The Third Child (10 page)

Rosemary took her to the train herself on Sunday. As they sat in Union Station with the tourists swarming around them to all the restaurants and shops, Rosemary fixed that clear beam of attention, that laser of energy and inquiry, on Melissa, who squirmed on the bench and wished for some interruption. A fire, a mugger, a bomb alert, the ceiling could fall in. She would be so much happier if her mother would just take off and let her cruise the shops.

“Have you been seeing any particular boys? You never mention any. Has no one asked you out?”

Melissa pulled at her hair, a habit when she was nervous. Come to think of it, Merilee did that too. Melissa’s hair was fine, light brown and straight. She twisted it around her finger. “I’ve gone out with three different boys. Two of them were nice. But I’m not really interested. But sure, I meet boys. Mostly we go out to movies and pizza and parties in groups.”

“Why do you think you weren’t interested?”

“Because they weren’t interesting.”

“In what way?”

“Too average. Too hard to distinguish from all the other similar boys.”

“That sounds rather snobbish.”

“You think I should settle for someone average, because that’s all I could possibly attract?”

“I’m just trying to understand, Melissa. There’s no hurry for you to find a boyfriend. How about other girls?”

“Well, of course there’s Emily. We have Intermediate French together.” She had e-mailed her mother all this information, but she did not expect Rosemary to remember something so trivial as who was in Melissa’s classes.

“But surely you’ve met other girls?”

“Of course. My roommate, Fern—”

“On scholarship, you said. Perhaps you could get them to give you someone more suitable.”

“She’s fine. Easy to live with. There are some very nice girls in my dormitory. But I’m trying to do well in school, so dating some guy and doing things with other girls are not my priorities yet.”

“Grades of course are important…” Rosemary was still speaking, but Melissa stopped listening. She knew what her mother was going to say. It was better for both of them if Melissa didn’t listen: she would not become depressed and defensive and she would not start fighting with her mother when she was about to get on a train and escape. She could see herself slipping into her seat, plugging in her laptop. She could even call Blake on her cell phone and hear his voice. She had hoped he would get on the same train in Philadelphia, but his parents were driving him back to school. She would sit watching the drab late-fall landscape slide past and she would feel liberated. Rosemary was always warning her about fast food, but on the train, she’d have a hot dog and just relax and read and work on her laptop all the way to New Haven. She was not leaving home, as Rosemary was saying: she was going home.

She felt that strongly as she ran across campus from the bus stop, climbing the hill, crossing Andrus Field and finally lurching into her room, carrying her bag of clean laundry, her backpack and laptop. Home! “Fern! Hey!” She ran over to hug her hard, as if they had been separated six months. “I’m so glad to see you. I’m so glad to be back.”

Fern had gone home too. “I guess I am. But I miss my mother. I even miss my cat Ginger.”

“Did you have a big Thanksgiving dinner?”

“Mom had to work. But I went to the restaurant and they let her serve me free. And she brought home food for the next day…. Oh, Blake called. He thought his parents expected him to have supper with them, but he’ll call you when they leave.”

Emily was in her room unpacking clean laundry. “My parents are so weird sometimes. They keep talking to me about how to meet guys and make friends, as if I am not your super pickup artist—but what do they know? They think I’m shy. I’m just invisible to them.”

“Not the worst thing.” Melissa told Emily her vacation and her disappointment at not seeing Blake that evening.

“Yeah, tonight you’ll have to put up with me.” Emily pouted. She had a way of raising her chin and kind of quivering when she felt insulted or disregarded.

“That’s fine, Em. Just great. We’ll hang out. I’ll unpack and be back.”

Melissa started putting away her clean underwear, which someone, probably their cleaning service, had actually folded. She realized she simply didn’t know what happened to her dirty laundry in Washington. She took it home dirty and brought it back clean.

What she really wanted to do was cruise by the likely restaurants to see what his parents—his adopted parents—looked like, to spy on him with them. But she recognized that neither Emily nor Fern would be enthralled by this knowledge-gathering activity and also that if Blake saw her, he would think she was crazy.

“Are you okay?” she asked Fern. “I’m planning to go see Emily, but if you want company…You could come too….”

Fern looked uncertain, then turned to her desk. “I didn’t get to study much over Thanksgiving. There was so much to do in the house. I had to fix things for my mom. So I better knuckle down. I have a paper due.”

Melissa went off to keep Emily company. Buttercup had flown to Saint Lucia and would be back tomorrow. “There’s no music in my par
ents’ house,” she said to Emily, who was playing something with flutes. “It’s sterile that way.”

