by Marge Piercy
“In Washington, D.C.”
His parents exchanged a look. “So much for the sudden interest in Russian.” Nadine grinned broadly. “It all becomes clear.”
“I wanted to learn Russian,” Blake said. “And I did damned well in that course. You saw my evaluation. I just didn’t see why I couldn’t do it in Washington and have fun with Melissa at the same time.”
“So how long have you been going out?” Si asked.
“Quite the interrogation you two have going,” Blake said. “Pity you can’t double-team like this in court.”
“Honey, we’re just interested. How could we not be curious and want to know as much as we can about your friend?” Nadine turned to Melissa. “Do you have brothers and sisters?”
“An older and younger brother and an older sister.”
She saw Blake dig Sara in the ribs. “Hey, I’m starving,” she said. “I’ll pass out on the floor if we don’t order. Does anybody know if the Buddha’s Delight is edible here?”
Ordering was not like being in a restaurant with her parents. It was a fast hard negotiation. I won’t get the too-hot tempeh dish if you don’t get the peanut chicken I hate. “No, Sara, you can’t impose vegetarianism on us tonight,” Nadine said. “You did it at Thanksgiving, but not again. You don’t eat what you don’t want, but you can’t keep us from eating what we want. If it grosses you out, go sit in a booth by yourself.”
“But, Mom, Melissa hasn’t got to choose anything,” Blake complained. Somehow with his parents he was younger. His voice often rose closer to treble. She thought, Everybody stays a helpless kid with their parents. She certainly went on the defensive with hers. She should not be judgmental because the Blake who interacted with his adoptive parents was far less commanding and far less in charge than her Blake. Her Blake was the real Blake, escaped from his family, as this was the real Melissa, having gotten away from hers.
“I like most things,” she said. “What you’re ordering is fine with me.”
Everyone looked at her as if she had made a faux pas. Apparently insisting on something was what this family expected and admired, while the bland go-with-anything air her parents cultivated was dismissed as wishy-washy here. Well, she could recover. She could play their game. “I do really like mu shi pork…or chicken,” she added, remembering they were Jewish. “With pancakes.”
“Extra pancakes,” Sara said. “So what attracted you to my gangly brother? His bike?”
“Didn’t know he had one until I’d gone out with him.” She could hardly say that it was the feeling they both were outcasts. She kept watching for signs of his lower status in his family, but she could not find them. Perhaps the Ackermans were so different in manners, habits, decibel level from her parents that she read them poorly. “I liked the essays he wrote for class.” She thought that was a politic answer and the parents seemed to like it, although Sara shot her a look that said she knew bullshit when she heard it.
“Blake started out having trouble in school. But he’s become an exceptional student. Largely because he wanted to,” Si said.
“More because I got into computers. I hadn’t cared about school before that.”
“How did you happen to name him Blake? Is it a family name?”
“Oh, he was named that by his father,” Nadine said. “I think it was in honor of the poet Blake and his stand against superstition and oppression.”
How did they know about his father? She was very confused, but she did not want to make a point of questioning them in front of Blake, who had immediately changed the subject to what he was hoping to get out of his classes this fall. If both his parents were unknown, as he had told her, how come they knew his mother was white and his father admired Blake, the English poet? “Tyger! Tyger! burning bright/In the forests of the night….” That was the one. She had been reading him at Miss Porter’s for a paper. She shivered suddenly.
“Somebody walked over your grave,” Sara said. They were sitting side by side in the booth and Sara had felt her reaction. “That’s what my bubba always says.”
“The air-conditioning is a little high,” Melissa said defensively.
“I hate air-conditioning,” Nadine said. “My body’s thermostat is set too low and I’m always chilly. I’m the only woman I ever knew who enjoyed her hot flashes.”
“Mother!” Sara said. “Don’t be gross. Who wants the last dumpling?”
Melissa didn’t think she was scoring high with them. If only she could think of something brilliant to say that would win them over. But startling statements were not her forte. She was a plodder, excelling, when she did, by simple stubborn persistence and remembering to cross every t and dot every i.
