Good Apple

by Elizabeth Passarella

  The most compelling factor, though, in making my kids eat school lunch is that, in New York City public schools, it’s free. It used to cost a dollar or so a day, but now it costs exactly zero dollars. I’m not sure why this change was made, and I’m guessing it’s for a less charitable reason than I’m about to offer, but in my mind, the Department of Education is trying to get more families to opt in on school lunch. They’re trying to soften the lines between kids who have no other option and kids who show up with salmon sashimi. I hope I’m right, because I like that idea, everyone being in the same boat. There are ample other ways for kids to congregate into haves and have-nots.

  My kids are also good, curious eaters—a valuable trait that they try to deny (“You’re wrong, Mom. I hate hamburgers. Always have. No, not Shake Shack. But all others. All of them. Except Shake Shack. Definitely the school hamburgers.”)—and have no allergies, which I know can make school lunch hard. The way I see it, for us, there’s no downside. School lunch is character building. They have to stand in line in the cafeteria, practice patience and flexibility, and deal with disappointment. None of that can hurt.

  Plenty about public school has been character building for me too. As my children grieve daily over the unfairness of lunch, I had to grieve the loss of what I dreamed elementary school would look like for them—which, in my head, was a school that looked like the one I attended. My experience was so very different: fourteen years, pre-kindergarten through high school, at St. Mary’s, a small, all-girls Episcopal school in Memphis. My friend Vanessa once described it to our husbands, during a slightly tipsy conversation, as “heaven,” which might have been overselling it, but not by much. In the 1980s, especially in my conservative Southern circles, being at a school that told us girls every day how intelligent, capable, and strong we were was life-changing. There were no boys to distract or diminish us. We roamed the halls like the Amazonian women of Themyscira, fierce and loyal. Being smart was cool. Being in the band was cool. So when I thought about where I’d send my intelligent, capable, strong daughter to school, I naturally went looking for an all-girls warrior incubator. The problem is that those cost as much per year in Manhattan as the GDP of Estonia.

  Parents all over the country have to weigh the social and financial outcomes of private versus public versus parochial; it’s not just a fraught decision in New York. And as we do, we say over and over that we’re just trying to do what’s best for our children. Trying to find the right fit. What could be wrong with that? It’s noble, responsible, loving. That, however, that exact notion, what was best for my child, became a bit problematic for me. Because I had hatched the idea in my head that what was best for my child was to have an identical school experience to what I had growing up. I didn’t consider at first that maybe my child was getting messages of female empowerment outside of school—in the T-shirt section of Target, specifically—because she was going to school in 2015, not 1980. I also didn’t consider that an all-girls school in Manhattan might not be a carbon copy of my beloved all-girls school in Memphis. Nostalgia does that. We hold too tightly to the good memories, and then we try to recreate them for our children, assuming history will repeat itself in heartwarming fashion. It rarely does. Ask any parent whose child has turned her nose up at that parent’s favorite book series or, crushingly, asked if it’s been turned into a graphic novel yet.

  So, if my kid couldn’t go to an all-girls school, then what was next best for my child—because she was brilliant—was to be plucked out of the mire of general education and placed apart, into one of the city’s gifted programs. Only that did not work out either. In the end, she was offered a spot in a progressive, non-gifted, completely normal school in our neighborhood, one where the administration didn’t believe in homework, and the children called their teachers by their first names, for heaven’s sake. I revolted. My exact words to Michael were, “Over my dead body.” No homework? No pressure? No way to measure how much better my child was than other students through dumb worksheets? Truly. Nostalgia took over again. I fondly remembered my first-grade class sitting in neat rows of desks. The children at this school congregated at communal tables and on rugs, like stray cats climbing all over each other in a cardboard box. “We can just move to a different school district. People do it all the time,” I said. But it didn’t make sense for us, not when we loved our home, and this school was fine—coveted, even, by some families (who obviously didn’t understand how much smug superiority one could whip up with a few take-home worksheets). But when you are dealing with your firstborn child, you are like a sharp, jagged, overgrown fingernail: every motion is consequential, potentially painful, capable of drawing blood. Everything feels fraught. So much is at stake. What I know now is that the emery board of time is a welcome thing. Years of experience and wisdom file down the rough edges, until you can scratch your nose without injury. This calm, levelheaded state was still far off for me that summer as we prepared Julia for kindergarten. I can’t say I was praying about it either. I believe I might have been looking at real estate in Memphis.

