by Marge Piercy
She was the tallest bridesmaid. That made her feel conspicuous as they congregated, sorted themselves out, usher to bridesmaid, ring bearer, flower girl, Rosemary and Mrs. Potts, Dick beaming and, like her and Rich, towering. They lined up in order, then stood around waiting for the Episcopal priest to get to them. Okay, the Wedding March from Lohengrin. Emily had told her what it was.
Music was a place she could go and her family couldn’t follow. Since she was eleven she had her own favorite singers, her own CDs nobody else liked, world music that her family called primitive noise. She loved Middle Eastern music, Greek, African, fusion, Haitian. It was her own special ambience. She could not even share that with Emily, who liked rap, boy groups and opera. Her music was like a foreign country she could run away to, where sounds and rhythms enveloped her and she could imagine herself dancing in veils or sequins, in a costume that would make her suddenly glamorous as she never had been. For a while she had taken dance lessons, but she was so much taller than the other girls, she felt ungainly and too visible.
It was hard to walk so slowly. She was halfway down the long aisle through the ornate church with its multicolored windows staining the air when it happened. Her dress began to slip down her shoulder. She lunged to fix it and hike it back up before her tits fell out in front of everybody. She stepped on Merilee’s pale blue train and then her ankle twisted. She lurched to the right and the little stilt on the stupid strappy shoe broke right off. Her face burned. Sweat broke out on her back. She had to limp the rest of the way down the aisle. Rosemary must have eyes in the back of her head—Melissa had often suspected that—because at the altar, her mother glared at her. She felt torrid with shame, sweat trickling down her back. She was sure she smelled of sweat. She had never been so humiliated—oh, yes she had. Dozens of times. It was her fate to be the clumsy one, too tall, too busty, too nervous. She wished she was in the hospital having an operation. She wished she was in a coma. She wished she was dead and buried with a nice small stone over her that nobody would ever notice. Here lies Melissa the fuck-up. The unnecessary. The lame one. If only she could run away and hide and change her name and be somebody, anybody, else.
• CHAPTER THREE •
Afterward, she wanted to believe that she had noticed Blake that first day in Creative Nonfiction—basically a comp course—that an aura of premonition had surrounded her first glimpse. But the truth was, she felt wound taut. Everything was new. She was afraid of standing out in some awkward, foolish way; she was afraid of fading into the background and never meeting anyone or making a friend. She wished Emily could be in every class, but they shared only Intermediate French. Campus was confusing. Students swirled around her who all seemed to know what they were doing, where they were going, how to behave, what to say.
Because she had turned down the wrong corridor, she was late to class. All period she scribbled furiously to take down every word Dr. Romfield said. He was a big man, tall and hefty with a ginger beard, middle-aged, probably forty. His voice boomed, and when he called her name, she jumped and stammered her answer. Afterward she could not remember what she had said. Probably something stupid. She so wanted to do well and fit in. This was her real life, she kept telling herself, this counted. She was in charge here and it was up to her to shape a new Melissa, stronger and more confident. But there was too much to adjust to. Too much to take in. She had thought herself sophisticated, for she had been through four elections and witnessed a hundred press conferences and been to Europe and Japan, but this felt like the first day of kindergarten.
After class, she stood reading notices on a kiosk: Psychic Fair, Private Lessons in steel pans. Cuba in 2004. Summer jobs to save the Environment. Discover the Buddhist path to understanding, faith and love. Bike for sale. Their first assignment was in response to an essay they read about teenage drinking. Some dean had decided that all freshman classes should address this issue. “Personally,” as she said to Emily, “I think it’s just bogus. As if we all don’t drink at parties. What are you supposed to do? If we didn’t, nobody would ever get up to dance except two or three girls who like to show off. I mean, what would we do for all those boring years?”
Emily was rooming just down the hall from her in Nic 5, one of a cluster of nondescript dormitories on Foss Hill. When she came into Emily’s room and saw her friend’s dark brown bangs and hair just brushing her ears, with her neat little body Emily would always consider too fat no matter how thin she managed to be, with the palest smattering of freckles and her honey-framed glasses, Melissa felt safe. She could say anything to Emily and be understood. They were twin souls. But Em wasn’t alone. She was with her roommate they called Buttercup when she wasn’t around, a total twit and perfect snob: Whitney from an old New England family, as she told everyone within five minutes of meeting them. Melissa did not bother telling her that the Dickinsons were also an old New England family, but Buttercup found out and tried to cozy up. They both hated her because Whitney was perfect except for a weak chin: blond, stick thin with mountains of clothes.
