My Latest Grievance (28 page)

I said, "I don't think she's loony."

"Where
is
Grace?" my father asked.

"In the study.
Sesame Streets
on," I said.

My father said, "Laura Lee? You're not a stupid woman. Was this storm really sent for your personal inconvenience?"

"That's not fair! Wasn't I just heading out the door to help Aviva? And of course I'm aware that this storm is wreaking havoc. They keep showing that same footage over and over again: the people up to their armpits in the slushy ocean water. I've seen it a dozen times."

My father stood up and said, "I have calls to make and calls to return." He stopped halfway down the hall and turned around. "I want you to know that I'm calling Eric for reasons that are purely administrative."

"What are you going to say?" Laura Lee asked eagerly.

"I'm going to say, 'There's no relief in sight. The deans and the provost are stuck in their respective homes, which may as well be in California for all the commuting they can do. You have to name someone as acting president or acting something.'"

"It had better be you," I said.

"Or me," said Laura Lee brightly.

"You can't be serious," I said.

"I certainly am. He named me acting hostess to the president. It's a women's college. And it's high time there was a woman in charge."

"And you'd be that woman?" my father asked, striding back toward us. "With no administrative experience, no seniority, no civil defense training? It boggles the mind how highly you think of your abilities! It's inconceivable to me. It's ... it's ... do you have any grasp of reality to say that the president, who has relieved you of your duties as housemother, who has asked that you not be here when he returns—"

"Dad—" I said. "Okay."

"Let him rant," said Laura Lee. "Your father wants to be in charge, a promotion at last! The hero of the Blizzard of 'Seventy-eight. If he feels better calling me names, fine."

He was so good at not rising to the bait that I expected him to respond coolly. What I heard instead was "You can't even look after yourself, charging like a madwoman into a life-threatening storm! We need you to calm down and to stop getting Grace agitated with your histrionics. Frederica has ten times the sense you do, and she's not even half your age!"

"I'm pregnant," said Laura Lee, sniffling. "It's natural that I would be frantic, with these hormones coursing around my body and the father of my baby a virtual prisoner in another state."

My father said, "Trust me: Pregnancy does not make every woman frantic."

"Like Aviva, you mean? That paragon? Let me remind you that she had a wedding ring on her finger and a devoted husband, who probably invented maternity leave."

Go,
I mouthed to my father.

As soon as he'd turned away from us, Laura Lee gave him the finger, energetically and with both hands. "No offense, Frederica," she said at the same time.

When I didn't respond, she coaxed, "Oh, c'mon. Don't you be mad at me, too."

I said, "Maybe you should go take a nap. Or a nice long soak in a tub."

She leaned back, elbows on the step behind her. "Do we know anything about this woman in Providence who's playing hostess to Eric?"

"Why?"

"Is she young? Old?"

I said, "Are you thinking that he's on a
date
?"

She leaned forward and took my chin in her hand. "One always has to think that. And you know why, don't you? My past. What happened to me in my first marriage. You can't be too vigilant. He strayed from his wife. He'll stray again. You never know what Trojan horse an unlikely girlfriend will come riding in on."

We were snowbound and trapped. No plows in sight and the governor begging us to stay indoors. I could bat her hand away and say, "You need help, Laura Lee," or I could politely excuse myself. "I think I hear the closing theme song," I told her. "I'd better go check on Grace."

"You're a wonderful girl, Frederica," said Laura Lee, giving my chin one more squeeze. "I hope I've told you that before. You'll make a great mother someday."

What a lying hypocrite I had turned into: "So will you, Laura Lee," I said.

***

After her nap, and after a long soak using Grace's English soap and Swedish bath oil from better days, Laura Lee appropriated the private line for her own mischief. Assignment desks at Boston newspapers were overwhelmed. Editors covering an unnavigable city with skeleton crews did not have time to take notes on the romantic transgressions of a minor college's president. She was shocked. No takers! What kind of newspaper ignored a tip like this?

When David and I said, more or less, "A newspaper covering news," she appealed to Aviva, victim to sociologist. My resourceful mother said, "I think there's only one thing you can do at this moment in time, Laura Lee, given the state of the city: Write it yourself. You should close yourself in a room and write your heart out."

