My Latest Grievance (7 page)

"It was beautifully written," said my mother.

"You helped him with it?"

"I wanted the woman's point of view," said my father.

"You don't break up with someone in a letter or over the phone. Everyone knows that."

"Then how did the expression 'Dear John letter' enter the lexicon if it weren't a common practice?" asked my father.

"You were married! Didn't you owe her a face-to-face explanation?"

"I gave her the letter in person and I stayed while she read it."

"But—"

"Your father was afraid that she might storm out as soon as she understood the nature of the discussion, whereas if it were in a letter, she'd read the whole thing. And could reread it as many times as she needed to."

"Did she go berserk?"

"Why are you asking?" my father said.

"I just want the whole story. She could have stormed out of the house to find Mom and kill her. I never would've been born. Maybe you'd have stayed together and she'd be my mother."

They both looked alarmed. My father said, "You take biology! If Laura Lee and I had had a child together, it couldn't have been you. You have half of Aviva's DNA. Were you serious? Or was it a form of poetic license to say that if we'd stayed together Laura Lee would be your mother?"

Et cetera. That's what I was up against, the psych.-soc. team of David Hatch and Aviva Ginsberg Hatch, Ph.D.s. Watergate had provided me with the gerund "stonewalling," which I employed whenever my questions provoked a string of theirs. They didn't mind: It showed I was paying attention to current events.

I
T WAS I WHO SLID
my tray onto her table the Monday following freshman orientation.

"I'm Frederica," I said. "Mind if I join you?"—the formulaic question I'd been taught to murmur, earnestly or not, when approaching an established table.

Laura Lee stood up. She was wearing a black dress that rustled and seemed from another century, with an ivory cardigan that was beaded and sequined. I expected the limp hand that adults usually offer children, but instead I got a hug of the overly long variety. I couldn't help but notice a faint body odor behind her cologne, which I would come to recognize as her signature smell: not so much a failure of personal hygiene as a reluctance to visit the dry cleaner. She said, sounding almost tearful, "Of
course
you would be Frederica."

We were still standing. I repeated, "Mind if I join you?"

"I'd adore it," she said.

As I arranged myself, my silverware, the four skimpy paper napkins it took to cover my lap, Laura Lee asked, "Is it very hard—this existence?"

I looked up.

"Being not only a faculty child, but a dormitory child? Is it both public and lonely at the same time?"

I said, "I don't know. I've never lived anywhere else."

"But when you go to school, and you hear about your friends' living in a normal family, in a house or an apartment, do you wonder if something is missing?"

"Like what?" I asked.

"Privacy? Space? The undivided attention of your parents?"

I split open my baked potato, pushing butter into its crevices with a teaspoon. I could sense that Laura Lee was studying my potato ritual, searching for clues to my upbringing. Her plate, I noticed, matched mine: the roast pork, the beige gravy, the baked potato, the crinkle-cut carrots. After my first bite she asked where my parents were this evening.

I said, "They eat later. They have what they call their cocktail hour, then usually run over at the last minute."

"So you usually eat by yourself?"

I gestured around the room. "I never eat by myself"

"Do you ever wait for them?"

I said no; I preferred to come early so there were still choices left.

"Choices?"

I pointed back in the direction of the line. "If you show up too late, you get the baked scrod or the tuna surprise."

"And you don't like fish?" she asked.

I was beginning to see that any meaningless answer I supplied—fish too often—would lead to another question that probed underneath what she considered the surface of something telltale. I said, "I don't like the fish
here.
It's always the same."

"And you like variety? A little more excitement than a steam table provides?"

I said, "Are you a psychologist?"

She said, "No," then smiled as if I had offered a compliment.

I asked again, "So, how are you finding the new job?"

"I'm passionate about it," she said.

I had expected something closer to ambivalence, based on every freshman's hesitant answer one week into the first semester. Laura Lee reached down to the floor and took a quart jar from a book
bag. Its label said
WHITE GRAPE JUICE,
and its contents were the color of champagne. She poured an inch into an empty water glass and took one sip.

