My Latest Grievance (2 page)

My unbejeweled mother insisted I return the necklace to its sender. When I did, with a regretful note, hinting that the rebuff was not altogether my idea, the present bounced back. This time Laura Lee wrote that she had read between the lines and determined that I
did
want these pearls, which would undoubtedly come into fashion again. If she was wrong, and I truly did
not
want to accept the gift, I should save them for the daughter I might have someday. She wrote a separate note to my father, which I begged to see in the name of full disclosure and family frankness. Laura Lee wrote that she had never had children and never would, had finally forgiven him, and, though it was an illogical and, according to my mother, pathologically altruistic position—she considered me the daughter she never had.

My parents were reasonable people, proud of their up-to-the-minute and public practice of child-rearing. At a remote table in the dining hall, in a rare assembly of all three busy Hatches, and, still rarer, displaying a ballpointed sign on lined paper that said, "Privacy, please," we discussed Laura Lee's note. Did I think it was right to accept an expensive present from a total stranger?

"She's not a stranger to you," I said. "And certainly not to Dad."

"Are you angry that you haven't known about her all along?" my father asked.

I said, "I've known for longer than you think."

"How long?" asked my mother.

I picked up my last cookie and nibbled it in a circular and dilatory fashion before answering. "Last time I was at Grandma's I saw a photo of Dad wearing a tuxedo and looking about twenty-five, dancing with a woman wearing a wedding dress."

"And inferred what from that?" asked my father.

"Well, first I inferred that Mom looked much better with blond hair, makeup, and contact lenses. And then I inferred that it wasn't Mom at all."

"Did you discuss this photograph with your grandmother?" my mother asked.

"She saw me staring at it, and said, 'That's your father with Laura Lee.' So I had to ask who Laura Lee was, and Grandma said, 'A friend.' I said, 'It's a wedding picture, isn't it?' and she said, 'Sort of. Half a wedding picture. All the guests got their photo taken with the bride.'"

"But you knew otherwise?" asked my father.

"You didn't look like friends," I said.

My mother asked how I felt about my grandmother's fabrication.

"I hate that she lied," my father murmured.

"She could have come to us," said my mother. "She could have said, 'I'm not comfortable keeping this fact from your daughter. I'd like you to tell her before her next visit.'"

"She's always been the queen of unilateral actions," said my father.

I shrugged. "Maybe she just liked the photograph. As art. Even if she had to hide it in a bottom drawer when comapny came"

"Why do you say that?" asked my mother. "Why did you call it 'art'?"

I said, not as kindly as I could have, "Because Laura Lee was so pretty."

"All brides are," said my father.

"Getting back to the present...," said my mother.

"The necklace, she means," said my father.

"Maybe Laura Lee has a terminal illness," I said. "Maybe she wants to give away all of her possessions before she dies so other people don't have to clean out her house."

My father asked if I knew something they didn't know, perhaps gleaned from my grandmother.

"Are they still in touch?" I asked.

"We wouldn't be surprised," said my mother.

I said I didn't know anything. Could I be excused for a minute to get another snickerdoodle? Why didn't they call Grandma and ask her what's new with Laura Lee?

My parents exchanged glances that meant, Should I handle this one, or should you? My mother said, "Your grandmother doesn't believe in divorce." She stood up, took her cup with her, and walked to the industrial coffee machine.

"Ever?" I asked my father. "Even if the husband murders the kids? Or has an operation to make him a woman?"

David didn't answer. He watched Aviva en route and smiled when she returned with a refill for her and a cookie for me. She sat down and asked, "Where were we?"

"Grandma doesn't believe in divorce," I said.

"Additionally, she always thought that Laura Lee was a more suitable wife for her son than I."

"Because...?"

My father volunteered that Laura Lee had certain interests in common with my grandmother, certain values that a woman of Grandma's generation appreciated above intellectual and professional accomplishments.

"Such as?" I asked.

"Clothes, houses, ...things," said my mother.

