“I’ve had enough,” Matt said on his way out of the room. Though not before he’d shot Karen a look of absolute disgust. He hated her. At least, that was how it seemed. The realization was devastating, but also, in some way, fascinating. At moments of crisis, Karen had always had the strange ability to remove herself from the drama, as if it were happening on a stage and she was sitting in the back row of the theater, watching.
She and Matt went to sleep not speaking and on opposite sides of the bed. But as upset as Karen was about their fight, she was equally concerned about Ruby making a good impression on her first day at her new school. Mather was four blocks farther away than Betts, but their school day began ten minutes later, so Karen didn’t technically need to reset the alarm. Just to be safe, though, she set it five minutes ahead.
When Karen woke up the next morning, dawn was just breaking. Against the still-dark walls, the light that filtered through the shades had the hazy quality of smoke from a campfire that hadn’t quite burned itself out. It would probably be a beautiful day. Next to her but facing the other direction, Matt lay motionless and in a deep sleep. Pondering the randomness of marriage—how had this man of all the men in the world’s population become her husband?—Karen tiptoed out of bed to go make coffee. An hour later, she went to wake Ruby and found her in an inexplicably compliant mood.
But forty minutes after that, when Karen took a right, not a left, on the corner of Cortland Avenue, Ruby accused Karen of lying, just as Matt had done the night before. “Sweetie, I never lied to you,” Karen said shakily. “I told you that you were starting your new school this morning. You must have forgotten.”
“You didn’t tell me I was starting today!” said Ruby.
“Will you just do me this favor and try it for one day? If you don’t like it, you can go back to Betts tomorrow.” Just then, that false promise seemed like Karen’s only hope.
“Fine,” Ruby said contemptuously as she followed her mother down the block.
What Karen couldn’t have guessed was how anxious she herself would feel on the way to Mather Elementary. Not only was she wary of seeing Betts parents on the street, who would wonder why she and Ruby were headed in the wrong direction, but she was fearful of running into Mather parents she knew from Elm Tree and the playground who would know where Karen’s family really lived.
What she couldn’t have predicted was that the most immediate threat would come from an absolute stranger. After waiting patiently for the light to change at the corner of Cortland and Donohue and for the red hand signal to turn into the outline of a walking man, Karen and Ruby stepped into the crosswalk. At the same moment, a thirty-something white male on a bicycle appeared out of nowhere and nearly mowed them both down. Jumping out of the way, Karen screamed, “Watch where you’re going, you fucking asshole!”
While the biker lifted his left hand off the handlebars and extended his middle finger, Ruby muttered with apparent fascination, “Mommy, you just used two really bad words.”
Karen felt ashamed of her behavior. What kind of example was she setting for her daughter? Even so, she couldn’t stop herself from calling after him, “I hope you get hit by a bus!” Then she turned back to Ruby, her heart still in her throat, and said, “Sorry, sweetie—on special occasions, like when someone almost kills them, grown-ups are allowed to curse.”
“But do you really hope that man dies?” asked Ruby.
“No,” said Karen. “But there’s nothing worse than bikers who believe they belong to a superior race because of their reduced carbon emissions.”
Ruby looked at her mother like she was crazy and said, “Huh?”
“I mean, I don’t hope he dies,” she said, “but I don’t hope he has a good life either.”
“Do you want me to have a good life?” asked Ruby. They had arrived at the other side of the street.
Karen drew her daughter near and kissed her forehead. “That’s my greatest wish in the world,” she said. And it was true. Wasn’t that why she’d done everything she’d done—and did everything she did?
Five minutes later they arrived at the school and joined the throng of parents and children amassed in the courtyard outside the front entrance, saying their good-byes. Understandably apprehensive, Ruby came to a sudden stop. So did Karen. Her eyes traveling from left to right and back again, she scanned the crowd. To her amazement, there was not a single dark-skinned child in the mix. There wasn’t a tan-skinned one either. There were hardly even any brunettes. It was as if Karen had fallen asleep and woken up in Norway. All around her were blonds—dark blonds, light blonds, strawberry blonds, and sandy blonds. Karen found the sight both disorienting and distressing.
Meanwhile, all the parents seemed to be going gray, owing to the fact that they all appeared to be Karen’s age and in some cases even older. Yet they were dressed like teenagers. Despite their silver-flecked beards and soft stomachs, the dads wore holey jeans, faded Tshirts with stretched-out necks advertising colleges and film festivals, and navy-blue ski hats, even though it was now spring. And despite their crow’s-feet and drooping backsides, the moms wore little-girl barrettes on their side-parted hair, embroidered Indian tunics with deep Vs, white cotton jeans that ended at the calf, simple gold or silver jewelry, and clogs of all colors and varieties: high-heeled clogs, boot clogs, closed-heel clogs, open-heel clogs, platform clogs, and clogs with ankle straps. Karen had never seen so many wooden heels in her life. Moreover, the dress code maintained by the Mather parents was so casual as to suggest that few were keeping traditional office hours or reporting to any kind of boss, raising the question of who paid for the real estate that had won their children access to the school in the first place.
Karen also found herself bemused by a new poster that had been hung on the outdoor bulletin board. JOIN THE MULTICULTURAL COMMITTEE! it read. NEXT MEETING—APRIL 17.
The sneaking if unwelcome thought occurred to Karen that when people said Mather was a great school, what they really meant was not that the teachers were so amazing or that the PTA was so strong or that the arts program was so extensive but that the housing in its catchment area was prohibitively expensive for poor minorities. It followed that an “up-and-coming” school—Karen had heard neighbors describe Betts this way—was one that was getting whiter but was still majority black and brown.
“We’re so behind on the camp-sign-up front,” Karen heard one Embroidered Tunic Mom say to another. “All we have Otis down for is, like, one week of Engineering Elves in July.”
“I was going to get the Number Sixes,” another voice cut in, “but I just felt like the Hasbeens were more forgiving around the toes. And the heel was, like, a tiny bit lower…”
And then a third: “Of course! Just have your nanny text our nanny.”
Just then, from a few yards down the block, came a piercing cry: “Winslow! You need to slow down. There are other people on the sidewalk.” Karen looked up just as a short, wiry boy in a black helmet rode his Razor scooter directly into her ankle.
“Ow,” she said, reaching down to rub it.
“Are you okay?” asked Ruby.