Class

by Lucinda Rosenfeld

  As Karen exited through the double doors and onto the street, she felt chastened by her apparently gross misreading of the family. That was the thing about clichés, she’d learned—and yet somehow kept not learning. They were often true. Just as often, they weren’t.

  Six months earlier, the neighborhood’s newest coffee shop, Laundry, had been an actual Laundromat with perpetually broken dryers, a peeling linoleum floor, and a tiny color TV installed near the ceiling and tuned to one or another daytime talk show catering to women. Now it featured exposed beams, dangling Edison bulbs in wire cages, recovered post-office cabinetry, free Wi-Fi, and whimsical line drawings of farm animals screen-printed onto reclaimed barn wood. Radiohead, Johnny Cash, and the Arctic Monkeys played in a loop on the sound system while the bespectacled patrons leaned stone-faced over their brushed-aluminum MacBook Airs. Karen considered Laundry to be overpriced and pretentious—and the coffee mediocre at best. But the choices were limited: a Dunkin’ Donuts three blocks away or an even more expensive place up the street.

  After ordering a five-dollar cup of single-origin organic coffee from Burundi and waiting ten minutes for a guy with a tattooed neck and hair that had been pulled back into a bun to pour hot water through what appeared to be a dirty sweat sock, Karen retreated to a honed-marble-and-wrought-iron table in back. There, she got out her laptop and assumed the facial expression of someone reviewing top secret plans to invade a nation in the Persian Gulf. In fact, she was searching for cut-glass boudoir lamps on eBay, and then for sea-grass throw rugs on Overstock.com, and then for girls’ cardigans at Gap.com, as Ruby had recently lost her favorite bright pink one. Though that was really just an excuse to go to the website.

  In truth, online shopping for clothes for her daughter and cheap crap for her home had become one of Karen’s greatest pleasures in life. Lately, that pleasure had begun to resemble an addiction that she was deeply ashamed of and hid from her husband. If he found Karen on her laptop at night, she would always say she was reading the international edition of the Guardian, because it was hard to argue against someone’s catching up on world events from a left-leaning perspective. And when packages arrived, which they did nearly every night—she and the UPS man, Larry, were on first-name terms—Karen would quickly open them, then flatten the cardboard boxes and put them outside in recycling before Matt came home and made comments.

  Little wonder that, in recent months, Karen and Matt’s joint checking account had fallen as low as it had. Though it hadn’t helped that Karen had dropped her phone three times in one year, each time purchasing a replacement at full cost. There was also the not-so-small matter of her husband, who still had outstanding student loans, currently earning zero dollars per week. The previous fall, after working for twenty years as a housing lawyer fighting for tenants evicted by greedy landlords, Matt had felt burned out and quit his job. Now he and a few friends were building a one-stop realty website for low-income city dwellers, attaching those in need of housing to lists of everything from rent-stabilized apartments to subsidized-housing waiting lists and even market-rate-but-affordable apartments in lower-income suburbs. A nonprofit foundation had given Matt and his partners seed money to build the website and even provided them with temporary office space, but the funds were already starting to run low.

  Secretly, Karen—who liked to refer to her husband’s project as Poor-coran, a joke that worked best with people who had familiarity with the New York and Florida real estate juggernaut Corcoran—thought the website was of dubious utility. In her experience, most poor people didn’t have consistent access to the Internet. Some didn’t even have e-mail addresses. Karen knew this because, as class parent the year before, she’d been asked to collect e-mail-contact info for all twenty-three students and had come up with only seventeen. But she wanted to be supportive of her husband, who was clearly excited about the project and had already put hundreds if not thousands of hours into it. Also, for the first five years after Ruby was born, and before Karen began working at Hungry Kids, Matt had earned far more than she had.