I said I was sixteen now, not much younger than Joan of Arc had been when she led the French into battle, and I ought to be able to keep the pearls. I added, "You ended up with Dad. Maybe Laura Lee has nobody. It's not like she sent me a ticket to a play, and when I get there I'd find out that she's in the next seat, and it was all a plot to kidnap me."

We then had to parse the emotional nuances of my mother's original reaction. We all agreed that something like jealousy might have motivated my mother. Yes, I did see that jealousy was wrong and petty and beneath her. A string of pearls was only a possession. The most valuable things in life are the intangibles, aren't they? The necklace decision would, accordingly, be mine.

I said that Laura Lee had been wearing pearls in her wedding portrait, so it was totally logical that she'd want to give them away, seeing as how they probably had a bad association.

"She probably has quite a collection of baubles by now," my mother murmured.

"Aviva," my father scolded.

"From men?" I asked. "Is that what you meant? That she's popular?"

Neither answered. Instead, my mother asked my father if the pearls in my possession were the ones Laura Lee had worn at their wedding.

"Dad doesn't notice stuff like that," I said. "Dad wouldn't notice if I went to school with a potted plant on my head."

"I don't remember any pearls," he said.

Before we adjourned, we decided that each of us would write a note to Laura Lee, stating our respective positions. My father would ask if she needed assistance of any kind. My mother would apologize for the rash return of the family heirloom and enclose a family snapshot of the three of us taken by an obliging waiter on my actual birthday, at the Chinese restaurant closest to campus. Mine would be another thank-you note, polite but brief so as not to build any bridges.

"What's so bad about Laura Lee that I can't even write her a friendly letter?"

"Nothing," said my father.

"I would think you'd feel sorry for someone who has to pass her jewelry down to a total stranger."

"Of course we do," said my father.

"Who divorced who?"

"Whom," my mother corrected.

"Technically, she divorced me," my father said.

"Why?"

"Sometimes people marry for the wrong reasons," said my mother. "But if they're very lucky, they correct the mistake early, before they have children."

"There must have been
something
weird," I said.

My father looked at my mother, a glance I knew well:
Is this the appropriate juncture to speak the truth in that frank and candid way in which we have mutually pledged to raise her?

She nodded.

"Laura Lee is, in fact, a distant cousin," my father said quietly.

I found this announcement first startling, then thrilling, with its whiff of incest and elopement. "Is that legal?" I asked.

My mother said, "They were several times removed."

"Distant," my father repeated. "Our grandmothers were cousins."

"Grandmothers?" asked my mother. "Or was it two great-aunts on different sides of the family? It's so vague."

I said, "That makes no sense."

"That generation wasn't close," said my father. "There was a family grudge that had to do with property or placement of a fence. This was well before people started tracing their roots and commissioning family trees."

"Did you have Thanksgiving dinners together growing up?" I asked.

My father said no. He and Laura Lee didn't meet until after college. In graduate school.

"
Daddy
was in grad school. She was taking dance lessons."

"What kind?"

"Expensive ones," said my father. "Five days a week."

"Ballet?" I asked. "Or tap?"

"You're not a baby," my mother said. "We've explained everything to you as honestly as we know how. It's not any more complicated than this: Your father was married before, briefly. It's worth mentioning that he's been married to me seven times longer than he was married to Laura Lee. Your grandmother was very fond of her, which means absolutely nothing because we all know that your grandmother and I don't always see eye to eye. And, again, there is the mildly embarrassing fact that her son divorced her cousin Bibi's daughter."

"I was just thinking," said my father. "Does this string of pearls have a small blue stone on the whaddyacallit?"

My mother said, "I didn't notice," as I answered, "A sapphire."

"Now that I think about it, I may have given them to Laura Lee as a wedding present."

"Whereas I have very little use for that kind of thing," said my mother.

"I wish you did," I said. "You must be the only woman in the world who doesn't even own a jewelry box."

