My Latest Grievance Read Online Free PDF Page A

off when the list went from long to short. Aviva and David discussed filing a suit based on several brands of discrimination: gender, religious, or union activity.
    Counsel for the union dissuaded her after a cursory evaluation of the finalists, all of whom had been presidents or deans somewhere. Aviva's administrative experience had been tested only in the Hatch parlor, where the faculty union executive committee cooked up its various strategies, and her one-semester stint as acting department head in Sociology. Still, it was her nature to feel downtrodden, to bite the hand that fed her, to grieve, protest, picket, sue.
    I was slipping, philosophically speaking. Not that I didn't want wrongs to be righted, but I also wanted the freedom to voice my admiration for things material and foolish, and to wear clothes not stitched by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union.
    My friendship with the Woodburys worried my parents. Wasn't the president's daughter spoiled? Rides to school and enough shoes for an entire Third-World village? "If her parents spoiled her," I answered, "it's their fault, not hers."
    "But don't you find her shallow?" my mother persisted. "I don't get any sense from her that she cares about what's happening in the wider world. Do you ever discuss politics? Do you know how her family votes?"
    "We're teenagers," I said. "Aren't we allowed to be shallow? I'm surrounded by girls"—I gestured to the floors above us—"who spend more time on the phone than on their homework. Do I have to be a little socialist before I'm even old enough to vote?"
    "Who called us socialists?" my mother asked sharply.
    "No one."
    "It's not a dirty word," she said.
    "Is it something you heard over at the Woodburys'? Or at the Leonards'?" asked my father.
    I said, "Marietta doesn't know what a socialist is."
    "I meant her parents."
    "Like Dr. Woodbury is going to say, 'Hi, Frederica. How are your parents the commies?'"
    My mother turned to my father. "See! These associations are coming from somewhere, because she certainly didn't make those leaps from anything she heard in this house."
    "What leaps?" I asked. "And what house? This is barely an apartment."
    "The leap," said my father calmly, "from protected union activity to 'commie.'"
    I said I was exaggerating, trying to get their goat. Okay? We're even. They called Marietta spoiled and shallow, so I called them Reds.
    My mother's expression turned tragic. "But that's our very point: that you would invoke political movements when you need to insult us. It makes me extremely sad."
    The colloquialism "lighten up" had not yet entered common usage, but it would have been exactly the right prescription for Aviva G. Hatch, Ph.D. I said, "You're
extremely sad
? Some parents have children who shoplift and flunk every test. I consider myself a pretty satisfactory daughter, and you should, too."
    Hugs ensued, as I knew they would. My parents were utterly predictable in all matters emotional. They loved when I lectured them, as long as I sounded psychologically astute and came to a kind conclusion:
Dad, sometimes you agree with Mom just to present a united front, but I don't think your heart's really in it ... Mom, you think you're being cool when you say "Hola!" every time you pass a Hispanic student, but it's really dorky. They're Americans. Just say hi.
    I was raising them. The outer Hatches—the professors, union leaders, dorm parents, and non-fashion plates—were famous for their nonconformity and their lefty leadership. Only I knew where the cracks and seams were.
    The Woodburys' united front was just as scripted and even more annoying. They were charming in a way I'd been raised to distrust—they called each other "darling" in public—yet I found myself adopting some of the Woodbury manners just the same. My parents pronounced the Woodburys phonies, a word that sprang to their lips easily and often. Mrs. Woodbury's clothes, my mother claimed, broke the rules of antivanity and