Table of Contents
Also by Cornelia Nixon
Now You See It
For Dean Young, Tony Hoagland, Lisa Ruddick
The Women Come and Go
Her name was Margy, hard g, like argh, not soft g, like margarine. One quarter of her waking life had gone to practicing the violin, but when her teacher entered her in a national audition, she was surprised to make to the finals and didn’t stay for the results, so the teacher had to track her down to tell her she had won. Margy knew it was a fluke, but soon she had been asked to play at Tanglewood, at Aspen, with the Boston Symphony, and at her school in the Back Bay, where she’d always had to practice straight through lunch, ignored by everyone, suddenly the most sought-after girls were seeking her. Ann was generally acknowledged the most beautiful girl there, and beautiful in a way that made other girls feel awe: she was perfect in the natural state, like Grace Kelly before she met the prince, only better, since she’d never bleached her hair or worn lipstick. She had a nun-like aura and wore expensive modest clothes, the kind most girls’ mothers picked for them and they refused to wear. Even the Huntington School uniform looked good on her. Calluses did not grow on her toes. Whatever she said was considered wise. She liked to quote Herman Hesse, Kahlil Gibran, and other sources of deathless wisdom.
“Just sit on your bed and think,” she said. Hushing to listen, girls went home and sat on their beds.
And with Ann came Elizabeth, her lifelong acolyte. Their mothers were friends, former debutantes who had married the wrong men and now lived in a neighborhood much faded from its former glory instead of in three-story mansions out in Brookline or Lexington. Elizabeth dressed like Ann, even vied with her a little in the neatness of her gestures, the propriety of her shoes. But she didn’t have the face, or the hair or the skin, and no one stopped to listen when she talked, unless it was about Ann.
“As Ann said to me last night,” she might begin, through a din of girlish voices, and suddenly a hush would fall.
Then in their junior year they took on Margy, who was related to no debutantes, whose hair was impossible, maggot-white and curled as tight as Velcro in tiny fetal snarls, who was always fidgeting and humming and dancing with her bony legs when she wasn’t playing violin. But she learned fast, and soon the three of them were gliding modestly around the school, discussing Robert Lowell or Sylvia Plath, looking benignly (but silently) at the other girls. Ann and Elizabeth would listen to Margy practice during lunch, and after school they all walked home with Ann (who lived only a block away, on “hardly passionate Marlborough”) or out in every weather to the Esplanade, where they would grieve together privately, for the divorce of Elizabeth’s parents, and the death of Margy’s mother when she was only twelve, and the last cruel thing Ann’s had said to her.
“‘Could it be then that this was life?’” Ann quietly intoned one brilliant winter day beside the Charles, the sky delft blue, the river frozen blistering white. “‘Was there no safety? No learning by heart of the ways of the world? No guide, no shelter, but all was miracle, and leaping from the pinnacle of a tower into air?’”
In their senior year, they read Camus in French and took on existential responsibility, marching gravely, all in black, with a hundred thousand others up and down the major avenues to protest the bombing of North Vietnam. Margy started quoting from the things she’d read, but without Ann’s authority: she might just mutter quietly, so no one else could actually hear, “‘Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid,’” or “‘Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux.’” On her birthday in November, Elizabeth and Ann gave her a locket with their three initials in a triangle, and for Christmas they all gave each other books, disapproved together of their family celebrations, and went to midnight mass at Holy Cross, for the music, and to appall their parents, none of whom were Catholic or in danger of becoming so. Away from Huntington they were more free, and sometimes, standing on street corners, waiting to cross in the winter sun, Ann and Elizabeth might fall in with Margy’s dance, gently snapping fingers, tapping feet. Crazed with success, she once vamped off a curb into the path of a careening cab, but they yanked her back in time.
Margy was happy to be their friend, though she knew she was not like Ann. She had calluses not only on her toes but on every finger of both hands, and had once had a hickey on her neck. She’d gotten it from a pianist named Gary Slade, on whom she’d had a crush until the night he tried to make her fish the car keys from his underpants. She had walked home that night, and never been alone with any guy since then, but still she went on having similar effects on other boys and men. The chorus master at her music school was a handsome man, but he was past her father’s age, and if she looked at him it was only on obligatory Saturdays, singing husky alto in the second row. But at the last school picnic out at Marblehead, he’d gotten her off by herself, both of them in bathing suits, not fifty yards from where her father stood. Running a pool cue through his toes, he’d said, “You know I want to make love to you,” as if she were accustomed to hearing words like that, when she was just sixteen and had been kissed exactly once, by Gary Slade.
She’d never mentioned these events to Elizabeth and
