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, at first—she’d talked about decorating her dorm room and eating in the dining hall. But in time her excitement had morphed into anxiety. Then she’d been informed by the school that before starting her junior year, she needed to take a summer class to satisfy a math requirement. So not only was she now moving away—which I simultaneously wanted for her and did not want at all—but she was leaving at the start of the summer instead of at the end. What did it matter, though, really? Those extra weekends together, luxuriating in free time with Margo, would have been merely a stall, and soon enough we would have found ourselves in the same position we were in now: packing her up, driving her away.
“Margo,” I said, pulling her from Dennis to face me. “This is a whole new ball game. New people, new classes. You’ll like the dorms. No mother hovering all the time.”
Margo scowled. Was this an adult, I thought, prepared to go off and live on her own?
“Your mother’s right,” said Dennis. “Free at last.”
“I guess,” she said. I wondered how often, over the course of her life, she would desire something only to feel ambivalent once she got it. I thought of a young woman in Margo’s high school class, a girl with grades worthy of the Ivy League, who had gone to the University of Florida because her father had given her the choice between an out-of-state education and a new convertible. Somehow, a reporter for Florida Public Radio had gotten wind of the story and the parents had agreed to be interviewed on the air. Callers had phoned in to rail against the family’s values and praise the benefits of an excellent education. The father had said—very reasonably, I thought—that one does not have to be a plane ride away from one’s family to read books.
“The thing about going away for college,” I said to Margo, “is that you can start over, be whoever you want to be.”
“Who else would she want to be?” said Dennis.
“I just mean you can make new friends without all the history mucking it up.”
Margo nodded solemnly. The sixth grade had left wounds—she was a skittish friend, slow to bond. Over the years she’d let go of early friendships just when I’d sensed that they were growing, as if afraid of what might happen next. And she’d never become preoccupied with romance or heartbreak or drama the way other girls had. Her only boyfriend in high school had been Peter—every so often, during her junior and senior years, he had come to the house after school and stayed for dinner, or picked her up on a Saturday morning for a day at the beach. For a few days he’d be in her conversation or plans. But then weeks later I’d realize I hadn’t seen him and he hadn’t called. It had been three years since Margo had asked me to take her to get birth control pills—a task I’d completed with surprisingly few tears—and since that time Peter was the only boy who had come to the house alone, without a group. I used to try to get her to talk about him, but she would just say banal, complimentary things like “He’s a very kind person” or “It’s not serious, but he’s a good friend.” From what I could tell, this was true: he was a nice person. When he’d left for Davidson, Margo had seemed genuinely happy for him and not at all possessive. There had been no pretense that I could surmise that they would not date other people while he was away. But during her two years at the University of Miami, Margo had made few new friends and hadn’t dated at all.
“We need to get a move on,” I said. Margo’s eyes were pink and swollen. Dennis looked as if he’d forgotten where we needed to be. “Wash your face,” I said to Margo. I kissed her warm forehead before she left the room.
“I hope we did the right thing, encouraging her to transfer,” said Dennis.
“I was just thinking that.” The Oriental rug beneath our feet was threadbare and faded; we’d bought it new on vacation in Asheville a decade earlier. I told Dennis about the tennis team. “But it starts Saturday morning,” I said, “so I’d like to go before we get on the road.”
Dennis held tight to the belief that road trips begin before dawn. Practice started at eight a.m.; I promised we would be on the road by eleven. He nodded and rubbed his face. Margo returned, wearing fresh makeup—a little too much, considering Gloria’s distaste for young ladies with painted faces, but I stayed quiet. “Kiddo,” said Dennis, “your mother has something to do Saturday morning, so we’re going to leave a little later.”
“Good,” said Margo.
“We can spend tomorrow night at Stiltsville. We’ll swing home in the morning and pick up Mom and get on the road.”
I was reminded of one reason I didn’t take up activities: because then I missed things. “As long as you’re packed,” I said.
“I shouldn’t take so much anyway,” she said.
“I thought the last time at Stiltsville was the last time,” I said. We’d skied and Dennis and Margo had fished off the dock. It had been five years since the state of Florida had declared Biscayne Bay a national monument and began pushing for an end to private ownership of the stilt houses. Marcus Beck, a trial lawyer, had negotiated a deal guaranteeing that current residents could keep our houses until the year 1999—after that, Stiltsville would belong to the state. Since the decision, we’d gone out every possible weekend.