  Karen and Matt were hardly indigent. According to Zillow.com, which Karen checked every so often when she needed cheering up about their finances, their apartment had nearly doubled in value in the three years since Karen and Matt had purchased it. As a down payment, they’d used a portion of the money Karen had inherited from her parents, who had died a few years before. In fact, their two-bedroom condo was now worth a cool million, possibly more. And Karen had money in the bank on top of that. But she hated the idea of dipping into her savings to pay for everyday purchases; God knew what college tuition would cost in ten years. Maybe that was why she felt even guiltier than usual that morning as she cardigan-shopped for Ruby. Karen was busily seeking out promo codes to plug into the Gap.com checkout page to mitigate that guilt when April Fishbach appeared in her face, flashing her Volunteer Hero smile. “Fancy running into you again!” she said.

  April was dressed as if it were 1973: corduroy bell-bottoms, a frayed jean jacket covered with political buttons offering such dated slogans as NO NUKES, and lots of ugly silver-and-turquoise jewelry. Two slender bobby pins kept her frizzy hair off her lunar-size forehead. It seemed to Karen that, in a certain light, April Fishbach was actually quite pretty, or she might have been if she hadn’t done everything possible to present the opposite impression. Objectively speaking, she and Karen had a good deal in common. In addition to both of them being white late-life mothers at Betts, their children (Ezra and Ruby) had been in class together since kindergarten. And both women had devoted their careers to bettering the lives of underprivileged populations. But Karen had never been able to stand April’s company for more than two minutes at a time. “Oh, hey,” she said, quickly closing Safari lest April see how Karen, in perusing Retailmenot.com, was failing to contribute to the Social Good.

  “Well, that was quite a harrowing scene in there this morning,” April continued.

  “Yes, it was,” said Karen.

  “To be honest, I was shocked by how harsh Miss Tammy was with Jayyden. The child needs help, not punishing.”

  “Well, he did assault the girl.”

  “That’s a bit of an exaggeration, don’t you think?” April raised one overgrown eyebrow.

  “Is it?” Something about April’s presence had a way of turning Karen into an unfeeling reactionary.

  “In any case, since I happen to have you cornered,” said April, smiling again, “the volunteer committee could really use some manpower this month. Any chance you could take time out of your busy café schedule to give us a hand?”

  Karen’s entire body tensed with displeasure and defensiveness. “I really want to be helpful, April, but the truth is that I already work at a hunger-relief nonprofit full-time, except for Fridays mornings, when I basically have two hours to myself to answer e-mail and do laundry.” She knew it was a slight exaggeration of her work schedule, but in this case it seemed merited.

  “And drink slow-pour coffee!” declared April.

  “Yes, I need caffeine in the morning like everyone else,” said Karen.

  “Well, how about just an hour every other Friday?”

  An escape route from April’s altruistic web seeming less and less feasible, Karen released a long sigh. “If I can find the time, sure,” she said. “What are my options?”

  “Let’s see,” April said. “Well, the arts committee needs volunteers to sit at a table in the lobby on Visiting Artists Day, which happens to land on the second Friday of April, if that works for you, and register our arriving artists. The garden committee needs someone to rake out dead leaves. The fund-raising committee needs someone to organize a penny harvest. The after-school committee needs someone to help with bookkeeping. The talent show needs a pianist, if you happen to play. Mr. Thad from the science room needs someone to take care of his white rat and boa constrictor over spring break. And last but by no means least, my Education Partners program could always use more hands in the classroom. What do
you say?”

  Karen guiltily flashed back to her silent encounter with the Mother in the Rhinestone-Studded Jeans. But her shame on that count did nothing to dissuade her from mentally vetting the options that April had laid out in an attempt to gauge which one would be the least taxing. Snakes and rodents were off the table: Karen had a long-standing phobia of both. And she’d quit piano lessons in the fourth grade. As for organizing a penny harvest, she already spent Monday through Thursday of every week soliciting money, if in slightly larger denominations; the thought of doing so a fifth day a week was almost too much to bear. Meanwhile, volunteering for April’s signature program seemed above and beyond the call of duty. “How about I register artists on Visiting Arts Day?” offered Karen.

  “It’s not Visiting Arts Day. It’s Visiting Ar-tists Day,” said April.

  “Fine, Visiting Ar-tists Day,” said Karen.

  “Excellent!” said April. “But we actually need you to do more than just check names off a list and point people in the right direction. We need interviews too. I have a printout with five questions for each of them. The artists can fill them out themselves—we’ll have pencils on hand—or you can read them the questions and write down their answers.”

