The Miseducation of Cameron Post (7 page)

We all had Cokes in the living room while Margot talked a little about Berlin, about the various business things she was doing while back in the U.S. Then she looked at this nice silver watch she had on, a big watch with a blue face, like a man’s watch, maybe, and she said that we should get a move on if we were to make our reservation at the Cattleman’s. That was kind of funny, because even though it was Miles City’s nicest steakhouse, tucked between the bars, a place with lots of dark wood paneling and stuffed and mounted animals, it still wasn’t a reservations kind of restaurant. But apparently she had made them just the same.

I could tell Margot was nervous when she opened my car door for me and then told me to pick any radio station I wanted for the sixty seconds it would take us to get down Main Street; and when I didn’t make a move for the dial, she did it for me, cycling through the three stations that came in, making a face, and then just turning the radio off entirely. But I was nervous too, and that made me feel like we were on a date, which we sort of were, I guess. The couple of worn-in ranchers who were ponied up to the Cattleman’s bar gave Margot, in her black pants and black boots and her non–Miles City haircut, the once-over as we passed them for our table; but things seemed decidedly calmer once our drinks arrived: the requisite gin and tonic, and for me, a Shirley Temple, double the cherries, light on the ice.

“Well, I’ll go ahead and say that this is strange, isn’t it? Awkward is probably the best word.” Margot took a long swallow from her drink, letting the ice cubes collide with the lime wedge. “But I am very glad we’re doing it.”

I liked how she said
we
, and made this dinner something the both of us were doing and not something she had done wholly
for
me. It made me feel like an adult.

“Me too,” I said, drinking from my mocktail, hoping that I looked as sophisticated doing it as Margot looked to me.

She smiled, and I’m sure that I blushed in response.

“I brought pictures,” she said, digging in this nice brown leather bag she had, more like a satchel than a purse. “I don’t know how many of these you’ve seen before, but I want you to have whichever you’d like.” She handed me an envelope.

I wiped my hands on my napkin before removing the photos. I wanted her to notice how seriously I was taking all of this. I hadn’t seen most of the shots before. The first dozen or so were from my parents’ wedding. Aunt Ruth might have been the maid of honor, but Margot was a bridesmaid. I thought she looked pretty but uncomfortable in her gown and long gloves, much how I imagined I might have looked in the same getup.

“Oh, your mother and that peach monstrosity,” she said, reaching across the table and bending the picture in my hand toward her so that she could shake her head at it. “I had every intention of changing into blue jeans before the reception, but she bribed me with champagne.”

“Looks like it worked,” I said, coming across a picture of her drinking straight from a champagne bottle, my grandpa Wynton in the corner of the frame, laughing a big laugh. I showed it to her and she nodded.

“You didn’t get a chance to know your mom’s parents, did you?”

“Except for Grandma Post, none of my grandparents ever even met me,” I said.

“You would have liked your grandpa Wynton. And he would have liked you. He was very much a rapscallion.”

I liked that Margot had decided, reflecting on the small collection of times she had “known” me, that I would have been appealing to my grandfather. My mother had told me that before too, but it was different coming from Margot.

“Do you know what a rapscallion is?” she asked, waving at the waitress to bring her another drink.

“Yeah,” I said. “A trickster.”

“Very nice,” she said, chuckling. “I like that—a trickster.”

The pictures at the back of the stack were older, from my mom’s high school days and before: a picnic, a football game, a Christmas pageant, Margot towering over the girls in each shot, and as she and my mother grew younger, photo by photo, Margot towering over many of the boys as well.

“You were always really tall,” I said, and then was embarrassed about having said it.

“At school they called me MoM for years and years—it stood for Miles of Margot,” she said, looking not at me but at a table of diners who had started their cross-restaurant trek to the salad bar.

“That’s sort of clever,” I said.

She smiled. “I think so too. Well, now I do. Not so much then.”

The waitress came back to take our order and bring Margot her second drink. We hadn’t even looked in the maroon menu folders with their gold tassels, but I knew that I wanted chicken-fried steak and hash browns, and Margot apparently knew that she wanted prime rib, because that’s what she ordered, with a baked potato, as well as another Shirley Temple for me. She ordered it without even asking me if I wanted it. It was nice.

