My Latest Grievance (17 page)

"Let me point out," said my mother, "that Grace Woodbury must have been an extremely unstable and depressed woman if she tried to take her own life. Now I'm going to say something you won't like: You are a child. No one expects a child to fix a marriage or prevent a suicide." She patted my hipbone through the quilt, then rose from the bed. "Your father and I will do whatever we can," she said.

"For who?"

She stopped in the doorway and turned around. "For everyone, Frederica," she said.

***

My father was working hard at rolling down the driver's window of our rental car in anticipation of the tollbooth. Because there was a light snow falling, I suggested he turn on the windshield wipers. There—the black knob. No, the other one. Clockwise. Now give the ticket to me for safekeeping.

Laura Lee had requested the passenger seat because she was prone to carsickness. She was sniffling, and pretending to do it privately. Every ten minutes or so my father would ask, "Do you want to talk about it, Laura Lee?" She'd shake her head, look out the side window, pass a tissue delicately under her nostrils.

Just beyond the Framingham exit, Laura Lee said, "I think this is a mistake. I don't think I should have run off like the guilty party."

"You're going to your mother's for Christmas," my father said quietly. "No one would consider that running off."

"The college virtually shuts down," said my mother. "No one stays behind to consider anything."

I said, "Maybe Laura Lee meant she should be by her boyfriend's side."

Laura Lee swiveled around to bark at my mother, "Your daughter has no right to be talking to me like that. Do you ever tell her that she's too fresh and too big for her britches?"

"All the time," said my mother.

"It's how they raised me," I said.

"You're annoying all of us," said my father. "So pretend you're traveling with Patsy's family, where children don't weigh in on adult conversations."

"Our nerves are frayed," added my mother.

"Who's Patsy?" asked Laura Lee.

"A school chum of Frederica's who has a big nuclear family and strict, God-fearing parents," my father supplied.

"They're not professors, so they live in a house," I said. "With a finished basement and a color TV."

"Is that what you want?" Laura Lee asked.

I pursed my lips, silence made observable, to remind her that she had requested no communication from me, the brat.

"Answer her question," my mother murmured.

"Yes," I said. "Okay? I would like to live in a house like most normal people do."

"Patsy Leonard has to share her bedroom with her little sister," my mother said.

"I might have liked a sister," I said.

"You have hundreds of sisters!" my father said. "Thousands, if you add up sixteen graduating classes at Dewing."

"I hate them all," I said.

We continued in silence along the Pike. Traffic was always heavy on the two days a year we traveled west, no matter what time we set out. The three-hour trip might be taking four.

"Do we have everything?" my mother asked. "David? Did you take the shopping bag on the kitchen counter?"

"In the trunk," he said.

"Did you bring the presents?" I asked.

"Ditto," said my father.

"We bought Jane an illustrated book on bonsai and a starter kit," said my mother.

I turned to her and asked quietly, "Does Grandma know what happened?"

My mother shook her head.

Laura Lee said, still facing front, "David and I think that Jane doesn't need to know any more than the fact that the president's wife is in the hospital—"

"She'll want to know why," I said.

"We're saying, 'She's in the hospital. Her car broke down and she was stuck by the side of the road, and her tailpipe was blocked by a snowbank and she suffered carbon monoxide poisoning.'"

"Who came up with that?" asked my mother.

"We both did," said Laura Lee. "David and I."

"Isn't it a little elaborate?" asked my mother.

I said, "If the car was running, she wasn't broken down."

"She was stuck in a snowbank," said my father.

"Wouldn't she have gone for help?"

My father said, "Your grandmother is not going to interrogate me. If she has any questions, they'll be about Grace's medical condition."

"Which is where we can pick up the truthful part of the story," said Laura Lee.

"Why not tell the whole truth from the beginning?" asked my mother.

Laura Lee answered for them both. "It isn't necessary. It's Christmas. Why bring up a difficult subject—"

"Like sin," I said.

My mother looked perplexed: What alien values had her daughter been assimilating outside the home?

"Now that Aviva brings it up, I'm not terribly comfortable with our fabrication," my father said to Laura Lee.

