“Well, let’s give some thought to all these ideas in the next two weeks,” said Susan. “Anyone with a proposal, please submit it by Friday. In the meantime, let’s talk fund-raising!” She turned back to Karen. “The school year ends in two months, I realize. And traditionally, fall and winter are our biggest moneymaking seasons. But I think the rest of you know how disappointed I was with the results of the spring auction. We netted just over six hundred thousand.” Karen coughed to disguise her shock. “Which might sound like a lot,” Susan went on. “But the year before, we made over seven. And we had similarly disappointing results from last fall’s Harvest Dance. On that note, Karen, I was wondering if you might have time to mastermind a kind of last-ditch spring fund-raising event. Like maybe a picnic or something? I was thinking we could call it Fund in the Sun. Too corny?” She surveyed the group.
“No, I think it’s—cute,” Karen replied with as much enthusiasm as she could muster, even as she wondered, Why raise more money when you can’t spend the money you already have?
“Glad you like it,” said Susan, smiling. “And since you’re going to be working the money angle, how about becoming our treasurer for the duration of the school year? Liz has kindly been filling in, but—as you can see—she’s due any day now with baby number three.”
Silently groaning at the prospect of devoting even more time to a cause she didn’t support, Karen glanced over at the Mather PTA interim treasurer and realized that her embellished tunic was in fact inflated to capacity. “Wow—congratulations,” she muttered.
“Thanks,” Liz answered morosely.
“I never made it past baby number one,” Karen felt somehow compelled to add, if only as a distraction from her own mounting obligations.
“That’s probably because you’re sane. Apparently, I have a deep masochistic streak.”
Karen smiled, then turned back to Susan and said, “Anyway, I’m very flattered to have been asked. But—”
“But you’re busy, I know,” said Susan. “I promise that being treasurer is not a time-consuming position. Liz can show you where we keep the books, so to speak, and how to get into the account. And I assume you’re familiar with Excel?” Before Karen had time to answer, she turned to the rest of the group and said, “All those in favor of electing Karen our new interim treasurer, please raise your hands!”
Nine hands went up. It was suddenly clear to Karen that no one else wanted the job—moreover, that they’d already tagged her for it. Allison was right, Karen thought. This was her punishment for lying about her address. Even so, her heart sank.
“So it’s settled,” said Susan. “Karen, congrats. You are officially on the executive board now.”
“I’m honored,” Karen said miserably.
“Now, moving right along to arts committee business,” Susan said, turning to her left. “Meredith, can you tell us what arts enrichment you’ve lined up for the month? I understand Pilobolus was a big hit.”
“Yes, it was. And this month, the fourth grade is going to see La Bohème, and the experimental puppeteering troupe Stringtheory is performing a kid-friendly version of Schindler’s List for the third grade. We also have a West African drumming troupe coming next week to perform for the lower school, thanks in part to the multicultural committee.”
“Thank you, Meredith. Sounds fabulous,” said Susan.
The others nodded in agreement—even Denise, who apparently found nothing ecologically objectionable about men with dark skin striking animal skins with sticks.
Ruby came home from school scratching. And when Karen lifted up Ruby’s hair, she found a row of tiny red bumps on the back of her neck. By then, Karen was madly clawing at herself as well and in a state of barely controlled panic at the thought of bloodsucking insects running rampant on her scalp. It seemed particularly ironic that she had picked them up at a school that looked as clean cut as Mather did. But then, bloodsucking parasites apparently didn’t select for socioeconomic status. In any case, Karen knew she had to act. After dinner that night, she sat Ruby down on the toilet seat with a Highlights magazine to distract her, while, comb in hand, Karen began dividing Ruby’s hair into sections the way she’d seen someone do it on a YouTube video. Ruby was reading her a knock-knock joke that had been sent in by a reader—“‘Knock, knock. Who’s there? Isolate. Isolate who? I-so-late to the party’”—when a tiny black insect resembling a mosquito only without the wings appeared in her part line. “Oh my God!” Karen cried before she dropped the comb on the floor and ran into her bedroom. She’d always considered herself competent, but this task was possibly beyond her.
