Margie Waverly sat in the chair holding her book, Love’s Torrid Edge, savoring her sherry. Christmas tree lights freckled the room and the fragrance of Douglas fir waxed the air while the polite mumble of a tender fire gathered in the fireplace.  But even with her feet tucked cozily beneath her and sipping sherry at a steady rate, Margie couldn’t numb the profound discomfort she felt.  She wished she were at home, with her things.  This cabin was Spartan.  The Christmas tree enjoyed the company of only a small couch and the chair Margie was sitting in.  The mantel was bare except for a single red beeswax candle at its center.  A generic picture of a sailboat hung on the wall opposite the tree. There were no knick-knacks, none of her little collections around her like attentive children.  She felt naked, vulnerable.  Coming here had been a terrible mistake.

She focused again on the first paragraph of page eighty-seven: Desmond took Catherine and pressed her to him, enfolding her, burdening her neck with tender kisses.  Margie stopped reading.  She turned the book and looked at its cover.  A man with no shirt and long, blond hair stood supporting a beautiful woman whose dress was torn.  She had seen him on a talk show one morning several years ago.  He was a model and had later appeared in margarine commercials.  Margarine.  She didn’t know which depressed her more, the margarine commercial or the fact that he actually existed.

She tried page eighty-seven again but it was too late.  She glanced at the window and felt the draw of the pale, cool glass calling to her like the beginning of a journey.  She placed the romance novel down, open-faced on the armrest of the chair, took her sherry and walked to the window.

Windows did this to her; they drew her in, always promising a revelation, but never delivering.  Still, she went to them, always hoping that one day she would be able to see.

Outside, blackness cloaked the night, obscuring all but a thick band of snow that surrounded them, choking out the landscape.  Margie wondered why on earth she had suggested coming to Lake Tahoe for Christmas.  ‘A family Christmas’ she’d said half-heartedly, as though she didn’t really believe they were still a family.  Their children could hardly be considered children after all.  Danny Jr. was nineteen and not doing so well.  And Randall was already a junior in high school.

What had Dan expected?  What had Margie herself expected?  It had been over a year since they had made love.  Did she think the romance of snow and fresh pine would send them into a sentimental trance?  Did she suppose the rustic cabin would capture them, holding their doubts and recriminations hostage so they could go back in time to a place where they actually believed themselves to be happy?  Had there ever been such a time?  Because to Margie, love had become exactly like a shadow; something she could see but not touch.  But then maybe for Margie it had always been that way.  She took a long draught from her glass.

Just yesterday they cleaved a gap into the cement wall of traffic and crept, like turtles, with the thousands of others towards Noel in the woods. Even after their six-hour drive Dan suggested a little gambling.  Going into the casinos was like entering a den of oppression.  The shrill nefarious lights, the leering faces, shimmering flesh, and the money pulsing around them like a hungry animal frightened and depressed Margie, and she thought the only thing missing was the opium.  Dan’s face rippled with excitement as he fingered his money clip.  Danny Jr. practiced stealing drinks while Margie and Randall wandered around as if needing to ask directions.  Besides not feeling the least little bit like Christmas, Dan lost over two thousand dollars at blackjack, and Danny Jr. had gotten arrested after being caught with two joints of marijuana.  Margie had had to get a cash advance from her credit card this morning to get her son out of jail. It had been a disaster.  It was only the 21st of December and she doubted she’d make it to Christmas, much less New Year’s.

Her sorrows gathered around her like brooding clouds when suddenly her back stiffened as she became aware of a something, maybe a dream made manifest; as if someone’s eyes were trained on her back.  It couldn’t be Dan or the boys; she heard their slumbered breathing still blanketing the room.  She turned around slowly and her heart pounded as she saw, sitting in the chair, an image.  A man; no, an image.  His hair was parted in the center and pomaded neatly back.  He was well dressed in crisp trousers with white piping on his vest, like something out of The Great Gatsby.  His legs were crossed and his hands were folded neatly in his lap.  He smiled at her.

Margie’s beautiful blue eyes widened in astonishment.  She opened her mouth to speak or to scream, but it didn’t matter.  Her throat constricted to a knot and the only sound that escaped her was as tiny and insignificant as a dot on a page.

“Tell me, Margie, looking out of that window, what are you hoping to see?”

“I-”

Margie’s head tingled as if she might pass out.  Her palms were cold with sweat.

“But isn’t it obvious?  There is only the other side of the window.” 

He smiled again; his crystal green eyes penetrated her as he spoke.

“Who are you?” she whispered.

