My Latest Grievance (22 page)

The girls were mean, complained the suddenly thin-skinned Marietta. They were laughing behind her back while her mother could be dying. Housemother Hatch, who had always risen above squabbles, who had always insisted that boarders settle their differences among themselves and without adult intervention, asked for names. Marietta tattled. One by one, Aviva spoke to the offenders. Be nice to the new girl. She's younger than any of you and very vulnerable right now. Try to imagine how she feels: mother diminished, father the center of a rumor that won't go away.

After witnessing one of these scoldings in the naked light of Curran Hall, I accused Aviva of selling out. How could Mrs. Fair Play choose sides—she who was famous for treating the daughters of ditch diggers just like the daughters of Hollywood moguls? What had happened to her lifelong commitment to equal justice and no pandering?

"Are you feeling a little neglected?" she asked.

I said, "I can't talk. I have a ton of trig to do."

She motioned that I should follow her into the dining room's coatroom, to the farthest wall of pegs. "C'mere," she said, my signal to walk into the open-armed hug she bestowed. "We haven't been exactly faithful to our homework schedule or to our dining contract, have we?" she asked.

I said that I had viewed our custody arrangement as loose and informal. I did my best homework at the library, anyway, sans either parent. And meals couldn't be pinned down, could they, given our extremely independent and overscheduled lives.

"Laura Lee's apartment has a new popcorn popper," she said, "which has inspired informal open houses Monday through Thursday nights."

"Is that an invitation?" I asked.

"Of course! The girls always ask for you."

"What time?"

"Nine to ten
P.M.
I also serve soft drinks."

I asked if Marietta was a regular. My mother said, "No. She doesn't mingle. At least not voluntarily."

I asked what that meant.

"I know you won't repeat this..."—a lead-in that always got my full and prurient attention. "Marietta walks around the floor naked. Which our lesbian population finds confrontational, and the others find inconsiderate."

"So tell her to stop it. What's the big deal?"

"I
have
told her. She says, 'It's a women's college. I'm not ashamed of my body. Why is it a big deal if I sleep in the nude? Show me where it says I have to put on a bathrobe to urinate in the middle of the night.'"

I said, "Ignore it. Let the inmates handle it. Why are they bothering you?"

"I represent authority. I'm new here. They're testing me."

I said, "It's not you. They certainly don't want Laura Lee back. Maybe they just hate Marietta."

She rubbed my cheek with her knuckles and said that she appreciated my support.

David and Aviva tried to make us a nuclear family on a regimen—eating together nightly for some or all of the hour between 5:30
and 6:30. Although we didn't explicitly invite Marietta, she had a talent for arriving at Curran Hall ninety seconds after we assembled. To my further annoyance, my mother developed the habit of slipping sample portions onto Marietta's finicky tray, cooing over how she really should experience our twice-baked potatoes or our cheddar cheese soup.

After four straight nights in our midst, I asked her if she ever took meals with her mother.

"Your evil president fired our cook," said Marietta.

"Wasn't she part-time anyway?" I asked.

"Three days a week. But she cooked stuff in advance and left it for us."

"Who feeds your mother?" I asked.

"The nurse," said Marietta.

My father asked, "Marietta? Is that the entire answer?" Marietta, her lip curled, said, "My father feeds her supper"

"Doesn't that invalidate some of your criticism?" he asked.

"Like what? That he's not a total asshole twenty-four hours a day?"

"Too bad about the cook," I said, remembering happier days and our after-school raids of the presidential refrigerator.

"I'm sure he's trying to save the college money," said my mother.

"That's not what I think," said Marietta. "I think he wants the house empty so he and his mistress can have sex as soon as the nurse leaves at three."

"With your mother right there?" I asked.

"She's a zombie. How would she know if they were having sex in the guest room?"

"Is she getting occupational therapy?" my father asked.

"How would I know?"

"Do you want one of us to ask?" he offered.

"Doesn't Bunny work over there now?" my mother asked. "She would know."

