Carpool Confidential

by Jessica Benson

  Rationality: If she knew it was you she wouldn’t be inviting you.

  Paranoia: She knows you’ll think that and she’s trying to disarm you to get you there so she can move in for the kill.

  The part of me with an actual voice, as opposed to two silent but psychotic warring voices, said, “What makes you think it’s someone we know? I mean, this is a big city, it could be anyone.” How desperate did that sound?

  “I know it sounds like a long shot”—Sue was clearly digging her heels in here—“and granted, some of the stuff doesn’t match up, but she admits right in the blog to changing details to obscure her identity, so it’s hard to separate truth from red herrings.” She dropped her voice to a whisper. “I mean, she’s talking about cookies for snack, but it doesn’t take much to decode and deconstruct that as fish sticks for lunch. And there’s another thing.” Pause. “There’s this person in the blog, this really bossy, totally overinvolved-no-outside-life, over-the-top PTA type, Trudy Bonham, and I think it might be—”

  I actually felt really bad at this moment.

  “—Betsy.”

  “Really!”

  “Don’t get me wrong, I love Betsy like a sister, but I think I recognize some of her less desirable traits. I actually think”— her voice dropped to a whisper—“the blogger might be Nancy Bosworth.”

  I’d stopped walking now and was just standing. “Why?”

  “She’s calling herself Delphine. Nancy would come up with a French name. She hasn’t liked Betsy since Betsy got the school to change art club to a talent-based group and Nicole got dropped. And she’s the type to do something like this.”

  “Maybe”—I kept my voice neutral—“under the right circumstances any of us could do something unexpected.”

  Sue laughed. “Unexpected, sure, completely out of character? No.”

  “But why are we meeting about it? What difference does it make?” I started walking up Clinton Street. Guilt about Nancy taking the rap was getting to me.

  “The NYMetro site gets major readership. Eventually her identity is bound to come out, and if you think about—” Actually, I preferred not to. “—the effect that could have on applications if prospective parents start to associate Meetinghouse with someone like tha—”

  “Order me a latte, I’ll be there in five minutes.” I might not be able to do damage control, but I’d at least know what was being said.

  “It’s possible I’m wrong about it being Nancy, but it’s someone in the inner circle.” Sue sipped her skinny half-caff soy latte.

  I was watching my children’s humiliation unspool. Following their father leaving them for Barry Manilow, their mother is unmasked as someone who, after tucking them in and making sure their revolving dinosaur night lanterns are switched on, sneaks off to blog about her sex life.

  “Inner circle?” Randy bit into the biggest muffin I’d ever seen (the fertility hormones apparently make it so you’re either puking or hoovering up anything without bones that crosses your path). “Is this a PTA or some kind of secret society?”

  “What makes you think it’s someone from inside?” Betsy asked.

  Sue looked down at her notes (she had taken notes!). “Little things—”

  I hadn’t to the best of my knowledge written a single thing that could identify me as a Meetinghouse parent. If part of the point, according to Charlotte, was to make people wonder if they knew me, I seemed to be doing pretty well. Was it wrong that I felt a little wiggle of pride?

  “She’s mentioned snack cookies, which I’m pretty sure is code for fish sticks.”

  “Isn’t that universal? Who doesn’t secretly call fish sticks snack cookies? And besides”—Randy didn’t even glance in my direction, for which I was grateful, because even with the terror I was having a hard time not laughing—“Nancy doesn’t care about the school food.”

  “She still knows stuff.” Sue looked up. “People talk. And—” She glanced at Ken. They had obviously been over this evidence before. “She made reference to that yert-dwelling hermit. The one who does the yellow pegs.”

  God. I wanted to smack myself in the head. If I was stupid enough to let myself be brought down by a yert-dwelling hermit, I deserved it.

  Betsy looked excited. “Did she mention me? That I’ve been to the yert?”

  “No.”

  “Has she mentioned anyone who devotes her summers to educating her children about lesser-studied indigenous peoples of the world?” Betsy persisted. “Because that could definitely be me.”