“So what does your father do?” Si asked.
The question she had dreaded. She did not see how, when asked directly, she could lie. “He’s in the government,” she said softly.
“What does he do in the government?” Nadine persisted.
Blake threw her a warning look, but what good could it do to lie now, when they would surely find out. “He’s a senator.”
“Dickinson,” Nadine said. “Oh my god, your father is Dick Dickinson?”
She nodded.
Everyone looked at her and at Blake.
“My old enemy,” Si said. “Well, this is a surprise.”
“She didn’t ask for him to be her father,” Blake said. “She’s a good person. You can’t hold her father against her.”
“But don’t you see?” Nadine said. “It’s the Capulets and the Montagues. You can’t hope that who your families are won’t enter into it.”
Sara was grinning as if she had known all along. Had Blake told her? Was that why she had come along? To see the fireworks.
“I’d prefer, I’d really very much prefer that you don’t talk about her father until you know Melissa better. Then we can discuss him.”
“Why didn’t you warn us?” Nadine laid her chopsticks in an X across her plate as if to forbid herself to eat more.
“Exactly because of how you’re reacting. I didn’t want her father to be the focus. I didn’t want her to end up having to defend him just because he’s her father when she doesn’t agree with him ninety percent of the time. I wanted—I still want—you to get to know Melissa for herself. I won’t even discuss her father now and I won’t let her discuss him.” Blake half rose in his seat.
Sara pushed him down. “Let’s not go there. Enough with the Actors Studio scene. So you guys don’t like her father. Blake’s not fucking the Senator. Let’s cool it. I like Melissa—what I’ve seen of her—and Blake’s crazy about her. Why not give him credit for knowing her better than we do?”
No, Melissa decided, Sara had come along because Blake had asked her to. She was on his side. Whatever might be his real position in the Ackerman family, he had a loyal supporter, and that he had never told her. Maybe he just took his adopted sister’s support for granted. Melissa was confused by the family dynamics. They were warmer than her own family, more argumentative. She could not say she felt comfortable with them. She could not tell herself she had won them over. She didn’t understand Blake’s relationship with the older Ackermans, with his sister, with this entire densely populated and very involved clan. She had dozens of questions to ask him, and a queasy suspicion that he wasn’t going to answer them readily. That he would, when she began to question him, pull that number of starting an argument and scaring her into apologies. He knew where her buttons were, and he knew how to push them. But she had to be proud that he had finally introduced her to his family; and maybe the worst was over on that front. Maybe the worst was over.
• CHAPTER EIGHTEEN •
Melissa decided that on the whole Blake’s parents had behaved better than hers. They had stopped their interrogation when Blake demanded they do so. He must wield a little more power in his family than she did in hers. They hadn’t made a scene about her not being Jewish. Further, Blake’s parents knew they were involved, whereas her parents
had made all that fuss about someone who as far as they knew was just an acquaintance from school. Yes, in the congeniality contest, his parents won hands down, although the evening had been tense.
She waited to see if there would be any negative reaction in Blake’s attitude toward her, but instead he complimented her on not losing her cool under questioning. “They’re not happy, but they’re prepared to act civilized. They’ll tell each other it’s just a passing thing, and they’ll wait for it to pass.”
“I wanted them to like me. I wanted that so bad.”
“Sara liked you.”
“Yeah, but she’s in Texas. A lot of good that does us.”
“Oh, she can make her opinions felt, don’t doubt that. Besides, I think she’ll break up with her boyfriend and come back. She’s getting tired of his fuck-ups. He went out to L.A. with the grand scheme of being a screenwriter, but he’s a bartender in a sleazy bar in Austin.”
She frowned, sitting on his bed against the wall with a pillow behind her. “I know your parents are supposed to be crack lawyers, but I have trouble imagining that. Especially Nadine.”
