Death of a PTA Goddess

by Leslie O'Kane

  I heard Jane gasp as a fortyish man in a dark suit entered the studio. “My God,” Jane cried. “That’s my husband. What’s he doing here?”

  Beaming, he came up to her and bowed. “May I have this dance, Mrs. Daly?”

  Still breathless, she said, “What do you mean? I’ve been trying to get you to dance for years. But you’ve always refused.”

  “I was just embarrassed. I needed to gain some ground on you, so I’ve been taking lessons on the sly.”

  Her jaw dropped. “You have?”

  He grinned. “Surprise.”

  “Oh, Aaron! I’m so touched! Thank you.” She curtsied to him and had to dab away the tears as they crossed the floor together.

  I, too, felt a catch in my throat at witnessing Jane’s delight. “Well,” I said to Stephanie. “That was worth the price of admission.”

  “I suppose so,” she replied in a bored voice.

  Just then, my vision happened to focus on Chad. Though he quickly looked away, he had clearly been listening. For some reason, he was now staring at the Dalys with a look of pure malevolence.

  Chapter 9

  Run for Your Life!

  We had another uneventful weekend. Nathan wrote a report about the giant squid that had been assigned three weeks ago and was due Monday; he started it Saturday morning. Karen spent a lot of time on the phone with Adam—or with Rachel to recount the previous phone conversation she’d just had with Adam. Karen was a straight-A student, and it would have been premature to get on her case about her social life interfering—unless and until it actually did interfere. As for parental duties, both Jim and I put in a couple of hours with her behind the wheel. The lessons were going reasonably well, despite her tendency to announce each time she got into the driver’s seat, “Don’t be surprised if we crash into something.”

  On Monday afternoon, Nathan was unusually quiet. He went straight to his room after school without looking for me or stopping into the kitchen for snacks. Knowing my son as I do and having once been in junior high myself, I played immediate host to gut-wrenching worries.

  I knocked on his door. His subsequent “Yeah?” was an octave lower than it was when he felt cheerful.

  “Can I come in?”

  “I guess.”

  I opened his door. He was lying facedown on his bed. The sight made me flash back to so many other times when I’d stood here, just inside his doorway, breathing in my child’s unique scent while he lay, distraught but dry-eyed, on his bed. “Rough day?” I asked.

  No answer.

  “Me, too.” Needing to draw him into conversation, I went on: “My cartoons have gotten really stupid lately. Today I drew a batch of terrified nuns running down the street and shouting, ‘Run for your life! The hills are alive with the sound of music!’ And in the background there’s a pair of enormous hills that have sprouted arms and legs and are dancing.”

  No reaction. Normally such a silly cartoon appealed to his sense of humor.

  Hoping that the cause of his sadness concerned the least worrisome aspect I could come up with, I asked, “Did you have trouble on a math quiz, or with some other schoolwork?”

  “No. It doesn’t matter. I’m fine. I’m just tired.”

  My stomach knotted. He was obviously far from fine, and if he wasn’t having academics troubles, he must be having social ones. I took a seat at his desk chair. “I remember my experiences at Carlton. One of the things that stands out was all the teasing I had to put up with. Especially from the older guys in the school.”

  Nathan stiffened, and I could tell he was listening. I went on, “There was this one class I had to get to in another part of the building. There was no way to get to class except down this one hall, and a group of boys would stand there and make fun of me. Every day. Mornings, I’d sit in class just dreading having to make that walk. It ruined my life for a while. I wouldn’t tell anybody about it, not even my friends, because it was too embarrassing.” I paused.

  “What did you do?” Nathan asked into his pillow, still not looking at me.

  “One day, one of the boys said something really awful to me . . . I don’t even remember exactly what . . . but I stopped walking. I looked straight into his eyes and didn’t say a word. Finally, he looked away, so I started walking again. And, of course, the guys with him teased me about that . . . ‘Whoa. She’s giving us the evil eye.’ Junk like that. But the next day and from then on, they didn’t say a word when I walked by them.”

