“Well, if you’re sure…”
“Totally.”
Closing the door behind Michelle, Karen felt her chest expand as if with fresh oxygen. She sat down on her linen-upholstered, feather-down sofa, which she’d purchased on sale at Restoration Hardware—not Ikea—and closed her eyes.
Hungry Kids was participating in a national hunger-relief conference in Kansas City, Missouri, and on Friday afternoon, at the request of the Hungry Kids’ executive director, Karen flew there and sat in on panel discussions with titles like “Moving Beyond the Soup Kitchen: Sustainable Nutrition in the New Century” and “Filling the Pantry: New Approaches to Hunger-Relief Development.” It was nice to get a break from the normal domestic routines. But Karen ultimately found the weekend a waste of time and resources, both the organization’s and her own. She also felt bad about abandoning Ruby for three whole days. Even when she wasn’t traveling, Karen never felt she was spending enough time with her daughter. Though when they were together, Karen was often counting the minutes until she could be by herself again.
By Sunday morning, she was counting the minutes until they could be reunited.
On Sunday evening, she unlocked the door to the apartment and found Ruby and Matt seated catty-corner from each other at the dining-room table. “Hey, guys!” said Karen.
“Hello, weary traveler,” said Matt.
“Mommy!” cried Ruby, eyes wide with excitement as she jumped out of her seat and ran to her mother.
“Hello, my sweet pumpkin—I missed you terribly,” said Karen, enveloping her body with her own and luxuriating in the velvety suppleness of Ruby’s cheeks. “But I need to use the bathroom. You go finish your dinner.” She carried her daughter back to the table and deposited her in her chair. Then she kissed her husband hello. His breath was redolent of garlic and pork. As she pulled away, her eyes fell on the greasy Chinese food that he and Ruby were in the process of devouring. “Good job holding down the fort,” she said, relief now tinged with dismay. “But, oh my God, what kind of crap are you two eating?” Karen knew that, for the good of her marriage, she ought to refrain from criticizing Matt the moment she walked in the door. It would make her sound unappreciative of the time he’d just spent watching Ruby while Karen was gone, especially considering the tiff they’d had the week before. Judging from the fact that she and Matt still hadn’t had sex, they hadn’t fully made up from it either. But wasn’t Ruby’s health important too?
“Mommy said a bad word!” cried Ruby.
“Crap isn’t that bad a word,” said Karen. “But even if it was, grown-ups are allowed to use bad words.”
“Thank you for your opinion of both my parental skills and my menu selection,” said Matt.
“Sorry, and you’re welcome,” said Karen. “But”—she couldn’t stop herself—“didn’t we agree that, on the pediatrician’s orders, Ruby wasn’t going to eat food like that anymore?”
“Mmm, isn’t this delicious?” said Matt, turning defiantly to Ruby, another forkful of slop lifted to his mouth. Of all the injustices of the modern world that he got worked up about, chemical additives in his food didn’t even make the top one hundred.
Ruby seemed to share his indifference. “Yummy!” she declared while sucking a piece of dripping broccoli into her mouth.
At least she’s eating vegetables, Karen thought. But who knew what evils lurked in the brown sauce? “I’m going to use the bathroom,” she said again, turning away.
“Have a good trip?” Matt called after her in a sarcastic tone.
“It was fine, thanks,” she called back. But she didn’t feel fine. Everything seemed to be slipping out of her control.
On Thursday evening, Karen had dinner with her friend Allison Berger. The two women had met in the mid-1990s at a meeting for a short-lived feminist activist group that modeled itself after ACT UP. Now a financial journalist who wrote about inequality and wage stagnation for a legendary left-wing magazine, Allison was married with two children, lived in a five-story town house on the best block in the neighborhood, and spent her leisure time playing tennis and perusing the Scalamandré wall-coverings catalog in search of the right Chinoise Exotique for her guest bathroom. She also sent her two children to the Eastbrook Lab, an elite prep school with a progressive approach to education where the tuition was equivalent to the average annual household income in America for a family of four. Allison’s husband, who made the extravagance possible, was a litigation partner at a white-shoe law firm. In addition to defending Fortune 500 companies, he did just enough pro bono work to dispel allegations that he was a corporate tool.
