11. Margot #2
She loved me. I need to say this because the rest of the story makes it easy to forget, and the forgetting is a lie I have been telling myself for twelve years because the lie is easier than the truth.
The truth is: Lyra loved me. She loved me the way she did everything: fully, without the infrastructure to sustain it.
She loved me and she could not stay, and the inability to stay was not a performance.
It was a limitation she did not know she had until the ordinary arrived in the form of a child and a routine and the Tuesday nights that are the actual substance of a life, and the limitation broke us.
We had private jokes. Couples do, the small language that belongs only to the two people who invented it.
We had one called the double trouble. It was silly.
It was sexy. One hand on a breast, one hand on the rear end, both at once, a playful simultaneous grab that she would deploy in the kitchen or the hallway or the bedroom, always with a grin, always accompanied by the phrase “double trouble” delivered in a voice that was half seduction and half comedy, and I would laugh every time.
The double trouble was ours. Nobody else knew about it. Nobody else ever saw it.
Until the morning they did.
Sophia had come to us. I wanted her. Lyra wanted her too, genuinely, I believe, in the way Lyra wanted everything: with her whole self, immediately, without asking whether the wanting could survive its own arrival.
I adopted her. Our attorney had walked us through it: Washington would recognize us as a couple but other states wouldn’t.
Lyra’s second-parent adoption was supposed to come later.
I was the legal parent. Lyra was the other parent, the one who held Sophia in the rocking chair and sang to her and called her little poem.
And for a while it was good. Lyra with the baby on her chest. Lyra reading poetry aloud to an infant who could not understand the words and who responded to the rhythm, and Lyra delighted by the responding, and the delight was real.
I watched her hold Sophia and I thought: this is the life.
The ordinary came. The ordinary always comes.
The 3:00 a.m. feedings and the diaper bags and the schedule that a child imposes on a life that had previously been organized around spontaneity and intensity.
Lyra tried. I want to be fair about this even though the fairness costs me something: she tried.
She was not good at it. She was not built for the repetition, for the smallness of the daily tasks, for the way a child requires you to be present in the same place doing the same things day after day after day.
She started leaving the house more. Writing at coffee shops.
Performing again, at night, at open mics I could not attend because someone had to be home with the baby.
I noticed. I did not say anything. That was the beginning of the system, though I did not know it then.
The morning of my tenure review came. I had finished the PhD at 28, been hired at Ardmore at 29, and gone up for early tenure at 32 because my record left the committee little choice.
I arrived at the review room twenty minutes early. Sophia was with Lyra, napping in the stroller. I crossed the quad. I encountered Bailey Rictor, one of my students, a senior in creative writing, bright and eager. She wished me luck. I felt a small lift of confidence.
I went into the review room. I began laying out my materials. I caught my reflection in the window and noticed my earring was missing. One of the pair Lyra gave me in Greece, gold, delicate. I had time. I went back to the quad to retrace my steps.
I found the earring. A glint in the grass. I bent to pick it up.
I lifted my eyes and I saw Lyra.
She was with Bailey. My student. In the middle of the quad, in the open. They were kissing. The kind of kiss that involves the back of the neck and bodies pressed together.
I stood with the earring in my hand.
Then Lyra did something. One hand on Bailey’s breast. One hand on her backside. Both at once. The double trouble. Our double trouble.
Bailey’s head went back. Her eyes opened. She saw me.
She gasped. Jumped back. Lyra turned.
There was a moment. I have replayed this moment for twelve years and it does not change.
Lyra’s face when she saw me was not what I expected.
It was not defiance or cruelty. It was relief.
The terrible, exhausted relief of someone who has been carrying a secret and who is glad, genuinely glad, to set it down, even here, even like this.
The relief was worse than cruelty would have been.
The relief meant she had been suffering too, in her way, and the suffering had made her reckless rather than honest. The recklessness had brought us here, to the quad, with our daughter asleep in a stroller and our private gesture on someone else’s body.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Margot, I’m so sorry. I should have told you. I’ve been trying to figure out how to tell you.”
