Karen tried not to judge how other people raised their children, but in truth, she rarely missed an opportunity to do so. And in her opinion, Laura Collier and Evan Shaw, who co-owned a production company that specialized in TV and web commercials, were doing a fairly shitty job. They’d essentially farmed out the parenting to a rotating cast of Tibetan nannies who seemed to quit every three months because they were paid substandard wages yet were expected to do the grocery shopping and cook and clean as well as child-mind. Meanwhile, the amount of time Laura and Evan spent with Maeve and her younger brother seemed to be inversely proportional to the number of pictures they posted of them on Facebook and Instagram. They also ran an almost impossibly tight ship (from afar), insisting that their children wear sunscreen 365 days a year and abstain from all foods containing added sugar. Was it any wonder that, according to Ruby, Maeve hoarded Tootsie Rolls under her bed?
But then, was Karen any less neurotic or uptight than Laura about sun protection and sucrose?
And was it any surprise that Jayyden had hit Maeve? Poor, unloved Jayyden. From what Karen had heard around school, Jayyden’s mother was in prison. And he’d never met his father, if such an individual could even be identified. As a result, he was reputed to live with someone named Aunt Carla and various cousins in a public housing project, Fairview Gardens, on the edge of the neighborhood. The project consisted of half a dozen mid-rise 1960s-era brick buildings with small barred windows. If there was any flora or fauna to be found around its concrete courtyards, Karen hadn’t seen it. Friends in the neighborhood sometimes referred to the place ironically as the pro-jay—that is, as if it were fancy and French. (They called the big box store Target, Tar-jay, for the same reason.) Of course, it was just the opposite. That was the joke. Karen still hadn’t determined if it was offensive or funny.
In all her time in Cortland Hill, Karen had entered Fairview Gardens only once—on a charity mission with Ruby’s predominantly white Girl Scout troop, the year before. (The residents of Fairview Gardens were almost entirely black.) The Daisies had been working on their Rose Petal, an embroidered uniform badge whose coordinating motto was “Make the world a better place,” when a ferocious storm had cut off electricity to the buildings in the project for more than a week. It had been the troop leader’s idea for the girls to make and deliver platters of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to Fairview’s community center. Karen had supported the plan wholeheartedly and offered to help. But entering the community center, a desolate affair featuring haphazardly arranged metal fold-up chairs, a Ping-Pong table with no net, and not a soul in sight, Karen had been simultaneously embarrassed and frightened. Reports of gang-related shootings at Fairview Gardens were not uncommon.
There was a personal angle to Karen’s sympathy for Jayyden as well. In the beginning of second grade, he’d taken to imitating Ruby and, on those days when Karen picked Ruby up from school, and even though he hardly knew Karen, coming over to embrace her as if she were his own mother. As she’d patted his head and said, “Hello, sweetie,” she’d felt proud and despondent in equal parts. He’d cut out the behavior after a month or two. Sometime the following spring, Karen heard rumors that an unnamed relative had been found to be abusing Jayyden. Children’s Services had become involved. For a nanosecond, Karen imagined taking Jayyden into her home as a foster child, but then realized it was probably beyond her capabilities. Besides, who knew if Jayyden would even want to come? In any case, it had become clear in recent months that Jayyden had serious behavioral problems, if not an actual violent streak. Even before today, there had been reports of shoving and hair-pulling. A year older and larger than his third-grade classmates—he’d been left behind in kindergarten for not knowing his letters or colors yet—he’d also begun to cut a figure in the classroom that Karen imagined other children might find, as much as she hated to put it this way and as confident as she was that it had nothing to do with the color of his skin, physically intimidating.
But it was also the case that Karen aspired to a life spent making a difference and helping those less fortunate than herself. She tried to live in accordance with the politics and principles she believed in. These included the notion that public education was a force for good and that, without racially and economically integrated schools, equal opportunity couldn’t exist. And so, the year Ruby turned five, Karen had happily enrolled her at Betts, aware that it lacked the reputation for academic excellence of other schools nearby but pleased that Ruby would be exposed to children who were less privileged than herself.