“Still? But you’ve given them CDs for years.”

“I don’t think they ever listened to anything I gave them.”

“Dead air,” Emily said bleakly. “I couldn’t live without music.”

“We are from different species, them and me. I will always wonder if there wasn’t a mix-up in the hospital.”

“Except you kind of look like them, you know?”

“You really think so?” She was a little annoyed. Blake would understand. He was her best friend now. She could hardly wait for class, when she would finally see him. It was the longest they had been separated since they began, and in spite of all the e-mails and several phone calls, she was nibbled by a dozen different anxieties until she could be with him again. Had he sat in Philadelphia with his adopted family and changed his mind about her? Thought, how could he get in so deep so quickly? Thought that he could do better—find a prettier girl, thinner, less neurotic, less clingy, less dependent on him? Maybe he’d decided he should date a woman of color instead of her. Maybe his parents had questioned him, he had told them about her and come to see everything differently. They could have persuaded him to take a step or many steps backwards. Too much, too soon, they would say, not understanding how their coming together had felt as if it were a force like gravity exerting its irresistible tug on them both. She made up scenarios that frightened her. He was intensely important, her center; their relationship was the one good thing she had that was truly her own. He had made her less ashamed of her body. She didn’t tend to wrap herself up in layers upon layers now. But would he still want her? She could not stop inventing stories of disaster until finally she saw him face to face, body to body, and alone together.

M
elissa read the e-mail correspondence every week that her mother exchanged with her brothers and sister. Blake downloaded it all for her. “Sometimes I used to feel,” she said, curled up on his lap after reading through the week’s exchanges, “as if I was paranoid. But here it all is spelled out. Even Billy gets more from her than I do. There’s fussing but there’s at least some caring. I’m like this appendage to her real family.”

“You don’t belong to them. You never did.”

“Even when I was little, I was never what she wanted.” Now although she was the least of them, she had the power of knowledge, the power that came from monitoring them without their being aware.

“How about your father? Did he care for you more?”

“When I was small, he used to take me on his lap and call me little Miss Muffet. He’d bring me presents from his trips, like taffy or a doll.” She felt herself flinching. That her father had seemed to love her once was not something she could stand to think about. It had wounded her so when he withdrew. “But after he became governor, he never had time for Billy or me. I felt like a disappointment—gangly, overgrown, not cute any longer. There came to be this fence of aides and front men and speechwriters between him and us. The only time we ever saw much of him was when a photographer would be taking family pictures. We’d be dolled up and hauled out like props. Or we’d have to sit smiling on a platform or at a banquet. We’d have to show up at some stupid ribbon cutting or old folks’ brunch, a prayer breakfast, whatever. You ought to hear Daddy pray. You’d swear he was a preacher. And you should hear how, when he
goes down near the Mason-Dixon line, he gets this little drawl in his voice.”

“But it has to be painful for you, that you used to be close and now you aren’t?” He stroked her fine hair back from her forehead.

She turned away from him, but she could not lie. “Yeah.”

“Your father is a powerful man, but you have something to offer him that he doesn’t get—obviously—from his wife or his staff or anybody else.”

She looked at him. “Like what? That’s a joke. A bad one.”

“No joke.” He took her face in his hands. “You could be his conscience. Don’t you see that?”

“No, I don’t see that. He never talks to me about anything real.”

“But you could inform yourself. You could learn about what he’s doing, what he has done. You could surprise him with your knowledge, and then you’d have a new and better relationship—and you’d be able to influence him for good.”

“How would I ever be able to do that? My mother is the one he listens to. He’d never listen to me.”

“He would if you surprised him by your savvy. If you took the time and trouble to learn all about his career and his politics, instead of just running away from it all.” He held her head, making her meet his gaze. “You could become a counterbalance to your mother.”

A surge of hope flowed through her. She did not believe she could really do it, fight with Rosemary for her father’s attention, her father’s soul even. But she could not resist the idea. Blake was always surprising her, the way he took an interest in everything to do with her. With Jonah, if she went on too long about her family, he’d glaze over.

“It just seems impossible. But I could try….”

“We have to find a way in. You mentioned prayer breakfasts. Is your father religious?”

“You’d say so, to listen to him. But it’s all a show. I don’t think he’s ever prayed for anything but help me with my backers, get me points with voters, let me win the election.” She stroked his cheek. “You have
such sleek skin, it always amazes me. Like satin. Are your stepparents religious?”

