Class

by Lucinda Rosenfeld

  “What?” said Matt.

  “I enrolled her at Mather Elementary,” Karen told him again. “She’s going to start tomorrow.”

  “You signed Ruby up for a new school?”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier.”

  “Isn’t that a zoned school?”

  “I called over there, and they happened to have a space.”

  “And when did you do this?”

  “This morning.”

  “Really? So, you just randomly called, and they said, ‘Sure.’”

  “Sort of.”

  “Or you lied to them,” said Matt. “Just like you’re lying to me right now.”

  “I’m telling you the truth,” said Karen, apparently unconvincingly.

  “But you told them that we live somewhere we don’t,” he countered. “Which is also why you didn’t tell me until just now, because you knew I’d disapprove of you breaking the law. You also made the decision to transfer Ruby without me agreeing to it.”

  Matt was right, of course, but Karen still felt unfairly maligned. “Well, you weren’t going to do anything about anything,” she said. “So I took action myself. If that’s a crime, so be it!”

  “I matter, Karen,” said Matt, taking a step closer and beating his chest with his fists, as if he were Tarzan calling for Jane. “My opinions matter. And Ruby is our child—not your child. But you chose to make a unilateral decision concerning her without consulting me first.”

  Karen could no longer tell who was right—the voice in her head or the voice in her ears. In that moment all she knew was that the understanding that she and Matt were two like-minded souls wading through the muck had begun to falter. “Fine—you win,” Karen told him. “We’ll keep her at Betts through fifth grade, knife wounds and all.”

  Matt’s eyes popped. “What knife wounds?”

  Karen couldn’t come up with an answer.

  “You’re really losing it,” he said, shaking his head.

  Was sanity slipping from Karen’s grasp? Even if it was, she wasn’t willing to concede—not just then, maybe never. “And you just want to be able to brag to all your friends that your daughter attends a minority-white school,” she went on. “Isn’t that what this is really about?” If Matt was going to hurl insults at her, Karen didn’t see why she shouldn’t do some flinging herself. Maybe her dirtiest secret of all was that she loved a good fight.

  “How dare you,” he said.

  “Well, I see no other reason why you won’t let me take her out of a school where, literally, her safety is endangered.”

  “Says who?”

  “Says me,” said Karen. “And I’m her mother.” It was a last-resort argument, she knew. But she’d run out of better ones.

  Falling momentarily silent, Matt narrowed his eyes at her.

  Karen stared back, feeling angry and ashamed and also inexplicably blank toward the man she’d promised to love and cherish a decade ago.

  Finally, he spoke. “You’ve changed,” he began in a lower register. “What’s happened to you?”

  “Nothing’s happened to me,” she said.

  “You used to care about the world.”

  But Karen was thinking something similar—that her husband had changed; that he used to care about her, and now he cared only about the people out there. “And you used to care about your family,” she said.

  “Karen, you’re the one trying to write me out of this family,” said Matt. “And to be honest, it’s making me question our whole marriage.”

  “So, go ahead and question!” cried Karen, outwardly defiant but inwardly trembling—less at the prospect of losing Matt than at the thought of being alone. However unhappily, Karen’s parents had managed to stay married for forty years, and Karen had always assumed she’d do the same. And if she wasn’t particularly happy herself, she wasn’t particularly unhappy. Was that such a terrible thing to be? In truth, intimacy had never been her strongest suit. In a strange way, she was most comfortable near but apart from loved ones—say, working on her laptop in the bedroom while Ruby slept in the next room over and Matt watched basketball in the room next to that.

  “Okay, I will,” Matt went on, his face twisting into an unrecognizable mask. “What else are you lying about? Are you fucking someone else also?”

  “Fuck you,” said Karen, her heart now pounding.

  “I’ve had enough,” Matt said on his way out of the room. Though not before he’d shot Karen a look of absolute disgust. He hated her. At least, that was how it seemed. The realization was devastating, but also, in some way, fascinating. At moments of crisis, Karen had always had the strange ability to remove herself from the drama, as if it were happening on a stage and she was sitting in the back row of the theater, watching.

