With Friends Like These

by Sally Koslow

  “The weekend when we’re gone Tom and Henry could do the natural history museum with Xander and Dash,” I added. “All four boys together. How cute is that?”

  “Maybe Sunday. Jamyang would appreciate the break.”

  “Isn’t she always off for the weekend?”

  “You know Xander—all work, all the time—so I hired her for the days I’m gone. We offered double salary.”

  What would Tom say about that? Nothing as nasty as what Mean Maxine was thinking. We’d be better off talking about work.

  “You did an incredible job on the storyboards for the cream cheese account.” Chloe’s pitch was so smooth that after seeing it, you’d never again dream of reaching for mascarpone. I was able to keep a conversation going about the campaign until we reached the Brooklyn Bridge, surprising myself with my knowledge of butterfat and lactic acid bacteria—because the other major topic I hoped to steer away from was school.

  When Tom had started in about wanting to see Jackson Collegiate, I was dumbstruck. “One thing I felt we were hard-wired for was going public,” I said the day he sprang the tour on me. “I’ve barely set foot in a private school.” I’m a proud graduate of the Santa Monica–Malibu Unified School District. I still know the words to “Dear old SaMoHi,” which I warbled. For an encore, I waxed eloquently about my two years at UCLA—no regrets at all, except the bite Astronomy 101 took out of my grade-point average. How did I know I’d be expected to distinguish Andromeda from Cassiopeia? I’m from southern California. I thought it would be like reading tarot cards.

  I rattled on about public schools’ indisputable superiority until Tom got us back to Jackson. “It’s an exceptional school and Betsy O’Neal is an extraordinary educator.”

  Still, I persisted. “Brooklyn’s public schools are why people who could live in Manhattan buy here. You teach in a public school. This decision should be simple.” I was exasperated by Tom’s seemingly deviant behavior—and suspicious. With a fancy WASP background like his, did a latent private school gene eventually kick in, an academic equivalent of adult-onset diabetes? Before he topped things off with an Ivy League diploma, he’d attended the same boarding school where two previous generations of Wells men had followed the family tradition of playing rugby until they tore every ligament and needed knee replacements by the time they were sixty.

  “Sometimes you’re rigid to the point of ridiculousness,” he said. “All I’m asking you to do is have a look-see.”

  That’s when I decided to play the money card. “How would we ever pay tuition when we’re having a hard enough time with rent and the occasional bottle of shiraz?”

  “Have you never heard of a scholarship?” His voice was calm, worse than yelling.

  I wondered what kind of conversation Chloe might be having at that moment with her husband. Deciding how huge a trust fund to establish for Dash, perhaps.

  Who says he doesn’t already have one? Mean Maxine asked. You’d better go after that job, missy.

  CHAPTER 9

  Chloe

  “When you take Dash to music class, don’t forget his Goldfish, please.” I went into our fully stocked pantry and pointed to several packages.

  “Yes, Mrs. Keaton.” Jamyang nodded politely

  “And a change of clothes,” I added. “And please don’t forget his jacket.”

  “Yes, yes.” In the three weeks Jamyang had been looking after Dash, not only had she captured my son’s devotion, she’d displayed the managerial capability required to run a chain of day care centers. Still, I couldn’t resist reviewing the basics. I knew I was being annoying.

  In less than an hour Xander and I would be touring yet another nursery school, the last of seven visits set up by Hannah McCoy. By next week, she’d want us to start filing applications. The pressure was mounting, and Xander wasn’t helping. At the end of each tour, he bombarded the director with questions. How does the education here foster intellectual independence? What do you do to stimulate a child’s imagination—examples, please? Could you explain why your theories are considered to be progressive? Or not. We’d started to have a nodding acquaintance with parents on the circuit, and I cringed to think that they’d pegged my husband as a fast talker in a well-cut suit. They didn’t know the man I did, a hardworking perfectionist who only wanted the best for our son.

