Primates of Park Avenue: A Memoir

by Wednesday Martin

  The fate of those female chimps playing in my head, I assessed the playing field. Being shunned was not a pretty picture, nor a fate I wanted for me or my child. The women who were ignoring me seemed nasty and off-putting, yes. I wanted to poke a few of them in the eye, yes. But on some level, I needed them, and I needed to fit in, and my kid needed a playdate or two, and some friends. Schlepping him downtown was not an option—and anyway, our friends there didn’t have kids his age, or any kids at all, in some cases. Spontaneous meet-ups with new kids at the park or playground up here, just making friends on the spot, sounded like a nice idea, but in a town where kids are hyperscheduled from drop-off to dropping off to sleep at night, that was extremely unlikely. Besides, the moms at the playground seemed to regard me as a stalker at worst or someone with poor boundaries at best when I approached in a friendly way. It was clear that on the Upper East Side, moms and toddlers had their pecking order worked out and their places set and their dance cards full long before the wee ones were out of their Robeez. I was late to the ball, and it made me feel desperate. My poor kid. And yes, poor me. I didn’t want drop-off and pickup to feel so bad. I needed to like and be liked by the moms at school.

  During this period I wasn’t feeling well physically—I had a spaced-out, derealized feeling many days, a sense of being dissociated from my body and the people around me. Describing it to my husband at dinner one night, I realized it was a clinical condition I had read about before in my studies. I had culture shock—a syndrome of unfamiliarity and alienation that bedevils anthropologists and foreign-exchange students and poor kids who get into elite colleges. By this point in my life I had spent time in many foreign cultures and always found a way in. I had worked briefly at the UN, writing speeches and attending functions with diplomats from all over the world, so I knew I had not entirely inconsiderable social skills. I was well dressed, relatively speaking, and friendly. What the hell else did these women want from me? Was there something I wasn’t doing? Something I was supposed to say? Trying hard to shake off the feeling that I was being judged and found wanting, or that it mattered to me much, I vowed to stop trying to find a way in, and simply watch. I was a struggling, insecure mom, but I was also a social researcher. So I’d act like one.

  Observing was easy, since no one really wanted to speak to me. The first thing I noticed was that outside, the Escalades with drivers were piled three deep and the moms were dressed to kill, though none of them seemed to have jobs. They were on their way to I didn’t know where, but obviously to them it mattered. Often the most overdressed ones—tipping in their platform boots and sky-high stilettos—would call out, “See you there!” after dropping their kids at the classroom door. “There” must be dreadful, I found myself thinking. In the elevator, the rule was more or less total silence. One morning when I had a meeting and eschewed my jeans and thermal shirt and ponytail for something more fashionable, sleek hair, and a bit of makeup, two immaculately groomed women watched, glowering, as I left the elevator. One hissed, “Who was that?” and my hairline prickled. The world of the school was turned inside out—it was all about the moms. The moms air-kissing and hobnobbing and chitchatting and sometimes backstabbing. The kids, in this reordered world, were part of a fashionable ensemble, dangling from the impressively toned arms of their mommies like ornaments or accessories. Motherhood, I gathered, was another outfit. And friendliness and chitchat were hoarded, bestowed upon only a few.

  I also noted that on most mornings, if a mom did deign to speak to me, she gave a curt hello, after which she performatively turned her back and began to speak to someone else. The head of the school’s PTA—a woman I had come to think of as the Queen of the Queen Bees—was the first person to do this to me. Mistakenly thinking, on one of the first days of school, that I was in a world where the rules approximated those of, say, a work environment or friendly cocktail party, I approached her—the parent liaison to the school, after all, and so someone more or less officially representing it—and introduced myself. She looked at me as if, in saying hello and outstretching my hand, I had committed a faux pas like drinking the contents of my finger bowl at a dinner party and then removing all my clothing. “How gauche and presumptuous of you to greet me,” her sneer and raised eyebrows said. Then she simply turned away without so much as a hello. I was shocked. But eventually, I realized this was just an extreme version of what nearly all the women at my son’s school did. They conserved their hellos for a select few and expended just about nothing on most others.

