Marge Piercy.

The Third Child.

* CHAPTER ONE *.

Your father is an important man." Rosemary placed her small delicate hands firmly on the ebony surface of her desk, the desk that had followed her through the governor's mansion to the Washington house the Senator had rented at what Rosemary said was an exorbitant price. She had called Melissa and Billy into her office at the back. "You have to learn to behave accordingly. If this gets into the papers, it could damage your father."

Billy was trying to look remorseful, but Melissa worried he was not succeeding. The windows were open onto the narrow yard, where something exotic was in bloom. It was spring vacation and much warmer in D.C. than at Miss Porter's School in Connecticut where Melissa was in her last year. In her father's family, the Dickinsons, the women always attended Miss Porter's-even her, no matter how far down the family hierarchy she was rated. The garden was her favorite part of this new house in Georgetown on a street called P in the block off Wisconsin where her parents had moved after the election. She and Billy sat out there last night smoking dope under a magnolia whose big flowers were just browning and falling on them. A tree with pink flowers was opening, a tree as feminine as if it wore a prom dress. In the twilight after Billy went in, she had lain under that tree imagining a lover-not real sex, with its brutal disappointment, but with a soft dissolve, romantic, like perfect kissing. Her grandmother Susie, whom she never saw anymore, would know the name of that tree. When she was little, she had wanted to be like Grandma Susie-growing tomatoes and peonies, beans and zinnias in the yard in Youngstown. She had started a garden on the grounds of the governor's mansion in Harrisburg, but when Rosemary discovered it, the gardener pulled her plants up and restored it the way it had been. Melissa was supposed to want to be a lawyer or something better, whatever that might be. Her father wanted to be President, and her mother was determined to get him there. Billy had bought the pot on M Street. M and Wisconsin were a different world from the staid block of old houses mostly flush to the sidewalk and always swarming with workers painting, gardening, tuck-pointing the bricks, primping the houses-on Wisconsin and on M it was a world of the young, alive and noisy, racially mixed and of all classes. This house was Second Empire, which sounded sinister, and only a hundred twenty-five years old; Rosemary had wanted a federal house of red brick two hundred years old, but those were even more expensive.

"It was just pot, Mother," Billy said. His forelock had fallen over his eyes. She fought the impulse to push it back. His hair in the sun beaming through the window was that light red gold called strawberry blond, different from anybody in the family-not blond like Father and Merilee. Not ordinary light brown hair like Rich Junior and herself. Mother's hair had been blond for years now; it went with her porcelain skin.

"You're just fifteen. Are you trying to get expelled again?" Rosemary shook her head in annoyance.

He gave Melissa one of those Here-we-go-again looks. Actually Billy did not much care if he got expelled, as he'd said to her when he was waiting to be called on the carpet-the two of them sprawled on her bed as always talking in mutters and whispers. He had friends at prep school, but he made friends easily and one school was like another to him. This was his third. They always let him get away with a lot before they tossed him because he was the Senator's son, and because he was good at every sport he bothered to try.

"I was just going along with the other guys."

Melissa said, "In high school, most guys smoke pot sometimes, Mother. Be glad he's not on Ecstasy or heroin. Let's have some perspective." She always tried to make peace between her mother and her younger brother-if only Billy could manage to seem truly sorry, but he couldn't fake it successfully. He had never taken their mother's reprimands as intensely as she had. She had been a puppyish fool, wagging her tail, fetching slippers, trying, always trying to be someone Rosemary wanted for a daughter. Now her aim with her mother was to be cool. She was an undercover agent playing the dutiful daughter, but they would see. They had no idea who she really was, her deadly skills and her hidden brilliance as she played the part of a too tall, too busty, hardworking high school senior. But under that drab exterior, she was something else, something that would astonish them. Oh, sure.

Rosemary ignored her. "Everything you do is visible, Billy. Everything any of us does can come back to haunt your father."

