The Third Child

by Marge Piercy

  “How should I be with them?” she’d asked Blake.

  “Be yourself.”

  “What part of myself? Nobody’s ever themselves with another person, especially someone who has power over them.”

  “Just be natural. Don’t be coy or afraid. Let them see you as you are.”

  That was not useful advice. How was she? With Blake usually she wanted to get into bed. Often she felt she was nobody. The third Dickinson child. The younger, less pretty, less bright, less accomplished sister. Blake made her someone special. Blake loved her; and he had also fashioned her into a weapon against her own parents. Who was she, then? The young Mrs. Ackerman? Blake’s wife? She sought for herself, but she felt as if she were grasping at something slippery in running water. She was just a minnow evading her own grasp, escaping into vagueness as she so often had throughout her childhood and adolescence. Her favorite answer to Rosemary since she entered adolescence: I don’t know. Duh.

  SI AND NADINE said they would arrive at five thirty, and they were within five minutes—which impressed her, since they had driven from Philadelphia. She was waiting with Blake. He did not want to face them alone, he said; he wanted them to present a united front.

  They went to the same Chinese restaurant, and all climbed into a booth, without Sara, who was in Austin with her bartender boyfriend.

  Nadine leaned over the table toward Melissa, her eyes bright, almost beady with intent. “Are you pregnant, dearie?”

  “No!” Melissa said loudly.

  “Well, that’s good,” Nadine said, and Si rolled his eyes. “So why all the hurry? Are you planning to quit school?” She poked at her white hair absentmindedly until it stood out around her head like a lopsided Shasta daisy.

  “Of course we aren’t,” Blake said. “That was part of the idea. Her parents were threatening to pull her out of school to keep her away from me.”

  “What do they have against you?” Si asked. “Never mind, I can guess. We don’t have to run through the messy parts.” He rubbed his nose as if the thought embarrassed him.

  “They didn’t like him the minute they saw him in Washington,” Melissa said. “But they first got really upset when they learned that you were the people who had adopted him. Then when they learned he was Toussaint Parker’s son, they exploded. They’re threatening to pull me out of school…. I don’t have any money of my own, except a little from my summer job.”

  “You told them his parentage?” Si asked, head propped on chin, eyes resting on her from under his brows.

  “No. They had one of their aides investigate.”

  “Why didn’t you tell them?”

  Instinctively she knew she shouldn’t let them know that she had been ignorant herself. “I tell them as little as possible. Whatever I really want to do, they disapprove of.”

  “Give me an example.”

  “Like seeing Blake. Like demonstrating with the African-American students against the firing of the only teacher who really knew about Africa. Like the research we’ve been doing on my father.”

  “What sort of research?”

  Both Blake and Melissa were silent. Si looked from one to the other. “Someone has been feeding information on Dickinson to a reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer. The same reporter you mentioned when you told me that Melissa was working with his son? Unless I’m mistaken.”

  “You’re not mistaken,” Blake said. “I don’t think we should talk about this.”

  Both Si and Nadine put down their chopsticks and stared from one to the other. Nadine said, “This is something you’re doing together?”

  “I don’t see any reason to talk about it,” Blake said. “It’s our project. It doesn’t involve you.”

  “You’re getting the information on your father?” Si kept his gaze on her now.

  She did not answer, letting Blake say whatever he chose to.

  “Why?” Nadine asked, leaning so far forward her dress brushed her food. “Because you love Blake, you’re doing this? Because of his father?”

  Now she had to answer. “Partly. Partly I feel my father is wrong. If I know and do nothing, I’m an accessory—aren’t I?”

  “Interesting,” Si said. “And you’ve been applying your computer skills, I suspect.” He was talking to Blake now. “That could get you in legal trouble.”

  “Melissa is the only witness to whatever I’ve done.”

  “And she can’t be forced to testify because she’s your wife now. It all begins to make a certain insane sense.”

  She wanted Blake to assure his parents they had not married for legal reasons, but he was silent. Maybe that was the kind of answer that made sense to them. Give a lawyer a legal reason. Still, she felt a little burned.

  Blake sat back. “I don’t want to talk about this. We’re engaged in a project together. We’re not about to stop. We’re not about to turn back. We know a lot that had never been put together, and we have a way to use it. That’s all you need to know.”

  Nadine said, “This could be dangerous for you both. Have you thought of that?”

  “Dangerous, how?” Melissa asked. “You mean like we could get into legal trouble?”

  “Things have happened to people who have gone up against your father. Don’t you know that?”

  “I know my aunt was put in an institution for five years because she was doing the same thing we are.”

  “I met her,” Blake said. “She’s a good person. Cool. She was Eve Kalman’s lover, if you remember her.”

  “Sure I remember Eve,” Nadine said. “A fervent and very political woman. And she died in a plane crash some people said was arranged.”

  “That’s a rumor without foundation,” Si said. “I don’t want to scare you unnecessarily.”

  Blake snorted. “What’s our quotient of necessary scaring?”

  Nadine patted Melissa’s hand. “I’m beginning to get the picture. Do your parents know you’re married?”

  “My god, no,” Melissa said.

  “Are you planning to let them know?”

  “When I have to,” Melissa said firmly. “When we have to.”

  “What do you think they’ll do?” Nadine was still holding her hand. Nadine’s hand was very warm.

  “Call out the National Guard. I can’t imagine. But it will be loud and long.”

  “I think you should tell them, but I understand your reluctance.” Nadine sighed. “They’re your parents. We won’t interfere. But when you tell them or they find out, I would like to know at once. I have to say we’re not thrilled at having them as in-laws, any more than this development is going to warm their cockles, whatever cockles are.”

  “I think they mean valves,” Si said wearily. “Well, this isn’t what I expected in the way of the first marriage in the family. David is gay, Sara—Whoops, I forgot, she did marry that jackass. But it only lasted five weeks. I hardly think that should count. I hope you both understand the choice you’ve made.”

  Blake said, “We’re committed to each other. We belong together.”

  “Thousands would say differently,” Si intoned. “But what the hell, we wish you the best and we’ll do what we can to help out. But I don’t think you’ve chosen an easy road, nor one I would have picked out for you.”

  “Do you remember a Yiddish word you taught me when I asked you about how you and Nadine got together?” Blake was working on Si to charm him; she knew the voice. “You said Nadine was your bashert. Your intended one. Your destiny. Well, I know that Melissa is my bashert.”

  “I hope so,” Nadine said. “I hope, for both your sakes, it’s so.”

  When they were leaving, Si drew Blake aside and they spoke earnestly. Nadine was chatting with Melissa, and she had to answer and keep up her end, but she really wanted to overhear what they were saying to each other. Still, it had gone far, far better than she had imagined beforehand. They had accepted her. They had accepted the marriage. They were on her side now.

  MELISSA SLEPT in Blake’s room, in
his narrow bed. She was too exhausted to make her way home, and she desperately needed to feel him beside her. This was one night she had to spend with him as the married couple they were supposed to be. The conversation with his parents had ended well, but it had shaken her. Everyone thought they were crazy. Everyone thought they had acted rashly. And had Blake really married her to protect himself because of how he had hacked into her mother’s and father’s computers? Maybe she would never know. Maybe it was better if she didn’t know. She had to believe he loved her; after all, it would be kind of drastic for him to marry her if he did not. He’d used that word, bashert, and more than once he had told her that they were each other’s destiny. She must believe. She asked him what Si had been saying to him so vehemently as they were leaving the restaurant.

  “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.

  • CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR •

  Melissa 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.”