I heard the news about Margaret today. Her picture was beautiful; she looked a lot like her mother when she grew up. I hadn’t seen Margaret in years. Probably close to thirty so I really didn’t know her as an adult. Living here in San Francisco now and owning a gallery I think about her mother a lot. Margaret’s mother and mine were close friends and she painted the picture of the window in Margaret’s bedroom in Tehran where I looked out onto the wall we used to jump barefoot off of as part of the thieves club. Now I look out the window of the painting where it hangs on my bedroom wall. Margaret’s mother was a painter and owned a gallery in Virginia for a while—my only experience in gallery work before I opened my own. And Margaret’s mother used to live here in san Francisco for a while, that was after my mother died, and then Margaret’s mother was dead and now Margaret is dead of a brain tumor.
She was younger than I was and played the flute and doodled curlicues and walked on her toes. Her brother told me she had died. I’m really bad at keeping in touch with people having moved around so much in the days before email and easy international calling so I had lost touch with the family. But one day at a demonstration in front of the white house a few years ago a man walked up to me and asked if I was sara powell. I said yes but I didn’t recognize him. It was Margaret’s brother Garrie.
The last time I remembered seeing him was on his twenty-first birthday when I rode with him and his mother up to cabin john where the rest of his family was waiting to celebrate with a dinner. I remember Garrie had to slam on the brakes at one point causing his mother to plunk her hand down in the middle of his birthday cake. As an artist she used to make the most amazing birthday cakes for her kids—I remember one—it was either for Johnny or Willy (the two younger boys) and had an entire marzipan farm on top.
But this cake was plain and Vida ruefully remarked that she hadn’t had time to personalize it before and imprinting her hand wasn’t really the way she would have chosen to do it.
That was probably the last time I saw Margaret and Garrie told me then she had a brain tumor. I wanted to call but I didn’t know what to say. I’d known Margaret and Garrie and the others since I was a little kid in Sri Lanka. We were both embassy families and hung out a lot together, especially since our mothers were friends. Once we all went up into the mountains together at Nuwara Eliya. We stayed at a tea plantation and my older sisters and Garrie tormented Margaret and me by putting granddaddy long-legs into our underwear. There’s a picture of us kids standing by a river—all of us in high-water pants because we had outgrown our clothes. But then they moved and we moved and like all the other friends I had growing up we lost touch.
Margaret
photo by Garrie Rouse
But then, after a stint in DC, we were posted to Iran and there they were. My most vivid memories of Margaret are from this time period but the picture of the window that was in her room was only later in our stay there. First it was her parent’s room and her room was on the other side of the house. It was in that room that I remember lounging on her bed, reading comics that were forbidden at home and listening to The Beatles’ The Long and Winding Road. And I remember sleeping on her roof in the summer and watching shooting stars and wandering the small streets together, buying sunflower seeds and visiting the cook’s family.
The list of my peers who have known me--and whom I have known--since childhood is tiny. I can count it on one hand. Now it’s one fewer person. I wish I had had the courage to call Margaret.
