“Well, I think that’s ridiculous,” said Karen. “I don’t see why girls your age need to wear bras when they don’t have boobs.”
Ruby shrugged, then lay down.
After Karen tucked her in, she went back into the living room where Matt sat reading sports scores on his phone and told him what Jayyden had said to Ruby.
“Boys just say stuff,” he said. He sounded as unconcerned as Ruby. “Besides, he didn’t say he wanted to fuck her up—or, God forbid, fuck her. He said he wanted to fuck with her. Honestly, it doesn’t sound that bad to me. Having said that, I wouldn’t be that psyched if I were Dashboard’s parents right now, or whatever that kid’s name is.”
“It’s Dashiell, not Dashboard,” said Karen, not in the mood for Matt’s punning. “His parents own the artisanal sausage place up the street.”
“Isn’t that kind of an oxymoron?” said Matt. “I mean, isn’t the whole point of sausages that they’re highly processed and really bad for you?”
“The artisanal ones are probably bad but not as bad for you, because they don’t have as many additives in them. But I’m trying to talk to you about something else!”
“Oh, right.”
“So you’d rather wait until Ruby is Jayyden’s next victim than try to do something about it now?”
“He’s not going to go after Ruby. He only goes after the kids who start up with him. And Ruby’s not like that. Also, they’re eight years old. Can we please not lose sight of that fact?”
“That’s not even true—Jayyden is nine going on ten,” said Karen.
“Whatever,” said Matt.
“I’m thinking of talking to the principal about it.”
“You sound like Maeve’s parents.”
The accusation made Karen wince. In her mind, Laura and Evan had become the apotheosis of liberal hypocrisy. “That’s not fair,” she said.
But wasn’t the child’s removal her unspoken goal too? And what if Laura and Evan had had a valid point about Principal Chambers protecting Jayyden at the expense of the others? Or had skin color distorted Karen’s perception to the point of blindness? If some troubled white boy had told Ruby he wanted to fuck with her at recess, surely Karen would have been concerned as well. But how concerned? And what would happen to Jayyden? Maybe April Fishbach was right, and the child needed succor, not censor. But did he have to get that help in the same building, the same room, as Ruby was in?
“Honestly, Karen, I really think you’re overreacting,” said Matt.
“Am I?” She could no longer tell.
Maybe not surprisingly, Karen and Ruby were late for school the next day. But Karen’s chronic insomnia was only partly to blame. Her head awhirl with visions of Jayyden inserting various sharp implements into her daughter’s flesh, Karen felt uneasy even entering the school building. And having finally done so, she was reluctant to let her daughter walk down the now-deserted hall. “I love you,” she said—twice.
“Mommy, you’re embarrassing me,” said Ruby.
“Sorry, sweetie—sometimes moms are really embarrassing,” said Karen.
For the rest of the day, every time the phone rang at work—before Karen picked it up and found it was a robo-call from a politician or HK’s charming but lazy truck driver Gregor calling in sick with a bad back, as he constantly did—Karen imagined it was the main office of Betts Elementary phoning to say that her daughter had been taken away in an ambulance. She even pictured herself in reaction, trembling and hyperventilating as she fled her office, the image superimposed over stock photos of slumped bodies from the latest school shooting, the latest terrorist attack. There was a new one seemingly every day. Was it any wonder she felt as if she were being thrown from the stern of a small boat to the bow and back again? Nausea was a not-unexpected by-product.
Yet Karen had always prided herself on being strong, reasonable, tolerant, and tempered—not a hysteric shivering and cowering in the corner at the very suggestion of ghosts. What was happening to her? How had she allowed her dreams to supplant reality? And what was fear, after all, but a projection into a future that no one could predict?
Only, for Karen, the future felt like right now. That Ruby apparently had a perfectly fine day at school that day did nothing to diminish her paranoia. “I need to talk to you,” she told Matt that night. “And it’s important.”
“Again?” he said.