“My tenure review starts in eleven minutes,” I said.
“I know. I know the timing is—” She pressed her hands to her face.
Bailey was staring at the ground. She was twenty-one.
She had been my student when Lyra guest-lectured in my class, which is how they met, which is a sentence I am going to set down now and pick up later because I cannot hold it and the earring and the tenure review at the same time.
Sophia was asleep. The old-growth trees threw their shadows across the grass.
“I can’t do this anymore. The house. The routine.
I love Sophia but I can’t— I’m not—” She looked at me and her eyes were wet, with real tears, and that was the thing I could not forgive.
If she had been cold I could have made her a villain, and she was not cold; she was a person in pain who had chosen the worst possible way to address the pain and who was standing in front of me asking me to understand.
I did not understand. I do not understand now. Understanding is not available for this.
“Sophia is in the stroller,” I said. My voice was level.
“I know. I—” She looked at the stroller.
Something crossed her face. It’s not the cartoon indifference I have sometimes, in my worst moments, revised the memory to contain.
It was closer to grief. She was about to leave her daughter because staying would mean becoming a person she did not know how to become.
“You’re her mother, Margot. You’ve always been her mother.
I was— I tried to be, and I couldn’t, and staying and failing at it would be worse than—”
“Nine minutes,” I said.
Lyra looked at me. “I’m leaving, Margot. Today. Now. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know how to tell you any other way.”
Bailey had not spoken. She was twenty-one.
She had been my student six months earlier, and Lyra had walked into my classroom as a guest and walked out with her.
I did not understand this then. I understand it now: Lyra was a force, and a force does not ask the things it moves through whether they are ready.
Bailey transferred at the end of that semester.
I hope she is all right. I have no way to know.
Lyra and Bailey walked away. I did not watch them go.
Bea watched. She had been standing at the edge of the quad with the tenure tray—the tradition at Ardmore, a bottle of champagne and glasses brought by someone who loves you, waiting outside the room for when you emerge.
Bea had been planning to be that person.
I saw her when I turned toward the building.
She was still under the old-growth trees, holding the tray.
She had taken in the whole of it, and she was not going to look away from any of it.
She met my eyes for one second. Then I turned and went inside.
She was still holding the tray when Lyra left. This is an image I have never been able to set down. Then I turned and went inside.
I wheeled Sophia toward the review room.
The committee was assembled. Five members, four men, one woman, Dr. Patricia Hess, who pulled me aside and said, “Doesn’t Lyra want to take Sophia?
We can’t have a baby in the tenure review.
” And I said, in the voice that was level and would remain level, “She can’t. She left.”
Dr. Hess looked at me. Something in her face changed. She took her seat.
I stood at the head of the table. Sophia was asleep in the stroller behind me.
“Before we begin,” I said softly, “our youngest attendee is currently asleep. I’d prefer not to wake her.”
The senior professor glanced at the stroller.
“So today’s tenure presentation will be delivered in a whisper.”
A ripple of confusion moved around the table.
“Which is, as it happens, entirely appropriate for the subject of women’s literature.”
The room was listening.
I lowered my voice further. “In patriarchal societies, women have rarely been permitted to shout. Instead, our literary tradition begins in quieter registers. Virginia Woolf reminds us that women wrote in private rooms, in letters, in diaries, in the margins of domestic life.”
The committee members leaned forward.
“When women could not speak publicly, they whispered. To sisters, daughters, lovers, readers. Adrienne Rich tells us that silence can be imposed. But a whisper is chosen. A whisper is strategy.”
I gestured toward the sleeping baby.
“Revolutions rarely begin with shouting,” I said. “They begin with a whisper.”
I presented my research. My voice stayed low.
The committee members unconsciously mirrored my tone, leaning forward, speaking softly when they asked questions, as though the hush in the room were sacred rather than practical.
By the midpoint, the entire tenure review was happening in a silence so delicate it felt almost holy. Sophia slept through all of it.