As soon as I said that, I braced for a condensed lecture from her seminar Private Troubles and Public Issues. Instead she held out her left wrist with a demonstrative jiggle. "Your father gave me this watch as a wedding gift," she said. "I never take it off except when I bathe."

"It's engraved with our initials and our wedding date on the back," said my father.

"Are you sure you never had a kid with her?" I asked him.

"Do you really think that your father would have had a child that he didn't see or support?" my mother scolded. "And are we the kind of people who would hide a half sibling from you?"

"Maybe she had a baby after the divorce and never told you."

"Now you're being ridiculous and melodramatic," said my father. "Which is exactly why we object to your watching television."

"You saw her note to David," said my mother. "Her point being that she never had children and never would—"

"And I was the daughter she never had?"

"Do you find that romantic?" my mother asked. "Because I think you're idealizing a total stranger—"

"Did you know her?" I asked.

After a pause, my mother said, "Not well. Not at all, really. I guess you could say I knew her as a face on campus."

I said, "I thought NYU didn't have a campus."

My mother turned to my father. "She's resentful because we waited this long to tell her."

"You never told me. I found out on my own."

My father said, "We were waiting for the appropriate juncture, when you could process this without being confused or upset."

"Like you're the only guy in the world who ever married twice? Like I don't know a million people whose parents got divorced, then married other people? Teena Samuels's parents got divorced and then her mother married the guy from next door, and her father married that guy's ex-wife. Teena was the junior bridesmaid at both of the second weddings."

"We miscalculated," said my father. "We should have said something earlier. You have a perfect right to be angry."

"I'm not
angry,
" I said. "I'm curious. What if this necklace arrived, and I didn't ask any questions? You'd worry that I was keeping it all inside, and you'd also be worried that I was lacking in intellectual curiosity."

That was me speaking directly to their child-rearing insecurities. I knew they were worried that they had gone amiss somewhere—that I was preoccupied with clothes, houses, frills, and things more than the textbook norm, and definitely more than a National Honor Society hopeful should be.

They asked why I hadn't come to them immediately after my
grandmother effectively spilled the beans. Had my feelings been simmering and festering for eight whole weeks?

"You're the experts," I said. "What do you think?"

"We think," said my mother, "that you know we always do what's best for you. If you didn't demand an explanation eight weeks ago, it was because you trusted us. You thought, Daddy made a mistake a long time ago. Everyone makes mistakes. Some are simply not worth revisiting."

And although I did need an explanation of the astonishing fact that not one but two women had agreed to marry the unappetizing specimen that was my father, I had a French test to study for and a sitcom to watch. I said yes, sure, I must have trusted them.

M
Y FATHER, WHO COMMUTED
by bike the three-tenths of a mile across campus to his classes, was one of those daft-looking professors who cinched his trouser legs and kept his helmet on until he reached his second-floor office. My mother walked to class, rain or shine, under a wool or plastic poncho, taught in sneakers, eschewed the elevator for the stairs.

It was all fine when I was little. Either or both would walk me to school, singing duets, arms swinging unselfconsciously. I was too young and too secure, walking between them, to notice that they were more peculiar than anyone else's parents.

In sixth grade I started to see the differences. Not everyone's mother painted nipples on her daughter's Barbie doll for the sake of anatomical correctness. And only Aviva had to borrow the rouge and lipstick prescribed for my role as the mayor's wife in
Bye Bye Birdie
because she owned no makeup herself. We had no car, which I had to explain almost daily (subway and buses as needed; every other destination walkable; for vacations, rent a car or borrow one from a relative). It wasn't as easy as having straightforward hippies for parents. Several of my schoolmates had longhaired mothers and fathers in sandals with corduroy feedbags over their shoulders
in lieu of briefcases. Mine were a special case: intellectuals who didn't care what people thought about hairstyles, pant lengths, eyeglass fashions, furniture, possessions—with the exception of books—or any other appurtenances that I felt were critical to the outward show of near normality.