  She and Matt went to sleep not speaking and on opposite sides of the bed. But as upset as Karen was about their fight, she was equally concerned about Ruby making a good impression on her first day at her new school. Mather was four blocks farther away than Betts, but their school day began ten minutes later, so Karen didn’t technically need to reset the alarm. Just to be safe, though, she set it five minutes ahead.

  When Karen woke up the next morning, dawn was just breaking. Against the still-dark walls, the light that filtered through the shades had the hazy quality of smoke from a campfire that hadn’t quite burned itself out. It would probably be a beautiful day. Next to her but facing the other direction, Matt lay motionless and in a deep sleep. Pondering the randomness of marriage—how had this man of all the men in the world’s population become her husband?—Karen tiptoed out of bed to go make coffee. An hour later, she went to wake Ruby and found her in an inexplicably compliant mood.

  But forty minutes after that, when Karen took a right, not a left, on the corner of Cortland Avenue, Ruby accused Karen of lying, just as Matt had done the night before. “Sweetie, I never lied to you,” Karen said shakily. “I told you that you were starting your new school this morning. You must have forgotten.”

  “You didn’t tell me I was starting today!” said Ruby.

  “Will you just do me this favor and try it for one day? If you don’t like it, you can go back to Betts tomorrow.” Just then, that false promise seemed like Karen’s only hope.

  “Fine,” Ruby said contemptuously as she followed her mother down the block.

  What Karen couldn’t have guessed was how anxious she herself would feel on the way to Mather Elementary. Not only was she wary of seeing Betts parents on the street, who would wonder why she and Ruby were headed in the wrong direction, but she was fearful of running into Mather parents she knew from Elm Tree and the playground who would know where Karen’s family really lived.

  What she couldn’t have predicted was that the most immediate threat would come from an absolute stranger. After waiting patiently for the light to change at the corner of Cortland and Donohue and for the red hand signal to turn into the outline of a walking man, Karen and Ruby stepped into the crosswalk. At the same moment, a thirty-something white male on a bicycle appeared out of nowhere and nearly mowed them both down. Jumping out of the way, Karen screamed, “Watch where you’re going, you fucking asshole!”

  While the biker lifted his left hand off the handlebars and extended his middle finger, Ruby muttered with apparent fascination, “Mommy, you just used two really bad words.”

  Karen felt ashamed of her behavior. What kind of example was she setting for her daughter? Even so, she couldn’t stop herself from calling after him, “I hope you get hit by a bus!” Then she turned back to Ruby, her heart still in her throat, and said, “Sorry, sweetie—on special occasions, like when someone almost kills them, grown-ups are allowed to curse.”

  “But do you really hope that man dies?” asked Ruby.

  “No,” said Karen. “But there’s nothing worse than bikers who believe they belong to a superior race because of their reduced carbon emissions.”

  Ruby looked at her mother like she was crazy and said, “Huh
?”

  “I mean, I don’t hope he dies,” she said, “but I don’t hope he has a good life either.”

  “Do you want me to have a good life?” asked Ruby. They had arrived at the other side of the street.

  Karen drew her daughter near and kissed her forehead. “That’s my greatest wish in the world,” she said. And it was true. Wasn’t that why she’d done everything she’d done—and did everything she did?

  Five minutes later they arrived at the school and joined the throng of parents and children amassed in the courtyard outside the front entrance, saying their good-byes. Understandably apprehensive, Ruby came to a sudden stop. So did Karen. Her eyes traveling from left to right and back again, she scanned the crowd. To her amazement, there was not a single dark-skinned child in the mix. There wasn’t a tan-skinned one either. There were hardly even any brunettes. It was as if Karen had fallen asleep and woken up in Norway. All around her were blonds—dark blonds, light blonds, strawberry blonds, and sandy blonds. Karen found the sight both disorienting and distressing.