  And that’s when God started talking to me. I hesitate to say it so bluntly, as if that’s a normal occurrence, like we frequently have burning bushes outside our door. But it’s the truth. A line kept floating in and out of my brain, every time I got an email from our new school or thought about how bummed I was that we couldn’t afford private school. God said, “I opened one door.” I would think to myself, “Yes, but it’s not the door I wanted or expected, and it’s certainly not the door that is best for my child.” And I waited for another door to open. But it didn’t. “I opened one door,” he said. “You can be pissed, but you’ll need to trust me and walk through.”

  Julia started kindergarten. I walked through the door. But just in case God was wrong, I kept looking for the secret exit. Maybe we would move, after all. Or hire a math tutor for fun. (FOR FUN. I said this out loud.) I asked every parent I ran into about their kindergarten experience, obsessing over details, comparing schools, apples to oranges, trying to figure out how we were doing. Julia seems happier than this kid who went to a private school but isn’t reading as quickly as that one in the district’s gifted program. Don’t I sound like a fun person to run into on the playground? But it was all in the best interest of my child, I reasoned. There was also a small part of me that wanted to delegate responsibility, to find the absolute ideal fit so that I could confidently foist some of the child-rearing and character-building to Julia’s school and teachers, because I needed a break. And yet, by virtue of being somewhat countercultural in our faith or our worldview from the mainstream public-school perspective, I was going to have to work harder. This annoyed me.

  But, over time, I’ve realized what a gift it is. I’ve realized that what is best for my child actually has nothing to do with school. As a Christian I believe that the most important thing to be concerned about when it comes to my child is her heart. My actions all too often say it’s multiplication tables or the difference between the plural and possessive, but it’s her heart. Yes. The heart. I can’t make her give her life to Jesus—that’s not my job—but I am responsible for leading the horse to water. Of all the things my children learn in this life, learning that they are loved unconditionally by a God who came to earth and died for them, even though they are sinners, is the biggest. If they never went to school but learned this, it would be better than to be educated at the most prestigious institutions but not know the Savior. That is a tough pill to swallow for a snobby New Yorker, but it’s accurate.

  You may not believe in the God I do, but I’m willing to bet you have other family values or character traits that you rank above education, even if education is very, very high. Those values are being introduced and refined and celebrated on your couch and at your dinner table, not in your child’s school. And if we all have those beliefs, and we take deep breaths and think clearly, then school choice begins to settle into its rightful place. School choice becomes a good thing—which it is;
we are lucky—not an ultimate thing. It loses its power as identity-defining. Would we stay at this school forever? Would it be the best place for James? Those were questions we had to wrestle with, but the wrestling was never life or death. We always had the freedom to shrug our shoulders and say, “Eh. Who knows? Let’s go forward and not worry about it too much.”

  . . .

  Being released from the constant worry that we may not have picked the perfect school for our child (hint: there is no perfect school) allowed Michael and me to start enjoying our school. It turns out that a no-homework policy was an enormous blessing. My kids had more time to play in the park after school and saved their tears for piano practice and dusting the baseboards. The parents at our school were an eclectic bunch of warm, down-to-earth people whom we’ve grown to love. Even when things go terribly—and they have, at various points; we’ve had teachers quit mid-year and resources run out and bullies surface—I think we are right where God wants us to be. When I think that I am somehow improving the public school system with my presence and donation dollars, something will happen that reinforces the fact that it is me who is being softly filed down. I am the one being changed.