"You can get juice here in the machines," I said.

"Not this kind," she said, smiling.

"Is it wine?"

"Chablis. Are you scandalized?"

I said, "Not at all." I returned to my food, buttering my roll, then drinking from one of my two glasses of milk.

"Something's wrong," she said.

"Like what?"

"Something changed when I brought out the wine."

"There's a rule about bringing alcohol into the dining hall."

She actually asked: "Pro or con?"

"Have you ever heard of a school that served wine at meals?"

"Not 'served.' This is B.Y.O.B."

If I were charting the course of my acquaintance with Laura Lee, here was where the graph took its first dip. I said, "Not that I agree with the rule, but you might consider having your glass of wine before you come here."

"And that's okay? Drinking in the dorm? When anyone could be having a crisis any minute? These kids can smell alcohol a mile away, or so I'm told."

Would I ever have a clean, simple, pleasant conversation with an adult? Question, answer, question, answer, your day, my day, the weather, the Sox, good-bye.

"Does everyone call you Frederica?" she asked.

I said yes, here they did.

"But elsewhere?"

"Some people call me Freddie..."

Laura Lee broke a piece from her roll, abandoned it, dusted off her fingertips. "Why do you say that as if it's a confession? Do your parents object to the nickname? Do you want to be called Frederica or Freddie?"

I said, "Both. Either"

"Well, here's a test: When you leave home and go away to school, will you introduce yourself by your proper name or your nickname?"

I said, "I'll see what comes flying out of my mouth when I get there."

A student approached our table, but before she could set her tray down, Laura Lee held up her hand. "I hope you don't mind, Claire, but Frederica wants me to herself. I promise that I'll extend the same courtesy to you anytime you need my full attention.
D'accord
?"

Claire didn't retreat. Laura Lee said, "I understand, I truly do: You're thinking that the dining room is a place for communal meals, come one, come all, aren't you? I've disappointed you."

"It's cool," said Claire.

I waited for Claire to be out of earshot before saying, "The dining hall rule is that empty chairs are empty chairs. You're not supposed to discourage anyone from sitting down. That leads to tables becoming little cliques. Besides, her parents pay a lot of money for room and board."

"What about privacy? Where does one carve out a sanctuary if one lives, works, sleeps, and dines at Dewing College?" asked Laura Lee.

One doesn't, I thought. One doesn't live in a dormitory or eat in a cafeteria if one is seeking privacy. And this was the teeming Curran Dining Hall, always a few tables short of ideal social groupings.

She leaned over and said, "Twice so far in our rather short conversation you've called me on the rules. Do you feel that living in an ivory tower is suffocating?"

I asked, "Do I look like I'm suffocating? I'm here, all by myself. I can sit anywhere, with anyone, have five desserts, talk about whatever I feel like talking about."

She poured another inch of wine and took a sip before asking a little too serenely, "And what did you hope to discuss when you put your tray down at my table?"

I said, "I didn't have a plan. Honest. I saw it was you, so I stopped."

She studied me as I drank half a glass of milk, then asked, "Who do you look like? I don't see your mother at all."

"No one."

"Remind me how old you are," she said.

"Sixteen."

"What sixteen-year-old," she asked, "wouldn't have gotten right to the point?"

I asked what point that was.

She leaned closer to confide, "Don't you think the reason you put your tray down on my table was so that you could interview, investigate, scrutinize, drink in, the woman who used to be married to your father?"

"You were eating alone," I said weakly. "You're new. I'm famous for being sociable."

"Which I suspect is the result of being raised communally: all for one and one for all, like on a kibbutz."

I skidded my chair backward and asked if she wanted anything. I was going up for a brownie before they disappeared. It was pretty much their best dessert. She said no thanks, then touched my forearm as I passed her chair. "When you come back? We'll talk about something comfortable, neutral. What might that be? Your friends? Your love life?"

I took my time, put both ice cream and whipped cream on my brownie, detoured to the salad bar for pineapple chunks and coconut flakes.