Melissa sighed and slumped into a chair. It was a weird curvy chair, which she supposed went with the house, upholstered in nubby blue silk. Her father's importance. She could not remember when it did not exist. In retrospect, it gilded even the snapshot of him from his Dartmouth days, holding an oar aloft like a captured trophy-a shot always accompanied by the caption saying that he had gone to the 1968 Olympics with his sculling team. She had learned only two years ago that he had not actually competed-her aunt Karen told her. Karen cultivated the unusual habit in the Dickinson family of telling the truth, not a trait valued by the rest of the family-except Billy and her, the two young misfits. Actually Billy was too handsome to be a real misfit. It was one of the many things she wished for, to be gorgeous like her older, golden sister Merilee or like Billy. Billy was two and a half years younger than Melissa. He had been a cute kid, but he had gone through an awkward period around puberty-an awkwardness she had never grown out of. But he had. Lately they weren't as close. Karen was her favorite relative, but she had only been let out of the sanitarium to attend Grandpa Dickinson's seventy-fifth birthday celebration. For the last five years, she had been shut up there. One of Rosemary's favorite admonitions to her: "Do you want to be like your aunt Karen?" when Melissa had done something her parents viewed as out of line, inappropriate, not supportive of family ambitions and goals.

Daddy's importance was like a family member, bigger and even more visible than her two older siblings, Richard IV, called Rich-to differentiate him from his father, Dick. Rich was already talked about as a candidate for state rep in Pennsylvania-and her perfect sister, Merilee, in her first year of law school at George Washington. When Melissa was little, she had imagined her father a king, a radiant figure out of fairy tales. As a highly visible prosecutor in Philadelphia, he had appeared a hero who put dangerous bad guys in jail. She would sometimes enter a room behind him, behind her mother, and the air would crackle and people would stand and applaud and cheer. It had been years since she had thought of him that way. She did not like to remember that she had been such a sucker for his phony smiles and big hellos and ready laugh. How she had believed in him! She had drawn his portrait in crayons, then in acrylic for art class. She had kept a photo of just the two of them-usually photos were of just him and Rosemary, him and some other politician, one of him and the President, or of the whole family-on her dresser until this year.

The first big event Melissa remembered after her father became governor was an execution. It was actually the second execution, but Melissa had been in bed with one of her frequent sinus infections during the first. Number two was a criminal Daddy had prosecuted himself. One great thing about being eighteen was that she had gradually come to understand things that had been encoded and hidden when she was young and nave. Her past with her parents rewrote itself as she gathered knowledge, as the landscape of her childhood mutated out of golds and bright sky blues to a landscape with shadows and dark pits and hidden fires burning underground like those anthracite mines under Wilkes-Barre that had been ablaze for decades. Her parents were powerful and she was powerless, but she could try to place them in perspective, she could learn and criticize, silently, stealthily. With them, stealth was everything.

Both parents had been out that night. Daddy was at the execution, and Rosemary was talking with her favorite reporter from Channel Four. Merilee and Rich were away at school. Melissa and Billy were in the upstairs rumpus room of the governor's mansion, supposed to be watching The Little Mermaid on the VCR, but both of them wanted to watch TV, where all the people with candles were in the streets singing. It was the same outside. Every so often they would look out the window and see the people gathered on Second beyond the fence that surrounded the governor's mansion. Security cameras would be trained on the crowd, and she could see state troopers standing by, as well as the regular security men she knew by name. Mommy called the demonstrators softheads.

The prisoner's name was Toussaint Parker, and he had killed a policeman. Mommy said it was an excuse for the radicals and the commies and the softheads to make a fuss, but no judge was going to let off a Black troublemaker who killed a cop. Melissa noticed all the African-American staff were gathered downstairs in the kitchen watching too. She was aware that her nanny Noreen did not rejoice in the execution the way Rosemary did. Melissa loved Noreen, who had come to take care of her and Billy when Daddy was first running for governor. She never felt that Noreen was disappointed in her the way her parents were. Sometimes she thought that they forgot about her entirely. "I'm not the oldest, I'm not the youngest, I'm not the smartest, I'm not the best looking, I'm not the best athlete," she wailed to Noreen.

"Then you be the sweetest. You be the sugar in the family tea," Noreen said, ruffling Melissa's too fine brown hair. She loved to be held against Noreen's warm chest, which she could sink into, her nice big lap where she was welcome.