  For a few months in fourth grade, Julia’s class (newly teacher-less) was chaotic, full of misbehavior and disruption. God told me to work harder to make our home a place of peace, which it definitely is not, the majority of the time. He reminded me that the most obnoxious kid in the class is no more rotten than I am and no less loved. When things have gone wrong on an administrative level, and we all shake our collective fists at the slow, grinding gears of the Department of Education, I’ve learned patience. And to be forgiving with my fellow parents. I’ve tried to stop pointing fingers, because “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23). I think what I’ve learned is contentment, to try to bloom where I’m planted, to turn toward the sun when I can. And that being a teacher is the hardest job on earth, so parents need to shut up and bring doughnuts.

  The mantra I repeat to parents who are a few years behind me in the process, who are wringing their hands and churning themselves into foamy stress balls about kindergarten, is this: our kids will be fine. It’s similar to what I tell my children when they ask if we are rich. I say, “Yes, we are. There are so many people who are richer than we are. But if you have a roof over your head and enough food to eat, if you can buy a toy whenever you feel like it, you are beyond rich.” And my kids are beyond fine. They have two parents who love each other and them. They live in a mind-blowingly awesome city (sorry, editorializing). They can go to a doctor when they get sick. They are in a good, safe school. They are fine. They could go to the worst-performing school in our district, and they’d still be fine.

  . . .

  Right in the middle of one of the hardest months we’ve had, school-drama-wise, I went to an event for New York–based alumnae of St. Mary’s. The current headmaster and a few other teachers and administrators were there, along with dozens of young women who had graduated from our all-girls school and now lived and worked in New York. The headmaster showed us a video of the new cafeteria and gym that was under construction on the campus in Memphis. It was beautiful. There was a coffee bar. I cried a little on the way home. Was I shortchanging my children by not sending them to schools with better amenities? Smaller classrooms? Daily chapel?

  These are questions that, thankfully, I don’t have to answer. I didn’t have to weigh options or tear my hair out over which path was best. I don’t have to second-guess my choice or wonder if the grass is greener on the brand-new track and field complex of the school across town. God, in his mercy, gave me one door.

  SIXTEEN

  THERE WAS A RAT IN MY BEDROOM, AND THEN I GOT STUCK IN AN ELEVATOR

  AS OF THIS WRITING, WE HAVE lived in our apartment for almost twelve years, and we’ve had all manner of weird things happen, among them mice—dumb mice, I should note, who always seem to leave the Shangri-La of our kitchen and inexplicably take up residence in the smaller of our two bedrooms off the hallway, past the living room. Once, when Julia was a baby and that room was her nursery, she cried out in the middle of the night. I went in, shushed her back to sleep in her crib, and then shut the door behind me on my way out—only, the door didn’t fully shut; it bounced back open, as if there was a ball or a small toy wedged in the hinges. I pulled again, and it shut, and I went to bed. The next morning, we found the mouse we’d been hunting. His head was mashed flat in the bottom corner of the door frame. I ask you: What are the chances I could shut the door at the exact moment a mouse’s head passed by? For weeks after I felt like Mr. Miyagi catching a fly with chopsticks. Skillful and victorious. Plus, that mouse and I were in a personal feud. A few days before I killed him, he’d run from the kitchen to the foyer and underneath a skirted settee while I was sitting on the couch, watching The Bachelorette. Michael wasn’t home, and I didn’t want him to get out from under the settee until I could line its perimeter with glue traps. So I sat on the floor for two hours with the settee in my sightline, saying, “Nope!” every time he poked his head out from under the skirt. I’ve never had to go to the bathroom so bad in my life. Michael finally came home with the glue traps, but even after we lay them end to end around that settee, he escaped. So it served him right to get his skull flattened.

  Another time, a mouse lived in my purse for a while. I only figured it out when I picked up the plastic baggies of kids’ half-eaten snacks, and they all had nibble marks in the corners.

  Living stacked on top of each other in apartment buildings, you sometimes become part of weird things that happen to your neighbors. The lovely man who lives above us had a leak in his bedroom window a couple of years ago, and the water slid down inside our walls, so that the layers of paint beside our bedroom window bubbled and began to droop like old jowls. I pictured the red slime from Poltergeist living under the surface. The walls looked alive. Then our building’s superintendent came and scraped out all of the wet plaster, and we repainted.

