Class

by Lucinda Rosenfeld

  “What?” she said.

  “I’m sorry to bring this up, but since I’m getting everything out—I have to say that I thought it was really unkind of Charlotte not to invite Ruby to her birthday party last weekend at the American Girl Café. Ruby was really hurt.”

  There was silence, during which time Susan helped herself to a final swig of her smoothie. The cup empty, she set it back on the tabletop. Finally, she spoke. “To be perfectly frank, Charlotte cooled her friendship with Ruby because Ruby is a loudmouth who yells in her ear and won’t let her play with her other friends, and Charlotte couldn’t take it anymore.”

  As chilling as Susan’s response to Karen’s confession had been, it barely registered compared to the criticism Susan had just voiced of her daughter. “Interesting reading of the situation,” Karen replied, “because Ruby’s version is that Charlotte lures in new friends, then turns on them to make herself feel important.” Ruby hadn’t actually said this, but no matter.

  “Thank you for sharing that,” said Susan.

  “My pleasure,” said Karen, unable to stop herself. “Oh, and for the record, I regret transferring my daughter to Mather. The computers may be nicer. And her old school may have had more troubled kids in the classroom. But at least the place wasn’t filled with stuck-up mean girls like your daughter.” Had she really said that?

  “Well, then, it sounds like your family ought to transfer back to your old school as soon as possible,” said Susan, smiling tightly.

  Karen knew she’d set herself up for it. But now that it had been said, it was clear to her that this was exactly what she intended. “I’m planning to do that very thing for the fall,” she told her.

  “Neither you nor your daughter will be missed,” Susan declared as she walked away from the table.

  “Same here!” Karen called after her. Though it was unclear whether Susan heard her or not. By then, the president of the Parent Teacher Association of Edward G. Mather Elementary was nearing the front door, her tote hooked snugly over her right shoulder.

  As it happened, Ruby was at home for two full weeks recovering. By the time she was ready to return to third grade, there was less than a month left of school. But that was still almost thirty days, and Karen realized she couldn’t stomach even a single encounter with the Embroidered Tunic Moms. Surely Susan Bordwell had told all eight members of the Mather PTA executive board what Karen had done. Among Karen’s intimates, it was now only Matt—who was sleeping on the sofa until further notice—who didn’t know that part of the story. But she didn’t know how much longer she could stall.

  When Matt got home from work one evening, Karen told him a version of the same tale she’d told Susan, admittedly playing up the redistribution angle. They were on opposite sides of the kitchen island. Matt had a bottle opener in hand and was busy prying off the top of a Corona Light. Ruby was in the other room doing the homework that, at Karen’s request, Ms. Millburn had e-mailed her. When Karen finished speaking, Matt was silent. Then he said, “So you’re telling me that, in addition to being a liar and a cheater, you’re also a thief.”

  “If that’s how you want to put it,” mumbled Karen.

  “If you’ve murdered someone too, now is the time to tell me,” said Matt.

  “I’ve murdered no one.”

  “Well, that’s something—I guess.”

  “I was thinking that, maybe instead of sending Ruby back to Mather,” Karen went on, “she could start again at Betts. I’m not sure the administration even realizes she left.”

  “Fine with me,” said Matt, shrugging. “But you better run it by Ruby.”

  “I will,” she said.

  And she did.

  “Sweetie—there’s something I have to tell you,” Karen said as she was tucking in Ruby that night. “Daddy and I changed our minds and decided you’d get a better education at your old school.”

  To Karen’s relief, Ruby seemed more perplexed than pissed. “I’m going back to Betts?” she asked, nose wrinkled.

  “Yes,” said Karen.

  “But why? I thought you said I’d get a better education at Mather.”

  “I did,” said Karen, improvising, “but the truth is that I let fear steer us down a road we didn’t need to go down. But now we’re pointed in the right direction again.”

  “But where were we going?” asked Ruby, her brow knit.

  “That’s a very good question,” said Karen. “I haven’t quite figured that out myself. Until I do, I just want to say that I’m really proud of how you’ve handled everything. I know you haven’t had the easiest third grade.”