"Bunny! She's in love with him, too. When my mother used to call, she'd put her on hold for ten minutes. She tried that with me once, and you know what I did? I ran over to the administration building, showed up at her desk, and said, 'Is he free yet?' She told me to take a seat. What an asshole."

I said, "Isn't Bunny, like, sixty years old?"

"Sixty-six," said my mother. "We're the ones who knocked out the compulsory retirement language from the contract."

"So it isn't just Laura Lee under your roof, but Bunny working there that makes your home uncomfortable?" my father prompted.

"Uncomfortable? Try 'beyond belief.' Try 'fucking impossible.'"

"Of course it is," said my mother. "No child should be made to feel as if she isn't the most important thing in a parent's life."

They beamed at me. Marietta said suddenly, eyes lowered to her untouched plate, "Oh, shit. I can't believe who just walked in here."

It may not have been Laura Lee's first appearance at Curran Hall since moving into the president's house, but it was the first time we'd seen her with Marietta present. She was dressed in a straight black skirt, several inches above the knee, and a ruffled pink blouse of a semitransparent nylon that I recognized from her Mamie Eisenhower collection. Her black high-heeled shoes had straps across the instep. If they weren't the legendary Radio City Capezios, they were meant to flatter the ankles that had started it all.

After surveying the room, she spotted the object of her search.

"Here she comes," I murmured.

My father stood, less good manners than sentry duty. "Can I help you?" he asked.

"I need Marietta," she said.

"Fuck you," said Marietta.

Mary-Ruths at the surrounding tables shushed their tablemates and stared.

"What is it, Laura Lee?" my mother asked.

"We need her at the house."

"
We
? You and my asshole father? Is that what 'we' means?"

To my astonishment, Laura Lee borrowed a chair from the closest table and dragged it to Marietta's side. "I don't think you mean that," she said.

With an angry bounce, Marietta turned her chair ninety degrees away from Laura Lee.

"I can't get through to her," said Laura Lee. "She thinks I'm forcing myself where I'm not wanted, especially with respect to her father."

"Liar," said Marietta.

"I am an employee of the college, following orders," Laura Lee said.

"What order is that?" Marietta spat out. "
'Come fuck me. My wife's a vegetable. She won't notice.'
"

"She is
not
a vegetable," Laura Lee said calmly. "She has some neurological deficiencies, and her brain may have reverted to a state when she was a child, but she's still ... a person."

"A person who wishes she could kill herself all over again, thanks to you."

"This is not the place to be having this conversation," said my mother.

"Then tell her to leave," said Marietta.

Laura Lee said, "I came to get you."

"Why you?" asked my father. "Didn't you know you'd upset her?"

Laura Lee said regally, "Her mother is asking for her, and her father didn't want to leave his wife's side."

"Is it an emergency?" my mother asked.

"He believes it is," said Laura Lee.

Marietta finally swiveled back to face Laura Lee. "And you can't even tell me what's wrong? You can't even be helpful for two seconds and tell me what the fuck is the matter?"

Laura Lee said, "Your mother refused to eat her dinner. Again."

"So?"

"Your father thinks it may be the beginning of a hunger strike. She clamps her lips together and bats the spoon away with her good hand."

"Maybe it's the food," said my father.

"Maybe she thinks someone's trying to poison her," said Marietta.

"Don't be ridiculous," said Laura Lee. "It's political. She's taking a stand."

"Political?" my mother repeated, blinking furiously.

"Isn't she aphasic?" asked my father.

"She can communicate," said Laura Lee. "When she wants to."

"Can she chew?" he asked.

"We don't take that chance," said Laura Lee. "Her swallow reflex isn't a hundred percent."

Marietta said, "Maybe she'll choke to death. Wouldn't that be convenient?"

Laura Lee fished a carrot stick out of my salad bowl, chewed, and swallowed a bite before saying, "Grace said something that we translated to mean that she wants to reach your sisters."

"
So?
"

"Like you, they refuse to talk to your father. He needs you to call them for her before she gets any more agitated."

"You're the assistant," said Marietta. "Why don't
you
call them?"