“Can you please mute the game?” Legs splayed on the sofa, he begrudgingly hit the remote. “I want to take Ruby out of Betts,” she said.
Matt unleashed a long sigh. “Is this about that kid again?”
“Yes, it’s about that kid, who is endangering the welfare of not just Ruby but all the other kids in his class. But it’s also about the fact that Ruby is bored and coming home singing really inappropriate songs she picks up in the schoolyard.”
“You mean, songs courtesy of the black girls with their morally bankrupt hip-hop culture?” countered Matt.
“I didn’t say anything about race,” Karen shot back.
“Well, I did. Besides, since when have you been a puritan?”
“Since today.”
“Whatever you say, Miss My Favorite Song in Fourth Grade Was ‘My Sharona’ by the Knack.”
“Okay, forget about music,” said Karen, already exasperated. “There’s also the fact that Ruby’s only friend at school turned on her, and the mother turned on me. And now it’s really uncomfortable for both of us.”
“So she’ll make new friends.”
“With who?”
Matt shrugged. “I don’t know. Aren’t there twenty-four other kids in her class?”
“Twenty-two of whom she has nothing in common with.”
“So, that’s what this is about,” said Matt with a leading smile that Karen didn’t appreciate. So often, Karen felt as if her husband was trying to out her as a reactionary or—even worse—a racist. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.
“There aren’t enough white kids,” said Matt, spelling it out for her. “Isn’t that the real issue here?”
“I never said that. You did,” said Karen.
“But that’s what you were thinking.”
Was Matt right, and was that why Karen wanted to take Ruby out of Betts? Karen refused to believe that about herself. It went against all her ideals and, really, everything she’d spent her life working toward. “It has nothing to do with race,” she told him. “I just don’t feel comfortable leaving her there in the morning anymore.”
“Well, I do,” said Matt. “Maybe she’ll learn the meaning of compassion, something you seem to have forgotten the definition of.”
“And maybe you’ll stop being so self-righteous,” said Karen, “and admit there are serious behavioral and discipline issues over there and also that it’s basically impossible for one teacher with twenty-five students to simultaneously teach kids who’ve had every advantage, like Ruby, and kids who live in homeless shelters and housing projects and barely have parents and are almost always behind in school.”
“So you want to send her to private school?” asked Matt. “Because money is the new IQ, and all rich kids are smart and want to learn. Is that how it works?”
“It has nothing to do with money,” scoffed Karen. “It has to do with coming from a functional family where people care about their kids getting an education and encourage them. In any case, we can’t afford private. And you know I don’t believe in it anyway.”
“So you want to move to the all-white half of Cortland Hill? Is that the idea? Or—even better—to a house in the suburbs with a picket fence and a green lawn?”
“I don’t particularly want to. But I’m not a hundred percent opposed to the idea,” said Karen.
“Well, I am,” said Matt. “This is my home, and I have no intention of leaving it.”
“It’s my home too,” said Karen. “And please don’t make me point out who actually put down the money for it.”
Matt’s jaw visibl
y tensed. For a few seconds, he didn’t speak. Then he said, “Are you seriously going there?”
“Sorry, that was unnecessary,” said Karen, already regretting the gambit.
“Thank you for your apology,” said Matt.
“So we’ll stay here. Are you happy now?”
“Happy enough.”
Well, you’re the only one who is, Karen was tempted to reply, but this time she stopped herself. “I’m going to shower,” she said instead and walked out of the room.
Undressing in the bedroom, she caught sight of her reflection in the full-length mirror. Although she was forty-five, it still came as a surprise and a disappointment to find that her body no longer resembled her youthful image of herself, which she continued to cling to despite all evidence to the contrary. Instead, she appeared in the mirror that evening as bulky in all the wrong places and hollow in the others, like a banana split that had been left out in the sun for too long. A part of Karen understood that it no longer mattered what she looked like without her clothes on, since she was (a) already married and (b) at the end of her childbearing years and therefore not expected to resemble a totem of fertility.
