“Wow! Well, that’s good your mom did that,” said Karen, nearly choking on her quinoa, even though the news seemed to make no impression on Ruby. She sat quietly munching on her sandwich, apparently indifferent to the problems of the world—or at least Empriss’s family’s problems.
“Hey, no fair,” she said, lifting her chin so she could see into Karen’s Tupperware, “you didn’t pack me any blueberries.”
On the bus going back to school, the Dutch architect’s redheaded son, Bram, and the black editor/activist’s son, Mumia, began to kick the seat in front of them, causing a fight with the girls who were sitting there (Jayla and Yisabella), which somehow set off a bus-wide, girls-against-boys battle involving spitballs. Chahrazad, the raucous Yemeni child, was of course the leader of the girls’ brigade, while Mumia commanded the boys’ batallion. By the time Karen got home—the kids had returned to the classroom for the last part of the day—she was so exhausted and stressed out by being around twenty-five eight- and nine-year-olds screaming about butts and ear wax that she had to take a nap. When she woke up, she discovered it was nearly time to go back to Betts to pick up Ruby. Readying herself to return, Karen experienced new levels of respect for Miss Tammy.
At two forty-five, she was passing through the gate that led to the schoolyard when she nearly collided with Mia’s mother, Michelle, who was approaching from the other direction. “Oh—hey!” said Karen, keen to establish that she had no hard feelings toward Michelle, just as she hoped Michelle had none toward her. But Michelle glared at her, said nothing, and marched on. Rattled by the rebuff and eager to avoid walking in lockstep with Michelle, Karen stopped walking and pretended to search for something in her bag. She pulled out her phone and discovered a recently arrived text from Clay Phipps. Her heart leaping—where had he even gotten her phone number?—she read:
Hey, dancing queen, made inquiries for u re WC’s move to your kid’s PS, but afraid my hands r tied. Apologies. Dinner Tuesday night? Say yes.
More bad news for the school, Karen thought. But this time her frustration and disappointment were mixed with tingling excitement at having heard from Clay again and, what’s more, at him having asked her out to dinner. On a date. Because wasn’t that what it was? It wasn’t as if they had any Hungry Kids business to discuss. And knowing that he’d made inquiries on her behalf while she wasn’t there—and while she was going about the business of her life, unaware—made her even more excited.
And yet, ever since the gala, Karen had felt a little like a middle-aged Cinderella, returned to a life of hearth sweeping the day after the royal ball. Moreover, while the families of the students at Constance C. Betts trundled by in various states of bedragglement and hopelessness—including a grandma with what appeared to be a burned face holding a cane in one hand and a cigarette in the other—Clay seemed so many miles away as to be almost fantastical. Karen also suspected that Clay’s efforts to veto Winners Circle’s co-location had been halfhearted at best. But this was the wrong time to start doubting him. Hungry Kids needed his money—and Karen, for whatever combination of reasons, needed his attentions. Even so, dinner was out of the question. How would she ever justify such a thing to Matt? How could she justify it to herself?
In any case, she needed to pick up Ruby. After enough time had passed that Karen could reasonably assume Michelle and Mia had left the building, she followed the thinning crowd into the gymnasium. By then, everyone in Ruby’s class was gone except for Ruby and Jayyden. The latter sat with his head bowed and his legs extended in front of him, scratching at something on his jeans. According to Ruby, Jayyden was retrieved every day by an older cousin who arrived at least an hour after school had been dismissed, forcing Jayyden to kill endless amounts of time in the hall outside the principal’s office. Although the after-school program offered financial aid to students whose families couldn’t afford the fifteen bucks a day, no one had ever turned in an application on his behalf, so the school couldn’t legally send him to it. And so he sat—and sat. “Hi, sweetie,” said Karen, glancing helplessly over at Jayyden as she reached down to pull Ruby off the floor.
“Thanks for forgetting about me,” she announced.
“Sorry, but I’m only two minutes late,” said Karen, steering her away. “And I just spent half the day with you already. What did you do when you got back to school?”