Billy and she thought they would actually see the killer die, but they didn't show it on television. Just the people outside the prison with their candles, the people in Philadelphia in front of the courthouse, and the people outside their own house they could see if they peeked out. It looked more impressive on TV. The guy from the Channel Seven news interviewed Daddy and then a police chief who said that cold-blooded cop killer was going to get what he deserved, to deter other lawless thugs from shooting policemen and leaving their families widows and orphans. She had been so silly, she had imagined that when her father was still prosecutor he went after killers like a lawman in a Western and brought them back.

Both her parents liked to ride. When they all went up to Vermont to Grandpa Dickinson's farm, everybody got on horses and climbed the trails on the mountain. Melissa really loved horses. When she was little, she used to pretend to ride a horse to school, before her father got too important for her to walk. Horses were the best thing about going to Vermont to visit crabby Grandpa Dickinson-especially the big grey horse Legerdemain-so it was easy to imagine her father on horseback bringing the outlaw to jail with hands tied behind his back. Seeing her father on TV that night, she wanted to be worthy of him, the hero who had captured the outlaw and now, as governor, was about to hang him. Except, as her teacher had explained in class, execution was by lethal injection. That made her think of the school nurse sticking a needle in her arm to give her a vaccine so she wouldn't get measles. She and Billy fell asleep on the floor by the TV. When Rosemary got in, she was upset to see them sprawled there and scolded Noreen.

When Noreen went out of the governor's mansion that week, she put on a black armband for Toussaint Parker who had been executed, as did a lot of people on the streets of the predominantly African-American neighborhood surrounding the governor's mansion and its huddled bunch of office buildings; but when she came inside, she took it off. Still, Rosemary must have heard about it, because suddenly Noreen was gone. Her place was taken by a white lady with a weird accent, Mrs. Corniliu, who bossed them around and told them how spoiled they were and how lucky. Melissa tried to feel lucky, to make herself worthy of her famous daddy and her beautiful mother.

Melissa felt as if she abandoned past selves like snakeskins of shame along her bumpy route toward adulthood. Girls in her class said that senior year was the best time of their lives, but she never believed that. No, she viewed herself as a project under construction, the road all torn up, piles of dirt heaped to the right and left, dump trucks coming and going, cranes digging away. She would remake herself, she would, into somebody strong and important.

Melissa jerked to attention, suddenly aware her mother was addressing her. "I hope I never have to worry about you, Melissa. I have to know you'll behave in an exemplary way when you begin college in the fall." Rosemary fortunately had no idea how many stupid stunts Emily and she had pulled over the years, because they were more careful than Billy about covering their tracks, about not getting caught. Together they had gotten drunk endless times, tried Ecstasy, shoplifted sweaters, bought and worn clothes Rosemary had forbidden as too revealing, too slutty, gone to raves, though Melissa was too shy, even on Ecstasy, to pick up guys there.

Rosemary said "college" and not "Wesleyan." Melissa suspected her mother had momentarily forgotten which school had accepted her. Rich had gone to Penn State and Merilee had gone to Penn, but now that Father was a senator, she was allowed to go out of state, even though her mother had been disappointed in her choice. Wesleyan would do her no good, Rosemary said, in terms of important contacts. She could easily fall in with a radical crowd there. But Melissa liked Connecticut, near her best friend Emily's family.

She knew her mother didn't want her to go to Wesleyan because she had hidden outside her mother's office and heard Alison, her mother's factotum, discussing whether Rosemary should insist she go elsewhere. Then later she had listened on the steps while Merilee was arguing with Rosemary. They hardly ever fought, so it was worth spying, especially since it turned out they were arguing about her. Merilee said, "You made me go to George Washington law school instead of UCLA to keep me close by. Don't lean on Melissa that way. She's already kind of damaged."

Her gratitude to Merilee for defending her choice of college vanished when she heard what Merilee really thought of her. Damaged? What did that mean? At that point, she hadn't even done it with Jonah yet.

Reprieve time! Alison came to the door of Rosemary's office. "Millie Hay on the phone for you."

