The Third Child (25 page)
Authors: Marge Piercy
“Warning me to be careful. He’s worried about us.”
“Are you worried?”
“Some risks are worth taking.” He rested his chin on her shoulder as they made spoons in the bed. “Like being with you. Like us being man and wife. Like fighting the good fight together.”
“Together,” she echoed. This night they were truly together. The day after tomorrow, she had to make a presentation in French Philosophical Lit on Robbe-Grillet. A year ago, she would have been frantic; now it seemed like a minor blip in her life. If she could face Blake’s parents, she could face her French class and her French professor and overcome, in French and in spades.
M
elissa read Rosemary’s latest e-mail, appalled but also relieved. Rosemary wrote:
I am delighted you have come to your senses and stopped seeing Toussaint Parker’s son. Even to be in a group with such an individual can reflect upon you in the eyes of people whom you would like to respect you.
Breeding is an unpopular term, although the owners of racehorses are paid huge sums for the genes of winners. Breeding can mean two things: the genes that an individual receives from his ancestors. Your father is the product of fine bloodlines as truly as any Triple Crown winner. Generation after generation has produced winners, generals, leaders of men.
Melissa paused, wondering about the sudden influx of horse-racing terminology into her mother’s vocabulary. Was Rosemary buttering up some important Washington player who was crazy about the races? Melissa made a bet with herself that she was right. Fine bloodlines. She thought of her crotchety grandfather, with his fondness for cows and disgust with people. What had he ever accomplished besides making terrible cheese? It infuriated her that Rosemary was going on about horses when she had never let Melissa have her own, something she had passionately begged for from ten on.
The second meaning of breeding is that indefinable polish that those who have grown up in a home of refinement, who have attended culturally rich schools, who have associated with the best people,
exhibit in private and in public—an aura of quality to which even voters respond.
Surely we have not failed you to the degree that you do not appreciate the second, for we blessed you with the first criterion of breeding.
Melissa read the message to Emily. “You never met my mother’s family, because she has absolutely nothing to do with them. And they don’t bug her, because they’re scared of her. They don’t know how she happened to them.”
“Are they, like, gross?”
“They’re nice—much nicer than my father’s dad was. They’re like meek church mice. They’re quite religious in a low Protestant style, a lot of hymn singing and an occasional wham-bang shouting tent revival where everybody gets saved for the seventeenth time. Her father taught shop in a technical high school. Her mother worked part-time in the same accountant’s office for thirty years. Now they’re retired and living in a cottage on a lake in Michigan. They’re quiet people who are active in their communities and their church, who live within their tight incomes and tried to give her and her sister everything they could. Their culture is TV and tuna sandwiches, but they mean well. I used to like visiting them, especially at the lake. I think of strawberry shortcake Grandma Higgins made and raspberry cobbler. They grew black raspberries at the lake, and I was allowed to pick them…. I haven’t seen them since I was eleven.”
“Did your parents have a fight with them?”
“Not that I know of. But they were inconvenient. Rosemary gives the impression of being, as she would say, wellborn. Born to culture and money. Anybody meeting her parents would know it’s an act, one she’s good at, but her going on about our breeding as if we were royalty in exile is a bit much.”
Emily yawned, stretching luxuriously. “Getting laid is so good for the muscles, even when the guy can’t do you right…. Aren’t you going to read the rest of the message?”
“I suppose I better.”
You contradict everything you have ever been taught, or that we have tried to teach you when you consort with the son of a murderer, raised, once his father was brought to justice by your own father, by two shysters who have done everything within their power to send criminals back on the streets to continue abusing and terrorizing innocent citizens.
We are under scurrilous attack in the press, particularly our old bête noire, the
Inquirer.
We are trying very hard to learn where these unfounded but potentially damaging accusations are coming from and on what they are purportedly based. These are dangerous times for our family, and we must circle the wagons. This is as important for your future as it is for the future of your father, Rich Junior and all of us. It’s ironic that these attacks should come just as your father is about to score his first major triumph as a senator, passage of the interstate transportation legislation he cowrote.