"A novel?" Laura Lee breathed.

"I'd view it as a record," said my mother. "And if that turned into a
roman à clef,
so be it."

"I'm not a great writer," said Laura Lee.

"Just record the facts," said my mother. "This is what our complainants do before we consider going forward with a grievance. It's very helpful."

"Just the facts?" Laura Lee asked. "Like a list?"

"Whatever feels right," said my mother. "Whatever tells the story."

"Can lists be turned into a novel? Like if I hired a ghostwriter?"

"One step at a time," said my mother. "But I don't have a desk. David's using Eric's day and night."

"Where does Bunny work when she's there?" my mother asked. "She must have a desk and a typewriter."

"I can't type," said Laura Lee.

"Then just pick up a pen and tell your story. It'll keep your mind off the blizzard."

Aviva told me later that she was surprised at Laura Lee's next question, yet pleased that it manifested an unselfish impulse. "How are my girls over there? Bored out of their wits?"

"We're coping," said Aviva.

"Anyone over there take dictation? Or touch-type? Either would help. And of course I'd pay."

"I'd get right on that," said my mother, "if I weren't a little preoccupied with the storm of the century."

"Oh, right," said Laura Lee. "I keep forgetting."

Life stood still in the dorms. All homework, all reading, all papers due, were put aside with the confidence that classes, when they resumed, would be a multidisciplinary meteorological review and teach-in. Aviva reported that the girls of Griggs and Tibbets were uncharacteristically collegial. Unable to leave or date or catch a movie, they ate canned soups and popped corn, got into their pajamas early, and had the good clean fun—charades, hootenannies, talent shows, s'mores—of an earlier time. If anyone whined, someone else reminded her: Thousands of homes destroyed. Thousands of cars stranded on the highway. People dead.

After two dark days of relentless wind and snow, the sun came out. Cars, mailboxes, hydrants, parking meters, Dumpsters—everything—had disappeared under drifts. Driving was banned in the city, and would be for four more days.

Aviva, the only housemother on the faculty, got permission from the academic dean to convene Criminology and Penology in Griggs Hall, attendance voluntary, for the bored and fidgety. Fifty students showed up for a seminar that usually taught fifteen. Departing from the syllabus, my mother talked about the Boston Strangler and Harvey Hawley Crippen, the mild-mannered London dentist who filleted his wife's body after murdering her. By Friday, my mother counted eighty carpetbaggers, including me.

My father spoke to President Woodbury several times a day, and over the course of the week I could hear a change in his voice. He was dispensing advice, vetoing suggestions offered by a president who couldn't comprehend from a side street in Providence what a shut-down city and a thousand snowbound adolescents might involve.

"How's Grace?" Dr. Woodbury asked, for the record, at the end of each call.

"I have a rotation," said my father. "I've hired—well,
you've
hired at a fair wage—a few responsible students to keep her company. Frederica's chipping in. We think Grace is getting ... a little more aware." He frowned as he listened to the response. "No, not
about that. Laura Lee is just another stranger at the dining room table."

He listened, color creeping up his neck. "Not only out of bed, but—without the tranquilizers and sleeping pills—she's joined the living," he told Dr. Woodbury.

I could hear anger crackling through the receiver. My father answered tersely, "The prescriptions ran out, and there isn't a pharmacy open in this city. If you'll excuse me, I have a parent holding on the other line."

He didn't. I asked when he'd finished, "Did she really run out of pills?"

"In a manner of speaking," said my father. He twisted his mouth one way, then the other. "I accidentally flushed them down the toilet."

It was just the two of us in the breakfast nook, eating the last of the eggs, boiled, with Uneeda Biscuits. Governor Dukakis was giving his first briefing of the morning, wearing a crewneck sweater, reporting from the state's emergency bunker. Grace and Laura Lee were still asleep. I said, "Was he furious?"