Rosemary picked up at once, motioning them out. When she used what Melissa called her geisha voice, Melissa knew the woman must be important. Normally that coy girlish voice was reserved for notable men who might be useful to Dick. She hung around downstairs just long enough to hear Alison congratulating Rosemary and Rosemary gloating. A Supreme Court justice was going to attend a dinner Dick and Rosemary were invited to.

By her third day home, Melissa realized her mother had managed to keep the story quiet and satisfy the school. Senator Dickinson would give a speech for commencement. Melissa had often heard it said that her mother was the brains behind the Senator. She believed it. Billy was a star hockey player and a reasonable baseball player. Her only athletic achievement was tennis, which Aunt Karen had taught her to play. Everything physical was his gift-even the way he moved made her sigh with envy, wishing she had his natural grace. The only thing he couldn't do was dance-he was tone-deaf, like her father. There was never music in the house unless she put it on. For years, she had given her mother and father CDs she loved, that promptly disappeared. She had thought music was one thing she could share with them, but she had been wrong. Neither was interested. For her, music was escape, another level of reality.

College meant liberation, motivating her to keep her grades up, to do every single pukey extracurricular activity from yearbook to French Club to Ecology Club to Young Republicans. Not that she intended to vote Republican when she was old enough. She'd vote Communist or Green or Vegetarian or anything at all that had nothing to do with her parents. She said that to Billy, who did not care, and her best friend, Emily, who thought it was cool. She'd tried that out on Jonah to make clever conversation, but he told her she was stupid.

She did community service to build up her resume. Summers, she volunteered to take underprivileged kids on camping trips, to the zoo, to the park, whatever. Rosemary had been disturbed when she went to a movie with Mark, who was Korean and volunteering also. Suddenly Mark was moved to another program and she never ran into him again. Back at Miss Porter's, she joined an after-school program in Hartford. Out where Miss Porter's stood, everything was pretty, handsome houses, manicured countryside. Everybody thought of insurance when you said Hartford. In reality, the center of the city was depressed beyond what she could have imagined. Sometimes when she read the little essays she was teaching her kids to write, she cried. She wanted passionately to help them, but it was ladling out a river with a spoon. The level of misery and trouble and rough stuff in their lives was lacerating. She tried to talk with Rosemary about it, but Rosemary nodded and got that glazed look with a little smile. "Yes, dear, those are the people your father is trying to help." Then her attention focused. "Should you be volunteering in such a dangerous neighborhood? Are there drugs around?"

At least she could share her feelings with Emily. She missed Emily on spring break and wished she could have gone home with her. Emily's parents were easygoing chiropractors who lived in East Lyme-which Emily said had given its name to Lyme disease. Aside from always being on a different diet every time she visited-macrobiotic, microbiotic, high protein, fish and seaweed, high carbohydrate-they seemed jolly and laid-back, both playing recorders in a consort and with music always jingling in the house and not an excess of questioning. That was what Melissa called a real vacation. Emily's home was like a soft airy cocoon with good music.

On the top floor in her dormered room, Melissa escaped to call Emily. "I am just so utterly bored, Em. I could just go up in smoke and drift away."

"I bet if I was there, we'd have fun. It's hot. Georgetown Park, that complex, it looks like a great place to pick up guys." Emily could always hook up. She could walk into a mall and come out with a guy. "Maybe your sister knows someone. Have you heard from Jonah?"

"He's such a pig, Em. I'm done with him. All he wants to do is knock boots. He's barely nice to me anymore. And who would I ever meet here? Merilee's seeing this other law student-" She knew deep down she wished Jonah would call or e-mail anyhow, just to make her feel better about herself, even if she was through with him. He made her feel used.

"Is he cute?"

"He's a dork. He's so straight he can't bend over to tie his shoes. But Mother doesn't like him. She doesn't think he's good enough."

"So is Merilee fucking him?"

"Sure. She practically lives in his apartment."

"Your mother doesn't mind?"

"She's so too busy with Daddy and Rich. Rich is getting married in June and it's like a full-time career, Em. It's this Major Event, like an election. Alison, Rosemary's assistant, makes these endless lists and schedules and charts."

