Class

by Lucinda Rosenfeld

  Wish I could, but I can’t. Hope you understand…

  Thank you for the beautiful earrings—they will always remind me of you (and the puppies). Karen

  Then she proceeded to check her phone every two minutes for the next half hour to see if Clay would write back. He didn’t.

  When Karen checked again in the morning, there was still no response. To her disappointment, he seemed to have understood only too well—and fallen silent. Then she felt as lonely and invisible as a speck of debris floating in outer space.

  The following night, Karen received her first group e-mail as a Mather parent. It was from the Gladiola Street Block Association, and it bore the alarming headline Urgent—All Mather Parents, Please Read. Admittedly, there was a certain frisson in finding herself among the lucky few who’d played the game well enough to be receiving such an e-mail. But the feeling quickly gave way to something more uncomfortable. The e-mail read:

  Dear Mather Parents:

  As residents of the neighborhood, we want to make you aware of a project that will have a significant impact on your school community. The Department of Corrections (DOC) is opening a parole center on Gladiola Street, just three blocks from your school. The DOC made the decision to combine two existing facilities into one location, which will service all six thousand parolees in the city. The center is scheduled to start operations early next year.

  While those of us who live on the block recognize the important role that the DOC plays in the city, we feel that the location of a parole center in our neighborhood is unjustified. First, the lack of public-transportation options near the proposed site means that parolees will be a constant presence on our streets, potentially impacting both the surrounding retail landscape and the quality of life enjoyed by neighborhood residents. Second, the existence of such a facility near an elementary school raises serious safety concerns.

  If you share our concerns, please join us for a strategy meeting next Tuesday night. Details are below.

  Thank you,

  Gladiola Street Block Association Executive Board

  Karen supposed you could argue that parolees, insofar as they were already mixed up with the criminal justice system, were inherently dangerous no matter their skin color. Conversely, you could protest that the criminal justice system was hopelessly racist and therefore indicative of nothing. Whatever the case, Karen suspected that, more than safety concerns, what the Gladiola Street Block Association really objected to was an influx of poor black and brown men into the neighborhood. But who was she to pass judgment when this was the very community she’d taken desperate and even duplicitous measures to become part of? After clicking Delete, she did her best to forget she’d ever read the e-mail.

  She did her best to forget about Clay too. But it wasn’t nearly as easy. At various intervals throughout the day, Karen imagined him pulling her toward him, bending her over, as she heard in her head the low murmurs he’d made while he was inside her. She’d lost her appetite too. Even so, she kept cooking, kept trying to impose order and regimen on the chaos. But the hole in her heart wouldn’t stop oozing raw matter or insisting on body over mind. On Friday night, while preparing dinner for Ruby, Karen nearly gagged at the sight and feel of raw chicken breasts in her hands, as slippery as they were dense. She pictured a row of bulbous white maggots crawling along the skin.

  But dinner brought relief as well. Seated across from her, Ruby told Karen about a girl in her class named Lulu who was in love with Justin Bieber, then about another girl named Charlotte who had given Ruby an extremely desirable Shopkin called Milly Mushroom in exchange for Ruby’s D’lish Donut. It seemed that Ruby was actually starting to make friends at Mather. Karen could have wept with relief.

  And later that evening, Ruby received her first playdate invitation from a certain susanb8@gmail.com.

  Hi, Karen. I got your e-mail from Ms. Millburn. Would your daughter, Ruby, like to come over for a playdate with my daughter, Charlotte, one day after school next week? Tuesdays and Thursdays are best. We live right near the school. I can pick her up and take her home with Charlotte. Let me know when you have a chance. All best, Susan

  Karen immediately wrote back.

  Susan, thanks so much for writing! I’m sure Ruby would love to have a playdate with Charlotte. Next Tuesday is perfect for us. I will let Ms. Millburn know that you are bringing home both girls. What time should I or my sitter pick Ruby up from your house, and what is your address? Thanks and regards, Karen

  Susan replied.

