The Third Child (5 page)

Dr. Romfield liked the essay all right, but then he had her read it to the class, and she almost died. It had never occurred to her anybody but “Gregory” would ever know what she had said—except of course Emily. He kept telling her to speak up, as her voice kept fading into her throat thickened with embarrassment. She was so very sorry she had taken the assignment seriously and written about her family and herself—and now to read it aloud to all those indifferent, bored faces was a terrible punishment. Every sentence sounded ridiculous to her, silly, naïve. Maybe they
would think she was boasting, mentioning that her father had been a governor. Maybe they would imagine she was proud of him.

Then she had to endure the criticism. “Be more specific,” that suck-ass Celia Hodges said. She always said that. “We want sensory details.”

“It’s just self-indulgent,” Florette said. “At least they took you all over. You had a vacation. You’re just going back and trashing it.”

“Where’s the epiphany?” the guy beside her complained.

After class that day, a student fell into step beside her. “Your father’s Dick Dickinson?” he asked.

She was even more embarrassed. “Yeah, that’s him.” She forced herself to look at him. He was tall, with dark golden skin and black hair. She had vaguely noticed him because he was exceptionally attractive in an exotic way, but she had been too focused on Dr. Romfield to pay attention to her classmates.

“You don’t sound as if you admire him as much as you’re supposed to.”

“I don’t admire him at all. I did when I was little, but not since I reached the age of reason—say, twelve?”

He was silent for a few steps. “It must be kind of hard, being someone like that’s daughter. Someone so public. It would probably be a lot easier if you did believe in him.”

“When I did, it wasn’t any easier, believe me…. Are you close to your father?”

“I’m adopted, so he’s not my real father. But yes, I admire him. I took his name and his religion.”

“Because you were grateful?”

“Yeah, partly. Partly ’cause he’s a good man. He’s kind of visible too, in a minor way—not like your father. But he’s a well-known criminal lawyer.”

“That sounds as slimy as being a politician.”

He leaned over her, grinning slightly. “What sharp teeth it has. He could be. But isn’t. Does a lot of pro bono work, death appeal cases, political persecution, that sort of thing.” She liked his voice. It was mellow, silky. She wondered if he sang.

“I envy you. I wish I could admire my father.”

“But you can’t?”

“No, I can’t.”

“Don’t envy me too much. I’m not the real offspring. They have their own flesh-and-blood children. I’m the add-on. I’ll never be a real son.”

“I know what that feels like.”

“Thought you might.”

She turned off toward her dormitory, where she was meeting Emily. “I live in Hewitt. Just across the path,” he said.

“I’m in Nic five.” The dormitories clustered on the hill all looked more or less the same, like aging three-story motels.

She told Emily about having to read the paper, but she forgot to mention the guy who talked to her about her father. But the next time class met, two days later, he waited for her afterward. She noticed other people looking at them. It wasn’t her they were looking at, she was sure. They walked into Mocon, the big circular echoey building where all the freshmen ate their meals. He took her elbow and steered her toward an empty table on the outer rim. “Let’s sit here.”

She was so surprised she could not answer for a moment. That stupid essay had not made Dr. Romfield fall in love with her, but it seemed to have intrigued this guy. She could scarcely believe it. Her track record with guys was not exactly super. She blamed her awkwardness on having gone to a girls’ school, but Emily knew how to walk into a party and be flirting in five minutes. Maybe he was just lonely. After all, he was a freshman too and away from home. She realized she had not answered and bleated, “Sure—sure.”

He had a turkey burger and she had the same, so she wouldn’t have to think about it and waste time in separate lines. She was looking at him carefully now, and her first impression of his startling good looks stood up to scrutiny. He had straight swept-back black hair and intense dark eyes, long lashes brushing his cheek when he looked down, an aquiline nose and high sharp cheekbones. Although he sat with the African-American students in class, he looked more like an Indian, a Native American, she mentally appended. She knew from class that his name was Blake.

“Where are you from?” she asked. Oh, brilliant opening.

“Philadelphia. And you live in Georgetown.” He gave her that cocky crooked grin she already liked.

“You’ve been asking about me.”