"So it's going to be a big society thingie? Can I go?"

"In my place! I was wondering if I couldn't get out of it by developing some not too debilitating disease like a mysterious fever and maybe I could even waste away some." She loved the idea of wasting away. If only she could lose ten pounds, she knew she would like herself better.

"Like Camille." Emily hummed something. She knew all the operas from her parents.

Melissa had no idea who Camille was. "It just seems like forever till we get to college." Melissa felt safe when she thought of going to Wesleyan with Emily. She would not be lonely, even if nobody else liked her. Emily did not care that her father was a senator, for she only got excited about movie stars and rock singers. "Emily, you're the best!" she said suddenly. Em was the only person with whom she could be completely honest. They understood each other's fears and anxieties and wishes. They knew each other's secrets.

"Sure I am." Emily giggled. "Best in show." Emily barked into the phone, subsiding into giggles. Melissa hated to end the connection. She felt cut off as she sat on the bed with its new Ralph Lauren comforter. Maybe once she had lived someplace real. The governor's mansion in Harrisburg had not been theirs. They just occupied it for two terms, and most of the downstairs held reception rooms and offices. This house too was a showplace for entertaining, with her mother's office, Alison's little office and an enormous livingroom and a diningroom formal enough to choke her on the parlor floor. Downstairs, in a sort of high basement called the subfloor, was a kitchen suitable for a restaurant with an antique of a dumbwaiter connecting it to the diningroom above, her father's at-home office lined with books and military memorabilia, and two rooms used by whatever aides were around plus the drivers, when they were in the house. Her parents' bedroom, dressing rooms and Alison's room plus a guest room were on the second floor. Her parents' room opened onto the roof of the downstairs extension, with a glass table, wicker chairs and potted plants. Upstairs under the mansard roof were her bedroom, Billy's and storage. Nominally she was supposed to share her bedroom with Merilee, but her older sister was living in Foggy Bottom near George Washington U with two other law students. The row house in Philadelphia that maintained Dick Dickinson's residence in his state was even less a home and didn't even have the excitement of Georgetown-when she could escape Rosemary's scrutiny.

Emily's family lived in a real house, with a black Labrador and an Irish setter, with old food in the back of the refrigerator, with CDs on every table and seat, so you had to look before you sat down. On one couch the setter Finnegan would be snoozing on an old fisherman's sweater. On the other, there would be newspapers and half-read books spread out. The Lab, Othello, had his special cushion by the fireplace. Melissa envied Emily her parents. She wanted warm fuzzy parents who would make her drink seaweed shakes, who played La Boheme at top volume and sang along with it while throwing sticks and rubber bones for the dogs to fetch. Emily, of course, resented her parents. She felt they were so into each other and their work that they couldn't really see or understand her. They had no idea what she really did. Emily had been sexually active since fourteen. Melissa admired Emily for her daring. Melissa always hung back, but Emily was always tugging her forward. She was always resolving to be bolder, like Em, to have the courage to take chances. Em had been on the pill for years.

A knock on her door. It opened before she spoke. Alison, in her thirties with a sleek cap of chopped-off auburn hair and thin as a broomstick, marched in. "You have an appointment at the J'ai Promis Spa in half an hour."

"What for? I never made an appointment." Guiltily Melissa took her feet off the new bedspread. Billy and she were convinced Alison reported every small transgression to their mother.

"Rosemary had me make it. Tonight is the first of the bridal showers-Laura's aunt is giving it. Come on, you'll enjoy looking smashing." Alison sometimes affected British phrases. She came from northern Pennsylvania.

"I hate going to that place!" Lacquered ladies, fashionable ladies, debutantes, they would look at her and quietly sneer. They would be gossiping with the hairdressers, the manicurists, the masseuses about Beltway things she didn't recognize. They would make her feel huge and ungainly. "I can't go. I have homework. I have a paper to finish."