I pulled three photos from the stack—one of my mom and dad dancing at their wedding, one of my mom on the shoulders of some unknown boy with a chipped front tooth, and one of Mom and Margot, maybe nine or ten, in shorts and T-shirts, arms around each other’s waists, handkerchiefs on their heads—that one reminded me of a picture I had of Irene and me. I held up my choices in front of her and shrugged my shoulders.

“So you’ve made your selections, then.” She nodded at the pictures in my hand. “The one with both of us was taken at a Campfire Girls jamboree. I was looking for something the other day and came across my old handbook. I’ll try to remember to send it to you; you’ll get a kick out of it.”

“Okay,” I said.

Then we looked at each other, or the table, or the salt and pepper shakers, for what seemed like a very long time. I concentrated on tying one of my cherry stems into a knot with my tongue.

Margot must have noticed my mouth working, because she said, “My brother, David, used to do that too. He could do two knots on a single stem, which he told us meant that he was a very fine kisser.”

I blushed, as usual. “How old was he?” I asked, without finishing the question with
when he died
, but Margot understood me all the same.

“He had just turned fourteen the weekend before the earthquake,” she said, stirring her drink. “I don’t think he had actually kissed very many girls before he died. Maybe none except for your mother.”

“Your brother kissed my mom?”

“Absolutely,” she said. “In the pantry of the First Presbyterian Church.”

“So much for romance,” I said.

Margot laughed. “It was very innocent,” she said. She picked up the salt shaker and tapped its glass base against the tablecloth a few times. “I haven’t been back to the Rock Creek area since it happened, but I’m going straight there after I leave Miles City tomorrow. I feel like I need to.”

I didn’t know what to say to that.

“I wanted to go back anyway; I’ve been wanting to for several years,” she said.

“I don’t ever want to go there.”

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.” Margot reached her hand across the table like she was maybe going to take my hand, or just touch it, but I moved it fast to my lap.

She smiled a tight smile at me and said, “I’m going to level with you here, Cameron, because you seem adult enough to handle it. Grief is not my strong suit, but I did want to see you and tell you that if you need anything from me, you can always ask and I’ll do my best.” She seemed like she was done, but then she added, “I loved your mom since I met her.”

Margot wasn’t crying and I couldn’t read on her face the potential for it, but I knew that if I looked at her long enough, I could definitely get all weepy, and maybe even eventually tell her about me and Irene and what we had done, what I had wanted to do and still did want to do. And I knew, somehow, that she would make me feel better about it. I could just tell that Margot would assure me that what I had done hadn’t caused the accident, and that while I wouldn’t believe anybody else telling me that exact same thing, I might actually believe her. But I didn’t want to believe her right then, so I didn’t keep looking at her face but instead drained the rest of my Shirley Temple, which took several swallows; but I finished every last sweet pink-red carbonated drop until the ice clacked against my teeth.

Then I said, “Thanks, Margot. I’m really glad you came.”

“Me too,” she said, and then she put her napkin back on the table and said, “I’m ready for that salad bar. How about you?”

I nodded, and then she asked me if I knew the German word for
bathroom
and I said no and she said
das Bad
, and it seemed funny so we both smiled, and then she stood and told me that she was just going to
pop into das Bad
for a minute before we ate. And while she did that, I took her photos back out of the envelope and found that wedding shot of her drinking straight from the champagne bottle and I slipped it up under my shirt and just inside the waistband of my pants, its surface cool and tacky against my stomach.

After Ruth came back, a moving van followed close behind; we had to make room for some of her stuff. This meant tackling the garage, closets, the storage shed in the backyard. During one of these clearing sessions we unearthed a dollhouse my father had made for my fifth birthday. As dollhouses go, it was amazing. It was a built-to-scale reproduction of some big old Victorian in San Francisco—according to my dad, it was a famous one on a famous street.

The version he built for me was three feet high and a couple of feet wide. It took both Ruth and me, working together, to get it out of the narrow opening of the cluttered storage shed.

