On her way out of the building, Karen nearly collided with a late-arriving student. The girl probably wasn’t much older than Ruby. But to Karen’s eye, she appeared to be dangerously overweight, with early breast development and a prominent gut. She was also clutching a half-eaten jelly doughnut. In a series of flashes, Karen imagined the rest of the girl’s tragic life. No doubt there would be a teen pregnancy, followed by a failure to graduate high school, a dead-end cashier job at a fast-food restaurant, more babies with unaccountable men, food stamps, diabetes type 2. She felt pity for the child on all fronts.
But at the sudden appearance of a woman who Karen assumed was the child’s mother—she was walking behind the girl and ordering her to “Hurry your ass up!”—Karen felt her pity turning to disapproval. It wasn’t just the woman’s crude language or the fact that she was very large herself (her hips reminded Karen of the side hoops worn under dresses in Velázquez’s paintings of seventeenth-century Spanish royals) yet was wearing skintight jeans with rhinestone studs down the sides, as if to call attention to her size. It was that she’d given her overweight child a doughnut for breakfast.
As if, seconds earlier, in order to win the affection of her own borderline chubby daughter, Karen hadn’t promised Ruby a sugary treat as well. In that moment, Karen couldn’t see that the doughnut might be an act of love on the part of this mother too, for whom it was quite possibly an affordable gift in an unaffordable world. She also managed to forget that sometimes, while in the car with Ruby, she f-worded other drivers—and that she owned a pair of skintight jeggings herself, which arguably looked no better on her own distressingly flat backside than on this woman’s large and shapely one.
“If it gets any later,” Karen heard the mother say as she passed her, “I’m gonna miss Education Partners orientation.”
Karen blinked back her surprise. Education Partners was one of April Fishbach’s pet projects, a volunteer program in which parents helped out in the classrooms, doing everything from putting away supplies to assisting children who were struggling to read. Karen herself was too busy/lazy/selfish, depending on your perspective, to donate her Friday mornings. But other heroic parents apparently had decided to do it—parents such as the Mother in the Rhinestone-Studded Jeans.
As Karen exited through the double doors and onto the street, she felt chastened by her apparently gross misreading of the family. That was the thing about clichés, she’d learned—and yet somehow kept not learning. They were often true. Just as often, they weren’t.
Six months earlier, the neighborhood’s newest coffee shop, Laundry, had been an actual Laundromat with perpetually broken dryers, a peeling linoleum floor, and a tiny color TV installed near the ceiling and tuned to one or another daytime talk show catering to women. Now it featured exposed beams, dangling Edison bulbs in wire cages, recovered post-office cabinetry, free Wi-Fi, and whimsical line drawings of farm animals screen-printed onto reclaimed barn wood. Radiohead, Johnny Cash, and the Arctic Monkeys played in a loop on the sound system while the bespectacled patrons leaned stone-faced over their brushed-aluminum MacBook Airs. Karen considered Laundry to be overpriced and pretentious—and the coffee mediocre at best. But the choices were limited: a Dunkin’ Donuts three blocks away or an even more expensive place up the street.
After ordering a five-dollar cup of single-origin organic coffee from Burundi and waiting ten minutes for a guy with a tattooed neck and hair that had been pulled back into a bun to pour hot water through what appeared to be a dirty sweat sock, Karen retreated to a honed-marble-and-wrought-iron table in back. There, she got out her laptop and assumed the facial expression of someone reviewing top secret plans to invade a nation in the Persian Gulf. In fact, she was searching for cut-glass boudoir lamps on eBay, and then for sea-grass throw rugs on Overstock.com, and then for girls’ cardigans at Gap.com, as Ruby had recently lost her favorite bright pink one. Though that was really just an excuse to go to the website.
In truth, online shopping for clothes for her daughter and cheap crap for her home had become one of Karen’s greatest pleasures in life. Lately, that pleasure had begun to resemble an addiction that she was deeply ashamed of and hid from her husband. If he found Karen on her laptop at night, she would always say she was reading the international edition of the Guardian, because it was hard to argue against someone’s catching up on world events from a left-leaning perspective. And when packages arrived, which they did nearly every night—she and the UPS man, Larry, were on first-name terms—Karen would quickly open them, then flatten the cardboard boxes and put them outside in recycling before Matt came home and made comments.
Little wonder that, in recent months, Karen and Matt’s joint checking account had fallen as low as it had. Though it hadn’t helped that Karen had dropped her phone three times in one year, each time purchasing a replacement at full cost. There was also the not-so-small matter of her husband, who still had outstanding student loans, currently earning zero dollars per week. The previous fall, after working for twenty years as a housing lawyer fighting for tenants evicted by greedy landlords, Matt had felt burned out and quit his job. Now he and a few friends were building a one-stop realty website for low-income city dwellers, attaching those in need of housing to lists of everything from rent-stabilized apartments to subsidized-housing waiting lists and even market-rate-but-affordable apartments in lower-income suburbs. A nonprofit foundation had given Matt and his partners seed money to build the website and even provided them with temporary office space, but the funds were already starting to run low.