We will be gone this weekend to Kentucky, where the chairman of the Rules Committee has invited us to visit with him on his lovely farm in the bluegrass country. He’s having a get-together of certain senators and industrialists and important CEOs. Your father and I are thrilled to be invited.
“Oh, there are the horsies,” Emily said as Melissa got that far in her reading aloud. “I’ll bet it’s a horse farm.”
Rosemary continued:
I’m sure it’s no accident that these attempts to undermine your father come just as he is beginning to achieve some well-deserved visibility and influence even in his freshman term in the Senate. After only two years in office, he has made friends and begun to garner influence.
It is more than ever important you watch your associations and also what you may say about your father or your family. Enemies are all around. I can’t believe you could have told this boy anything
while you were seeing him that could cause us trouble, but you should think back on what you might have said or implied. Let me know if you remember anything.
Melissa reminded herself that Emily had no idea what she had been doing with Blake that was causing Dick problems. She was not about to confide in her roommate. After all, the less people knew, the less likely she and Blake were to get into trouble and the less likely they were to be uncovered as the source of the information Rosemary was lamenting.
“Yeah, when I first met you at Miss Porter’s, I thought, Wow, it must be great to be a governor’s daughter. I mean, you got picked up a couple of times in a limo. You got to live in a mansion—”
“Where I wasn’t allowed to make holes in the walls by hanging anything, where my mother fussed constantly we would break something valuable, where three quarters of the house was offices and visiting backers and dignitaries and camera crews and constituents and state reps, all wanting something. Where you never could, like, go downstairs in your bathrobe and put your feet up and get away with smoking a joint with your friends or drinking beer somebody’s older brother bought.”
“I get it by now. It was a bad deal for you. You got nothing out of your father’s fame, except your mother on your back all the time telling you how to behave. As if adolescence isn’t a bitch anyhow until you get away from home.”
“I didn’t think yours was. I mean, they left you pretty free.”
“My folks are cool as folks go, but like you, I never felt I lived up to their weird expectations. I eat meat, I’m no beauty, I have sex with strangers—”
“They don’t know that.”
“I think they kind of do. But they don’t want the facts so they pretend they don’t see what’s obvious.”
“Everybody else’s folks look better from the outside. But I still think you got the better deal.”
“I won’t fight you on that one.” Emily got up and began to dress. She was seeing Mitch again. He’d turned up in their dorm room a couple of
evenings ago and acted sorry and cute. Since Emily didn’t like sex with the guy she’d picked up at the Halloween party and she really liked it with Mitch, she’d decided to give him another chance.
“Will you be back?”
“No idea. If it doesn’t go well, sure. Wish me luck.”
“I wish you a great lay, Em. You deserve it.”
“You bet I do.”
It struck her she would never go out with anybody else in her life again, never have sex with anybody else. So what? Her other experience had been depressing. Dating had never been her forte. She had always felt awkward and as if she were dressed wrong, saying the wrong things, liking the wrong music or films or food. It was a relief to have it all behind her, but still she felt a little startled, as if it had not occurred to her that part of her life was finished. She was, alone among her friends, a married woman.
ON FRIDAY,
Blake said to her, “Let’s take tonight and get done what we have to for class. I want to take a little trip Saturday.”
“Are we meeting that guy again?”
“This is something completely different. Be prepared for a longish trip. Dress warm enough. We might stay in a motel overnight, or not.”
He loved to surprise her, and even more, he loved control. Most of the time that didn’t bother her. At worst, she felt he was preparing a maze for her to run correctly or badly. She would be judged. At best, she felt planned for, cared for, supremely important, as she had never before been to anyone.
They headed toward Philadelphia, but when they got to I-80, he turned west. They stopped for lunch in Stroudsburg in the Delaware Water Gap, as much to warm up as to toss down chili and a hamburger, then stopped a couple of times more just to stretch and use the facilities. Why should she be so happy? But she was. When they rode off together, she held tight to him and wanted to grin or whoop with joy. She felt as if everyone they passed could glance at them and see a couple, mates, the real thing. Love
seemed to her much rarer than it was supposed to be. Once upon a time she had loved her mother and her father passionately. Her mother loved her as someone with many dogs might love the runt of the litter, the one she could not sell but had to keep around. Her mother approved of her most when she was quiet. Rosemary would have preferred her mute and stuffed. Gradually, she admitted it to herself, she had stopped loving them. Quiet and obedient, a dog successfully put through its training by someone paid to do just that, that was the only time she pleased Rosemary. Dick had lost interest when she grew out of her early girlish cuteness.
