Primates of Park Avenue

by Martin,Wednesday

  She looked a little taken aback. “Oh, well . . . I guess it’s . . . I guess it’s still nice there then,” she faltered. Now she tilted her head and nodded and said, “Aspen, then!”

  She said it so confidently, as if everybody saw everybody in Aspen, that I thought for a brief moment that she knew something I didn’t know about my travel plans, and we were in fact going. But of course I hadn’t skied in years and told her that no, we’d be having Christmas in New York. Her eyes widened. “Oh right,” she said, “getting ready for the move and everything, I guess?” I nodded and smiled, as if to leave open the possibility that, yes, next year we’d be right back to Palm Beach for Thanksgiving and Aspen for winter break. Definitely.

  Apparently I had confused her as much as she had confused me. Clearly, I had to get a grip on the migration patterns of the Upper East Side. I was a bird of a different feather.

  The apartment we hoped to buy was one of the only condos on Park Avenue, making it particularly desirable for people who didn’t want to have to deal with a co-op and all its rules and regulations and restrictions, or who feared they wouldn’t measure up. And for people who really care about a Park Avenue address. And so here was the rub—the building was actually a “condop”—a hybrid beast that was technically a condo but “acted like a co-op.” Oh Lord, I thought when Inga delivered the news. There’s a word for that?

  Whatever it was, the application was long and detailed, demanding we disclose everything from our credit card numbers to our college GPAs to every school we, our parents, and our children had ever attended. “Why don’t they just ask us how often we have sex?” I nearly wailed to my husband as we talked it over. A circumspect Midwesterner in my heart, I was outraged and deeply offended by the idea of all this poking and prodding from total strangers.

  I was coming to understand that the “purchase application process” was one of the most humiliating hazing rites imaginable, after which, everyone said, you could not shake the feeling that a lot of people you don’t know well know way too much about you. Because they do. And that, I realized, as we contemplated our next move and our application, is one of the ways hierarchies are established and maintained in Manhattan, where buildings comprise unrelated strangers living in close physical proximity and a fragile but utterly imperative mutual dependency prevails. We engineer relationships and a sense of obligation to do right by exchanging information, just like women gossiping over fences or sitting next to each other washing clothes on river rocks do.

  Of course, the exchange is unequal. As supplicants (I preferred the term to applicant because it felt more honest) abasing ourselves for access, we were at a disadvantage, and at the mercy of our potential neighbors. By showing our carotid artery, or our belly, as dogs do when they lie on their backs in a fight, we demonstrated a willingness to submit, to cede power, to make ourselves utterly vulnerable. As with punishing hazing rituals and rites of passage the world over, we would emerge on the other side utterly exhausted and spent, with a newly minted identity: residents of 900 Park Avenue. Or so we hoped.

  I was in the very early stages of a complicated pregnancy and on mandated bed rest when it was time to do our board interview. No problem, the board representatives said—they would come to us. And they did. There we were, just us and seven total strangers. In our bedroom. I wore pearls and a jacket on top and pajama bottoms under the covers. We served cheese and crackers and wine. They had to stand up. They commented awkwardly on our book collection and asked about our son and whether we had plans to renovate.

  It seemed our answers and application were good enough. We moved into our new home on Park Avenue at the very height of the economic boom, a moment when incomes, investment portfolios, and egos were surging all over the city, and nowhere more so than in our newly adopted, elite zip code. If we thought we were done, that after having completed this particular bruising and humiliating rite of passage, we were home free, or even home, and that we could finally let our guard down a little and just relax, we were wrong.

  Oh my God, I realized one afternoon with a start as my toddler and I sat on the new sofa in our new living room reading a story about a teacher and her students on a magic school bus. I totally forgot to apply to nursery school.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Playdate Pariah

  GEOGRAPHICALLY SPEAKING, the Upper East Side is only a few miles from the West Village. We had merely moved from one corner of town to another, which sounds like no big deal. But in social and emotional and cultural terms, it was another world. There were changes, big and small, like getting our son accustomed to his new bed and the noise the bathtub made. And then there was the process of acclimating, all of us, to our new neighborhood. The whole place felt starchier and more formal than I had imagined it would. On my first runs to the corner for groceries, I felt terribly underdressed in my jeans and clogs—the women around me were decked out, dressed and groomed to the max even at 10:00 a.m. on a Tuesday. Everything about them—their demure, costly-looking boots and cashmere pea coats with gleaming buttons, their shiny blowouts and gorgeous bags—looked lavishly expensive and meticulously tended to. All the world was a stage in our new ecological niche, it seemed, each day an opportunity for a fabulous, carefully curated change of wardrobe, as well as painstaking attention to hair and makeup.

  The inside of our new building was not any more relaxed or casual. Or friendly. Just as we moved in, a debate was raging between residents over whether people with babies and toddlers in strollers should be required to take the service elevator, normally used for ferrying deliveries and garbage. The passenger elevators, some of our neighbors apparently believed, should be reserved for everyone except children, including dogs. These were dressed in cashmere and leather finery, accessorized with bejeweled leashes, clutched in the hands of decidedly ungrandmotherly dowagers sporting massive diamonds. “Is that thing real?” I whispered to the elevator attendant after a soignée older woman wearing the biggest bauble I’d ever seen stepped off one afternoon. “I think so,” he whispered back, eyebrows raised in astonishment. “She has a few of them, actually.”

