Curse of the PTA

by Laura Alden

  “Where? Let me see that.” Claudia half stood and grabbed the folder. “Where does it say that? I don’t see it anywhere.”

  “Page four,” I murmured, earning a thumbs-up from Marina.

  “Four? I don’t see it. You’re wrong about this. You must be.”

  I tucked my lips between my teeth, leaned over, and pointed out the pertinent paragraph.

  “No, this only talks about . . . oh.” Claudia slapped the folder shut. “Fine,” she said. “We’ll vote. Something like this, it has to be a board vote, right? I vote for Tina. Randy, how about you?”

  Randy, who’d been busy collecting the last crumbs of his corn chips on the end of his thumb, grunted.

  “There,” Claudia said. “Randy votes for her, too. That’s two votes and that’s enough. Tina, you’re the new PTA secretary. Come on up.” Smiling, she pointed at the empty chair.

  I dreamed a short dream of a distant and secluded island populated only by Claudia. She’d be happy there, after a short period of adjustment. And even if she wasn’t, I’d be comforted by my own happiness in knowing that she’d never attend another PTA meeting.

  “Page five of the bylaws,” I said, “states quite clearly that multiple nominations will be voted upon by the PTA membership.”

  “It can’t.” Claudia snatched at the bylaws and flipped through the pages. “It just can’t.”

  “Page five,” I said. “Robert’s Rules of Order concurs. I can find the section number if you’d like.”

  Claudia didn’t answer; she was too busy running her finger down the text on page five, muttering as she went. “Nominate . . . office of . . . multiple . . . PTA.” Her finger stopped right where I knew it would.

  After a moment, her chin went up. Grim-faced, she looked out at the people in the audience, one by one. “All right, then,” she said. “We’ll vote.”

  “By secret ballot,” I said.

  “Oh, absolutely,” she said, smiling.

  I watched her smile turn into more of a smirk and wondered what she was up to. Coercion by narrow-eyed glare? Telepathic mind control? Please. But Claudia looked far too confident for my comfort. What if . . . ? I shook my head and concentrated on the task at hand.

  In short order, Claudia, Randy, and I rounded up paper, ripped the pieces into quarters, wrote down the names of both candidates on each one, folded each ballot in half, and passed one to each PTA member in the room.

  There was a rustle while women fished through purses for pens, a few murmurings as the men present asked to borrow a pen from their wives; then the ballots were refolded and passed to the front, where they were deposited on the table in front of me.

  I looked at the pile. It shouldn’t have been a surprise that the ballots were given to me. I was president, after all, but somehow it I wasn’t ready for this. Part of me still thought the presidency thing was a mistake of some kind. Erica Hale was president. She’d been PTA president for years. Surely she was going to walk in the room any second and motion me aside.

  Only that wasn’t going to happen. Erica had made it quite clear that she was done with the PTA. “I’ll be in Italy from mid-August through October,” she’d said. “You’re on your own. And don’t look like that. You’ll do fine.”

  So. It was up to me to run this meeting and make sure it was run smoothly. I looked at the ballots and reached out to take the first one.

  “You think you’re the one who should count?” Claudia asked.

  My hand froze.

  “Don’t the bylaws have something in them about counting votes?”

  I revised my earlier fantasy involving Claudia and a distant island. It didn’t have to be far away. A close one would do. And it didn’t even have to be an island. It just had to be somewhere that Claudia was and I wasn’t.

  “We’ll all count,” I said. “You, me, and Randy; we’ll each make a tally, then compare. A triple check.”

  She started to protest, but the audience was nodding in collective agreement. I felt an odd rush of pleasure. Maybe I could do this. Maybe I wouldn’t want to crawl into the back of the closet when I got home.

  Turning to a fresh sheet on my legal pad, I wrote the names of both nominees at the top and drew a vertical line down the middle of the page, dividing it in half. Tina on the left, Summer on the right.

  Out in the audience, murmurs of conversation started up and grew in volume. Marina was asking Carol and Nick about their summer vacation to Nova Scotia, and Summer was asking someone about an upcoming ski swap. Good. Being eyeballed throughout this process wouldn’t have been good for my blood pressure.