“Should we put this in the car, take it to St. Vincent’s?” Ruth asked after we’d made it through the cobwebbed doorway and were standing together on the lawn, both of us sweating. “It would make some little girl awfully happy.”

We’d taken carload after carload to that thrift store. “It’s mine,” I told her, though I wasn’t planning on keeping it until right that minute. “My dad made it for me, and I’m not giving it to some stranger.” I hoisted it up by its peaked roof and took it into the house, up the stairs to my room, and shut the door.

Dad had painted it a blue he called cerulean, and I thought that name was so pretty that I named the first doll to live in the house Sarah Cerulean. The windows had white trim, and real glass panes, and flower boxes with tiny fake flowers in them. There was a fence made to look like ornate wrought iron around the little platform yard, which was done up with synthetic turf scraps left over from the indoor soccer field in Billings. I don’t know how Dad even wound up with those. He’d cut up scraps from real shingles to do the roof. The outside was entirely finished, every detail, but the inside was another story.

The whole dollhouse was hinged, so you could close it and see it from all four sides, or open it and have access to each of the individual rooms, like a diorama. He’d done the framing for all of the rooms, and put in a staircase and a fireplace, but that was it as far as it got, no other decorations or finishes. He’d wanted to have it ready for my birthday, and he’d promised that we could finish it later, together, which we never did. Not that I minded. Even unfinished it was a better dollhouse than any I had ever seen.

My mom and I had picked out a few pieces of furniture for it at the crafts display counter at Ben Franklin. Irene and I used to spend hours with that thing, until sometime after my tenth birthday, when I had decided that I was too old for dolls, and therefore, dollhouses.

While Ruth continued her decluttering, I moved the dollhouse over to the corner of my already cramped room and put it on my desk, which was another thing—a monstrous thing—Dad had built for me, with cubbyholes and all sizes of drawers, a wide top for art projects. But the dollhouse was monstrous, too, and it left me only one small corner of free desktop. Still, I liked having it there, despite its bulk, but for a few weeks that’s all it was: there, hulking and waiting.

The Klausons had hit it big with their dinosaur farm. “Raising dinosaurs beats the hell outta raising cattle,” I heard Mr. Klauson say more than once. Mrs. Klauson bought a slippery teal convertible even though it was fall in Montana. Irene came to school with all kinds of new stuff. By Halloween it was settled: She was off to Maybrook Academy in Connecticut. Boarding school. I had seen the movies. I knew all about it: plaid skirts and rolling green lawns and trips to some seaside town on the weekends.

“Where are all the boys?” Steph Schlett had asked Irene, a bunch of us crammed in a booth at Ben Franklin, some of the girls
oooh
ing and
aaaah
ing over a glossy brochure.

“Maybrook’s a girls’ academy,” Irene said, taking a slow drink from her Perrier. You couldn’t buy Perrier at the Ben Franklin lunch counter, or anywhere else in Miles City; but Mrs. Klauson had taken to buying it in bulk in Billings, and Irene had taken to carrying a bottle with her practically everywhere.

“Bor-ring,” Steph giggled in this high whinny thing she was known for.

“Hardly,” Irene said, careful not to catch my eye. “Our brother school, River Vale, is right across the lake, and we have socials and dances and whatever with them all the time. Almost every other weekend.”

I watched as Steph trailed a french fry through a pool of ketchup, and then into a big plastic vat of the good ranch dressing Ben Franklin made gallons of, before popping the fry into her mouth and starting on another. “But why are you going now?” she asked, the chew of mealy potato thick in her braces. “Why not wait until next fall, or until spring semester at least.”

I had wanted to ask the same thing, but was glad that Steph did it for me. I didn’t want Irene to notice how jealous I was. I could see part of that brochure from where I sat: fresh-faced girls playing lacrosse, or cuddled in thick wool cardigans sipping cocoa in rooms filled with leather-bound books. It really was just like the movies.

Irene took another drink of her Perrier. Then she screwed on the cap really slowly, sort of puzzling her forehead, as though what Steph had asked was just incredibly thought-provoking or something. Finally she said, “My parents think it’s best that I start my education at Maybrook as soon as possible. No offense, you guys,” she said, looking right at me, “but it’s not like Miles City is known for its outstanding school system.”