Susanna Daniel - Stiltsville

“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.”

I started to cry, and she put an arm around me and we drank more wine. After she left, I debated for a long time about calling the home of Beverly Jovanovich, whom Margo had mentioned during her retelling of the events and who, according to Margo, had told Trisha to lay off when it was clear she had my daughter in her sights. I decided it could hardly make things worse. “I want to thank you for standing up for Margo last night,” I said to her when she came to the phone.

“OK,” said Beverly.

“What’s it going to be like tomorrow?”

“Trisha was pretty mad she left,” Beverly said. I started to tell her what I thought about that, but held my tongue. “I think it’s kind of hard for Margo,” she said. “Sixth grade is tough.”

“I’m starting to realize that.”

“Seventh is way better,” she said. I had to believe her. There was no other option.

Monday morning Dennis hemmed and hawed about calling in sick on his first day at the new job—he’d seized on the idea of taking Margo to Stiltsville to help her feel better—but I forced him out of the house. He told Margo he loved her through her locked bedroom door. Before getting into his car he said to me, “If we did the wrong thing, why not just put her back where she belongs?”

“Because she doesn’t belong there anymore,” I told him.

After he left I stood outside Margo’s room for a long time, weighing the options. I looked at my watch and calculated that homeroom was already over. I called my supervisor at the bank and asked him to find someone to cover for me for the rest of the week. I called Sunset School and asked firmly to speak to the principal, who listened to my story and promised that he would ask sixth- and seventh-grade teachers to do their best to check this kind of bullying behavior, as he put it. I called Mr. Callahan, the school counselor, and he recommended increasing Margo’s sessions to twice a week. He also recommended, strongly, that I bring her to school right away. I called Dennis’s mother and left a message asking if we could come for dinner that week; we hadn’t seen her and Grady in a while and I thought it would be good for Margo, and for me. I knocked on Margo’s door and told her to get dressed for school. “If you can do this,” I said through the door, “you can do anything.” When she came out, her eyes were red and her face was still. She didn’t argue. In the car I handed her a tube of lip gloss and she put it on compliantly. I touched her hair before she opened the car door. “This sucks,” she said.

“No swearing,” I said. “It does suck. It sucks very badly.”

She hesitated, one foot on the ground outside. The school was imposing and inanimate, as if arrested in time. There was no one outside, no movement beyond the frosted windows. Then after a minute, a man emerged from the school office, folding a piece of paper. He walked to his car and got in. A woman crossed the courtyard toward the gym. Margo adjusted her backpack and stepped out of the car and closed the door behind her, waving quickly, then walked toward the school without looking back.

The good news was that since they were not in the same classes, Margo didn’t see Trisha that day until the last class let out and she was pulling books from her locker, at which point, she reported, Trisha walked up, called her a snitch, and kept walking. As Margo left school, Beverly came up and said she liked her sneakers and they walked the rest of the way to the parking lot, where I was waiting in the same spot I’d taken that morning, as if I’d never left.

That night we tie-dyed T-shirts for ourselves and for Carla, who had called to tell Margo she hated her new school in Massachusetts. This made Margo feel better—though not, as she put it, in a mean way—and the next morning we drove back to school and Margo took a deep breath and got out of the car again. We did this again the next day and the next. I took Margo to the hardware store and let her choose a paint color for her bedroom—she chose scarlet—and the three of us moved everything out of the room, painted the walls and let them dry, then moved everything back. While we painted, Dennis tried to explain to Margo what maritime law was all about, and she asked questions and told him she was happy he was happy. That Saturday Margo went to a movie with Beverly, and soon after that she started smiling again. I woke up in the middle of the night several times, but every time Dennis was asleep beside me, and Margo was asleep in her bed.