  An errant breeze made the ballots shift in their loose pile. If Tina won, it’d be Claudia and Tina against Beth the entire school year. Randy would swing between being a tying vote and a three-to-one vote in favor of whatever Claudia wanted to do, and since Randy wasn’t big on confrontation, there’d be three-to-one votes from now until June.

  Icky didn’t begin to cover how I’d feel about that. Okay, maybe Claudia and I didn’t disagree on everything. We agreed on some things. Like . . . like . . .

  I gave up the effort, took a shallow breath, and reached for the first slip of paper.

  • • •

  A few short minutes later, I was steepling my fingers and dreaming more island dreams, this time with me on the island along with my children, our cat, our dog, and an enormous pile of books. My pleasant reverie was interrupted when Claudia and Randy handed their tallies to me. I unfolded their papers and looked at their totals. Both agreed with mine. Exactly.

  I signed all three tallies and had Claudia and Randy also sign all three. Better to cross the T’s with too long of a cross and dot the I’s with too big of a dot than to be called up later for not doing things properly.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” I said, and waited for the chatting to die down.

  I could have used the gavel, but something in me balked at the idea. At the June meeting, the one in which I’d been voted president, Erica had ceremoniously handed me her gavel. “Use it wisely,” she said, smiling, “but not too well.” Since I wasn’t the gavel-banging type, I didn’t want to use it at all. Before tonight’s meeting started, I’d felt like a poseur pulling it out of the diaper bag and setting it on the table. Me as president was weird enough. Me wielding a gavel was ridiculous.

  When everyone was facing front, I stood.

  For a moment, I didn’t say anything. All eyes were upon me, and surprisingly, I didn’t feel uncomfortable. I didn’t want to speak fast and sit down as quickly as I could, I didn’t feel as if I were undergoing a sort of Marina-induced torture, and I had an odd confidence that I wasn’t going to say anything deathly embarrassing in the next two minutes.

  Wonders, truly, never cease.

  “I’d like,” I said, “to announce the name of the new secretary of Tarver Elementary’s PTA.”

  Chapter 2

  I looked at the nominees for PTA secretary. Tina and Summer had similar expressions on their faces: two parts apprehension and one part excitement. How could you not want to win, once you’re running for an office? How could you not be nervous about the possibility of winning?

  “And this year’s secretary will be . . .” Maybe it was Marina’s presence that made me do it. Or maybe it was the teensy-weensy, almost nonexistent part of me that wanted to be in show business. For whatever reason, I took a dramatic pause and looked around the room, taking in the caught breaths and eager faces.

  “This year’s PTA secretary will be . . . Summer Lang.”

  A smattering of light applause went around the room. Claudia drew a long line across the agenda item and didn’t say anything. Randy nodded sideways at the chair next to him. “All yours,” he said.

  “Tonight, you mean?” Summer’s straight brown hair seemed to straighten a bit more. “Like right now?”

  I sensed that Claudia’s mouth was about to open. “Yes,” I said, speaking quickly so that Summer could be inaugurated without a snide comment. “Go ahe
ad.”

  “Oh. Okay.” Summer stood slowly, walked to the front of the room slowly, and sat down the same way. She looked at the audience. Blinked. Looked at the table. “Oh,” she said. “I don’t—”

  But I was way ahead of her. “Here.” I passed down my extra legal pad and a pen. The secretary’s copy of the agenda was already in front of her. “Do your best to take notes.” I gestured at the ancient tape recorder on the table, doing its creaky best to record everything we said. “If you miss something, this should help.”

  “Um. Good. Thanks, I mean.” She uncapped the pen, drew a little squiggle, peered at the mark she’d made, and gave herself a small nod.

  I tried not to beam like a proud parent. Summer would do fine. And I would never tell a soul what the vote count had been. Did anyone need to know that Tina had received all of two votes? No, they did not. Tina wasn’t my favorite person by any means, but no one needed to be smacked with a defeat like that.