“They go to synagogue on High Holy Days. At Passover, we have a seder at my grandma’s. But they believe in good works. That’s the best thing about them.”

“Do you really consider yourself a Jew?”

“I was bar-mitzvahed. I like being a Jew. It takes people aback. It’s kind of interesting. I like Hebrew. I like languages. Before I decided on computers, I thought I might be a translator. Languages are like computer code in a way, with their rules. I’d love to know ten, twelve languages.”

“
J’étude le français, comme tu sais
…. What languages do you know?”

“Spanish pretty well. Some French, German and Italian—enough to have a conversation. I picked up a little Czech. I told you I bummed around Europe on my own—on my bike. I wasn’t staying in Hiltons. I had to speak the language.”

“I want to travel with you.”

“We will, babes, we’ll go every place.” He took her face in his hands. “Do you believe me?”

Sometimes he asked questions, like Do you believe me? or Do you trust me? with an intensity she found flattering. Who else cared if she trusted them? “Of course I believe you.”

“I want you to trust me completely. I don’t want any doubt between us, any reservations. Nothing held back.” His hands pressed hard into her shoulders.

“You’re hurting me.”

“I have to know.”

She wriggled off his lap. “Why do you doubt me?”

“How do I know, if it came to a choice, that you’d come with me?”

“But we aren’t going off to Europe next week.”

“It’s something I have to know, that you’re really mine.”

When he said it that way, she thrilled deep in her belly, along her spine. It touched some old feral desire, something she needed like a drug. “I swear I am.”

“I have to know.” He stood and paced to the window, looking out. “It’s
snowing.” The intensity was gone and he was just a rangy nineteen-year-old. “I’m hungry again. Let’s go get a burger or pizza.”

“You’re still growing.”

“Damn right.”

AFTER CLASS
on Wednesday, they walked out just as they always did and headed for Mocon. Then he sat down with Florette and Jamal, from their Creative Nonfiction class, and motioned Melissa into a seat. She was disappointed, because they hadn’t had that much time together since Thanksgiving. She felt shy with Florette, who was meltingly pretty, with a smile that, when it flashed, made Melissa jealous. Florette dressed cool too, and she was African-American, an advantage with Blake. Maybe he was having doubts about the relationship. She was nervous about talking in front of Florette, for fear she’d say something that could be considered racist and really mess up. Two, then three more Black kids sat down with them. They all looked at her, but none of them said anything about her until a guy who looked vaguely familiar—a really tall guy wearing a basketball jersey—plunked himself down. They all sat up as if they had been waiting for him. “God, I haven’t been in this pit for two years, and I can’t allow as I miss it.” He looked straight at her. “What’s whitey doing here?”

“She’s Blake’s bitch, Ironman,” Florette said. “He don’t cross the street without her.”

Jamal said loudly, “They’re going to let Alan Foreman go. He’s the only dude on the faculty who speaks any African languages and really knows West Africa.”

“What’s their excuse?” Ironman asked, polishing off a big plate of something with chicken in it.

“Hasn’t published enough in academic journals,” Jamal said.

Florette waved that away. “No, his bad is he actually writes so folks can understand what he’s signifying.”

“Demonstration in front of the library?” Blake asked casually, eating his usual turkey burger.

“Rapid response,” the basketball forward they called Ironman intoned. “Slam them right away.”

“We can mount it by Friday.” Blake wiped his mouth meticulously. He was clean as a cat and moved with the same grace. She wondered if it was racist to think of him in those terms, but he was so very physical. The way he moved was like music. A demonstration by Friday. He was so casual. She had read about demonstrations, sometimes against her father, and seen them on television, but she had never imagined being in one or how they could be organized. She had always thought of them as being put on by professional agitators, the way her father said. But here were Florette and Jamal and Blake and five other kids planning such an action, sitting and discussing posters and signs with Ironman.

“What can I do?” Melissa asked when there was a lull.

Florette lowered her chin and looked at her sideways. “Honey, your old man is one of the biggest foes of affirmative action in the whole nasty Senate. Why would you care about Foreman?”

“Well, my father’s wrong. I know that.”

“Did you know that before you were making it with Blake?”

“Blake and I have never talked about affirmative action. Yes, I wrote a paper in opposition to my father’s policies when I was in high school.” That was a whopper, but after all, Florette wasn’t about to interview her teachers back at Miss Porter’s. Blake kept looking sideways at her to see what she would say; she felt he was judging her, whether she was on his side enough, whether she had the courage to support him and the other African-American students.

