Margo Ball

I. The Luck of the Nail
II.About Margo


The Luck of the Nail

     “They’re still coming,” Dad said, watching the line of cars crawling past our house. They’d been moving up the hill all day: Chryslers, Buicks, VWs, swaddled with elaborate roped bundles of furniture, boxes, and suitcases--like so many crazed Easter bonnets in a panic parade. At first it had only been the families who lived along the dike, grown skeptical of the soggy piles of sandbags and reading portents in the weariness of the volunteers. Other families had joined them, to the tune of better-safe-than-sorry, until it seemed as if the whole valley was streaming past the house.
     From the radio on the kitchen counter, the staticky roll-call droned on: Lundgren, Paul and Ellen; Lundy, Sarah; Lunn, Robert, Joyce and Amy--the names of those who had made it to the storm shelters. I pictured them in dark basements, huddled together in family groups on army cots. They’d be wrapped in scratchy, wool blankets and their hair would be hanging wet and limp, rivulets of floodwater trailing into their collars.
     Some of the names I recognized: Mr. Jacon, the music teacher; Ms. Lesne, the lady from the bank who urged lollipops on us kids like a drug pusher; and Sammy Wendell—the boy in my class who sat next to the pencil sharpener and made incredibly authentic fart sounds using his mouth and the inner skin of his bicep. Anyone taking her dull pencil for repair would endure the humiliation of his ventriliquistical farts. I wondered if Sammy was making fart sounds under his wool blanket; I wondered if anyone was laughing.
     But it was the names that we didn’t hear that kept us huddled around the radio, that caused my parents’ coffee to sit neglected in front of them. We hadn’t yet had word of the Westings. As long as I could remember, Pat and Lonny Westing were my parents’ closest friends. Their daughter, Mary Jo, was my best friend. We had once tattooed that very fact in magic marker on each others’ arm—hers in green, mine in neon pink. “Best Friends Forever” we wrote, or tried to before our mothers caught on and scoured us mercilessly with lectures and harsh soaps until only the faintest outline remained like an oddly eloquent nest of veins.
     The Westings’ house was two towns over on the street that backed right up to the dike. When we’d visit, our mothers would stretch out on its grassy slope, mugs of lemon tea propped on their belt buckles, while Mary Jo and I raced along its green, spongy spine. The conversation of the mothers would ricochet around us as we played--playing out scenes from a certain and sunny future--my mom’s laughter shooting up sudden and lovely as fireworks, Pat’s chuckle husky and low, jiggling her large, loose breasts like molded Jello.
     In the aftermath of the storm, we drove to the Westings’ house. Strange, unnatural sights littered the familiar route: fences snatched up and balled into wads like wastepaper; a smashed-up car snagged high in the crook of the overpass; houses lifted off their foundations and set down just yards away as if some giant child had been playing roughly with its toys.
     The Westings’ house was still standing, but water had reached to the second floor before retreating back to the riverbed. Mrs. Westing flapped her arms at the tangled debris on the floors and the inch-thick mud coating the walls like milk chocolate paneling. We loaded up crates of muddy objects and dragged them out into the yard, hosing them off one by one to reveal their true shapes like so many crackerjack prizes: pots, pillows, lamps, shoes.
     The talk as we worked was of luck—a nervous sort of luck. We were luckier than the woman whose newborn baby was sucked from her arms as she stood on her front porch, or the man who returned home for the family dog only to get swept away by a wall of flood waters. Here was a different kind of luck than I’d previously contemplated—a relative, temporary sort of luck, the luck of the nail when the hammer misses its mark. The weight of this luck lay across Mrs. Westing’s shoulders like a mantle as she sat enthroned on an upturned bucket--a sad Solomon passing judgment on each of her hosed-off belongings in turn: this can be saved; this is lost; this is lost.

Margo Ball is a graduate of SUNY Binghamton and Suffolk Law School. She lives in Eastern Massachusetts where she is raising her three children.