Ruby extended her neck. “Mommy, what are my magnet dolls doing over there in that big bag by the door?” she asked, back to her regular voice.
“You never play with them anymore, sweetie,” said Karen. “And we don’t have that much room in the apartment. I’m taking them to the Salvation Army so kids who can’t afford new toys can play with them.”
“But I do play with them!” cried Ruby, squinching up her face.
“The Salvation Army? Seriously? You know they try to convert people over there,” said Matt, a committed atheist whose parents attended a Methodist church.
“Okay. But they also do a lot of food assistance,” said Karen, who was ethnically Jewish but who described herself as an agnostic. “HK even contracts with them.”
“I just think the Homeless Solutions Thrift Store will make better use of Ruby’s old toys,” said Matt, his tone turning serious, “without bringing in all that salvation BS.”
“But why can’t I keep my own toys?” moaned Ruby.
“Maybe they will,” said Karen, ignoring her daughter’s lament. “But the Homeless Solutions donation center is two miles away, and there’s a Salvation Army on our corner. So I can actually drop stuff there on my way to the train instead of having to get in the car to take it somewhere—or instead of asking you to get in the car to take it somewhere, which we both know will mean that bag will be sitting in the hall getting tripped over for the next two years.”
“Touché,” said Matt, conceding the fight and, in doing so, pleasing Karen, who smiled triumphantly.
After Ruby went to bed, Karen and Matt sat on the sofa and shared frustrations from their workdays. Matt told Karen about what a hard time the staff was having getting the city’s housing authority to cooperate with his website. Karen told Matt about how the grant she was writing was taking forever—and also about what had happened at the community-unit party. “Which one is Maeve again?” asked Matt.
Karen didn’t understand how her husband couldn’t keep straight their only child’s few friends, but she chalked it up to a failure of vision above all else. By nature, Matt wasn’t very observant. Karen could get a new pillow for the sofa, and two months would go by before he noticed—if he ever did. “The blond one who looks like JonBenét Ramsey who comes over to our house, like, every weekend?” said Karen.
“She wears heavy makeup and cowgirl outfits?” asked Matt.
“No! I just mean she looks like her. Blond and blue-eyed with a turned-up nose.”
“Oh, right—I know who she is.”
“Or at least it was turned-up until Jayyden got there,” joked Karen.
“So he broke her nose?” asked Matt.
“I haven’t heard,” said Karen, shrugging. “I mean, I assume her mom, Laura, would have e-mailed me if it was that bad. But who knows. She and Maeve’s dad, Evan, are probably out of town shooting an important GlaxoSmithKline commercial and haven’t heard the news about their daughter yet. Seriously, those two are never around. I honestly don’t know why they had kids.”
“Did you know pharmaceutical companies are banned from directly advertising to consumers in every country in the world except the U.S., New Zealand, and Brazil?” said Matt.
“Why am I not surprised?” said Karen, shaking her head. Then she launched into a harsh description of her run-in with Leslie Pfeiffer. “She might as well have said, ‘We couldn’t deal with all the black people at your school so we decided to send our precious firstborn to an apartheid-like all-white B-and-E program in the middle of a poor black school, where she won’t actually have to interact with any dark children because they keep them in their own holding pens.’”
“That sounds charming,” said Matt.
“Yeah, really charming,” said Karen.
“People think Republicans are racists,” said Matt, who had grown up in Tacoma, Washington, where his not particularly warm but refreshingly sane parents toiled as a college secretary and a building contractor. “But I’ve always thought college-educated liberals are actually the worst.”
“I totally agree.” To Karen’s mind, it was her and Matt’s shared political outlook and commitment to social justice, combined with their willingness to impugn those who didn’t share it, that had kept them more or less happily partnered for ten years. Also, they still had fairly decent if infrequent sex.
After their chat, Matt and Karen went back to their computers, as they tended to do in the evenings after Ruby went to bed. Since there was no word from Laura, Karen briefly considered sending her a hope everything is okay–type e-mail. Like other mothers thrown together on account of their children’s affection for one another, and even though it was quite possible that Laura secretly disapproved of Karen as much as Karen secretly disapproved of Laura, they went through the motions of being happy to see each other on the rare occasions when they did. They also regularly Liked each other’s Facebook photos of their children doing cute things, though Karen posted far fewer than Laura did. For no discernible reason, they also occasionally shared incredibly intimate details about their personal lives. The previous December, while at a birthday party for a classmate of Ruby and Maeve’s, Laura had revealed to Karen that for a year or more after giving birth to Maeve’s younger brother, Indy, she’d lost control of her bladder, regularly peed in her pants, and had at least once accidentally done so on her husband while they were having sex. It had been a detail too much for Karen, who hadn’t quite been able to get the image out of her head.
But in the end, Karen decided to hold off on sending anything. She wasn’t sure what tone to strike and was concerned about coming across as either nosy or inappropriately blasé. There was something about Laura that made Karen feel like she was one of those overinvolved, overprotective mothers who had no lives outside of their children—or like she was totally negligent. There was no in-between. Besides, Karen was fairly certain that despite her tears, Maeve was just fine.