A Most Uncommon Degree of Popularity (14 page)

I grimaced. “I fully support my husband’s interest in educating the children in a school affiliated with his faith.”

Chris tapped the back of his hand and peered across his desk as if trying to see the crib sheet written on mine, but beyond that he said nothing.

“So why am I here?” I asked. “What do you need?”

“I suppose it goes without saying that I need something,” he said, his tone not one bit sheepish. “I need someone to host a buffet to launch the new Capital Campaign next spring.”

The Capital Campaign was a fund-raising drive designed to, among other things, improve Mrs. Chester T. Paige’s gym. “When next spring?” The fair was going to blow a great big hole in my spring. I really didn’t think I should take on anything else, especially as we couldn’t predict how long Jamie’s trial would last.

“The week before Spring Break. We’re not asking you; we’re asking for someone like you. A big house in Northwest, a family with kids in the lower and middle school, probably without a strong alumnae connection. I don’t know who picked this campaign committee, but there aren’t enough lower- and middle-school families, and almost none of what people call ‘new’”—he used his first fingers to make quotation marks—“families. If this isn’t a schoolwide campaign, it will be a disaster.”

I knew that Chris’s fund-raising abilities had been a big part of why he had been hired. “Julie Rossi would be a prime candidate.” Julie had three kids in the school; her youngest was in Thomas’s grade. “But she is redoing her kitchen this year. And Tricia Shepherd is about to rip up all her bathrooms. So you might try my neighbors Mimi and Ben Gold. They aren’t redoing anything at the moment.”

He was shaking his head. “Why aren’t you on this committee? Who else knows the status of everyone’s plumbing?”

“There are actually quite a few others,” I answered. “When you live in an old house, plumbing is an interesting subject.”

“I’ll remember that the next time I am stuck for conversation. I will ask about wall flanges and ball-cock assemblies.”

“And we will have answers.”

Then there was silence. His mission had been accomplished, and we had exchanged the necessary amount of parent-headmaster pleasantries, probably more than was really necessary. But Chris was not pushing his chair back, glancing at his phone, or sending any other messages that the meeting was over.

“Is that your son?” I gestured to the photograph on the credenza. It was the one in which the boy had an odd shadow along his nose. “Is he at Cornell?”

He nodded. “Did you go there?”

I had. “I recognized the building.” I asked him if his son liked the school, and he said he thought that he did.

“You only
think
?”

“No, no, I know. Considering everything, he and I do have a reasonably decent relationship. His grandparents did a very good job with him.”

“Do you see him often?”

“As often as I see anyone whom I’m not paid to see.”

Chris said this with such a light, pleasant tone that I could not take it personally even though he clearly was being paid to see me.

I suddenly had a vision of him not as a lonely person, but as an isolated one, someone who had deliberately chosen to have few intimate relationships. That was probably what would make him a success as the head of this school, his ability to remain disengaged.

Whereas I—as I kept having to tell my husband—was all about relationships. All of my various pursuits—raising my kids, keeping my house going, staying married, and taking pictures of people without shadows on their noses—involved relationships. Jamie and Chris had goals; I had relationships.

So true to my relationship-nuturing
self, I went home and warned Mimi that she would get a call asking her to host the kickoff dinner for the school’s Capital Campaign. As I had anticipated, she liked the idea. “But you’ve got to have the dog at your house and let people park in your driveway,” she said.

Our very pretty, very theme park–looking street was narrow. The city maps labeled Mimi’s side of the street as No Parking, but there was only one sign, rather randomly placed in someone’s forsythia hedge. A widower on our side of the street kept posting very official-looking No Parking signs in front of his property. This was, of course, illegal and morally indefensible, but the family on Mimi’s side who had chosen to fight the battle were using such very heavy legal weaponry that the rest of us were cowering, hoping not to get caught in what was still a metaphorical crossfire.

We theme-park residents do like our lawsuits.

