Stiltsville: A Novel by Susanna Daniel Page A

steps, clumsy enough to slip from the dock. Dennis and I had talked briefly about putting up netting or fencing, but with so many hazardous surfaces—the entire downstairs, the wraparound porch, the T-shape dock—it wasn’t feasible. Instead, Dennis started teaching her to swim when she was just ten months old. When she was two, she spent hours on his lap as he fished off the dock, clapping each time he reeled in a fish. When she was almost three, Marse bought her an orange bikini with yellow polka dots and she wore it every day of the summer, refusing every other garment in her closet. When she was four, she and Bette put on elaborate performances on the porch, wherein Margo played a pirate or schoolteacher, and Bette played a damsel in distress or an insubordinate student, and by the end of the day they were both sweating through their T-shirts and glassy-eyed with exhaustion.
    Those early years of Margo’s life, of our marriage, were uncomplicated to a degree that I’ve never experienced again. But every so often, during this period, I would find Dennis sitting in front of a bottle of beer at the kitchen table, or alone on the porch at Stiltsville, and when I asked him what was wrong he would say simply that he did not like his job. I suppose if we had let it, this could have become the ruling discontent in our home. But he was not the kind of man who took to moping, and for years this was a back-burner issue, a low-grade nuisance.
    We tried for a time to have a second child, and then when Margo was three I miscarried, and then eight months later I miscarried again, and then five months later, again. It was a terrible time. I felt as if our lives had been put on hold; the future darkened. It’s incredible to realize that one can’t have children simply by taking the usual steps. Doctors couldn’t seem to help, and I might have become bitter in the face of this fact, as so many people do, but later in my life I would need to trust doctors, to be guided by them, so I am glad this wasn’t the case. Then, some months after the third miscarriage, I chaperoned Margo’s kindergarten class on a field trip to the Everglades, and we were walking in the early evening down a swampy path when our guide pointed to an owl perched on a high branch, and Margo’s freckled face when she searched the sky for a glimpse of the creature was so open, so full of joy, that I decided (or I realized, I’m not sure which) I didn’t need more children. Dennis had wanted a noisier household—this was difficult, knowing how he wanted it—but eventually he followed my lead. I concentrated on Margo, our marvel, and the sadness of losing the pregnancies ebbed over time, and I thanked God for her.
    As for my new hometown, I’d fallen quickly and surely in love with it. I loved to drive through the dense neighborhoods with my car windows down and smell the rotting sweetness of a ripening mango tree. I loved to eavesdrop on the loud conversations of the ladies at the deli counter, ferreting out select phrases using the lazy Spanish I’d acquired over the years. I loved the lychees and star fruit that fell into my yard over the neighbor’s fence, and I loved the bright bougainvillea that dropped its papery pink petals onto my lawn. I loved the rusty barges loaded with stolen bicycles that plodded down the Miami River and out to sea. I loved the half-dozen chilly February nights, all the windows in the house open and the fireplace going. I loved the limestone and the coral rock, the fountains and the ocean and the winding blue canals. I loved the giant banyans and the dense wet mangroves and the gumbo-limbo trees and the many-sized, many-shaped palms. I loved the pelicans and manatees and stone crabs and storms and even the thick, damp summers.
    Miami is the only place in this country where Stiltsville could exist, and for a while I had the good fortune of spending time there.
    I lived in Miami through scandals and riots, through dozens of