  How’s five o’clock? We’re at 321 Pendleton. See you then!

  At first reading, 321 Pendleton failed to register with Karen as anything more than an address. A split second later, to her horror and fascination, she realized it was Nathaniel Bordwell’s address. That Nathaniel Bordwell. Which meant that Charlotte was most likely Nathaniel’s daughter (or granddaughter) and Susan his wife (or daughter, or daughter-in-law). What were the chances of Ruby befriending the one child in a school of seven hundred whom Karen would have wished her to stay away from? She supposed the odds were one in seven hundred. But now that Ruby had beaten them, what was she supposed to do?

  Karen knew it would be prudent for her to write back and say she’d forgotten about a prior engagement and needed to reschedule and then fail to do so—and hope that, in the intervening weeks, the two girls lost interest in each other. But the truth was that it also pained her to have to contemplate canceling. She’d been so tickled on Ruby’s behalf to receive the invitation, which had somehow confirmed for Karen that she’d made the right decision in taking her daughter out of Betts. (What mother doesn’t want her child to be popular and have lots of friends?) Plus, Karen knew Ruby would be tickled too. And what were the chances that the Bordwells would go to the school administrative office and discover that the address that Ruby’s family had registered her with at Mather was, in fact, their own? Moreover, if the discrepancy between Ruby’s real and fake addresses should ever come to light, Karen could always claim it was a mistake on the part of the school.

  “Guess what—your new friend Charlotte invited you on a playdate!” Karen couldn’t resist telling Ruby that evening.

  “Really?” said Ruby.

  “Really.”

  “Yay! I wonder if her mom will let us play Minecraft. Charlotte loves Minecraft so much she’s going to be an Enderman for Halloween. She already has her costume picked out.”

  “Wow—that far in advance?” said Karen, who had lost the ability to differentiate between her daughter’s excitement and her own.

  Hungry Kids was such a small organization that, at times, everyone’s job bled into everyone else’s. Because of this, Molly had asked Karen to coordinate an Easter Sunday feast and egg hunt at a soup kitchen run out of a Baptist church that was practically in Karen’s backyard—or, really, the backyard of the Fairview Gardens public housing project.

  Karen’s first decision as organizer was to fill the plastic eggs that the children would hunt for with tiny boxes of raisins rather than the usual milk chocolate morsels in colored tinfoil. In the back of her mind, she worried that the switch was a patronizing and Scrooge-like gesture, akin to the no-candy e-mail that Laura Collier had sent out to her daughter’s class the autumn before. But then, part of Hungry Kids’ mission was to encourage healthy eating habits in a population at high risk for diabetes. Ever keen to instill a sense of social responsibility in her only child, Karen had decided to bring Ruby along to the event, explaining that they’d be “serving a fancy lunch to people who can’t afford to do anything fancy.”

  “I have to serve?” cried Ruby. “I’m just a kid!”

  “You don’t have to serve,” said Karen. “But maybe you can help carry a few things to the table. Is that too much to ask?”

  “But what if they’re heavy?”

  “Then you don’t have to carry them,” said Karen, sighing. “You just have to be nice. Okay?”

  “Fine.”

  “Plus, there’s goi
ng to be an Easter egg hunt.”

  “Really?” Ruby sounded suddenly more enthusiastic.

  “Yes,” said Karen, who didn’t have the heart to tell her about the raisins, not least because Ruby had always detested them. Secretly, so did Karen.

  On the Sunday in question, Karen woke inexplicably late to find a cold rain beating on the windows. Distressed, she reminded herself that the feast was scheduled to take place in the church’s basement, not outside, and that the Easter egg hunt was easily moved into the church proper. There were plenty of hiding opportunities in the pews. Keen to keep up morale, Karen texted these sentiments to her two-person volunteer corps, who were due to arrive at the church in advance of her and set up. Then she went to make breakfast.