"Finish it tomorrow," Alison said. "You'll feel great after a makeover. The Senator's car is waiting." Alison would never side with her. The assistant before had sometimes let slip a word of commiseration, but Alison was loyal to Rosemary to the death. Alison seemed to have no other ambition or desire than to please Rosemary and ease her through her days. Even the way she said "Rosemary" suggested that uttering it was a privilege she never took for granted.

That car reference rubbed it in. Melissa had been asking for a car for a year, but she wasn't allowed to have one. Rosemary was terrified she'd get a ticket or cause an accident that would reflect on the Senator. "Aren't I supposed to buy a present?" she asked as Alison hustled her downstairs. "I'll shop after the salon."

"You got them a lovely silver serving set."

"Did you have to go shopping? I could have." It might even have been fun, buying something stupid and expensive.

"It's no effort, Melissa. The bridal register is on-line and I simply ordered something from Tiffany's. Our presents are downstairs, wrapped and ready to go."

She was relieved it was Ox driving-short for Oxford, his given name-not Smart Alec. Ox was middle-aged and Black and easygoing, although he also was security. Alec was just twenty-two and insisted on chatting her up. He was a gofer for Joe, Dick's chief of staff, who had come to Washington with her father from Pennsylvania. Joe stood a head shorter than Dick, his grey hair receding from his forehead. Rosemary said it was from pulling his hair in frustration. Melissa hated him. She remembered the first time she had wanted to talk to her father and Joe had interfered. Since her father had run for governor, a fence of aides and assistants and secretaries had been erected between Dick and her. She wasn't important enough. They had stolen her father from her.

Alison probably had two hundred gifts in her brain filed away and labeled. Bridal registers sounded dull. It was just as well she hadn't had to buy the present. It was so unreal! Rich and Laura had been a couple for three years. Laura was pretty, soft-spoken, a sort of nothing in perfect clothing who was devoted to Rich and with few interests beyond pleasing him and both sets of parents. Laura had all the personality of a sofa pillow. Even when she was playing tennis or jogging, she was perfectly turned out. Rosemary ought to adore her, but didn't. However, since the wedding had been planned for a year, she was going to be stuck with Laura as a daughter-in-law. Laura was the daughter of one of Dick Dickinson's richest and most generous backers, so Rosemary could do little about the match. Melissa grinned to herself. Rich was getting what he wanted, a wife he could boss around-the opposite of his mother. Her father liked Laura just fine, for she flirted with him a little, just the right amount. Melissa could still remember when her father used to take her on his lap, but that had stopped when she was ten and began to sprout breasts, way ahead of the girls in her class. All of a sudden he wouldn't hug her anymore. Rosemary never did.

The wedding, she decided, was really an advantage, because it kept Rosemary off her back. Up until age twelve or thirteen, Melissa would have done anything for a larger share of Rosemary's time and affection. Then she had plotted to capture her mother by all-A report cards, by making gifts in arts and crafts for Rosemary's birthday-bowls and scarves and pins that promptly disappeared-by writing supposedly brilliant essays, by attempting to paint or sculpt or make something out of clay she could bring home and show off, anything that would make her mother say, Why, Melissa, I never knew how talented you are! But something always went wrong. Her pot was crooked. Her essay did not follow what her mother considered the best line, her report card was marred by one B. Even when she got 1460 on her SATs, Rosemary remarked that those tests were dumbed down. Now Melissa just hoped to creep along under Rosemary's radar. If she did well in college, maybe her father would appreciate her.

Rosemary, Dick and Joe were using the diningroom table to spread out resumes. Rosemary was saying, "But what does Babezi know about farms?"

Joe smirked. "He eats vegetables, doesn't he?"

Dick nodded. "We'll put him in for farm service agency director. Now the U.S. marshal..." They were making appointments again, the patronage Dick controlled as Senator. He complained it was much less than he'd had at his command as governor, but Rosemary always soothed him.

Melissa felt stunted in her family. Outside, she would blossom, she would grow into someone different from anybody in her family, someone admirable, someone strong and good and loved by others. She would meet people who would judge her not as the inferior child of superior parents, but as herself-alone, separate and visible. Finally she would stand out so powerfully that her mother would see how wrong she had been. We never knew, Rosemary would say, we never guessed. Melissa would do something important or write a wonderful book or make a discovery. It was only a matter of getting away from them finally, so she could show them and the world who she really was.

