Hungry Kids was participating in a national hunger-relief conference in Kansas City, Missouri, and on Friday afternoon, at the request of the Hungry Kids’ executive director, Karen flew there and sat in on panel discussions with titles like “Moving Beyond the Soup Kitchen: Sustainable Nutrition in the New Century” and “Filling the Pantry: New Approaches to Hunger-Relief Development.” It was nice to get a break from the normal domestic routines. But Karen ultimately found the weekend a waste of time and resources, both the organization’s and her own. She also felt bad about abandoning Ruby for three whole days. Even when she wasn’t traveling, Karen never felt she was spending enough time with her daughter. Though when they were together, Karen was often counting the minutes until she could be by herself again.
By Sunday morning, she was counting the minutes until they could be reunited.
On Sunday evening, she unlocked the door to the apartment and found Ruby and Matt seated catty-corner from each other at the dining-room table. “Hey, guys!” said Karen.
“Hello, weary traveler,” said Matt.
“Mommy!” cried Ruby, eyes wide with excitement as she jumped out of her seat and ran to her mother.
“Hello, my sweet pumpkin—I missed you terribly,” said Karen, enveloping her body with her own and luxuriating in the velvety suppleness of Ruby’s cheeks. “But I need to use the bathroom. You go finish your dinner.” She carried her daughter back to the table and deposited her in her chair. Then she kissed her husband hello. His breath was redolent of garlic and pork. As she pulled away, her eyes fell on the greasy Chinese food that he and Ruby were in the process of devouring. “Good job holding down the fort,” she said, relief now tinged with dismay. “But, oh my God, what kind of crap are you two eating?” Karen knew that, for the good of her marriage, she ought to refrain from criticizing Matt the moment she walked in the door. It would make her sound unappreciative of the time he’d just spent watching Ruby while Karen was gone, especially considering the tiff they’d had the week before. Judging from the fact that she and Matt still hadn’t had sex, they hadn’t fully made up from it either. But wasn’t Ruby’s health important too?
“Mommy said a bad word!” cried Ruby.
“Crap isn’t that bad a word,” said Karen. “But even if it was, grown-ups are allowed to use bad words.”
“Thank you for your opinion of both my parental skills and my menu selection,” said Matt.
“Sorry, and you’re welcome,” said Karen. “But”—she couldn’t stop herself—“didn’t we agree that, on the pediatrician’s orders, Ruby wasn’t going to eat food like that anymore?”
“Mmm, isn’t this delicious?” said Matt, turning defiantly to Ruby, another forkful of slop lifted to his mouth. Of all the injustices of the modern world that he got worked up about, chemical additives in his food didn’t even make the top one hundred.
Ruby seemed to share his indifference. “Yummy!” she declared while sucking a piece of dripping broccoli into her mouth.
At least she’s eating vegetables, Karen thought. But who knew what evils lurked in the brown sauce? “I’m going to use the bathroom,” she said again, turning away.
“Have a good trip?” Matt called after her in a sarcastic tone.
“It was fine, thanks,” she called back. But she didn’t feel fine. Everything seemed to be slipping out of her control.
On Thursday evening, Karen had dinner with her friend Allison Berger. The two women had met in the mid-1990s at a meeting for a short-lived feminist activist group that modeled itself after ACT UP. Now a financial journalist who wrote about inequality and wage stagnation for a legendary left-wing magazine, Allison was married with two children, lived in a five-story town house on the best block in the neighborhood, and spent her leisure time playing tennis and perusing the Scalamandré wall-coverings catalog in search of the right Chinoise Exotique for her guest bathroom. She also sent her two children to the Eastbrook Lab, an elite prep school with a progressive approach to education where the tuition was equivalent to the average annual household income in America for a family of four. Allison’s husband, who made the extravagance possible, was a litigation partner at a white-shoe law firm. In addition to defending Fortune 500 companies, he did just enough pro bono work to dispel allegations that he was a corporate tool.
Karen wouldn’t necessarily have objected to any part of the picture, except for the fact that, in recent years, Allison’s columns had assumed a strident and didactic tone that seemed, if not hypocritical, then certainly at odds with her lifestyle. She was always just returning from some exclusive eco-resort in Costa Rica or snowcapped mountain in Idaho that was accessible only by helicopter with this or that wealthy and connected new friend. It was as if there were two Allisons, and one was always trying to shame the other, except it was the first one who showed up in print, constantly taking the other to task for her sense of entitlement. A recent column about how the wealthy preserved class privilege via connections, internships, and estate tax law and how it was nearly impossible for someone in the bottom quadrant of the socioeconomic ladder to climb to the top was headlined “All in the Family: How the Filthy Rich Keep Getting Filthier.” Nonetheless, she and Karen had a rich history. And Allison had always been a loyal friend.
Barn Yard, the farm-to-table restaurant at which the two met that evening, had long, carefully distressed communal tables running the length of its unfinished-wood floor. Karen found Allison sitting at the end of one of them and somewhat squeamishly took a seat across from her. Communal tables never failed to remind Karen of the church-basement soup kitchens that Hungry Kids oversaw. Partly owing to acne scars left over from high school, Allison had never been beautiful. But with her platinum-dyed pixie cut and slim figure, which she played up with oversize jewelry and formfitting clothes, she was chic in a way that seemed to exist outside of aging. “Anna Karenina!” she cried at the sight of Karen. It was an old joke, harking back to the days when both of them had had personal lives that could be described as dramatic. In truth, Karen could hardly remember hers. “It’s insane how long we haven’t seen each other,” Allison went on. “Tell me everything.”
“I wish I had something to tell you,” said Karen. “My life is so boring, it might fall asleep.”
“I don’t believe that for a minute,” said Allison. “What’s his name?”
“Whose name?”
“The Swedish UNICEF executive you’re sneaking off to the Mandarin Oriental with every Wednesday at three.”
“Ha-ha. What I think you mean is ‘How was the Comfort Inn in Kansas City that you spent last weekend in—alone—while attending a nonprofit development conference?’”