“Well, I could be frightfully naughty and tell you I was J.B. Carstairs, or John Phillip Carms or even Amory Blaine, but I suppose you’ll require the truth, though you hide from it at every turn.”  He soothed his impeccable hair with his hand.  “F. Scott Fitzgerald, unequivocally yours.”  He bowed his head slightly.

“But you’re,” Margie’s voice trailed off.

“Dead?  Yes, I’m afraid so.  A minor inconvenience at this point.”

Margie’s mind raced wildly.  She blinked a couple of times thinking maybe the sherry was causing her to hallucinate, but there he sat, as clear to her as the Christmas tree or the burgundy plaid sofa in the corner.

“But why?”  Even as Margie asked she felt ridiculous, insane.

“I suppose you must know that too, but let’s not get mired in all the ugly detail just yet.  Let’s just say I’m here for the purposes of illumination.  Now, I’ve answered every one of your questions and you’ve neglected to answer my first.  What are you hoping to see through that window?”

Margie’s knees felt as weak as over-cooked spaghetti.  Her eyes darted quickly at the window, then back to Fitzgerald.  Nothing made any sense.  Why would the ghost of a dead writer visit her, of all people?  She had heard his name, of course, as one hears the names of famous people bandied in vague and worldly conversations; names like Churchill, Van Gogh or Mozart.

Fitzgerald raised both eyebrows at her, urging her to speak.

“I, well, it’s been so long, I think I’ve forgotten,” she said distracted.

“Maybe you’re looking too hard,” he said. 

He shifted slightly in the chair, re-crossing his legs.

“Where did you come from?”

“Originally, I became persona non grata from the Jazz Age.  More recently, here and there.”

“Why me?”

“My dear Margie, why not you?  Does any star know why it was created?  Does it know why it shines and can it comprehend the wonder or joy it creates in those who look upon it in breathless amazement?  The question you must ask yourself is not why, but rather, why not.”

Margie’s head ached.  She put her hand to her forehead and rubbed her temples.

“You’re not happy,” he said.  “Your husband, it’s Dan right?  He sleeps with other women and drools over girlie magazines on his lunch hour.  Danny Jr. is learning to excel at living in the haze of booze and drugs.”

“It was only one affair.  And I love my boys,” Margie said defensively.  “Randall’s the best quarterback Livermore High School has had in over twenty years.  Scouts from Stanford and Berkeley have come to watch him play.”

“But after all these years you’ve neglected someone equally as important, haven’t you?” he asked.

Something inside Margie began to hurt.  As if her heart had just sustained a tiny, hairline tear.  Her chest heaved in uneven breaths.

“What do you want?”

“Precisely what you want.”

Margie pulled at the top of her pink sweat suit.  Even near the window she felt hot, closed in.

“I don’t know what that means,” she said.

She reached to put her glass on the mantel above the fireplace but misgauged her aim and the glass fell to the floor and shattered.

“Pity.  That was good sherry, no?  Still, I’d be careful if I were you.  Alcohol has submerged many a noble soul.”

Margie thought she noted a trace of regret in his voice.

Footsteps shuffled down the hallway and suddenly Dan stood at the entrance to the living room, bleary-eyed, absently scratching his dark, hairy chest.

“It’s almost two-thirty in the morning.  What are you doing out here?” he mumbled.

Margie’s eyes dashed from Dan to Fitzgerald, but when she looked at the chair, it was empty.  At that exact moment Love’s Torrid Edge fell with a thud and landed, face down, on the old scuffed hardwood floor.

*          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *         

It was good to be home, Margie thought, smiling as she walked through the familiar hallway into her kitchen.  The polite charades of Christmas and New Year’s had been exhausting, especially with Margie always looking over her shoulder for ghosts and spirits.  Nothing more had appeared and Margie began to think of that strange night as a stress-induced hallucination brought on by the conspicuous lack of her material possessions.

Her eyes absently skimmed the kitchen counter full of old mail, Phred’s collar and leash, and a half-empty bottle of baby shampoo.  The black and white cat clock on the wall clicked in measured, obedient tocks.  She stepped over the boxes of old cookbooks and retrieved her latest favorite coffee mug purchased from Goodwill.  She poured hot coffee into the red ceramic mug trimmed with white kittens and then opened the package of cheese Danish quietly, so as not to wake Dan.  Randall was already gone to an early football practice and Danny Jr. was sleeping off another hangover.  From the family room Phred, their miniature dachshund, propped his head on the armrest of a chair and regarded Margie with a beseeching gaze.

