“Find me a couple who doesn’t fight,” said Lou. “I’ve never met any. Gunnar and I? We try to stick to physical violence only, especially when it involves dirty dishes left in the sink for ten straight hours while he’s lying on the sofa playing Shadow of Mordor.”
“Okay, that makes me feel better,” said Karen, chuckling through her tears. “By the way, if you need a good laugh yourself, check out”—she leaned into Lou’s ear—“you-know-who’s son’s story. It’s a classic of the genre. Set in a food co-op, of course.”
“Naturally,” said Lou.
“Though if you’re in the mood for heartbreak, that one will slay you.” Karen discreetly pointed at Empriss’s paper.
“Oh, yeah. I read that,” said Lou. “I believe that genre is called So Realistic It’s Actually Memoir.”
“Exactly,” said Karen.
“People screw up their kids so badly.” Lou shook her head.
“I hope I’m not one of them,” said Karen.
“Please,” said Lou, making a wry face. “You mean by providing Ruby with too many after-school enrichment classes in one week?”
“Are you telling me I’m a horrible cliché?”
“The worst,” said Lou, smiling.
Lou’s words were still reverberating in Karen’s head when, five minutes later, she said good-bye to her, then to Ruby, and headed back out of the building. At the corner of Cortland, rather than continue walking to the train station, she turned left—in the direction of Edward G. Mather Elementary.
The building itself was nothing much to look at: a low-lying white-brick structure dating back to the 1960s. But the landscaping was pristine. Clusters of purple and white early-spring crocuses decorated the flowerbeds. And there was nary a Skittles or Snickers wrapper in sight. What’s more, the glass-enclosed bulletin board by the entrance featured an announcement for an upcoming wine tasting for parents. OUR BIGGEST SPRING FUND-RAISER! it read. Beneath the headline was a black-on-white ink drawing of a hand wrapped around an angled goblet, its elongated fingers adorned with cocktail rings. By comparison, the outdoor message board at Betts was caked in grime, splattered with bird shit, and still featured an announcement from the previous fall about registering for pre-K.
Also unlike at Ruby’s current school, the security guard at Mather sat in the lobby directly facing the front doors, a fact that Karen noted with relief and approval as she walked into the building. “Excuse me, I’m here to register,” she told the man.
“You’ll have to speak up, ma’am,” he answered.
Karen suddenly realized that she was whispering. “The main office?” she tried again, a little louder this time.
“It’s down the hall to the left,” he said. “Can I see some ID?”
Karen showed him her driver’s license. Then she entered her name in the arrivals’ log in an only partly decipherable script, reluctant to be recognized. What the two schools did seem to have in common, Karen noted on her way down the hall, was their art curricula. Just as at Betts, student-made tissue-paper collages decorated the walls. But to Karen’s untrained eye, the ones at Mather were a little more sophisticated, the shapes positioned a little less haphazardly. Or was she projecting? Maybe they were exactly the same, the defining difference being the names inscribed on the bottom right-hand corners of the construction paper: Daisy, Lincoln, Sadie, Gemma, Oliver. You could imagine all of them a hundred years ago in their Sunday best, wearing hats and carrying handkerchiefs. There was not a Zaniyah or a Janiyah in sight.
“Can I help you?” asked an older white lady behind the front desk, the soufflé-like appearance of her frosted hair suggesting it had been set in a beauty parlor with an astronaut-helmet-style bubble dryer.
“Oh, hi!” said Karen, smiling and trying to sound casual. “We just moved to the neighborhood. I’m here to sign my daughter up for third grade. I hope I’m in the right place!”
“That’s not for me to say,” snapped the woman, immediately putting Karen on edge.
“Well, I think we’re zoned for the school,” Karen continued with a lighthearted laugh while her heart went pitter-patter. “Here’s our lease, my daughter’s birth certificate, and our gas and electric bill.” She laid the documents on the counter.
