Meanwhile, to the great joy of the Mather PTA and to Karen’s commingled pride and disgust, Fund in the Sun raised far more than anyone had expected—close to forty thousand dollars in one afternoon. Yet again, Karen was on the receiving end of multiple accolades. In the aftermath of such success, and even despite the upset that her run-in with Laura Collier had caused her—or maybe because of it; maybe because it secretly pained her to think she was enhancing the education of a certain small blond child with a hyphenated name—Karen felt newly emboldened.
But it wasn’t just about punishing Maeve. It seemed so unjust that the quality of a child’s education should be predicated on how much money his or her parents made. Why should rich kids get to attend fancy private schools with swimming pools and small classes and no one interrupting—or public schools that had the same amenities, thanks to property taxes and/or the prohibitive price of the real estate in their catchments—while the poor were left to fester in overcrowded, chaotic classrooms with not enough books and too many problem kids? Shouldn’t it have been the other way around? And didn’t underprivileged children stand to benefit the most from the extra attention? Moreover, who had decided that, with a few exceptions, the light-skinned people of the planet should rule over the dark ones? Racism was so random, really, when you thought about it. It was as if people one day had decided that attached earlobes were superior to unattached ones, and those with the former should reap the riches of this world.
Or maybe race was only part of the equation. Maybe it was class that mattered the most, Karen thought as she unlocked the door to the PTA office on Monday morning—class and the lifestyle preferences that went with it. That is, the taste for Pellegrino over Pepsi, clapboard over aluminum siding, community-supported agriculture over community college, imported Parmigiano-Reggiano over Kraft Reduced-Fat Parmesan-Style Grated Topping, and beach yoga at an eco-resort in Tulum over daiquiris in the wet bar at the Grand Bahía Príncipe Coba with a crowd of two hundred overweight, sun-poisoned binge drinkers, at least one of whom could be heard yelling, “Is my wife built or what?” (Also, in a certain echelon of society, you had to know how to nod slowly and say, “Wow, that’s so funny,” without seeming to find it even remotely amusing after the person seated to your left at some boring dinner party said, “My roommate at Choate was her best friend on the Vineyard.”)
But if the government wasn’t prepared to divide the riches up more equitably, why shouldn’t Karen try to do her part? And was it even stealing if you didn’t pocket the money yourself? Besides, by organizing the picnic, she’d more or less earned the dough herself; hadn’t she therefore earned the right to decide how to spend it? These questions in mind, Karen wrote another check to herself in the amount of four thousand dollars, then recorded the deduction in the ledger as Portfolio Expenses. It was a phrase she’d learned from her father. She never entirely understood what it meant—she’d always envisioned oversize black-fronted albums filled with modeling shots from glossy magazines—but to her ear, it had the ring of a well-run business.
Just as before, Karen cashed the check on her lunch hour, then placed the bills in an envelope that she sent to the Parent Teacher Association of the Constance C. Betts School, again with no explanation or return address. The only difference was that, this time, as the envelope tumbled down the chute, she felt determination, not trepidation.
That evening, Karen asked Matt to put Ruby to bed so she could attend the community meeting about the proposed rezoning of the western portion of Cortland Hill. Although doubtful that Ruby would be personally affected if the rezoning went through, Karen wanted to be prepared. She was curious too. Car keys in hand, she set off in a light drizzle.
Millicent Grover turned out to be only a five-minute drive from Karen’s home. But somehow she’d never noticed it before, even though the building looked uncannily like Mather, at least from the outside and at night; it was another story inside the school auditorium. To Karen’s surprise, the crowd in the audience was roughly three-quarters African American and about one-quarter white and Asian. Was this because the latter had already decided they wouldn’t be caught dead sending their children there, so there was nothing to discuss? Or maybe the white families had been too frightened—both of entering the school and of being shouted down—to show up. If and when the next meeting was held in Mather’s own auditorium, they would no doubt come out in droves. In the meantime, a reverse ratio was visible on the stage, where a handful of beleaguered-looking city officials were seated at a metal table dotted with plastic water bottles. Her head bowed with the hope of not being recognized, Karen took a seat in the back row. The meeting was already under way.
“Mr. Erun Dasgupta,” one of the female bureaucrats read off a note card, “please come to the podium.”
An expensively suited thirty-five-ish man with a complexion the color of caramelized sugar approached the microphone. “Good evening,” he began. “I am a resident of Cortland Hill. And I would like to say this: I would never have purchased our condominium were it not for the expectation that we would be able to send our son to Edward Mather. Now all our plans are up in the air. But one thing we will definitely not be doing is sending our child to a failing school where the students are more interested in rap music than arithmetic.”
There were hisses and boos from the audience, along with a lone cry of “Racist.”
“Peeeeeople! Please,” bellowed another of the city officials, this one a balding white man in a brown suit, “we ask that you refrain from expressing your opinion of the speakers. This is a community forum, and everyone has the right to speak here. Please be respectful.”
“He’s the one who needs to show some respect,” a woman yelled from the audience. Eventually, the boos and cries died down. But at the sight of the next speaker—a certain Reverend Jeremiah Reed—the crowd again erupted, this time in whoops and cheers. Reverend Jeremiah, for his part, appeared to have been lifted from a time-travel machine that had stopped for gas in the 1970s. A feathered fedora sat on his tightly curled hair, a handlebar mustache framed his lips, and an ascot decorated with fleurs-de-lis filled the triangle at the top of his wide-collared maroon polyester button-down. “My name is Reverend Jeremiah,” he began. “Some know me from my God job at the Church of Our Lord the Savior, others from my day job as the parent-teacher coordinator of Millicent Grover.” There were more cheers. “Some from outside the community may believe it is their duty to show up here and accuse our school of being in poor shape.” He paused. “We know we are poor. But we believe our shape is beautiful already. And so is the color of our skin.”