“I’ll take it,” I said.
“Done.”
“It might even fit me now,” I said.
“You look good. I’ve been meaning to mention it.”
I was wearing a dress I’d bought more than a year earlier but had never worn, because it had never fit right. It was a black-and-white plaid taffeta sheath with a low neckline. It hit just below my knees. Truth be told, I didn’t think it was dressy enough for a wedding, but I’d wanted to wear it—it finally looked good on me, after all—so I’d added patent leather pumps and jangly crystal earrings and swept my hair up. “It’s the tennis,” I said.
I knew it was hard on Marse, going to wedding after wedding, year after year. At some point the weddings had tapered off—when we were about thirty, I suppose—but a decade later the divorces had started, and then the second marriages. In the meantime, Marse had dated a dozen handsome, emotionally unavailable men. I didn’t think she wanted to get married per se, but she wanted something. “What’s happening with that guy?” I said, thinking of Ted, the boat salesman.
“Nothing. Over.”
“Do you want to get some air?”
“Lord, yes.”
I scanned the room for Dennis and saw that he was talking to Julia. I caught his eye and waved as we went out. At some point since the brief wedding service, it had started to rain. We stood under an awning in front of the hotel among guests who had come outside to have the valet get their cars. “Don’t we all look handsome,” mumbled Marse. She turned to me. “You’ve been absent lately. Is it possible you’re playing that much tennis?”
“I know. I don’t know what it is.” In the past week, I’d baked two loaves of bread and taken a nap every day. I’d been to the grocery store three times and painted two bookshelves that had been in the guest room since we’d moved into the house. They had been white, and now they were yellow. It was a modest change, but it made me happy—if not because they now matched the wallpaper, then because painting them had been on my list for so long and now was done. I hadn’t been to practice since the day at the beach with Jack, but I’d planned to return the following Wednesday and pretend nothing had ever happened.
“I thought with Margo gone you’d be a pain in my neck. How is she?”
“Fine. Apparently starting a new semester involves a lot of parties,” I said. “She’s enrolled in a class called Harbingers of Evil in Postmodern Literature. I keep meaning to ask for a copy of the syllabus. I could be one of those mothers who reads along with her child’s class.” A woman left the hotel and stepped into a black Lincoln, turning to wave as she did. I waved back. “Is that Eleanor Everest?” I said to Marse.
“Oh, God, I know—they botched her face-lift.” One of Eleanor’s cheeks drooped considerably, and the eyelid on the same side drooped as well, as if she’d been stuck with something and deflated. “She’s going to that guy in Naples to fix it, but they can’t get her in for six months. You’d think this would qualify as an emergency.”
“How did you hear all this?”
She waved a hand. “Around.” Marse’s social life had always been a bit of a mystery to me. When she was with me, when she picked me up in her Wrangler and we ran out to Dadeland mall or she came over with a movie (usually a movie she’d seen and wanted me to see), or we took her boat to Stiltsville to watch the sunset, then came back to my house to make dinner—during these times, she referred to the activities that comprised her week, often mentioning people I knew casually or men she’d dated and broken up with before I’d even heard about it. Mostly, though, she remained close with people I considered acquaintances, women from our days in the Junior League, people whose families her family had known for decades. In so many ways, Miami was a small town.
Did I think Marse had made a mistake, staying single? Did she?
When Marcus Beck had first left Kathleen, Marse and I had gone to Kathleen’s new condo for dinner, and Marse had asked her more or less the same question. “Do you miss him?” she’d said, and before I could stammer a protest—Marcus had left her, after twenty years together—Marse cut me off. “Let her answer,” she’d said, and Kathleen had nodded. “I wouldn’t say I miss him, because that would be pathetic,” she’d said. Truth be told, I hadn’t ever respected Kathleen much. She wore Laura Ashley dresses even though she was gaining on fifty, and her twin girls were sweet without seeming to mean it, and they’d been dorm roommates in college, an arrangement that I thought reflected poor parenting. But at this moment, sitting at Kathleen’s country French dining table, drinking the bold red wine Marse had brought, I’d been impressed. “I will say that I don’t like being alone,” Kathleen had said. “That’s all. I don’t like it.” She’d looked at Marse, who was shaking her head silently, and suddenly both of them looked older to me. They looked tired. “It sucks, doesn’t it?” said Marse to Kathleen. She looked at me, and then Kathleen looked at me. “We hate you,” said Marse, and Kathleen laughed lightly for a long time, and it had occurred to me that Marse had been faking it—maybe she wasn’t tired of being alone, and instead was trying to give an old friend someone to lean on. Marse wanted Kathleen to think they had much in common, but Kathleen was a housewife who was suddenly not a wife and not living in her house—she was a fish out of water, whereas Marse’s life made sense. Marse had a successful career, a busy social life, and a stream of romantic prospects. It wasn’t the same thing at all. Kathleen would be more lonely now precisely because she’d once had a husband and a home, not in spite of that.
I said to Marse, “Margo is living in an apartment, did I tell you that?” The rain was coming harder now, spattering the tops of my feet and ankles. Marse and I huddled closer together.
“Why would she want to do that?”
“I think it might have something to do with a boy.”
“A man,” said Marse. “She’s in college. They’re men, and she’s a woman. That’s what they want to be called, anyway.”
“I don’t think quite yet,” I said.
“You’re not ready.”
“I suppose not.”
“Who does she live with?”
At that moment, under the canopy outside the Biltmore’s stately main entrance, I could not recall her roommate’s name. “A girl from Tampa,” I said. “And I guess the girl’s boyfriend is pretty much a third roommate.”
“Have you met them?”
As a matter of fact, Margo and I had made plans that afternoon for me to come up for a weekend in October. “Not yet, but I will. Next month.”
“Do you know anything about this man?” said Marse.
“You’re interrogating me,” I said. “Margo is fine. She was paired with a roommate and she says they’re very compatible. Janelle—that’s the girl’s name. Margo gets along with the boyfriend. The apartment is right off campus—lots of kids do it, I guess. It’s common.” Even as I spoke, I felt uneasy—it had struck me as overly mature, this live-in boyfriend situation, but I’d told Dennis that I felt comforted knowing a boy would be around.
The wind was picking up, blowing around the royal palms that rimmed the Biltmore’s circular drive. Marse said, “I still think of her as thirteen years old, that brace face. Let’s get a drink. We’ll toast her independence.”
We’d had a couple of drinks each already. The bar inside the reception was serving wine, beer, and several flavors of daiquiris, which Marse had noted said a lot about the bride, and possibly about the promise of everlasting happiness. Marse didn’t want to go back to the party, so she headed to the hotel bar while I stopped in at the reception to tell Dennis where I’d be. I found him in a corner with Julia, standing close and laughing. His daiquiri was peach, hers was strawberry. Before I left them alone again, I said, “I won’t be our ride home,” and Dennis raised his glass and said, “We can take a cab.”