Great Big Beautiful Life(63)
And holding her little sister’s hand, running as fast as they could from the edge of the pool, convinced that if only they were fast enough, worked hard enough, they could sail right across the surface of the water without sinking.
She still thinks about this day a lot, as a kind of before picture. The last golden day.
After that, the world turned blue. As if when she dove under the surface of the water, the cool tones had washed across her eyes and never left.
After that, Margaret’s memories are different. Fights—sometimes screamed, and other times whispered. Slammed doors. Bits of jagged blue sentences, sneaking through doors and walls.
—Do you even care that you’re a mother? Do you even love them—
—out again until all hours, so you can do whatever you want, but I should be here—
—not the person I married, not even close—
—if you hate your life so much, why are you even still—
She remembers her grandmother Rosalind introducing her and Laura to their new nanny, and feeling so sure it was all a punishment, if she could only figure out for what, what she had done wrong. She was always getting herself into trouble, in the form of scraped knees, muddy tracks across rugs, and broken vases. It could have been anything.
She remembers quiet meals at the dinner table—one of the tables was exclusively for dinner—with the whole family, and then one day the small table moved into the playroom, and all her and her sister’s meals taken there, apart from the others.
She’d go days, sometimes, without seeing her parents, and worse still, somehow, were the nights they came in one at a time to say their good nights, looking tired or angry or pained.
What is it like when all of your clothes were made to fit your body, your shoes resoled without your asking, your hairdresser waiting for you on the veranda once a month? What is it like to cry when your favorite swan dies, and to have your grandfather look you in the eye and say, “Your father was supposed to have a son. Who’s going to look after all of this when I’m gone?”
What’s it like to roller-skate in the ballroom with your sister, or to read a book about a pony and wake up the next morning to find one wearing a big velvet bow in the marble foyer, and to love it, to love it so much you name it after the swan you lost, and tell yourself that maybe, somehow, it is the swan, come back from beyond the grave to care for you, because while everyone around you takes care of you, you aren’t really sure that any of them care about you?
When you fall and scrape your knee, there’s a mad rush for gauze and rubbing alcohol, but when you weep over the delicate broken neck of a bird, you’re given a lollipop.
When you want something you have no idea how to ask for, and no clue whether it even exists.
What do you do when you live in a world that was built around you, and so you find yourself trapped, like one sentence in a myth, one brick in a wall? When you’re built into the fabric of a place and that place was built to keep everyone out?
What’s it like to feel yourself alone in the world?
20
“They did their best,” Margaret says. “The truth is, I think all my mother ever really wanted was to make her art. And I think all my father ever wanted was to be my mother’s husband. When either of them felt like those things were being challenged…well, they never really learned to compromise. Not until they split up.”
“I’ve read some old articles,” I say. “About the divorce.”
She winces, and I can guess why. The tabloids—and Dove Franklin—had all positioned Bernie Ives as an uptight nag who’d never been worthy of the rich, charming, handsome Freddy Ives.
“I remember my grandmother Rosalind trying to convince them to stay married,” she says. “She loved my mother, and she knew the world would be unkind to her. Or…less kind than it already was. But my parents weren’t ever invested in controlling the narrative the way my grandparents had been. And besides that, as long as I’ve been alive, there was a strict rule against any tabloids in the house. Laura and I were young and secluded enough not to be exposed to the worst of it, but I would occasionally hear Rosalind talking about it with my aunt Francine and great-aunt Gigi.
“She convinced my parents to take us up to the mountains, to stay at…” She considers for a second, like the name is just barely evading her. “The Nicollet. One last long weekend, to remind them what they were giving up.”
“How’d it go?” I ask.
“It was bliss,” she says. “And then we got home, and the next morning, they sat us down in Laura’s room and told us Mom was moving out. Years later, she told me she wanted to leave while she still loved him. For us. I think it broke her heart to do it though. I’m not sure she ever got over it. Even after she remarried.”
I stay quiet, half expecting her to clam up again, but she doesn’t.
“You know, my mother was ahead of her time. The kind of woman who wanted to have it all,” she says. “She knew she deserved it too. But the problem is, once you love someone, you can’t have it all anymore. Love comes with sacrifice. That’s how it works. Lawrence left his little sister in Dillon Springs thinking he could help her, and instead he never saw her again. Gerald loved Nina, but he had to give her up to take care of Ruth. Rosalind loved Gerald, but she had to accept his secret as her own, had to believe the story until it was true.”