My Latest Grievance (8 page)

"It was a joke," I said. "Possibly her first."

Laura Lee cocked her head and gazed at me in analytic fashion. "She's very bright, isn't she?" she asked my mother.

"
We
think so."

"She was telling me about her high-profile existence and its attendant responsibilities."

"Such as?" my mother asked.

"Strict attention to the rules. Never discriminating against less-than-desirable company in the dining hall."

"How do you mean?" asked my mother.

"Always offering a seat to anyone who approaches your table, no matter how deep in personal conversation you appear to be."

"You find that odd?" my mother asked.

"I value my privacy," Laura Lee said.

"As long as no one's feelings are hurt," my mother said. "Imagine arriving here, possibly your first time away from home, and you see a girl from your English class or from your dorm, maybe not a friend yet, but at least a familiar face, and an empty chair next to her, so you work up the courage—"

Laura Lee had lost interest in the subject of dining hall protocol. "Is David here tonight?" she asked.

"If he were here," my mother said quietly, "he'd be eating with his family." She hesitated before adding, "He has a meeting."

"He must have a lot of meetings," murmured Laura Lee.

"Usually they have meetings together," I offered.

"Oh," said Laura Lee. "That's right: your activities on behalf of your faculty alliance."

Her tone sounded like my grandmother's, condescending and anti-union. My mother said, "Sometimes."

I said, "Too bad housemothers can't join the union."

My mother, who ordinarily would have said, "Hear, hear," to any unit-expanding sentiments, didn't respond.

Laura Lee asked my mother how she and David got so deeply involved in the union, or was it just in her blood?

"My Jewish blood, you mean?"

"Is that a terrible thing to say?" Laura Lee asked.

"Acculturation is one thing," said my mother. "Genetics is something else entirely. I don't think you meant that Jews are driven by biology to be, for example, shop stewards or Freedom Riders."

"I'm not a sociologist," said Laura Lee.

"When you attribute someone's flair for union activity or sports or math to certain ethnicities and races by saying it's in their blood—"

"No need to lecture me, Aviva," said Laura Lee.

I said, "She can't help it. Life is pretty much Sociology 101."

"We raise her to see the big picture," my mother explained. "The sociologist, according to Charles Wright Mills, should hold three sets of values: the first is truth, the second is reason, the third is emancipation and freedom—"

Laura Lee held up one finger, reached down to her book bag, and came back with a slip of paper. "Criminology and Penology," she said. "I signed up for it. To audit. I need your signature."

My mother took the registrar's slip and studied it as if she had never seen such a thing. Laura Lee produced a pen.

"There's a prerequisite for C and P," my mother finally said.

"To
audit?
" asked Laura Lee.

My mother handed the slip back to her. "You might enjoy an introductory course, like Contemporary Society. Or Youth and Youth Cultures. That might be particularly relevant—"

"I want
this
one," said Laura Lee. "And if I can't take Criminology and Penology, I'll sign up for Abnormal Psych." She paused. "From what I know of David, he's willing to bend the rules."

I took the permission slip. "You like older students," I reminded Aviva. "You always say they bring life experience into the class."

"That's certainly true," said Laura Lee.

"Okay?" I asked my mother. She shrugged.

I took the pen, checked to see if anyone in Curran Hall was watching, then discreetly scribbled my mother's initials on the correct line. I returned the slip to Laura Lee with the advice we gave all auditors: Do the reading, don't cut class, and don't hog the office hours of our overburdened faculty.

W
HAT ELSE COULD I EXPECT
from a walking role model like David Hatch other than his enveloping his ex-wife in a selfless hug upon their first private meeting? I saw it from my first-floor window, an early-morning exchange on a deserted sidewalk. It was an awkward moment brought to life: He stopped, she stopped. My father spoke first, presumably no more than
Hello, Laura Lee.
She seemed to say something more acidic, probably
Well, we finally come face to face.
The hug came next, peacekeeping without warmth. Laura Lee said something—
I met your daughter? I dined civilly with your wife?
—her head erect, followed by separation and mutual businesslike nods. They were both heading in the same direction, but didn't walk together. I drew back from my blinds.

