Page 5 of Endless Summer: Stories
“Do I everwhat,Margot?”
“Do you ever…”
“No,” Drum said. “I don’t.”
There were other tense conversations, whispered late at night after the boys were asleep.
Margot said: “It’s exhausting, you know, being the only one who brings home a paycheck.”
Drum said: “You don’t have to work as hard as you do, Margot. The apartment is paid for. You could make half of what you do and we’d be fine.”
This infuriated Margot, mostly because he was correct.
Margot said: “I like working hard. I love my job. I want to make partner.”
Drum said: “Okay, so why are you complaining?”
Whywasshe complaining? Drum was taking care of the home front so she didn’t have to. He was a classic 1950s housewife but better because he was handsome and sexy and everyone loved him. He wore flip-flops and Ron Jon T-shirts even in December. Margot wasn’t sure what the problem was. If pressed, she might say it was Drum’s lack of ambition. He seemed to expect nothing from his days but smiles on his kids’ faces and dinner with his family. Wasn’t a grown man, a man of thirty-five, then forty, supposed to want more?
She said to him one night, “It’s like you don’t have dreams.”
“Dreams?” he said.
Then Margot’s mother, Beth Carmichael, was diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer, and Margot’s world was thrown into a tailspin.
In one of the last conversations Margot had with her mother, Beth had grasped her daughter’s hand and said, “All a mother wants, Margot, is for her children to be happy. And that may take different forms at different times.”
“I am happy, Mom,” Margot said.
Beth had seemed unconvinced. But that could have been the morphine at work. Margot said, “You don’t have to worry about me.”
Beth said, “Ever since you were a little girl, you’ve been too hard on yourself. It’s the curse of the firstborn. You need to cut yourself some slack, allow for your imperfect moments. You need to be your own best friend.”
Margot had squeezed her mother’s hand. “I have a best friend,” she said. “It’s you.”
“Oh, honey, I know,” Beth said, and her eyes fluttered closed. “Just listen to me.”
When her mother died, Margot cleaved to Drum. She couldn’t get him close enough; she wanted to inhabit his body. She wanted him to absorb her pain, to sop it up like a spill on the counter.
During this period of grief and renewed closeness, Margot got pregnant again—with Ellie. To have a daughter and not have her mother to share the experience with? God, the pain! When the doctor placed Ellie in Margot’s arms, Margot gazed up at Drum and burst into tears. And he had wept right along with her and said, “I know, babe. I know. She should be here.”
A week after Ellie’s first birthday, Margot made partner at Miller, Sawtooth. There was a party and, of course, a large raise. This was when things drastically slid downhill. She was impatient, bitchy, entitled; she said things she regretted. She was mean to Drum; she accused him of wasting his life. Instead of growing angry at her, instead of telling her to go jump in a big pool of fuck you, which was what he should have done, he kowtowed to her even more. He texted her forty or fifty times a day; he told her he loved her; he filled their apartment with fresh flowers; he threw her a surprise birthday party at Bill’s Bar and Burger; he booked a family trip to Japan. No skiing, no surfing, he said. We can do whatever you want to do—the cities, the gardens, the pagodas. You always said you wanted to go to Japan.
Margot made him cancel the trip immediately. She told him she’d wanted to see Japan because that was where he had grown up. She had wanted to see it for Drum’s sake. But that desire had faded as well.
She started going to a therapist even though she didn’t really have time. She admitted to the therapist that she didn’t think she loved Drum anymore.
If you could change five things about him, the therapist asked, would that make a difference?
Would it? Margot wondered. What if he landed a job as a TV anchorperson and he was on the news every night at six o’clock? What if he became a professor of Japanese at NYU? What if he invented something, started a company, made millions? What if he wore Robert Graham shirts and Ferragamo loafers? What if he took up golf and followed the stock market? What if he read Tolstoy, Dashiell Hammett, Norman Mailer? What if he listened to opera, subscribed to theWall Street Journal,smoked a pipe?
But Drum didn’t need to change; Drum was happy the way he was. Drum was, in fact, the happiest person Margot knew. Margot wanted to change one thing about herself. She wanted to be a woman who loved Drum the way he was.
What do you do when the love is gone? Margot asked the therapist. She was in tears. She wanted it back. She wanted to feel.
Where does it go?
The morning of the surfing lesson, Margot’s father, Doug Carmichael, piled her three children into the back seat of his Jaguar. He was taking them to the Downyflake for doughnuts and pancakes and hot chocolate. Doug Carmichael was a prominent divorce attorney in Manhattan, but Margot hadn’t told her father how close she was to jumping off the cliff of marriage into the churning sea of divorce. She didn’t want to be work to him. When the time came, he would give her a colleague’s name; she knew she would be in the very best hands.
