The Third Child

by Marge Piercy

  “Must be something good. You’re all lit up.”

  “Blake asked me to marry him!”

  “Jesus. Are you real? Was he kidding around?”

  “He meant it. And I said yes.”

  Emily backed out of her file and shut down her laptop. “Lissa, what is this? We’re just sophomores. He’s only like the second guy you ever bonked.”

  “But my mother is threatening to pull me out of school. If Blake and I were man and wife, they couldn’t touch us.”

  “They could try to get the marriage annulled.”

  “It would be a scandal if they did. Because the two of us would be screaming and kicking and fighting.”

  Emily straddled her desk chair, staring. “But how come you want to get married so quick? I mean, it seems crazy to me. We’re still kids. We don’t need to think about pairing off permanently for years. We have lots of time to meet guys and get to know them and find out what we really, really want. It’s time for fun, not for settling down in a condo with some guy you only met last year.”

  “But I love him, Em. How much can you love someone? That’s the way I love him. It can’t get better than that. What would I be waiting for? A rock star? A millionaire? I just want someone to love me the way I love them.”

  “So can’t you just go along loving him for a couple of years until you know for sure what you want to do with your life?”

  “I don’t have a couple of years. Rosemary’s threatening to pull me out of school.”

  “That would be so uncool. You couldn’t get into a good school in the middle of the year.”

  Melissa snorted. “That’s what I told her. She doesn’t care. She’ll always sacrifice me to my father or Rich. Everybody’s more important than me.”

  “You just can’t let them pull you out of school! You have to talk to her.”

  “She’s not interested in what I want. Only what’s good for Dick. What’s good for Rich. What’s good for her.”

  “So if you got married, you could stay in school?” Emily frowned, trying to puzzle it out.

  “I wouldn’t even tell her unless she tried to make me go home. Then that would be my trump card. You see?”

  “Sort of. But it just seems like such a drastic step. Although I suppose you could always get a divorce if it doesn’t work out.”

  They both laughed. “Me, a divorcée at twenty.” Melissa felt close to Emily again. “It seems like I’ll wake up and it’s just a game or a fantasy, something you play around with imagining when you’re bored. But it’s the only way I can be sure of being with him, of staying in school. The only way to keep them from just eating me up to satisfy themselves. And it isn’t like I never thought of marrying him. When the two of us stayed in my parents’ house last summer, while they were up in Maine, we pretended like we were married.”

  Melissa wished that Emily could enter into her plans more enthusiastically. She tried to imagine how she would feel if Emily came barging in one evening and announced she was getting married. Probably her first thought would be that she would have to get another roommate and she would not see nearly as much of her friend. “Em, it’ll be a secret. We’ll just have the ceremony and come back here and resume. I’ll be living here, we’ll go to classes and do each other’s hair and borrow clothes and everything will be the same. But I’ll just have an insurance policy against my mother.”

  About an hour later, she checked her e-mail and found a message from Blake. “Wow, do you believe this? Above eighteen, no parental permission is needed.” Melissa turned to Emily, waving her hands like wings. “It costs thirty-five dollars and we need to get a blood test and I need a rubella vaccination. What’s that?”

  “Measles,” Emily said. “You must have had it. We all did in grade school or earlier.”

  “How can I prove it?”

  “Go get another one. Who cares if you get revaccinated?” Emily laughed. “Thirty-five bucks. At that price, we could afford to get married every week.”

  “Tomorrow morning we’re going to pick out rings.”

  It was the weekend before they had everything organized. Emily would be a witness. Blake had not told his parents, but he had let his sister know. Sara flew in from Austin to Logan in Boston, where Emily drove them to pick her up the night before. Emily was agreeable about driving back and forth. She also drove everybody to the justice of the peace Saturday morning.

  “Do you mind doing it like this?” Blake asked Melissa in the backseat of Emily’s car.

  “I hate big weddings. They’re gross and humiliating. I’ve always said if I ever got married, I’d do it quickly, quietly and no fuss.”

