by Lian Dolan
“Board of trustees meeting tonight. I’ll be here late.”
Adele hustled off in her capable way, a good educator and a gifted administrator. She was tough, but firm. And how she managed to stand up to that collection of egos on the board of trustees was a tribute to her fortitude. Merritt was just one of the Masters of the Universe who had contributed large enough amounts to attain a seat on the board. I supposed that was what she wanted to talk to me about, assuming Merritt’s seat on the board.
The more I thought about it, the more I wanted that seat. I felt like I’d earned it with everything I’d done for the school. I may not be the typical board member with the MBA and the blank check, but the work I’d done at the school meant something to the kids, to the life of the school. I was beginning to believe I was as qualified as any, maybe even more. Even if Aiden was moving on, there was no reason I couldn’t still have a voice at Millington. It was my theater, after all!
I saw the Word-Write committee gathered in Eustice Courtyard, a collection of about a dozen mothers, all clinging to Starbucks venti lattes and frantically typing information into their Blackberrys. If all the women had been in suits, this would have looked like any business meeting in any company in Los Angeles, with a mix of races and faces. But the yoga wear on half the participants was a dead give-away that this was a gathering of Pasadena mothers. At any given moment, in any given hair salon, grocery store or tart yogurt emporium, 50 percent of the mothers in town would be decked out in lululemon yoga pants, even if the last class they had been to was in 2004 before Pilates ate suburbia. I myself had fallen prey to this trend, leading Tina to beg me one day, “Buy some pants with an actual zipper or no one will take you seriously.”
As I surveyed the table with half suits and half yoga pants, I wondered where I would fit in now, with my job. Would I make Team Yoga Pants feel inferior now that I had to wear clothing with zippers and tailored shirts?
No, these were all my people. Nothing to worry about here.
There was Dependable Jeanie from publicity and art director Sandy from decorations sitting next to Kate and Sally, the speaker series girls. Cris and Kathy, the hardest-working women on the food committee, were squeezed in next to the go-getter book donations team of Sun, Jinny and Jeku. This was an all-star cast lead by Dr. Natasha Natarova, an orthodontist from Pasadena by way of Russia who wore four-inch heels every day, everywhere, because being 5’ 11” apparently wasn’t imposing enough.
Natasha’s husband, Yuri, had many mysterious meetings in Moscow, despite the fact that he allegedly owned a chain of gas stations here. Was he bringing the gas back from Moscow himself? Natasha had immigrated to the U.S. at age 6 but still had an accent strong enough to inspire many “Boris and Natasha” imitations, but only behind her back. She straightened the teeth of most of the middle-school students at Millington with an iron fist. She was a mover and a shaker who had jumped at the chance to “take Word-Write global!” At least that’s what she’d told me over coffee at an informal meeting last June. Now her plans for world domination had hit a snag.
She’d called my cell phone in a panic about an hour ago, screaming the words “disaster” and “cancellation.” She begged me to come to the meeting for my sage wisdom.
“Helen!” Natasha shrieked. “Crisis averted! But thank you for rushing over to help. You are too much.”
Natasha explained that the keynote speaker, so spectacular, so big-time that the school was actually worried about security if the speaker’s name was advertised ahead of time, had backed out at the last minute. Just this morning, she got a call from the agent explaining that the Mystery Speaker had eaten too much sushi and was under medical observation for mercury poisoning. Hence he would be unable to be the main mystery of Mysteries Revealed!
“Who was it?’ I asked, naturally.
“I promised to keep it quiet, but I can’t. Stan Black. Stan “I-wrote-the-Michelangelo-Coda-and-ate-too-much-sushi’ Black,” Natasha spit out in her angriest accented English. “I hate his books. So unbelievable and stupid. The same book over and over again. But he is very popular, when he is not eating sushi. All over the world, people love Stan Black. It would have been a huge story to get him for Millington. But oh no, too much sushi! Don’t think I’m not going to leak this story to your friend Candy.”
I was about to point out that it wouldn’t be the best possible PR for the school or Word-Write to humiliate a top-selling author, but I held my tongue. Let Dependable Jeanie deal with that. Or the Russian mafia.