  “Oh—thanks,” said Ruby, pausing as if she were trying to make sense of her mother’s words. But when she spoke again, it was on a new topic. “Well, I just hope that when Chahrazad sees my cast, she doesn’t try to write sexy on it,” she went on. “It’s her favorite word. That would be so embarrassing.”

  “I agree, and I hope so too,” said Karen, thankful for Ruby’s digression.

  If anyone at Betts should ask about Ruby’s absence, Karen had decided, she’d simply point to Ruby’s cast and say she’d had a bad accident. It wouldn’t even be a lie.

  The only person whom Karen felt compelled to contact before Ruby reappeared in Room 303 was Lou. After Ruby was asleep, Karen called her on the phone. “It’s Karen,” she said.

  “Oh—hey,” said Lou, neither warm nor cold.

  “I just wanted to let you know that Ruby is coming back to Betts,” Karen said quickly. “It’s a long story, but the short version is that I realized I made a mistake.”

  “So, it’s both long and short?” said Lou, still sounding the tiniest bit prickly. But at least the channels had been reopened.

  “Something like that,” said Karen, who hoped that, over time, they could rebuild their friendship.

  She sent an e-mail along the same lines to April Fishbach.

  Welcome back to the front lines, Comrade Kipple, April responded.

  An involuntary giggle escaped from Karen, who realized it was the first time she’d laughed in a week.

  To Karen’s joy and relief, Ruby hadn’t been back at Betts for two days before she had a new best friend—Fatima, the Egyptian girl who’d arrived the same week that Maeve left. To Karen’s further joy, although she would never have admitted it out loud, Fatima’s parents turned out to be educated professionals. Fatima’s mother was a sociologist who had a fellowship at a state university branch nearby. Her father was some kind of engineer.

  Meanwhile, it emerged in the subsequent weeks that Winners Circle hadn’t received as many applications as they’d expected. The result was that two projected kindergarten classrooms had been consolidated into one. After all that, it seemed that Betts’s school library would be left as is. What’s more, thanks to several anonymous donations made to the PTA, there was suddenly enough cash to purchase new books and even beanbag chairs. But there was still no money in the budget for a librarian, which seemed like a terrible shame to Karen, since the school couldn’t keep the library open without one.

  Over the next month, Karen and her own NBF, April, hatched a plan to reopen the space with parent volunteers. April did the scheduling, and Karen wrote the e-mails asking for help—and was pleasantly surprised by the number of parents of all colors and creeds (though nearly all of them were female) who came forward to offer their time. A local construction company promised to do a free paint job over the summer. For once, Karen felt as if she was really making a difference. Though she continued to believe there was a place for the kind of fund-raising work she did at Hungry Kids. Maybe it wasn’t a pure form of philanthropy, but really, was there a pure form of anything?

  The very last Friday in June, Karen was walking down the hall en route to the library, where she planned to help unpack and then shelve some of the new titles that had come in—she’d decided to donate her Friday mornings to Betts, after all—when she ran into Principal Chambers. In Karen’s nearly four years at the school, she’d
never spoken to the woman directly. In fact, until that moment, Karen very much doubted that Regina Chambers even knew who she was or that her daughter had left and come back. “It’s Karen, isn’t it?” she said, stopping and pivoting.

  Karen could have fallen over. “Yes, it is!” she said, stopping too.

  “We’re happy to have you and your daughter back at the school,” said Principal Chambers.

  “Oh, thank you!” said Karen. “We’re really happy to be here.”

  “I understand you ran into a little trouble over at Mather Elementary?”

  Karen blanched with embarrassment. Was it possible that Regina Chambers knew her secret? “Well, yes, a little,” Karen mumbled, then chuckled.

  “Well, on behalf of the Constance C. Betts School, let me just say thank you for your generous donation. It was very much appreciated.” Principal Chambers offered Karen a toothy grin.