“I do my homework.” Then he began to talk about class.

She spent most of the next day wondering if on Friday he would ask her to lunch again. In class Friday, she no longer stared at Dr. Romfield but rather kept glancing at Blake. He was sitting with the two African-American kids. Why would she expect him to eat with her again? He was gorgeous and cool and tall. There was something about him, as if there were a zone of silence surrounding him even when he was chatting with his friends or laughing. A shield, she thought, something she could sense but never describe, not even to Emily. She almost hoped he would ignore her, because she felt out of her depth with him. A guy that good looking could never be interested in someone like her. At least he was four inches taller than she was, so she would never have to stoop with him the way she had with Jonah, kind of shuffling so as not to tower over him. Blake was the right size for her, but he could never really be interested. Probably that girl Florette he sat with was his girlfriend…. But then he wouldn’t have asked her to lunch by herself, right?

Friday after class he hurried out with his friends, Florette taking hold of his arm intimately to check his watch. She noticed then he had a shoulder bag with him, a kind of duffel bag, and his friends had bigger backpacks than usual. They were running to catch the bus, she guessed, going into New York for the weekend. He told her he came from Philadelphia, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to New York with his friends—or maybe just to New Haven to catch the train home. She tried to put Blake out of her mind, but Dr. Romfield had lost his charisma, just a middle-aged man with a ginger beard and a nice speaking voice. She would go on working hard on her essays for him, but she no longer imagined living with him in a nice brick house in Middletown with two babies and a dog, or a baby and two dogs. Instead she imagined herself with Blake. They were dancing in a big room lit only by candles. No, there would be a fire in a high fireplace, like at the lodge of the ski resort. They would dance
together just perfectly and gradually he would hold her tighter, closer to him. Her breath caught in her throat as she imagined their bodies touching. He would never be interested in her, but he was perfect for her fantasies. That night and the next, she put herself to sleep having long conversations with him.

Emily brought her along with a group of students she had already managed to meet at some mixer, out for pizza, then a movie, then for ice cream. She was glad to be with them, even though this guy Reed kept hitting on her. He reminded her of Jonah: in fact he had the same squared-off blond looks, the same too-thick eyebrows, the same smirk. No, thank you! She had not come to college to replace one man who felt superior to her for no good reason with another who felt the same. All he could talk about was football and TV and the hundred he had won on last week’s Patriots game. There was no mystery, no romance in him.

Emily went off with a guy whose name Melissa never caught. Melissa returned to their dorm by herself, but she would rather be alone with her fantasies than with a man who would treat her the way she knew Reed would. She’d prefer to be alone forever than with a man who did not care for her, a man she could not love with her whole being. She would wait, she would look for love but accept no substitute. Fern greeted her enthusiastically, as if she had been afraid Melissa would never return. “Everyone has so much stuff,” Fern said. “I’m on scholarship. I’ve never seen your friend Emily’s roommate in the same outfit twice. She must have come to school with a trailer.”

“Think of her as upper-class trailer trash.”

But Fern didn’t smile. “I could never call anybody that.”

“She’s just a twit, Fern. The brains of a canary. Em can’t stand her.”

Fern perched on her bed looking forlorn, her eyes lowered. “Everybody here has gone to summer camp and Europe and I’ve never left home before….”

“Fern, we’re all out of our depths. Every time a professor calls on me in class, I jump. I’m terrified of saying something stupid. But we’ll survive. You’ll see. You’re going to go out for sports, right? So once you’re on some team, you’ll make friends there too and you’ll feel like you belong.”

“If it wasn’t for you, I don’t know what I’d do. Thank you.”

She ought to thank Fern for making her feel secure by comparison. She patted her roommate’s shoulder and basked in being big-sisterly. It helped. Fern was actually pretty, with her blue-black hair and large melting brown eyes, but she didn’t seem to care. She was more interested in using her body than in looking at it or adorning it. However awkward and out of place Fern felt in college, she was at home in her body in a way that neither Emily nor Melissa herself had ever been or probably ever would be. Buttercup had social confidence, but Fern had jock confidence, the belief that whatever she saw any other woman do physically, she could match or better. Already her tennis game was competitive. Melissa envied her. She would love to relax into her body and her life and just live, just plain live.