“I called you for brainstorming because you read so much. And then I had a brilliant idea. I just called Sarah White at the Huntington to see if they had anyone in town that could be mysterious. A great speaker. And guess what?”
I knew what.
“Indiana Jones is in town! Some famous archaeologist who digs up treasures somewhere! Troy, I think. And Sarah said he is a dynamic speaker. Mesmerizing, she said. So he’s all set. I forget his name.”
“Dr. Patrick O’Neill,” I provided. “I work for him.”
A collective gasp escaped from the committee. Knowing looks accompanied the gasp. Since the Meltdown, lots of these women had quietly taken part-time jobs to bolster their husbands' shrinking paychecks. Hourly wages at boutiques, bookstores, clothing resale shops. Now even Helen Fairchild, of the Fairchild Theater, was in the workforce.
“I started today as his research assistant,” I announced, acting as though I’d been chosen for a plum assignment, not just working a J-O-B.
And then the shock turned to admiration. I was Professor Fairchild again.
“That is marvelous, Helen,” Natasha purred. “And is he dynamic, your archaeologist?”
“Oh, yes. He is brilliant.”
“Tell him to bring his bullwhip.”
As I made my way back to Adele Arnett’s office, I spied Aiden hanging out with his friends in the middle school courtyard. I’d texted him that I would be a few minutes late and to meet me at the office. Now I gave him a brief wave; I didn’t want to interrupt his social life. When he was little, he used to love to see me at school, serving up hot lunch or selling popsicles at the school store. Now, in middle school, we both pretended not to notice each other. I respected his space. And, knock wood, he respected me for that.
Aiden’s friends weren’t the cool kids (the lacrosse boys and the drama girls) or the smart kids (the students in the top math class called themselves the Asian Einsteins), but they were solidly in the second tier of popularity. His crowd occupied the social strata just below the Bad Attitudes, the sophisticated kids with older siblings, solvent trust funds and wayward parents, but way above the Puberty Busters, those who either had hit puberty really early and were gigantic and blemish-ridden, or those who had yet to experience the magic of getting taller, getting hairier, or getting breasts. Aiden and his friends, a mix of about eight girls and boys, had settled into their above-average spot comfortably, free of major angst or rebellion.
Even a worrier like me didn’t worry too much about sex, drinking or drugs with his group. Well, in truth, I worried about the sex, because that was free and easy to procure. And the girls in his class seemed about a decade more knowledgeable than the boys in matters of the flesh. When I drove the carpool to games, the boys dished away like I wasn’t even in the car. I loved getting the fly-on-the-wall viewpoint of these man-boys and their daily concerns. Those concerns did not include Tiff, Karly or Morgan.
Listening to Aiden and his classmates talk made me realize that the hours I’d spent agonizing over Keith Von Brockitsch in eighth grade were a complete waste of time. Thirteen-year-old boys are not thinking about the finer qualities of thirteen-year-old girls. They are debating the finer points of video games and paintball guns.
I’d start worrying in earnest next year, when Aiden went to high school and his new friends might be sufficiently savvy enough to steal pharmaceuticals or beer, but for now his friends seemed more interested in iChatting and going to the movies together
than breaking into their parents’ liquor cabinets.
I couldn’t really say the same for that jaded lacrosse crowd. I kept my eye on them.
Before I turned into the headmistress’s office, I took one more look at Aiden. He looked absolutely nothing like Merritt and everything like my brother Des. Merritt had been tall and thick, his features broad and open. He had been handsome in a prep school kind of way: neat, clean, blue-eyed, blue-blazered. Merritt told me once he thought he looked like Ed Harris with more hair. With more hair and less intensity, I concurred.
Marriage is a series of little half-truths and hasty agreements that add up to a life. I certainly wasn’t going to spoil my husband’s vision of himself.