  “Oh!” said Karen, both gratified and horrified. “Well, it was my pleasure. But how do you—”

  “My daughter babysits for a family you might know—the mother’s name is Liz Chang. Just had her third kid. She said you were a genius of subterfuge.” She laughed lightly.

  “Oh, right—I do know her,” said Karen, dying on the inside.

  “Apparently some of the PTA ladies pushed hard to go to the police, but Liz told me she was the one who advocated letting it drop. Got to hand it to her there!”

  “I didn’t know—wow—that was so…nice of her.”

  “Not to worry—it’s all between us.” Principal Chambers smiled again.

  Karen smiled back even as her stomach was busy twisting itself into a poison pretzel. “I appreciate you keeping it that way. Some people might not—understand.”

  “Well, I get it,” she replied.

  And that was how Karen Kipple and Regina Chambers became, if not friends, then friendly enough that, by the following fall, Karen felt justified in calling her Regina, just as Lou did.

  On occasion, it still made Karen uncomfortable over how few white kids there were in Ruby’s fourth-grade class—at last count, just six. When it came time to apply to middle school, Karen found herself worrying, would it hurt or hinder Ruby to be graduating from such a “marginal” school? But an informal survey of the parents of the new kindergartners suggested that more families from the community were beginning to use the school. And on most days that Karen walked into Betts, she felt proud to be doing her part in pursuit of a more perfect, more unified world. She never felt it more than on the evening of the fourth-grade choral concert. Karen had always considered Whitney Houston’s songs to be saccharine and overwrought. But that evening, at the sight and sound of her daughter and her mostly brown- and black-skinned classmates belting out “‘Who knows what miracles you can achieve / When you believe,’” Karen felt her eyes tearing up and her lower lip beginning to quiver. Whitney suddenly emerged in her mind as a veritable goddess of all things righteous and inspiring. After nearly five years at Betts, it seemed, Karen was finally getting used to being in the minority. She was also starting to see that race was really just a fantasy, like any other.

  Like running away in middle age with a hedge-fund billionaire.

  Karen never really spoke to Clay again. Nor did he wind up joining HK’s board of directors. Though his LLC did donate another fifty grand at the end of the year. And the two made loaded eye contact across a crowded ballroom during their twenty-fifth college reunion the following June. Karen still found him alluring. But she had no desire to renew their liaison. She couldn’t think what to say to him either. She wondered if he felt the same. Several times throughout the evening, she saw him looking over at her table. Though it was hard to tell if he was looking at Karen or checking out Lydia Glenn, his long-lost crush/red herring (it was never clear which). In any case, Karen had a great time catching up with her old roommate, who—it turned out—was about to direct her first off-Broadway play.

  Karen had come to the reunion unaccompanied. But Clay was with his wife, Verdun. There was also a small crowd of people waiting to talk to him at all moments throughout the evening. Even if Karen had hoped to have a private chat, it was unlikely there would have been an opportunity for one. Apparently, all of Karen’s former classmates wanted to be near the Class of ’91’s most successful graduate. In fact, Clay had recently promised to endow his alma mater with a new student center. Karen had read about it in her monthly alumni magazine.

  A week after the reunion, Karen had a similarly wordless if far more uncomfortable encounter with her erstwhile Mather friend Liz Chang. By coincidence, they were both in the fruit aisle of Whole Foods, examining organic white peaches—Liz with her adorable toddler in the front seat of her shopping cart, Karen alone. Liz shot Karen a quizzical look and opened her mouth, apparently about to speak. Panicking, Karen fled down the aisle and disappeared into the next one, her heart in her throat.

  Karen knew she was lucky not to have been prosecuted for siphoning off PTA funds, and if Regina was to be believed, some of the credit was due to Liz. But ever since a neighborhood mommy blog had published an anonymous account, four months after the fact, of a certain “wannabe Mather Mommy/impostor/swine” who had “lied about where her trough was” and then “helped herself to the PTA teat to the tune of twenty-five thousand dollars,” Karen’s embarrassment over the circumstances surrounding Ruby’s departure from the school had only grown. The final indignity: the article quoted one Mather parent, identified simply as Laura, as saying that it was “past time the school investigate families who don’t belong there and who are ruining it for everyone else.” That line in particular had made Karen’s entire body smart and suffer. What’s more, according to the article, on account of both the overcrowding issue and the embezzlement scandal, Mather administrators had recently introduced “far more stringent address-verifying measures” and were now considering “door-to-door checks for the incoming kindergarten class.” Little wonder that Karen lived in terror of running into anyone from that tumultuous two-month period of her life—anyone except for Ruby and, more recently, Matt.