“Fill this out first,” said the woman, handing Karen a form that asked for her child’s name, address, birth date, and other basic information and leaving the documents she’d brought lying unattended on the counter. Karen wished she could take them back. What if a parent should walk in and spot them—a parent like Nathaniel Bordwell?
“Of course,” she said, reaching her hand into her bag for a pen, only to come up with nothing. “I’m so sorry,” she went on while trying to quell the panic that was now seizing her throat—panic built partly of the fact that her dream from the previous night appeared to be coming true. How soon before the doors began to vanish, followed by the floor and the ceiling, until Karen was suspended in midair? “But is there any way I could borrow a pen?”
Looking mildly peeved, the Woman with the Frosted Hair handed over a ballpoint featuring the name of a local plumbing company.
“Thank you so much,” said Karen, gripping the pen in her fist so tightly that after she’d finished filling out the required information (she listed her address as 321 Pendleton Street, no. 2), her hand ached.
Frosted Hair took the form from Karen, finally (to Karen’s relief) scooped up the documents that Karen had left on the counter, and typed something into her desktop computer. Then she looked up and said, “Why is the name on the bill different from your family’s name?”
Karen had predicted the question—and planned her answer. “I know, it’s ridiculous,” she replied with a conspiratorial roll of her eyes, as if they were all in this absurd charade known as urban life together. But the woman stared blankly back at her. “Our landlord likes to have all the bills in his name,” Karen went on. “And then we pay him what we owe. Don’t ask me why!” She laughed again, this time to hide her terror, while Frosted Hair reexamined her documentation, her head moving from side to side. Karen stood there, waiting. It might only have been for twenty seconds but to Karen, it felt like twenty minutes. Her entire future, as well as that of her daughter, seemed to hang in the balance of this stranger’s mood—and whether she’d awoken that morning to the sound of birds chirping or an obnoxious car alarm.
Finally, without explanation, Frosted Hair ambled over to a copy machine, placed the document that Karen had filled out beneath its cover, and pressed START. Then she handed Karen a short stack of papers to sign, including one verifying that the information she’d provided was true under penalty of law. Refusing to ponder the implications of that threat, Karen signed them all in her best cursive and then pushed them toward the woman with a cheerful “Here you go! Oh, and here’s your pen!” She laid the plumbing-company ballpoint on top of the documents she’d signed.
Frosted Hair slid the pile off the counter without a thank-you. Then she announced, “School starts at eight thirty. Your daughter can come tomorrow. I’ll inform the principal today so she can make a class assignment.”
“Great—thanks very much,” chirped Karen, trying to sound upbeat but not so appreciative that her enthusiasm would seem suspect. After all, wasn’t it her daughter’s right to attend the public school that her family’s home was zoned for?
“You’re welcome,” Frosted Hair muttered ungraciously before she turned her back.
Could that really be it? Karen wondered as she made her way out of the office, then back down the hall. She couldn’t believe how easy it had all been.
She couldn’t believe what she’d just done either. But when she pushed open the double doors to the street and an undulating ribbon of crystalline sunlight appeared over the clouds, it didn’t seem like a coincidence. It seemed as if spring had been merely waiting for Karen to solicit it herself.
Almost giddy with relief and feeling newly energized, she lifted her face to the sun and let the rays war
m her cheeks and lids. Then she headed up the block, past the Mather schoolyard, where recess was now in progress. On the other side of the fence, ahead of where she walked, a group of girls about the same age as Ruby were drawing with sticks in the dirt border around the blacktop and whispering conspiratorially. Instead of the jeans, sweatshirts, and sneakers that Karen had grown accustomed to seeing at Betts, they were wearing puffer vests, patterned tights, corduroy minis, suede boots, and sparkly headbands in their shiny blond and light brown bobs. As Karen got closer, she realized that the blonde with the longest stick was Maeve.
A whiff of hurt regarding the apparent ease with which her daughter’s onetime best friend had apparently found a new one (or two, or three) momentarily ate into the relief that Karen had experienced when she left the school building. But she pushed the feeling away, telling herself that, for once, Maeve had done nothing wrong. Besides, in due time, Ruby might be palling around with the same gaggle. As Karen passed her, she lowered her head so Maeve wouldn’t recognize her.