In her classes, among her friends, she heard much about dysfunctional families—parents who fought wars over or around their children, fathers who drank, mothers who did drugs, bitter divorce and custody battles. But privately she sometimes wondered if the worst luck wasn’t being the child of parents who doted on each other, who loved passionately and found each other fascinating. Yet Rich had done just fine. Merilee had enjoyed fulsome attention from both of them. Melissa was the superfluous one. Perhaps if she were gorgeous, like Billy, they would have forgiven her for coming along unwanted, untimely. But she was just herself, pleasant looking but no beauty. Nothing spectacular that Rosemary could feel was worthy of them. But Blake found her special and he made her special. She still felt a shiver of shock every time she remembered that he was her husband. She was his wife. Sometimes she felt she had dreamed the whole thing, or that it was just a hoax. No real wedding could slip by the bride’s attention, could it? Were they really married?
He left I-80 heading south, along the river. They came to an old industrial town, grimy and depressed, downtown mostly boarded-up stores. He handed her an envelope with an address and instructions scrawled on it in his scarcely legible handwriting.
“Turn right on Elm,” she read off. After three more turns, climbing up from the river, they arrived at a double-barreled frame house that had perhaps once been white. It listed visibly downhill in a line of elderly houses the color of smoke and rust straggling around the corner wedged against the granite of a mountain. All had tiny dark backyards tucked under an overhanging ledge that almost hit the houses. It had been a while
since the trash had been collected. A man sat on the stoop smoking and staring at nothing. He glanced at them and away, then his gaze returned to Blake and he glowered. He did not move aside for them and they had to step around him.
The doorbells did not look functional, hanging on exposed wires. Blake found the name he was looking for, Grabowski, and they climbed to the third-floor right front apartment. “I hope she’s expecting us,” Blake said. “I’ve been in contact with her.”
She was Sharon Grabowski, a harried-looking woman Melissa judged to be forty. She opened the door perhaps an inch on its chain. There were grey streaks in her dark blond hair. “Mrs. Grabowski? Karen put us in touch with you, if you remember. Karen Dickinson.”
“I remember Karen.” She stood aside, opening the door for them. They walked into a cluttered livingroom. A fat child was sitting on the floor banging on an empty tomato juice can. “That’s Bobbie. He’s seven now.”
“Seven?” Melissa repeated. He didn’t look nearly that old.
“Down’s syndrome they call it,” Sharon said. “He’s a sweetheart, full of love. He’s just so good!”
“You’ve lived on the river all your life?” Blake asked.
“My father worked at the plant. My mother sold bait. She used to have these metal rods that gave a shock in the ground, and the night crawlers would come right up so we could catch them in cans like that one.” She pointed to the big can that had held tomato juice. “She liked to fish too.”
“In the river?”
“Yeah, the river.” Sharon waved at the couch. “Sit down. Would you like some coffee?”
“I’d love some,” Melissa said. She was still cold through and through.
“No, thank you,” Blake said. “I don’t drink coffee. Lissa, are you sure you want coffee? It makes you jittery.”
That was weird. Of course he drank coffee. Gallons of it.
“Tell us about your mother,” Blake went on.
“She was a good woman. She never hit any of us. She did her best for us. After all the fish died off in the river, she took up hooking rugs. She
was always collecting rags and making these rugs with big fish on them. People liked them.” She pointed to her feet. “That there’s one of hers.”
Melissa looked down to see a braided rug of concentric ovals with a big bloated-looking blue fish filling the center. “It’s wonderful,” she said lamely.
“Is she still around?” Blake asked.
Sharon shook her head wearily, passing her hand across her forehead and eyes. “She died of kidney failure two years ago. She was fifty-one.”
Melissa was startled. So then Sharon could no way be forty herself. “Fifty-one?” Melissa repeated, to make sure she’d heard right.
“A lot of people around here die pretty young. The cancer gets them.”