We’d been unlucky and now it seemed we might become lucky again. Sometimes I think the guiding principles of good parenting are luck and circumstance. And sometimes when I’m feeling pompous I think there is no such thing as luck, that Margo’s strength comes from our steerage. The night she fled Trisha Weintraub’s house, I’d told her while she cried that no one should have the power to make her feel bad or ugly or embarrassed, that she was the one to decide who could hurt her feelings and who could not. I was just filling the air, of course; she knew well enough that this wasn’t true. I hoped, however, that at some point she’d learn what is true: that although we like to believe we are our own little islands, capable of protecting ourselves as well as sheltering and welcoming others, this is never really the case. Still, we must behave as if it is, and hope that we can withstand the wills of other people more often than we cannot.

In mid-May of that year—a month before the end of sixth grade—an all-white jury in the McDuffie case acquitted the accused officers of all thirteen counts after less than three hours of deliberation. Riots broke out in three Miami neighborhoods—black neighborhoods—immediately after the verdict was read. From Stiltsville, we could see smoke rising over the city, and when we got home, South Bayshore was a ghost town. Dennis took the long way to work to avoid the rioting, and when he was home he walked around the house checking the locks on the doors. Although we lived only a five-minute drive from some of the violence, we were shielded from it. Two miles from our house, at a stoplight in a rougher part of Coconut Grove, a white man was dragged from his car and beaten. Governor Graham summoned 3,500 National Guard troops to Miami. Fifteen people were killed, hundreds were injured. Our television stayed on all the time, tuned in to the frequent news alerts. On the third day of rioting, with the troops in place, along with a curfew and a ban on liquor and gun sales, the violence started to abate. On television, the cameras focused on dark empty storefronts with broken windows, on alleys where small fires still burned. Journalists shoved microphones in the faces of crying black women who shook their heads in disbelief. The federal government declared Miami a disaster area and allotted funds for rebuilding.

Shortly after the trial verdict, Margo spent the night at the Jovanovich house, and when she got home, she said, “Beverly’s dad says those people are just destroying their own neighborhoods,” and Dennis said, “Margo, we don’t say those people in this house. If you want to talk about black people”—a few years later he would adopt the term African-Americans—“then say black people. And they’re angry. This isn’t a conspiracy, it’s a riot. This is what rioting is.”

A few days later, Dennis and I took Margo and Beverly out on the boat to see Christo’s Surrounded Islands in Biscayne Bay. The day was bright and blue, and the girls chatted at the stern about a classmate’s new haircut and what to wear to so-and-so’s birthday party. Having crossed off his job search, Dennis and I had agreed to talk, at some point, about the possibility of leaving Miami. It had seemed that the riots would make this talk more urgent, but they hadn’t. To Dennis, this was what parenting was about: teaching our daughter how to think about these events. If we moved somewhere smaller, somewhere less messy—what would Margo learn?

Dennis cruised along the shoreline past the mouth of the Miami River, then slowed to a putter. The girls and I sat at the prow, holding on to the boat railing. The Surrounded Islands were replicated in the lenses of their sunglasses. It had taken dozens of workers and 2,200 feet of woven polypropylene fabric for the artist to transform eleven small islands in Biscayne Bay into enormous pink flowers. Each tuft of island, as dense 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.

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 spent an hour swimming in the pool where Esther Williams had performed, backstroking past the soaring colonnades, and in the locker room afterward, I noticed a flyer tacked on a bulletin board amid news of support groups and housecleaning services. The flyer advertised the Biltmore tennis center’s newest team, the Top Forties. I knew immediately, though there were no other clues, that the title meant the team was composed of people who had reached middle age. I was forty-seven years old, and alert to the attendant afflictions: empty-nest syndrome loomed, midlife crisis itched, menopause dogged. Though I had not played tennis with any regularity since high school, I knew before I’d finished getting dressed that I would join the team. I crossed the parking lot and climbed the tennis center’s exterior staircase, walked through the lounge past a row of windows overlooking the courts, and knocked on a door marked OFFICE. On the other side of the door was a tall, dark-haired man in tennis whites. His name was Jack. So began the summer of 1990—the summer of tennis.