Laura Lee asked smartly, "At what point did you tell your mother that you'd left me and were having an affair with Aviva?"

"Promptly."

"No, you didn't! She called the apartment and asked for you, and I had to tell her you were no longer in residence, but could be reached at the apartment of a Miss Aviva Ginsburg."

"Is this necessary?" my mother murmured.

"What's our exit number?" asked my father.

I said, "The last exit on the Pike. You don't even have to think about it"

Laura Lee said, "You don't know the exit number for your childhood home?"

"He's got a lot on his mind," I said.

Aviva asked, "What about
your
mother, Laura Lee? Don't you think she'll pick up on the fact that you're upset and want to draw you out about what's bothering you?"

She said tersely, "Not all families work the way yours does, Aviva."

"She's going to know something's wrong," said my father. "I think you should tell her, especially if you're going to extend your stay."

"She is?" I asked.

"We weren't speaking to you, Frederica," said Laura Lee.

"Is this something new? You won't be returning with us?" asked my mother.

"That depends," said Laura Lee.

"Are you talking about Mrs. Woodbury?" I asked. "If she dies or not?"

"No one thinks she's going to die, honey," said my father.

"You don't know! You haven't talked to her doctors!"

"Poor Marietta," said my mother. "We should have taken her with us."

"You must be joking," I said.

"Christmas for her will forever be associated with this tragedy," said my father. "Whether her mother fully recovers or not."

"You don't think Marietta knows her father was fooling around and that's what drove her mother to suicide? Do you think she'd want to spend Christmas with her father's girlfriend?"

My mother said quietly, "We would have altered our plans. Your grandmother would have understood."

"I'm telling Grandma the whole story," I said.

"No, you're not," said Laura Lee. Then: "Does anyone have any control over this child?"

"Maybe Frederica is right," my father said. "Maybe the lesson of Watergate was 'Keep secrets at your own peril.'"

"Or you'll have to resign," I added.

Laura Lee turned around, this time facing me squarely, hands gripping the back of her seat. "What happened?" she asked. "We were such good friends. I explained to you, to all of you, about this gigantic, unforeseeable, profound, and, most amazing of all, mutual bond between Eric and me. Don't make me say anything more. Don't make me verbalize what he didn't have with his wife."

The traitor at the wheel chimed in, "I guess I don't appreciate, either, Frederica, why you're so hostile to Laura Lee."

"Maybe she misses her," said my mother. "Maybe it's precisely because they were such good friends that Frederica feels the loss so intensely and is masking it with anger."

I wasn't ready to admit to any such thing. I said instead, "I don't think the president of a college and a housemother should be having an affair like they're proud of it. And I don't want Marietta's mother to die. Is that so hard to understand?"

Laura Lee clucked and flounced back around to face the road. My mother patted my hand. "We'll call the hospital from the next phone booth," she said.

"Try the morgue," I said.

"Frederica's never been a Pollyanna," my father announced proudly.

O
UR HOSTESS SHOWED US
to my father's childhood room, still decorated in brown corduroy, still displaying artifacts from his science-club and Eagle Scout days.

"Wouldn't it make more sense for David and Aviva to have his old room, and for me and Frederica to sleep in the guest room?" Laura Lee asked.

"Married people get the guest room," said my grandmother.

Laura Lee assumed a pained expression. "I didn't prepare myself for this," she said.

"For what?" my grandmother asked.

"Sleeping in my ex-husband's bed." She sighed, crossed the threshold without her suitcase, and turned back to face us.

My grandmother said, "I bought these sheets well after David ever spent the night in this room. And the pillow, too. There really isn't anything of his left. The towels are new."

"Which bed did he sleep in?" I asked.

My grandmother pointed to the one beneath the solar system mobile.

"I'll take that one," I said. Laura Lee didn't answer. She lay down on the spare bed and stared up at the ceiling.

"She didn't get much sleep last night," I told my grandmother.

"I can speak for myself, Frederica," said Laura Lee.