  This sort of refusal to greet and dramatic back-turning most often took place, I realized, when the hoped-for interlocutress was a socialite, someone I recognized from the pages of a glossy magazine, or the wife of a wealthy man whose name I knew from the newspaper or from my days in advertising. Yes, I figured out pretty quickly, these women were not talking to one another so much as they were jockeying for position to talk to one or two or three particular moms. They had a laser-like focus, it became obvious, on what I came to think of as the highest-ranking females—those who were, it seemed, richer, prettier, more successful or, most important of all, married to someone more successful than anyone else—someone who, apparently, mattered more.

  Often I’d call my close friend Lily, the calmest mother and most gracious hostess I knew, whose daughter was my son’s age, to tell her the latest, and she would gasp. “That can’t be true! That they think it’s all right to be so awful!” she would shout into the phone, and just imagining her as she said it, downtown in the studio where she worked as a fashion designer, reminded me there was a world outside the one I was trying to break into, a world I understood. It was a place where women worked and there were gay couples and straight couples and there wasn’t always enough money for every single thing you wanted and not everyone had a car and a driver. “I hate them,” my friend Candace would say, urging me to act out a shunning scenario from the day before while we had coffee. And then she would remind me what writer Wendy Wasserstein, whose children had gone to the same school mine went to, had said about the experience: “So many skinny women, so many gigantic bags.” And we would laugh. It helped, but the next day I still had to go back to the school.

  My husband thought it was all ridiculous girl stuff and that I was overreacting. “C’mon, it can’t be that bad,” he told me when I shared the details of yet another morning drop-off drama. So I let him do drop-off the very next day. “What the hell is wrong with those women?” he asked after his first misadventure. “They wouldn’t even respond when I said ‘Good morning’!” I told you so, I smirked. We marveled that these women had determined that even the most basic and commonly observed tenet of the social contract—returning a greeting—was for chumps. They were above it.

  Not long after my husband’s experience, our son came home from school one day and excitedly announced that he had been invited to a playdate by his friend Tessa—on her family’s private plane. It was a strange and fanciful invitation, I thought, until our nanny, Sarah, told me that everybody at the school had a private plane and all the kids had been discussing the relative merits of their particular planes when our son said we didn’t have one, and Tessa took pity on him and invited him to play on hers. I felt nauseated, but it was a start. He was doing better than I was.

  As I sat on the bench watching morning drop-off, longing for a real playdate for my son and me, I didn’t just think of vulnerable female chimps and their babies. I also recalled what I had learned years before about Papio anubis, or olive baboons, in seminars on primate social behavior. Olive baboons live in troops of up to 150 members, with males dispersing at sexual maturity, so that the groups are composed of female baboons who are usually related, form tight cooperative networks, and essentially run the show. The troops are rigidly hierarchical, with the highest-ranking female baboons getting all kinds of benefits—better food, safer sleeping spots, nicer male “friends” and protectors (who have to emigrate from other troops and pass muster before they are accepted), lots
of opportunities to copulate, and higher rates of reproductive success—that is, more offspring that survive into adulthood and reproduce themselves.

  Lower-ranking females obviously want some of this sweet life as well. One strategy they may use to “pull themselves up” in Papio anubis society is attempting (often repeatedly) to groom the alpha females—and care for their babies. High-ranking females may rebuff these attempts over and over, with swats and slaps and even frequently vicious attacks on the would-be babysitters, but eventually a high-ranking female may allow a lower-ranking one to become what she desperately wishes to be—an “allomother,” or an extra caregiver to the alpha’s infant or junior offspring—for limited periods of time. This gives the lower-ranking female an “in”; after all, she is increasing the boss lady’s fitness by allowing her more opportunities to forage for herself and her baby, unfettered. And the prestige of her affiliation with the mom, via the child she is hauling around and tending to, can afford her more power and security in the troop over time. Powerful olive baboon moms have the power to empower less-powerful ones by proxy.