But in that moment, it did matter. She felt old and irrelevant and, as with many women in moments of insecurity, began to mentally flagellate herself for her lack of self-control—for her failure to go to the gym often enough and eat sparingly at all times. Her diet may have been largely organic, but it was also frequently excessive. The problem was that the salads never filled her up. And the smoothies only left her craving something smoother, like ice cream.
Once in the shower, the simple joy of hot water streaming down her scalp and back soothed and distracted her. But when she emerged from the downpour, her dissatisfaction both with herself and with the world returned. For Karen, negativity was like a wisteria vine that, if left to its own devices, would creep into every last crevice of her conscience and wind itself around every last limb until she felt strangled by her own discontent and desperate to escape. “I’m going out for milk,” she called out over the voice of the sportscaster.
“Don’t we have some?” Matt called back.
“Not enough,” she answered. It seemed like the easiest explanation.
Karen locked the door behind her and headed to the elevator.
It was far from warm outside, but the dampness had lifted. And the air felt cool and fresh on Karen’s face. Pausing outside the front door of her building, she looked around her. The doggie-day-care center next door was dark. So was the Vietnamese sandwich shop that had recently taken over from a bail bondsman. Only the Korean deli and the bistro on the corner appeared to be open for business. The latter business was so cool it didn’t even have a name. What it did have was greasy comfort food with a gourmet flair, like cheeseburgers made of dry-aged beef with cave-aged cheddar. In the new culinary economy, it seemed, everybody wanted food that had been sitting around for a long time. Karen marveled that it wasn’t the other way around. Out of habit more than anything else, she began walking toward it.
Peering into the bistro’s handsomely canopied windows, she saw tables of white people in their twenties and thirties, their faces elastic with the effects of alcohol, their clothes just the tiniest bit rumpled, their hair unkempt, their heads thrown back in laughter. Every Wednesday—Karen had seen the posters in the window—the bistro hosted a bingo night, which was clearly meant to be ironic. Karen had always hated board games, even as a child, finding them dull and fundamentally pointless. She had a far more ambivalent relationship with the bistro itself.
When Karen first moved to the neighborhood, there had been a decrepit bodega in the same spot. Karen had almost never shopped there, choosing to buy her staples at the more upscale Korean-owned deli nearby or to order them online. But once in a while, when the deli had run out of milk or orange juice, she’d find herself walking on the bodega’s broken black-and-white-vinyl-tiled floor while a tabby cat with green-gold eyes darted in and out of the aisles. The Tunisian immigrant family who owned the place must have been trying to capitalize on the first wave of gentrification to hit the neighborhood when, one day, they erected a new marquee promising ORGANUK FOOD. The misspelling had made Karen cringe. Not surprisingly, a year or so later, the bodega was shuttered. For six months, the store sat empty. Then the bistro guys arrived in their black leather motorcycle jackets. While they stood out front smoking American Spirit cigarettes and talking on their phones, a crew of Central American construction workers began yanking out the vinyl tiles and chucking them into a dumpster, exposing the original wide-plank subfloor—and ultimately increasing the property value of Karen and Matt’s condo.
And now, next to the Bistro with No Name, where there had previously been an African American barbershop—until the barber was shot dead in what the local papers called a personal dispute—there was a store that sold macaroons and nothing more. It was closed for the night, but the display window was still lit, revealing Easter egg–colored disks laid out in rows in an old-fashioned oak-and-glass case with cabriole legs. Beneath the sweets were handwritten note cards advertising exotic flavors like passion fruit and champagne. Karen thought of jewels in a jewelry store. She also thought that, whatever it was the macaroon people were selling, it had very little to do with eating. But then, for people in a certain milieu, a milieu that surely included Karen, this was what food had increasingly become—a luxury item, rather than a means to stay alive.
