A Most Uncommon Degree of Popularity (12 page)

Everyone was quiet.

So I went first. “You all keep saying that this will blow over, and I know that’s what we all would like, but the other three girls really do like Faith.”

“Maybe they will become a group of five,” Annelise said.

“I don’t know how you can think that will happen.” My voice was high and thin. “Whenever Faith Caudwell organizes something, Erin is not included. When she came to my house for these pictures, she did not speak to Erin. If the difference between a group and a clique is that a clique is defined by the fact that who it
ex
cludes is more important than who it
in
cludes, then Faith is creating a clique by excluding Erin. She’s showing how much power she has when she can get the others to leave Erin out. Not inviting, say, Suzanne Singer demonstrates nothing. Not inviting Erin shows real power, and this isn’t just about the number of seat belts Mary Paige has.”

“We know that,” Blair said. “We’ve talked about it—”

We? We’ve talked about it?
That hurt. When had there started being a “we” that didn’t include me?

“—and we haven’t been sure about what to do,” Blair continued. “Insisting that they include Erin is becoming counterproductive. Inviting Erin became a symbol of having your parents too involved in your life.”

“But when did they stop
wanting
to have her?” I needed to know. “What happened? What did she do?”

“It is a two-way street,” Mimi said a little crisply. “Erin is telling the other girls that she doesn’t want to come out with them.”

“She’s hurt,” I cried. “She feels rejected. Saying that she doesn’t want to come is her defense because she feels that they don’t want her.”

“But there’s no reason for her to feel that way,” Mimi said. “Of course they wanted her … at least until she got so defensive.”

“So this is
her
fault?” I was furious.

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Mimi said.

But she had.

Blair spoke quickly. “None of us understand this, and if you are right, Lydia, that Faith is orchestrating a clique, then she has more control over our girls than any of us can like.”

I couldn’t sit here anymore. I couldn’t listen to my friends try to talk their way out of this. I flipped shut the book of proofs and thrust it into the bag. My hands were shaking.

Startled, Mimi picked up our two cups and hurriedly carried them into the kitchen, then followed me through the front door, thrusting her hand out so that I couldn’t slam it. We had come together so she was going to have us leave together.

Stay here!
I wanted to shriek.
Stay here and talk about me and how this is all Erin’s fault and be all smug because this isn’t happening to your daughter.

We were at the end of Blair’s drive before Mimi spoke.

“This isn’t like you, Lydia.”

I was almost too angry to answer. “Isn’t this how you felt when Rachel wasn’t going to be in the ensemble?”

“That was different. That was—”

“No, it wasn’t. We feel the same way. The difference is that you could keep your kid from being left out.”

“And a lot of good it’s done her,” Mimi snapped back.

I looked at her.

“You can gloat,” she said. “You were right. Mrs. Barton is making Rachel pay and pay for my interference. Rachel would have been better off if I’d just let her learn to deal with not being in the ensemble, even though it was completely unfair.”

And Erin would have been better off as well. This whole fall would have played out so differently if Rachel hadn’t been in the ensemble.

“Don’t be like Candace Singer and assume that the cool girls don’t have problems.” Mimi was lecturing me. “Brittany’s headaches are getting worse and worse; Blair’s worried sick and she doesn’t dare talk to you because she knows that you are still pissed off that Erin wasn’t invited to that movie. And Rachel’s not operating from a position of strength right now. Ensemble rehearsals are a nightmare for her; Mrs. Barton picks on her constantly. She comes home and is awful to her little brother. But you don’t have to withdraw from the adult friendships,” she went on, “just because the kids are realigning themselves.”

“I’m not doing that.” I was going to stand up for myself. This was not my fault. This was
so
not my fault. “I’m not withdrawing. I got in touch with everyone about these stupid pictures. You just feel guilty because your kid is avoiding my kid, and so you’re not confiding in me about other stuff. Don’t blame me for that. And do not, do
not,
talk about me when I’m not around.”

“We aren’t doing that,” she protested. Now she was on the defensive.

“Yes, you are. Blair just said you were.”