“Mooommm!” Ruby called to her in a whine.
“I’m sorry, sweetie,” Karen called back. She counted to three on the inhale, then three on the exhale. Then she did it again. Feeling calmer, she walked back into the bathroom and announced, “Mommy can’t handle this. We’re going to see a specialist.”
That was how, an hour later, she and Ruby ended up in the vinyl-sided home of an Orthodox Jewish nitpicker and mother of ten. When Karen and Ruby arrived, at least seven of the ten were visible under the dining-room table, playing with plastic toys. Bathsheba sat Ruby down in a chair facing a wall of gold-framed photographs of white-bearded rabbis who appeared to be as old as Methuselah and went to work with a metal comb. Then it was Karen’s turn. “You have a bad case, even worse than your daughter,” said Bathsheba.
“And you’ve got quite a brood!” declared Karen, keen to change the subject. “Are you going to have any more?”
“It’s not up to me,” said Bathsheba, shrugging. “It’s God’s will.”
“Right,” said Karen, nodding.
“Please stop moving.”
“Oh, sorry.”
“So, why do you have only one?”
“One what?” asked Karen.
“Child,” said Bathsheba, wiping her comb on a Kleenex.
“Oh, right,” said Karen, surprised by a question that few dared ask but many likely wondered about. “Well, I got married on the late side and didn’t have my first kid till I was thirty-seven. And then, sadly, time got away from me.” It was true and not true. In fact, Matt had been iffy on the idea of a second, fearing they’d be unable to travel, even though neither of them ever went anywhere. And Karen had bowed to his wish, even though it was a source of secret hurt. She’d always wanted a big family—or at least, she’d once thought she did. “And now I’m too old, so it’s too late to have another,” she added.
“How old are you?” asked Bathsheba.
“Forty-five, almost forty-six.”
“Nonsense, it’s not too late. My mother had her thirteenth at forty-seven.”
“Oh—wow!” said Karen, horrified at the very idea.
Afterward, it pained Karen to have to write the woman a check for three hundred dollars for forty-five minutes’ work. Then again, Karen would have paid nearly any amount for the ability to think about something other than lice. And Bathsheba apparently supported the family. “He studies the Torah,” had been her answer to Karen’s question about what Bathsheba’s husband did for a living…
“Where have you guys been?” asked Matt when Karen and Ruby walked in the door at ten of eight.
“The lice lady,” Karen told him.
“Oh—shit,” he said.
“You should probably get checked too. Though according to Bathsheba the nitpicker, they usually stay away from men.”
“Unlike some people I know,” Matt muttered cryptically before he walked away.
“Excuse me?” Karen said, flinching. For a panicked moment, she wondered if he knew more than he was letting on. But he didn’t answer or explain.
That night, she began the first of seven loads of laundry.
At work the next morning, despite misgivings, she began a formal letter to Clay on foundation letterhead that made no mention of their personal relationship. Considering that the document would become part of the charity’s archives, it seemed imperative that she
play it straight. Dear Mr. Phipps, she wrote. On behalf of Hungry Kids, I would like to officially invite you to join our board of directors. We feel that your experience and involvement would be an asset to our organization, and we hope that you will consider accepting our offer…She signed it Gratefully yours, Karen Kipple. When she finished, she printed it out and sent it via overnight mail.
Clay sent a one-line e-mail the next afternoon. When Karen saw his name in her in-box, her heart thumped. The subject line read Your Letter. The body read:
I’m honored. Now will you do me the honor of seeing me one more time? Pretty please?
It took every ounce of Karen’s mental strength not to write back Yes.