“Mmmm. You can hold a sign right at the cameras. Oh, and call the TV stations. Including Hartford and New Haven. Say who you are. It’ll get their attention,” Jamal said.

She glanced at Blake, hoping he would say she didn’t have to, but he was nodding. “Cool.”

She was scared. Her father would surely hear of it and she would be in deep trouble with her parents. If she backed down, Blake would not trust her. How had she gotten into this? Still, she must behave as if she were
willing and hope something would come up so she wouldn’t have to go through with it.

“Maybe we could make a list of TV stations? I don’t really know them around here. And if anybody knows who to contact for the news?”

Ironman said, “I can get the contact list from Josie. She’s in Malcolm X with me.” One of the houses upperclassmen lived in. “She has it from last year. Or I’ll bring it by. What dorm are you in? I’ll make sure you get it by tonight. So when are we doing this? We need to get the word out.”

She went very slowly back to her dormitory, wondering how she had gotten in deep so fast. It was just a little picket outside the library and nobody would pay any attention—if she didn’t mention who she was. But they wanted her to. She had to prove to Blake that she could be trusted, that she was absolutely on his side. On Friday, they would be there with signs and chants and all the things that demonstrators did on television. Somebody would call her parents for comment. Rosemary would be furious. Could her mother pull her out of school? There would be a reckoning in the family, they would find out about Blake. Disaster hung over her head.

Of course Blake and his friends were in the right. She knew that. Her father wasn’t even deeply racist. Although he boasted of being a collateral relative of Robert E. Lee on his mother’s side, he also, when it was to his advantage, trotted out an Abolitionist ancestor who had been shot leading a charge in the Civil War. Neither Dick nor Rosemary ever used bad language about people of color, never told racist jokes or permitted them. But Dick did not count Black voters among his constituency, so he had no reason to please them. They weren’t going to vote for him, work for him, fund-raise or contribute money, so they and their needs and issues were no more important than the opinions of seagulls or pigeons. They were not on his radar except when he had to make a speech about crime or drugs or welfare mothers or family responsibility, whatever. It was not that he hated African-Americans; rather, they simply didn’t exist for him in a meaningful way. But they did for her, ever since Hartford. Rosemary was probably more deeply imbued with racism, because she never took
her position in life for granted. She had been born lower middle class in a working-class town to sweet parents she viewed as shameful failures. Rosemary had an edge of quiet terror that she would slip in class, in social position. She could not afford to take chances with people she viewed as dubious assets. And herself, Melissa, what was she? Scared.

Later, when they were alone in Blake’s room, she asked him, “How come this is so important to you? I mean, you told me yourself, you don’t even know if you’re African-American. And you hardly look it.”

“But that’s how I’m classified by others. The cause is right. Besides, what are the odds that I’m Filipino or West Indian? The odds are my parents were African-American. Does that bother you?”

“Of course not! I assumed you were from the beginning. It’s just that my mother’s going to kill me.”

He raised his eyebrows high. “I doubt that. It wouldn’t be good publicity to shoot her own daughter.”

But she remained scared. How had she pushed herself so far out front of her friends, her acquaintances? She had not meant to take an active role, just to go along with it. She thought she would turn up and wave a sign toward the back. She should have kept her mouth shut. But Blake had kept looking at her sideways. She had to prove herself to him so he would go on loving her. She could not lose him through cowardice. No matter how scared she was, she had to go through with what she had said she would do, even though it made her sick to her stomach. His loving her was a small miracle. No other guy ever had, and she could not easily believe any other ever would. He was something she did not deserve, and she had to do whatever it took to keep him interested. His friends would never really accept her, but this way, they would not give him such a hard time about her—a constant series of small and large sneers, jokes, remarks, attacks she had suspected all along. She saw the way Jamal and Florette looked at them when they passed their table or saw them together.

Ironman hand-carried her the list of contacts, probably to make sure she was really going to make the calls. Fern looked after him with a surprised, impressed face. Ironman was a local sports hero, a junior who’d
been on the basketball team since his freshman year. “What did he want? I mean, is he a friend of Blake’s? I didn’t know he hung with us lowly freshmen.” She was at her desk writing a paper.

Melissa explained to Fern and Emily, who often took refuge in Melissa’s room to get away from Whitney. Melissa waited for Emily to tell her what an idiot she was. But Emily was intrigued. “That’ll drive your parents wild. It’ll be fun, too. I’ll go. I’ll carry a sign. I can make a good one.”