Karen wouldn’t necessarily have objected to any part of the picture, except for the fact that, in recent years, Allison’s columns had assumed a strident and didactic tone that seemed, if not hypocritical, then certainly at odds with her lifestyle. She was always just returning from some exclusive eco-resort in Costa Rica or snowcapped mountain in Idaho that was accessible only by helicopter with this or that wealthy and connected new friend. It was as if there were two Allisons, and one was always trying to shame the other, except it was the first one who showed up in print, constantly taking the other to task for her sense of entitlement. A recent column about how the wealthy preserved class privilege via connections, internships, and estate tax law and how it was nearly impossible for someone in the bottom quadrant of the socioeconomic ladder to climb to the top was headlined “All in the Family: How the Filthy Rich Keep Getting Filthier.” Nonetheless, she and Karen had a rich history. And Allison had always been a loyal friend.
Barn Yard, the farm-to-table restaurant at which the two met that evening, had long, carefully distressed communal tables running the length of its unfinished-wood floor. Karen found Allison sitting at the end of one of them and somewhat squeamishly took a seat across from her. Communal tables never failed to remind Karen of the church-basement soup kitchens that Hungry Kids oversaw. Partly owing to acne scars left over from high school, Allison had never been beautiful. But with her platinum-dyed pixie cut and slim figure, which she played up with oversize jewelry and formfitting clothes, she was chic in a way that seemed to exist outside of aging. “Anna Karenina!” she cried at the sight of Karen. It was an old joke, harking back to the days when both of them had had personal lives that could be described as dramatic. In truth, Karen could hardly remember hers. “It’s insane how long we haven’t seen each other,” Allison went on. “Tell me everything.”
“I wish I had something to tell you,” said Karen. “My life is so boring, it might fall asleep.”
“I don’t believe that for a minute,” said Allison. “What’s his name?”
“Whose name?”
“The Swedish UNICEF executive you’re sneaking off to the Mandarin Oriental with every Wednesday at three.”
“Ha-ha. What I think you mean is ‘How was the Comfort Inn in Kansas City that you spent last weekend in—alone—while attending a nonprofit development conference?’”
“Okay, you win.”
“In the plus column, a hedge-fund guy I went to college with recently told me I was hot while I was asking for a donation.”
“You see! I told you that you were this close to having an affair.”
“He also told me I was really ugly in college and I looked better without a nose ring.”
“Screw him. I bet you looked adorable. But please tell me there wasn’t a skull dangling off the ring or something.”
“No skull, I promise—just a graceful gold hoop.”
“What do you say we order something to drink?”
“Excellent idea.”
Just then, the waiter arrived. After taking their drink orders, he gave them menus that appeared to be printed on pieces of birch bark. Karen and Allison began to read them. After a few moments, Allison said, “Oh Jesus, did you see the special today? ‘Pan-seared locally sourced pigeon.’ Seriously, this may be the moment when the urban-farming movement went a step too far.”
“Are you f-i
ng serious?” said Karen, scanning the entrées in search of the offending listing. “That is so disgusting.”
Allison pursed her lips for a moment. Then she burst forth with “Just kidding!”
“You’re so full of it tonight!” Karen cried and tsked before she swatted Allison’s arm across the table.
The waiter came back with their wine, then delivered a four-minute disquisition on the specials. While he rambled on, Karen found her mind wandering. The only words that reached her ears were horseradish crème fraîche and pickled raisins. But when he finally finished, she felt guilty, considering how long it had probably taken him to memorize all the ingredients.
After the waiter had gone, Allison said, “So, what’s the news on your end? How’s Ruby Tuesday?”
“The usual,” said Karen. “You know, needy, demanding, and overbearing, but basically fine. What about yours?”
“Driving me insane,” said Allison. “All I can say is, thank God for the invention of ADHD. Or I guess I should be praising the Lord for Big Pharm. Thanks to Adderall, my kids are actually doing their homework this year, which is more than they did last year. Though what I really wish the pharmaceutical industry would invent is a drug to prevent middle-class white boys from imagining they’re gangster rappers. They could call it You’re-Not-Black-at-All or something.”