He grinned at her, shaking his head. “Many a prosecutor has thought the same and gone down in flames. She comes on grandmotherly. She charms the jury. Then she goes for the jugular, always with an air of just cleaning things up. Don’t let the little pigeon body and sweet smiles fool you. She has a serrated mind. And Si is one of the top ten in the country at what he does. Criminal cases and a lot of appeals.”
An e-mail message was waiting for her from Rosemary that evening, although it wasn’t Friday, only Wednesday.
That rather strange young man whom you brought into the house while we were in Maine turns out to be the son of Simon Ackerman. As you may recall, Ackerman and your father were at odds for years over the trial, conviction and execution of a man who killed a Philadelphia policeman, Toussaint Parker. Ackerman was a real thorn in your father’s side. They also clashed around another less publicized case involving a convicted felon, Atticus Jones. Ackerman openly supported your father’s opponent in both gubernatorial and the recent senatorial elections. I feel that his son is not the best companion for you, and we certainly do not welcome him into our home. Please keep this in mind. You must choose your companions less unwisely. I have often told you that people judge you as much for the company you keep as on what you yourself may do or say.
College in some ways is preparation for life, but in other ways, it is your life. Your father made friends in college who are his backers to this day. While in some ways the college environment is protected and not quite real, the friends and acquaintances, the enemies, the contacts you make there can help you or haunt you long after you have been graduated.
Blake would also be reading this message, since he monitored Rosemary’s e-mail. She was furious. How dare they essentially forbid her to bring a friend into the house because of what his father had done in previous elections? Was she supposed to befriend only descendants of people who had laid money on Dick?
A message came from Blake almost immediately:
Don’t answer in anger. Let it stew for two days. Then we’ll compose an answer together.
She e-mailed him back:
I’m too pissed off to answer tonight anyhow. Let her worry for a change.
“Rosemary is so condescending it gives me heartburn,” she said to Emily. “She addresses me as if I’m an idiot.”
“It’s just her manner. She talks to me the same way, and we’re not even related.”
“She never talks like that to men. She doesn’t talk that way to Dick or Rich.”
“How many women talk to women and men the same way? Get real.” Emily was riding high because, standing in line at registration, she had met a guy she had a good time with, in and out of bed. She had seen him twice already. Besides, she liked the gang he hung out with better than her old group from the year before. “You hear me on the phone with Mitch. Do I sound like an idiot, or what? I hear my voice going up into baby treble and I hear myself giggling the way I never do, right?”
“I know I talk to Blake just the same as I do with you, Em.”
“Yes, honey, yes, baby, yes, sugar. You don’t yes me all the time that way. We’re all a little tainted when we’re with a guy we need to impress with how soft and sweet and sexy we are.”
“Anyhow, I’m ripshit with her. She has no respect for me.”
“She’s your mother. Mothers have no respect. They just have rules.” Emily had got a car finally from her parents, a five-year-old Honda—not what she wanted, but it had wheels and an engine. Last Sunday the girls had gone for a drive, Em and her and Fern and Fern’s new almost-girlfriend, Tammy, from the Ultimate Frisbee team, to the state park and back.
“At least they gave you a car. I couldn’t even get a motorcycle out of Rosemary.”
“This car is just about embarrassing.”
“Yeah, but Em, it goes. We have wheels finally.”
“Training wheels. Even tricycles have wheels.”
“We could trade parents.”
Emily snorted. “No thanks. I may be fed up with mine, but yours are worse. If my mother wrote me the kind of letter Rosemary just sent you, I’d file for divorce. At least my parents don’t ride me. I’m beginning to think that’s cool.”
That evening, Blake wanted to show her the stuff he had been working on, proof, he called it, that King Richard had played fast and loose with campaign finances. Dick was using money he had raised for campaigns to pay for his attempts to get close to powerful members of the Senate. “That’s illegal. That could cause something of a stink.”
“Really? It just seems a technicality. I mean, who could get excited about that? So he’s friendly with guys he sees at work. Big deal.”
“The media. The Senate. They care about technicalities. Paying attention to technicalities keeps them away from the real corruption, the buying of legislation through contributions. That’s legal, but taking money out of the till for any use that could be construed as personal, that’s dirty pool.”