My mother said quietly, "Why don't you go home and see if she'll take some food from you. Didn't you tell me she loves coffee ice cream?"

"She can't eat ice cream three times a day," said Laura Lee primly.

"Fuck you," said Marietta.

"That doesn't help, Marietta," my mother said quietly.

"I can't believe he'd send her to get me!"

"Then tell him that," said my father. "You two need to talk. And if you need a referral, I know some very good people off-campus."

"Don't think Eric hasn't begged her for that," said Laura Lee.

I kicked Marietta under the table. "Your mother's upset and she's asking for you. So what if you hate everybody else? Go! Get the hell out of here."

Laura Lee had to ask smugly, "Frederica? Is the swearing new? Something you've picked up from your mother's new charge?"

Marietta rose to her feet slowly, disdainfully. She said to Laura Lee, "I'm leaving, but don't you dare follow me."

"Fine," said Laura Lee. "I was going to stay and have a bite. I need to eat."

Marietta shoved her tray into mine to convey,
You're dumping this for me.

"Knock on my door when you get back, Mare," said my mother.

Laura Lee went through the food line and returned to our table. She set her tray down in Marietta's spot and smiled as if no one had cursed her or made a scene. "How's everyone feeling?" Laura Lee asked serenely.

"Fine, okay," we mumbled one by one, eyes on the Formica.

"Isn't anyone going to ask how
I
am?"

We didn't have to. I'd eaten at Curran Hall my whole life and knew the signs, seen young housemothers arrive and seen their families expand. I understood immediately what it meant when lined up on a tray, in neon lights, were three full glasses of frothy, prenatal milk.

I
GOT MY PARENTS' ATTENTION
the old-fashioned way: by falling off the honor roll. Of course we had to dissect every psychosocial factor, and the coincidence of my taking up with a boy just as double dorm duty was watering down their parental intensity. Thus the weekly family meeting in our Griggs Hall kitchen, instituted since the bifurcation, had only one unwritten item on the agenda: the correlation between Ritchie Almeida and my C in Honors Chemistry. They spared me the relations-are-a-beautiful-thing speech, which I'd been hearing since I attended my first coed party at eleven, and went directly to their true quandary: What did I possibly see in a boy like Ritchie, who played hockey, who wasn't going to college, and didn't ever—as each of my parents had independently observed—make eye contact with adults? Was it a daughter's cry for help?

They were blind, obviously, to Ritchie's varsity appeal, the light eyes in the olive-complected face, which compensated for his underachievement as far as I was concerned. I said, "He's shy around adults. And as far as going to college, he doesn't have the money."

"My concern is that he's a senior," said my father. "And I am all too familiar with the urges of young men that age."

"Firsthand?" I asked.

"I was eighteen once, if that's what you're asking. But you know my areas of interest."

I did: "Adolescence, Puberty, and Emotion Regulation," the subject of his doctoral thesis, never published.

"You're barely sixteen," said my father.

I recognized this as the perfect opportunity to accuse them of being old-school, definitely conservative, possibly even conventional.

The charges induced a few stumped seconds of silence until my mother said, "Perhaps, earlier, when we said everything is beautiful and awe-inspiring, we were being theoretical, because sex was very far down the road and we didn't want it to loom ahead of you as scary or unpleasant. At the same time, we may have given you the false impression that intimacy could be entered into casually—"

"Whereas what we want to convey is that there's nothing to fear about sexual relations with the right person—" added David.

"At the right
time,
" added my mother.

"Which is why we've made an appointment with your mother's doctor," said my father.

I said I wasn't sick. And wasn't Dr. Frankel still my doctor until I was eighteen, or whenever it was a person stops going to the pediatrician?

"We meant my gynecologist," said my mother.

"Would you like me to leave so you two can talk, woman to woman?" asked my father.

I said, "I don't need a gynecologist."

"Are you sure?" my mother asked.

My father said, "We'd like some kind of reassurance that you've internalized what we've discussed through the years—"

"About taking precautions," my mother added.

I said, "I don't need birth control. When I do, I'll let you know."

"
Will
you?" they asked in unison.