Of course I had to spook David after school by telling him I'd observed the hug and asking if, in the course of it, he'd apologized to Laura Lee.

"For what exactly?"

I was writing a draft of a paper on "The Lottery" in my multi-subject binder and didn't look up. "Falling in love with your next wife while still married to her."

He led me to our sofa, underneath our college-provided portrait of the founding Dewing. "Divorce," he began, "is very sticky. And very difficult because it is essentially a legal matter. Apologies become something else once they're on the record, before a judge. It gets into the area of fault. Do you understand what I'm saying?"

"It's worse if you fall in love with someone else than if you just don't want to be married anymore?"

"At the time we were going through this, yes. I was the adulterer and your mother was the corespondent, which is the correct legal term for the party who committed adultery with the defendant."

"Cool," I said.

"It was very humiliating. Extremely."

"For who?"

"For whom," he corrected, but without his usual grammatical gusto. "For everyone concerned."

"Why did you let Laura Lee come here?" I asked.

He exhaled a deep, regretful breath and said, "Pity. I knew how much it meant to her—after a very spotty job history—just to be a finalist. And, truthfully? I never thought she'd get the job once they met her. I thought I'd do the honorable thing, sit back, not interfere. Besides, with a promanagement administration like ours, a bad reference from me would act as a green light to the powers that be."

I asked him why he thought Laura Lee wouldn't get the job once they met her.

When he didn't answer, I turned around to address founding mother Dewing. It was something David and Aviva were fond of acting out when either wanted to make a moralistic point after some act of selfishness or thoughtlessness on my part. I said, "Mary-Ruth? Don't you want to hear why Dr. Hatch thought Laura Lee was not qualified to be one of your dorm mothers? By 'dorm,' I mean dormitories. Which were built after you died. With your money."

"Laura Lee French...," my father began, then stopped.

"Is she not responsible enough to be a houseparent?" I prompted. "Is she ... not smart enough? Not nice enough?"

"She can be very nice," he replied.

"So what's the worst thing you can say about her?"

Ordinarily, he'd duck such a question, citing nobler instincts, but this time he answered rather indifferently, "Self-absorption. Self-regard. Egocentricity. Vanity."

This was better, a note more vitriolic than I had expected from Mr. Fair-minded and Equal. I egged him on. "I noticed a little of that myself when I ate supper with her."

"Even that! I don't love the idea that my ex-wife is taking a proprietary interest in my daughter—"

"She wasn't. I was the one who sat down with her." I added lamely, "It was pretty crowded."

"You're a young, impressionable girl—which I'm sure you'll disagree with. But I know from my research that you're at the age when adolescents, especially girls, find ways to break away from their mothers in order to assert their independence. To separate one being from another." He illustrated this principle by entwining his fingers, then pulling them apart. "What worries me is that Laura Lee will strike you as a very attractive alternative to the parents you have."

"Do you think she's attractive?"

"I didn't mean in that sense. I meant as a magnetic figure—with her stories and her costumes."

I said, "They're not costumes. They're antiques. I like them."

"Her appearance is irrelevant. I'm just saying that at your age, you're easily taken in by flashy alternatives to the family you were born into."

"Do you
not
want me ever to eat a meal at her table? Is that what you're saying?"

"No. I just want you to be aware that Laura Lee—and I believe this wholeheartedly—came here for the sole purpose of insinuating herself into your life."

I was thrilled, despite my previously stated lack of affection for Laura Lee, because I was sixteen, vain, and experienced in making friends with all varieties of dormitory unlikables. I could change my mind about Laura Lee yet. I certainly could give her a few more audiences at Curran Hall. I said in an effort to be modest, "Why me, though? A total stranger. I could have been an awful kid. Why change your life for a total stranger who could be a real pill?"

My father smiled. "I think your grandmother may have communicated over the years that you weren't a real pill." His smile disappeared. "And mostly, Laura Lee has no one else."

"Does Mom know?"

"Know what?"

"That Laura Lee came here because of me?"

"It's more complicated than that. Aviva thinks she came to make us—Aviva and me—uncomfortable. That she wanted to be a thorn in our sides."