  The most terrible thing we’ve dealt with involved our single downstairs neighbor, Freddy, who died, and no one knew until we noticed an odor. You think that’s just a joke single women make in sitcoms—you’ll die, and no one will know until the neighbors complain of a smell, and by then, your cat will have eaten most of your left thigh!—but it really does happen. We thought the smell might be a dead mouse in the wall, and when we mentioned it to a guy who works in our building, it somehow triggered him to think that he hadn’t seen Freddy in a while. A few building staffers knocked on Freddy’s door and eventually let themselves in; the coroner gauged that he’d been dead for ten days.

  Friends of ours were a little unnerved by the Freddy story, but, honestly, the rat freaked people out far more. And I understand; nothing symbolizes the city’s resignation to its own filth like rats. New Yorkers can be as skittish as anyone else when a rat pops out from under a mound of garbage bags on the sidewalk; it’s the element of surprise, and the fact that you know he’ll walk right over your open-toed sandals, if he pleases. But seeing one on the subway tracks, five yards removed? It’s amusing, almost exciting, like spotting fireworks off in the distance on a random day in October. Non–New Yorkers don’t see it that way, of course. Rats must be the natural consequence for moving to a place so uncivilized that the building codes don’t even allow garbage disposals. If the wages of sin are death, then the wages of scraping your dinner detritus into the kitchen garbage are rats. Meanwhile, my friends who live in the suburbs have raccoons living in their attics, squirrels making nests in their chimneys, and snakes slithering through their bathroom pipes. Those are all equally disgusting, not to mention vastly more expensive to deal with, and still: I will never live down this rat.

  We were in a miserable phase of our family sleeping life wherein James came into our room every night around 3:00 a.m. He would stand, silent and creepy, next to my side of the bed, until I told him to get in, and if I didn’t wake up, he’d wander over to Mich
ael’s side of the bed and wait for the invitation there. Once he’d climbed between us, adjusted the covers, and stopped shifting around, he’d ask for water, which would start the adjusting and shifting all over again. This night, we’d all finally settled in, I was just beginning to doze off again, when James sat up in bed and said, “What’s that rustling sound?”

  I’d left a few loose papers on the floor beside the bed, and we had a fan in our room. “It’s just the fan blowing the papers,” I said. I turned on the lamp, picked up the papers, put them in a basket, and turned off the light.

  “Now I hear scratching,” said James. Sure enough, it sounded like something was scratching the wall in the closet, about two feet from my side of the bed.

  “Guys, it’s the pipes. That wall backs up to the bathroom. Sometimes you hear water dripping or hissing. Go to sleep,” said Michael.

  I turned on the lamp anyway. Nothing. Then we heard unmistakable scurrying on the hardwood floors by the bedroom door.

  “Michael, it’s a mouse. I hear its feet,” I said. When I turned on the lamp a third time, a gray animal the size of my fist turned and ran under our bed. I screamed, and Michael jumped to his feet on top of the bed, furiously picking up the sheets and blanket, screeching. (Later that morning, in an unbelievable burn for a six-year-old, James would say, “Dad, you didn’t have to jump like that. It was a rat. No big deal. We are city people.”)

  “That was the biggest mouse I have ever seen,” I said, assuming, because it is the only logical assumption, that it was a mouse. By the way, we live on the eighth floor of our building. Rats had occasionally—rarely—managed to slip into the basement. The idea that one could travel to the eighth floor was inconceivable. My only other thought was that maybe someone’s pet guinea pig had gotten loose.

  The three of us left the bedroom, closed the door, and went to the back room, where Julia was now up, awakened by our screaming. I knew the mouse could get under our bedroom door, but my hope was that he’d head for the kitchen, not the kids’ bedroom, and anyway, what was there to do in the middle of the night? I went downstairs to our lobby and asked the overnight doorman for some glue traps, since they keep some on hand in a storage room. It’s always nice to see the overnight doorman. His shift is from midnight to 8:00 a.m., which means we catch him every once in a while on our way out to breakfast, but we don’t have much of a relationship going.