Susanna Daniel - Stiltsville

“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.

After I handed over a check for $200, which committed me to the team for one twelve-week season, I left the tennis center and stood on the sidewalk outside the fence that enclosed the courts. The air smelled of gardenias and was filled with the hollow popping sound of balls hitting rackets, and I was suddenly, overwhelmingly satisfied with myself. Not until I arrived home and was unloading groceries from the car did I remember that the following Saturday—the day of the team’s first practice—was already consumed by one principal activity, an activity to which I’d given surprisingly little consideration: this was the day when we would pack up the station wagon, drive north for six hours, and drop off my daughter at her new college.

After returning from the Biltmore, I went to the garage to look for my old tennis racket, and it was there that Dennis found me half an hour later, elbow-deep in a box marked ATLANTA, a porcelain-faced doll in one hand and my old wooden Wilson in the other. He gave me a look but didn’t ask any questions. “Is she all packed?” he said.

“I doubt it.” I turned off the garage light and followed Dennis back into the kitchen. He was just in from work, slightly sweaty; I could smell the dry cleaning of his suit. That evening, Dennis’s parents were throwing a farewell barbecue for Margo, and as usual it would be a struggle not to arrive late. I took my old racket down the hallway and knocked on Margo’s door. “We’re leaving in half an hour,” I called. There was no answer. I knocked again and opened the door. Margo stood on the far side of her bed, sorting through a heap of clothes and shoes. She was tan and freckled from a month spent fishing with Dennis in the early mornings, and from driving our car around with the sunroof open. She looked up. “I heard you,” she said. She gestured toward the pile on the bed. “I have no system.”

Why hadn’t I made certain she was packed before now? “I’ll help you tonight, after the party.”

She pointed at the racket in my hand. “What’s that?”

“Nothing. A tennis racket. There’s a team at the Biltmore.”

She looked dubious. I hadn’t been one for joining teams in her lifetime. “Is Marse joining, too?”

It hadn’t occurred to me to rally Marse, but I didn’t think it would be her cup of tea. She’d started teaching aerobics at her health club. I’d gone to a few classes and left exhausted, with a bruised ego. “No, just me,” I said.

“Nobody uses wooden rackets anymore, Mom.”

It always surprised me when my daughter seemed to think I noticed nothing. “I know that,” I said, “but this is what I have.” I picked up a pair of old gym shorts from the pile on her bed. They were printed with the insignia of her high school. “I don’t think you’ll need these,” I said. “Or this.” I picked up a straw hat she had not worn in years. I separated the gym shorts and the straw hat and a fringed leather jacket from the heap.

“I guess not,” she said.

“You need to get dressed.”

“I am dressed.” She moved out from behind the bed so I could see her. She wore a long patchwork skirt that she’d bought in Coconut Grove, a white peasant top, and a wide leather belt. “Should I take 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.