  “Well, what you wanted is what you’re getting. Quick, quiet and sans fuss. So here we go.”

  Sara leaned over the seat. “Never understood big weddings. Unless you could have an orgy. That would be cool. Did you remember to buy rings?”

  The jeweler had tried to talk them into ordering fancy rings, engraved, platinum, part of a set with a diamond. They bought the plainest gold bands in stock. Blake put them on his Visa. Now he jingled his jacket pocket. “Right here.”

  They had an appointment but they still had to wait. A couple was ahead of them and another couple came in while they were sitting around the little waiting room—sort of like a doctor’s office: vinyl chairs, a small sofa and coffee tables covered with House & Garden and People magazines she was too nervous to pick up. She almost expected her parents to rush in. She half expected Blake to jump up and say it was all a joke. But the other couple came out, looking dazed, and the justice’s wife waved them in. “The Ackermans? Come this way, please.”

  “That’s us.”

  “Are you going to take his name?” Sara nudged her. “It’s not a great last name.”

  “I don’t want to keep my father’s name. I’ve never been a proper Dickinson.” The idea of getting rid of the whole family at once was exciting.

  The justice of the peace was a heavyset white-haired man with a silver-tipped cane leaning against his mahogany desk. On two walls were shiny leather-bound legal books she suspected were not real, they looked so untouched. She imagined opening one of them, and nothing but blank pages riffling past. How did somebody get to be a justice of the peace? A strange phrase. Was there a justice of the wars? He made a joke she smiled at without hearing. Then he asked for the license and the blood tests.

  “Everything seems to be in order. Shall we proceed?” A rhetorical question. “You’re sure you want to enter the holy state of matrimony?”

  She felt a little sick to her stomach—apprehension? Fear that something would go wrong, someone would burst in and stop them before they could marry.

  She was trying to imagine what she would say to Rosemary if she suddenly appeared, when the justice said, “I now pronounce you man and wife. You may kiss the bride.”

  “Are we married?”

  “Absolutely,” the justice said.

  His wife added, “I hope you’ll be as happy and loving to each other as we are.”

  “Married forty-four years,” said the justice, rubbing his cheek absently. “You can pay my wife in the outer office. Send the next couple in, Betty.”

  She could not remember the ceremony. She knew she had spoken on cue, but it was a blur. She felt as if she had missed her own wedding. But what did it matter? Emily and Sara took turns photographing them on the sidewalk. As they crammed back into Emily’s little blue Honda, Melissa said, “It’s hard to believe it’s legal. It’s like a game we played. Like a rehearsal. When I was a little girl and we played wedding, it took much longer than that.”

  “It’s real.” Blake was looking moody. She wondered if he regretted marrying her, if he already had qualms. She was afraid to ask. She turned the ring on her finger round and round. Finally she asked softly, “Are you okay?”

  “Did you see the way that fat pig looked at me? And the way he asked you twice if you really took me in matrimony?”

  She hadn’t noticed a thing,
lost in a fog of anxiety. “Yeah, he was a loser. But who cares? The ceremony is just as legal. It’s like we stuck a couple of twenties in a Coke machine. We put the money in, and five minutes later, a marriage comes out.”

  “You’re right. That pig doesn’t matter. We’re legal.” He clutched her hand. “We did it.”

  Sara knelt backwards on the front seat, grinning at them. “So when are you telling the folks?”

  “I’m not in a hurry.” Blake shook his head.

  “I think you better before they find out accidentally.”

  Blake grabbed her by the shoulder. “You won’t tell them.”

  “No way. They don’t even know I’m here…. But I’m serious, you better carry the news yourself.” She turned to Melissa. “What about you? When are you breaking the news?”

  “My aunt Karen will be the first to know. I trust her. But I’ll tell my mother only when I have to. Not before.”

  “Bunch of cowards. What are you afraid of?”

  Emily said, “You don’t know her mother. She’s to be afraid of, believe me.”

  “Yeah? What could she do?”

  “Call out the National Guard,” Melissa said. “Send me to Devil’s Island. Cut off my head.”