  I marveled, day after day, at the abundance all around me. It wasn’t just that the neighborhood and the neighbors were rich. Through the lens of anthropology, I saw that they lived in a state of what one could only term extreme ecological release. Every living thing is tethered to its surroundings. Environmental conditions—climate, flora and fauna, predation—all help determine the daily course and overall lifecycle and evolution of every population of every species. In much of the world, humans still struggle to ward off predators and disease, and work hard to provision themselves and their families in unstintingly difficult environments—the savannah or the rain forest or a shantytown in Brazil. It is nothing new to say that things are different for the well-off in the industrialized West, where our dinners come prepackaged in stores, we get vaccines, and, in the words of primatologists Sarah Hrdy, there are no jaguars lurking outside our nurseries. In short, many of us live unconstrained by our environment in unprecedented ways. But nowhere, I considered as I walked from here to there every day, foraging for crisp Frette sheets and shiny All-Clad pots and pans and the perfect sconces, are we as radically and comprehensively released as on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It was the land of gigantic, lusciously red strawberries at Dean & Deluca and snug, tidy Barbour jackets and precious, pristine pastries in exquisite little pastry shops on spotless, sedate side streets. Everything was so honeyed and moneyed and immaculate that it made me dizzy sometimes.

  What really caught my eye, though, was the profusion of indescribably lovely children’s stores. There were nearly a dozen of these within a few blocks of our new home, and they specialized in the kind of classic, beautifully crafted clothing for tots you never saw downtown—little wool shorts and kneesocks, navy blue shoes with beige leather soles, white blouses with Peter Pan collars and red rickrack trim and fuddy-duddy argyle cardigans for m
ini-me boys. It was all made in Italy or France. Except the pajamas, which were always made in Portugal. My favorite of these upscale children’s boutiques was called Prince & Princess. “No, we’re not having any sales, we never do. But we can give you a perfect size,” a saleswoman told me when I asked whether there was a markdown in the future of a tiny powder blue cashmere sweater I coveted for my tyke. Living in a state of ecological release, I surmised, must have an impact on parenting. But other than paying retail for fancy kids’ duds, what precisely did it mean to be a child, and a mommy, living on the floridly, exotically plentiful, and bounteous Upper East Side? What did it do to mothers and children to live in this world—and what, I wondered with a pulse of anxiety, would it do to my child? And to me?

  Things weren’t equally Edenic for everyone, even here, this I knew. For Eden was segmented into the Haves and the Have Mores and the Have Mosts. You could tell the difference pretty easily—the Have Most women looked the most carefully put together and the most beautifully turned out, and generally had the most children. The first time I witnessed a perfectly coiffed, perfectly dressed petite brunette and her two nannies hauling her brood of half a dozen into an upscale kiddie clothing boutique, it was so unlike anything I’d seen before that I could hardly process it. Was she a stepmother to a few of them? I wondered, staring as the kids wiggled and protested in and out of precious outfits whose price tags presumably ran into the thousands of dollars. She must be. Right? Oh no, she wasn’t, the saleswoman later told me. She was a stay-at-home mother whose husband owned a whole lot of businesses and buildings and concerns. And she wasn’t a rarity in my new niche, not by a long shot.

  I quickly became desensitized to massive families—they were everywhere. Three was the new two—something you just did—in this habitat. Four was the new three—previously conversation-stopping, but now nothing unusual. Five was no longer crazy or religious—it just meant you were rich. And six was apparently the new town house—or Gulfstream. The culture war in our building between the older residents and families with children—the retirees who owned yippy little dogs and believed that babies in strollers belonged on service elevators, versus the couples with young kids pressing for a playroom off the lobby—mirrored a larger trend in the city. People with children were staying, rather than fleeing for the suburbs as the previous generation so often had. The superheated economy meant that the rich—whether they were newer, hedge-fund wealthy or inherited-wealth wealthy—were snapping up townhouses, or two or more apartments at a time, connecting them and creating three- and four- and six-bedroom spreads with space you could previously only find in Westchester or Wyoming.

  The change was creating pressure in two places: the real estate market—where as I had just learned, there was not enough inventory to keep up with demand—and Manhattan private schools. I knew there had been a time when, if you could pay private school tuition—now the price tag had climbed to something like 25K per year for nursery school and 35K or more for “ongoing”—your kids could go. Getting into Brearley was just a matter of affording it. But now, I kept reading in the newspapers and hearing moms around me whisper over coffee on the park benches, with so many families deciding to make a life here, and so many of them able to afford private school, everything was different.

  So many kids. So much money. And only so many school spots. In this land of plenty, it seemed, some things were very, very hard to get. The specter of failing to land one’s child in an elite school—in the changed ecology of the Upper East Side, this was the terrifying predator to be outwitted and bested. It was our jaguar.