  I, on the other hand, rarely peeped, except to praise the tidiness of a block corner or to ask if the children were supervised on the swings. We’d sat through Mrs. McCoy’s tutorial on how to handle a tour—ask questions without speaking too loudly, she advised, which apparently some parents needed to be told. Every pre-K classroom looked like the one I remember from my own childhood, with a bored bunny twitching in a cage, dress-up clothes, and a bathroom whose toilet barely clears an adult’s ankles. The only substantial change since my day was the names. Theo, Ariel, Dylan, Aspen, Charlie, Brett, Alex, and Morgan—were they boys or girls?

  Every director made sweeping statements. “Here at the Whatever School we help our students grow within an atmosphere of civility…. We embrace both an ethical and developmental perspective…. It’s our rich heritage that encourages well-rounded individuals…. The depth and breath of our program nurtures a student’s desire to make connections between the classroom and the larger world.” Whenever these declarations began, my mind would meander. Other parents might nod knowingly, but I was tempted to say, Huh? English, people.

  No tour guide addressed what I was afraid to ask: Would this be a school where boo-boo kissing was practiced or forbidden? How would a teacher treat Dash if he couldn’t tie his shoes properly? Was the school going to help him become a nice person or was “nice” obsolete, like—I speak from the humiliation of personal experience—innocently referring to your Chinese college roommate as Oriental? I was already worrying that Dash was at the beginning of a long life on the slow track, that lonely line that crawls below the spiking EEGs of brighter, more aggressive little boys, boys like Henry Fisher-Wells, who was only four months older but did everything ahead of schedule. Henry could already recite the alphabet. Every letter!

  “You go now,” Jamyang urged. Apparently I’d been frozen in place. “Dash and I fine.”

  I knew I shouldn’t be imposing my insecurities on my nanny, and especially not on my child, who’d hit every mark—sitting up, walking, holding a sippy cup—exactly on schedule. “Thank you,” I said, and turned from her to Dash. “Give Mommy a kiss, sweet prince.”

  He giggled, touched his lips, and danced his fingers, miniatures of Xander’s, in my direction. I quickly pressed my mouth to his rounded cheek and forced myself to walk out the front door, moving briskly in my flats. I wanted to present myself as a respectable young matron, an image I hoped was amplified by my yellow cardigan and pearls.

  Jackson Collegiate School, five blocks from our home, was near the wide cobblestone promenade that overlooks the East River. For more than a hundred years, Brooklyn’s finest, along with children who lived across the river in the Village, had begun their education here. The school, originally girls only, took up a row of six tall, matching brown-stones connected like a chorus line of dignified spinsters.

  I pushed open a heavy wrought-iron door and entered a wood-paneled hall heavily scented with lemon oil. The walls were hung with many portraits, mostly of tightly cinched, high-breasted women in buns and starched white collars. These ladies had been dead a hundred years, yet I could feel their narrowed eyes judge me as I walked toward a young redheaded man seated at the corridor’s end. “Here for the open house?” he asked.

  “Chloe Keaton. Please tell me it hasn’t already started?”

  He checked off my name on a list. “We’re still waiting for all the parents,” he said, and gestured. “Right this way.”

  I entered a room with a wide view of the Brooklyn Bridge, which stood like heavy black lace against the sky. As many as forty other parents—mommies and daddies, daddies and daddies, mommies and mommies—filled rows of straight-backed ch
airs. Xander had five minutes in which to arrive. While I looked for a seat toward the back, I heard a familiar voice stage-whisper from several rows in front of me.

  “Chloe!” Talia was waving her hand like a traffic cop, forming the words “sit here” and leaning over Tom to tap an empty chair.

  What was Talia doing here? She was supposed to be at our office today. I walked over to see my friends and showed them a smile as big as a poodle.

  “Sit down,” Talia said after the three of us kissed hello.