In her peripheral vision, she couldn’t help but note that Maeve’s nose looked just fine.
Karen had a busy day at work with meetings and conference calls. HK was launching a new healthy-eating initiative for young children, called What I Ate, which promised to simultaneously improve early writing skills and get kids to think about what they were eating by having them keep daily food logs. Which was exactly what Karen had done in her late teens, at the height of her neurotic-eating years, registering the calorie count in parentheses next to each food item she’d consumed. To her mind, it was a slippery slope from there to a full-fledged eating disorder. But no matter. What I Ate was the brainchild of HK’s nutritionist, Cary Ann, and everyone else at the organization, including Molly, was excited about it.
At six o’clock, Karen returned to Betts to pick up Ruby from what Karen envisioned would be Ruby’s final after-school session—and found her daughter in an unexpectedly and somewhat confusingly buoyant mood. “Mama Kajama!” cried Ruby, running into her mother’s arms. It was one of their jokey phrases.
“Hi there, sweetie!” said Karen, kissing her head and weighing the possibility that Ruby was simply happy to see her and be heading home. “What do you say we get out of here?” She took Ruby’s hand and led her away from the second-floor classroom in which she was supposedly learning the art of puppetry.
“What’s for dinner?” said Ruby. “I’m starving.”
“I’m not sure yet,” said Karen, who secretly wished her daughter didn’t enjoy eating as much as she seemed to.
In the stairwell that led down to the front entrance, Ruby and Karen encountered a young couple changing a newborn’s diaper on the windowsill of the second-floor landing. The man was holding up the baby’s dimpled legs while the mother wiped its rear. Karen felt vaguely repulsed. Couldn’t they have found a more secluded setting? she thought. Then again, where were these people, who quite possibly lived far from the school, supposed to change their baby? There were no adults allowed in the girls’ and boys’ bathrooms. And in truth Karen had seen a couple doing the same thing in the open back of their Passat station wagon directly in front of the Bistro with No Name the weekend before.
“Hey, Ruby,” came a voice.
“Hey,” Ruby, who was farther down the staircase, answered flatly.
“What after-school class are you in?”
“Puppetry.”
“I’m in karate.”
“Oh.”
Karen glanced down and saw Empriss leaning against the banister, one flight below, a lollipop in her mouth. It occurred to Karen suddenly that the baby-changers must have been Empriss’s mother and stepfather. Guilt washed over Karen—not just that her daughter was being so unfriendly, but that Karen herself had been silently passing judgment on the way these people lived when their lives were so much harder than hers.
At the same time, Karen couldn’t help but question why people in financial straits as dire as theirs were bringing more babies into the world. Or was Karen an awful person for even thinking that way? The desire to reproduce was biological, universal, and arguably irrational in all of us, and there was no reason to believe that the same fantasies and ambitions that inspired the rich to make tiny versions of themselves who promised to outlive them would fail to motivate the poor. And it was Matt who had pointed out one night that, far from poor children being a burden on any system, capitalism depended on them, insofar as it required an endless supply of future laborers. Besides, the only area of the labor market predicted to expand over the coming century was the service industry. Before he became a housing lawyer, Matt had been an assistant attorney for the hotel employees’ union. “She’s adorable,” said Karen, trying to compensate for her daughter’s standoffishness. “How old?”
“Three months,” the mother said, smiling back.
“What’s her name?” The baby had a giant pink bow on top of its bald head, so Karen assumed it was a girl.
“Kimora.”
“What a beautiful name!” said Karen, who probably would have answered the same way even if the child had been called Adolf.
“Thank you.”
“Well, have a good evening.”
“Same to you,” said the woman.
“You weren’t very friendly,” Karen groused to her daughter as they stepped outside.
“Mommy, Empriss is a bully!” said Ruby.
“Ruby, do you even know what bullying is?” said Karen, doubtful.