Saturday mornings were always her favorite time.  The crisp morning air mingling with the smell of fresh coffee and all those garage sale ads in the paper suggested a kind of restrained hope.  Delving into other people’s lives, fondling their fondue pots and table lamps, Margie felt as if she were one step away from solving a mystery.  As if the next garage sale or thrift shop would have that precise something she had been searching for all her life.

Margie claimed another Danish with vague thoughts of guilt.  What did it matter, putting on a pound or two here and there?  Certainly it didn’t matter to Dan, who seemed more interested in his wounds as a prodigal husband. 

She felt a cold nose push against her knee.  She looked down and saw Phred’s small, lithe, black body pressed to hers, his thin tail thumbing against the linoleum. When their eyes met, Margie saw a boundless love and she thought Phred was trying to tell her that he lived solely to embrace her, if only he could.

“Here you go, you little stinker,” she said breaking off a piece of the pastry and giving it to the appreciative dog.

Neither she nor Dan had addressed the issue of his affair directly.  It had been last September, the month when all monumental, disastrous things seemed to happen to Margie.  She found the note when she was doing the laundry; cleaning out pockets. 

She always saved what she found in pockets.  It was like re-living history from the previous week of people she once knew very well.  There was a whole drawer in the kitchen devoted to Dan’s pockets, which contained bits of multi-colored plastic covered wire, small wads of black electrical tape, and plastic wire caps.  She kept a separate box under her bed, remnants from the boys’ pockets: gum wrappers, pennies, old baseball cards, and small toys from a lifetime ago.  These were the precious things.

Margie had read the note and thought at first it was a joke.

To my daring, desirable Dan.

Could this note be referring to the same Dan?  The middle-aged electrician with the thinning curly hair who snored on the couch all weekend?

I enjoyed last night!  You’re a real sex machine!  Please!  Call me!  I’m dying to see you again!  Jennifer.

So many exclamation marks, as if this Jennifer had the hiccups.  Was she really dying to see Dan again?

When Margie realized that it was no joke, she went numb.  She placed the note on Dan’s night table and dried her eyes with the sleeve of her nightgown.  That evening after Dan got home, the note disappeared and Dan seemed changed.  He offered to take Margie out to dinner or else do the dishes, but Margie only wanted to sift through her box of old key chains.  He began apologizing in a bruised voice for everything from the weather to the crime rate, but Margie could only stare out the window, her thoughts covered in a dull, flat blanket of silence.

Margie licked the sweet, sticky frosting from the Danish off of her thumb and from the corner of her eye caught her reflection in the toaster.  Margie knew she used to be beautiful.  Before she was married, men told her that all the time.  A boy in high school, a self-proclaimed poet, once told her she had “catastrophic beauty”, but Margie had been afraid to ask him what that meant.

She tucked her long, coffee-brown hair behind her ears and turned her face to the side, regarding her profile.  Her deep blue eyes were still her best feature.  She leaned across the table, closer to the toaster and could easily see the wrinkles, crow’s feet and laugh lines.  She sighed and returned her attention to the classifieds.

Behind her, Dan appeared in his usual weekend attire, painter’s pants and a threadbare T-shirt.  Phred regarded him with a prudent eye.  Dan adjusted his baseball cap and headed for the coffee but stubbed his toe on one of the boxes of cookbooks.  Margie let out a small gasp and jumped at the sudden noise.

“Jesus, how long are these going to set out here?”

Margie turned the page of the newspaper and cleared her throat.  Dan looked at her.

“You’ve sure been jumpy lately.  Ever since Tahoe, you seem, I don’t know, different.”

He grabbed a cheese Danish from the package.  Margie continued to ignore him, scanning the list of addresses in the ads.

“Look if it’s about the money I lost…”

“It’s not about the money.”

“What then?” he asked.

Margie got up and with effort, lifted one box of cookbooks and headed to the garage.  Dan followed.  She carefully wove her way through the maze of boxes and finally found a spot near the water softener for the cookbooks.

“You know, we should get rid of some of this stuff.”

Margie regarded him with a steely eye.

“These are my things,” she said.

“But look at it.  It’s junk.  We should have a garage sale.  Whatever we don’t sell we take to the dump.”

She looked around at the boxes of old magazines, the vases, the empty cookie tins, the antique metal milk cans, and wicker baskets.

“You’re not going to sell my things.”

“Christ Margie look!”  He grabbed a box and peered in.  “There’s nothing in here but old spoons.”  He bent down and looked into another box.  “And these, used greeting cards.  These aren’t even ours, for Christ’s sake.”

“Every one of those spoons is from a different city,” she said defensively.  “And someday I’m going to make a collage from the cards.  I saw it once in a magazine, it was very cute.”