“Nothing,” Ruby replied with a shrug.
“Nothing?” asked Karen.
“Just boring stuff.”
“Why was it boring?”
“Because it’s too easy,” said Ruby, “and we never learn anything.”
“What’s too easy?” asked Karen, attempting to quiet her own distress at this revelation. “I don’t understand.”
“Every part, but especially math. We always have to show our work even if it’s just, like, twenty-five plus twenty-five. It’s so stupid. Like, we can’t just say, ‘It’s fifty.’ Also, we did the same unit in second grade.”
“That does sound frustrating. But I thought you were doing fractions now. That’s what Miss Tammy’s newsletter said.”
“Well, we were going to start fractions,” said Ruby. “But this afternoon, while Miss Tammy was trying to teach us, Empriss started calling out and making fart noises like she does every day now.”
“And what did Miss Tammy do?” asked Karen, further dismayed but also surprised. The picture that Ruby was painting of Empriss didn’t mesh with the outspoken but overall cooperative child Karen had met on the class trip to the botanical gardens.
“She told her to stop,” said Ruby.
“Did she?”
“She stopped calling out, but she was still making fart noises. It was so annoying. Finally, Miss Tammy called the principal, and she took Empriss out of class. But by then, it was time to pack up.”
Sympathetic to both sides, Karen wondered if there was some way to turn the anecdote into a teachable moment—that is, an opportunity to instruct her daughter about socioeconomic difference and unequally distributed resources. “That must be frustrating,” she said, choosing her words carefully. “But you know Empriss is probably trying to get attention because she doesn’t get enough at home—because her parents are probably busy and preoccupied just trying to put food on the table. Being very poor, like her family is, can be very stressful for grown-ups.”
“How do you know she’s poor?” asked Ruby.
“I just do,” said Karen, embarrassed to admit the truth even to her daughter.
“Well, then, why does she have her own iPhone Five?”
“I don’t know the answer to that. But you realize that Empriss’s family doesn’t live in a nice house like we do.”
“We don’t live in a house—we live in an apartment,” Ruby pointed out.
“Well, a nice apartment,” Karen went on. “Empriss’s family lives in a homeless shelter because they can’t afford a real apartment with separate bedrooms and everything. So next time Empriss is annoying you, will you try to think about that before you feel critical?”
“If they’re so poor, why doesn’t her mom get a job?” said Ruby.
“It’s not that easy,” said Karen.
“Can we go home now?” asked Ruby, showing no signs of having registered the intended message.
“We’re going, we’re going!” said Karen, leading her daughter out of the gym and feeling frustrated not for the first time by what she felt to be a lack of empathy on Ruby’s part. What was Karen doing wrong? She feared the only thing she’d accomplished by sending her child to a mixed-income school was to make Ruby feel venomous toward at-risk children. Or was she expecting too much from an eight-year-old?
That weekend, Karen and Matt finally had sex. It was neither great nor terrible, neither loving nor angry. All parts functioned as designed, and afterward Karen felt relieved and refreshed. But the high lasted only so long. By morning, she was back to fretting and obsessing over what to do with regard to both Clay and Betts. Needless to say, she couldn’t ver
y well discuss the former with Matt. But in light of their recent tiff, she was also reluctant to raise the latter. Instead, on Sunday night, she vented to Miss Tammy in an e-mail.
Hi, Tammy. So sorry to bother you on the weekend, but Ruby has been complaining that the math program isn’t quite challenging enough. Is there any way you could throw some harder worksheets her way? My husband and I would really appreciate it. Also, I hate to bring this up, but I understand that a certain girl (Empriss) has been regularly disrupting the classroom. I’m aware that she has a challenging situation at home, but I’m wondering whether there are services available at the school that could be utilized to help her control her impulses so she doesn’t jeopardize her classmates’ ability to learn. Thank you, Karen
But as soon as she clicked Send, she felt uneasy. She feared that she sounded like one of those brilliant-and-exceptional parents who seemed genuinely to believe that, by random chance that had nothing to do with their socioeconomic status, God had granted them the stewardship of a certifiable Einstein (or two). She also worried that, by tattling on Empriss, she was only adding to the girl’s troubles.