Yet over the previous three-plus years, a part of Karen had also come to feel thankful for any and all middle-class Caucasian or Asian children who attended Betts—and desirous that there should be more. (At present, the white population of the school hovered around 25 percent.) The truth was that she’d yet to grow entirely comfortable with being in the minority. Nor had she ever fully recovered from the shock of walking into Ruby’s new classroom on her first day of kindergarten and finding herself gazing out on what appeared to her eyes to be a sea of beaded braids, buzz cuts, and neon backpacks with rubberized cartoon decals that ran counter to her finely honed bourgeois-bohemian aesthetic sensibility, which prized natural materials and a muted palette.
Karen had also failed to fully exorcise the deep-seated fear that a school having both an abundant population of brown and tan children and middling standardized test scores, as Betts did, must by definition offer an inferior educational experience.
But she also saw the school’s diversity was an educational experience unto itself and, once or twice, had even felt teary-eyed at the spectacle and promise of so many beautiful children of so many different hues and hair types walking down the hall together.
And by any measure, Ruby had done well at Betts. A voracious reader, she was also proficient in adding, subtracting, and even early multiplication; sociable to the point of overbearing; and knowledgeable about many of the great figures of U.S. history, in particular Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks. In kindergarten, the white children in Ruby’s class had had to sit in the back of the classroom for a period to see how it felt. And according to Ruby, her class had completed the same study unit on MLK four years in a row. Ruby could even recite the date he’d married Coretta (June 18, 1953). At Betts, it sometimes seemed to Karen that every month was Black History Month—except when it was Latino History Month. In keeping with the new Common Core curriculum, Ruby had recently written an “informative text,” as essays were now known, on Cesar Chavez’s advocacy on behalf of Latino migrant workers. Karen knew this because, out to dinner with her family one night, Ruby had asked the waitress if the Caesar salad was named after the aforementioned man, drawing a bemused look from the woman. Which Karen had found hilarious and embarrassing at the same time. “Sweetie, it’s probably named after Julius Caesar,” Karen had told her.
“Who’s that?” Ruby asked—a question that Karen had found less charming.
Later, Karen learned that Caesar salad was actually named after the restaurateur Caesar Cardini—and felt foolish herself and a little more forgiving of her daughter and her school.
Yet during parent-teacher conferences, when Miss Tammy informed Karen that Ruby was the strongest reader in the class—or, in Miss Tammy’s words, the “most awesome reader in Room Three-oh-three”—Karen’s first thought was not pride but paranoia that Ruby’s classmates must all be behind.
Moments after Nurse Smith led a still sniveling, now bandaged Maeve out of the classroom, Principal Chambers appeared in the doorway in a black pants suit and low heels, her expression stern. After a low-voiced conference with Miss Tammy in the corner, she took Jayyden by the back of his shirt collar and marched him out of the classroom. The other students looked on in stunned silence. The mood had shifted from celebration to sobriety.
“Fun morning,” quipped Lou.
“What that kid needs is a serious whupping,” muttered Sa’Ryah’s mother, Desiree Johnston, an attractive single mothe
r in her late twenties who worked in a Medicaid office.
“With all due respect, violence is not the answer to violence,” demurred Ezra’s mother, April Fishbach, a late-life PhD candidate in cultural anthropology as well as the president and sole active member of Betts’s Parent Teacher Association.
Desiree rolled her eyes.
Marco Cicetti, who was the father of Maeve’s other best friend, Amanda, seemed similarly unimpressed by April’s argument. “Yeah, wait till it’s your kid who ends up in the ER,” he said.
“I completely agree—he needs to leave the school,” said Bram’s mother, Annika Van Den Berg, a five-foot-eleven Dutch architect who dressed in avant-garde fashions that resembled crumpled sleeping bags and who was clearly just slumming it for a few years before the family moved back to a canal house in Amsterdam filled with ultramodern molded-plastic furnishings.
