Class

by Lucinda Rosenfeld

  “She only talks to Finley now.”

  “Who’s Finley?”

  “A girl in my class.”

  “But why can’t she be friends with you and Finley?”

  “You don’t understand.” Ruby shook her head.

  “I don’t understand what?” said Karen.

  “Everyone has a best friend but me.”

  “Well, I didn’t have a best friend when I was in third grade.”

  “You grew up in the olden days.”

  “Are you sure you’re not just being oversensitive?”

  “I’m not being oversensible,” insisted Ruby, mispronouncing the word. Karen decided to let it go. “When I tried to sit down next to Charlotte in the cafeteria, she said, ‘This seat is taken.’ So I sat across the table. And then Finley sat down next to her, and they didn’t talk to me once the whole lunch period.”

  Was it something about her daughter that caused other girls to push her away? Karen found herself wondering. Was she too clingy? Too bossy? Or were girls her age just mean? Karen had read in one of her parenting books that elementary-school-age children and especially girls were constantly changing friends. It was part of the developmental process and had something to do with identity formation and was therefore not a cause for concern. But then, why wasn’t Ruby sometimes doing the leaving instead of always being left? In any case, Charlotte Bordwell, like Mia, was too young for Karen to be angry at and, at the same time, too old to be considered an appendage of her mother. So Karen couldn’t very well hold Susan responsible. Moreover, in Karen’s experience, children came out of the womb with their personalities more or less already formed.

  And yet…she found she was angry. Angry and hurt. It was intolerable to Karen that someone should have made her daughter feel so excluded and so unloved. It made Karen feel those things too. “Well, if Charlotte’s going to be rude, why don’t you sit with someone else?” she said.

  “Like who?” said Ruby.

  “What about Maeve?”

  “I never see her. And when I do, she doesn’t talk to me anyway.”

  “Well, then you’ll make new friends,” insisted Karen.

  But would she? That was the question that nagged at Karen for the rest of the afternoon and evening.

  The next morning, Karen turned on her phone and discovered a group e-mail from Principal Chambers. The administrative office of Betts must not have realized that Ruby had left, Karen thought. Dear Betts Families, it began. The e-mail concerned an emergency meeting that was being held in the school auditorium that night. It seemed that the city’s board of education had not only approved Winners Circle’s co-location inside the Betts building but had granted the WC network permission to begin immediate renovations on their portion of the school building, even though the charter was not planning to move in until the fall. This meant that Betts students would likely be spending their last two months of the school year breathing in construction dust and shouting to be heard over jackhammers. According to Principal Chambers’s e-mail, the CEO of Winners Circle was a close personal friend of the mayor, and this wasn’t the first time that the mayor had gone out of his way to accommodate her. To add insult to injury, due to budget cuts, Betts had no choice but to let its librarian go at the end of June. Since the library space would therefore be off-limits to Betts students, the city was allowing Winners Circle to take it over as their new robotics room.

  As Karen read through the e-mail, she felt angry and frustrated, but also relieved that Ruby wouldn’t be personally affected. Those emotions, in turn, were followed by amazement at the randomness of life. Were it not for Nathaniel Bordwell having tossed out his gas bill and Karen having walked by the particular bag of trash in which he’d tossed it while she was in a particularly upset mood, Ruby would likely still be at Betts. But he had, and so had Karen—and now Ruby wasn’t. And so Karen gave herself permission not to dwell.

  But as the day progressed, she found she couldn’t stop feeling outraged at Clay and his ilk for what she considered to be their misguided munificence. It was above all the impulse to punish and shame, not seduce and be seduced, that made Karen break down and e-mail Clay that afternoon—or, really, forward Principal Chambers’s e-mail to him without comment. Though as soon as she’d done so, she realized that her e-mail was bound to elicit a response, the thought of which filled her with excitement and trepidation.