Two days later, Karen met up with the interim treasurer, Liz, in the Mather PTA office, which turned out to be a hole in the wall next to the music room. Liz, by now so pregnant that she could barely lean over far enough to open the desk and show Karen where the PTA checkbook and ledger were kept, nonetheless managed to teach Karen how and where to manually record deposits and withdrawals. No less essentially, she showed Karen how to electronically access the PTA account that was kept at Citibank. Owing to a sluggish Wi-Fi connection, the page took forever to load. Finally, the numbers became visible. But Karen had trouble believing her eyes. To her astonishment, the account currently contained $955,000.86, not a penny of which appeared to be spoken for. “Jesus, that’s a lot of money,” Karen muttered.
“Yeah, well, I guess compared to the other public schools around here we’re a bunch of rich motherfuckers,” said Liz. “Though it’s really not that much when you compare it to the endowment of, like, Eastbrook Lab. Then we look like paupers.” She shrugged. “I guess it’s all relative.”
“True enough,” said Karen, noting that Liz must have regarded private schools the way Betts parents like Karen had once regarded Mather—as winning lottery tickets being dangled in their faces. “Well, thanks for showing me the ropes,” Karen continued. “I think I can take over from here.”
“Great,” said Liz, “because either my water just broke or I just peed in my pants. In any case, I think I need some of Denise’s recycled toilet paper.”
“Oh no!” Karen laughed, feeling an unexpected kinship with the Mather PTA’s secretary and former interim treasurer—or, at least, enough intimacy to say, “Hey, can I ask you a weird question before you take off?”
“Sure,” said Liz. “So long as you don’t want to know if I’m excited to have another baby.”
“I promise not to go there,” said Karen. “I’m just wondering: Has anyone on the PTA ever thought about—how do I put this?—throwing a little extra cash at one of the schools in the area that can’t afford to fund-raise? By which I mean, donating some of the donations?”
“Are you kidding?” Liz said drily. “Parents at this school would go ape shit if they thought a dime of their money was going someplace else. Sad to say, but they only care about their own kids getting ahead. And I’m probably no better. Or maybe I’m worse. I wish I gave more of a fuck about my kids getting ahead. As it is, all I seem to care about these days is canned pineapple and not missing True Detective. Meanwhile, my kids’ screen-time allocations are up to six hours a day.”
“Hey, you’re forty weeks pregnant, you get a pass,” said Karen.
“It’s actually been forty-one. They’re inducing me on Saturday if nothing happens before.”
“Oh my God! Good luck.”
“Thanks—also for taking the shit job no one on the PTA wanted. I got suckered into it the first half of the year. And now I’m sorry to say it’s your turn. When I’m recovered from Newborn-Land, let’s go out to lunch and charge it to the PTA as compensation for our hardship. What do you say?”
“It’s a deal,” said Karen, who felt strangely gratified by the encounter—was it possible that she, too, was starting to make friends at Ruby’s new school?—even as she continued to feel horrified by the money hoarding she’d seen on display.
Karen was horrified at the state of her marriage as well. She and Matt were down to about ten words a day, and Karen was at a loss as to how to up the number even to twenty. It was as if they were strangers all over again or, worse, roommates who had found each other on some bulletin board—the kind who respectfully kept their milk and cottage cheese on different sides of the fridge. Sitting alone on her bed that night, staring at the familiar scenery—the unread novels on her side table, the wedding photo on her dresser in its fancy sterling-silver frame, the Roman shade with its now-tedious brown-and-purple-chevron stripes that had seemed so chic at the time she’d bought it—she felt as if she were not in a marriage so much as in a museum of one.
And so, despite still being angry about things that Matt had said, and having too much pride, and dreading conflict, and continuing to fantasize about Clay and checking her phone every five minutes just in case he’d texted, she walked into the living room, where her husband sat simultaneously typing on his laptop and watching some game—there was always one on—and forced herself to say, “Do you want to talk?”
“Not really,” he answered with a glance in her direction. “But I will.”
“We can’t go on like this forever,” said Karen.
“No, we can’t,” said Matt. But he didn’t offer any solutions.