But Aiden seemed to have come entirely from my gene pool in terms of looks. Someday he’d be tall and lean like my brother, with great dark eyebrows and a cute face. Now he was just growing and eating and trying to keep up with all the changes. When Aiden was little, I loved that he looked like my side of the family. I was surrounded by Fairchilds, but Aiden was so clearly a Castor. With Merritt gone, maybe it was too bad he didn’t inherit something other than bad debt from his dad.
“Come on in, Helen!” Adele’s voice broke my reverie. Right, time to talk to the headmistress and accept that board seat.
Adele Arnett’s office was warm and cozy, with dark stained beams, Oriental rugs and a seating area with two brown leather chairs and an olive green chenille couch. Adele was sitting at her large, neat, antique oak desk when I strolled in. Even as involved as I was at Millington, I hadn’t spent much time in Adele’s office. Aiden wasn’t in trouble much, and Merritt and I weren’t the type of parents who complained over every little grade or indignity suffered on the playground.
“Suck it up,” Merritt would tell Aiden when he came home with another horror story about the unfairness of the touch football game at recess. “It’s a dog-eat-dog world. You’ve gotta learn to deal with assholes. You know why you suck it up now? Because someday you’ll be managing those assholes. Then they’ll have to suck it up.”
Classic Merritt.
“So, tell me how the testing went at Ignatius. What did Aiden say?” Adele jumped right into the conversation. I appreciated her efficiency.
“He said it went fine. But he says that about everything, and then we get the C-minus.” I laughed. It was true! “Fine” was the kiss of death for Aiden.
“When’s your interview?”
“On Friday afternoon. I’m nervous,” I admitted. The admission director at Ignatius had put off our interview until the last possible date because of the “circumstances.” Now, after my meltdown with Patrick O’Neill, I was afraid I was going to come across as a complete nut job. Merritt was a master in this type of situation, so I’d usually deferred to him. Now I was on my own.
“Don’t worry,” said Adele. “They’re good people at Ignatius. They understand. And really, the interview is about Aiden, not you and your life.”
That was a lie and both Adele and I knew it. At all of the local private schools, the “interview” was more about checking out the family than the kid. When Aiden had “interviewed” at Millington, he was 5 and really had no opinion about the kinds of questions that we’d been asked, like mounting a successful capital campaign or measuring our commitment to the Millington community. Aiden sat in the corner and played with a dump truck.
The admissions director at Ignatius had already met Aiden on several occasions. Millington was a feeder school that set up private tours for their kids to ensure a high yield of acceptances. It was me Ignatius wanted to see.
Me without Merritt.
“And don’t worry, Helen, we are not going to alert Ignatius about Aiden’s grades. Obviously, he’s just checked out since his dad’s death. Who can blame him? We’ll give him some incompletes for this quarter if it comes to that, and he can make up all the work in the last quarter.” Adele poured herself another cup of coffee from a sleek Cuisinart machine on the antique side table. She splashed in some milk and waited for my response.
I was dumbfounded.
“I’m sorry, Adele. What do you mean, ‘checked out’?”
“Well, you’ve seen the progress reports. He hasn’t turned anything in, hasn’t passed a test. It’s understandable. And we know you have your hands full with everything you’re dealing with. You couldn’t be that much help to him.”
What was she talking about? I hadn’t seen any progress reports, had I? I would have noticed them in my inbox; the teachers e-mailed them every week if there was a problem. And did she really need to add “you have your hands full”? And “not much help”?
Headmistress Arnett’s patented warm voice was starting to sound a little sharp to my ears.
“Adele, I haven’t seen any progress reports, and my hands are not so full that I would ignore Aiden. He is my first priority.”
“Of course. I didn’t mean to imply that. It’s just that we’ve been updating you on Aiden’s lack of effort,” she said, moving over to her desk and pulling up the progress reports on her computer. “Here we go. Three sent in the past three weeks to your merritthelen address.”
Of course! I hadn’t checked that address in weeks. One of the first things I did after Merritt’s death was get a new e-mail address. It was a tiny, tiny expression of anger. I didn’t want that old address anymore, the one that Merritt and I had coined when we got our first e-mail account and Merritt never used himself. Only I answered to merritthelen. Once I found out about Shelley Sleazy, I wanted a fresh cyber-start.