  In the meantime, arrangements for the fund-raising picnic needed to be finalized. Karen had planned on joining Susan in the school library the next morning to go over the details, but Susan e-mailed that night to say she had a plumber coming to deal with some kind of pipe leak and she didn’t want to miss the guy—would Karen mind swinging by her house after drop-off instead? Having already made a decision not to involve herself or Susan in the Ruby-Charlotte schism, Karen promptly replied that it would be no problem at all, though secretly she wondered why Nathaniel couldn’t handle it. Hadn’t Susan said her husband worked from home? In any case, the Bordwells lived only a block from the school, so, for Karen, the change of location presented no particular inconvenience.

  There was a certain type of woman who always carried a good umbrella, the kind with a smooth wooden handle, a wide span, and a bright-colored block print or stripe. Not Karen, who had never bought a nice umbrella in her life, having always assumed she’d lose it as soon as she acquired it. Instead, she regularly purchased the semi-disposable made-in-China versions that were sold in outdoor kiosks by train stations. After three weeks, she inevitably either lost them or found that the spokes had become detached from the canopy, in which case she threw the whole business in a trash can and bought a new one the next day. But the truth was the plastic handle never felt solid in her hand, especially when she gripped it too tightly. That was what she found herself doing the next morning while standing in a light drizzle at Susan’s front door.

  It wasn’t Susan’s fault that Charlotte had blown off Ruby, Karen reasoned. And yet, here she was, devoting her precious free hours to the PTA; it hardly seemed fair that her reward should be the ostracism of her daughter by the president’s daughter. Was it any wonder Karen was feeling surly and standoffish when Susan opened the door?

  “Karen! I’m so sorry to make you travel in this weather,” said Susan, pleasant as ever. Per usual, she was dressed in upscale athletic wear.

  “It’s fine,” Karen said with a tight smile, following her inside.

  “I hear our girls have a sub today.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “I try and support the teachers’ union,” Susan went on, unprompted, “but considering they work only nine months of the year and get to go home at three, I think they get way too many days off!”

  “Yeah, well, it’s a pretty grueling job,” said Karen, thinking that it was somewhat rich of Susan to be complaining that teachers didn’t work hard enough when she appeared not to work at all. Judging from her outfit, she was probably en route to some “important” kettleball class. Or was Karen, in shortchanging the essential if unbillable work that Susan performed on behalf of both her family and her local public school, being the worst kind of sexist? She followed Susan into the living room.

  “Karen—this is my husband, Nate,” she said.

  Karen looked up and then down. To her astonishment, her eyes landed on a clean-shaven, square-jawed, middle-aged Caucasian man seated in a wheelchair with padded grips. His large biceps were straining against the sleeves of a bright red polo shirt. The lack of a cast on either leg suggested to Karen that whatever ailed him must be permanent. Suddenly, it all made sense—the elevator at the back of the living room, the half marathon for a paraplegia charity she’d read about on the web. He must have completed it in his chair. “Oh, hi!” she said, trying to mask her shock and embarrassment with verbosity. “It’s so nice to meet you! I’m Karen and I’m a new parent at the school, and I’m also helping Susan plan a fund-raising picnic for the PTA. Our daughters are friends, which is how I met Susan. S
he was actually the first parent to invite my daughter over for a playdate, so I’m indebted to her forever…” Karen rambled on and on. It was exactly the opposite of how she’d intended to act. But when she got flustered, she had a tendency to talk too much. Besides, under this new and unforeseen set of facts, how could she justify being a bitch?

  “Well, it’s nice to meet you” was all Nathaniel said, but he was eyeing her strangely. Or maybe Karen was imagining it; maybe he simply had an odd facial expression on account of whatever condition he’d fallen victim to. In any case, guilt flooded her body, not only due to her original theft, but because she’d dared to pass judgment on this family and their work habits. That she’d piggybacked on the life of a man who couldn’t even walk was another issue. Nathaniel Bordwell’s paralysis reminded Karen that money was not everything, not even close. Even the affluent suffered. And because their expectations for what constituted a successful life were so much higher, they were sometimes the unhappiest of all. Nothing was as simple as, well, black and white.