  “Seriously, what can anybody do except yell and moan?”

  “She could try to have the wedding annulled,” Emily said. “Right, Lissa?”

  Sara shook her spiked black hair. “Wouldn’t that cause a great big scandal? As I understand it, your mother would do anything to avoid that. Besides, you’ve consummated it.”

  “Not in the last five minutes,” Blake said. “Maybe it doesn’t count before. Could you pull the car over? We can do it now. You all shut your eyes.”

  “He’s so romantic,” Emily said. “I see why you fell for him.”

  “My husband,” Melissa said, trying out the words. “He’s my husband.”

  “It sounds so weird,” Emily said. “I know every girl is supposed to want one, but I think I’ll stick to dogs for pets, no offense meant, Blake.”

  “Arf!” He was sunny again. “I can do any trick your dog can. And more! I’m a bargain.”

  “If Rosemary was thinking straight,” Emily said, “she’d thank you profusely. Your brother’s wedding must have cost twenty-five, thirty thousand minimum. I can’t even guess. You saved her a bundle.”

  “I’ll be sure to tell her that when she goes ballistic.” Melissa shuddered, not bothering to say that the bride’s family had paid that bill. She could scarcely believe how everything had changed. She was a real grownup, a married lady like friends of Rosemary’s. Who would ever have expected it? She felt as if she had done something totally clever, that eventually would show them all how mistaken they had been about her. One, a handsome brilliant man had married her. Two, she had married before her older sister. Three, she had brought it all off secretly and they couldn’t touch her. She had escaped for good and forever from Rosemary and Dick and them all. She was somebody else now, somebody much better. She almost wished she could call them up and tell them and hear their reaction, but almost wasn’t enough to jump into the shark’s mouth. Her own satisfaction with herself would do her just fine.

  • CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO •

  Melissa decided that she would confide in Karen first. She called her Monday night. “That was a huge step,” Karen said. “What prompted you?”

  “Rosemary and Dick walked in on us, I told you. They know I’ve been seeing him.”

  “But you said you were just eating supper. They didn’t walk in on a sex scene or anything they could wax heavy about, right?”

  “Blake isn’t white. That’s all they saw. And then they found out who his adopted father is—Si Ackerman, an attorney—”

  “I know who he is. A top-notch defense lawyer, does a lot of appeals on capital cases. He’s the genuine article, Melissa. No wonder Dick can’t stand him. They’ve gone head-to-head since Dick was a prosecutor.”

  “It gets worse.” She told Karen about Toussaint Parker.

  “How come you didn’t tell me all this before? Did you think it would scare me? Come on. You should trust me more.”

  “Well, Blake didn’t tell you either when you were talking, did he?” She couldn’t bring herself to admit to Karen that she had not known. “I didn’t think it was terribly relevant. I wanted you to meet him, not to be thinking about his father.”

  “Still, you could have told me after I’d met him, when we were talking about him together.”

  “I’m sorry. I just didn’t think of it. After all, his father isn’t very real to me. I was just a kid when he was executed.”

  “It was a cause célèbre for a lot of us. We thought he was innocent and that he was framed and railroaded.”

  “Do you still think so?”

  “Nothing ever came up to change my mind.”

  “Blake knows his father didn’t kill that cop.” She told Karen the story.

  “That’s enough to drive anyone crazy. Knowing the truth and not being able to do anything about it. It’s scary, kiddo, really scary.” Karen was silent for a moment. Melissa waited her out. She was disappointed in Karen’s reaction. It seemed as if no one was going to rejoice with her. Karen finally continued, “It just seems like too much of a coincidence, the two of you getting together.”

  “We had the same writing class. It wasn’t like we hit it off right away, but we liked what each other wrote.”

  “I have never been a great fan of coincidence, that’s all.”

  “Okay, the truth is out. Blake went to Wesleyan just because I was enrolled there. Somehow he found out. Then he bribed the registration people to put us in the same class. Actually maybe I went there because he did, since he was accepted way before me. He got better grades in high school.”

  “I guess I’m being paranoid.”