* CHAPTER TWO *.

Melissa felt superfluous, nothing new. Personally, if she ever did get married, she would just sneak off with the guy and do it on the sly. Quiet and personal was tasteful. This was like an awards ceremony. Rich had been sleeping with Laura since he graduated from Harvard Business School, so why couldn't they just say, Hey, we're a couple. Give us a toaster and call it even. But no, Rosemary and Laura's mother, Mrs. Potts, had been planning this event for a year. Now it was hot as a Frialator in Washington and they all had to continuously change their clothes and run around dolled up like idiots. Every five minutes, there was a crisis about whether some senator or cabinet official or under-secretary of waste management or presidential advisor on office supplies was going to come. It was sickening! As if any of them liked each other. It was just head counting. How many advisors and undersecretaries can you cram into a church on a Saturday in June?

It was lucky Laura's parents had money, because this was an incredible potlatch of the stuff. Laura's father was a relatively new backer of Dick's-had kicked in for his campaign for a second term as governor of Pennsylvania. Mr. Potts owned an interstate trucking firm, a corporation specializing in highway construction, a string of ice cream parlors and several steak and brew restaurants. Mr. Potts had the habit of talking as if over a windstorm, to make himself heard by the very deaf. Perhaps he was deaf himself, for he never seemed to hear half of what people said. He had been calling her Melinda and Marissa and Melody. She noticed he never got Merilee's name wrong. If she had that bellowing man to deal with, she would buy earplugs, but Rich seemed to like Potts just fine. Rosemary was closeted with him half the morning. He wasn't her usual type of flirtation, but he was a backer and thus entitled to some attention. Plus the Pottses were paying a fortune for this wedding. Rosemary felt a lavish wedding might put a freshman senator like Dick on the Washington society map. So Mr. Potts was the focus of Rosemary's charm, along with wives of men she wanted to attend.

When Rosemary wanted to pick the brains of some useful type, when she was buttering up a backer or a supporter or useful connection, she spoke differently than she did any other time. Her voice became soft and girlish. She was deferential and almost coy, but she never concealed her intelligence. That fine-pointed instrument was always available. She was absolutely loyal to her husband. Her world was built on Dick and his career. She did not have affairs. No, she had intense ladylike flirtations, usually knee to knee over coffee or tea or sherry.

Alison was frantically busy with the Wedding. Somewhere a gown as large as Idaho was being sewn by angels with gold thimbles. The Save the Date invitations had been sent out six months earlier, hand calligraphy by a weird woman built like an upended box of tissues who actually wore a pince-nez. Emily and she had giggled over that. The Pottses lived near Bryn Mawr, but they had taken a house in Washington for the year so that Laura and her mother could prepare. Mr. Potts usually stayed in Philadelphia, but occasionally he appeared to roar at them. Dick always made time for him, as did Rosemary. Laura was the only daughter in a family with two boys, one of whom was whispered to be gay. Her parents were putting their all and everybody else's into this wedding.

"If you got married," Melissa asked Alison, staggering by with a load of mail that would tax a healthy elephant, "would you want a big wedding like this?"

Alison looked at her blankly. "Married? Why would I marry?"

"Most women do."

"I don't have time for all that," Alison said. She collapsed at her desk, shaking her head slightly, and began slitting open envelopes. "Your mother needs me. She calls me her right arm."

Melissa was relieved when Emily finally came to visit, so she had somebody to vent to besides Billy, who was off every day with guys and indifferent to the preparations. "So it keeps Rosemary off my back. Great. Besides, there'll be champagne. I never got loaded on champagne. They say it's a gigundo high."

Emily and she lay on her bed listening to the bustle. The doorbell rang constantly. Deliverymen came and went. Alison rushed upstairs and then back down. Laura appeared in tears about jewelry. A popular ambassador who was supposed to come was recalled by his country and Rosemary fumed.

"I don't see why Old Man Potts couldn't just buy them a small country like Luxembourg or Liechtenstein. I don't understand weddings. All that preparation-nonstop for twelve months-then one day and it's over."