Laura Lee smiled warmly when I returned. "How about this as a safe conversation? Our fellow resident heads. What can you tell me about my predecessor? Priscilla ... I can't recall her surname, even though it's sewn into every tea towel."

"Knight," I supplied.

"Were you and Mrs. Knight friends? I mean, to this degree—like you and me. Did you eat meals with her when you needed some adult companionship?"

I said, "I get plenty of adult companionship."

"Of course," she said. "Sorry."

"What adolescent would eat three meals a day with her parents if she didn't have to?"

She tapped my hand. "Shall we get back to Mrs. Knight? I'm curious about the woman whose shoes I'm filling."

I said, "I used to feed her fish when she went away weekends."

"To where?"

I said I didn't know.

"She must have left a number where you could reach her in case of emergency."

I said, "I wasn't left in charge of the dorm. I was only left in charge of the fish."

"Don't you find fish as pets to be a very telling facet of a fish owner's personality?" she asked.

"Not really," I said.

She cut a tiny piece of her neglected meat, chewed it daintily, and washed it down with a sip of wine before continuing. "No feedback. No warmth. Swimming around in cold water. Do they ever give anything back? Do they even know you're there? What does a person living alone get from a relationship with fish?"

I said, "I think she loved animals, and fish were the only things allowed in the dorms."

"If I were an animal lover, you know what I'd do? I'd sneak my dog or cat in and out of the dorm in a big straw pocketbook. I'd buy the smallest breed of dog and keep her a secret. And, if possible, teach her to use a litter box. I would
not
settle for fish."

"She gave them names, and she didn't feed them fish food. They ate chicken and lettuce and whole-wheat bread because she thought fish food was poisonous."

"Poisonous," she repeated. "She actually
believed
that manufacturers of fish food would want to kill off their clientele?"

"We didn't discuss it. She mentioned it once to explain why she fed the fish people-food."

"Did the girls like her? Because I get the impression that I am something of a breath of fresh air."

"Girls
tell
you that?"

"No. What they tell me are things like 'Mrs. Knight used to go to bed at nine o'clock. Mrs. Knight'—they call me Laura Lee by the way—'used to cut out pictures of fashion models and hang them on her door.'"

I said, "Only one model, her nephew."

"Her nephew? Are you sure? How could you prove that a magazine cutout was an actual relative? Did you ever meet him?"

I said, "No. He went to Brown. Brown students don't come to Dewing, even if their aunt lives here."

Her face registered something that I, the daughter of social scientists, knew well: an onlooker prospecting for greater meaning in what I'd said than I'd ever intended.
Frederica is implying that Dewing is inferior. She must be ashamed of her home, her kibbutz.
I could see that a follow-up question was perched on her lips. But she looked up, past me. Someone was approaching our table directly behind me. "Dr. Hatch," my tablemate said in greeting.

"Mind if I join you?" my mother's voice asked.

"Please," said Laura Lee. "Your daughter and I have been having a most interesting conversation."

My mother put her tray down next to mine. Her plate held only the evening's carrots, baked potato, and raw cauliflower florets from the salad bar. She looked her dowdiest, her gray hair bushing out from two mismatched barrettes of mine, her reading glasses dangling over a faded brown cotton turtleneck, torn along one shoulder seam.

"Are you a vegetarian?" asked Laura Lee.

My mother looked at our plates and said, "I don't eat pork. They ran out of Salisbury steak."

"Oh, that's right," said Laura Lee. "I forgot."

My mother said, "I was raised that way, and old habits are hard to break."

"She's never, in her entire life, eaten a cheeseburger," I volunteered.

"The laws of kashrut," Laura Lee said. "I know them well. I was seriously involved with an Orthodox Jew, or thought I was. But of course it couldn't last." She paused before asking, "Yet you don't mind that your daughter drinks milk with her meat?"

My mother reached over and moved my glass of milk onto her tray. "Usually we beat her if she drinks milk with her meat, but not in public. Certainly not in the dining hall."

I laughed.

Laura Lee did not. "I doubt very much," she said, "that you and David, of all people, ever beat your child."