If I Forget You(12)

The boat was retrieved, repaired, and eventually replaced with a new one her father wanted even more. The Jones boys were temporarily banned from her house, and she was told she wouldn’t be able to do all the things she usually did for the remainder of that summer, but after a week it was like it had never happened, with the exception of one conversation with her father a few weeks before she was set to depart for college.

This was on the Vineyard in August. The day was gray, with leaden skies, and cool for the season, the wind roaring off the sound and causing the American flag flying above the patio to wrap tightly around the pole and shake in the breeze. Margot’s mother found her in her bedroom and told her that her father wanted to speak with her downstairs. Margot sighed but knew better than to protest: Her father, when he wasn’t leaving the management of her to others, didn’t ask for things, but expected them.

Her father was on the glassed-in porch, sitting in a white wicker chair, his face in profile as she approached, staring out at the endless gray sea. He wore a white polo shirt, tan chinos, and Top-Siders without socks. He turned to Margot when she reached him and gave her a half smile and motioned to the chair across from him. Margot sat down.

“I’ve been meaning to talk to you,” her father said.

“About?”

“Bannister,” her father replied. “It’s coming right up.”

“Two weeks,” Margot said.

“Yes. I don’t think I have ever said this to you before, or not like this. Between you and your sister, you are the one who is more like me, you know. You take risks. You have that spirit. That energy that can be your greatest strength or your greatest weakness, depending on how you use it. But the similarities between you and me when it comes to Bannister end there. You know what I mean?”

“I’m not sure,” Margot said.

“Bannister wasn’t a continuation of this life for me,” her father said, using his hand now to sweep out around the room. “I didn’t come into it with all the advantages you have. I was going there to kill it and I wasn’t coming back. I decided I was going to hit the ground running on day one and never look over my shoulder. I knew what I wanted. For me, it was never about money. It was always about freedom.”

Margot had heard this all before. How her grandfather had spent his life selling textiles to hotels and hotel chains, a job he was ill suited for, and one that was unceremoniously taken away from him on his fiftieth birthday. How hard it had been for him to find other work and how her own father, at the time, sixteen years old, had worked three jobs to try to help them keep their small ranch house in Poughkeepsie, New York, an effort that turned out to be in vain. How this life lesson had steeled him to become the man he would eventually be, et cetera, et cetera.

“I have always given you everything you have wanted. And I have tolerated, some would say to a fault, the mistakes you have made. But Bannister is different. It is the place that showed me the path to my own freedom. I have a lot of influence there, as you know. But this is your chance. This isn’t high school anymore. You can’t flunk out and have it be okay because there is another school. If it doesn’t work out, your life will be very different, you know what I mean?”

Margot shrugged as her father’s gaze lowered to her own eyes. “I think so,” she said, just wanting this talk to end.

“Do you?” her father said. “Let me be clear. If it doesn’t work there, if you make the wrong choices, your life will not be easy. You will have to find a way to support yourself. Some shitty job that means getting up really early in the morning. I know you think I won’t do it, but I will. Do you understand now?”

Margot looked at her father. “I get it,” she said.

His face softened. “Okay,” he said. “It’s going to be the time of your life. I would give anything to be there again.”

Her father looked away from her then, back out to the sea and the leaden clouds. Margot rose to her feet, knowing she was dismissed.

*

And so Margot arrives at Bannister with her father’s words echoing in the back of her mind. And for the first time, something clicks for her, and perhaps it is as simple as the fact that Bannister sits at the center of the many different concentric circles she already knows. She knows other freshmen from Vineyard summers. She knows others from boarding school, and still others from boarding schools that friends attended. Some she recognizes from New York. They are all no more than one degree of separation, it seems, and for a time, Margot moves with ease through that first year, surprising even herself by staying out of trouble, and perhaps it is the culture itself that allows her to do this, less of a college that first year and more one great extended party, classes, for her, something one must endure to get to the real action, the nighttime.

On campus, Margot is welcome everywhere, especially at the grand old fraternities that line the hill above the long, slender lake. Margot wraps herself in the social fabric of Bannister, rather than swim against it, and in phone calls home she can tell her parents are pleased with this, and for a time she does not care.

Margot gets the coveted invite to all the fall formals, nights when she and Cricket dress like grown-ups, and within the incongruence of frat houses, where the smell of stale beer and ratty furniture stands in contrast to the young students in their cocktail clothes, they move sideways through the crowds, practicing for the life of New York socialites that is their fate.