  “Actually, Sue, I checked, and”—Ken was reading something on his pocket-sized Sony Vaio with Wi-Fi as he spoke—“that’s a dead end. Apparently the yert hermit is part of the NYAIS curriculum.” He took off his glasses and passed the back of his sleeve over his forehead. “All the independents in Manhattan and Brooklyn belong, so that narrows it down to eighty schools.”

  Jen came in and sat down with her coffee. “Maybe she’s a public-school mom having fun with us.”

  “Or a man,” Randy said and started laughing.

  “Please understand we’re not trying to drum anyone out. We’re an inclusive school community”—Sue gave Jen a meaningful look—“and I’m all for that, absolutely, but let’s be frank, that doesn’t come without a downside: we’re fighting a perpetual uphill battle against St. Stanley’s for reputation, and this won’t help us any.”

  Libby Sawyer said, “I guess I still don’t understand how it can hurt.”

  “To be blunt,” Sue said crisply, “our parents as a group are, shall we say delicately, known for being a diverse and eccentric group. This one’s an out-and-out oddball. And so’s the husband. Who but a total weirdo leaves their family, particularly in questionable financial shape, to go be some fake Barry Manilow? I’m not saying, by the way, that the last disc isn’t excellent, because it is. Love it. Listen to it all the time, but who’d do that?”

  “But you always say St. Stanley’s parents are neglectful and uninvolved,” I said.

  “But not publicly psychotic,” Sue said.

  “Didn’t you think the way she wrote about the snack cookie crisis made us sound like a bunch of foolish overprivileged parents getting worked up over nothing?” Ailsa Grandman asked.

  Libby said, “We are a bunch of overprivileged parents getting worked up over not much. It’s one of the great pleasures of my life that I have the freedom to live that way.” (Libby had grown up in a steel town in Pennsylvania.) “I have to admit, I find the whole blog pretty entertaining.”

  Maybe I should just come clean. How awful could it be? Maybe there’d be a groundswell of support and I’d become a kind of PTA cult hero.

  “I disagree,” Sue said stiffly. “I think she’s a liability waiting to happen and she’s going to make laughingstocks of us—”

  OK. No groundswell of support. No coming clean. No cult hero status.

  “No more than of herself,” Jen said, and I shot her a gee, thanks look.

  “—and,” Sue continued, “I just believe we need to get to the bottom of this.”

  “And then what?” Randy asked. “Because as far as I know, those annoying freedom of speech rights still stand.”

  “Make sure she isn’t given access to sensitive information,” Sue retorted.

  “Sensitive information?” Libby said, laughing. “Come on, Sue. Even the Bush administration would declassify the PTA exec committee minutes.”

  “I’ve drawn up a list,” Ailsa said, “of possible people. But I see Nancy as a long shot. I think it’s someone—as you touched on, Sue—much closer to the center.”

  “Can I see?” Jen asked, reaching out to take the list from her. “What’s this based on?”

  “Anyone you guys don’t like,” Randy said.

  Jen looked up and gave me an almost imperceptible head shake meaning I wasn’t on it.

  “It shouldn’t be difficult to figure out if any dads have taken off recently,” Betsy said. “Has anyone heard anything?”

 
“You know what I think?” Randy sounded very decided. “It’s impossible to tell. Like Sue has already said, people talk, and that applies to inter-school gossip. I had lunch with a friend two days ago whose girls go to Brearley. I could give you practically a blow-by-blow description of their last middle-school-parents meeting.”

  “My oldest friend’s kids go to Collegiate, and we talk all the time,” Betsy admitted.

  “Actually”—Arlene Rundgren unscrewed the thermos of low-sodium miso she drank in lieu of coffee—“I have it on good authority that it’s someone at Calhoun!”

  “And I heard yesterday that it’s almost definitely a Dalton mom who does the 11:30 yoga at Equinox at Columbus Circle. Supposedly everyone in the class knows for sure that it’s her,” Tierney Leblanc said.

  “Has this woman admitted it?” Sue asked coolly.

  “I don’t know,” Tierney admitted. “I don’t belong to Equinox.”

  “Who does?” Sue looked around the table.