Then it was December. Needless
to say, I took on way too many projects, but the massive baking binges and the overly elaborate decorating schemes were lots of fun. Thomas had a party with twenty seven-year-olds decorating gingerbread houses that I had made out of graham crackers and hot glue. For weeks afterward we had sugar sprinkles in the carpets and dried-up streaks of colored frosting under the first-floor faucets.

Of course, all these happy little reindeer games could not conceal that my family was not living up to the ropes of evergreen garlands that festooned the front-hall banister. Jamie was MIA. He was spending most of every week in Houston, and he did not go to a single Christmas party, including the one put on by his firm.

Erin, while not quite roadkill, continued to be knocked down by Faith Caudwell’s relentless pursuit of popularity. Fortunately some of the other mothers in the ensemble had become incensed that their daughters had been left out of Faith’s little rotation of Friday-night sleepovers, and so a few social events for all eleven girls in the ensemble were scheduled. This, of course, angered the mothers of the girls who weren’t in the ensemble. They took their complaints to Mrs. Shot, the principal of the middle school, and she answered them by saying that she had warned Mr. Goddard that this was precisely what would happen if he enlarged the ensemble, that there was really no point in coming to her, it hadn’t been her decision.

I stayed out of that battle.

Rather than being by herself on Friday night, Erin started baby-sitting a lot, which certainly made her very popular among the parents of small children. Concerned about her mood, I took her to the pediatrician, and he spoke to her privately for almost twenty minutes, which is a very long time in that practice. He asserted that she was not depressed, and then he made me feel like an overreacting private-school mom (which wasn’t a great leap), but I decided that it was better to worry about your child being depressed when she wasn’t than fail to worry about it when she was.

At least I decided to trust him and not insist on Erin seeing an adolescent psychiatrist. Such a person would have, no doubt, recommended that she be institutionalized as being preverbal because she wouldn’t have said a word.

Blair’s daughter started her period,
the first of our girls to do so. It gave her great status. A week later, Faith announced that she had gotten hers as well. Now Erin had something else to feel defective about—she hadn’t started her period. Menstruation had become a competitive sport among these girls.

Erin started carrying a little zippered pouch with a Kotex pad in her backpack, but she still hadn’t needed to use it when we went to my mother’s for Christmas.

After I quit working at EPA, I felt that I needed to justify myself to my mother. She had not been happy staying at home, and so I felt that I needed to explain why, despite all the societal resources invested in my education, I was going to stay home, too. Then I realized that she was taking my contentedness as a reproach. She did not view her unhappiness as her own fault—nothing was ever her fault. It was society’s fault. Intelligent women could not be satis- fied in a capitalistic, patriarchal culture. The fact that my sister-in-law and I were happy with our differing mixes of domestic and professional activities—Suzanne was a busy orthodontist—suggested that perhaps Mother’s thesis was wrong.

And my mother was never wrong.

•  •  •

Jamie went straight from Indiana
to Texas. Jury selection was scheduled for January 10.

His clients had almost certainly engaged in some dreadful accounting procedures that had made a lot of people lose jobs and savings, but Jamie believed that he could put on a viable defense. The indictment wasn’t well-written, and so while Jamie would have been in trouble in the face of a well-crafted federal civil suit, this criminal charge was questionable. Furthermore, the prosecutors handling the trial didn’t fully understand all the dreadful accounting procedures, and Jamie did.

So he felt confident that he would be able to persuade a judge to throw out a lot of the evidence and several of the charges. He also felt that there was a good chance that he could get the jury to acquit on what was left. Whatever the clients had done, they hadn’t done this.

But clever legal tactics weren’t going to be enough. When the trial was over, the jurors had to go home and face their neighbors. The jurors, the press, and the public needed someone to hate, and Jamie needed to find someone for them to hate besides his clients.

Many of the clients had second wives—gorgeous, ambitious, ill-educated young women who had gone almost overnight from shopping at Target to shopping on the top floor of Neiman Marcus. Their spending patterns made for delicious reading; their clothes, their parties, and their interior-design extravagances. Jamie’s firm was making a “court of public opinion” case not against the wives, but against the people who had helped the wives spend the money. Personal shoppers, stylists, and florists sensed the insecurity behind these young women’s aggressiveness. These young women were pursuing social status as wholeheartedly as a middle-school girl would pursue popularity. The lifestyle advisors only had to say, “The best people do this,” and the wallets opened up.