  Meanwhile, all the parents seemed to be going gray, owing to the fact that they all appeared to be Karen’s age and in some cases even older. Yet they were dressed like teenagers. Despite their silver-flecked beards and soft stomachs, the dads wore holey jeans, faded T-shirts with stretched-out necks advertising colleges and film festivals, and navy-blue ski hats, even though it was now spring. And despite their crow’s-feet and drooping backsides, the moms wore little-girl barrettes on their side-parted hair, embroidered Indian tunics with deep Vs, white cotton jeans that ended at the calf, simple gold or silver jewelry, and clogs of all colors and varieties: high-heeled clogs, boot clogs, closed-heel clogs, open-heel clogs, platform clogs, and clogs with ankle straps. Karen had never seen so many wooden heels in her life. Moreover, the dress code maintained by the Mather parents was so casual as to suggest that few were keeping traditional office hours or reporting to any kind of boss, raising the question of who paid for the real estate that had won their children access to the school in the first place.

  Karen also found herself bemused by a new poster that had been hung on the outdoor bulletin board. JOIN THE MULTICULTURAL COMMITTEE! it read. NEXT MEETING—APRIL 17.

  The sneaking if unwelcome thought occurred to Karen that when people said Mather was a great school, what they really meant was not that the teachers were so amazing or that the PTA was so strong or that the arts program was so extensive but that the housing in its catchment area was prohibitively expensive for poor minorities. It followed that an “up-and-coming” school—Karen had heard neighbors describe Betts this way—was one that was getting whiter but was still majority black and brown.

  “We’re so behind on the camp-sign-up front,” Karen heard one Embroidered Tunic Mom say to another. “All we have Otis down for is, like, one week of Engineering Elves in July.”

  “I was going to get the Number Sixes,” another voice cut in, “but I just felt like the Hasbeens were more forgiving around the toes. And the heel was, like, a tiny bit lower…”

  And then a third: “Of course! Just have your nanny text our nanny.”

  Just then, from a few yards down the block, came a piercing cry: “Winslow! You need to slow down. There are other people on the sidewalk.” Karen looked up just as a short, wiry boy in a black helmet rode his Razor scooter directly into her ankle.

  “Ow,” she said, reaching down to rub it.

  “Are you okay?” asked Ruby.

  “I’m fine,” said Karen, irritated by the failure of supervision that the collision implied.

  Just then, a woman whom Karen presumed to be Winslow’s mother appeared before her. She had her hair back in a ponytail and no makeup on. “I’m so sorry,” she said before turning to her son and saying, “Winslow, say you’re sorry!”

  “Sorry,” the kid mumbled.

  “I’m seriously so embarrassed,” said the woman, turning back to Karen. Although she was now standing right in front of her, she continued to speak in an unnecessarily projected voice, as if other people might be interested in hearing what she was saying. “My son is, like, a complete maniac on that thing,” she went on. “I can’t even keep up with him.”

  “It’s fine—really,” said Karen. She tried to smile in appreciation of the apology. But she had the distinct impression that, for Winslow’s mother, the child’s speed and carelessness was meant to be understood as a metaphor for his fast learning, his quick wit, brash creativity, and intellectual chance-taking.

  Or did the woman simply feel bad that her son had ridden into Karen?

  “Watch where you’re going next time,” Ruby suddenly piped up. “You could have hurt my mom.”

  “Rubes, it’s fine—really,” said Karen, embarrassed and touched in equal parts. “It was an accident.”

  Just across the courtyard, Karen caught sight of a mother she’d briefly known when they both had kids at Elm Tree. From what Karen recalled, the woman made baby slings out of vintage calicos and sold them on Etsy under the name of her older daughter (Clover). She was also visibly pregnant. Karen recalled that her younger daughter, who was Ruby’s year, was named Ivy. Would her third child be called Pachysandra—or maybe just Ground Cover? As Karen followed the mob into the school building, she lowered her eyes to avoid having to say hello.

  A minute later, Karen found herself back in Mather’s main office. “She’s in Ms. Millburn’s class,” said the woman with the frosted hair.

  “Oh, terrific!” said Karen, as if Ms. Millburn’s reputation preceded her.

  “Third floor, room three-eleven.”

