Laura cocked her head. “Oh! You didn’t know that? We’re getting ready to submit it to festivals.”
“Wow! And no, I didn’t know that. Well, I don’t actually have time either,” said Karen. “But I try to do my part.” Unlike you was the obvious subtext. Karen knew she was being provocative. But she’d finally lost patience with Laura and Evan faux complaining about how busy they were—and, by extension, how important—while also implying they were superior parents, despite the limited time they spent with their children, because wasn’t that the subtext?
But if Laura was wounded by Karen’s dig, she didn’t let on. “Well, you’re a better man than me!” she declared in an ever-so-slightly mocking tone.
“I don’t know about that,” said Karen, retreating.
“So, have you guys been happy at Mather?” said Laura, changing gears.
“Really happy,” Karen told her.
“I actually ran into someone from our old class last weekend—do you remember Bram’s mom, Annika?”
“Of course. The Dutch woman with the six-foot legs.”
“Right—her. Well, Annika said Jayyden is gone from Betts.”
“What? You’re kidding! Where did he go?” said Karen, trying to mask her dismay. If only she’d waited two more weeks, she thought bitterly. Or had it never really been about Jayyden?
“I guess he sent one too many kids to the ER,” said Laura, shrugging.
“Yeah, I guess,” said Karen, still marveling at the news. “Wow, I can’t believe that. Maybe we should all go back.”
“That’s not going to happen for us. But maybe you should go back.” Laura smiled cuttingly, while a single eyebrow appeared above the lens of her left shade.
Karen knew she’d set herself up for it. But Laura’s suggestion, which felt more like a request, stung. It seemed suddenly clear to Karen that Laura not only didn’t want Maeve to be friends with Ruby but also didn’t want Ruby to attend Mather. Maybe the school had felt like Laura’s winning lottery ticket, and she didn’t like others sharing in the pot. Or maybe, not unlike Karen, she was embarrassed about the circumstances under which her daughter had matriculated there—circumstances about which, quite possibly, only Karen knew. In any case, Karen felt heat climbing up the back of her neck, then fanning across her cheeks. “Well, maybe you should piss off,” she blurted out, “and then go piss on your husband while you’re at it.”
“Excccuuusssse me?” said Laura. But by then, Karen was already striding back to her own blanket. There, she got out her phone and pretended to be engaged in urgent textual communication, but inside she was a quivering tangle of neurons. Had she really just said that? It had felt so good to finally tell the woman off. Only now that she’d done so, she felt embarrassed and uncomfortable. It was hardly the time to be making enemies of Mather parents. Pretending not to feel well, Karen yanked Ruby away from the bubble gun. Together, albeit with Ruby protesting, they left the picnic early.
A new e-mail came in that evening from another neighborhood organization that Karen had never heard of. This one was called Concerned Parents and Citizens of Cortland Hill. The subject line was Emergency Meeting on Redistricting.
Dear Mather Parents,
It has come to our attention that the city’s board of education, noting overcrowding issues at Edward G. Mather, is floating a proposal to rezone the eastern section of Cortland Hill between Moreland and Cherry. As a result, many families who purchased or rented homes in the neighborhood with the understanding that they would be able to send their children to Mather will no longer be able to do so. Instead, they will be assigned seats at the Millicent Grover school, an underenrolled, underperforming elementary school on the other side of a major thoroughfare.
While we believe that standardized testing scores do not represent the true measure of a child’s potential—and that integration is a valid pursuit in a multicultural city such as ours—we are concerned that only 12 percent of Grover’s third-, fourth-, and fifth-graders received passing grades last year on the state’s English-language and math exams. What’s more, for those living on the west side of Cortland Avenue, having their children attend Grover will mean traversing a busy intersection every morning and afternoon, inconveniencing families and endangering lives.
Rather than sacrificing the next generation to a failing school that lacks the commitment to education that has long defined Edward G. Mather, we are proposing that Mather instead transfer its two special-education classes to a facility that is better equipped to deal with high-needs children. This would free up at least two classrooms, where additional kindergarten and first-grade classes could be placed.
If you support this alternate proposal, please attend a community forum in the Millicent Grover school auditorium this Monday night at seven. Your voice is urgently needed! The meeting is open to the public, but representatives from the board of education will be in attendance.
Thank you,
Concerned Parents and Citizens of Cortland Hill
Karen felt newly unsettled. On the surface of it, the letter’s call to arms sounded reasonable enough. But it seemed to Karen as if there were another letter hiding behind the one she’d just read, and the former was filled with quiet hate. She found the suggestion that Mather’s special-ed children be kicked out of the building to make way for the regular ones especially galling. At the same time, she was aware that Ruby’s matriculation at the school was at least partly to blame for the overcrowding that had led to the board of education’s proposal. Also, would Karen have willingly enrolled her own daughter at a school that had posted as low scores on the state tests as Millicent Grover apparently had? Above all, she feared that the fracas over the possible rezoning might lead to a witch-hunt of the kind that had been suggested by the volunteer coordinator at the PTA executive board meeting, in which those families who were found not to be living in the correct catchment area were outed as interlopers, their children expelled from the school. Making a note of the meeting time, Karen closed out of the e-mail.