I said, "Did you know she registered for one of Mom's courses?"

His eyes narrowed slightly, unaccustomed as he was to less than full disclosure between union cochairs. "Which one?" he asked.

"Crime and Penisology."

He let that pass, as ever. Enlightened fathers didn't wash their children's mouths out with soap. "That's an upper-level course," he said. "You need the instructor's permission."

"She got it! I was a witness." I pantomimed a scrawling of initials, adding a little John Hancockish bravado.

"I can see you're enjoying this," my father said.

"Mom can handle it. That class always attracts the crackpots. It's the field trip to the prison, I think. Maybe she shouldn't put that in the catalogue."

My father said, as if to himself, "This is going to be harder than I thought. More intrusive. I'd hoped that between my classes and the union, I wouldn't have more complications to deal with." He sat up straighter, shook that off. "Did you hear what I just said? 'No more complications to deal with'? I can't believe I said that. That is not who I am. You know that, right? Your old dad is not a shirker."

I said, "Don't worry. She's got a whole dormitory full of kids now. I'm sure one of the lost souls will adopt her."

He seemed to perk up a bit with that. "And every year there are at least a dozen or so on campus from broken homes with no mothers. Maybe someone could steer those girls in Laura Lee's direction."

"We could," I said. "You and Mom can spot those sad cases a mile away."

Flattered, he squeezed my hand.

I said, "That wasn't a compliment. I meant that you spread yourselves a little thin."

"At your expense?"

"Sometimes."

"But you've always come first! Even though we have a hundred girls under our roof, whom we may, on occasion, refer to as daughters, that's hyperbole. As long as we wear the dorm-parent hat, then these boarders, by definition, are our surrogate daughters. But that's fleeting, isn't it? They arrive, most a little needy, and then before we know it, they graduate."

"Or flunk out."

"My point is, we adopt them temporarily, superficially. No one lives here for more than four years."

"No one except us! We'll never move, unless it's to another dorm."

"Or across the river," he enthused. "Maybe Harvard will be calling one of these days. Did you know that your mother is a guest at one of their sociology colloquia next fall?"

"Dad," I said. "How many of our faculty have gone from Dewing to Harvard?"

He said then what he always said when Dewing crowded in too closely and he remembered that our living arrangement was voluntary, correctable, and not the way of the world. "Maybe we should think about a real home," he said.

Marietta Woodbury started off on the wrong foot at Brookline High School. It wasn't entirely her fault: Her homeroom teacher introduced her with too much admiration as "the daughter of the new president of our neighbor, Dewing College." Immediately the high school arithmetic progression sprang into action: thirty kids told thirty more kids, and so on, until I heard that that new Marietta girl was high, mighty, and stuck-up. The real crime was hubris: being the daughter of Dewing's president was nothing to crow about at a public school whose PTO boasted dozens of Harvard and MIT professors.

I decided to help, not out of altruism or fairness—she
was
high and mighty—but because I valued the rides in Mrs. Woodbury's car on rainy days, and perhaps (I now recognize) out of loyalty to Dewing. My first thought was to enlist Patsy Leonard, popular, athletic, younger sister of a much-admired senior. On my left
I had Marietta, kohl outlining her prominent gray eyes, brown hair dyed black and styled like a flapper's; while on my right I had Patsy—cheerful, peppy, freckled, with ginger-colored bangs above the Caribbean blue Leonard eyes.

I didn't sugarcoat it. I told Marietta in the presidential pantry, as we snacked on duck liver pâté left over from a trustees' cocktail party, "It's not your fault, but people think you're stuck-up."

"Maybe I am," she said. "And why would I care what the drips at Bullshit High School think about me?"

I said, "I've seen this all around me, my whole life: New girls arrive, and some rumor swirls around them—they missed freshman year because they were pregnant; they're here because they flunked out of Radcliffe, Wellesley, Vassar, you name it, or were thrown out because of drugs, sex, grades, alcohol, insanity, whatever, and their father bribed someone to get his kid in here." I tapped the rim of her gilt-edged hors d'oeuvre plate. "Besides, it'll make
my
life easier if you're not an outcast."