Tammy replied almost immediately.
Hey, Karen,
I’ve offered to give your daughter supplemental math worksheets. But she always tells me she hates math. As for Empriss, yes, the school psychologists have been working with her. But thanks for your “concern.”
Tammy
P.S. Speaking of interrupting learning, Ruby has been arriving late to school almost every day. It would be way more awesome if you got her here on time. Thank you.
If Miss Tammy was unmoved by Karen’s pleas, then so be it. But she didn’t see why the teacher had to be a complete and utter bitch about it. With a shudder, Karen hit Delete and tried to pretend the e-mail exchange had never happened.
For the next week, she busied herself writing a grant proposal to the Walmart Foundation. She heard nothing else from Clay or Michelle. Nor did she answer Clay’s text. With varying degrees of success, she attempted to put both of them out of her mind.
Then Ruby came home from school and glumly announced that in the cafeteria that day, Mia had told Ruby that she wouldn’t be friends with her anymore unless Ruby threw out the remains of Mia’s lunch.
“What? Tell her to throw out her own frigging lunch!” cried Karen, shocked and outraged—possibly too much so. Karen had never been good at separating her own history of social rejections from those of her young daughter’s.
“I told her I didn’t want to,” Ruby continued. “So she got up and went to sit with Empriss and then she didn’t talk to me for the rest of the day.” Ruby made a sad-clown face.
“Well, that was a very mean thing for her to do,” said Karen, her upset now metastasizing into full-blown resentment at the entire Hernandez family—minus Mia’s tragic half sister, Juliana—even as a part of Karen wondered how Michelle would greet the news that Mia’s NBF, similar to Gisela and Juliana, lived in a shelter. With compassion? Further condemnation? “I don’t want you to talk to her anymore,” Karen went on. “Tomorrow I want you to play with someone else at recess and sit with someone else at lunch.”
“But there’s no one else to sit with,” said Ruby.
“What about Happy?” Karen heard herself invoke the name of one of the only other white girls in the class—a skinny thing with flyaway hair and buckteeth whose parents seemed strange and vacant-eyed and dressed as if they were in a movie or a play about nineteenth-century pioneers on the American frontier, or possibly a polygamous cult, the mother in long prairie skirts and high-necked lace blouses, the father in trousers with suspenders. Or maybe they were just hipsters. Karen had reached an age where she struggled to discern what was considered cool. But Ruby had mentioned in passing that Happy had reached the dizzying alphabetical heights of S-T on the leveled scale that all the teachers at Betts used to judge their students’ reading abilities. Or maybe it was T-U. Not that Happy was unique in the achievement. There was a sweet and taciturn African American girl named Essence who shared in the distinction. According to Ruby, Essence lived an hour and a half away from Betts and woke at five each morning so she wouldn’t be late for school. But given the physical distance between Ruby’s and Essence’s homes, Karen assumed that an outside-of-school friendship between the two would prove challenging. Or was that just an excuse? Was it the cultural distance between them that Karen assumed would present the largest obstacle?
Ruby scrunched up her face as if she’d just smelled something rotten and said, “Happy’s into girlie stuff like anime and My Little Pony.”
“My Little Pony is girlie,” said Karen, confused. “But Barbies aren’t?”
“Barbies are different.”
“Well, then, why don’t you sit with Zeke? You’ve been friends since kindergarten.”
“Mommy, I’m not going to eat lunch at the boys’ table!” Ruby rolled her eyes and shook her head as if her mother’s ignorance were almost beyond comment. Maybe it was.
