Kinfolks by Lisa Alther Read Free Book Online

it might house the Addams family. As I present myself to the receptionist, I doubt if I have a chance here. I have a bad suit and no parents.
    I’m ushered into a room with stained-glass windowpanes and enough elaborately carved oak furniture and paneling to have fueled the fireplace in our cabin for an entire winter. My interviewer, an older woman in a Pendleton plaid suit, doesn’t seem to notice my burlap fashion error. But she does ask where my parents are and how I’ve gotten here from Tennessee. I mumble something about my mother’s having a baby and not being able to get away. The interviewer studies me as though I’ve escaped from Tobacco Road.
    An ornate silver tea service sits on a table beside her needlepoint-upholstered chair. She asks if I’d like some tea.
    I accept.
    Organizing two Limoges cups and saucers, she inquires whether I’d like lemon or milk.
    I’ve never drunk hot tea before, but I like milk and lemon, so I say, “Both, please.”
    She raises one carefully tweezed and penciled eyebrow. A corner of her lip-brushed mouth twitches. Gritting her molars so that her jaw muscles pulse, she pours milk into my cup, followed by tea. Then she briskly places a slice of lemon on my saucer and passes it to me.
    After I squeeze the lemon into my tea, the milk begins to curdle, and I realize I’ve committed a faux pas. I also realize that my quest is hopeless. Whatever made me think that a mongrel like me could sprint with these Ivy League greyhounds? Did I learn nothing from the flag-swinger debacle? I’m wearing a suit sewn from a feed sack. My parents aren’t interested enough in my future to accompany me. My brother at MIT is a juvenile delinquent. I don’t know not to put both milk and lemon in hot tea. And my SATs are well below Wellesley’s average.
    A month later, I’m accepted at Wellesley. Everyone is incredulous, especially me.
    My grandmother arrives at our house in her silver Cadillac demanding, “What’s wrong with Duke or Vanderbilt?”
    I reply that nothing’s wrong with them, but I want to see the world.
    â€œBoston is hardly the world,” she snaps.
    After enduring many years of condescension from the Seven Sisters wives of the Kingsport plant managers, she’s pleased I’ve been deemed bright enough to function at Wellesley (an assumption that soon proves questionable). But she also seems sad. It was a giant step from Darwin, Virginia, to Kings-port, Tennessee, and once she’d taken it, she rarely looked back. The step from Kingsport to Boston is even more drastic, and she doubts John and I will look back either.
    Her own son went up north to the University of Rochester, one of five promising Kingsport students given scholarships there by George Eastman (who killed himself shortly afterward, hopefully for unrelated reasons). After Harvard Medical School, a residency at the Roosevelt Hospital in New York, and a tour of duty in the field hospitals of France, my father finally came back home for good. But he brought along a Yankee wife, a Congregationalist whose idea of a good time is to read the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
. The Virginia Clubbers asked my grandmother why my father couldn’t have married a nice Virginia girl, and she repeated this to my mother.
    As I skim the results of the senior class poll to be published in the next edition of the
Indian Tribune
, I descend into a state of terminal chagrin: I’ve been elected Most Studious. It was bad enough not to make flag swinger. Now this!
    In the first place, I’m not studious. I cruise Broad with the best of them. In the second place, I didn’t need to be studious to become salutatorian. Any idiot could have done well on the true-false quizzes that determine our grades.
    In fact, but for the machinations of Mrs. Hawke, I’d have been valedictorian. At the end of the term, she gave us several spelling tests in which she mispronounced