Obviously, I’d forgotten to inform the school, and the reports were going to the old address. But why hadn’t the school noticed my auto-reply with the new address?
“I have a new e-mail address. This is the first I’ve heard of Aiden’s issues.” I felt myself on the verge of apology, but something cool in Adele Arnett’s expression stopped me from segueing into a sob story. I concluded concisely, “I’ll get on Aiden. We’ll turn it around.”
“Good. We have the greatest sympathy for him, but we can’t let him graduate if he doesn’t pass his classes, all his classes. You understand, Helen. We have the school’s reputation to think about. The expectations for our students are very high, because the high schools they will attend will demand it. Aiden cannot be an exception.”
Everything generous thing I’d ever thought about Adele Arnett dissipated in that moment. She was talking about a 13-year-old boy who had just lost his father, not his mind. So he had missed some homework and failed some tests? For God’s sake, he’d been at the school for nine years and now he needed some understanding, not tough love. Aiden was grieving, not selling drugs, threatening teachers or cheating on exams. If he wasn’t an exception, he should be. We were talking about the eighth grade, not medical school.
Sometimes, the years of living with Merritt paid off in unexpected ways. Like right now. I wanted more than anything to pummel her with the big Waterford crystal apple that must have been a gift from one of her exceptional students. But if I killed Adele Arnett, then Aiden surely would not graduate.
I sucked it up.
“Understood. You have the school to think about.”
“Speaking of thinking about the school, Helen, we have a board of trustees meeting tonight. It’s when we nominate new board members for next year,” Adele transitioned so smoothly, I barely had time to grasp the conversation’s new direction.
Was she kidding? Did she really think that after threatening to fail my son, to ruin his entire scholastic career to preserve the reputation of Millington as a top-notch academic school, a school my money had help to build, by the way, that I was going to spend one more minute of my valuable time steering the future of her heartless institution? Adele Arnett could go to…
“And we’ve decided to ask Yuri Natarov to fill Merritt’s seat. We hope you understand. We have the future of Millington to ensure.”
I could no longer suck it up.
“No, Adele, I don’t understand. Pleas
e explain.”
Then Adele Arnett displayed the mettle that enabled her to stand up to the corporate CEOs on the board. She got nasty.
“We need the seat for someone who can afford to support the school financially in a substantial manner. We need that now more than ever. I don’t believe that is within your capabilities anymore. It’s time for somebody else to have the opportunity.”
I stood up and was grateful that I was wearing the fashionable wide-legged trousers that Tina had picked out at J.Jill, so that Adele Arnett, Headmistress of the Damned, couldn’t see my knees shaking.
But my voice was strong.
“Aiden is going to graduate from this school, regardless of whether he passes all his classes or not. And if Ignatius calls, you are going to support his admission. Or else I let it be known to the people who still consider my opinion important, like Candy McKenna, gossip columnist, my good friend Natasha Natarova and my mother-in-law Mitsy Fairchild, who still has a healthy checkbook, what you just said to me. And your reputation, Headmistress Arnett, will suffer. Not mine. I hope you understand.”
Headmistress of the Damned raised an eyebrow, then nodded slightly.
Merritt was right about one thing: Someday I would have to manage the assholes.
“Hey, Mom.”
“You ready to go?” I said in a tight voice that I hoped sounded normal. “Hi, guys! Did you learn anything today?” I turned in the direction of Aiden’s buddies, Dex and Connal Ramsey, fraternal twins, IVF-style.
“Not a thing, Mrs. Fairchild,” red-haired Dex answered without missing a beat. Connal, the adorkable one with the brown hair and the high IQ, guffawed. Someday, Dex would host his own late-night talk show, I had no doubt. He was sharp, funny and media literate well beyond his years. Both his parents were TV writers of some fame. Until his turn behind the desk, though, Dex would have to weather the curses of adolescence, bad skin and a giant nose, with a series of Best Sense of Humor honors. “We have a sullied reputation to uphold here at Millington, and we’re doing our part.”
