“Holy hell,” said Dennis. “Margo’s too tall for the fifth grade?”
Outside, Margo finished her hand-puppet conversation and Carla cracked up. In the past year, Margo had become very talkative, almost nervously so, and very sensitive. She had started to put a lot of pressure on herself. Her dentist had fitted her with a retainer to use while sleeping so she didn’t wear down her molars grinding her teeth. I checked on her sometimes in the night, and each time her eyelids fluttered a lot but she didn’t seem to be grinding. When Dennis had mentioned the retainer to his mother, she’d recommended a psychotherapist. Sixth grade, I thought, could hurt her confidence. It could do damage. But the scales tipped when I considered that if she skipped the fifth grade, she would no longer be the most buxom girl in her class. Give her a classroom full of girls tossing their hair and applying lip gloss, I thought. Give her a few friends whose T-shirts reveal the lump of a bra strap on each shoulder.
Dennis knocked on my desk. “We have some parenting to do here.”
Mr. Oxley smiled diplomatically. “It’s not our decision, but it’s possible Margo might feel more comfortable around classmates who are as far along as she is, physically speaking.”
“I was just thinking the same thing,” I said, and Dennis shot me a look.
Mr. Oxley said, “The older girls take health education classes. They spend a week learning about reproductive health and menstruation.” His manner was that of a man who’d practiced not tripping over certain words. “Has Margo gotten her period?”
I wasn’t easily flustered—with girlfriends, I could talk about PMS or sex or pregnancy—but in that classroom, beside the model Metro Rails, I floundered. “She—” I stammered. “Last summer, at sleepaway camp—”
Dennis started laughing. He knew the story: she’d had some spotting, so a counselor gave her a sanitary pad and explained how to use it, and Margo was so embarrassed that she’d pretended to be sick during swim time for three days. But the spotting went away as quickly as it had come, so the camp counselor explained about the hymen and said she’d probably torn it horseback riding. Margo had chronicled the whole icky affair in a letter marked FOR MOM’S EYES ONLY. When I got to the part about horseback riding, I was so relieved that I cried.
The real deal had arrived four months later, in the bathroom before school. I’d declared it a mental health day and we’d fixed a picnic lunch and gone to Dennis’s parents’ house to lie by the pool.
When he was done laughing, Dennis said, “She’s had it for a little while.” He covered my hand with his own. I felt bad for him, crammed into the little desk. I felt grateful for him.
“I can’t say with certainty that this is the best thing for your daughter,” said Mr. Oxley. “We just want to make you aware that promotion is an option.”
I was sorry he wouldn’t be Margo’s sixth-grade teacher, and her seventh-grade teacher, and so on. He went on to discuss Margo’s math skills, which though adequate had not developed at the rate of her reading or her body. Tutoring was an option. During this part of the conversation, I daydreamed of stepping out of the classroom to join my daughter in the sunlight.
Dennis had given notice in January of that year, while we were still paying off Christmas. On the evening of his last day of work, I’d found him in the backyard, sitting in one of the scooped rubber swings of Margo’s jungle gym. It was raining lightly. His shoes and socks and necktie lay on the grass and his shirt was unbuttoned to the middle of his chest. His hair rose from his head at odd angles, as if he’d rubbed it around without smoothing it back into place. The sight of my husband disheveled was not rare, but the sight of him downhearted was. My impulse was to return to the house. I’m not proud of it, but there’s something about weakness—even momentary weakness—that hardens my heart. Get up, I wanted to say. Occupy yourself. We’re having fillet of sole for dinner. Dennis lifted his arms, palms out. A different man might have meant, Why me? But I knew that Dennis, who had never liked practicing law, not even right out of school, meant, What now? On the bright side, there were a dozen possibilities; on the downside, there were a dozen possibilities. We’d hoped Dennis would have a new job before the old one ended, but the search had taken longer than we’d anticipated, so we were poised to subsist on his year-end bonus and our meager savings, crossing our fingers. Dennis’s mother had recommended that I take a position as a teller at the bank where his father worked. She’d made the recommendation even though she and I both knew she disapproved. I found the gesture touching. I hadn’t held a job since moving to Miami.
I sat in the swing beside Dennis. Water soaked through the seat of my slacks. He said, “Babe, I have some concerns.”
“I know you do.”
He’d dug the sandpit himself. He’d carved away the grass and dry black dirt and shoveled in fifty gallons of glinting white sand. He’d secured each knuckle of the jungle gym with epoxy. Now, he wiped rain from his face and pushed against the ground to start swinging. I watched his back as he rose. The rain had soaked through the fabric of his button-down, and through it I could see the outline of his undershirt. When he drew back, I could see the round caps of his knees through his wet trousers, and the delicate bluish hollows of his pale ankles. As for his face, it wasn’t grim exactly, but I could tell he was thinking hard and trying not to think, and that he was glad I was there, sitting next to him in the rain, and that he hoped I’d swing, so there wouldn’t be any pressure to tell the story of the day. So I swung a little, but ended up circling above the pit, toeing the sand to keep out of Dennis’s way.
It had been a decade since he’d left the house for his first day of work as an attorney. I’d checked him for wrinkles and kissed him good-bye. “Are you nervous?” I’d said. He’d shaken his head. “A means to an end,” he’d said, and rolled his eyes. Then he was off, and we’d fallen into a routine. And still sometimes when he came through the door at the end of the day, I saw him unshoulder his work and take on the life he meant to live. A different man could not have done it, that shrugging away of work cares, day after day. When women I knew complained about their overworked, overtired, overstressed husbands, I thought of energetic, unworried, distractible Dennis—Dennis, who would never fulfill his potential or win an award or retire early, Dennis the underachiever—and I understood that we were lucky. He was home by five almost every day, he never worked weekends, and sometimes he left the office in the afternoon and went to the marina to tinker with the boat engines—we now owned a twin-outboard sports fisherman—or came home to share a sandwich with me and water the alamanda bushes in the side yard, then retied his tie and returned to the office.
I couldn’t think of a single job that Dennis would truly love. And while I accepted the close boundaries of my own ambition, I was nonetheless a little unnerved by the same lack in my husband; I thought one of us should be setting an example. As I sat beside him, holding tight to the reins of the swing as he pumped away, I found myself warding off annoyance by recalling the things I appreciated about him: he loved to wake up early and go running, and as a result I never had to make the coffee. He spent money lavishly on things he enjoyed, like fishing equipment and gifts for me and Margo, and meagerly on things he didn’t, like his own clothes and generic-brand deck shoes. He still wore his hair as long as he had worn it when I’d met him, so it hung half an inch over his ears.
Beyond the jungle gym, light from Margo’s bedroom bled into the evening. She crossed the room and lingered out of view, then crossed again. Fourth grade was in full swing and sixth grade was still in the hazy long distance. I didn’t know when her bedroom door had started being closed as much as it was open, or when I’d stopped knowing what she did when she was alone. I considered tiptoeing to the window and peering in, then watching as she danced alone to a cassette on the yellow shag rug, or as she dragged the telephone in from the hallway and shut its cord in the door hinges, or as she read a book with one hand in a bag of pretzels.