  Then I started wondering who had cast those two votes.

  The only certainty was Claudia. If Randy had truly grunted assent for Tina’s nomination, wouldn’t he have voted for her? And if he had, that meant Tina hadn’t voted for herself. But if Tina had voted for herself, that meant Randy . . .

  I shook my head. There was no point in thinking about it. Claudia’s attempt to stack the PTA board had failed. Full stop. Time to move on.

  “Okay, folks,” I said. “If you’ll look at your agendas, you’ll see that the next item is PTA financial investments. The storybook project is generating enough money that we might want to consider investing a portion of it in something other than a savings account that makes us basically nothing in interest.”

  “What kind of investments?” Nick Casassa asked.

  “Exactly what we need to find out,” I said. “We have a guest tonight who will give us a short course in investments for nonprofit organizations.” I nodded to the man sitting in the back of the room who’d been wearing a bemused expression for the last fifteen minutes. “This is Dennis Halpern, a Madison-based financial consultant. Dennis recently opened an office here in Rynwood. He’s also the author of a book on investing and was gracious enough to agree to speak to us. Dennis, thanks for sitting through the first part of our meeting. Welcome.”

  “Thank you, Beth.” Dennis made his way forward to the teacher’s desk. The four board members screeched our chairs around to face him.

  He was sixtyish, average height, slope-shouldered, and the fat around his midsection was starting to droop over his belt. Unimpressive physical stature aside, he projected an air of intelligence and alertness.

  I squinted at him, trying to figure out how he did that, and came to the conclusion that it was what his eyes were doing. He was paying attention not only to everyone, but to everything. His gaze flicked over the posters tacked up on the wall, taking in the map of the United States, an exploded diagram of the parts of a skyscraper, and pictures of Yellowstone National Park. I saw him take note of the flowers and books on the teacher’s desk, the box in the back corner labeled LOST AND FOUND, and saw how he quickly scanned each face in the room.

  An observant man, I thought, and was pleased that I’d been able to talk him into attending the meeting.

  “So,” he said. “I hear you folks have a lot of money.”

  Marina thrust her fist into the air. “We’re rich! We’re wealthy!”

  “Comfortably well off, perhaps,” Dennis said. “But not rich.”

  Randy moved his chair around a little farther, making the feet screech horribly. “Richer than a lot of PTAs.”

  “Which is why I’m here.” Dennis leaned back against the desk. “Your president asked me to talk about possible investments.”

  “Is that legal?” Claudia asked. “I mean, can we even do that with PTA money?”

  Dennis nodded. “Good question. My advice is to run options past your attorney. That way you can get a legal opinion before a decision is finalized.”

  I opened my mouth, then shut it. Erica. As a retired attorney, she’d always provided the PTA with legal counsel. Was she going to charge us for advice, now that she was off the PTA? If so, how much? And why hadn’t I thought about this before? There was no way I was qualified to lead this group. I had no idea what I was doing and—

  Stop that, I told myself. Cut it out right now. You’re president and people are depending on you. So . . . figure it out.

  “But that can wait,” Dennis said easily, talking over my small crisis of confidence. “All I want to do tonight is present a few simple options.”

  “I like simple,” Randy said.

  Dennis laughed. “You’re not alone. And that is certainly something to consider as we move along in this decision-making process.”

  “I have a question.” Carol raised her hand. “What are we going to do with all that money? I mean, before we invest it somewhere, shouldn’t we think about what we want to do?”

  “Yeah,” Claudia said. “It doesn’t make sense to invest money if we’re just going to take it out and spend it. We might have to pay penalties.”

  Why hadn’t I seen this coming? If I could have turned back time, I would have gone back about ten minutes and told everyone that tonight was just for informational purposes, that educating ourselves about investments would be a good thing, that once we knew the possibilities, we could make a well-informed decision about what would be best for the PTA.

  Tina’s hand shot up. “My mom? She took money out of her 401(k) once and had to pay all sorts of penalties. If the PTA did that, it’d probably be a crime or something, wouldn’t it? I mean, public money, right? You can’t be doing that.”