  Except when it was.

  “If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go get some breakfast,” he announced while wheeling himself out of the room.

  “It was great meeting you!” said Karen.

  “Well, you probably have things to do,” said Susan, turning to Karen. “So should we get started?”

  “Sounds good,” said Karen.

  “Oh, and if you’re wondering about my husband—and most people do when they meet him for the first time—he has a spinal cord injury from a boating accident he was in twenty years ago.”

  “Oh my gosh,” said Karen. “That must be very—challenging for all of you.”

  “We’re both used to it. But, yes, it has its challenging aspects.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “We’re very lucky that Nathaniel’s parents left us the house. Otherwise we wouldn’t be living like this. And we have tenants downstairs who help cover our expenses.”

  The Bordwells already had tenants? “Right,” said Karen, nodding. “And do the tenants have kids too?” The question flew out of her mouth before she had time to realize how odd it would sound.

  “The tenants?” said Susan, squinting at her.

  “I was just curious,” Karen said quickly.

  “Oh! Well—not that I’ve heard about! I mean, not yet. They’re still in their early twenties, I believe.”

  “Right.”

  “Anyway, back to more urgent matters—were you able to get a permit from the city for the event? I just don’t want there to be any beef with the parks people when we get there.”

  “Yes, it’s all done.”

  “Fabulous. And what about the balloon sculptor?”

  “Already booked.”

  “And the bouncy castle?”

  “Same. Though the bouncy-house guy insisted on a three-hundred-dollar deposit up-front,” said Karen, “and I couldn’t be bothered to argue. So I wrote him a personal check.”

  “Oh! Well, that’s fine,” said Susan. “I’m just sorry for you! I’ll have to order you a PTA charge card one of these days. In the meantime, make sure to reimburse yourself out of the PTA account. And if you could itemize your expenses in the ledger, it would be much appreciated.”

  “Of course. I’m happy to,” Karen told her.

  “You don’t have to get really specific, like paper towels—ten dollars. But if you could list the category, at least, that would be great. And if it can’t be categorized, just write supplies or miscellaneous.”

  “Not a problem.”

  “Terrific. Well, I think that’s all my questions. Sounds like we’re good to go!”

  “Now we all just have to pray for sun.”

  “Very true,” said Susan, with a quick laugh. “What was the name of the Egyptian sun god?”

  “Ra, I think,” said Karen.

  “Well, then, let’s both pray to Ra on Friday night.”

  “It’s a deal.”

  On Friday, the day before Fund in the Sun, Karen still hadn’t reimbursed herself for any expenses connected to the picnic. But she’d kept a fairly detailed list of everything she’d purchased out of her own pocket. After dropping Ruby in her classroom, she continued down the hall and let herself into the PTA office with a duplicate key that Susan had given her. She was about to get out the ledger when she decided on a whim to log into the PTA bank account first. Some part of Karen needed to see for herself, one more time, how much money was actually in there. As she waited for the page to load, the nasal honks of a group recorder lesson wafted un-mellifluously from the adjacent music room.

  Owing to the lice expert’s workshop and other incidentals, the balance was down to $953,000.41. Even so, it seemed like an unfathomable sum for a midsize public elementary school to have accumulated in private donations. And Karen couldn’t help but fantasize about what Betts would do with even a quarter of it. To start, they could rehire the librarian, she thought. And with the roughly nine hundred thousand dollars left, they could probably also renovate the library itself, and maybe even outfit it with MacBook Airs, like Mather had, as well as beanbag chairs and a new collection of early-grade books—and still have three-quarters of a million dollars left over. (From what Karen could tell from the titles Ruby had brought home during the previous year, Betts’s book collection was at least thirty years old. The covers were sticky and frayed, and no one wanted to open them anyway. Instead of Ivy and Bean, the library had multiple copies of Winnie-the-Pooh.) After taking these steps, Betts would no doubt begin to attract more affluent families from the community, who would lift enrollment, flooding the school with more money from the city and state, potentially pushing out Winners Circle and, in the process, building their own base of private donations.

