Class

by Lucinda Rosenfeld

  “Hey, what’s up?” he said with a brief glance in her direction. “How was your dinner?”

  “Fun,” she said, pointedly carrying Matt’s dirty dishes to the sink. Not that he seemed to notice. “Though Allison was doing her usual complaining about how much her fabulous life sucks.”

  “That sounds familiar,” he said.

  Was he trying to imply that he’d heard all of Karen’s stories before or agreeing that Allison was always complaining? Karen couldn’t tell. Matt had never registered any particular objection to Allison. But he seemed to regard all of Karen’s old friends as types rather than actual people. “Come on, Kev!” he shouted at the TV screen.

  Feeling suddenly frustrated, Karen found herself blurting out, “I feel like we’ve hardly spoken lately.”

  “Aren’t we speaking right now?” asked Matt.

  “Yeah, but I feel like you’re always a million miles away all the time.”

  “Hey, you were the one out with friends tonight, not me.”

  “I know. It’s just—I don’t know.”

  “Sorry if I’ve seemed distracted. Work has been really intense lately.”

  “Do you want to plan a date night?”

  “Sure.”

  “Also, if you want to come to the HK benefit, we have to get a sitter.”

  “Of course I’ll come. What night is it again?”

  “The eighteenth.”

  “Oh, shiiitttt.” Matt hit his forehead with his palm.

  “What?” said Karen.

  “That’s the night of our dinner with the foundation people,” he said. “They want updating. And I guess we’re also hoping to talk them into replenishing the coffers, so to speak.” Karen didn’t answer. He was telling her this now? “I’m really sorry about that,” Matt continued, sounding genuinely remorseful. But a millisecond later, he was leaning toward the TV, arms outstretched, yelling, “Where’s the fucking defense?” As if the matter of his nonattendance at her biggest work event of the year had already been settled and forgotten about.

  Except it hadn’t.

  “I also feel like you don’t take what I do seriously,” said Karen. It was less that she believed this to be true than that she didn’t feel like letting Matt off the hook. Not yet. She also wanted his attention.

  Finally, he turned away from the screen and squinted at her. “Kar—what in Yahweh’s name are you talking about?”

  “I think you think housing is more important than hunger,” she went on, half knowing that her argument verged on the absurd. “Like, you think people can live without enough food but not without roofs over their heads, whereas to me, it actually seems like the other way around.”

  “That is such a ridiculous thing to say that I’m not even going to honor it with a response,” he said. “Though I will say this: I’m not the one who came up with the ‘hilarious’”—Matt made quotes in the air—“nickname for the project I’ve devoted the last twelve months of my life to. Honestly, it was funny the first time you called it Poor-coran, but less so the four hundredth.”

  Matt’s offense took Karen by surprise. “I was just trying to make you laugh,” she said. “Sorry if it didn’t work.”

  “It’s okay,” he said, backing down. “Luckily, I have a thick skin.”

  But unlike Matt’s team, Karen wasn’t ready to cede the offense. “If you had a big event, I’d come,” she said.

  Matt released a long sigh. “If you really want me to try and reschedule the dinner, I will. But I can’t promise it’ll work. They set it up months ago, and it took like a week to find a date that worked for everyone.”

  “I don’t want you to do it unless you want to do it,” said Karen, aware that she sounded juvenile and petulant but feeling that it was somehow merited.

  “You know, it’s kind of a big night for me too,” he said.

  “What a coincidence.”

  Matt grimaced, looked away. Then he turned back to her and said, “Honestly, Karen, you sound like your mother right now. The whole world is allied against you, and you’re going to make everyone feel bad about it. Is that the idea?”

  The accusation made Karen recoil in shame; was he right? “Yes, that’s exactly the idea,” she muttered on her way out of the room.

  “Come onnnnnn,” said Matt. But he wasn’t talking to her. The other team must have gotten a basket.

  There were two e-mails of note waiting in Karen’s in-box. The first was from Laura, saying that Maeve was starting to settle in at Mather but that she definitely missed her old friends, like Ruby. To that end, she wrote, Would Ruby like to come over for a playdate on Saturday afternoon? Unfortunately, Evan and I will be traveling for work, but our new nanny, Jangchup, will be here with the kids, and I know Maeve would love it if Ruby could join them.

  Karen read the e-mail with a certain amount of relish and feeling partially vindicated. It seemed as if, without her having done anything, the power had somehow shifted back into her hands. And she had every intention of exercising it—that is, of punishing Laura and her husband for taking Maeve out of Betts by withholding Ruby’s company. Karen knew she was being petty. It was also arguable that she was being unfair to Ruby, who would surely have jumped at the chance to bake cookies and rainbow-loom with her old friend the following weekend—and who, in truth, had no plans whatsoever on Saturday. But Karen also knew that her daughter could live happily without having done so. With an absurd level of satisfaction, Karen replied:

  Hi, Laura. Unfortunately, Ruby already has plans with another friend that afternoon, so I’m afraid she’s not going to be able to make it. But thanks for the invite. Best, Karen

  The second e-mail that came in was a Listserv announcement from Principal Chambers explaining that, due to the school’s underenrollment—Betts was at only 75 percent capacity that year—the city’s board of education was planning to move a new K-through-5 Winners Circle charter school into the top floor of the building.