“Well, maybe we should book a date night,” said Karen. “Try to have fun or something. I don’t know.”
“Sure,” he said.
“All right, well, would you want to see a movie?”
“What is there to see?”
“I don’t know—there’s always something.”
Matt paused, grimaced. Then he blurted out, “It still bugs me that Ruby is going to that school under false pretenses and because you decided it was better. Every day she goes there, I’m reminded of that. Maybe I’m having trouble moving on. It still just feels really wrong to me.”
“Well, I don’t know what to say except I’m sorry, and I’ve already said that,” said Karen.
“Well, thanks for saying it again, but—”
“But you’re never going to get over it?”
“I didn’t say that, but I’m not over it yet,” said Matt. “And I guess I need to know that, in the future, you’re going to include me in decisions that affect our family.”
“I promise to include you,” she told him.
“But it’s also—I don’t know—you seem so secretive these days. You’re always huddled over your phone, and you’re so vague about everything.”
Karen felt her chest tightening. “I could say the same for you. Half the time, I don’t even know where you are. And it’s kind of hard to include you in my life when you’re not here to tell stuff to.”
“I know, and I’m sorry I’ve been working so much,” said Matt. “It’s just been crunch time with Poor-coran, as you like to call it. But starting tomorrow, I’m going to try and get home earlier in the evenings. And maybe we can do more stuff together as a family on the weekend.”
“Great—organize it,” said Karen, encouraged.
“You’re better at that stuff.”
“I’m not better. I’m just a woman. And women are expected to manage everything on the home front. But once in a while, it would be great if you could organize something. Maybe we could go play miniature golf some weekend. Or maybe you could look into summer vacations. I think we could all use a vacation.”
“I agree,” said Matt.
Karen felt even more sanguine when, the next day, Matt surprised her by researching beach rentals, then e-mailing her the top contenders with the subject heading These Ones Look Decent.
She e-mailed him back immediately. Number two looks nice. Want to find out if it’s available the third or fourth week of August?
But in the back of her mind she was wondering if Clay was still planning to invite her to his beach house one of those same weeks, like he’d promised to do—and, if so, how she’d respond.
Meanwhile, to Karen’s relief, Ruby seemed to
be further settling into Mather. And Karen had received promising signs from several family foundations that, with any luck, might be persuaded to make up at least part of the funds that could no longer be expected from Jesse James. In her few spare hours, and despite the nagging sensation that her expertise was better utilized elsewhere, Karen helped plan the Mather PTA Fund in the Sun picnic at a local park. In the plus column, her volunteer efforts at the school made her feel less paranoid. In the minus one, she was filled with a particular kind of self-loathing.
It was around the same time that Karen’s dreams of her dead mother returned on a near-nightly basis. They were always variations on the same melody, and they were simultaneously welcome and unwelcome. Mom! What are you doing here? Karen would ask as Ruth Kipple appeared at the top of the stairs in her favorite light blue polyester nightgown and said, What took you so long? I’ve been waiting for you for hours. Her mother was always exaggerating, Karen would think. But she was waiting—night after night after night—until Karen woke up, and Ruth Kipple wouldn’t be there after all, causing Karen to feel both exasperated and bereft. It was just like her mother to keep guilting her, even from the grave, Karen thought. Yet it was clearly Karen who had summoned her. So, really, what right did she have to complain—about any of it? Karen was one of the lucky ones on this earth.
If only it felt that way.
And then Charlotte blew off Ruby. The only reason Karen knew about it was that, finding her daughter unexpectedly glum at pickup on Friday, she proposed that Ruby invite over one of her new friends for a playdate. It seemed to Karen that enough time had passed that it was safe to reveal where they actually lived. Following Allison’s advice, Karen could always say they’d just moved. By city decree, a child who changed addresses didn’t need to change schools as well.
“I don’t have any friends,” Ruby told her.
“What?” said Karen, a twinge in her stomach. “But what about Charlotte?”
Class Page 24
