When Karen first moved to the neighborhood, there had been a decrepit bodega in the same spot. Karen had almost never shopped there, choosing to buy her staples at the more upscale Korean-owned deli nearby or to order them online. But once in a while, when the deli had run out of milk or orange juice, she’d find herself walking on the bodega’s broken black-and-white-vinyl-tiled floor while a tabby cat with green-gold eyes darted in and out of the aisles. The Tunisian immigrant family who owned the place must have been trying to capitalize on the first wave of gentrification to hit the neighborhood when, one day, they erected a new marquee promising ORGANUK FOOD. The misspelling had made Karen cringe. Not surprisingly, a year or so later, the bodega was shuttered. For six months, the store sat empty. Then the bistro guys arrived in their black leather motorcycle jackets. While they stood out front smoking American Spirit cigarettes and talking on their phones, a crew of Central American construction workers began yanking out the vinyl tiles and chucking them into a dumpster, exposing the original wide-plank subfloor—and ultimately increasing the property value of Karen and Matt’s condo.
And now, next to the Bistro with No Name, where there had previously been an African American barbershop—until the barber was shot dead in what the local papers called a personal dispute—there was a store that sold macaroons and nothing more. It was closed for the night, but the display window was still lit, revealing Easter egg–colored disks laid out in rows in an old-fashioned oak-and-glass case with cabriole legs. Beneath the sweets were handwritten note cards advertising exotic flavors like passion fruit and champagne. Karen thought of jewels in a jewelry store. She also thought that, whatever it was the macaroon people were selling, it had very little to do with eating. But then, for people in a certain milieu, a milieu that surely included Karen, this was what food had increasingly become—a luxury item, rather than a means to stay alive.
The sound of clinking glass turned Karen’s attention away from the macaroons and toward the curb, where a homeless man with a filthy dreadlocked beard and a bum leg scrounged through a blue trash bag, presumably in search of redeemable bottles. Tuesday evening was when residents of the neighborhood put out their recyclables for Wednesday-morning pickup. At the sight of the man, Karen felt competing desires: to reach out and to run far away, to sympathize but also to condemn. As if there were no history, no mitigating circumstances that had led to his situation in life. When had she grown so callous, she wondered—in life, in her marriage? As the man began to hobble away with his giant clanging bag of recyclables slung Santa-style over his rounded back, Karen guiltily thrust a five-dollar bill into his hand. “May God bless you,” he muttered after her.
“Good luck,” she told him.
As if luck had anything to do with it.
After crossing the neighborhood’s main commercial thoroughfare, Karen started down a leafy street lined with handsomely proportioned, history-rich nineteenth-century brick row houses with brass hardware on the doors. She’d crossed the line that separated the Betts school district from the one zoned for Edward G. Mather. Here, the homes featured plaques claiming to have been the birthplaces of important but now obscure figures from the Civil War, from literature, and from architecture. Staring covetously through their elongated windows, she could make out chandeliers of various vintages, beginning with the introduction of the gas lamp and continuing into the present, with sleek steel, brass, and glass versions from Design Within Reach. Karen’s wealthy friends, like Allison, called it Design Out of Reach, even though they readily dove their hands into their wallets in order to purchase home furnishings from the place. (They also referred to Whole Foods as Whole Paycheck, even as they continued to buy their heirloom tomatoes there.) But then, in the city in which they all lived, feeling poor was apparently intrinsic to the experience of being rich, unless you were incredibly rich. Allison and her family actually lived just around the corner. It was another of the ironies of the area that the real estate had gotten so expensive, and the people moving into it so moneyed, that they didn’t necessarily even use the public school that had made the neighborhood so sought after just a few years before.
The block was deserted except for a Caucasian man with a shaved head, walking a French bulldog. The man was dressed in the casual uniform of the Euro elite: dark-wash jeans, a black suit jacket, a crisp white dress shirt, and black loafers with a silver horse bit on each toe. Karen guessed he was a private banker, or maybe an art consultant who advised bankers. In any case, he exuded a compelling type of confidence. And as the two passed each other, she smiled what she imagined to be her most beguiling smile. But the man stared blankly back at her—really, through her. Reminded again of her reduced desirability, being a woman over forty, Karen felt ashamed and embarrassed and turned her eyes toward the curb, where clear plastic bags filled with paper trash formed high-class hillocks beneath the streetlamp.
Through the plastic, she could make out back issues of Bon Appétit magazine and various official-looking envelopes that bore the insignias of financial institutions like PricewaterhouseCoopers and Fidelity. It was that kind of neighborhood, filled with those kind of people, she thought—the kind she’d spent her life both shunning for their sense of entitlement and trying to keep up with, in roughly equivalent proportions. But in that moment, the latter impulse was in ascendance. Although Karen was aware that, compared to the vast majority of city dwellers, she and Matt were greatly privileged, she also saw her own family as being at a distinct disadvantage. Why should the children on this block get to walk the hallowed halls of Mather instead of the higgledy-piggledy ones of Betts? It seemed as unfair as—well—cancer. Also as random.
Of course, the disparity in privilege between Karen and Clay Phipps was surely many times greater than it was between her and the public-school parents in the neighborhood who sent their children to Mather. But Clay’s wealth was so beyond the realm of imaginable that it somehow didn’t merit comparison, whereas walking down Pendleton Street, which was only four blocks from Karen’s home, she had the uneasy feeling that she’d taken a wrong turn a hundred miles back, and now it was too late to turn around. She’d never find the exit in time, never catch the train. It had already left the station without her. And there wasn’t another one coming any time soon. Karen had never considered herself to be a particularly competitive person. But even if winning wasn’t her life’s goal, it was also true that she hated to lose.