  “I do,” Libby said. “I just joined. Why?”

  “Because I think we need to get someone uptown and into that class and find out if it’s the truth. Because I don’t believe it. I think it’s someone here. I mean, are they saying they have a ‘snack cookie’ crisis at Dalton?”

  Tierney looked defeated. “I don’t know that either.”

  “It’d be kind of a shame for this to become a witch hunt,” Libby said.

  Sue was firm. “We need to make it clear if it’s a Meetinghouse parent that this kind of selfish behavior at the expense of the school’s reputation is not all right.”

  “How?” I asked. “Like Randy said, the freedom of expression thing. We can’t tell someone not to.” I was sort of checking. We couldn’t, could we? “Can we?”

  “No, but we can make clear our feelings about people who are prepared to disregard the school’s reputation in the quest for their own glorification,” Ken said.

  Glorification? Somehow I hadn’t seen detailing what it felt like to have every pubic hair you own ripped out of your body that way. “Sort of a running out of town on a rail philosophy?”

  “Of course not.” He gave me a level look. “More of a good of the group versus the good of the individual thing. I think,” he continued, “that Sue mentioned earlier, she’s planning to go to an orgy as part of her exploration of the new, single life.”

  Libby raised her eyebrow at Sue. “You are?”

  “I meant the blogging woman, Delphine,” Ken said.

  “Ken,” Randy said so gently that I knew she was moving in for the kill. “Did your glasses fog up when you mentioned the orgy?”

  “Of course not.” He took them off and polished them on a napkin.

  I wasn’t sure how long the ex-Mrs. Ebersole had been out of the picture—long before Robert had started at Meetinghouse— but I was guessing Ken hadn’t gotten any since. Which, come to think of it, was looking depressingly similar to my own long-range forecast.

  “If they did, I think we can all be sure it was from disgust.” Sue looked approvingly at Ken. “Obviously once we ferret the person out, it will be up to the school whether to keep them on as a family. I hope I’m not being crass if I say that I’ve put a lot into this school and I would expect to have some influence in a situation like this.”

  “I think it’s Samantha Trask,” Ailsa said. “Have you noticed how short her skirts have gotten?”

  “Does anyone know anything about the state of her marriage?” Sue asked. Head shakes all around. “I’ve been thinking it could be Breanna Cargill. When was the last time anyone saw Ira?”

  I sat miserably, waiting for someone to say, Hey, Rick’s been on that business trip for an awfully long time, but no one did.

  “Cassie, you’re a writer,” Sue said brightly. “Is it you?”

  My ears buzzed as panic set in. What would it mean exactly if they knew?

  “Would you mind showing us your bikini line?”

  I stared at her. Everything seemed to be blocked out except me and her, we were in a tunnel together. “I—”

  She laughed. “I was kidding. You look like you thought I meant it! Please, keep your jeans on—I know you’re too smart to substitute snack cookies for fish sticks, because it’s so obvious. You’d definitely have come up with something more devious.”

  Or maybe not. The plain fact was that the persona they were looking for was so far from the me they knew, no one was going to connect us unless they were hit over the head with evidence.

  “What I was going to say”—she was still chuckling—“my God, your face! was maybe we should get you to analyze the writing style, see if it’s familiar at all. What do you think?”

  I swallowed. The buzzing was diminishing. “I think that’s out of my league.”

  “Oh come on Cassie”—Sue was still grinning—“are you saying you’d be outsmarted by someone who’d write about her pubic hair on the www?”

  I just wanted to get out of there and hug my anonymity. I was going to have to be on my toes, because Sue, once she started sniffing at something, was definitely not going to let go of it easily. For now, though, there was nothing I could do other than head home, change, and go endure lunch with Letitia.

  25

  Say No More

  I tore down Remsen Street like an Olympic sprinter. Since this left me sweaty (on top of freezing), I arrived at my front door with the understanding that a shower had transitioned from desirable option to social necessity. I’d given up fantasies of eye-liner and blow dries. At this point just achieving clean was going to make me late for lunch.

