19
Margaret answers her own door on Saturday morning, and I’m so caught off guard that for three seconds after she greets me, I just stare.
“Where’s Jodi?” I finally ask when I step inside and slip my shoes off.
“Day off,” Margaret says shortly, and leads me down the hallway. “Too hot to be outside today. Mind if we sit in the living room?”
“Works for me,” I tell her.
We stop by the kitchen first, and she shakes a box of colorful frozen macarons onto a plate. “Coffee? Tea?”
“Coffee,” I say. “But I can get it myself.”
She waves me toward the pot, and I pour myself a mug and find the sugar in a jar beneath the cupboard. “You want one?” I ask.
“Already got mine waiting in there,” she tells me, and I follow her back to the room where we first met. It’s so hot out today that the air-conditioning can’t keep up. The air feels stiff and damp. Even for me, it’s a bit much.
Just not enough to keep me from drinking hot coffee.
I must wince when I taste it, because Margaret laughs. “All right, all right, I don’t usually make the coffee.”
“It’s not that bad,” I say.
I try another gulp. My reaction makes her start laughing again, and it’s contagious. As I rein my giggles in, I set my mug aside and take out my recorder. “So today’s the day.”
“What day is that?” Her silver brows leap upward, but there’s something in her expression that tells me it’s an act. That she’s actually just as excited for today’s interview as I am.
“The day it becomes your story,” I say, hitting the button to start recording and setting the device on the table between us.
She flicks a hand over her shoulder, an unconvincing pishposh. “I told you: It’s all my story. When you come from a family like mine, you’re a part of a whole, like one square in a quilt. Anytime you try to pull in a particular direction, there are hundreds of other squares to resist. To pull you back.”
“I get that,” I say. “But today, try to ignore those squares. I want to know what it was like to be you.”
She smiles wide. “For a time,” she says, “it was pure magic.”
The Story
Their version: What it must be like to be raised in a castle!
Her version: What’s it like to be raised in a castle?
What’s it like to have everything you want before you’ve asked for it?
What’s it like to have your food plated by a chef when you’re still a toddler?
What’s it like to have the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus perform at your fifth birthday?
To have snow blown in on the hill behind your house in time for Christmas, and to spend all summer wandering through your private orange groves and playing hide-and-seek in the hedge maze, or the chapel, or the slew of Greek follies? To grow up with horses and dogs, swans and zebras and peacocks all wandering past your window, bonded enough to you to eat straight from your hand?
What’s it like to break your arm sliding down a grand staircase’s banister and take your family’s helicopter to the hospital? To live inside a ten-foot stone wall, so far from your front door that anything beyond it might as well be a different world?
What’s it like when your father loves your mother madly? When he fills the breakfast room—because there is a room just for breakfast—with daisies—potted, not cut—on her birthday, and she rolls her eyes but laughs too, because she doesn’t have an ounce of his whimsy, but she understands the hundreds of ways her husband tries, again and again, to say something along the lines of I love you?
When they were younger—Margaret and her sister, Laura—life came in flickers of yellow gold. Warmth, that’s what she remembers. Laughter. Her mother blowing raspberries on her stomach. Her father trying, and failing, to make daisy chains for his girls to wear. Her cousin Ruth braiding her hair, her aunt Francine taking her horseback riding. Strolling with Great-Aunt Gigi down the perfume aisles in the glossy department stores along Seventh Street. Grandmother Rosalind reading to her in the library, Margaret sitting in her lap and toying with the string of pearls that lay against Rosalind’s cashmere sweater, while her grandfather Gerald smoked an overpriced cigar over by the window.
She remembers kissing her parents good night before they left for premieres, balls, galas, and loving the smell of her mother’s soap, the oh-so-rare appearance of a muted mauve paint on her lips. She remembers sneaking out of bed to meet Laura in the tent strung up in their playroom—because there was a room just for playing—and staying up all night, giggling and whispering, and shining flashlights on their picture books.
There’s one day in particular she remembers best. A Sunday in late summer, before the heat had broken, when she spent the whole day with her parents and her sister in the ornately tiled outdoor pool—not to be confused with the indoor pool. She remembers practicing diving with her mother. She remembers her father tossing her up, up, up, then catching her right before she crashed against the surface.
And holding her little sister’s hand, running as fast as they could from the edge of the pool, convinced that if only they were fast enough, worked hard enough, they could sail right across the surface of the water without sinking.
She still thinks about this day a lot, as a kind of before picture. The last golden day.
After that, the world turned blue. As if when she dove under the surface of the water, the cool tones had washed across her eyes and never left.
After that, Margaret’s memories are different. Fights—sometimes screamed, and other times whispered. Slammed doors. Bits of jagged blue sentences, sneaking through doors and walls.
—Do you even care that you’re a mother? Do you even love them—
—out again until all hours, so you can do whatever you want, but I should be here—
—not the person I married, not even close—
—if you hate your life so much, why are you even still—
She remembers her grandmother Rosalind introducing her and Laura to their new nanny, and feeling so sure it was all a punishment, if she could only figure out for what, what she had done wrong. She was always getting herself into trouble, in the form of scraped knees, muddy tracks across rugs, and broken vases. It could have been anything.
She remembers quiet meals at the dinner table—one of the tables was exclusively for dinner—with the whole family, and then one day the small table moved into the playroom, and all her and her sister’s meals taken there, apart from the others.
She’d go days, sometimes, without seeing her parents, and worse still, somehow, were the nights they came in one at a time to say their good nights, looking tired or angry or pained.
What is it like when all of your clothes were made to fit your body, your shoes resoled without your asking, your hairdresser waiting for you on the veranda once a month? What is it like to cry when your favorite swan dies, and to have your grandfather look you in the eye and say, “Your father was supposed to have a son. Who’s going to look after all of this when I’m gone?”
What’s it like to roller-skate in the ballroom with your sister, or to read a book about a pony and wake up the next morning to find one wearing a big velvet bow in the marble foyer, and to love it, to love it so much you name it after the swan you lost, and tell yourself that maybe, somehow, it is the swan, come back from beyond the grave to care for you, because while everyone around you takes care of you, you aren’t really sure that any of them care about you?
When you fall and scrape your knee, there’s a mad rush for gauze and rubbing alcohol, but when you weep over the delicate broken neck of a bird, you’re given a lollipop.
When you want something you have no idea how to ask for, and no clue whether it even exists.
What do you do when you live in a world that was built around you, and so you find yourself trapped, like one sentence in a myth, one brick in a wall? When you’re built into the fabric of a place and that place was built to keep everyone out?
What’s it like to feel yourself alone in the world?
