Ruby stopped walking. They were two blocks from home. “What?” she said, turning to her mother, her thin eyebrows lifted nearly to her hairline. “Why?”
“Because Mommy thinks you’ll get a better education elsewhere,” Karen said quickly.
Ruby looked stricken. “But where am I going?”
“To Mather, where Maeve goes now.”
“But I’m not even friends with her anymore.”
Karen suddenly regretted the abruptness with which she’d turned down Laura’s playdate invitation a few weeks back. “Well, that’s just because you haven’t seen her for a while,” she said. “You will be again, I’m sure. Besides, there will be a hundred new girls to be friends with there.” Karen put her arm around her daughter.
But Ruby shrugged it off. “I’m not going,” she announced.
“Sweetie,” said Karen, trying to disguise her own alarm at Ruby’s alarm. She hadn’t expected so much resistance. “You were the one who told me a few days ago that school was too easy and that you weren’t being challenged and also that you had no one to sit with at lunch.”
“Well, it wasn’t too easy today,” she said. “And Amanda and I sit together at lunch.”
“Amanda? Who was friends with Maeve?”
“Yes.”
Karen was baffled. When had all this happened? “Well, we can discuss it at home, with Daddy, but to do that you need to keep walking.” Karen was already thinking ahead to the far more agonizing task of telling Matt.
“Fine,” said Ruby. “But I’m not leaving Betts.”
But at least she was walking in the direction of home again.
Ordinarily, Karen was irritated when Matt got home after eight. But to her relief that evening, Ruby was already in bed when Karen heard the key in the lock—at a quarter to nine. Not that she was willing to acknowledge the relief. It seemed more important that she continue to keep score in the never-ending tennis match known as her marriage. “Where have you been?” was her opening question. Maybe it was aggressive, but wasn’t his chronic lateness a form of aggression? Fifteen–love, Karen.
“Sorry, I got caught up in work stuff,” he said. “And then Mike and I went to get something to eat.”
“Right,” said Karen, who suspected he was also trying to avoid her—and that he still hadn’t forgiven her for pointing out who had put up the money for the down payment on their condo.
“How was your day?” he asked.
“Fine,” she answered. Then she took a deep breath and said, “I registered Ruby at Mather.”
“What?” said Matt.
“I enrolled her at Mather Elementary,” Karen told him again. “She’s going to start tomorrow.”
“You signed Ruby up for a new school?”
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier.”
“Isn’t that a zoned school?”
“I called over there, and they happened to have a space.”
“And when did you do this?”
“This morning.”
“Really? So, you just randomly called, and they said, ‘Sure.’”
“Sort of.”
“Or you lied to them,” said Matt. “Just like you’re lying to me right now.”
“I’m telling you the truth,” said Karen, apparently unconvincingly.
“But you told them that we live somewhere we don’t,” he countered. “Which is also why you didn’t tell me until just now, because you knew I’d disapprove of you breaking the law. You also made the decision to transfer Ruby without me agreeing to it.”
Matt was right, of course, but Karen still felt unfairly maligned. “Well, you weren’t going to do anything about anything,” she said. “So I took action myself. If that’s a crime, so be it!”
“I matter, Karen,” said Matt, taking a step closer and beating his chest with his fists, as if he were Tarzan calling for Jane. “My opinions matter. And Ruby is our child—not your child. But you chose to make a unilateral decision concerning her without consulting me first.”
Karen could no longer tell who was right—the voice in her head or the voice in her ears. In that moment all she knew was that the understanding that she and Matt were two like-minded souls wading through the muck had begun to falter. “Fine—you win,” Karen told him. “We’ll keep her at Betts through fifth grade, knife wounds and all.”
Matt’s eyes popped. “What knife wounds?”
Karen couldn’t come up with an answer.
“You’re really losing it,” he said, shaking his head.
Was sanity slipping from Karen’s grasp? Even if it was, she wasn’t willing to concede—not just then, maybe never. “And you just want to be able to brag to all your friends that your daughter attends a minority-white school,” she went on. “Isn’t that what this is really about?” If Matt was going to hurl insults at her, Karen didn’t see why she shouldn’t do some flinging herself. Maybe her dirtiest secret of all was that she loved a good fight.
“How dare you,” he said.
“Well, I see no other reason why you won’t let me take her out of a school where, literally, her safety is endangered.”
“Says who?”
“Says me,” said Karen. “And I’m her mother.” It was a last-resort argument, she knew. But she’d run out of better ones.
Falling momentarily silent, Matt narrowed his eyes at her.
Karen stared back, feeling angry and ashamed and also inexplicably blank toward the man she’d promised to love and cherish a decade ago.
Finally, he spoke. “You’ve changed,” he began in a lower register. “What’s happened to you?”
“Nothing’s happened to me,” she said.
“You used to care about the world.”
But Karen was thinking something similar—that her husband had changed; that he used to care about her, and now he cared only about the people out there. “And you used to care about your family,” she said.
“Karen, you’re the one trying to write me out of this family,” said Matt. “And to be honest, it’s making me question our whole marriage.”
“So, go ahead and question!” cried Karen, outwardly defiant but inwardly trembling—less at the prospect of losing Matt than at the thought of being alone. However unhappily, Karen’s parents had managed to stay married for forty years, and Karen had always assumed she’d do the same. And if she wasn’t particularly happy herself, she wasn’t particularly unhappy. Was that such a terrible thing to be? In truth, intimacy had never been her strongest suit. In a strange way, she was most comfortable near but apart from loved ones—say, working on her laptop in the bedroom while Ruby slept in the next room over and Matt watched basketball in the room next to that.
“Okay, I will,” Matt went on, his face twisting into an unrecognizable mask. “What else are you lying about? Are you fucking someone else also?”
“Fuck you,” said Karen, her heart now pounding.