Great Big Beautiful Life(62)

“You mean you’ll carry me,” I tease. “I hear there are snakes around here.”





19




Margaret answers her own door on Saturday morning, and I’m so caught off guard that for three seconds after she greets me, I just stare.

“Where’s Jodi?” I finally ask when I step inside and slip my shoes off.

“Day off,” Margaret says shortly, and leads me down the hallway. “Too hot to be outside today. Mind if we sit in the living room?”

“Works for me,” I tell her.

We stop by the kitchen first, and she shakes a box of colorful frozen macarons onto a plate. “Coffee? Tea?”

“Coffee,” I say. “But I can get it myself.”

She waves me toward the pot, and I pour myself a mug and find the sugar in a jar beneath the cupboard. “You want one?” I ask.

“Already got mine waiting in there,” she tells me, and I follow her back to the room where we first met. It’s so hot out today that the air-conditioning can’t keep up. The air feels stiff and damp. Even for me, it’s a bit much.

Just not enough to keep me from drinking hot coffee.

I must wince when I taste it, because Margaret laughs. “All right, all right, I don’t usually make the coffee.”

“It’s not that bad,” I say.

I try another gulp. My reaction makes her start laughing again, and it’s contagious. As I rein my giggles in, I set my mug aside and take out my recorder. “So today’s the day.”

“What day is that?” Her silver brows leap upward, but there’s something in her expression that tells me it’s an act. That she’s actually just as excited for today’s interview as I am.

“The day it becomes your story,” I say, hitting the button to start recording and setting the device on the table between us.

She flicks a hand over her shoulder, an unconvincing pishposh. “I told you: It’s all my story. When you come from a family like mine, you’re a part of a whole, like one square in a quilt. Anytime you try to pull in a particular direction, there are hundreds of other squares to resist. To pull you back.”

“I get that,” I say. “But today, try to ignore those squares. I want to know what it was like to be you.”

She smiles wide. “For a time,” she says, “it was pure magic.”





The Story


Their version: What it must be like to be raised in a castle!



* * *



? ? ?

Her version: What’s it like to be raised in a castle?

What’s it like to have everything you want before you’ve asked for it?

What’s it like to have your food plated by a chef when you’re still a toddler?

What’s it like to have the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus perform at your fifth birthday?

To have snow blown in on the hill behind your house in time for Christmas, and to spend all summer wandering through your private orange groves and playing hide-and-seek in the hedge maze, or the chapel, or the slew of Greek follies? To grow up with horses and dogs, swans and zebras and peacocks all wandering past your window, bonded enough to you to eat straight from your hand?

What’s it like to break your arm sliding down a grand staircase’s banister and take your family’s helicopter to the hospital? To live inside a ten-foot stone wall, so far from your front door that anything beyond it might as well be a different world?

What’s it like when your father loves your mother madly? When he fills the breakfast room—because there is a room just for breakfast—with daisies—potted, not cut—on her birthday, and she rolls her eyes but laughs too, because she doesn’t have an ounce of his whimsy, but she understands the hundreds of ways her husband tries, again and again, to say something along the lines of I love you?

When they were younger—Margaret and her sister, Laura—life came in flickers of yellow gold. Warmth, that’s what she remembers. Laughter. Her mother blowing raspberries on her stomach. Her father trying, and failing, to make daisy chains for his girls to wear. Her cousin Ruth braiding her hair, her aunt Francine taking her horseback riding. Strolling with Great-Aunt Gigi down the perfume aisles in the glossy department stores along Seventh Street. Grandmother Rosalind reading to her in the library, Margaret sitting in her lap and toying with the string of pearls that lay against Rosalind’s cashmere sweater, while her grandfather Gerald smoked an overpriced cigar over by the window.

She remembers kissing her parents good night before they left for premieres, balls, galas, and loving the smell of her mother’s soap, the oh-so-rare appearance of a muted mauve paint on her lips. She remembers sneaking out of bed to meet Laura in the tent strung up in their playroom—because there was a room just for playing—and staying up all night, giggling and whispering, and shining flashlights on their picture books.

There’s one day in particular she remembers best. A Sunday in late summer, before the heat had broken, when she spent the whole day with her parents and her sister in the ornately tiled outdoor pool—not to be confused with the indoor pool. She remembers practicing diving with her mother. She remembers her father tossing her up, up, up, then catching her right before she crashed against the surface.