  Ruby was in the living room Netflixing a salacious tween sitcom that, in all likelihood, she’d been watching for an hour already. It was one of the mysteries of the universe why her daughter, who struggled to wake up for school, voluntarily woke at dawn on weekend mornings, seemingly fresh and rested. The situation with her husband wasn’t all that different: Matt had a standing Sunday-morning basketball game that he was religious about attending, but during the week he seemed unable to get out of bed before ten. Was it unfair to expect consistency in others?

  “Sweetie,” Karen announced at quarter to eleven, “it’s time to get dressed for the Easter lunch. Now.”

  “Can I just watch the end of the show?” asked Ruby. “There’s only five more minutes.” There were always five more minutes.

  “I’d really rather you turned off the TV,” said Karen. “You’ve been watching for almost three hours already, because Mommy was being Bad Mommy and felt like doing her own thing this morning.”

  “Pretty pleeeease?” moaned Ruby.

  “Fine, but only if you promise to get dressed up,” said Karen, who, when it came to parenting, didn’t see any harm in bargaining.

  “I promise,” said Ruby, who not only honored her pledge but who felt compelled to try on every dress in her closet, the majority of which she’d outgrown two years before.

  By the time Ruby and Karen got out the door—Ruby in a purple-flowered sundress that wouldn’t zip all the way up—they were not just late but horribly so. Karen was on the verge of a panic attack. Still, it seemed crazy to drive to the church and then have to look for parking when it was only four blocks away. So the two of them set out on foot and, at Karen’s directive, never stopped moving, not even when there was a red light or vehicles in their path. Karen knew that by crossing against the lights, she was taking risks. But despite being a nonbeliever, she childishly imagined that no God would allow her and Ruby to perish while en route to a church basement to deliver Easter lunch to the poor.

  Karen had passed by the church probably twenty times in the past ten years, but until that morning she’d never taken a good look at it. On closer inspection, it was a boxy and charmless affair, its beige brick façade interrupted only by two sliver windows that seemed designed to keep out the sun. A large black metal cross hung over a set of steel double doors. Next to the doors, a white nylon banner announced THE FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH OF CHRIST ALMIGHTY and implored congregants to FOLLOW CHRIST’S WORD. Someone had incongruously draped a pair of Air Jordans with the laces tied together over the rusted chain-link fence that separated the front yard from the sidewalk. On one side of the fence was crabgrass. On the other was a concrete sidewalk that had been broken and distended by the roots of a nearby ginkgo tree. Karen pulled open the door to the church, Ruby’s hand in her free one, and found herself face to face with an elderly African American lady in a robin’s egg–blue hat decorated with ribbons. The woman was sitting at a folding table covered with photocopied brochures. “Welcome to First Baptist,” she said.

  “Thank you!” said Karen. “I’m from Hungry Kids, and my daughter and I are here to help with the Easter luncheon.”

  “May the Lord bless you,” said the lady, beaming. “And may the Lord bless your daughter.”

  “Oh, that’s very kind,” said Karen, smiling as broadly as she felt she could without seeming patronizing. “I hope we’re not too late.”

  “They’re just getting started, I believe.”

  “Fantastic! Where do I go?”

  “Right that way,” said the lady, pointing down a short staircase with frayed rubber treads.

  “Thank you very much,” said Karen. “And happy Easter!” Did people wish each other a happy Easter? Or did that sound weird? Karen suddenly couldn’t remember. By then, she was at the bottom of the stairs, gazing into a windowless room with brick walls painted a dirty shade of yellow and a half a dozen long metal tables covered with pale blue nylon cloths. On the far wall, a few citizen volunteers dished out beef and gravy, honey-glazed carrots, and potatoes au gratin from large metal vats. A line of about thirty-five, with an equal number of grown-ups and children, stretched from the vats to the wall. Karen was thanking the citizen volunteers for their service and apologizing for being late when Ruby pointed at the far end of the food line and cried, “Look, Mommy! It’s Jayyden!”