The sound of clinking glass turned Karen’s attention away from the macaroons and toward the curb, where a homeless man with a filthy dreadlocked beard and a bum leg scrounged through a blue trash bag, presumably in search of redeemable bottles. Tuesday evening was when residents of the neighborhood put out their recyclables for Wednesday-morning pickup. At the sight of the man, Karen felt competing desires: to reach out and to run far away, to sympathize but also to condemn. As if there were no history, no mitigating circumstances that had led to his situation in life. When had she grown so callous, she wondered—in life, in her marriage? As the man began to hobble away with his giant clanging bag of recyclables slung Santa-style over his rounded back, Karen guiltily thrust a five-dollar bill into his hand. “May God bless you,” he muttered after her.
“Good luck,” she told him.
As if luck had anything to do with it.
After crossing the neighborhood’s main commercial thoroughfare, Karen started down a leafy street lined with handsomely proportioned, history-rich nineteenth-century brick row houses with brass hardware on the doors. She’d crossed the line that separated the Betts school district from the one zoned for Edward G. Mather. Here, the homes featured plaques claiming to have been the birthplaces of important but now obscure figures from the Civil War, from literature, and from architecture. Staring covetously through their elongated windows, she could make out chandeliers of various vintages, beginning with the introduction of the gas lamp and continuing into the present, with sleek steel, brass, and glass versions from Design Within Reach. Karen’s wealthy friends, like Allison, called it Design Out of Reach, even though they readily dove their hands into their wallets in order to purchase home furnishings from the place. (They also referred to Whole Foods as Whole Paycheck, even as they continued to buy their heirloom tomatoes there.) But then, in the city in which they all lived, feeling poor was apparently intrinsic to the experience of being rich, unless you were incredibly rich. Allison and her family actually lived just around the corner. It was another of the ironies of the area that the real estate had gotten so expensive, and the people moving into it so moneyed, that they didn’t necessarily even use the public school that had made the neighborhood so sought after just a few years before.
The block was deserted except for a Caucasian man with a shaved head, walking a French bulldog. The man was dressed in the casual uniform of the Euro elite: dark-wash jeans, a black suit jacket, a crisp white dress shirt, and black loafers with a silver horse bit on each toe. Karen guessed he was a private banke
r, or maybe an art consultant who advised bankers. In any case, he exuded a compelling type of confidence. And as the two passed each other, she smiled what she imagined to be her most beguiling smile. But the man stared blankly back at her—really, through her. Reminded again of her reduced desirability, being a woman over forty, Karen felt ashamed and embarrassed and turned her eyes toward the curb, where clear plastic bags filled with paper trash formed high-class hillocks beneath the streetlamp.
Through the plastic, she could make out back issues of Bon Appétit magazine and various official-looking envelopes that bore the insignias of financial institutions like PricewaterhouseCoopers and Fidelity. It was that kind of neighborhood, filled with those kind of people, she thought—the kind she’d spent her life both shunning for their sense of entitlement and trying to keep up with, in roughly equivalent proportions. But in that moment, the latter impulse was in ascendance. Although Karen was aware that, compared to the vast majority of city dwellers, she and Matt were greatly privileged, she also saw her own family as being at a distinct disadvantage. Why should the children on this block get to walk the hallowed halls of Mather instead of the higgledy-piggledy ones of Betts? It seemed as unfair as—well—cancer. Also as random.
Of course, the disparity in privilege between Karen and Clay Phipps was surely many times greater than it was between her and the public-school parents in the neighborhood who sent their children to Mather. But Clay’s wealth was so beyond the realm of imaginable that it somehow didn’t merit comparison, whereas walking down Pendleton Street, which was only four blocks from Karen’s home, she had the uneasy feeling that she’d taken a wrong turn a hundred miles back, and now it was too late to turn around. She’d never find the exit in time, never catch the train. It had already left the station without her. And there wasn’t another one coming any time soon. Karen had never considered herself to be a particularly competitive person. But even if winning wasn’t her life’s goal, it was also true that she hated to lose.
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