It made for fun reading. In one client’s home, an interior designer had noticed the envelope of a kid’s school pictures and had offered to “pick up” a little frame. Three weeks later the client got a bill for a three-hundred-dollar custom mat and frame created for this routine, standard-sized photo of a stepchild whom the second wife barely knew. A florist managed to persuade one young woman that she needed a weekly standing order so that she would have fresh flowers in all of her “principal rooms”—whether the rooms were going to be used that week or not—and the deliveries continued even when the family was out of town. Interior designers took “oh, how nice” for an approval. When one young thing said that she didn’t really like the orange tiger lilies in a wallpaper, the designer ordered a custom run of the paper with magenta tiger lilies. Fashion stylists helped the wives put together ensembles, but not a wardrobe. One of these wives bought seven very expensive black knee-length skirts in sixty days, and she still didn’t have anything to wear. Each skirt had detailing or an embellishment that kept it from being combined with anything but the one jacket it was purchased with.

The popular media picked up on the theme quickly, using it to create a backlash against the cable-television makeover shows and every other kind of stylist. The coverage quickly outgrew Jamie and his case, but that was fine. An antistylist culture was in the air, and Jamie’s clients would benefit.

The strategy had not been Jamie’s idea, but he had authorized it.

He appeared on every talk show that would have him. He needed the public to think of him as one of the good guys. There was no live television coverage of the trial itself, but once jury selection was over, Court TV spent an hour each evening summarizing the day’s proceedings. Jamie was having his fifteen minutes of fame.

Chris Goddard called and asked if there was anything the school needed to be doing for my kids.

“I don’t think so.”

“I was assistant principal at a private school in California. We had a lot of high-profile parents, some of whom didn’t behave very well. So we had some challenges.”

I made a face. “I can imagine.”

“No, you can’t imagine, and you should be grateful for that.” Then he sobered. “Have your kids said anything?”

“Thomas says that kids have seen snippets of Jamie on TV, but, of course, they are clueless about the case itself.”

“Aren’t we all?” I sensed that he was smiling. “What about Erin? Has she said anything?”

“No.” I took a breath. “But she wouldn’t. What’s going on?” Obviously something was.

“Most of the attention she is getting is positive.”

I didn’t like the sound of “most.” “Is someone saying that the other kids shouldn’t talk to her because her dad is representing bad people?”

“More or less.”

“It’s Faith Caudwell, isn’t it?”

He couldn’t answer that directly, but, of course, it was. “The sixth-grade teachers are spending some time on the case where John Adams represented British soldiers, emphasizing how everyone is entitled to legal representation.”

I sighed with grateful relief. This really was a wonderful school. The teachers were changing the curriculum in order to provoke some meaningful discussion of an issue that might be used to torment my child. This is what you are paying for when you get the tuition bill … and it is worth it.

Blair was giving a party.
Looking at our houses, you would think that we entertained all the time. The big kitchens, the open spaces, and the multilevel decks are ideal for crowds. In my cellar are bays of shelving where I keep two thirty-cup coffee urns, boxes of wineglasses, a folding banquet table, twelve stackable catering chairs, and twenty-four bamboo trays for guests to use at buffets. Mimi has twelve more chairs identical to mine, Blair has two more folding banquet tables and fifty white china dinner plates, Annelise has a portable coatrack, three beautiful copper tubs for chilling adult beverages, and countless bright plastic ones for kiddie drinks.

And so what kinds of parties do we give? The end-of-the-season soccer–family potluck and the going-away party for the one kid in the fifth grade whom no one really liked. The only times we have adults-only parties are when we host the Parent Service Association Volunteer Appreciation Tea or when we open our homes for fund-raisers, as Mimi will for the school’s Capital Campaign in a few months.