  “In the middle of the lobby?” asked Karen.

  “Yes, in the middle of the lobby. Is that a problem?”

  “Well, the lobby seems like a hard place to do interviews. I mean, depending on when they arrive, it can be really loud. Plus, they’re going to be standing there wanting to get to whichever classroom they’ve been assigned to. Can’t we e-mail them questions in advance?”

  “That’s a terrible idea,” April shot back.

  “It is?”

  “Yes. It is.”

  Karen felt heat on her forehead. “Because I thought of it, April, and you didn’t?” she said sarcastically.

  “Look,” said April, flaring her nostrils. “If volunteering for Visiting Artists Day is too large of a commitment for you right now, I can find someone else. These are working artists who are taking time out of their busy schedules to visit the school—”

  “Exactly,” said Karen, “which is why I was suggesting we save everyone time and let them answer the questions at their leisure.”

  “Well, it wasn’t a helpful suggestion,” April said sharply.

  Karen could feel blood rushing to her cheeks. April, did anyone ever tell you what a self-righteous little twat you are? she imagined saying out loud. But she knew it wasn’t worth the subsequent fallout. There were still three months of third grade left. Also, it was still early in the morning, and Karen had drunk only half her sock coffee. “April, if you want my help on Visiting Artists Day, e-mail me,” she said in a leaden voice. “But I’ve got work to do right now.”

  “Fine,” said April. Chin raised, she stomped off.

  Karen happily resumed her top secret Gap.com shopping. Although it was generally true that she was thankful for any and all Caucasian or Asian parents who sent their children to Betts, there were exceptions that proved the rule. First among them was April Fishbach.

  Twenty minutes later, Karen collected her belongings, returned her mug to the counter, and walked out. A block from home, she bumped into a former mom-acquaintance from the Elm Tree Center for Early Childhood Development, the play-based private nursery school that Ruby had attended before matriculating at Betts. The woman was dressed in high-tech running gear and carrying a cardboard box filled with gnarled-looking fresh vegetables with scrotal-like hairs growing off them—no doubt her weekly community-supported agriculture allotment. Karen never knew what to do with root vegetables when she brought them home; they tended to sit in the produce drawer of her fridge until they began to leak green juice, at which point she threw them out. “Karen! Oh my God!” said Leslie. “How are you?”

  “We’re good!” said Karen, trying to match Leslie’s excited tone. “How about you guys? How’s Clare? How are the kids?” Back when Karen seemed to spend half her life at playgrounds—she was working only part-time then, freelancing—she and Leslie would sometimes share a bench while their children climbed the play structures. They’d chat about nap schedules, breast-feeding schedules, the pros and cons of thumb-sucking versus pacifiers, and whether grapes were safe for toddlers to eat or if they presented a compelling choking risk unless sliced in half. Karen had found that the minutiae of early-year parenting was fascinating for the exact moment you were living it, after which it became, quite possibly, the most boring subject on earth.

  “We’re hanging in there.” Leslie laughed and sighed. “You know, the usual impossible juggling act.”

  Was the comment an oblique dig at Karen for having only one child and therefore having it easy while Leslie and her wife toiled away at raising two? Or was Karen projecting? “I know it well,” Karen replied in an arch voice.

  “So, what’s going on with Ruby? Where is she in school again?” Leslie narrowed her eyes and cocked her head.

  “She goes to Betts,” said Karen, defensive before she’d even gotten the words out.

  “Really? Wow!” said Leslie, blinking and nodding in slow motion.

  “Don’t act so surprised,” said Karen.

  “I’m not at all! We almost sent Willa there. I mean, we’re actually zoned for the school. Have you guys been happy there?” Leslie blinked again.

  Karen’s heart had begun to pound. Defending her daughter’s school to college-educated white liberals in the neighborhood who were zoned for Betts but who didn’t send their children there on account, Karen assumed, of the number of black and brown faces they saw in the schoolyard had become her second obsession, after online shopping. “So happy. Honestly, it’s an amazing place—the teachers are beyond dedicated, and the kids are literally from all over the world,” she said. “It’s like a Benetton ad from the eighties come to life.” Karen always exaggerated her fondness for the school in reaction to those who shunned it. She had two goals: to foster guilt and shame, and to instill doubt about whatever alternative had been secured.