“The whole Jayyden situation just makes me sad,” muttered Karen. It was the only thing she felt it was permissible to say, striving as she always did for a tone of compassionate neutrality that would counteract any suspicions that she was just another white parent wishing the school would gentrify more quickly than it was.
“But where are these parents of Jayyden?” asked Annika in her stilted English.
“Mom in jail—dad, who knows,” Lou said, shrugging.
“Trash begets trash,” said Marco. “End of story.”
Karen cringed at Marco’s comment, while Mumia’s father, Ralph Washington, who was the editor of a small hip-hop and black politics magazine, stepped into the fray. “Except you left out the beginning,” he said hotly. “Where the legacy of slavery and the white hegemony begets the vicious cycle of black poverty.”
There was an uncomfortable silence. Even April, who was never at a loss for sanctimonious words regarding social justice for poor minorities, seemed tongue-tied. Karen stared at her shoes.
Luckily, Miss Tammy chose that moment to return to the front of the classroom and say, at a marginally lower decibel level, “I’m sorry about the disruption, parents. But we’re still totally pumped to have you here. And your children have worked awesomely hard on their buildings. So please continue to explore our community. But if you have to leave, don’t forget to sign our guest book.”
Suddenly conscious of time passing—and keen to escape the tension—Karen touched Ruby’s arm and announced that she had to go.
“Maeve left early. Can I go home early too?” asked Ruby. As if the two children’s disparate dismissal times were the real injustice.
“No, you cannot,” said Karen, exasperated by the question.
But the sight of Ruby’s wounded face undid Karen. Fearing she’d been too harsh, and even though both Ruby’s pediatrician and dentist had urged her to cut back on the sweets, Karen said, “But I promise we’ll go out for a treat after school—before gymnastics.”
“What kind of treat?” asked Ruby, who was in the 25th percentile for height and the 80th for weight.
“Maybe ice cream.”
“Awwww,” Ruby moaned. “I’m tired of ice cream. Can’t I have an icie?”
“No, you can’t,” said Karen, wondering if she had only herself to blame for her rising irritation.
In truth, Karen’s complex and often contradictory relationship to eating had grown more so in recent years. This was due not only to her current job—to the truly hungry, all food was in some sense good food—but to the outsize importance that her particular demographic group had placed on the business of consuming calories. Along with weight, teeth, and marriage, food had somehow become a dividing line between the social classes, with the Earth Day–esque ideals of the 1960s having acquired snob appeal, and the well-off and well-educated increasingly buying “natural” and “fresh” and casting aspersions on those who didn’t.
Karen herself had grown up in the 1970s and ’80s eating Ring Dings and washing them down with cans of Tab, and so far, health-wise, she didn’t seem any worse for it. But she also had a history of neurotic eating that dated back to late adolescence. It had never risen to the level of an eating disorder—she didn’t have that kind of willpower—but it had left her overly preoccupied with every morsel she ate and, recently, what her husband and daughter ate. Unlike the majority of her female friends, Karen actually disliked cooking. Yet she took an almost maniacal level of pride in doing so and in presenting various fresh and healthy options that would provide her family with the nutrients they needed.
For all these reasons, Karen preferred to be financially extorted at the artisanal ice cream shop up the street that offered weird flavors like Rooibos Tea and Maple Fennel than to contemplate the number of chemical compounds that were entering her daughter’s body via the neon-colored, artificially flavored, no doubt corn syrup–enhanced Italian ices that were sold outside her daughter’s school for a dollar a pop by an older Hispanic lady in a gingham smock. The woman was clearly just trying to make a living. Karen nevertheless resented her for forcing parents like herself to engage in constant battles with their children over its purchase. The fact that a scoop of artisanal ice cream likely contained more calories in it than a small Italian ice didn’t undermine her conviction.
“Why not?” the child moaned.
“You know I don’t like all the chemicals in that stuff,” said Karen.
“That’s all you care about—chemicals,” said Ruby.
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Then why don’t you let me eat icies?”
“I’m not going to talk about this anymore.”