  In the first month or two after her affair with Clay came to light, Karen had felt ambivalent about her marriage. She was tired of saying she was sorry, tired of being on the receiving end of Matt’s hostile and contemptuous gaze. And when Matt moved out of their condo and into his friend Rick’s spare room—at the time, it had seemed, for good—a part of her had felt relieved. She hadn’t missed coming home from work to find dirty socks and empty coffee cups scattered around the house. She didn’t miss Matt passing judgment on her career either.

  But over time, she came to miss even the ubiquitous sound of the game, whichever one he happened to be watching. The apartment felt empty without him. Ruby seemed so forlorn about his departure. And Karen felt so helpless in the face of her daughter’s melancholy. If only for Ruby’s sake, Karen wanted them to be a happy family again—or at least happy enough, the way they’d once been. Karen also found she missed having someone to talk to about her day and discuss Ruby with and also complain about her friends and job to. She even found herself pining for Matt’s bad puns. And divorce loomed in the back of her mind as, above all, a financial disaster. Plus, the thought of dating again filled her with dread.

  Karen reached out to Matt and suggested couples counseling as a precondition to any separation agreement. At first, he refused to go, claiming to find the very concept onerously “middle class,” as he put it, in its treatment of relationships as skills that, like tennis or cooking, could be improved. But eventually she talked him into a few sessions. It was there—on the beige, wool-bouclé sofa of a certain Dr. Krantz—that he’d confessed to a platonic flirtation he’d been carrying on with a college intern named Kiley who’d been hired to help with Poor-coran. This, it turned out, partly explained his long workdays the year before. Though as he was fond of pointing out, unlike Karen, he hadn’t acted on the attraction. Nonetheless, Karen had been disappointed to hear that, in the end, her tire
lessly upstanding, ethical-to-a-fault husband was just another middle-aged cliché. But, really, what right did she have to object? At least everything was out in the open now—or at least, almost everything.

  Karen still hadn’t told Matt how relieved she’d been to see a telltale dumpster outside Miguel’s apartment a few months before.

  But she’d told Matt that she wished he’d come back—it was true, more or less—and he’d finally admitted that he missed her too. Slowly, he began to transfer himself and then his possessions back to Macaroni-Land. And now Karen and Matt were officially trying to make it work again. With the encouragement of Dr. Krantz, they’d also decided to take a proper family vacation for the first time in five years. Karen had found a package deal on the Internet to a boutique resort on a relatively undeveloped part of the Dominican Republic. The only question was how to pay for it. Their savings had taken a serious hit after Karen repaid the Mather PTA, and the one-way tickets back from Mustique hadn’t helped. Their checking account was lower than ever. And the cost of therapy was only adding to the problem. Karen had only 50 percent reimbursement after a high deductible.

  And then, one day at work, while searching for paper clips in the top drawer of her desk, Karen came across the diamond studs that Clay had given her at the beginning of their affair. Realizing she’d never feel right about wearing them and also suspecting that their worth would more than equal the cost of a vacation, she slipped them in her purse and, on her lunch hour, took them to a diamond dealer near her office. The dealer’s first offer was on the low side. But when Karen began to walk away, he raised it by two grand. Having now learned the game, she balked again. The dealer’s third and final offer was one she felt she couldn’t refuse.

  Back at the office, she bought the vacation with her new points card, then e-mailed Matt to tell him the good news. She explained that she’d sold a piece of jewelry she’d never liked, so it hadn’t really cost them anything. It wasn’t the whole truth, but it wasn’t a lie either, she reasoned.