  “I’m waiting for Xander,” I said, seeing only one empty chair next to them. “I’ll look for you during the tour.” I couldn’t bring myself to ask Talia why she hadn’t mentioned that she’d be here. Preschool was a subject we’d been discussing since our breast-feeding days, but our conversations politely sashayed around specifics. I hadn’t planned to admit—ever—that I’d hired a professional to guide me through the school application process. That was like confessing I needed to pay a personal shopper—Jules, for instance—to pick out my clothes. But there was more. I’d gotten the impression that Talia and Tom wanted to wait another year before enrolling Henry anywhere. “Does a four-year-old really need school?” had been her exact words just last week, which had shut me up fast. What surprised me more was, why Jackson Collegiate? Hadn’t Tom and Talia made a commitment to public school, on account of Tom working, as he likes to say, “in the public sector”?

  I didn’t have to speak. Talia read my mind. “Tom’s adviser at Columbia is married to the head of the lower school,” she offered. “Her name’s—”

  “Betsy O’Neal,” Tom said. “Her husband’s my thesis adviser.”

  I kept my smile going while a thought snuck up like a burp. Was that the thesis Tom Wells had never finished, the one Talia complained about with regularity?

  “Betsy nagged us to check out the school …,” Talia said, and lifted her eyebrows ever so slightly to telegraph to me that she was a skeptic.

  “Jackson’s got a great reputation,” I said. It was the most sought-after private school in Brooklyn, I’d learned from Hannah McCoy, and enrolled students from as far away as Gramercy Park and Chelsea.

  “We’ll be the judge of that.” Talia laughed. “Let’s see how they deliver the goods.”

  I wasn’t used to feeling flummoxed around my best friend. Fortunately, I spotted Xander walking through the door. “Do you want to have coffee later?” I asked Talia.

  “I have to get back to the office,” she said. “There’s a limit to how long a faked eye doctor appointment lasts.”

  “Then let’s talk tonight,” I said, and walked to the back of the room, where Xander had carefully folded his black overcoat over his arm as he found two chairs.

  “What kept you?” I whispered when we were seated.

  “I’m lucky I got here.” He was slightly out of breath. “I have to leave in exactly an hour.”

  That hour fled. Dr. O’Neal introduced department heads and specialists—every witty one of them had spent summers running programs for children in third-world countries. Following the faculty rundown, we were treated to an a cappella choir singing Native American folk songs, a Dixieland band, and an abbreviated performance from Swan Lake, accompanied by a four-foot-tall string quartet playing Tchaikovsky. Only after Odette and Odile took their bows and the director introduced the mathletes did Dr. O’Neal lead the parent group—we must have totaled close to one hundred—around the school like a trail of tall, gawking geese.

  I counted no more than sixteen children in each class, and faces of every hue, all sunny side up. Not one teacher appeared scary, burned out, or in need of immediate dental attention, and every classroom seemed to pulse with laughter and good health. I couldn’t imagine a child here getting lice or, God forbid, fat.

  “At Jackson Collegiate we have a historical emphasis on the arts,” Dr. O’Neal said as we stepped inside a room filled with first graders painting at individual easels, “but we value all the disciplines—science, the humanities, and physical education, too.”

  “What sets Jackson apart?” Xander asked as we caught up to her. Talia wasn’t far behind.

  “What’s most important here is building character,” Dr. O’Neal said. “We try our best to cultivate authentic respect for one another.”

  I’d heard more or less the same speech from every director, but this was the first school where I felt that it might be true. Maybe here “nice” wasn’t a dirty word left in the dust of “hi-ho, Harvard.” This might be a school where Xander, Dash, and I would all fit in and make friends. I stayed close to him as we migrated back to the hall. “What do you think?” I whispered into his ear.

  “I like it,” he said. “I think I like it the best yet.”

  “Me too,” I answered. As I gave his arm a squeeze I felt a tap on my shoulder.

  “Wouldn’t you have killed to have gone to a school like this?” Talia said, grinning. “Poetry on the walls, for God’s sake.”

  “What about the science labs?” Xander said. “A sixth grader could cure cancer in there.”

  “And the library?” she said. “That’s where I’d like to spend the whole afternoon.”

  Tom caught up to us. “Now do you see why Betsy’s my idea of an educator?”