  Nathan boosted himself on one elbow and looked around at me. “They quit teasing you? Just because you looked at one of them?”

  “Yes. I guess they figured that it wasn’t fun anymore if their victim was going to stop and look them straight in the eye. But do you want to hear about something much worse that happened, and that bugs me to this day?”

  He shrugged as if indifferent, but also sat up.

  “It happened during my sophomore year, a year or two after the teasing from those boys in the hall. There was this girl who rode our school bus. She was a little plump, but not at all fat or unattractive. She was just a normal-looking girl, a junior in the high school. A really nice-looking boy lived in our neighborhood, and we all thought he was really cool. He started teasing that one girl just . . . hideously . . . way worse than what those guys had said to me. And some of his buddies joined in, showing off to their ringleader. It went on like this for a couple of weeks. One day, they made her cry. She was just . . . sobbing as she got off the bus. The rest of that year, she never rode the bus again. Not even once. You know why that bugs me so badly, Nathan?”

  “Because she cried?”

  “Because I never said a word to tell them to stop picking on her. I never told the bus driver what was going on. That would have been so easy, but it didn’t even occur to me. And you know why I didn’t?”

  He just looked at me.

  “Because I was just so relieved that it was somebody else getting picked on, and not me. I’d bet anything that’s what more than ninety percent of kids think when they see someone get teased. ‘Thank goodness it’s her, not me. If I try to help her out, it will be me.’ ”

  “It would have been, if you’d said something.”

  “Maybe so, but I’d have survived. And you know what, Nathan? That was some twenty-five years ago. Nowadays, I almost never think about how I’d been teased by those guys in the hall. Yet I think about that girl on the bus a lot, wishing I’d spoken up.”

  I paused, weighing my words, not wanting my advice to make matters worse for him. “I know it’s rough, Nathan, but we’re all only in junior high and high school for a few years in what we hope will be a long, happy life. It just feels like it’ll never end when you’re a student.”

  He flopped back down on his bed. “I’ll say. I’m too skinny. I’m a wimp.”

  “Who’s teasing you?”

  “A whole group of guys. I don’t know. Some guy named Raine is their leader.”

  “For what it’s worth, Nathan, the experts say that the thing to do is to ask for help. To say to the bully, ‘I don’t like what you say to me, and if you don’t stop, I’ll get help.’ ”

  “I’d feel like a dork if I said that.”

  “And what do you feel like when you’re being teased?” Nathan didn’t answer, so I prompted, “Would feeling like a dork be any worse?”

  He grabbed hold of a textbook and set his jaw, making it clear that the discussion was over.

  “You will gain weight, you know. And when you do, you’ll still have all the qualities you do now. You’ll be smart and funny and have a great heart and care about other people, and all the things that really matter in this world.”

  He pretended not to hear me.

  I left, closing the door behind me, wishing that I could be taking his pain with me. Because that wasn’t possible, I went straight to the desk in the kitchen and rummaged through the messy drawers until I found the school directory. Even in a class of three-hundred-plus, there couldn’t be that m
any Raines in the junior high. Plus, the boy had to be in the eighth grade. A younger boy was unlikely to tease an older one in this manner.

  I discovered one boy named Raine and searched through every name to be sure there was no mistake. Indeed there was only one: Raine Embrick, the younger brother of Adam, my daughter’s new love interest, and whose mother was Susan Embrick, the secretary/treasurer of the PTA.

  “Dammit!” I muttered. I hated it when my life started to digress into downward spirals.

  I would probably see Susan at the menopause support group tonight. At least I had a couple of hours to try to come up with a tactful way of telling her that one of her sons was getting himself into some deep doo-doo where I was concerned.

  Later that evening, Stephanie was my unwilling passenger as we drove to Emily Crown’s house. Stephanie must have found the concept of going to this particular group so humiliating, she might as well slum it and travel there in my inexpensive car.

  “I’ll have you know that I did a little preliminary research,” Stephanie said at length, breaking what had been a gloomy silence.

  “About menopause?”