  Karen found the news disheartening on multiple fronts. First, she was dismayed to hear that enrollment was flagging at Betts. All the other schools in the area were bursting at the seams; why not Betts? And what did it say about the education she was providing her daughter if the school couldn’t fill its own classrooms? Second, Karen was upset at the prospect of the school having to share facilities with a new one. She’d read stories in the local papers about public-school children in co-located buildings having to eat lunch at nine in the morning and play dodgeball in the hallway while the charter students enjoyed free run of the cafeteria and the gym when they weren’t learning Java on their spanking-new iPads or building robots with the help of their 3-D printers.

  Karen objected to Winners Circle on ideological grounds as well. It wasn’t just that the schools were famously run like military-training camps with punishments meted out for every set of hands not folded neatly in a lap, or that they received taxpayer funds but were accountable to no one in the government. It was that WC’s consistently good test scores seemed at first glance to prove that poverty wasn’t a factor in children’s outcomes without acknowledging that WC’s student body was self-selecting and that problem children were regularly “counseled out”—that is, sent back to neighborhood public schools, which inevitably suffered the consequences. And yet, families of color in disadvantaged neighborhoods generally seemed to welcome the arrival of new WC schools, which confused Karen and made her wonder if it was elitist of her to object to them.

  She was vaguely aware that some of Hungry Kids’ main donors also supported charter schools, though until just then, she’d never given the crossover much thought. Suddenly curious, she opened Winners Circle’s website and clicked on the tab marked Board of Directors. There were twelve names listed. The first, second, third, and fourth were the usual chief executive officers or managing directors of companies whose names consisted of a predatory bird or a multisyllabic term invoking the beauty of nature followed by the word Capital or Fund. The fifth guy was the former governor of
Massachusetts. The sixth was a timber-company executive. The seventh was a cellular-communications titan.

  The eighth was—was it possible?—Clay.

  Karen’s eyes blinked then widened at the sight of her new-old friend’s name typed out in an elegant Garamond. It seemed impossible, but there he was. The description beneath his name read:

  Clayton R. Phipps III

  Prior to forming Buzzard Capital, a private investment firm, in May 2010, Clay Phipps was a partner at Babbling Brook LLC, where he had portfolio and general-management responsibilities and chaired the firm’s advisory committee.

  Fascinated by the coincidence and horrified by the connection, Karen quickly banged out an e-mail to him.

  Hi, Clay,

  Hope all is well and I’m looking forward to seeing you at the gala!

  I’m actually writing about a non-HK-related matter. I just got an e-mail from Betts Elementary, a public school in Cortland Hill that my daughter attends. Apparently there are plans to move a new K-through-5 Winners Circle charter school into the building in September. I see that you are on the board of directors. If you have any influence in this area, can you please attempt to put a stop to it? If the WC network has such deep pockets, I really don’t see why it can’t build its own schools instead of poaching existing ones at the taxpayers’ expense. What’s more, my daughter’s school building is already close to capacity, and I would hate to see her and her friends getting squeezed.

  I would also hate to see the student body of Betts—which includes children who come halfway across the city every morning to get there—begin to feel bad about themselves because the new charter kids get to sit in freshly painted classrooms with new computers while the regular public-school kids don’t, since the governor never stops cutting funding.

  In case you couldn’t guess, I’m not a fan of the discipline-and-test-prep model of WC either. That’s not my idea of a well-rounded education, and I suspect it’s not yours either.

  Thank you, Clay. I appreciate anything you can do. I wouldn’t be bothering you about this, but it affects my family directly.

  Yours,

  Karen

  Karen knew she should probably sleep on the e-mail before she sent it. What if it antagonized Clay, and he withdrew his support from HK? Then what would she have accomplished? Here, she’d recently roped in an important new source of funds for the organization. And there were children who would eat a hot meal that very night because of his contribution from the week before. But unable to turn off the blasting radio in her brain—and half convinced that every second counted—Karen clicked Send.

  To her surprise, Clay wrote back almost immediately:

  Ah, the leftist firebrand I remember from college returns with an even sharper set of claws! Nice to hear from you again, Karen Kipple. But back to your question…If I wheedle WC’s CEO into finding another location, will you dance with me at the benefit next week? I can rumba and fox-trot, courtesy of the National League of Junior Cotillions of Charleston, circa 1986. But seriously, if the computers are going to be that much nicer across the hall, why don’t you just transfer your daughter?