  Far from the savanna, in the halls of an Upper East Side nursery school, during an economic boom, my husband and I were low-ranking primates, and it showed. The kids were all extensions of their parents, it seemed, used in bids for upward social mobility. “Maybe if we befriend Ari, whose dad is a hedge-fund manager, we’ll become friends and Ari’s mom will tell Ari’s dad about my husband’s start-up and . . .” Other times, it seemed, these lower-ranking moms just wanted to bask in the glow of the fantastic wealth of others and warm their children there. We were new to the scene, and my husband couldn’t really help anyone’s career, so we were an unknown quantity, slow to be welcomed. On the Upper East Side, there is a sense that one’s child’s friends and playmates can set your position in a hierarchy, bumping you up or dragging you down. You are only as fabulous as the playdates you procure on behalf of your progeny, and if you don’t rate, neither does your cherub. This precarious and anxiety-inducing order of things, I was learning, turns mothers into powerful gatekeepers . . . and hopeful supplicants.

  As happens for so many nonhuman primates who transfer into a troop, I was stuck at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy, regarded with suspicion, alternately ignored and harassed. How I wished, some days, that I were a howler monkey—those young females who immigrate jump to the top spot, pushing more established females down the hierarchy. But no, I was a baboon in this instance. There is no one lower-ranking than a new female in a baboon troop, and if she fails to build coalitions with the mid-level and top females, her life circumstances and those of her offspring can be dire. I knew this: if my son and I were ostracized, that status would be hard to shake as long as we stayed here. I didn’t want my son to be the kid with no friends at school. I didn’t want us—him—to be shunned. So I schemed and smiled in the hallways even though it was killing me. And, in spite of all the hours of observation, I wondered what to do.

  My salvation was unexpected, but had I remembered my studies better, I might have hoped for or even tried to engineer precisely the circumstances that turned my fate around. It came the same way it does for so many nonhuman female primates in my predicament: through the attentions of an alpha male. At a “class cocktail party” hosted by the “class mom,” I got into a vaguely flirtatious conversation with the father of a boy in my son’s class. He was polite, clever, and slightly rakish, unusual among the straitlaced Upper East Side finance guys I was still trying to get used to. He was easy to talk to, and since my husband had stayed home with our son and the moms were busy talking to one another in a clump I had no hope of breaking into, he and I chatted. I later learned he was the scion of some sort of Manhattan banking empire, the son of a powerful and wealthy matriarch like Flo, and so very “top tier” in the school and our class. The next day at drop-off he suggested, in front of a group of moms, that our boys should play. “How about this Friday?” he asked, and I agreed.

  “How did you do that?” one of the friendlier moms asked in a whisper, her eyes wide as he headed off. “I’ve been trying to get him to make a playdate for weeks and he won’t! Even though my parents knew his parents when they all lived in Westchester.” I shrugged and suggested that next time, she might try having a glass of wine with him.

  From that day forward the playdate tide turned dramatically. My son had a regular weekly playdate with the alpha’s son, which paved the way for playdates with the kids who were friends with his kid, and whose parents—rich and powerful as he was—were friends with him. When these mothers saw me engaged in friendly conversation with Alpha Dad in the hallway, they took note, it seemed: their body language and newly friendly smiles suggested that they felt I had been vetted and approved. Talking to me, they could now rest assured, wasn’t necessarily going to pull their own rank down or be a total waste of time. And the more these mothers acknowledged and returned my hellos in the halls, the harder it was for them to ignore my emails and playdate pleas.

