Free My Latest Grievance by Elinor Lipman Page B

flunk out."
    "My point is, we adopt them temporarily, superficially. No one lives here for more than four years."
    "No one except us! We'll never move, unless it's to another dorm."
    "Or across the river," he enthused. "Maybe Harvard will be calling one of these days. Did you know that your mother is a guest at one of their sociology colloquia next fall?"
    "Dad," I said. "How many of our faculty have gone from Dewing to Harvard?"
    He said then what he always said when Dewing crowded in too closely and he remembered that our living arrangement was voluntary, correctable, and not the way of the world. "Maybe we should think about a real home," he said.

    Marietta Woodbury started off on the wrong foot at Brookline High School. It wasn't entirely her fault: Her homeroom teacher introduced her with too much admiration as "the daughter of the new president of our neighbor, Dewing College." Immediately the high school arithmetic progression sprang into action: thirty kids told thirty more kids, and so on, until I heard that that new Marietta girl was high, mighty, and stuck-up. The real crime was hubris: being the daughter of Dewing's president was nothing to crow about at a public school whose PTO boasted dozens of Harvard and MIT professors.
    I decided to help, not out of altruism or fairness—she
was
high and mighty—but because I valued the rides in Mrs. Woodbury's car on rainy days, and perhaps (I now recognize) out of loyalty to Dewing. My first thought was to enlist Patsy Leonard, popular, athletic, younger sister of a much-admired senior. On my left
I had Marietta, kohl outlining her prominent gray eyes, brown hair dyed black and styled like a flapper's; while on my right I had Patsy—cheerful, peppy, freckled, with ginger-colored bangs above the Caribbean blue Leonard eyes.
    I didn't sugarcoat it. I told Marietta in the presidential pantry, as we snacked on duck liver pâté left over from a trustees' cocktail party, "It's not your fault, but people think you're stuck-up."
    "Maybe I am," she said. "And why would I care what the drips at Bullshit High School think about me?"
    I said, "I've seen this all around me, my whole life: New girls arrive, and some rumor swirls around them—they missed freshman year because they were pregnant; they're here because they flunked out of Radcliffe, Wellesley, Vassar, you name it, or were thrown out because of drugs, sex, grades, alcohol, insanity, whatever, and their father bribed someone to get his kid in here." I tapped the rim of her gilt-edged hors d'oeuvre plate. "Besides, it'll make
my
life easier if you're not an outcast."
    "I don't notice you being queen of the hop," said Marietta.
    "I get along," I said. "I play soccer in the fall and basketball in the winter. I went to the junior prom when I was a freshman. I'm considered a good kid."
    "Congratulations," said Marietta.
    "You're talking to a trained professional," I said. "I know what works and what doesn't. So far you've been a disaster, which isn't necessarily bad."
    "And why is that?"
    "Because if you were homely and pathetic, no one would pay any attention."
    Marietta seemed to like that. "And?" she asked.
    "First, I'm going to get help from Patsy Leonard, who's in your Spanish class, and pretty much does whatever I ask her to."
    "Isn't she a cheerleader?"
    "Only jayvee." I hastily explained: It was the culture within her family. It would be unthinkable not to have tried out. She had pinned to her bra the handkerchief that her mother had worn when she was elected cocaptain somewhere many decades ago.
    "How touching," said Marietta.
    I told her that she shouldn't feel superior to Patsy, whose family was so normal that they could win a contest: two boys, two girls, a mother, a father, two sets of grandparents, and they'd never lived anywhere but in a white house with red shutters as long as I'd known them.
    "What does the father do?" Marietta asked.
    I walked to the big refrigerator to take inventory and came back with a