Karen had always thought elementary-school scissors, with their rounded blades, were too dull to cut anything sturdier than a piece of construction paper. Until she learned otherwise, she’d also thought that Jayyden Price was just a boy who got mad when kids teased him; that is, a boy like any other boy, just a little madder and a little more troubled—and a lot more tragic. But that evening, Ruby reported in a tone that was more reportorial than frantic that Jayyden had tried to choke a boy in her class named Dashiell, then stabbed him with a scissors. And now Karen wasn’t so sure anymore. All of this had apparently happened in art class. “What? I don’t understand,” she said, hungry for a reason, or at least evidence of a provocation so outrageous that it would explain, if not justify, Jayyden’s anger. If there was no valid excuse, then Laura Collier and Evan Shaw weren’t conniving racists but overprotective realists, and it was possible that Karen’s daughter’s safety was at risk as well. “Why would Jayyden have done that?” she went on.
“Well, Dashiell accused Jayyden of stealing his Starburst,” said Ruby. “And Jayyden said he didn’t. And then Dashiell told him he didn’t believe him. And then Jayyden got mad and made fun of Dashiell for wearing boxer shorts, and Dashiell pushed him. Then they started fighting, and Jayyden put his arm around Dashiell’s neck and stuck the scissors into his arm.”
“Oh my God, that’s terrible! What did the teacher do?”
“She was screaming at them. They both had to go to the principal. Well, actually, Dashiell had to go to the nurse first because he was bleeding all over.”
Karen gripped Ruby’s arm and looked straight into her eyes. “Ruby, tell me the truth—has Jayyden ever bothered you?”
“Well, he’s usually pretty nice to me,” said Ruby. “But yesterday he did use the f-word.” She lowered her head and rounded her back. Though whether the stance was born of fear or embarrassment at having referenced a swearword, it was hard to know.
“How did he use it?” said Karen, alarm bells ringing. “What did he say?”
“He asked me what I was doing at recess. Because he said”—Ruby leaned in, so she could whisper—“he wanted to f-word with me.”
Karen felt her head grow light. Ruby was only a child—not exactly a trustworthy source or a reliable narrator. But the language was so specific, it was hard not to believe that she was repeating exactly what she’d heard. I want to fuck with you. Karen understood it to be some variation of the phrase I want to fuck you up. That is, mess with her, harm her. “But what do you think he meant?” she asked.
Ruby shrugged as if Karen had asked her to predict the weather on Friday and said, “I don’t know.”
“Well, did he seem like he was just kidding around? Was he mad at you about something?”
“Well, second period, I did tell him to leave Empriss alone, because he was making fun of her for not having her own bed.”
“That was sweet of you,” said Karen, her pride in her daughter’s defense of her impoverished classmate momentaril
y trumping her distress at Jayyden’s threat. Never mind Karen’s disbelief that someone in Jayyden’s situation would be teasing another classmate about her lowly status on the socioeconomic ladder. “But I thought you didn’t like Empriss,” she went on.
“I don’t like her,” explained Ruby. “But I felt sorry for her.”
“Well, good for you,” said Karen. But the song and dance that Ruby then began spontaneously to perform in front of Karen’s closet mirror only exacerbated her misgivings about the school. “‘When you’re ready, come and get it, na-na-na,’” she sang while wiggling her behind.
“Ruby, stop that. It’s inappropriate,” said Karen, dismayed by both the lyrics and the sexual nature of Ruby’s movements. Or was it not sexual if there was no knowledge of sex? From what Karen could tell, Ruby had no idea how babies were made, and Karen hadn’t yet offered to explain.
“But all the sassy girls in school twerk,” said Ruby. “Like Janiyah, Khloee, and Jasleen.”
“I don’t care what all the girls are doing,” said Karen, for whom the t-word seemed like an omen of civilization’s final descent. Though what in particular was so terrible about a bunch of eight- and nine-year-olds shaking their backsides was hard to say. What if they simply found it funny? And wasn’t the area of the body from which waste matter was expelled inherently amusing? Even so, Karen couldn’t ignore the growing conviction that invisible forces of corruption, dissolution, and danger were growing ever closer to her daughter, turning her head in the wrong direction and pulling her farther away from Karen’s reach—a conviction that only grew stronger after Ruby leaned forward and said, “Can I tell you something else?”
“What?” said Karen.
“Jasleen and Janiyah both wear bras!”
Class Page 14