M
onday Em and she were walking into the Center for the Arts complex, all white and modern and squarish, to see an old Hitchcock movie.

“Okay, I’ve made some inquiries…. Here I am, your private private eye.”

Emily raked her hand through her cropped hair and put on a serious glower, pressing her glasses against her nose. Emily was nearsighted and could not endure contacts. “He hangs with the African-American kids some, but he’s a loner. He has a bike, a Honda. Believe it or not, he’s Jewish. He had a girl come up and see him once. Nobody paid her enough attention for me to get any dirt. So can’t size up the competition.”

“Emily, nobody’s competition. He’s just in class with me. He was curious because of my father. I’m used to people being curious.”

“We’ll see about that,” Emily lilted. “I want you to wear your blue sweater Wednesday. Your tit sweater. I do so well that I’m giving you advice.” Emily had gone to a beer party Saturday with the guy from the movie group, but he got drunk and puked on her shoes. “I’m off him. He wasn’t much in bed.”

“I just have no skill or luck with men. Better without.”

“A Black Jew. That would curl your mother’s hair. Go after him! It’d drive them up the wall.”

“He isn’t Black, Em. His skin is barely darker than mine. It’s more like Middle Eastern or Mexican or Indian. Anyhow, that’d be just pitiful to try to snag him with a sweater.” But she wore it. Her mother sent her an e-mail to watch C-SPAN. Father was in the paper Tuesday with his maiden speech in the Senate, in favor of an amendment to an appropria
tions bill. It was too complicated for her to figure out, but the amendment had something to do with trucking. Melissa would pretend she had seen it, to save a quarrel. He was always wanting to deregulate something. Probably he wanted truck drivers not to have to bother with licenses, like that. She could imagine the world her father would create, black water spurting out of faucets, air thick as pudding in cities, planes falling out of the sky like dead birds, trucks caroming all over the turnpike.

Wednesday was warm, even for October—the temperature at seventy, the wind abated, the sky blue porcelain. The leaves were still brilliant on the hills around Middletown, since no storm had ravaged them yet. It was one of her favorite times of year. Her siblings and friends would say summer was their favorite season, but in summer, she always felt inadequate. Not as slender as Merilee, apt to burn rather than develop a mahogany tan. Summer was the time she was cast back on her family, separated from the fragile support group school offered. Fall was the time life cranked up and everyone went their own way. Today she was happy—happy to be away from home, happy to be living with Fern right near Emily, happy to be doing all right in school. She and Emily had buddies in the dormitory and both had been to parties a reasonable number of times. Ronnie next door, a sophomore from Texas, often dropped in to chat and one evening taught them the two-step so they could line dance. Em and she were not only surviving, they were flourishing, even if they hadn’t been asked out much or found a boyfriend. But who needed a boyfriend? What would she do with one, with all her effort going into making friends and trying to excel in her classes? When they had any time, there were free movies and lectures and cheap events and plays every single night.

Her first class on Wednesdays was Ecology of Plant Populations, to satisfy her science requirement. She had not the least interest in plant ecology, but had taken it because she couldn’t get into the more interesting sounding classes. Except for the boredom and the difficulty of making anything out squinting through a microscope, it was not difficult. The microscope was a problem. The first time Melissa had drawn something,
it had turned out to be her own eyelash, not the plant cells they were supposed to be studying.

Then she had French with Emily. They were reading Zola’s
Germinal.
Melissa was quicker at French than Emily, who had trouble with languages. Melissa liked the sound of her own voice talking French, and she was always trying to get Emily to talk French—but then they never knew the words for what they really wanted to say, so it was always too much trouble after the first few sentences.

She felt like cutting her writing class today. Her crush on Dr. Romfield had evaporated, and the day was so gorgeous, she could imagine taking a long walk down into town under the brilliant maples or just lying on the sun-warmed grass. However, she was not secure enough to cut. She was still afraid she might miss something vital, and she was bound to get one of her sinus infections that winter and miss classes. She wanted to do well in college. She would never be brilliant like Merilee, but at least she could avoid fucking up. She saw herself Phi Beta Kappa, she saw herself taking honors in whatever she finally decided to major in. She lifted her head as she walked along, moving in her cap and gown onto a platform to wild applause.