A glint appeared in Ruby’s eye. “Mommy—if you were stuck on a desert island and you had to eat at one chain restaurant for the rest of your life, would you choose Burger King, Taco Bell, KFC, or Wendy’s?”
“Wendy’s, because they have a salad bar,” said Karen, who also recognized that her life was ripe for mockery. “Anyway, I really need to go.”
“I thought you didn’t have to work on Fridays.”
“I have to work from home.” With a quick kiss to Ruby’s forehead, Karen walked out of the classroom and back down the hall. Typically, Friday mornings were among her favorite times of the week. But something about the Maeve-Jayyden melee had left her with a palpable sense of foreboding, as if she’d successfully fled a house fire but forgotten to close the door behind her.
Soon, she found herself back on the main floor of Betts, a tidy if depressingly low-ceilinged expanse of beige brick with a trophy case on one wall and the obligatory display of student-made tissue-paper collages decorating the other. As Karen passed the collages, her eyes scanned the names written on the bottom left corners. The newfangledness of the black ones with their apostrophes, dashes, purposeful misspellings, and randomly added letters (Queen-Zy, Beyonka, Yisabella, Jayyden) stood in stark contrast to the antiquation and preciosity of the white ones (Prudence, Violet, Silas, Leo). The disheartening thought suddenly struck Karen that Ruby fit snugly into the latter category. But she quickly pushed the idea away, assuring herself that it was a family name, since it had also been the name of her great-grandmother.
Just past the collages, the school’s uniformed security guard sat at a wooden desk at a remove from the main entrance. Which had never made any sense to Karen. Wasn’t the whole point of having a security guard to deter homicidal maniacs who might try to enter the building in possession of semiautomatic weaponry? Karen had considered scheduling a meeting with Principal Chambers to express her concern. But since she lived in fear of sounding like one of the rBGH crusaders—that is, another uptight white mother with a petty complaint—she’d decided against it, trusting fate, if barely, to deliver her daughter home safely each day.
On her way out of the building, Karen nearly collided with a late-arriving student. The girl probably wasn’t much older than Ruby. But to Karen’s eye, she appeared to be dangerously overweight, with early breast development and a prominent gut. She was also clutching a half-eaten jelly doughnut. In a series of flashes, Karen imagined the rest
of the girl’s tragic life. No doubt there would be a teen pregnancy, followed by a failure to graduate high school, a dead-end cashier job at a fast-food restaurant, more babies with unaccountable men, food stamps, diabetes type 2. She felt pity for the child on all fronts.
But at the sudden appearance of a woman who Karen assumed was the child’s mother—she was walking behind the girl and ordering her to “Hurry your ass up!”—Karen felt her pity turning to disapproval. It wasn’t just the woman’s crude language or the fact that she was very large herself (her hips reminded Karen of the side hoops worn under dresses in Velázquez’s paintings of seventeenth-century Spanish royals) yet was wearing skintight jeans with rhinestone studs down the sides, as if to call attention to her size. It was that she’d given her overweight child a doughnut for breakfast.
As if, seconds earlier, in order to win the affection of her own borderline chubby daughter, Karen hadn’t promised Ruby a sugary treat as well. In that moment, Karen couldn’t see that the doughnut might be an act of love on the part of this mother too, for whom it was quite possibly an affordable gift in an unaffordable world. She also managed to forget that sometimes, while in the car with Ruby, she f-worded other drivers—and that she owned a pair of skintight jeggings herself, which arguably looked no better on her own distressingly flat backside than on this woman’s large and shapely one.
“If it gets any later,” Karen heard the mother say as she passed her, “I’m gonna miss Education Partners orientation.”
Karen blinked back her surprise. Education Partners was one of April Fishbach’s pet projects, a volunteer program in which parents helped out in the classrooms, doing everything from putting away supplies to assisting children who were struggling to read. Karen herself was too busy/lazy/selfish, depending on your perspective, to donate her Friday mornings. But other heroic parents apparently had decided to do it—parents such as the Mother in the Rhinestone-Studded Jeans.
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