  “Wow, that sounds amazing,” said Leslie. “I’m so happy for you guys.”

  “And where’s Willa?” Karen couldn’t help herself.

  “She’s actually in a brilliant-and-exceptional program.” Leslie grinned sheepishly.

  “Oh. How’s that going?” said Karen, feeling even more embattled as she recalled the 71 out of 100 that Ruby, then age four, had scored on the so-called B-and-E test. Karen later concluded that Ruby had been more interested in the fish tank in the testing lady’s office than in counting the number of triangles and circles. Or was that just an excuse to ease the pain of acknowledging that her daughter was merely average? Then again, it had been widely rumored at Elm Tree that Leslie and Clare had had their then-four-year-old daughter tutored for the test by a Harvard grad who charged two hundred and fifty dollars an hour.

  “It’s okaayyyy,” Leslie answered in a singsongy voice. “I mean, the commute is a total pain in the ass.” Karen didn’t answer. Was she supposed to express sympathy? “But we just felt Willa was one of those kids who needed to be around other really motivated kids or she’d kind of drift off. And I guess we were also worried about sending her to Betts because it seemed a little—I don’t know—crazy over there. And, like, maybe the kids didn’t all seem that inspired.” She lifted her shoulders and pressed her teeth together as if she were stepping on hot coals.

  Every fiber of Karen’s being wanted to answer, You mean, because so many of them are black? (The city’s B-and-E programs were made up almost entirely of white and Asian students.) But she didn’t. She was a member of polite society, and people in polite society didn’t mention skin color.

  “Also, we just felt Willa would do better in a more nurturing environment,” Leslie went on. “She’s kind of a sensitive kid.”

  “Oh, is the B-and-E class really small?” asked Karen.

  “Well, not anymore—unfortunately,” Leslie said with a bitter laugh. “She’s got thirty-two k
ids in her class this year.”

  “Wow, that’s big!”

  “But her teacher is great. I mean, if anyone can handle that many little smarty-pants, it’s her. So that’s something.”

  “Right—well, Ruby’s class has only twenty-five kids in it this year,” said Karen, simultaneously bristling and gloating.

  “Wow! Lucky you—that’s really small!” said Leslie.

  “But of course, the vast majority of them are incredibly stupid.” Where had that come from?

  Leslie laughed nervously. “I’m sure they’re not stupid.”

  “Oh, I’m sure they are! My daughter in particular,” Karen went on. “She got, like, a two on that B-and-E test. I doubt she’ll even get into community college. She’ll be lucky to get a job as a cashier at CVS. Maybe your daughter will take pity on her some day and hire her as the receptionist at her quant fund or something.” Had she really just said that?

  “You’re so funny,” said Leslie, but she wasn’t laughing or even smiling. And it was suddenly clear that she couldn’t wait to get away from Karen. “Well, it was great running into you,” she said, readjusting her box of scrotal-haired vegetables in her arms and taking a step backward.

  “Yeah, you too!” said Karen, half mortified, half elated by her outburst.

  As she continued down the block, she entertained the perversely affirming notion that, far from being a racist, she might well be its diametric opposite, insofar as it tended to be white people who irked her the most.

  Karen hadn’t always seen the world through the lens of race or class. Growing up in an affluent suburb, she’d actually paid scant attention to the subject. This was not so much because she had a naturally open mind or had been raised with good values but because pretty much everyone in her town was white and middle to upper-middle class. That included Karen’s own family. Her father, Herb, was a tax lawyer who made a good salary. Her mother was a housewife who sometimes helped in his office. Pretty much all the kids Karen knew attended the same legendarily rigorous public school, which sent as many of their graduates to Ivy League schools as the privates nearby did. To the extent that there was a pecking order—and there was, of course, by high school—it had mainly to do with whether or not you were having sex. Karen wasn’t.