“I feel—”
“This is the hard part, Dennis. We knew this was going to be hard.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
I shrugged. “I don’t mind it so much.” This was true. I’d carved out a little place for myself at the bank, and had been promoted from teller to loan processor, for a higher hourly wage. The people were friendly and the work was easy. I’d always planned to go back to work someday, and now I had done it. “It’s going to be fine,” I said. But reassurance was rarely my responsibility, and it sounded forced. I tried again: “It’s going to be fine.” If he couldn’t believe it, I wasn’t sure I could.
“I was thinking something.”
“What?”
“Used to be,” he said, “she had twelve years of school, total, before we sent her off.”
I inhaled sharply. How could I not have considered this? We’d robbed ourselves of an entire year of Margo. “I’ve been thinking maybe fifth grade was the best year that never happened.”
“Right,” he said. From inside I heard Margo calling for me.
“Come see what she got,” I said to Dennis.
“I saw plenty,” he said, but he rose anyway, and stretched up on the balls of his feet, pointing his long arms toward the sky, and when he came down again he put one arm around me, and we went inside. The next week, I drove Margo to the front entrance of Sunset School, where Carla was waiting for her. They stood on the sidewalk, admiring each other’s outfits—Margo had worn the red velveteen pants, despite the muggy weather—and then Carla walked in one direction, and Margo walked in the other.
Dennis and I were late for parent-teacher night because Marse and Margo and I had spent the afternoon on Marse’s boat and lost track of time. Dennis and I snapped at each other in the car, and I was flustered upon arriving at the school gates, where a student handed us name tags and a schedule. According to the schedule, our evening would follow the design of our daughter’s day: ten minutes in each of her classes. I studied the schedule as we walked toward her homeroom, then looked across the courtyard at the elementary school building. There, our other selves headed to the fifth-grade classroom, where we would have drunk coffee from Styrofoam cups and chatted with parents whose faces were familiar but whose names we’d forgotten. The fifth-grade teacher would have taken me by the elbow and told me that Margo was doing marvelously, that she had many dear friends, and that her scores were top-notch. We would have popped our heads into the fourth-grade classroom and waved hello to Mr. Oxley. Margo might have felt the same nostalgia. In the month since school had started she’d been spending a lot of time on her schoolwork and in the backyard on a blanket with sunscreen and a book. From what I gathered, she had not made new friends.
Dennis was bored by the time the homeroom bell clanged. He slouched like a kid in his chair. Margo’s English teacher was a handsome, dimpled young man named Mr. Lopez, and her social studies teacher, Mrs. Gonzalez, wore tinted glasses and chunky brass bracelets that clattered when she moved. Mrs. Gonzalez’s class was starting a unit on the Constitution; she explained that every student would be required to write a report about an article or an amendment. “Finally, something useful,” said Dennis as we shuffled with the other parents to Margo’s science class. Our group finished back in homeroom for refreshments, and Dennis and I stood in the corner while the other parents shook the teacher’s hand and filed out. Margo’s homeroom teacher was Mrs. Madansky, a short bony woman with spiky yellow hair. “Can we leave?” said Dennis to me. Cookie crumbs dotted his lips and he licked them off.
“In a minute.”
“Did you see that Lopez guy’s earring?”
“Don’t be provincial.”
Finally, Mrs. Madansky headed our way with an outstretched hand. “Margo’s parents,” she said. “I was hoping we’d get a chance to chat.”
“So were we,” said Dennis, and his forward-leaning stance gave him away: he thought Mrs. Madansky was a dish. His taste was, in my opinion, rather banal.
She gestured to an empty circle of desks and we sat down. The group was thinning out; a few people touched her shoulder to say quick good-byes. “First,” she said, “I think you should know that I’ve been keeping an eye on Margo from the start of the year.”
“And?” said Dennis.
She pinched her lips in concentration, as if choosing her words. “She’s doing well. But so far my impression is that she—well, she’s high-strung, if you know what I mean.”
“Sure,” said Dennis.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said.
Mrs. Madansky met my eye, and I felt a shudder of enmity. I know her best, I wanted to say whenever a teacher chose an adjective for Margo. I’d heard garrulous, precocious, outgoing, sensitive, mature, and—this from her second-grade teacher, whom I did not care for—prideful. Presumptuous, I wanted to say in response. Demanding, obtuse, restrictive. I was not a mother who believed her daughter was flawless—on the contrary, I thought Margo sparkled with faults, bubbled with imperfections. She talked too loudly and too much; she was stubborn, unpredictable, and moody. She had personality.
“If I may ask,” said Mrs. Madansky. “What time does Margo get to bed at night?”
“Eight-thirty or nine,” said Dennis.
“Does she fall asleep easily?”
“Not always,” said Dennis. “I’ve been having trouble sleeping, and sometimes she sits up with me.”
This was news to me.
Mrs. Madansky said, “How often?”
“Twice a week, maybe three times. It’s a phase.”
I said, “Has she been sleeping in class?”
“No, no,” said Mrs. Madansky. “She’s very alert. Too alert. She raises her hand every time a question is asked.” She took a breath. “Even when she doesn’t know the answer.”
“She’s eager,” I said. “She’s proving herself.”
Mrs. Madansky cocked her head. “She’s tense,” she said. “And getting more so. I’m recommending that she spend an hour a week with the school counselor, Mr. Callahan.”
“But she’s trying to fit in,” Dennis said.
I agreed, absolutely. It would take a dozen shopping excursions, I thought, to fix that smear on her reputation: school counselors were not cool.
“She can meet with him during her elective period,” said Mrs. Madansky. “We can be discreet.”
“We’ll think about it,” I said.
“Margo is probably reluctant to worry you,” she continued in her calm, teacherly tone. She looked at Dennis as she said it, but the comment pierced me.
On the way home, on the verge of anger fueled mostly by pride, I asked Dennis why he hadn’t told me about Margo’s sleeplessness. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I figured you’d stop sleeping, too. We’d wander the house at all hours, a family of ghosts.”
Carla’s parents had skipped parent-teacher night, and Margo had eaten dinner at their house, so we stopped to pick her up on the way home. While she gathered her things, Carla’s mother, Sylvia, stooped to speak to us through the car window. “I’ve been meaning to ask you,” she said. “How did you manage to get Margo into the sixth grade?”
Dennis looked as weary as I felt. “It’s a long story,” he said.
“We have some news,” Sylvia said. “We’re moving to Massachusetts.”
“Oh, no,” I said. Weeks earlier, their house had been burglarized and Margo had told us that Carla’s parents thought Miami was becoming too dangerous. Margo had wanted to know if this was true. “We have an alarm system,” Dennis had told her. He didn’t mention that we rarely used it. “You don’t have to worry.”