“Okay, so maybe we are. But, Lydia, what do you expect?”

“I’d expect you not to act like we’re the ones in middle school. Don’t shut me out the way the girls are shutting out Erin.”

Mimi jerked at one edge of the big antique paisley shawl she was wearing, flinging it over her shoulder. The fringe caught in one of her big jingling earrings, and she winced as she tried to pull it free. I put down my canvas bag and untangled her.

We were looking at each other, standing close. “Okay,” she said, “we feel guilty. We feel awful. But none of us want to hear other people, even you, criticize our daughters. Rachel, Elise, and Brittany are being lousy friends. Faith Caudwell may be piping the tune, but they are her little dancing sheep. Now it’s one thing for me to call Rachel a ‘dancing sheep,’ but I don’t want anyone else to. Even when her father criticizes her, I feel attacked and I can’t see straight. So what I want is for you to tell me that either none of this is Rachel’s fault or it doesn’t matter and Erin doesn’t mind, but you aren’t going to say that.”

“No,” I said slowly. “I’m not.”

“Then I’ll say what you want to hear. What’s happening among the girls stinks, and my little angel isn’t doing one thing to make it better. But we’ve all got our egos so caught up in our daughters that it’s really hard to admit that they aren’t perfect.”

Because Mimi had been so
honest, we were able to part on good terms. I knew that neither of my kids was going to be home: Thomas was playing with some Sidwell kids who were on his soccer team, and Erin had a baby-sitting job. I was glad of that. I felt exhausted. When I opened the door, I heard the sound of a jazz recording that only Jamie liked. I followed the sound into the dining room. He was sorting papers at the table.

I wish he wouldn’t do that. He has his own study upstairs, but he likes to work in the dining room and then he leaves his stuff there forever. The tabletop had been clear when I left for Blair’s; now it was covered with papers. Jamie was standing at the long side of the table, picking up papers off a six-inch-high stack.

I pulled out one of the chairs and sat down to watch him. He was dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved, faded red polo shirt. He had started wearing red when he was an undergraduate at Haverford, a Quaker-affiliated college outside Philadelphia, because that was the school color, and he had just kept on buying his casual shirts in red even though with his auburn hair, he didn’t look particularly great in the color.

Apparently it took him a minute to notice me. “How was your thing?”

“It was okay.”

He could tell from my voice that it wasn’t.

I could sense the struggle in him. He was, no doubt, doing exactly what he wanted to be doing, listening to jazz and getting these papers sorted. He was almost never alone in the house, and he did occasionally enjoy it.

So he didn’t want to stop what he was doing and listen to me recount what he had in a fit of bad temper once called the “trivia of the universe,” but he knew that he should.

I did not want to be anybody’s “should” right now. If he didn’t want to listen to me, screw him. I stood up to leave.

“Lydia, wait.” He put down his papers and crossed the room to stop me at the door. “It wasn’t okay, was it?”

His eyes are greenish brown with a lighter hazel circle around the pupil. Whatever he might have felt when he laid down the papers, he was paying attention to me now.

“Oh, Jamie.” I could feel my throat thicken and my eyes start to sting. “I am so sick of this. You can’t believe how sick I am of all this.”

He put his arms around me. I pressed my cheek to his chest and I could feel him breathe. “What exactly do you mean by ‘this’?” he asked.

“This whole business with Erin and her dramas and her unhappiness. I feel like it is taking over my whole life.”

He stepped back. “I don’t understand it,” he admitted. “I’ve tried, but I can’t.”

“You understand what Erin’s going through, don’t you?”

“Yes. It’s the intensity of your involvement that baffles me.”

“But it’s affecting my friendships, too.”

Jamie listened to me with extreme patience for another ninety seconds or so, and then, guy that he is, wanted to go straight to the problem-solving, fix-it mode. “You know, Lydia, you can always rethink some of the choices you’ve made.”

“Like whether to go back to work?”

“Not necessarily. Just how to have some more balance in your life.”

Balance? Okay, this was really annoying. “Achieving balance was precisely what I had been trying to do when I quit work.”