"I don't know," Emily said dreamily. "You're like the star. You get to wear an incredibly sexy dress if you want to and everybody has to look at you."

"I'd rather have the money. I'd buy a horse and a convertible."

"I'd rather have a ski chalet, like in the mountains."

Melissa had been off of skiing since Jonah had taken her cherry on a ski weekend they had all gone on, Chandler and Emily, her and Jonah. Chandler was the guy Emily had gone out with the longest, a whole four months. Melissa had been so depressed afterward that she had just about given up skiing. Emily said that was silly. You didn't have to fuck some jerk every time you put on a pair of skis. Melissa hadn't felt she had a choice with Jonah, for they had been dating all year and she had just been blowing him and putting the whole thing off.

Em had been so cool about sex, giving her real pointers from the time she started making out with guys. "Don't ever breathe through your mouth, no matter how excited you get. If you had onions even yesterday, if you mouth-breathe on him, he'll be grossed out." It had been a day like today, but in the dorm at Miss Porter's. Em had spoken in a low voice, so the other girls would not overhear. "Use body English when you're kissing." Em wriggled her body. "It gets them excited. They think you're hot. But never initiate the next step or they'll label you a slut. From time to time, you have to say don't or no but not like you really mean it. It's pro forma, if you get what I mean." Then when Melissa knew she had to suck off Jonah, Emily showed her, using a roll-on deodorant that was about the right shape, demonstrating what to do with her lips and tongue. "Run your tongue around it. Like this." Without Em, she would have freaked out or made some gross mistake. Emily kept her from making a fool of herself in the savage clumsy world of teenage dating. Emily knew what to do, although she seemed so tiny and demure, Rosemary never guessed what Em was really like.

"By the way, where's Rich himself?" Em asked, leaning on an elbow.

Melissa suspected that Emily had a little bitty thing for her older brother. "He's on a bachelor party weekend. They've gone to the Bahamas, about ten of them. He'll be back Monday." It would be a disaster if Emily really did fuck him, but Rich never paid attention to Emily. He liked tall women.

"Have you got your dress yet?"

"It's being altered."

"So what's it like?"

"Mother calls it dupioni silk. But I have to wear yellow, and I totally hate yellow. Laura's in white off the shoulder with gold touches. Her mother is in gold. Rosemary is in blue, and us bridesmaids are in shades of blue or yellow. The guys all get to wear black, naturally. The dress isn't half bad, really, except for the color. Maybe afterward I'll have it dyed. It's kind of slinky."

"Are yellow and blue Laura's favorite colors or school colors or what?"

"It's got something to do with the color of the walls where the reception is. Don't ask me. I'd rather wear black. I look thinner in black. I look huge in yellow."

"Melissa, don't be an idiot. You're not fat. You have a shape, that's all."

"Next to my mother and Merilee, I'm fat. They think I am."

"Well, they're wrong. You don't look like a model, you look like a cute girl with boobs and a nice ass. So stop complaining. I wish I had your chest." Emily had been overweight around puberty, when they had first become friends. She had started having sex because she was fat, she said, and that made up for it with guys. She had long since gone on one diet after another till she was pretty thin, but she never did like the way she looked. They were the same that way. Emily had been invited; that was the only thing Melissa had gotten her way on. She had come a week early to stay the whole time in Melissa's room. It made the wedding bearable. She had heard Rosemary say to Alison that having Emily there who was after all only a chiropractor's daughter nonetheless kept Melissa from conspicuously sulking, so it was worth it. Billy liked Emily, calling her a hottie. He kept sauntering around the upstairs with his shirt off to show his tan-he had burnt himself lobster red on the Maryland shore last Sunday-and his muscles, which were all right, but only all right. Billy thought they were better than that. Emily paid no attention. Billy was two years younger and Emily couldn't care less.

Emily was curious about Alison. "Does she have a life?"

"Not that I can tell. She has a couple of girlfriends she sees maybe once a month. She never dates. I've never heard her make a personal call."

"God, Lissa, she's like a servant in those nineteenth-century dramas on PBS-like a ladies' maid."