“So what are you going to do with this?” She perched on a chair. She knew better than to pick up anything on his desk. He went ballistic if she touched his computer or his discs or his peripherals. It was one of the least endearing things about him.
“Get it to Roger via Phil. We’ll establish a relationship so we can feed him things.”
She felt a little queasy about what he was planning to do, but frankly it all seemed too esoteric to matter. Besides, her parents had been nasty. They’d arrived without warning, without a polite little phone call saying, Here we come, ready or not. Instead they’d barged in and then Rosemary was furious that she actually had a life. They had been rude to Blake. In fact, they had been rude to her. “You’re going to set things up so you can give information directly to Roger eventually—cutting Phil out of the loop.”
“It’d be simpler that way, unless Phil starts coming up with goodies he dug up on his own. He’s been useful—but you don’t find him easy to get along with.”
“I don’t. You’ve met his father? Roger?”
Blake nodded. “But we need to establish our reliability first.” He put the materials together and tucked them into his backpack. “We should meet Phil tonight and pass on this stuff.”
“You can give it to him.”
“Are you nervous about it? Cold feet?” He took her chin in his hand.
“This is a long way from trying to influence my father, isn’t it? Giving stuff to some reporter who has it in for my dad.”
“This should come from both of us. And this does move you into a position of power—when the time comes, he’ll be more likely to listen. A spot of tiny blackmail. Besides, I thought you were pissed at them.”
It could help her to stir up a tiny fuss, to pull Rosemary’s scrutiny away from her and Blake. Her mother went into a dither whenever Dick was criticized. Rosemary would be mounting a countercampaign and too busy to bother with her.
It would prove only a passing nuisance, but her parents’ attention would be elsewhere. Plus she was really angry with them. Phrases from Rosemary’s message kept bobbing up to jab her.
By the next day, she felt she had mulled over her response quite enough. She was not going to wait for Blake to compose an answer. Rosemary was her problem, so she should crank up her courage and deal with her.
I thought one of the purposes of going away to college was to meet different kinds of people and broaden my horizons. If the sins of the fathers are to be visited on their sons and daughters, I’d be quite the outcast here, wouldn’t I? At least half the kids on campus wouldn’t speak to me. And don’t tell me I shouldn’t speak to them. Our home environment is quite controlled enough. It’s time I learned there are other kinds of people and other opinions. Isn’t that part of growing up?
As for Blake, I like him. I have been seeing him since I got back to school. I find him pleasant, not pushy or aggressive, but intelligent and thoughtful. I think judging him by his father or grandfather or uncle is silly. It’s him, not his family, that I go to the movies with. Eat lunch with occasionally. Are you going to vet everyone in my classes whom I decide to see now and then? Some of them are probably Democrats!
She was pleased by her reply. She read it to Emily, and then she sent it, before she lost her moment’s courage to stand up to Rosemary. She had never been good at fighting back. She wasn’t being that courageous. Describing Blake as if he were a casual date was a calumny on their love. It belittled him. But it was a beginning. If she wrote honestly that she loved him, was deeply involved with him, wanted eventually to marry him, then her mother would be up in Middletown tomorrow to drag her out of school and take her home, she was sure of that.
Out of idle curiosity, she told herself, she went online and checked Connecticut’s laws on marriage. She was old enough to marry without parental consent. Not that she was really about to run off with Blake and get hitched, but it made her feel stronger to know that legally she could, that her parents couldn’t stop her. It was a little fantasy she could use to prop up her courage and keep in the back of her mind as a secret weapon against them. Yes, she would wear her blue Tencel dress, her favorite. Or she could wear the bridesmaid’s dress she had dyed black last summer. She’d never had an occasion to wear it since. They were bathed in golden light and a tall, distinguished-looking…what? Would Blake want a rabbi? She had never been to a Jewish wedding. Emily had. She’d ask her what they were like. Blake would be utterly handsome.
