On Friday, the day before Fund in the Sun, Karen still hadn’t reimbursed herself for any expenses connected to the picnic. But she’d kept a fairly detailed list of everything she’d purchased out of her own pocket. After dropping Ruby in her classroom, she continued down the hall and let herself into the PTA office with a duplicate key that Susan had given her. She was about to get out the ledger when she decided on a whim to log into the PTA bank account first. Some part of Karen needed to see for herself, one more time, how much money was actually in there. As she waited for the page to load, the nasal honks of a group recorder lesson wafted un-mellifluously from the adjacent music room.
Owing to the lice expert’s workshop and other incidentals, the balance was down to $953,000.41. Even so, it seemed like an unfathomable sum for a midsize public elementary school to have accumulated in private donations. And Karen couldn’t help but fantasize about what Betts would do with even a quarter of it. To start, they could rehire the librarian, she thought. And with the roughly nine hundred thousand dollars left, they could probably also renovate the library itself, and maybe even outfit it with MacBook Airs, like Mather had, as well as beanbag chairs and a new collection of early-grade books—and still have three-quarters of a million dollars left over. (From what Karen could tell from the titles Ruby had brought home during the previous year, Betts’s book collection was at least thirty years old. The covers were sticky and frayed, and no one wanted to open them anyway. Instead of Ivy and Bean, the library had multiple copies of Winnie-the-Pooh.) After taking these steps, Betts would no doubt begin to attract more affluent families from the community, who would lift enrollment, flooding the school with more money from the city and state, potentially pushing out Winners Circle and, in the process, building their own base of private donations.
After signing out of the account, Karen removed the ledger from the file cabinet and recorded her picnic expenses under the rubric Miscellaneous/Supplies, just as Susan had instructed her to do. Then she got out the PTA checkbook and was about to write herself a check for the amount she was owed—$483.00—when, pen poised over the desk, a tantalizing question lodged itself in her brain and refused to vacate it: Would anyone notice if she added another zero to the amount and sent the surplus over to the PTA of Constance C. Betts?
To Karen’s knowledge, that organization—to the extent it even existed as a separate entity from April Fishbach—had made a total of six hundred dollars the year before. And all of it had been from the vanilla cupcakes and sugar cookies sold before and during the intermission of the talent show, a vaguely pornographic affair in which two children played the piano and, to Karen’s quiet horror, the rest lip-synched and dirty-danced to that year’s pop and hip-hop hits. But that was a separate issue. To Karen’s mind, the students at Betts were no less worthy of meditation coaches, lice workshops, and ceiling-mounted video projectors than the Mather kids were. Nor would any of the students at Mather be affected negatively if deprived of roughly .05 percent of a money pile that no one on the PTA could even figure out how to spend. In fact, it seemed increasingly clear to Karen that the fund-raising game at Mather was as much about achieving a number as it was about fulfilling any tangible goals. And the Fund in the Sun picnic was on target to raise at least twenty-five thousand dollars more, since two hundred fifty families had already promised to pay a hundred dollars apiece for the privilege of attending.
And were Karen’s inclinations all that different from what her accountant father had done during his lifetime? A closet Lefty, Herb Kipple had once admitted to Karen that, with wealthy clients, he sometimes refrained from employing the aggressive tactics that would have saved them money at tax time, believing that they owed the U.S. government a fair share of their hefty incomes. And who could blame him? Not Karen. And if her motives were not purely altruistic—even if, say, she was seeking to assuage her guilt and atone for her own elitism by throwing a few bread crumbs at the masses she’d already spurned and abandoned—money was still money.
Karen thought of the fixer-upper she’d gone to see on a whim a year earlier in a marginal neighborhood close to her own increasingly affluent one. Prewar town house! Well below market value; needs work, great potential, read the ad, and Karen had wondered if maybe she, Ruby, and Matt should get a proper house and yard—if that was what they lacked and what would elevate their lives from good to great. The price was right. And Karen figured that she and Matt could sell their own condo for a profit and get a home-equity loan to renovate. She’d e-mailed the real estate agent: I’m very interested!
They’d made a date to meet.
The house had potential, all right—the potential to make Karen run screaming. Not only had it been barely standing, with enormous clear plastic sheets tacked to the ceiling to prevent the elements from coming in, but it had been occupied by at least two dozen people. On the first floor, four of them had been seated on a single twin mattress watching TV while a barely clothed woman had lain half asleep behind them with a newborn in her arms. Shower curtains featuring Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck motifs had separated the various mattresses distributed around the area. “So sorry to bother you,” Karen had said, creeping through the tiny sunken rooms, the floors buckling, the walls covered with mold, the inhabitants surely illegal immigrants from foreign lands.
“De nada,” one man had answered, smiling, gracious, desperate.
On other floors, the inhabitants had stared wide-eyed at her but didn’t appear to understand English or Spanish, so Karen hadn’t been able to apologize. Even the basement, with its not-quite-six-foot-high ceiling and concrete floor, had been occupied. There had been a twin mattress parked on either side of the boiler. Karen had felt sick as she’d thanked the agent and explained that it was too big a job for her.
But there were smaller jobs she could take on, she now thought—smaller and more direct ways of creating equity that were far less daunting to contemplate and potentially more effective than writing newspaper op-eds that would probably never be published anyway or convincing financial bigwigs to make tax-deductible donations, thereby starving the government of revenue.
For a few moments, Karen stood staring at the sum she’d written in the ledger. As the recorders honked on the other side of the wall, she wondered how walls had even come into being. They must have arisen in conjunction with the concept of privacy, which itself must have emerged around the sexual act. Or was there something primal about the desire to hide things from others?