“Stop focusing on the working–not working thing. Your whole life is about relationships. That’s what’s not balanced. Even your work, your photography, when you talk about it, you always talk about individuals or relationships.”

“So? That’s what people want when they bring their kids to me. What pictures of our kids do you like the best? The perfect head shots? No. You like the ones that show a brother and a sister who love each other.”

He admitted that was true. “So that might make it harder for you to find balance, but—”

I waved my hand, interrupted him. “A balanced life is supposed to keep my heart from breaking when my child is miserable? I can’t imagine any weight big enough or heavy enough to balance out that.”

I left the book of
proofs on the front-hall table where we put the mail, thinking that Erin would see them when she went up to her room and could look at them in private if she wanted. Although it was clear from the position of the binder that she had looked at the pictures Sunday evening, she didn’t say anything about them until Tuesday.

It was on that day that her SSAT scores arrived. The envelope was addressed to “the parents of,” and so I opened it before she came home, thinking that if her scores were awful, I just wouldn’t tell her about them unless she remembered to ask. Why add to her sense of disappointment and failure?

I’d been warned not to expect dazzlingly high percentiles. Only students applying to academically challenging high schools take the SSAT, so the percentiles compare the test taker only to the best and the brightest. My eye went to the verbal percentile. Seventy-three. Ouch. We had been hoping for the high eighties, low nineties, and would have been happy with mid-eighties.

But, I reminded myself, we hadn’t had her prepare. We hadn’t hired tutors, hadn’t made her memorize lists of vocabulary words. It was clear from the other mothers in the waiting room that many families had.

Math: ninety-nine.

I looked again. Ninety-nine. I ran my forefinger over the number, making sure that there wasn’t a crease in the thin paper that had made the second digit seem a nine when it was really a zero. No, it was a nine. Her score was really ninety-nine.

Farther down the page was a section called “Test Question Breakdown.” On “Number Concepts and Operations” Erin had gotten twenty-one right, none wrong, and had omitted two. On “Algebra, Geometry, and Other Math” she had again gotten none wrong, having answered twenty-three right and omitted three.

This was really amazing. She seemed to have been in complete control of the math section of this test. She knew what she knew, and she knew what she didn’t know.

Mathematical ability does run in both our families. My father was a C.P.A., and Jamie’s dad teaches high-school math. My mother is a crackerjack bridge player, my brother is a math professor, and his son, my nephew—God love him—dropped out of college to become a professional poker player. The numbers gene skipped Jamie and me, but clearly it had surfaced in Erin.

Ninety-ninth percentile—this was something. I couldn’t wait to call Jamie.

Erin was walking a neighbor’s dog after school this week so she tended to drop her backpack on the front steps, go walk the dog, and then come into the house through the front door.

As soon as I heard her come in, I hurried to the front hall to show her her scores. “Erin, this is fabulous. You did a great job. Dad and I are so proud of you.”

Clearly she hadn’t been giving the test any thought. She shrugged. “I told you that the math part was easy. It was probably just a fluke.”

“I think they design the tests to avoid that.” I started to explain the significance of her being able to distinguish between what she knew and what she didn’t, but since she wasn’t listening, I shut up.

She was looking down at the silver binder with the proofs in it. She jerked her head in its direction. “Are you going to use the picture with just the four of us or the one with Faith?”

I was sorry that she couldn’t enjoy the success of these test scores.

“What do you think?” I tried to be neutral.

“They all look the same to me.” Erin shrugged. “But the ones with the five look wrong.”

“They do to me, too.”

“What will you say to the rest of them if you use one of just the four of us?”

“I don’t need to say anything. It’s none of anyone else’s business what I choose. It’s my gift to them; I can do whatever I want.”

I selected the best pictures
of the four original girls and framed them to match the previous years’ pictures, and as I had done for the past few years, I printed a smaller version for Mimi’s mother, Bubbe, who was quite fond of all the girls. I also gave my friends the second best of the five, the one that revealed Erin’s isolation less starkly, but I cropped it to a different size and framed it differently so that they would not be tempted to hang it with the others.