For a split second, Karen considered pointing out that Allison’s children were not actually middle class. She decided to let it go in favor of laughing and saying, “Stop! You’re killing me.” Besides, it wasn’t entirely clear that Karen’s child was middle class either.
“Seriously, Lucien goes around saying ‘Yo-yo-yo’ to everyone and telling them they’ve got swag,” said Allison. “To be honest, I don’t even know what swag is—except that I feel fairly sure I don’t have any. Meanwhile, Esme is obsessed with that horrible Australian rapper Iggy Azalea and wants to be a makeup artist when she grows up. For this, we spend a kajillion dollars in tuition per year.” She shook her head and rolled her eyes.
“Hey, there’s always public school!” said Karen.
“Believe me, I’m thinking about it,” said Allison, even though both of them knew she wasn’t doing anything of the kind.
“Not only is it free,” Karen continued, with a perverse desire to bolster Allison’s position, as if trying it on for size, “but you get to send your children to school with tragic ‘ghetto’ kids who are being abused at home and take out their rage issues in the classroom, where they break other kids’ noses for calling them stupid, which is basically what happened in Ruby’s third-grade class last week.” For white liberals like Karen, it had somehow become okay to throw around the g word as an adjective, at least among other white liberals. Surely they’d understand that you were using the word ironically and in quotes; that you were being self-consciously provocative, not condemnatory; and that you were still fully aware of the unspeakable historical precedents, beginning with slavery, that had led to the development of the underclass you were referencing. Besides, calling something ghetto wasn’t racist, went the thinking, because it alluded to a condition, not a people.
Except no sooner had Karen used the word than she felt ashamed. Would she have used the term with a black friend? Probably not.
“Are you serious?” said Allison. Eyes bugging, she lowered her chin and leaned in.
“Dead serious,” said Karen, who sometimes felt as if she were providing Allison with material for her columns that, as a journalist, she should have gone searching for herself. Karen was also aware of playing up her access to the poor, just as Michelle may well have been exaggerating the dysfunction in her own extended family for Karen’s benefit. Just as easily, Karen could have told Allison about how the fifth-grade chess team at Betts had made it to the state championships. But what was the fun in that? “Oh, and the girl who got socked in the face, who was one of the four white girls in the class—and also Ruby’s best friend—just transferred out of the school,” Karen went on. “Which is kind of a bummer. But, whatever.” She shrugged, trying to downplay her investment.
“Wow,” said Allison, eyebrows now up near her hairline. “Well, I wish Eastbrook Lab had a few more disadvantaged minorities. Seriously, the only kids of color in the whole school are adopted ones from Ethiopia with white parents who thought it would be really cool to go to Africa and buy a child like Madonna did. Oh, and there’s one half-black girl in Esme’s class whose dad is one of the top guys at Bank of America, but that so doesn’t count. I think there’s one actual impoverished scholarship student in the other seventh-grade class, the one that Lucien’s not in. Maybe it’s the school janitor’s son or something? But really, everyone else is either a banker’s or a lawyer’s kid, including my own little brats. It’s so disgusting. A kid in Lucien’s class literally just hired Kanye to perform at his bar mitzvah. And Esme’s fourth grade is almost as bad. I was picking her up the other day, and I heard this little missy saying”—Allison assumed a high-pitched voice—“‘I spent spring break at the Four Seasons in Nevis. Where did your family go?’”
“Sounds awesome,” said Karen, who couldn’t always tell the difference between Allison bragging and Allison complaining. “How do I get myself invited?”
“You and me both.” Allison laughed. “We just got back from ten days with David’s parents in Florida. Shoot me now.”
“Don’t his parents have a house on the Gulf Coast?”
“Yeah, in Naples. The infinity pool was nice, I admit. But they’re honest-to-God Rush Limbaugh fans. It’s really hard being around them, to tell you the truth. They think Obama is a communist agitator—as if. I honestly couldn’t wait for school to start again. Though of course, Eastbrook being Eastbrook, they were off for practically the entire month of March. It’s like, the more you pay in tuition, the fewer days of school there are.”