Margie looked around her and began reorganizing her possessions.  She covered her box of bottle caps and a plastic container of costume jewelry.  The broken watches she obscured with a box full of lids, rubber bands and twisty-ties.

“We haven’t been able to park the car in the garage in years.  Wouldn’t you like to do that?” he asked, tempting her.

“I like parking in the driveway just fine,” she said, not budging.

This was so typical of him, she thought as she rubbed the smell of dust and cobwebs from her nose.  Obviously, this compulsion to purge and evacuate stemmed from his childhood; his difficult years of living on the streets, having nothing before being rescued by that retired electrician, Silas Beakerman.

“Well maybe I’d like to have a little spot for a workbench or something.”

“A workbench?  Whatever for?”

“A man has a right to have a workbench in his own garage.”  He stared at her with pursed lips, his eyebrows diving downward.

Margie put her fists on her hips and they stood opposing each other like Hannibal and Nero during the second Punic War.

“You’re never home,” she said.  “And when you are, you’re on the couch with a beer and a game.”

“Well, look what I have to come home to,” he said, waving an aggravated hand over the garage full of objects and Margie as if she were nothing more than just another garage sale item.

Margie stood there, letting Dan’s indictment fall against a shield of indifference, but inside she felt herself beginning to cave in.  How dare he?  This was all she had in the world.  Of course he was blind to the daily heartaches she endured.  The regular agonies of motherhood caused by children who grew up with such zeal and intensity, leaving her to wander around in the dust of the past like a forgotten pet. 

Danny Jr. no longer hid his lifestyle from them.  He walked into the house drunk, stumbling around stupidly, sputtering about his escapades as if looking for congratulations.  The more he bragged, the more constricted and confused Margie felt.

And Randall, upon whose shoulder every hope of Margie’s was pinned, would only be home another year before going off to college.  In a supremely bittersweet moment, one of the scouts from Stanford who had come to see Randall play told Margie that her son had enough raw talent to easily make it to the NFL.  He rattled off a list of names:  Joe Montana, Dan Marino, John Elway, and someday, Randall Waverly.  He would be up there with the greats; gone for good.

Margie hung her head.  She really was all alone and would be, it seemed.

“I’m sorry to disappoint you,” she said sullenly.  “I guess you’d like to get rid of me along with the rest of the garbage.”

“Oh great.  Here we go, let’s just feel sorry for ourselves and drown our sorrows in a puddle of tears.”  He raised his hands up and looked at the ceiling.

“You know, if I would have done that I never would have gotten where I am today.”

Margie glared at him.

“Don’t give me that old ‘pulling yourself up by the bootstraps’ speech. If that old man hadn’t taken you in off the streets in the city and taken enormous pity on you, that’s where you’d still be.”

“Don’t you dare knock Silas.  He was like a father to me.”  Dan’s chest heaved with emotion.

Margie knew what was coming next.  The self-made man speech.

“I started from nothing.  I’m a self-made man.  Did you hear?  I had nothing!” he shouted.

Margie rolled her eyes.  Always this business of his being a self-made man, as if he were some wealthy tycoon instead of this miserable, paunchy electrician humping girls named Jennifer.

The door to the garage from the kitchen opened and Danny Jr. poked his head in.  His curly red-brown hair was disheveled. 

“Marge, Dan, either of you seen my lighter?” he mumbled.

Danny Jr. had taken to calling them by their first names a few months ago.  It amused and irritated Margie, adding to their already strained, surreal relationship with their oldest son.

Even now, if she looked at her boys long enough her eyes played tricks on her.  Staring, the years seemed to melt from their faces and they became young and vulnerable again.  Sometimes, in the middle of the night, when a distant breeze rustled the trees, she thought she heard their young voices crying out for her.  She’d sit up in bed and cock her head to one side, concentrating, listening with her entire body, her head almost hurting with desire to hear that sound again.  And then reality would drop like a heavy weight and she would remember, falling back on her pillow in defeat.

Dan looked at the boy.

“Not now, son.”

“Whatever,” Danny Jr. said up to the air, closing the door and retreating back into the kitchen.

“Something needs to be done about Danny,” Margie said, staring at the closed door.

“He’ll be fine.  He’s just sowing his oats is all.”

“How can you say that?  Look at him.  He comes home drunk almost every night.  He doesn’t want to go to college; he won’t find a job.  It just doesn’t seem healthy somehow.”

“He’s coming into being a man now; he’s trying to find himself.  He’ll come around, you’ll see.”