  “It would be great if Henry and Dash could be in the same class,” I gushed, and then felt embarrassed. Dr. O’Neal hadn’t mentioned money—nobody did on these tours—but I’d read the fact sheet, and tuition was higher than at any other school we’d seen. What if Tom and Talia couldn’t afford this school, which cost an arm and a leg and maybe a spleen? The four of us took seats, and Dr. O’Neal began to field questions.

  “Do you give preference to brothers and sisters of current students?” the woman to the left of me asked.

  “We believe in family traditions and give siblings every consideration,” she said. “But unfortunately, we can’t offer guarantees.”

  “Last year eighty percent of the class was siblings,” a woman in back of me carped to no one in particular. “In vitro run amok—too many frigging twins.”

  “When do you introduce foreign languages?” asked a man in a white turban.

  “Second grade,” Dr. O’Neal said. “Spanish, French, Chinese, Japanese, Punjabi, Arabic, Hebrew, and Italian.” Sports facilities, trips to museums, and religious education—there was none, unless you counted the history of Eastern spirituality—had all been covered by the time Tom asked, “What’s your policy on scholarships?”

  “We handle them case by case,” Dr. O’Neal said, “but yes, we have resources for especially deserving students.” Tom glanced at Talia. I couldn’t see her face.

  Finally the director called on Xander. “How many applications do you expect to receive this year?” he asked.

  I couldn’t miss her pride. “If last year is any indication, I’d say at least a thousand.”

  “How many spots are there?”

  “In preschool, thirty-two.”

  These numbers could mean only one thing. If Dashiel McKenzie Keaton was to get into this school, his parents would have to play the game. The question was, how?

  CHAPTER 10

  Talia

  Though I’d spent forty minutes wielding a blow dryer and a round brush, I was crowned with a halo of frizz: I looked like the love child of Botticelli’s Venus and Tom Wolfe. The morning was, as my father might say, as hot as a Hasid in Haifa. My white linen suit was losing starch with each limping step.

  In June Rittenhouse’s waiting area, every chair was slick and uncomfortable; even the tall French tulips on the desk wore wires up their ass. Almost half an hour ticked away before I was ushered into a conference room fitted with a black marble table and two glass bottles of Evian. Let the inquisition begin. I’m guilty, Detective. I confess to being here under false pretenses.

  Yet when the headhunter entered the room, she was apologetic for the delay as well as refreshingly wrinkled. With more sense than I had, June Rittenhouse had pulled he
r hair into a chignon, although I could see the real deal was as kinked as my own. This made me like her. “Happy to meet you, Ms. Fisher-Wells,” she said, shaking my hand. “Have a chair. I’ve looked over your résumé, and you’ve accomplished quite a lot.”

  I wondered if at this point I was expected to display humble gratitude for a compliment or was supposed to brag about my incomparable qualifications. I stuck with “Thank you.”

  “All right, let’s start. What do you consider your greatest accomplishment?” She stared into my eyes so intently I would have backed away if it wouldn’t have suggested that her breath might be less than minty fresh. Faking sanity at work when Henry hadn’t slept through the previous night? Getting my mother-in-law, Abigail Wells, the great-great-great-granddaughter of austere New England preachers, to tolerate me? Those were accomplishments. But what I said was, “It had to be the time we had only twenty-four hours to pitch Odor-Eaters and my approach nailed a multimillion-dollar account.” I narrated my story with beguiling anecdotes augmented with numerical flourishes, and watched the woman take notes as I silently lamented that my life’s work had been dedicated to training people to be spendthrifts.

  “Do you prefer to work alone or as part of a team?”

  Tricky. Was the job in question—if there was a real job at stake—for freelance consulting (“I work best independently, preferably on the tundra for months on end”) or a traditional inside position (“I’m a team player and love to brainstorm endlessly with witless morons who grab credit for my ideas”)? “Actually, I’m one of those people who swings both ways,” I said, and gave examples of star performances on both the autonomous and Ms. Congeniality fronts.

  She offered a cryptic “Aha,” asked a few more easy questions, and then said, “For the right position, Ms. Fisher-Wells—”

  “Talia.”