  The morning bell was ringing. Karen and Ruby returned to the hall. The crowd of arriving students and parents had begun to thin. As the two of them ascended the stairs to the third floor, Karen tried to silence their mutual anxiety with meaningless chatter. “Hm, I wonder if this is the right staircase. Well, I guess we’ll soon find out! Wow, there are a lot of steps!” She rambled on, and on, while Ruby stared stonily ahead and said not a word. Finally, at the end of the hall, Karen located a door marked 311. Ruby took a step backward while Karen tentatively pushed it open, craned her neck into the resulting space, and said, “Excuse me?”

  It was a classroom like any other public school’s: crowded and colorful, with fluorescent lights attached to the ceiling, linoleum tiles on the floor, and a hodgepodge of lists, charts, maps, calendars, and inane inspirational posters pinned to the walls. One read TODAY IS A GREAT DAY TO LEARN SOMETHING NEW! But here the walls were freshly painted mint green, the children’s chairs had gleaming chrome legs, the desks were not covered with the brown residue of partially peeled-off stickers, and there was a seemingly brand-new multicolor rug depicting the United States up near the whiteboard. The three-pronged cactus representing Arizona immediately called to Karen’s mind a devil’s pitchfork.

  The only adult in the room—presumably Ms. Millburn—glanced over from where she was standing near the board. To Karen’s amazement, she looked uncannily like Miss Tammy, only about five years into the future and with a ring on her fourth finger. “Can I help you?” she said.

  “Sorry—my daughter is new,” said Karen. “And we were told to come here.”

  The students, who until then had been busy putting their backpacks and coats away in the closet, turned to gawk.

  With a grimace and a waggle of her large head, Ms. Millburn walked brusquely over to where Karen and, behind her, Ruby stood. “No one told me we were getting a new student,” she said. It was unclear to whom the comment was addressed, but it struck Karen as unnecessarily harsh. Then again, there must have been thirty students in the class already, if not more, which meant that Ruby would be number thirty-something. No wonder the teacher didn’t look pleased about the arrival of a new student, Karen thought guiltily. She also wondered if Ruby would be able to learn anything in such a large class. “Hello there,” Ms. Millburn went on, sounding slightly more genial as she leaned her head around Karen and into the hallway to ad
dress Ruby, who was now hiding directly behind her mother. “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Ruby,” she replied in a barely audible voice.

  “Why don’t you come in,” said Ms. Millburn.

  “Go!” said Karen, attempting to pry her daughter’s hand off her jacket sleeve.

  But Ruby clung to her, wouldn’t budge. As so often happened these days, Karen felt her frustration growing into franticness. It was Ms. Millburn who finally coaxed Ruby away. “Why don’t you follow me, and I’ll show you where to put your coat,” she said, taking her hand and leading her into the classroom. Relieved, Karen ducked away.

  As luck—or, really, the lack thereof—would have it, Karen nearly collided at the front entrance with Maeve and her father, Evan. Maeve looked predictably trendy in a leopard-print top with dolman sleeves and capri leggings. So did Evan in his black T-shirt with the mathematical symbol pi on it and black track pants with a white stripe down the side. Since Karen had last seen him, he’d grown a rectangular-shaped mustache that made him look the tiniest bit like Hitler. “Evan!” said Karen, hoping this encounter would go smoother than the others she’d had that morning.

  “Hey—what are you doing here?” he said in his faux mellow drawl. Karen could never tell if he was stoned or just acting that way.

  “Ruby just started here,” Karen said simply. No apology, no explanation. It seemed like the safest approach. Besides, it wasn’t as if Maeve’s family lived in the right zone either.

  But, then, why did Karen feel so uncomfortable and so out of place? Or would she always feel that way, wherever she went in life? “Oh—cool,” he said. But he was looking at Karen—in her dowdy office separates—as if she were anything but.

  “Ruby goes to Mather?” asked Maeve.

  “This is her first day!” said Karen.

  “Who does she have?”

  “Ms. Millburn.”

  “I’m in Ms. Carter’s class.”

  “Oh, too bad,” said Karen, disappointed. “But can you do me a favor and find her at recess? She doesn’t know anyone here.”