An instant later, as she trotted along College Row with its weathered brownstone buildings toward her class, she felt overwhelmed by indecision. She still didn’t have any idea what she was going to major in. Every Friday when her mother e-mailed her, Rosemary asked her. Government, maybe. After all, that was what she knew the most about. She would be a crusading reporter, investigating men like her father and unmasking their insincerity and corruption. She was doing well in American Government and Politics. She had a lot of knowledge of how politics really worked and what went on that the public never saw. She could tell Rosemary journalism next time her mother pestered her. But Rosemary would ask why, and she could hardly say, In order to prevent people like you and Daddy from running the country and lying to people.

Someone else was in the hot seat today, a football player who had probably cribbed his essay off the internet. That guy really did steal it, she
thought, because he was doing a crappy job of answering questions about what he was supposed to have written. It took nerve to copy an essay, or maybe only a lack of imagination. She never cheated, because she was always sure she would be caught; or maybe because she wanted to please, to be deemed worthy. If she did not do her own work, how could she prove herself?

It really was stupid to imagine Blake had felt any boy-girl type interest in her. That girl, Florette, he was sitting with, she was much prettier. Enormous doe eyes. Emily missed her dogs, and Melissa herself was going around like a homeless dog looking for some guy to attach herself to. She felt ashamed. She just wanted someone to care about, someone to care about her. They weren’t allowed to have pets in the dormitory. Every day she alternated between thinking she was doing really well at college and suspecting she was a complete misfit and people ignored her or laughed at her. Florette’s eyes reminded her of one of the kids she had tutored in language skills in Hartford, Robert, whom the other kids called Pup. He had been writing about his lost mama—he lived with his grandma and his mama was in prison for drugs—and then one day he wasn’t in class and Sonya, who always sat with him, was crying. Drive-by shooting. They were aiming at somebody else, but Pup was dead. She would never forget the kids she had tutored, she thought, never. Nobody in her family understood—only Emily, who had an enormous heart for everything living that hurt. Maybe sometime she could tell Blake about it all and how it had changed her. Would he think she was putting it on? Trying to come off liberal and cool? She walked out of class thinking how inept she was at relations with guys, when Blake fell into step with her. “So, want to pick up a sandwich and grab some countryside?”

“What do you mean?”

“You can ride with me. We’ll go up into the hills. Looks pretty today, doesn’t it? You have afternoon classes?”

She had an aerobics class, but she could cut that. “I was thinking all the way here how gorgeous it is today and how much I’d love to be outside.”

“Great. Come on, we’ll pick up something at Mocon. My bike’s just by Hewitt.”

“I’ve never been on a motorcycle,” she said when they came up to where he had chained it to a wrought-iron fence around a little cemetery there weirdly in the middle of campus, by the dorms. Fern said she had heard it held the bodies of students who had killed themselves. Melissa hoped that was a legend.

“You’ll love it,” he said confidently. “You can’t help loving it.”

She knew she was supposed to wear a helmet, so it felt clandestine, vaguely wicked and a little dangerous to climb on behind him, holding on to his leather jacket. She thought as he sped through town that they must look tough and very cool. They could not talk, which made things easier. Talking with guys was always skipping along a tightrope. Of course, plastered to his jacketed back, she could see little and only to the right side. They were climbing now, riding the curves up and out of town. She was a little scared but excited. How often did she do something as unlikely as go off with a guy on his bike up into the hills? It was something other girls did, like Emily (not Merilee, never Merilee), and she would envy them their adventures. Even if he just wanted to talk about class or even if they had nothing to say and it was a complete fiasco, she would have a story to tell. She would have an experience of her own. She would say to Ronnie, the redhead in the room next door, that she had cut her afternoon classes and gone up in the hills on a motorcycle. He turned off the pavement. They bumped far more slowly along a dirt road through the woods.

When he finally stopped and she got off, her legs felt funny—tingly and stiff. She misstepped and he caught her arm. “Takes getting used to, but you did fine.”

