Primates of Park Avenue

by Martin,Wednesday

  But what could I, or any of the other mothers, do? The nursery schools had all the power, and many of them, you could tell, believed that the fact we were all there begging to be admitted attested their excellence. Really though, none of them was so excellent—it was a numbers thing—there just weren’t enough schools. And given the hordes applying to the school my husband’s nieces and nephews had attended, many of them with their own strings to pull and connections to play, we had to try everywhere. So I kept going, kept dragging my son to auditions. One day, holding my hand as we were about to enter yet another “playroom” full of kids he didn’t know, he looked up at me and said, “Mommy, I can’t do this,” and I wanted to weep.

  We thought it best to let my husband, a calm and collected fellow, take our son to the audition at the fancy preschool his nieces and nephews had gone to. He pointed out that this particular director was probably one of the most powerful people in the city, and hence, the world. We had a good chuckle about that, but he wasn’t entirely kidding. I tapped my fingernails on my desktop waiting to hear from him after the audition. When the phone rang, I nearly fell off my chair. “I’m going to jump out of a window,” my husband whispered. My heart did a dive down to my feet. “Why?” I asked, struggling not to sound as hysterical as I felt.

  It turned out that the school’s director was in the room for my son’s audition. As she talked and rolled playdough and pasted and drew with my son and the other kids, he wanted her attention. He called her name several times and when she failed to respond in the noisy classroom, he punched her (albeit lightly) in the arm and said, “Hey, I’m talking to you!”

  I have no idea why my son was admitted to the school. I never asked. We chalked it up to my sister-in-law’s influence and the fact that the school, so desirable, was also deeply tribal. If you were family of someone who had gone, perhaps especially someone who had sent four kids there and donated a fair amount of money and was pleasant to deal with, you were at a distinct advantage. You were, in their view, vetted, and a relatively safe bet. Even, apparently, if your son punched the boss lady in the arm. And here we were, with a child at the “best” nursery school in the city. I was learning how to reap the benefits of tribal membership. Now I would learn that there were disadvantages as well.

  We were euphoric when our son landed at a “good” nursery school. It felt like a slam dunk, a real accomplishment, and while I knew better than to talk about it much, for fear I would seem to be gloating, I was not above relishing the envious looks of other mothers when they asked where he would go to nursery school and I told them. Like a town house, a big diamond, or waterfront in the Hamptons, a spot at this nursery school, reflecting as it supposedly did one’s social connectedness and influence, and increasing the likelihood that your child would go on to a “top tier” grammar school, was a coveted Manhattan “get.” Mostly, though, it made me feel like a “good” mother. Like Flo.

  But, once again, our sense that we had crossed the finish line and were “done” was an illusion. Because, aside from a shrinking water hole in the Serengeti during the dry season, there is no place more desperate, aggressive, dangerous, and inhospitable than the halls of an exclusive Manhattan private school at morning drop-off and afternoon pickup. Those corridors make the conference rooms at Goldman Sachs (where, an investment banker acquaintance once observed, “They don’t bother to stab you in the back, they just stab you in the front and step right over your body”) seem like a nice, friendly place to stroll with Aunt Bea from Duluth. I had landed at the fanciest school in the snobbiest zip code in the wealthiest town in America, where everyone was advocating for and living through their offspring. So maybe I should have seen it coming. But I didn’t.

  My son started nursery school at the height of the boom. There was adrenaline in our blood and hope in the air. People were closing deals. People were buying second and third and fourth homes. Everyone in Manhattan seemed manic with happiness. And every day after dropping my son off at school, I cried. Not because it was touching and sweet to watch him cross the threshold of the classroom. Not because letting him go was some metaphor for watching him grow up. Not because being a mother is poignant and painful sometimes.

  No, I cried because the other moms were so mean. I called them the Mean Girl Moms when describing them to my husband and my friends from downtown.

  They gathered in the hallways in clusters and cliques, heads bowed, murmuring, laughing, whispering. They all seemed to know each other somehow, “from before.” Their uniform telegraphed that they were one tribe united—their identical Burberry raincoats on rainy days and their chic puffers on cold days. Their crinkly Lanvin flats, or the high heels that screamed, “I have a driver.” They might lift their heads from their huddle to return my hello as I walked by—but that almost never happened. I arrived early at school every day to avoid the feeling—that sensation of falling through space—I got when they looked right through me. Standing awkwardly on the edge of the group, alone, I would usher my son into his room the second the door opened, say goodbye, and scurry away. Outside on the sidewalk my arms felt empty and on the worst days my stomach churned. Because it was unnerving to feel invisible. And because, for the life of me, I couldn’t get any of these women to agree to make a playdate for our children.

  This I knew: our children request that we arrange for them to play with someone after school, and we arrange it. We arrange it by text or email or phone. I knew the drill from other moms and other schools. But my texts, emails, and phone calls to the mothers of my son’s classmates went unnervingly unanswered. Even worse, when I followed up in person with the moms in the hallways, they frequently put me off or changed the subject. Sometimes, when I asked, they shot alarmed or sly looks at their friends, as if to telegraph, “Oh my God, is she actually doing this? Can you believe how awkward?!” My son and I, I realized as the other moms continued to look through me every day, were playdate pariahs. I was uncharacteristically distraught.

  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 pick up 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, de-realized 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 lived in many foreign cultures and had 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 had 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 my son’s 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 had 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 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 each other 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 tenant 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 myself, 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 one hundred fifty 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 past 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 her 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 savannah, in the halls of an Upper East Side nursery school, during an economic boom, we 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 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. And there is no one lower-ranking than a new female in a baboon troop, and if she fails to build coalitions with the mid 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.