  Was he kidding about Karen transferring Ruby? Had he not read her e-mail, registered her objections? Or was everything a joke to him? The jocular tone of Clay’s e-mail infuriated Karen in its apparent refusal to take her argument seriously. Nonetheless, she found herself tickled by his invitation to dance. She was also pleased and relieved by his quick response and seemingly genuine offer to help thwart the co-location and wrote back:

  CP, Many thanks for offering to help—and also for the “helpful” suggestion to have Ruby change schools. One more question: Would you send your children to a Winners Circle school? Bet not. Your friend the firebrand, KK

  As Karen waited for a reply, she opened Facebook. The first item in her newsfeed was a picture of a scraggly cockapoo with its tongue out standing in a field of grass. Karen’s elementary-school friend Sue Borneo had posted it. Karen hadn’t seen Sue in nearly thirty years and it seemed unlikely that she would see her in the next thirty either. Their lives had taken completely different paths. Sue had never left the town they’d grown up in, had three teenage children, and worked at her family’s jewelry store. If she and Karen were put in the same room, it was doubtful they’d have found anything to say to each other after they’d finished reminiscing about their fourth-grade classmate who’d later gone to jail for pederasty. But through the arguably pointless alchemy of social media, they were back in touch—at least in a fashion. Beneath the photograph, Sue had written, RIP, Meatball. And now Karen felt like she had to comment, mostly because not to do so seemed thoughtless. But how? She didn’t feel right about clicking Like, since wouldn’t that imply she liked Meatball’s death? So she wrote, Very sorry for your loss, Sue, then felt like a fraud, since, in truth, she wasn’t all that sorry.

  The next post came courtesy of Laura Collier. It was a photo of Maeve holding up a skateboard covered with tiny skulls. Her long hair was poking out of a straw fedora, and her upper body was encased in a tiny black leather motorcycle jacket. First board, read the caption. The comments below ranged from Amaaazzzing to Such a hipster! to So beautiful and chic, like her mama. Even though the whole setup seemed staged to induce envy and made Karen feel vaguely like throwing up, she felt somehow compelled to click on the thumbs-up icon, if only to be a good sport. In doing so, she elevated the number of Likes from 203 to 204, then wished she hadn’t. But un-Liking the photo seemed even more pathetic. So she moved on.

  Maeve’s father, Evan, was responsible for the third post in Karen’s newsfeed. He’d linked to a news story about Trayvon Martin, the seventeen-year-old African American boy who was gunned down by a citizen vigilante in Florida. According to the article, the perpetrator was apparently never going to be charged with anything, not even a civil rights violation. Evan had added his own caption beneath the story: Disgusting—#blacklivesmatter. Karen felt disgusted as well—not just at the obvious injustice of Trayvon’s killer going free but also just as viscerally at Laura and Evan. It seemed to Karen that they pretended to care about the fate of African Americans yet had taken their daughter out of a school precisely because of the existence of one of them, if not all of them. And wasn’t that the real reason the Collier-Shaws had left Betts—that there were too many of them for Evan and Laura’s taste? It was easy to get worked up about racism when you didn’t have to engage with any actual black people. Not that Karen, aside from her friendship with Lou, led an integrated life. But at least she tried.

  For a brief moment, Karen imagined commenting beneath Evan’s caption, Disgusting—so long as there aren’t too many boys with his shade of skin in your daughter’s classroom? But she knew she was a hypocrite too and that if she’d been walking down a quiet street after sundown, and Trayvon Martin had come up it in a hoodie with the hood pulled tight, she might well have let her imagination run wild with pictures and incidents culled from tabloid newspapers and late-night cop shows, and, if it was possible to do so without causing offense, she would have crossed the street. (College-educated white liberals were nearly as terrified of being seen as racists as they were of encountering black male teenagers on an empty street after dark.)

  Karen was closing out of Facebook when, once again, Clay’s name flashed onto her desktop. He’d replied.

  Of course not. My kids go to private school. But then, I’m really rich. xox

  At least he’s being honest, she thought. But the response aggravated her as well. It seemed so smug, so facile. Karen knew that if she didn’t answer, she would come away with the upper hand. Only, she couldn’t quite bear not to get the last word—and wrote back:

  Lucky you.

  Her flipness masked defensiveness. In that moment, Karen had the distinct impression that her daughter’s school—and, by extension, Karen’s entire way of being—was under attack. Moreover, battle lines having been drawn, it was time to choose a side. It was also time she put her professional
skills to use. Swallowing her pride, Karen opened a new window and quickly drafted an e-mail to April Fishbach, reiterating her pledge to man the front table at Visiting Artists Day and also offering both to chair the PTA’s fund-raising committee and to help elevate the profile of the school. Betts might not have been a clothing or cosmetics brand, but in a public-school system where parents had choices about where to send their kids, even elementary schools had to market themselves.

  A reply arrived just ten minutes later.

  Dear Karen,

  On behalf of the PTA of Constance C. Betts Elementary, I’m delighted to hear that you’ve finally decided to volunteer your time, and I accept your offer to fund-raise! But you make one mistake: the fund-raising committee already has a chairperson. It’s me. In this case, however, I’m happy to share the honors and responsibilities with you as cochairs. Perhaps we can meet for coffee tomorrow or the next day to talk strategy. I look forward to hearing from you.

  April Fishbach

  The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.—Mahatma Gandhi

  Karen had grown so accustomed to April’s power-mongering that her response failed to evoke anything in Karen but resignation. April was simply the price one paid for trying to help out. Though Karen had found that the woman did serve one useful purpose: her very unbearableness provided endless opportunities for bonding among those who found her similarly hard to stomach. Before answering April’s e-mail, Karen forwarded it to Lou with the subject heading Classic April.