application process, so she’d applied only to the University of Florida. She’d been excited,