  When I stood back from it, the playdate hierarchy high jinks struck me as strange and unsavory. Their seamy underside was the notion that some parents and some children were more worth it than others. This was repellent, but it was also the name of the game. If my son was finally playing with schoolmates and was happy, I was happy. And I felt very indebted indeed to Alpha Dad, even if Candace and Lily agreed that it was a bad idea to count on him for anything. Wasn’t he married to one of these unfriendly women? Could he be much better himself? they asked. I wasn’t sure. I just knew that in this upside-down world, where the parents lived through the kids, it was sort of like being a teenage girl again, and having the attentions of the high school football team’s star quarterback. His casual friendliness had utterly transformed my son’s social life and my rank, which I now realized were unquestionably and inextricably linked. Like Candace and Lily, I didn’t trust the state of affairs to last for long, and I was right—Alpha Dad moved on, as alphas do. By that time, though, my son had what he needed, which meant I did, too. Maybe this wasn’t going to be so hard after all.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Going Native: Mommy Wants a Birkin

  WHEN I STUDIED anthropology in college and graduate school, I was fascinated by descriptions of the anthropologist who “goes native”—merging with the culture she was supposed to be studying, slipping into being one of those she had set out to examine and analyze. With Bronislaw Malinowski, about whom I wrote my doctoral dissertation, it was a gradual process. He became increasingly fed up with his informants in the Trobriand Islands, who were not as forthcoming as he wanted them to be, and eventually commenced having sex with Trobriand women. In another case, a professor of Middle Eastern culture of my acquaintance revealed he had “gone native” at dinner one night when he greeted his graduate students dressed in traditional garb from Yemen, where he had done fieldwork, and proceeded to conduct himself as an indigenous Yemeni tribesman for the course of the evening (sabers were involved). In Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco, Paul Rabinow made an entire narrative out of losing it—and himself—there.

  Going native is today viewed by anthropologists as equal parts inevitable and instructive, a dynamic process that happens as fieldworkers get to know their subjects, and come to understand, value, and internalize some of their beliefs. First, typically, a fieldworker may feel at sea, alienated, overwhelmed by the unfamiliarity all around her. Bit by bit, however, she gains her footing and eventually, without even noticing it is happening, begins to “think Samoan.” Or Aka. Or Upper East Side.

  But in the field, “going native” was long tainted with shame. This is because anthropology struggled for so long to distinguish itself as a “science” separate from and superior to its actual historical roots in missionary work, Victorian “armchair science,” and plain old imperialism. Slipping from scientist to “one of them” is messy and unscientific, to say the least. So, for a long time, anthropologists prided themselves on their “objective distance” from th
e cultures they studied and lived in, staving off “going native” like a case of malaria. “Going native” has always carried with it a whiff of impropriety, and a menacing, thrilling sense of losing one’s very self.

  As a self-designated participant-observer of privileged Upper East Side motherhood, an interloper in the Upper East Side mommy tribe, I frequently felt conflicted about my relationship to the women and culture around me. On the one hand, I longed to fit in, to become one with and one of them, and felt I had to, mostly for the sake of my child (and, later, children). But I also struggled to keep my sense of apartness or separateness—some semblance of analytic distance—as I watched and took part in the frequently insane-seeming doings and goings-on about me. The back-turning, the dozens of illegally parked Escalades, one of which nearly plowed into my son one day as we struggled to get a cab after pickup. Who the hell wanted any part of this selfish, entitled world? I sometimes asked myself.

  Ultimately, though, the drop-off dramas and experience of being a playdate pariah—which made me feel so vulnerable, sad, and rejected—actually drew me deeper into the world of my son’s school. They hardened my resolve to assimilate and win acceptance. I wasn’t going to let anybody reject me, or my kid. Screw them. And once he (and I) had playdates and a school-based social life, these “triumphs” drew me further into the world I was observing, rendering my foothold in the world outside it more tenuous. I called and saw my downtown friends less and less, given the rigors and demands of work and keeping my hand in the game and maintaining friendships for my son and me uptown. Before I knew or realized it, I had surrendered to this new world in a real way, and there was no going back.