My Latest Grievance Read Online Free PDF

respect for the poor and underdressed: designer, expensive, seasonally fur-trimmed, rarely repeated. "She must be a very insecure woman if she needs to dress herself up in dollar signs," my mother said regularly.
    "What does that mean?" I asked.
    "You haven't noticed that big rock on her finger. She never takes it off."
    I asked, "Is that how you want me to judge people? By their jewelry and clothes? Isn't that a little superficial?"
    She said absolutely not. Well, yes, if you belonged to a teenage clique excluding someone who couldn't afford so-called fashion. But did I not see the difference: money slavishly spent on clothes and jewelry and leather accessories when people were going hungry?
    "Where?"
    "Right here in Boston!"
    I asked, "Ma? Do you think people would stop starving if Mrs. Woodbury stopped shopping?"
    "In the big picture, globally speaking, yes."
    It's not that my mother was stupid. Far from it. I'm sure her IQ was in the genius range, although she would dismiss such categorizing as discriminatory, a scam by the testing establishment. Somewhere along the way, she'd narrowed her sympathies to the ideals I was deeply sick of. She had no compassion for the rich, the well-dressed and well-born, the socially glib and the managerial.
    Perhaps I was the true egalitarian, or perhaps I was rebelling. Either way, I sensed early in my life that a tolerance for things grander than myself would come in handy later.

5 Cahoots
    N OT ENTIRELY UNSELFISHLY , I proposed that my grandmother visit during my school vacation so that I—an only child with working parents, as I liked to remind them—would have company on my upcoming visits to museums and matinees. "She won't live forever," I said. "I'd really like to dedicate this vacation to her just in case she dies soon." My parents agreed, enfolding me in a group hug as reward for my outreach. Public school vacation didn't overlap with the college's spring break, and they were worried that I would sleep till noon and do nothing constructive. Several months had elapsed since the receipt of the necklace, and, because they were easily distracted by the social sciences and faculty disgruntlements, neither parent suspected that I was playing detective.
    My grandmother drove from the Berkshires in what she called "the truck," actually an ancient Hudson Hornet station wagon with bags of potting soil and bone meal in the back. I took her suitcase while she carried a pie plate holding the same apple-cranberry-raisin concoction I'd made the mistake of complimenting too effusively on my last visit.
    "Where are your parents?" she asked as soon as she crossed the threshold.
    "At school. We're going to meet them over at Curran for lunch."
    "I've always meant to sit in on one of David's classes," she said.
    "His classes are Tuesday and Thursday. Mom teaches today, though."
    She hesitated. "Would I enjoy one of hers?"
    "Mom would say
absolutely.
"
    She raised her eyebrows, which I took as an excellent sign that we'd soon be discussing the relative merits of my father's wives. I crossed the kitchen to the bulletin board, where each parent's schedule was thumbtacked. "Monday is Social Stratification. Ninety minutes. Starts at one P.M ."
    She joined me at the bulletin board. "I might just have lunch over at the faculty dining room today and go to one of David's classes tomorrow. Methods of Testing and Assessment sounds interesting."
    "
He
thinks so," I said.
    "I wouldn't want to breeze into your mother's seminar unannounced."
    I said I understood completely. Alternately, we could go to the Museum of Fine Arts, the Isabella Stewart Gardner, the Museum of Science, the glass flowers at Harvard, or the Freedom Trail. But first to settle the all-important question of where she'd sleep.
    "Not the guest suite?" she asked, referring to a bed and bath down the hall occasionally used to house a visiting dignitary or generous alumna.
    I explained that my room had two brand-new mattresses, whereas the small,