  I wanted to bang my head against the table.

  Dennis didn’t flinch. The man, clearly, was a professional. “Helping you understand different investment vehicles is the reason I’m here.”

  “Vehicles?” Natalie’s friend asked, frowning. “We’re investing in cars?”

  Yes, it was true. Inviting Dennis to speak had been one of my worst ideas ever. Worse than my idea of painting the family room lime green and way worse than the day I’d decided it would be a good idea to take Spot to the bookstore. Not quite as bad as the time I’d chosen to eat the slightly off-color chip dip in the back of the refrigerator, but it had to be close.

  Claudia gave a wheezing cough.

  “I think we should decide what we’re going to do with the money,” Tina said.

  “Good idea,” Claudia said quickly, and I got the sneaking suspicion that Tina had been primed to speak up on cue. “We should buy new soccer goals. And we have lots of money to pay for new playground equipment. I found this place online that has these really great slides. And we could even pay for some special-needs equipment.”

  “All worthy projects,” Dennis said. “But if you’d like to have a sustainable base for—”

  Summer raised her hand. “I think we should pay for a music teacher.”

  “We applied to the Tarver Foundation for that,” Claudia said.

  “And they still haven’t made a decision. We have the money, why should we wait for them?”

  “Because that’s not something the PTA should pay for,” Claudia snapped.

  Summer put her chin up. “I’m guessing a whole bunch of people don’t agree with you. And what’s the PTA’s mission, anyway? To promote the health, well-being, and educational successes of our kids through strong parent, family, and community involvement.”

  What Summer had said was one of PTA National’s values, not the mission statement, but I was impressed, nonetheless.

  “I don’t see how buying soccer goals fits into that,” Summer said, shaking her head. “I just don’t.”

  “And I don’t see how a music teacher fits into it,” Claudia said.

  “I do,” Carol said.

  Tina turned to look at her. “Well, I don’t.”

  In one sudden surge, the room erupted with sound. Claudia was telling Summer that if she (Summer) didn’t kno
w how important soccer was to the health of children that her children must have no athletic ability at all. Summer was giving it right back to her, saying that anyone with an ounce of sense understood the importance of music and the arts to a child’s development. Randy, stuck between them, was turning his head back and forth, trying to sneak in a short word every so often. His bursts of “It’s—,” “Both are—,” and “Don’t—” were completely ignored by the two women.

  Out in the audience, Tina and Carol were going at it hammer and tongs over the merits of swim lessons for toddlers. Nick was volubly discussing designated hitters with a young father who’d never once said a word at a meeting. Red-faced and shouting, they were getting to their feet with clenched fists. Marina was alternating between telling the mother on her left that buying a drum set for her daughter would be an excellent idea and debating the father on her right about the best Green Bay Packer quarterback ever.

  I looked at the melee in disbelief. All this, over a disagreement on how to spend money? What was wrong with these people? And it was going on much too long. Why wasn’t Erica doing anything about it? She never let a meeting get out of hand like this, why wasn’t she—

  Oh. Right.

  As Tina shrieked out, “There should be laws to keep people like you from even having kids,” I wrapped my fingers around the wooden handle.

  When Carol called back, “It’s people like me that keep people like you from becoming a menace to society,” I raised the gavel and swung.

  Crack!

  A few sets of eyes darted glances my way, but there was no decrease in the din.

  Crack! Crack! Crack!

  “Order!” I shouted. “That’s enough, people! This is not the time or place for this kind of argument!”

  The noise level went down several notches, then fell away to complete silence. I realized that I was standing up, one hand flat on the table, the other curled around the upraised gavel, leaning forward in a pose of intimidation. When that had happened, I had no idea.

  “We have a guest,” I said pointedly. “This is a sad way to introduce him to the Tarver PTA.” I heard a few mumbles that might have been apologies, but I was too angry to pay attention. “And what kind of example are we setting for our children? Is this the way we want them to act?” I sat down with a thump, disgusted by the whole group.