  So I was thrilled to realize that I had run out without my keys and was locked out. In a doorman building, this should have been a nuisance, not a disaster. Unfortunately, the doorman was nowhere to be seen and the buzzer to my apartment went unanswered. Where was Harmonye? Hopefully walking the dog. I gave the super’s apartment one last unoptimistic buzz, then tried a couple of neighbors, but no one answered. It was like a neutron bomb had gone off in the building.

  I knew when to accept defeat. So, sweaty and clammy, with lank, unwashed hair, still in my threadbare jeans, frayed shirt, running shoes, and black down jacket (praying that Harmonye would walk the dog), I turned and trudged up to Montague Street to take the N train to have lunch in possibly the most elegantly over the top Ladies Who Lunch restaurant in the whole city.

  I didn’t feel too self-conscious on the train. The guy sitting next to me hadn’t washed since the Lincoln administration, so I didn’t think I was offending him. When I came up out of the subway at Fifth and Fifty-ninth, my phone was flashing that I’d gotten a voice message and a text while I’d been out of range, underground.

  The text was from Charlotte: have got sex club 4 u. all tied up. zack will contact u. u cant go alone. need a date. xx.

  Am I the only one who saw the irony? I needed a date to go to the place that was going to show me how unsuited to dating I was (like I needed to go there to know that).

  The voice mail was from Rick. “Cassie. Paulette asked me to give you a call and let you know that she considers the repeated phone calls from you threatening and she’s going to file harassment charges against you if this continues. Please, Cass, for your own good, stop calling her. Think of the children and how much they need you.” He hung up.

  I was outside of Esta now. Two friendly messages on her voice mail were harassment? Hmmm. Next week’s meeting with Humphrey could not come soon enough.

  The maitre d’ gave me an odd look through the window. I thought about Paulette. How dull I’d found the countless hours I’d hung on my end of the phone over the years listening to stories about her life, her controlling husband, her daughters. How I’d always suspected she had a less than nodding acquaintance with that commodity called truth. How no one with an ass that fat could possibly be the size two she frequently proclaimed herself to be.

  And as I stood there, I thought about the fact that she was an officious, annoying woman who used me to liste
n to her endless, dull stories. Rick used to make fun of her, but I’d known he was secretly flattered by the attention and importance she vested him with. I’d always figured, if she’d wanted to stroke his ego and he wanted it stroked, who cared? But now he was threatening me to get me to leave her alone? This was just bizarre.

  I slid my phone into my bag and walked into the restaurant. “Hi.” I smiled at the maitre d’. “I’m here to meet Letitia Martin.”

  To his credit, he didn’t put on surgical gloves before taking my coat.

  I was edgy from the entire morning and felt like a disgusting, greasy, smelly frump. “I didn’t think they allowed dogs in restaurants,” I said to Letitia. “Hi, Bouvy.”

  “He appears to have been to the groomer more recently than you.” She smiled.

  “Will Bouvier be having his usual, Mrs. Martin?” the maitre d’ said.

  “Yes, thank you, Frederic.”—Letitia eyed me as I slid onto the banquette across from her—“You shouldn’t have bothered dressing up, Cassie.”

  I looked down in vain for a menu. “I like to do what I can,” I said modestly.

  A waiter materialized. “Would you care for a menu today, Mrs. Martin?”

  “No, thank you, Leonard,” Letitia said. “I’ll have the Tuesday salad.”

  “As it’s Thursday,” he said, “may I respectfully suggest the Thursday salad?”

  Another waiter put Bouvier’s plate in front of him. Letitia tied a napkin around his neck. “No,” she said. “I dislike the Thursday salad. I’ll take the Tuesday.”

  This lunch already had a definite down the rabbit hole quality to it.

  “Very well, Mrs. Martin.” Leonard turned to me. “Do you care for a menu?”

  “I’ll have the Tuesday salad, too.” Might as well make someone’s life easier.

  An even more severe man appeared, and he and Letita air-kissed Continental style. “Hello, Mario. Is the ninety-two Krug the Clos du Mesnil?” She put Bouvier’s plate down on the banquette beside her. It was, of course. She ordered a bottle.