“Trash begets trash,” said Marco. “End of story.”
Karen cringed at Marco’s comment, while Mumia’s father, Ralph Washington, who was the editor of a small hip-hop and black politics magazine, stepped into the fray. “Except you left out the beginning,” he said hotly. “Where the legacy of slavery and the white hegemony begets the vicious cycle of black poverty.”
There was an uncomfortable silence. Even April, who was never at a loss for sanctimonious words regarding social justice for poor minorities, seemed tongue-tied. Karen stared at her shoes.
Luckily, Miss Tammy chose that moment to return to the front of the classroom and say, at a marginally lower decibel level, “I’m sorry about the disruption, parents. But we’re still totally pumped to have you here. And your children have worked awesomely hard on their buildings. So please continue to explore our community. But if you have to leave, don’t forget to sign our guest book.”
Suddenly conscious of time passing—and keen to escape the tension—Karen touched Ruby’s arm and announced that she had to go.
“Maeve left early. Can I go home early too?” asked Ruby. As if the two children’s disparate dismissal times were the real injustice.
“No, you cannot,” said Karen, exasperated by the question.
But the sight of Ruby’s wounded face undid Karen. Fearing she’d been too harsh, and even though both Ruby’s pediatrician and dentist had urged her to cut back on the sweets, Karen said, “But I promise we’ll go out for a treat after school—before gymnastics.”
“What kind of treat?” asked Ruby, who was in the 25th percentile for height and the 80th for weight.
“Maybe ice cream.”
“Awwww,” Ruby moaned. “I’m tired of ice cream. Can’t I have an icie?”
“No, you can’t,” said Karen, wondering if she had only herself to blame for her rising irritation.
In truth, Karen’s complex and often contradictory relationship to eating had grown more so in recent years. This was due not only to her current job—to the truly hungry, all food was in some sense good food—but to the outsize importance that her particular demographic group had placed on the business of consuming calories. Along with weight, teeth, and marriage, food had somehow become a dividing line between the social classes, with the Earth Day–esque ideals of the 1960s having acquired snob appeal, and the well-off and well-educated increasingly buying “natural” and “fresh” and casting aspersions on those who didn’t.
Karen herself had grown up in the 1970s and ’80s eating Ring Dings and washing them down with cans of Tab, and so far, health-wise, she didn’t seem any worse for it. But she also had a history of neurotic eating that dated back to late adolescence. It had never risen to the level of an eating disorder—she didn’t have that kind of willpower—but it had left her overly preoccupied with every morsel she ate and, recently, what her husband and daughter ate. Unlike the majority of her female friends, Karen actually disliked cooking. Yet she took an almost maniacal level of pride in doing so and in presenting various fresh and healthy options that would provide her family with the nutrients they needed.
For all these reasons, Karen preferred to be financially extorted at the artisanal ice cream shop up the street that offered weird flavors like Rooibos Tea and Maple Fennel than to contemplate the number of chemical compounds that were entering her daughter’s body via the neon-colored, artificially flavored, no doubt corn syrup–enhanced Italian ices that were sold outside her daughter’s school for a dollar a pop by an older Hispanic lady in a gingham smock. The woman was clearly just trying to make a living. Karen nevertheless resented her for forcing parents like herself to engage in constant battles with their children over its purchase. The fact that a scoop of artisanal ice cream likely contained more calories in it than a small Italian ice didn’t undermine her conviction.
“Why not?” the child moaned.
“You know I don’t like all the chemicals in that stuff,” said Karen.
“That’s all you care about—chemicals,” said Ruby.
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Then why don’t you let me eat icies?”
“I’m not going to talk about this anymore.”
A glint appeared in Ruby’s eye. “Mommy—if you were stuck on a desert island and you had to eat at one chain restaurant for the rest of your life, would you choose Burger King, Taco Bell, KFC, or Wendy’s?”
“Wendy’s, because they have a salad bar,” said Karen, who also recognized that her life was ripe for mockery. “Anyway, I really need to go.”
“I thought you didn’t have to work on Fridays.”
“I have to work from home.” With a quick kiss to Ruby’s forehead, Karen walked out of the classroom and back down the hall. Typically, Friday mornings were among her favorite times of the week. But something about the Maeve-Jayyden melee had left her with a palpable sense of foreboding, as if she’d successfully fled a house fire but forgotten to close the door behind her.
Soon, she found herself back on the main floor of Betts, a tidy if depressingly low-ceilinged expanse of beige brick with a trophy case on one wall and the obligatory display of student-made tissue-paper collages decorating the other. As Karen passed the collages, her eyes scanned the names written on the bottom left corners. The newfangledness of the black ones with their apostrophes, dashes, purposeful misspellings, and randomly added letters (Queen-Zy, Beyonka, Yisabella, Jayyden) stood in stark contrast to the antiquation and preciosity of the white ones (Prudence, Violet, Silas, Leo). The disheartening thought suddenly struck Karen that Ruby fit snugly into the latter category. But she quickly pushed the idea away, assuring herself that it was a family name, since it had also been the name of her great-grandmother.
Just past the collages, the school’s uniformed security guard sat at a wooden desk at a remove from the main entrance. Which had never made any sense to Karen. Wasn’t the whole point of having a security guard to deter homicidal maniacs who might try to enter the building in possession of semiautomatic weaponry? Karen had considered scheduling a meeting with Principal Chambers to express her concern. But since she lived in fear of sounding like one of the rBGH crusaders—that is, another uptight white mother with a petty complaint—she’d decided against it, trusting fate, if barely, to deliver her daughter home safely each day.