gown with lacy cap sleeves and satin Mary Janes with chunky heels. I was so stunningly, stupidly happy that I remember little outside of what is frozen in photographs: Dennis’s grip over mine as we cut the three-tiered cake; my mother spreading my veil and my father pumping Dennis’s hand; Grady extending his arm in a toast; me posing on the chapel steps with my mother on one side and Bette and Marse on the other. Back in Miami, Dennis’s parents threw us a reception at their yacht club, and then Dennis and I spent a week in the Keys, hopping from island to island in his father’s boat and camping on shallow beaches. One night we woke to the sight of hundreds of glowing anemones drifting by. In the morning, dozens had washed ashore and lay sickly at the foot of our tent. Dennis gave me a book of Wallace Stevens poems with certain pages dog-eared, and sometimes we read the poems to each other before falling asleep.
Dennis graduated from law school and passed the bar exam and was hired by a firm downtown. With inheritance from his grandmother, we bought our own home in Coral Gables, a three-bedroom ranch with a large backyard and a ponytail palm in one corner. We culled spare furniture from Dennis’s parents’ garage and secondhand stores, and hung paintings I’d made during college. Within the year I was pregnant. We had a little girl and named her Margo, ostensibly after Dennis’s maternal grandmother but in truth because I loved the name: I thought it was earthy and wise and unmistakably South Floridian, a tropical name for reasons I couldn’t explain. Margo was a fleshy, contemplative baby with Dennis’s blue-green eyes and my pointy-tipped ears. My mother took the train down and stayed a month in our guest room, and during the day we took turns changing Margo and giving her long, warm baths. We sat on a blanket in the backyard and made plans for her future: my mother predicted she would be a stunning beauty, possibly a fashion model, and I predicted she would be a career woman with expensive handbags and a busy social calendar. We told her there had never been a sweeter baby. After my mother returned to Atlanta, it was, oddly, Grady who took time off to help me while Dennis was at work. He brought groceries and held the baby so I could shower, and stepped out to light a pipe when I opened my blouse to breast-feed. While I nursed Margo, she looked up at me as if she didn’t quite know who I was, but she was willing to accept my love anyway, to give me the benefit of the doubt. When she was sleepy, she blinked in a slow-motion way that reminded me of a sloth I’d seen in a nature show on television. Instead of dividing, the focus I’d previously reserved for Dennis multiplied; in the early months of Margo’s life I found myself stunned at my luck. I’d found a person to love, and together we’d made another person to love. It was simultaneously exactly what I’d wanted and more than I could have asked for myself.
When Dennis was home, we took long walks with Margo in her stroller, and on the weekends we put her in a life vest and went to the beach, or out on Grady’s boat, or to Stiltsville, where I held tightly to her and stepped carefully, fearful of falling with her into the water. She clung to Dennis’s chest as he walked the flats and giggled maniacally when he dunked her. She got sunburned and the pediatrician reminded me sternly about sunscreen—the only bottle we owned back then sat on a shelf in the downstairs stilt house bathroom, crusty at the neck and watery with time and disuse. She and I spent hours together in the hammock downstairs, napping and reading, sweaty locks of hair plastered to her forehead. She took her first teetering steps in the stilt house living room, from Dennis’s lap to mine. After that, the stilt house became a kind of disaster area for a time, where I was called on to be ever-vigilant as she darted in each direction, small enough to fit through the porch railing or
Dennis graduated from law school and passed the bar exam and was hired by a firm downtown. With inheritance from his grandmother, we bought our own home in Coral Gables, a three-bedroom ranch with a large backyard and a ponytail palm in one corner. We culled spare furniture from Dennis’s parents’ garage and secondhand stores, and hung paintings I’d made during college. Within the year I was pregnant. We had a little girl and named her Margo, ostensibly after Dennis’s maternal grandmother but in truth because I loved the name: I thought it was earthy and wise and unmistakably South Floridian, a tropical name for reasons I couldn’t explain. Margo was a fleshy, contemplative baby with Dennis’s blue-green eyes and my pointy-tipped ears. My mother took the train down and stayed a month in our guest room, and during the day we took turns changing Margo and giving her long, warm baths. We sat on a blanket in the backyard and made plans for her future: my mother predicted she would be a stunning beauty, possibly a fashion model, and I predicted she would be a career woman with expensive handbags and a busy social calendar. We told her there had never been a sweeter baby. After my mother returned to Atlanta, it was, oddly, Grady who took time off to help me while Dennis was at work. He brought groceries and held the baby so I could shower, and stepped out to light a pipe when I opened my blouse to breast-feed. While I nursed Margo, she looked up at me as if she didn’t quite know who I was, but she was willing to accept my love anyway, to give me the benefit of the doubt. When she was sleepy, she blinked in a slow-motion way that reminded me of a sloth I’d seen in a nature show on television. Instead of dividing, the focus I’d previously reserved for Dennis multiplied; in the early months of Margo’s life I found myself stunned at my luck. I’d found a person to love, and together we’d made another person to love. It was simultaneously exactly what I’d wanted and more than I could have asked for myself.
When Dennis was home, we took long walks with Margo in her stroller, and on the weekends we put her in a life vest and went to the beach, or out on Grady’s boat, or to Stiltsville, where I held tightly to her and stepped carefully, fearful of falling with her into the water. She clung to Dennis’s chest as he walked the flats and giggled maniacally when he dunked her. She got sunburned and the pediatrician reminded me sternly about sunscreen—the only bottle we owned back then sat on a shelf in the downstairs stilt house bathroom, crusty at the neck and watery with time and disuse. She and I spent hours together in the hammock downstairs, napping and reading, sweaty locks of hair plastered to her forehead. She took her first teetering steps in the stilt house living room, from Dennis’s lap to mine. After that, the stilt house became a kind of disaster area for a time, where I was called on to be ever-vigilant as she darted in each direction, small enough to fit through the porch railing or
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