I put my overnight bag in the closet, which was now my grandmother's arts and crafts headquarters, stuffed with bags of yarn and bolt ends of fabric.

"Towels in the linen closet. You don't have to use the brown ones. And cocktail hour at five, or whenever anybody comes downstairs."

Laura Lee lifted her head from the flat pillow. "Not a party, I hope?"

"
We're
a party," said my grandmother happily.

I unpacked quickly and quietly. The one skirt I'd brought was brown corduroy, not intentional, but depressing just the same. The sight of it caused Laura Lee to lift her head from the pillow. "Hand-me-down from your father?" she asked before subjecting me to one of her increasingly cruel laughs.

While no one was explicitly forbidding me a refill of eggnog, the subject was under discussion. My grandmother had set out the seasonal punch bowl with its ten etched cups and a plate of cookies meant, via their blue sprinkles, to be ecumenical.

"You decide," said my father. "Think about what you could miss later if you get sick."

"What would I miss?"

"My yule log," said my grandmother. "And carolers from Bible Baptist."

"I don't understand what you object to," said Laura Lee.

"I've seen people get sick on eggnog," said my mother. "Even experienced drinkers."

"This is spiked?" asked Laura Lee, taking an insincere sniff from her fourth cup. She'd been drunk since guzzling her third.

"Can't you taste it?" asked my grandmother.

"Here, Freddie," said Laura Lee. "You can finish mine."

"I'd prefer that she didn't," said my mother.

"It's probably good for her," said Laura Lee. "Protein and vitamin D."

"I should have put some aside for Frederica before I added the bourbon," said my grandmother.

"Surely not necessary in that family," said Laura Lee. "They wouldn't want their teenager to know she was under twenty-one."

My grandmother looked toward my parents, who were tucked under the same poinsettia afghan on a loveseat. "Is something going on that I don't know about?"

I stopped what I was doing—my annual painstaking job of draping tinsel strand by strand on the Christmas tree—and checked with my parents. My father fixed me with his sternest stare, a clear request for nonparticipation.

"Something very upsetting happened on campus," my mother answered. "Something that has us all a little shaken."

Laura Lee grunted in what might have been agreement, except that she raised her glass, not in a toast, but to examine the reindeer etched in the glass. "I have Prancer," she said. "Who has Rudolph?"

"We lost Rudolph," said my grandmother. "In fact, I don't think he survived David's childhood. Santa's disappeared, too"

"It's a shame eggnog's only served once a year," said Laura Lee.

"She makes it at Thanksgiving, too," I said.

"This is homemade?" Laura Lee asked.

"Of course," said my grandmother. "From fresh eggs, newly laid. And the nutmeg is freshly ground."

"Do you own chickens?" asked Laura Lee.

"I've thought about it," said my grandmother. "But for one person, I'd have too many eggs. And I certainly don't want to get into the retail egg business."

"You'd need a rooster, too," I said.

"Even sillier when you consider that Panek's Poultry Farm is a ten-minute ride from here," said my grandmother.

"I prefer the city," said Laura Lee, and burst into tears.

My grandmother said, "Frederica, get Laura Lee a handkerchief from my top drawer. Upstairs. Go."

They held back until I was out of eavesdropping range. I ran the rest of the way, grabbed the top handkerchief, and galloped back downstairs. My father was delivering the hospital update we'd obtained at the phone booth. "Critical but stable," he was saying. "That's all they tell you at the switchboard."

"I don't understand," said my grandmother, turning back to Laura Lee. "Were you very close to this president's wife?"

Laura Lee ignored the handkerchief from my outstretched hand, letting the tears run down her cheeks for more dramatic effect. I tossed it onto her lap and took a seat on the piano bench. "What did I miss?" I asked.

Aviva answered, "Your grandmother knows that the reason the president's wife is in the hospital is because of carbon monoxide poisoning, self-induced."

"Didn't you just attend his inauguration?" asked my grandmother.

"Induction," said my father. "September."

"So you haven't known her very long," my grandmother said to Laura Lee.

"I met her once."

"What are you crying about, then?"

"It's a big mess," I supplied when no one else answered.