  “You forgot?” the woman demanded, the second word a register higher and a measure harsher than the first.

  Her voice conveyed disbelief, disapproval, and more than a hint of the haughtiness of someone who has something she knows someone else wants very badly. Our son would be attending public school eventually, we were sure. So we didn’t need to find him a spot in a preschool that was a “feeder” for a prestigious private school. But getting into any nursery school up here at all—“top tier” or not—was a cutthroat endeavor. What with all the parents committing to raising all those kids they were having in the city, spots at nursery schools that were previously considered “safety schools” were now coveted and nearly impossible to come by. Manhattan was bursting at the seams—with children and their anxious, ambitious-on-their-behalf parents. But the nursery schools themselves had not yet caught up with demand. They hadn’t expanded their class sizes in any real way, most of them. And there were not any “new” nursery schools.

  Meanwhile, not sending your kid to nursery school just wasn’t done. The vast and overwhelming consensus was that children did better with some formalized preparation and socialization before kindergarten. And so the woman on the phone had me where I lived—at the intersection of ambition and anxiety about my little son’s well-being. I wondered briefly about my blood pressure—it felt like my heart was trying to pound its way out of my eyes—and took a deep breath before pleading my case. Again. It was my third call of the morning. Yes, I knew it sounded strange, but we had recently moved from downtown, where things were different and deadlines were later, and if she could just possibly tell me whether it was worth my while at all, I would be really, really grateful. And if it were, and she would deign to let me, I would dash right over to pick up the Envelope from her—the large manila mailer with an application, parent essay form, and in some cases, forms for letters of recommendation, inside. I so appreciated her time, I really did, and I apologized for the trouble.

  But what I really wanted to say to her, to all of them, was, “Why are you so unfriendly?!” We were talking about nursery school, after all. Sure, there were too many kids and too few slots. I got that. But c’mon, this was about graham crackers and finger painting and circle time. Warm, fuzzy, hands-on fun. Making friends and reading stories. Wasn’t it her job, as the school’s liaison to the outside world, to be helpful and polite, no matter how clueless the caller and how naïve her questions? Up here on the Upper East Side, though, child’s play was apparently a deadly serious business. And a lot of work. There was a right way to do it. Applications, playdates, all of it. When it came to school, I had things to learn.

  A few music class moms and my sister-in-law, an Upper East Side mother of four teens, were in charge of my education and filled me in about the school drill. Certain nursery school directors, they explained, have relationships with certain “ongoing” (that is, K–8 or K–12) school directors who do, in fact, based on their relationships, have better and worse track records getting kids into “good colleges”—which in a superheated, -ber competitive environment no longer means Ivy League schools but basically any US college with decent teaching and research facilities. Moreover, many nursery schools and “ongoing” schools had agreeable “sibling policies”—once you had a child in that school, the next one’s admission was pretty much a given. Between the nursery school playing a role in where your kid would wind up for college and the likelihood that if you played your cards right, you’d only have to apply to K–12 once, preschool mattered a lot more than you might think. And preschool directors were very, very powerful people. Yes, we were sure the neighborhood public school would be good for our son, and our family. But what if, down the line, we wanted the option to send our son to private school? What if the class size in public school was too large for him to learn effectively? What if the public school went down in quality while he was there (it was not unheard of, when a school got a new principal) or before he even arrived? What if the trend of “teaching to the test,” a practice that seemed to be burning out and stressing public school teachers, kids and parents alike, continued, and created problems for my son as it did for so many kids in public school? What if, for whatever reason, we wanted him to be in private school at some point? That meant we needed a great preschool director now, so she could pull strings for us later. Lesson learned.

  I sighed as
I held the line. I was a supplicant again, and this time around, I gathered, I was at an even more distinct disadvantage than I had been in my housing quest. Because, unlike all the other mothers on the Upper East Side, I hadn’t received the Memo. The one that apparently read: “Always plan way, way, way ahead.” One of the tribal ways, I was learning from my chats with other moms on playgrounds and at the park, was to always be doing what you were supposed to be doing long before you thought you should be doing it. For example, before nursery school, your toddler was supposed to take classes at Diller-Quaile School of Music. Before Diller-Quaile, you were supposed to do a certain baby group. Everything, it seemed, fed into everything else, and having this knowledge, exchanging it, and acting on it in a timely fashion was something like insider trading. It affirmed that you were part of the tribe of Upper East Side mommies.

  It was also an anxiety-provoking way of living, parenting, and being, because it meant you could never let your guard down and relax about anything at all. When these moms shook their heads upon hearing that my kid “took music” at the pedestrian Gymboree, I could not help but think of Jane Goodall’s matriarchal chimp Flo, the entrepreneurial dynast whose canny advocacy, sheer ambition, and skillful coalition building on behalf of her offspring Fifi, Figan, and Faben catapulted them to the top of the dominance hierarchy of their troop in Gombe, Tanzania, making the family’s reign something previously unheard of: an intergenerational affair. Just getting by up here, it seemed, required Flo-like perseverance, cleverness, forethought, and strategy.