  After signing out of the account, Karen removed the ledger from the file cabinet and recorded her picnic expenses under the rubric Miscellaneous/Supplies, just as Susan had instructed her to do. Then she got out the PTA checkbook and was about to write herself a check for the amount she was owed—$483.00—when, pen poised over the desk, a tantalizing question lodged itself in her brain and refused to vacate it: Would anyone notice if she added another zero to the amount and sent the surplus over to the PTA of Constance C. Betts?

  To Karen’s knowledge, that organization—to the extent it even existed as a separate entity from April Fishbach—had made a total of six hundred dollars the year before. And all of it had been from the vanilla cupcakes and sugar cookies sold before and during the intermission of the talent show, a vaguely pornographic affair in which two children played the piano and, to Karen’s quiet horror, the rest lip-synched and dirty-danced to that year’s pop and hip-hop hits. But that was a separate issue. To Karen’s mind, the students at Betts were no less worthy of meditation coaches, lice workshops, and ceiling-mounted video projectors than the Mather kids were. Nor would any of the students at Mather be affected negatively if deprived of roughly .05 percent of a money pile that no one on the PTA could even figure out how to spend. In fact, it seemed increasingly clear to Karen that the fund-raising game at Mather was as much about achieving a number as it was about fulfilling any tangible goals. And the Fund in the Sun picnic was on target to raise at least twenty-five thousand dollars more, since two hundred fifty families had already promised to pay a hundred dollars apiece for the privilege of attending.

  And were Karen’s inclinations all that different from what her accountant father had done during his lifetime? A closet Lefty, Herb Kipple had once admitted to Karen that, with wealthy clients, he sometimes refrained from employing the aggressive tactics that would have saved them money at tax time, believing that they owed the U.S. government a fair share of their hefty incomes. And who could blame him? Not Karen. And if her motives were not purely altruistic—even if, say, she was seeking to assuage her guilt and atone for her own elitism by throwing a few bread crumbs at the masses she’d already spurned and abandoned—money was still money.

  Karen thought of the fi
xer-upper she’d gone to see on a whim a year earlier in a marginal neighborhood close to her own increasingly affluent one. Prewar town house! Well below market value; needs work, great potential, read the ad, and Karen had wondered if maybe she, Ruby, and Matt should get a proper house and yard—if that was what they lacked and what would elevate their lives from good to great. The price was right. And Karen figured that she and Matt could sell their own condo for a profit and get a home-equity loan to renovate. She’d e-mailed the real estate agent: I’m very interested!

  They’d made a date to meet.

  The house had potential, all right—the potential to make Karen run screaming. Not only had it been barely standing, with enormous clear plastic sheets tacked to the ceiling to prevent the elements from coming in, but it had been occupied by at least two dozen people. On the first floor, four of them had been seated on a single twin mattress watching TV while a barely clothed woman had lain half asleep behind them with a newborn in her arms. Shower curtains featuring Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck motifs had separated the various mattresses distributed around the area. “So sorry to bother you,” Karen had said, creeping through the tiny sunken rooms, the floors buckling, the walls covered with mold, the inhabitants surely illegal immigrants from foreign lands.

  “De nada,” one man had answered, smiling, gracious, desperate.

  On other floors, the inhabitants had stared wide-eyed at her but didn’t appear to understand English or Spanish, so Karen hadn’t been able to apologize. Even the basement, with its not-quite-six-foot-high ceiling and concrete floor, had been occupied. There had been a twin mattress parked on either side of the boiler. Karen had felt sick as she’d thanked the agent and explained that it was too big a job for her.

  But there were smaller jobs she could take on, she now thought—smaller and more direct ways of creating equity that were far less daunting to contemplate and potentially more effective than writing newspaper op-eds that would probably never be published anyway or convincing financial bigwigs to make tax-deductible donations, thereby starving the government of revenue.