Free My Latest Grievance by Elinor Lipman Page A

her." I added lamely, "It was pretty crowded."
    "You're a young, impressionable girl—which I'm sure you'll disagree with. But I know from my research that you're at the age when adolescents, especially girls, find ways to break away from their mothers in order to assert their independence. To separate one being from another." He illustrated this principle by entwining his fingers, then pulling them apart. "What worries me is that Laura Lee will strike you as a very attractive alternative to the parents you have."
    "Do you think she's attractive?"
    "I didn't mean in that sense. I meant as a magnetic figure—with her stories and her costumes."
    I said, "They're not costumes. They're antiques. I like them."
    "Her appearance is irrelevant. I'm just saying that at your age, you're easily taken in by flashy alternatives to the family you were born into."
    "Do you
not
want me ever to eat a meal at her table? Is that what you're saying?"
    "No. I just want you to be aware that Laura Lee—and I believe this wholeheartedly—came here for the sole purpose of insinuating herself into your life."
    I was thrilled, despite my previously stated lack of affection for Laura Lee, because I was sixteen, vain, and experienced in making friends with all varieties of dormitory unlikables. I could change my mind about Laura Lee yet. I certainly could give her a few more audiences at Curran Hall. I said in an effort to be modest, "Why me, though? A total stranger. I could have been an awful kid. Why change your life for a total stranger who could be a real pill?"
    My father smiled. "I think your grandmother may have communicated over the years that you weren't a real pill." His smile disappeared. "And mostly, Laura Lee has no one else."
    "Does Mom know?"
    "Know what?"
    "That Laura Lee came here because of me?"
    "It's more complicated than that. Aviva thinks she came to make us—Aviva and me—uncomfortable. That she wanted to be a thorn in our sides."
    I said, "Did you know she registered for one of Mom's courses?"
    His eyes narrowed slightly, unaccustomed as he was to less than full disclosure between union cochairs. "Which one?" he asked.
    "Crime and Penisology."
    He let that pass, as ever. Enlightened fathers didn't wash their children's mouths out with soap. "That's an upper-level course," he said. "You need the instructor's permission."
    "She got it! I was a witness." I pantomimed a scrawling of initials, adding a little John Hancockish bravado.
    "I can see you're enjoying this," my father said.
    "Mom can handle it. That class always attracts the crackpots. It's the field trip to the prison, I think. Maybe she shouldn't put that in the catalogue."
    My father said, as if to himself, "This is going to be harder than I thought. More intrusive. I'd hoped that between my classes and the union, I wouldn't have more complications to deal with." He sat up straighter, shook that off. "Did you hear what I just said? 'No more complications to deal with'? I can't believe I said that. That is not who I am. You know that, right? Your old dad is not a shirker."
    I said, "Don't worry. She's got a whole dormitory full of kids now. I'm sure one of the lost souls will adopt her."
    He seemed to perk up a bit with that. "And every year there are at least a dozen or so on campus from broken homes with no mothers. Maybe someone could steer those girls in Laura Lee's direction."
    "We could," I said. "You and Mom can spot those sad cases a mile away."
    Flattered, he squeezed my hand.
    I said, "That wasn't a compliment. I meant that you spread yourselves a little thin."
    "At your expense?"
    "Sometimes."
    "But you've always come first! Even though we have a hundred girls under our roof, whom we may, on occasion, refer to as daughters, that's hyperbole. As long as we wear the dorm-parent hat, then these boarders, by definition, are our surrogate daughters. But that's fleeting, isn't it? They arrive, most a little needy, and then before we know it, they graduate."
    "Or