My father confided that Woodbury's phone call the night before led him to believe that our president had snapped. He was near blubbering, cataloguing his woes as if he were the sole sufferer of these indignities: He'd had to wear borrowed underwear that had belonged to the recently deceased husband of his hostess. She ate only TV dinners, and those had run out after lunch on day three. They'd been eating hot cereal, prepared with water instead of milk the way he liked it, some old cheese, tuna packed in oil, and root vegetables, boiled beyond recognition. The woman was no intellectual companion. She had graduated back in the days when Dewing was a secretarial school. In fact, she was dotty. She had visited his room in the middle of the night, had sat on the boudoir chair, facing the drapes, staring. She seemed to have no memory of it by morning, but nonetheless it was disconcerting, even a little frightening. Should he call a doctor? He was so desperate to leave that he considered walking back to Brookline, but he didn't have proper boots, and the dead husband's were too small. Did a college president in exile qualify for a lift from the National Guard? Could David look into that?

"The Guard is rescuing women in labor," my father had told him. "Unless you have appendicitis, you're going to have to sit tight."

"I'm moving south," Eric had whined. "I can't take your winters!"

"Did you tell him it was the storm of the century? That it won't happen again if he lives to be a hundred?" I asked.

My father winked above the rim of his coffee mug. "No, I did not," he said.

From my borrowed upstairs windows, the out-of-doors looked irresistible, a Technicolor nondenominational Christmas card, every surface, every branch, frosted and glistening. Downstairs Laura Lee pecked away at Bunny's Correcting Selectric. Sometimes Grace wandered by the breakfast nook and took a seat so she could stare at the typewriter's twirling metal ball of letters, as if she knew what Laura Lee was writing.

"We're fine," Laura Lee would say when I stuck my head in to check on Grace. "Why don't you go visit your mother, or get some fresh air?"

"Because I don't trust you with her," I'd say cheerfully. "Such devotion," Laura Lee murmured, not looking up from the keyboard. "You must be getting paid."

"Time and a half. My father worked it out with you-know- who."

"Eric Woodbury," Laura Lee pronounced deliberately, loudly. "The father of my child."

"C'mon, Gracie," I said, hustling her toward the mudroom. "Let's leave Laura Lee to write 'The Autobiography of a Very Cruel Woman.'"

"Eric?" Grace whimpered.

"He's no good, either," I said.

I dressed Grace and myself in extra layers and rubber boots and led her out the front door, down indistinguishable steps, through powder up to our thighs. No paths were plowed or shoveled, but cooped-up girls had stomped from dorm to dining hall, and we made our way in their boot prints.

"Snowman," Grace would say, pointing happily, when we passed one of the crude ice sculptures that were springing up all over. I
had promised her hot chocolate at Curran Hall, my first sampling of the modest hot-beverage-and-cookie program my father had instituted when the dorms emptied onto the quad. As we left the cafeteria, I helped myself to two trays, then led Grace back outside to one of my childhood hills.

It took a lot of smoothing and flattening to fashion a run that wouldn't swallow us. I went first, kneeling on my tray, paddling in the snow for enough traction to get me launched.

"Whee," I yelled back to Grace instructively. "Wheeeee."

She put her tray down at the top of my path, kicked it, riderless, down to meet me, and clapped when I dove to stop it.

"Not the idea," I said. "What I'm looking for here is a little 'Put me in, coach!'"

"Freddy up," she answered.

I worked my way back up the hill. "Your turn," I said. "See: Like a sled. Like a half-assed mini-toboggan." I sat her down, curled her fingers around the tray's rim, and said, "On the count of three..."

Her first ride wasn't fast or clean or a straight trajectory, but she was out of jail and shrieking with joy when she reached the bottom.

"You did it!" I yelled.

"My turn!" she answered.

"Now get off your tush and hike back up here," I said.

She rolled off her tray and ate the clumps of snow stuck to her mittens before scrambling to her feet.

"How great was that?" I asked.

"Love Freddy," she called back to me.

Her nurse came back to work on Monday and promptly quit when she found a whole new order: a strange man in charge, hinting at her complicity in overmedicating the patient, and that same former ghost of a patient out of bed, dressed, and cheerfully Windexing kitchen appliances. I left the house at six
A.M.
for my first day back at school, on foot. Residential life would soon return to normal, my father said. Today the two RAs who had been sleeping in our Griggs apartment to heighten the appearance of their authority would go back to their rooms. "What about Laura Lee?" I asked.