  “Heavens no. About the group. Three people are going to be there that we know from the infamous PTA board meeting. Emily Crown, of course, since it’s at her house, but also Jane Daly and Susan Embrick.”

  I winced involuntarily at this last name.

  “Don’t you find that suspicious?” she asked.

  “Which part?”

  “That there is such a big crossover between the PTA board and this other group?”

  “Not especially. One group was probably recruited from the other.”

  Stephanie scoffed. “As in, ‘You’re obviously having hot flashes from hormonal imbalance. Why don’t you come join the PTA?’ ”

  I chuckled and didn’t reply. We pulled into Emily’s driveway. Her home was a tri-level, on a quarter-acre or so of nicely manicured lawns. I hadn’t realized—or had forgotten—how close she lived to Patty’s house. It was just around the corner.

  Emily greeted us warmly, but her usual spark seemed absent. Stephanie and I were a couple of minutes late. Even the habitually tardy Jane Daly was already there. Emily told us to join the dozen or so women seated in a circle of hard-backed chairs in her living room. We did so, and Emily introduced us to everyone, but I instantly lapsed into memory overload. I said hello to Jane and Susan, but avoided Susan’s gaze, not ready to broach the subject of Nathan’s troubles with Raine. The mood in the room was somber.

  “I’m sorry I’m not fully up to my hostess duties tonight,” Emily said, partly to me and partly to the group at large. “This is the first time we’ve met since . . . Patty left us. I was going to cancel, but was just having such a rough time that I thought some company would do me good.”

  “We understand,” Jane said in sympathetic tones. “All of us were Patty’s friends, too, but you two were so close. Did something happen today that especially set you off?”

  She nodded and sighed, her eyes averted as she fidgeted with a tissue. “This morning I saw the ad for the annual craft show.”

  Emily’s words reminded me that, as a cartoonist who sometimes helped out in high school art classes, I had been tapped to judge the “youth” category this year. I also immediately remembered the event’s significance: Patty had won “Best in Show” for the last two years, deposing Jane Daly’s stranglehold on the contest. In fact, Jane’s facial expression soured at the mention of the fair.

  Emily continued, “I actually picked up the phone to call Patty to ask what she was entering in the contest this year.” She shuddered. “The reality of Patty’s death hit me like a sledgehammer.”

  An uncomfortable silence ensued, and I sensed that Emily needed someone else to talk for a while. “How long ago did Patty get the idea to form this group?” I asked Jane.

  To my surprise, though, it was Emily who immediately answered. “It wasn’t her idea. It was mine. It became Patty’s group as time went on, the way all of my ideas eventually . . .” She gave me a sheepish smile. “I’m a marriage counselor, and a wife’s menopause can be a stressful time for marriages. By the time I went through menopause myself, I had accumulated so much information from my own research and my patients, I decided to form a support group. Patty was perimenopausal herself then, and so she . . . took over the membership.”

  We again lapsed into silence. I’d run out of ideas for conversation starters. What was I supposed to say? Have you heard the one about the menopausal woman who goes into a bar . . . ? I didn’t know the majority of women here, although they’d bought my cartoons for their newsletter and to share with friends. I glanced over at Stephanie, but she was in a total frump. She sat in the circle of chairs with her arms tightly folded, her eyes downcast and the corners of her lips down-turned.

  A thin, fiftyish woman leaned closer to Stephanie in the circle and peered at her face. “I must say that your complexion is really remarkable.”

  “Thank you,” she replied, instantly brightening.

  “That’s what the HRT does for you,” the woman said with a knowing nod.

  “HRT?”

  “Hormone Replacement Therapy. Estrogen works wonders for the skin.”

  Stephanie straightened and said in a partial growl, “It won’t be able to work any wonders on mine, because I’m not on estrogen.”

  “Too bad. It also improves one’s disposition,” the woman retorted.

  Stephanie pursed her lips and shot a fiery glare at the woman, then at me.

  “All right, then,” Emily said. “Let’s get the meeting started.” She gestured at Stephanie and me. “I already introduced everyone to our new members.”