“I don’t know if I can make it here,” Fern said plaintively when Melissa took refuge in her own room. Fern was as tall as Melissa but thinner. Her hair was blue-black and shiny but hacked unevenly short as if she had done it herself. She had a waif air, a natural shyness. Melissa was so relieved that someone was even more lost feeling than herself that she immediately warmed to Fern. They played tennis together. Even though Fern had played only a couple of times, she picked up fast. Like Billy, she was a natural athlete, at ease in her lanky body.
Melissa liked her writing instructor. Dr. Romfield was kind, he was brilliant, he remembered her name. She began to enjoy a little crush on him, no matter if he did have a silly ginger beard. She wondered what it would be like to kiss someone with a beard: would it tickle? She adored conferences with him. He gave her a B plus on her second paper, on immigration policy. She wanted an A. She made Emily walk past his office.
“But he’s old,” Emily wailed.
She didn’t care. She wanted to shine in his eyes. She wanted to have endless conferences with him while he fixed his marvelous blue-grey eyes on her and saw into her soul and listened with the force of great music. The way he listened drove her into infatuation. She had to be pried out of his office. She hated the next student who would usurp his pungent attention.
“You can’t want to fuck him,” Emily said.
Of course not. She never wanted to fuck anybody. She’d done it because she was expected to after she and Jonah had gone steady all senior year. Before that she had just sucked guys off, which was okay. A girl who did that wasn’t a skank, but still a virgin. No, she didn’t want to fuck Dr. Romfield, just to write essays that she worked really, really hard on, then have conferences where he discussed what she wrote for him. He made her feel visible and bright. He greeted her intellect to intellect, a novelty she reveled in.
The third assignment was to write about an experience that had seemed one way at the time, but that in retrospect seemed the opposite. He spoke of it as an epiphany. She loved that word. She vaguely remembered it from church, but she always spaced out there and, since she turned fourteen, had refused to go. Now she would get to write directly about herself and he would read it. Excited by the assignment, she paced in her dorm room trying to pick out the thing in her life that would be best, that would show a lot about herself, that would impress Dr. Romfield. His first name was Gregory. Greg.
“I was the third child in my family,” she wrote. “I was born seven years after my older sister and have always suspected I was an accident. My parents were very busy when I was little and even busier as my childhood progressed. My father was the district attorney in Philadelphia, and my mother was preoccupied with the lessons and sports activities of my older brother and sister and also the political support she always gave my father. People said she was the brains behind him, and I have come to believe they are correct. At that time, she still wrote his speeches and she certainly recruit
ed and trained his staff.
“Thus when I was nine and my father and mother took me and my younger brother Billy”—she used his name and only his in the narrative—“on a prolonged vacation trip all around our home state of Pennsylvania, I was thrilled. I had never spent so much time with them. Time was the rarest thing in our household. Not my time, of course. Time went by like a glacier of lard when I was little and often alone, except for Billy and the various au pairs who lived with us during this period. I always had the feeling I was on the tail end of a very long list of tasks to be attended to, people to be dealt with, events to arrange.
“My mother was busy and my father was important. That thing, my father’s importance, was something that occupied the center of all our lives since I can remember. As a child, I thought of my father’s importance as a big object, like the armoire Grandfather Dickinson had given our family, which my mother disliked and considered hideous, but which she always pointed out to visitors, making sure they knew that it had been in the Dickinson family for six generations. Mother was big on tradition, since her family had none. They were the likeable ones, of no importance. Importance was important, I learned early.
“I was crazed with anticipation. I suppose if we had been given a choice, we might have asked to go to DisneyWorld or Yellowstone or California. But to go anyplace for weeks with our parents was like being promised heaven—the best gift in the world. I remember looking at the map of Pennsylvania and getting so excited I couldn’t sit still. I felt suddenly special. It was our turn, Billy and I. Maybe they had just been waiting till we were old enough to share things with them. I couldn’t sleep for two nights before we left. I kept being afraid something would happen and the trip would be cancelled, like so many other promises when a crisis arose. It would be just the four of us, together on an adventure, a vacation like other families enjoyed and I had always envied, without my older brother and sister who usurped most of the attention my mother could spare. My father’s mentor, Uncle Tony, as we had always been taught to call him, kept appearing and every time Billy and I were scared that meant no trip. He was closeted with first our father and then our mother for hours. He had been mayor but now he was a judge. I was always told to sit on his lap and he would rub his stubble into my sore cheek.
