It happened that Karen’s closest mom-friend at Betts, Lou, was also dark-skinned. Second-generation Jamaican, she’d been raised in New Hampshire, of all unlikely places, and was now married to an Icelandic guy who worked in graphic design. Karen prized Lou for being warm and witty. But she was also aware of taking an inordinate amount of pride in the existence of their friendship, which seemed to prove that she was the kind of person she liked to think of herself as—that is, a person with friends from all walks of life. Because of this, she was aware of putting more effort into the relationship’s maintenance than she put into friendships with her old (mainly white) friends, whose e-mails she often didn’t answer for days and on whom she canceled dinners, coffees, and drinks as frequently as she scheduled them.
But it was also true that, in that particular moment, Karen felt more comfortable with Lou than she did with many of the old gang from her twenties and early thirties, all of whom had subsequently paired up and produced two children per couple, spaced two years and ten months apart. Because the majority of these old friends sent their children to segregated schools that were populated entirely by professional-class families like themselves, Karen felt she could no longer entirely relate to them, whereas she and Lou, despite the difference in their skin colors and backgrounds, were in it together.
Except never entirely.
The one thing Karen struggled to talk about with Lou was the racial composition of Betts. To Karen, Lou’s children, with their caramel-colored skin, frizzy gold hair, and hazel eyes, reminded her of nothing so much as beautiful glowing lanterns. At the same time, Karen recognized that, according to the peculiar logic of the country in which they both lived, Lou and her kids, though not her husband, were understood to be black. Therefore, Karen was constantly on guard about saying the wrong thing and broached the race issue carefully, if at all. Though it felt equally weird to pretend there wasn’t one. “So, could you believe that e-mail from Maeve’s mom last night?” Karen began at pickup late the next day as she and Lou walked out of the building together, their children three paces ahead.
“Yeah, well, I can’t say I’m surprised by any of it,” said Lou, shrugging and sounding unbothered. Or was that just an act? “They were never a good fit at this school.”
“I agree. Though Ruby is really upset about Maeve leaving,” Karen found herself lying—maybe as cover for her own distress. “And I kind of think Principal Chambers could have handled the whole thing better too.” What Karen didn’t say was that it was a common point of agreement among the white parents at the school that Regina Chambers always prioritized the needs of the parents of color over those of their paler counterparts. Though Karen had no factual evidence of this, being too timid ever to have approached the woman with concerns of her own.
“She can be inflexible,” agreed Lou. “But in the case of Jayyden, there’s nothing she can do. You can’t suspend kids till fourth grade. And as far as I know, they don’t have reform schools for kids Jayyden’s age anymore. The last administration phased them out. They were seen as ‘pipelines to prison.’” Lou made quotes in the air. “And Jayyden is plenty smart, so they can’t put him in special ed. Maybe Regina didn’t properly explain all that to Maeve’s parents.” Lou was one of a few parents who was on first-name terms with the principal, a fact that filled Karen with quiet awe.
“Or maybe they didn’t want to hear it,” said Karen, hesitating before she spoke again. “To be honest, I think Laura and Evan are racists, and they’re just using this incident as an excuse to take Maeve out of the school.”
“Karen, honey,” Lou said, half laughing, as she touched Karen’s arm. “All white people are racists.”
“Ugh, is that true?” said Karen, squinching up her face and somehow hurt at the suggestion. She’d always assumed that Lou didn’t think she was like that—and, moreover, that her friendship with Lou meant she wasn’t like that.
“My husband is the worst,” Lou went on.
“Oh, stop! That can’t be true,” Karen said, shocked at the very suggestion. Or was Lou joking?
“Of course it is,” she said. “But I don’t care. I’m his wife. He has no choice but to love me. I’ll kill him if he doesn’t.”
Both of them had started laughing—maybe to take the pressure off. “You’re so hard on Gunnar,” said Karen.
When Matt got home that evening, neither early nor late, Karen told him that Ruby’s friend Maeve was transferring to Mather—and that, as ridiculous as it might sound, the whole thing had put her in a bad mood all day.
“Wait—which school is that again?” he asked as he leafed through the pile of bills that Karen had conspicuously left on the kitchen counter, secretly hoping it would inspire him to go back to a paying job.
Karen squinted at her husband. “You just don’t care about this stuff,” she said. “Do you?”
“I do care. I just think you’re getting overinvolved in the whole thing.”
“Thanks.”
“Also, you said the parents were total douche bags, so what do you care what they do?”
“They are, but Maeve was Ruby’s best friend.”
“So she’ll make a new best friend. Besides, it’s elementary school. They don’t actually learn anything.”
“Except reading, writing, math, how to speak in complete sentences, and how to get along with other kids.”
“Karen,” said Matt, lowering his chin and making eye contact for the first time. “Rubes comes from a middle-class home. Or, really, let’s be honest, upper middle class. We may not make very much salary-wise, but we own a valuable piece of real estate, we’ve got some money in the bank, both of us have degrees from elite colleges. Which means that Ruby will probably end up at some elite college too. Did you know the major determinant of a child’s future position on the socioeconomic ladder is the education level attained by the mother? They’ve done studies. And since you have two degrees, one of which is from a frigging Ivy League university, I’m really not that worried! Plus, I think it’s good for her to be interacting with poor kids. Maybe she’ll gain some perspective on how privileged she is.”
“I guess,” said Karen, glancing at their galley kitchen with its off-the-shelf Home Depot cabinetry and secretly wishing she and Matt were a little bit more privileged.
“Plus, the way the world works,” Matt went on, “it’s unlikely she’ll ever again end up in such close proximity to the kind of kids she’s meeting now. They start tracking them by middle school.”