  “Visitors,” Stephanie corrected. “Drop-in visitors.”

  “What did you say your name was again?” the woman who’d had the prickly exchange with Stephanie asked me.

  “Molly Masters.”

  She grinned. “You’re the one who does those adorable cartoons for us!”

  “Yes, I am, and thank you. This group sure saved my business, let me tell you.”

  Stephanie felt the need to interject, “Molly needed emotional support to come to the group today, so that’s why I’m here.”

  The thin woman leaned forward again, patted Stephanie’s knee, and asked kindly, “In denial, honey?”

  “Absolutely not! I assure you, whoever you are, that I understand and appreciate that menopause is a natural stage of a woman’s life, and when I’m old enough— many years from now, I might add—I will face up to it with my head held high.”

  The woman scoffed, and a couple of other women in the circle snickered. “Yeah, right,” the dyed redhead seated directly across from me said. “A woman like you could proudly sweat through her dress till it was soaking wet, have handfuls of hair fall out, and watch her complexion go to hell.”

  Stephanie stared at the woman in horror. In barely audible tones, she asked, “Your hair falls out?”

  “Only in thirty percent of the women. Mostly just happens to the bleached blondes.”

  “Carla!” Emily chastised. “You know that’s not true.”

  She laughed openly. “Sorry. Just teasing.” She returned her attention to Stephanie. “How old are you, anyway? Forty-three? Forty-four?”

  “Thirty-nine!” Stephanie retorted with all due indignation.

  Carla chuckled. “For how many years now?”

  Determined not to laugh at Stephanie’s plight, I avoided everyone’s gaze by riffling through my purse, as if in search of a pen and notepad. If this was a support group, I would hate to be in a nonsupportive one. After a long pause, Stephanie quietly answered, “Three.”

  “And you’ve never once had the boob sweats?” Susan Embrick asked.

  “Pardon?”

  Jane added, “You know, Steph. Boob sweats. Where they were itching and sweating so badly, you wanted to rip your blouse and bra off and do a chest-press into a snowbank?”

  Stephanie lifted her chin
and said evenly, “That’s only happened to me once. Despite your colorful analogy, I’m quite certain that was because I forgot to add fabric softener to my whites.”

  Emily said gently, “Stephanie, it’s an undeniable fact that, even though we might be unconscious of our hormonal changes, every woman’s body undergoes drastic changes from her late thirties until actual menopause occurs.”

  “Well, isn’t that just . . . ducky,” Stephanie said, giving me another glare.

  “The thought of a woman raging out of control emotionally because of her menopause is a gross exaggeration, though, right?” I asked, picturing the scenario of a menopausal woman attacking Patty with a knife.

  “Ha!” a woman cried. “Tell that to my husband. One time when my hormones were raging, I dumped all his things out the window.” She focused on Stephanie and asked, “Want to know what he’d done to set me off?”

  Stephanie said, “I suppose so.”

  “He left the toilet seat up.”

  “That is annoying,” I said.

  “At the time, I swore up and down the fact that I’d been having hot flashes every hour on the hour all that day had nothing to do with it. Now, of course, I know differently.”

  Jeez. Maybe I was on the right track, infiltrating this group to investigate the murder. “What about you, Emily?” I asked, wondering if she felt a hormonal imbalance had caused the embarrassingly harsh, recorded conversation that she’d later blamed on a bad day. “Has your temperament been affected much?”

  “No, but then my husband never forgets to put the seat down.” Everyone chuckled, then she said, “Seriously, no. I’m more inclined to get weepy than angry when I’m hormonal.”

  I glanced at Susan’s and Jane’s faces for signs that they were especially uncomfortable with the subject matter, but they didn’t appear to be. It was strange that Jane Daly was even in this group, at her age. “Jane, you look quite a bit younger than I am. Aren’t you still in your thirties?”

  “Yes, but I had a hysterectomy last year.”

  “They automatically give hormones then, don’t they?” I asked.