“I liked it.”

“Of course you did. Riding the wind. And this was just a little run. But it got us up here, didn’t it?”

They were in a clearing near the edge of a cliff—the valley with the college and Middletown below them. “It’s beautiful. Thank you.”

“Yeah, I arranged it just for you.” He pulled a blanket from the saddlebag and spread it out. “I’m hungry.”

They ate the sandwiches they had bought, sitting face-to-face on the
blanket, with the cliff falling away to their side. A hawk circled over them and then off in spirals across the cliff face. A second hawk spiraled way up and the birds called back and forth, sharp high cries, a couple sharing the sky. There had been no frost yet, and the crickets were shrilling in the shaggy grass of the clearing. She felt a fierce joy that was rare to her, a sense of having escaped from her life, her usual self, her prison of expectation and disappointment. No one knew where she was. No one would guess that she was here and with Blake, an attractive cool guy with a motorcycle. It was her own private, her own secret experience. No matter why he had asked her to come along—maybe he was lonely, maybe he was still curious—she was here and not anybody prettier or smarter or more popular shared a blanket with him.

All her life she had tried to keep little things to herself, often unsuccessfully, the way she had hidden away her diary, the way she hid things like a cobalt blue bottle about four inches high she found in a cabinet in the governor’s mansion and quietly appropriated; like a special red rock she had come upon hiking in Vermont with her aunt Karen. Like a blue jay feather that had floated down on the lawn. Silly treasures. If she had something of her own, she was real, she was protected from others’ scorn, others’ judgments. This afternoon with Blake was such a secret, a treasure all her own. No matter if it was singular and accidental, it was hers to take home, mull over, relive.

“Today you seem happy, full of life,” he said, as if he could read her mind, or perhaps her face.

“I am. Thanks for asking me to come with you.”

He smiled slightly. “It wasn’t a favor. It was an opportunity.”

“What do you mean?” She had a moment of apprehension. But he couldn’t be a mugger, a rapist, something bad. He was a fellow student.

“Why are you usually so down? I’m right about that, aren’t I?”

She shrugged, embarrassed. “I’m less depressed here at college than I usually am at home, that’s for sure.”

“Escaping?”

“In a way. But escaping to my own life. Me. Not them.”

“
Them
is your family.”

“My parents, mostly. My younger brother, Billy, he’s okay. He’s a charming fuck-up. We’ve always been close.”

“But you aren’t close to your mother?”

“Rosemary? She doesn’t bother much with me, unless I do something she thinks is bad—mostly in the sense that it could reflect poorly on my father. I mess up in any way, and she goes, ‘Oh, what will your father say?’ or more often, ‘What will people say?’” She felt embarrassed talking so much about herself. “What about your parents? Are you close to them?”

“I never knew them. I’m adopted.”

“Yeah, I remember you said that. But don’t you know who your mother was?”

He shook his head. “It’s a blank. A mystery.”

“I used to have fantasies I was adopted,” she said softly, afraid he would laugh at her.

“Why?” He lay down on the blanket, staring up into the sky. “Believe me, you wouldn’t want to be.”

“So I wouldn’t belong to them. I’d have real parents who would swoop down someday and carry me off and love me the way I am. Just for being me.”

“That’s what we all want, isn’t it? To be loved for being just ourselves. Not for being smart or winning scholarships or playing some stupid game well—just for being us.”

“Exactly,” she said. “But how well do you get on with your adoptive parents?”

“I respect them,” he said. “They’ve been good to me, and they’re good people. But we’re different. I’m different from everyone else.”

“I always felt that way too.”

“Why? You know who you are. You’re white, you’re affluent, your daddy is important.”

“But that isn’t me. And it’s like I don’t really belong in the same family with my older sister, Merilee, and my older brother, Rich. They do everything right. I never did, I never will.”

“Doesn’t that depend on who’s looking? Who’s judging? What’s right for you may be all wrong for them.”

“Yes!” She found herself laughing and didn’t know why. He hadn’t said anything funny. Maybe she was laughing with pleasure, because she loved talking with him. “I really like being with you. You’re easy for me to talk to. Talk with, I mean.”