“That’s crazy,” said Karen, feeling marginally better about her own life again. In Karen’s experience, as much as she adored Ruby, school holidays was an oxymoron.
“And it’s only been two months since the four weeks they had off for Christmas and New Year’s,” said Allison. “Also, can I tell you? I just found out that, for snack at Eastbrook’s after-school program, they hand out Oreos. Real Oreos. Like, the Nabisco version with the trans fats, not even the Paul Newman kind. As if the school doesn’t bring in enough tuition dollars to buy non-crap cookies.” Allison shook her head and scoffed.
Growing the tiniest bit weary of Allison’s tirade, Karen downed half the wine in her glass and began to sing a commercial jingle from her own youth: “‘Do you know exactly how to eat an Oreo’—”
But Allison didn’t get the hint and apparently wasn’t finished. “And don’t even get me started about the math program,” she went on, and on. “I swear, the fourth-graders haven’t learned multiplication yet. Or at least my fourth-grader hasn’t. They’re still adding, like, twenty plus forty. It’s pathetic…”
To be fair, Allison and Karen had a long-standing tradition of ragging on everyone and everything in their lives. Some of it was serious; some clearly for sport. But at that moment, Karen had the distinct impression that Allison was playing up her discontent for Karen’s benefit. As if the education Karen was providing her only child was so inadequate that she needed to hear that private school wasn’t perfect either. “Allison,” she said, grabbing her friend’s wrist and leaning forward. “If you hate the school that much, why do you send your kids there? I’m serious.”
Allison let out a whimpery little moan, as if she were a teenager who’d been caught at the front door breaking curfew. “I know. You’re right. It’s just—it’s complicated. David never went to public school, so he doesn’t even consider it an option. And I guess I’ve bought into that whole BS about progressive education, even though I’m not sure what it really means, although I think it has something to do with school not just being about memorization and test prep and the kids getting to dress up in fairy costumes and write their own plays or
something. But mostly, once your kids are in private school, it’s really hard to go backward. Or forward. Or whatever you want to call it. Not that we can actually afford to send them to Eastbrook—this ridiculous basement-pool dig-out is literally eating up every last dollar we own—but whatever. I just have to say, I really admire you for sticking it out in public school, and not even one of the famous or selective ones.” She smiled apologetically at Karen, just as Leslie Pfeiffer had done on the street.
“Sticking it out?” scoffed Karen, because it was the easiest point to argue. “Ruby is only in third grade. I wouldn’t really call that sticking it out. But whatever! Compliment taken.”
“What do you say we order?” said Allison, adjusting her chair. “I’m suddenly starving.”
“Sounds good to me,” said Karen.
“To be honest, I get so bored talking about my kids,” Allison added while perusing her menu a final time. As if she’d been the one monologuing Karen with a jeremiad against Betts.
Karen bristled, irritated on multiple fronts. Not only did Allison’s declaration seem like a cop-out, but it also implied that Karen, not Allison, had been the one who’d forced them to talk about their children at the expense of more interesting topics. “I’m not bored,” she demurred. “But sure. Let’s talk about something else.”
“There must be something on this menu that isn’t pigeon.”
“Locally sourced rat?” said Karen.
“Ha,” said Allison.
The joke was less funny the second time around.
When Karen got home from dinner, she found Matt sprawled on the living-room sofa watching a basketball game. His dirty socks were in balls beneath the coffee table. His dirty dinner plate was on the coffee table alongside a saucer holding a morass of crumbs and melting butter. “Hey,” she said, wishing he would put the laundry, dirty dishes, and perishables where they belonged—that is, in the hamper, dishwasher, and refrigerator, respectively. Karen worked hard at keeping a comfortable and orderly home, and Matt seemed always to be thwarting her efforts with his indifference, his slovenliness, his failure even to notice when things were amiss. Then again, she was the one who’d just been out to dinner while Matt had stayed home and watched Ruby. And what if Karen was turning into one of those fussy old ladies she’d been so frightened of as a child—the type who’d reprimand you in gift shops and antique stores for touching the merchandise?
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