Margie’s eyes welled with tears.  Danny Jr. had been a difficult child.  Colicky as a baby, he never wanted to cuddle longer than a minute, as if he always had other, more important things to do.  In school he was chronically behind and frequently in fights.  His first day of high school he had been escorted home by a policeman for showing up drunk at school and caught urinating in the hallway.  Sometimes, Margie thought it was like watching a beautiful ship in flames, sinking slowly into the ocean.  By the time the fire was out, it would be too late; he would already have been swallowed up by something too vast and powerful to conquer.

“Maybe he needs counseling or something,” she said.

“He does not need counseling.  Just because he’s not ‘perfect’ like Randall doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with him.  Jesus, if you’d stop comparing Danny with Randall and just let him be, things would be fine.”

“That’s not fair, I don’t compare them.” 

But even as Margie spoke she knew what Dan was talking about.   It was as if Danny Jr. belonged to Dan and Randall to Margie.  Danny Jr. was like his father, physically and emotionally. 

And Randall, oh Randall had been different in every way.  He used to coo contentedly in Margie’s arms for hours as she rocked him in the late afternoons while the sun streamed into the nursery in orange-colored ribbons.  He walked perfectly from barely ten months and mastered new activities almost without trying.  He threw a perfect spiral from the age of eight and now, when Margie watched him scrimmage, his beautiful body poised like Adonis in the sun, her heart melted with pride.  Even though Margie loved Danny Jr. equally, she had to admit it took less effort loving Randall.

“Yeah right.  I suppose you’re just as proud of Danny as you are of Randall,” he said.

“Of course not.  Are you?”

“At least I love my boys the same.”

“I love them both the same too and if you were any sort of a decent father, you’d take some time to try to help Danny,” she said, her voice rising with intensity.

“Danny is fine.  If you wouldn’t be so god damned controlling, maybe he’d be able to breathe a little and he’d stop being so rebellious.”  Dan’s face was red with anger.

Margie took a step back and clenched her fists; her eyes filled with tears.

“I love my boys.  I have always loved my children more than anything else in the world; more than anything else in life.”

“Yeah, I know,” he said bitterly.

The door from the kitchen opened again.  Danny Jr. stuck his head out.

“Marge, phone.”

Dan punched the button to the garage door opener on the wall with the side of his fist.  The door let in a tidal wave of sunlight and Margie felt suddenly swallowed in a helix of chilly January air.  The smell of fresh cut grass and the reckless cry of sparrows struck her as she watched Dan stomp to his truck and take off.  She let out a resigned huff; of course he’d leave, that’s what he was good at.  She walked into the kitchen and picked up the phone.

“Hello?”

“Hey Margie, it’s Flo.  Randall’s over here with Bunny.  Her cheerleading practice ended at the same time so I just brought them both home and thought I’d make a big brunch.  Randall says he’ll be home later.”

“Oh, yeah, that’s fine.”

“Hey girlfriend, you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.  I guess I’m just not awake yet,” Margie said, biting her lip.

“Ah, the life of a princess, it must be nice,” Flo said and then giggled.

“Now don’t forget about Monday.”

“Monday, right.  What time?”

“I’m picking you up at ten o’clock.  And I’ve got some juicy news for you,” she bubbled.  “But I can’t talk right now.  See you on Monday.”

Margie hung up the phone and groaned.  Ever since Flo’s daughter Bunny had begun dating Randall two years ago, Flo claimed Margie as a best friend.  In the beginning Margie thought Flo might liberate her.  Flo’s well-fitting clothes and perfect nails seemed to Margie to be a sign of feminine success.  But over time Margie found herself surprisingly reluctant to adopt any sort of change whatsoever.  Beneath it all, Margie felt the real reason Flo was so friendly was because Randall was such a good catch for her daughter Bunny.

From Danny’s closed bedroom door came the frightening, discordant sounds of heavy metal rock music.  The too-sweet smell of aging Danish flooded her nose.  She looked at the newspaper with doleful eyes.  It was already after eleven, all the good stuff would already be gone.  She had forgotten all about Monday but now had that silly make-up party to dread all weekend. 

She gazed from the hallway to the pantry.  Wasn’t eleven close to noon?  She usually never drank before twelve o’clock.  In the back of her mind was a vague sense that drinking before noon was somehow not only unwise, but even possibly immoral.  But what would one little glass of sherry hurt after all? 

She looked down at Phred, whose eyes volleyed from Margie to the last remaining cheese Danish.  Though she knew she shouldn’t, she tore off another piece and gave it to the dog and thought with relief that it was already the middle of the afternoon in New York.  At this point, a glass of sherry and a romance novel seemed just the right thing.