“But no crisis intervened and we left on time, car packed to the roof. We drove all over the state. It was incredible to me, that suddenly we had all this time together, days and nights staying in motels, in hotels, once in a lodge in the mountains, but often with acquaintances of my father’s. Some of them I had seen before, but most I hadn’t. It wasn’t like staying with relatives. I didn’t like those nights, because there would be long suppers, then my father and mother would go off and have even longer conversations, leaving Billy and me to amuse ourselves in a strange house where we were supposed to be very, very good. Often a family member would be assigned us, playing cards or games with us or just sitting there, resenting it. Mostly we watched television. We had brought a couple of our favorite movies along, but after we’d seen them six times, even we were tired of them.
“Between every stop, my mother would read my father notes about some guy he was going to see, his interests, his political history, his family. My father was always a quick study, and when he arrived, he would always ask the politician about his family in detail right away. ‘How’s your wife Ellen doing after her operation?’ ‘Did Congressmen Portocelli help your son into West Point finally?’ ‘How’s that sewage study going?’ It wasn’t even fake, you have to understand: he loved them, he wanted to possess them. He was genuinely fascinated not only with those in power but with those who had lost elections. He sought them out and stroked their egos. He recruited them to his cause. He flattered them, asked them for favors and made them his own.
“I remember the first time I walked into a room where my father was having one of those political conversations. There are times when some cliché strikes home to you. A watched pot really does seem to take longer to boil. And this really was a smoke-filled room. That summer, there were plenty of smoke-filled rooms all over Pennsylvania.
“We went to county fairs, and even though once you have seen five prize hogs in five different counties and five prize jars of strawberry jam and five different midways on which to throw up after rides that toss you around like buttered popcorn, you get a little jaded, still that was at least some kind of fun. The other thing we did a lot was walk up and down outside courthouses and office buildings, waiting for my father. Sometimes we would be parked at an ice cream place or coffee shop or in the lobby to wait, when our mother was needed also.
“I don’t mean to give the impression we did nothing normal tourists do. We drove around Pennsylvania Dutch country and ate shoofly pie. We visited the chocolate factory at Hershey. We went to a baseball game in Pittsburgh. We toured Gettysburg with the assistant mayor, a tall skinny man who kept telling us that everyone said he resembled Abraham Lincoln, even though he didn’t have a beard and his hair was grey. Billy and I ran among those mostly hideous monuments whooping and pretending to shoot each other. The other thing I remember is chicken potpie. A park restaurant there served chicken potpie, which I had a passion for at nine. I’d eat it every chance I got. It was not something we ever had at home. Too fattening. I was proud that most of the mayors and other pols we met treated my father so well. It confirmed my sense of how wonderful he was, that he cut a ribbon at a mall in Johnstown and gave a speech about the importance of coal in Wilkes-Barre. Everybody seemed to like my dad, and that made us feel as if we were important too.
“Mostly, we were happy, Billy and I. We felt special. Our older brother and sister were not along because they had summer jobs Daddy had found for them. Our parents’ attention was enough to make us giddy. We would have stayed in that car forever—an Olds only a year old, dark blue—and never complained. We never whined, Are we almost there? We were so glad to be away and with them that we didn’t care. When we arrived, they would have to deal with our hosts and my father would be off doing something we didn’t understand.
“Of course, eventually we did. He was lining up backers and feeling out other politicians with an eye to running for governor. That was the sole purpose of our vacation, and Billy and I were along for window dressing. Until he had a firm base of support across the state, he didn’t want publicity, he didn’t want attention, he didn’t want to tip his hand to possible rivals for the Republican nomination. There were other politicians thinking of running, since the two-term governor’s time was running out. The old man was retiring from politics back to the family business of ski runs and lumber. Besides, he had just bought himself a minor league hockey team.
“Unlike the outgoing governor, Daddy was not a millionaire and he relied on other people with money to help him on his way.” She wasn’t going to explain that Rosemary actually had built them a decent fortune since then over years of careful investing but didn’t believe in using their own money for campaigns. “He and Mother were recruiting that summer. That was why my parents had suddenly taken an interest in their two youngest children, taking us on a wonderful journey we both thought meant something else. It wasn’t until I was twelve that I figured it out. Until then, that trip was the time I always thought about when I wanted to make myself feel cared for. It hasn’t worked since.”
She hoped that Dr. Romfield would like her essay. She wanted to explain herself to him, and so she was honest about her family, something she had been carefully trained never to do. She had not had a real home since that year of the traveling together. She found out Gregory Romfield wasn’t married—he was said to be divorced from another faculty member—so she imagined marrying him and living in Middletown, far from her parents, far from Washington. She wanted to get married young and have a house and the hell with the rest of them, except Billy, who could come and visit. She would elope and not even tell them till afterward. Then she would have a baby as fast as possible, so that her new family couldn’t be taken
from her. And dogs. At least two dogs.
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.”