  “I guess you are.”

  “Melissa, did he know about your family before you started going out?”

  “Of course not.” She was getting used to lying, because she was beginning to understand she was going to have trouble getting others to accept their union. “It was a shock to him. He didn’t actually know till we were both in Washington last summer.”

  “I want to be happy for you, kiddo. You’re both just a bit young to get married. And it’s bound to cause a huge flap.”

  “For now, it’s a secret. I’m not going to tell anybody else, except maybe Billy, I haven’t decided. You can’t say a word to anyone, drop a hint, anything.”

  “I don’t have much communication with the rest of the Dickinsons. I’m the black sheep. The lavender sheep, whatever. Unless somebody dies, I never see them. And I sure don’t call them up to chat.”

  “Anyhow, I wanted you to know.” Melissa wished someone would say, How wonderful, you have married the man of your dreams. She had.

  “IT’S LIKE Romeo and Juliet,” Emily said. “Star-crossed lovers who secretly marry.”

  “I never read it.” Melissa was sitting cross-legged on her bed brushing her hair. She was startled every time she looked at her roommate. Emily had dyed her hair red—not reddish like Karen’s had been or Billy’s was, but bright garish red. She decided she wasn’t interesting enough looking to attract interesting men, and this was her solution.

  “Maybe you should,” Emily said. “It’s so much apropos.”

  “Didn’t they end up badly?”

  “Well, it’s a tragedy. Shakespeare’s tragedies all end with body counts.”

  MELISSA WENT to see Fern, who was home in the room she shared with her girlfriend Harriet, a short slim girl with light brown hair worn in a single pigtail. Harriet was sitting cross-legged on the double bed. Fern sat straddling her desk chair. Tammy had proven to be a kind of lesbian predator, who brought out young women and then moved on, but Fern had not remained alone long. She had been seeing Harriet for a month and they seemed tight.

  Harriet said, “It’s heterosexual privilege, you know. Like we couldn’t get married, no
matter how much we wanted to.” She was glaring, her forehead creased in a frown.

  But Fern squeezed Melissa’s hand. “I know what this means to you. You’re crazy about him. I hope it all works out. No matter what, you have what you want. My mother never got to marry my father before he was killed, and she always regretted that.”

  “I always assumed your parents were divorced?”

  “He’s the only soldier I ever heard of who got killed on a training mission. He drowned. She was mad at him for enlisting, and she didn’t even tell him she was pregnant…. So at least, no matter what happens, you get to be together now, and that’s what matters.”

  Melissa felt at least slightly congratulated. Jeez, marry him now before he drops dead. Nobody was going to cheer, so she had to settle for being glad herself. She walked from Fern’s through the streets of Middletown past the Victorian houses, the trees dropping their leaves in huge drifts in the gutters and on lawns students didn’t bother raking, onto campus itself and past College Row, with its nineteenth-century brownstone buildings that always struck her as gloomy and even more so today. Why didn’t anyone understand?

  HE SENT HER an e-mail:

  My own, great news, too hot to send. Come by me ASAP.

  He was pacing, sparking energy. Like a great cat, he covered his little room in three strides, turned and strode back, again and again. “I deciphered the papers that we were handed. I finally figured out at least part of it.”

  “So what is it? More contributions.”

  “There are two lists.” He handed her the lists from the guy who had met them at Foxwoods. “One of them has numbers beside it that I bet are contributions. But the other list had me stumped. I chased these names down through database after database.”

  She shook his shoulder impatiently. “So cut to the chase.”

  “This is the chase, babe-aroni. I finally found them. They’re all convicted of crimes in Pennsylvania.”

  “Crimes? I don’t get it. He’s getting contributions from prisoners?”

  “That’s what the guy was giving us. Lists of contributors and lists of convicted criminals. And the link between at least some of them—gubernatorial pardons or releases from the parole board he appointed. I’ve only begun to work through the list, but I can link pardons and early paroles to contributions to a special fund by family members, business partners, whatever. He was selling pardons and paroles, Melissa. Is that corrupt or what?”