  Karen looked up with a start and confirmed what her daughter had already discovered. A baseball hat casting a shadow over his already deep-set eyes, Jayyden stood surrounded by five other children ranging in age from four to fourteen. The lot of them, with their vastly different heights, formed a mini-skyline of their own. Behind the children was a very large woman with a somber expression. She was wearing sweatpants and shower shoes, and her hair was pulled back and enclosed in some kind of net. Was this Aunt Carla? As Karen connected the dots, she realized that her fear of Jayyden’s potential for violence, however justifiable, was a cover for something deeper, more nefarious, and less easy to rationalize—namely, contempt for the version of poverty Jayyden’s hodgepodge family embodied. Poor blacks. That was how Karen’s mother had referred to people like them. The two words had been inseparable and almost interchangeable to her, possibly because Ruth Kipple didn’t really know any middle- or upper-class African Americans, but also because it had been an easy way of dismissing an entire subset of society that she didn’t understand—a way that Karen herself had not entirely escaped. That was clear to her now as never before, and she cringed in recognition.

  Nor had the irony of the present situation escaped her. Here she’d gone to near-criminal lengths to get Ruby away from the boy, only to voluntarily bring them together on Easter morning to teach Ruby about social responsibility. “What a funny coincidence,” murmured Karen—really, to herself—as she watched her daughter walk over and say, “Hey, Jayyden.”

  “Hey, Ruby,” she heard him reply in a neutral voice. “How come you don’t come to school no more?” If he was embarrassed to be there, waiting in line with his aunt for a free meal in a church basement, he didn’t show it.

  “I go to a new school,” Ruby told him.

  “Why’d you leave ours?”

  “My mom wanted me to.”

  “Oh.”

  “What are you guys doing in math?” was Ruby’s next question.

  “I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Just stuff. Like fractions.”

  “Oh. At my new school, we’re doing multiplication.”

  Just then, Jayyden’s baby cousin fell onto his bottom and began crying. Not untenderly, Jayyden turned around, picked him up, and dusted him off—and for the moment lost interest in Ruby.

  But the two joined forces a half an hour later for the egg hunt. Karen watched as Ruby and Jayyden playfully tussled over a purple plastic one that had been hidden under the church pews. In the end, it was Ruby who claimed it. But after she separated the two halves and discovered the raisins inside, she made a face and handed the reassembled egg back to Jayyden, who opened it and popped a raisin in his mouth. And hadn’t that been Karen’s goal all along—to get poor children to eat fruit and vegetables? It was true that Ruby’s dentist had recommended staying off the dried versions. Even so, Karen hadn’t stopped believing that raisins were nutritionally superior to M
ilky Ways.

  “Mommy, why were there raisins in the Easter eggs?” was Ruby’s first question on their way home.

  “Because they’re healthier than candy,” Karen told her.

  “So the Easter Bunny wants poor people to be healthier?”

  Karen had forgotten about the Easter Bunny. “Something like that,” she said, already uncomfortable with where the conversation was going.

  “But then, why do other people get chocolate? The Easter Bunny doesn’t care if rich kids eat healthy?”

  “I think he wants everyone to be healthy. But a little chocolate isn’t that bad,” Karen said unsteadily.

  “Mommy, can I ask another question?” asked Ruby.

  “Of course!”

  “Why did all the people getting free food have dark skin? And also, the people you see on the street who are asking for money, they always have dark skin too.”

  “Well, that’s a complicated question,” said Karen, struggling to come up with an explanation that would be intelligible to an eight-year-old. “You see, in the olden days, even after slavery was outlawed, people with white skin wouldn’t give people with dark skin jobs or let them buy houses or, in some places, even let them vote. So, even though things are a little better now, thanks to Martin Luther King and others, a lot of people with dark skin are still very poor, because they don’t inherit anything. And it’s hard to join the middle class when you start off with nothing.”