“Yes! We had an assembly and a workshop on it.”
“Well, she seemed perfectly nice just then.”
“That’s because her mom was standing right there. She’s always nice around grown-ups.”
“Does this have to do with her being best friends with Mia now?”
“No! I don’t care who she’s friends with!” Ruby insisted. “And I’m not even friends with Mia anymore.” This was not unwelcome news to Karen. “I just don’t like Empriss. Okay?” Ruby went on.
“You don’t have to be friends with her,” said Karen. “But can’t you be nice?”
“Why should I be nice? Yesterday she called me a tattletale just because I told Miss Tammy that she was hiding in the girls’ room when we had a fire drill. And she’s always saying I get in everyone’s business and try to boss people around.”
“Well, do you?” asked Karen.
“Mommmmm!” cried Ruby, clearly exasperated.
“Okay, okay.” As Karen pulled back, she pondered Ruby’s question: Why was it so important to Karen that her daughter make an effort with Empriss at the very moment when she was taking her daughter out of the girl’s school? In all likelihood, they would never see each other again. Was Karen trying to reassure herself that Ruby’s imminent departure from Betts had nothing to do with the school’s inclusion of students like Empriss? And why was it so difficult for Karen to accept the idea that a girl who lived in a homeless shelter might also occasionally be obnoxious? To have faced extreme adversity didn’t guarantee a winning personality or strong moral fiber—possibly just the opposite. “I believe you,” said Karen. “I just—well, we’ve talked about it before. Empriss has a way harder life than you. I’m not excusing the way she acts. I just want you to remember that. In any case, you probably won’t be seeing that much of Empriss in the future”—Karen figured she might as well tell her now—“because you’re changing schools.”
Ruby stopped walking. They were two blocks from home. “What?” she said, turning to her mother, her thin eyebrows lifted nearly to her hairline. “Why?”
“Because Mommy thinks you’ll get a better education elsewhere,” Karen said quickly.
Ruby looked stricken. “But where am I going?”
“To Mather, where Maeve goes now.”
“But I’m not even friends with her anymore.”
Karen suddenly regretted the abruptness with which she’d turned down Laura’s playdate invitation a few weeks back. “Well, that’s just because you haven’t seen he
r for a while,” she said. “You will be again, I’m sure. Besides, there will be a hundred new girls to be friends with there.” Karen put her arm around her daughter.
But Ruby shrugged it off. “I’m not going,” she announced.
“Sweetie,” said Karen, trying to disguise her own alarm at Ruby’s alarm. She hadn’t expected so much resistance. “You were the one who told me a few days ago that school was too easy and that you weren’t being challenged and also that you had no one to sit with at lunch.”
“Well, it wasn’t too easy today,” she said. “And Amanda and I sit together at lunch.”
“Amanda? Who was friends with Maeve?”
“Yes.”
Karen was baffled. When had all this happened? “Well, we can discuss it at home, with Daddy, but to do that you need to keep walking.” Karen was already thinking ahead to the far more agonizing task of telling Matt.
“Fine,” said Ruby. “But I’m not leaving Betts.”
But at least she was walking in the direction of home again.
Ordinarily, Karen was irritated when Matt got home after eight. But to her relief that evening, Ruby was already in bed when Karen heard the key in the lock—at a quarter to nine. Not that she was willing to acknowledge the relief. It seemed more important that she continue to keep score in the never-ending tennis match known as her marriage. “Where have you been?” was her opening question. Maybe it was aggressive, but wasn’t his chronic lateness a form of aggression? Fifteen–love, Karen.
“Sorry, I got caught up in work stuff,” he said. “And then Mike and I went to get something to eat.”
“Right,” said Karen, who suspected he was also trying to avoid her—and that he still hadn’t forgiven her for pointing out who had put up the money for the down payment on their condo.
“How was your day?” he asked.
“Fine,” she answered. Then she took a deep breath and said, “I registered Ruby at Mather.”
Class Page 17
