A Most Uncommon Degree of Popularity (15 page)

We keep meaning to entertain a lot, we think of ourselves as people who entertain a lot—that’s why we buy all this stuff—but in truth, we have what the etiquette columnist Miss Manners calls “faux social lives.” We rarely just have friends over although we look as if we do. More life in the theme park.

Blair’s party was for adults, but its basic impulse was professional, not personal. Her husband, Bruce, is a lobbyist. His firm was merging with another firm, and I didn’t understand the details, but Branson—their last name—was going to be part of the firm’s title.

Bruce Branson is vibrant, smart, and persuasive, and he does not sweat the small stuff. He never worries about the whereabouts of his car keys, his attaché case, his umbrella, or his passport. He is the sort of person who always leaves the last page of his original document in the copying machine. He has instead allied himself with two detailed-oriented women, his wife and his assistant. Blair rescues him at home; his assistant at work.

Blair never seems to mind dropping whatever she is doing and taking him an extra set of car keys. She never buys expensive umbrellas because Bruce will lose them. I would mind having a husband who was so unable to take care of himself, but I suppose being the rescuer makes her feel powerful.

She was giving a party to celebrate Bruce’s success. His parents were coming in from out of town.

“It’s going to be Presidents’ Day weekend,” she said right after finding out from me which caterer Mimi was using for the Capital Campaign party so that she could use someone different. “And you have to promise that Jamie will come.”

“What?” Promise that Jamie would come? Why? “You know I have no idea whether or not he will be in town.”

“But he was home last week for Martin Luther King Day. Surely the trial will take a long weekend for Presidents’ Day, too.”

I was suddenly feeling cautious. “That doesn’t mean he will be home.” The lawyers at Jamie’s firm prided themselves on always being more prepared than the other guys. If an unexpected issue arose during a trial, they instantly invested the hours and hours required to master the subject. They hammered their opponents with the breadth of their knowledge. “Don’t ask us a question,” was their motto, “unless you want an answer that will take you eight hours to read.”

“But if he’s home, he will come, won’t he?” Blair asked.

“Blair, I have no idea. He didn’t go to any Christmas parties, and that was before the trial had even started. So if it’s a sit-down dinner with place cards and such, if you need to know, then I’d better say no.”

“I don’t need an answer right away,” she said, “but you know how it is. Everyone knows that we know you. And Bruce’s parents have been following the case on Court TV, and they really do want to meet him. You know how it is.”

Somewhere during that speech, well before the second “you know how it is,” she had stopped looking at me. My husband, my very tired, very absent husband, was now a sought-after commodity.

Oh, no, now
he
was popular.

I certainly hoped that his popularity wasn’t going to be as painful as Erin’s.

I was at Blair’s to drop off some Spring Fair contracts, but I needed to get home to cook. One of the mothers in Thomas’s class was on jury duty for what might be a two-week murder trial. The other second-grade moms had set up a three-day-a-week meal rotation. A family from church was also needing dinners brought in because that mother had broken one ankle and sprained the other.

So I thought I would be clever, and I grabbed the same date for both families. Since people in crisis usually like comfort food, I bought about seven hundred pounds of pot roast and just as I was flouring the meat, the person in charge of the jury-duty meals called to confirm that I was providing the dinner that evening and to ask me what I was making. I told her.

“Oh.” Her voice was timid and anxious. “You didn’t know that the Eriksons don’t eat beef?”

I paused. “Obviously I did not.”

“Didn’t someone tell you?”

I paused again. “No, no one did.”

“Oh, I guess we must have assumed that all their friends knew.”

Maybe they did, but Patricia Erikson and I weren’t, in truth, friends. I didn’t have anything against her; I’d certainly talk to her a mile a minute if we were stuck together in the grocery-store line, but that had never happened. I was making this meal more out of institutional and sisterly solidarity than out of a particular closeness to Pat.

“I’m sorry,” the voice on the phone apologized again, “but this is something that they feel quite strongly about.”

“And I suppose that they don’t want lasagna or a casserole.”

You might think that people who were getting free home-cooked meals would be more grateful than fussy, but you would be wrong. Maybe in normal parts of the nation you could take people a casserole, but here in theme-park, aging-yuppie, food-snob land, the organizer of these meals always specified “no lasagna, no casseroles,” although you could never be sure if it was the family who was so picky or the high-control, messiah-complex organizer.

In some ways I could understand. No-boil noodles, sauce from a jar, and pre-shredded packaged mozzarella the family in distress could have made for themselves. But Mimi made a lasagna with spinach, four kinds of cheese, and a béchamel sauce that everyone adored. And Annelise, who described her cooking as nouvelle Wisconsin, had a three-sausage, sweet-pepper hot dish that was fabulous, but definitely a casserole.

I stared at these masses of bloody animal tissue oozing on my big cutting board. Droplets of blood had hardened in the flour, forming purplish pellets. I sent a quick e-mail to the organizer for the church-family’s dinners. “They do eat beef, don’t they?”

No, came back the answer almost instantly. They were vegetarian. Didn’t I know that?

Obviously I didn’t.

I am from the Midwest. We eat beef. I have no decent vegetarian recipes except Mimi’s spinach lasagna. So I called my mother. She is a very good cook. Smart women are allowed to be good cooks.
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
is worthy of one’s intelligence. But she is reluctant to share recipes.

“Mother, I’m in a bind, and I’m your only daughter. If you are going to give a recipe away to anyone, it’s me.”

She is not without a sense of humor. “I don’t want to come to your house and have my own recipe served to me.”

“Mother, I need a vegetarian recipe. I’m not going to serve it to you.”

She thought for a moment. “You can get fresh basil and fresh thyme, can’t you?”

We theme-park residents can always buy fresh herbs. I copied down a recipe for a zucchini thing. “I used half-and-half instead of the heavy cream,” she said, “and cut the butter by a third.”

But when I went back to the grocery store for the zucchini, basil, and thyme, I bought a quart of heavy cream and two pounds of butter. I was so seriously pissed off at these two families for their eating habits that I decided to kill them in the only way I knew how—with dairy fat.

While I was cooking, my laptop kept chirping at me from the kitchen desk, indicating that I was receiving e-mail. While my beautifully minced shallots were browning themselves, I opened my in-box. The request for silent auction donations had just gone out, and unbeknownst to me, donations had to be—or so announced this set of high-control volunteers—accompanied by a .phb file. It was mandatory. The number of subsequent e-mails that I had received with the subject line “silent auction” suggested that this was a problem.

Before I could read any of them, the phone rang. The caller shrieked that she had no idea what a .phb file was.

“It’s from a digital camera.”

“I don’t have a digital camera,” she snapped. “Well, I mean, we do have one, but I don’t know how to use it.”

“Maybe your kids could take the picture.” Kids always knew how to work digital cameras.

“My kid? He’s a junior. Do you know what junior year is like? Do you have any idea how hard those kids have to work? And he is doing winter track. So when he is supposed to take a silent auction photo?”

I had no idea. “Let me look into this.”

But before I could I got another call. “Every year my husband’s mother makes a perfect copy of a Disney princess dress for American Girl dolls.”

“I know. They sell for the earth.”

“And do you think that she has a digital camera?”

No, I didn’t suppose that she did.

I called the chairman of the silent auction catalog subcommittee.

She was belligerent. Obviously mine was not the first such call she had received. “We spent hours and hours last year scanning pictures for the catalog. If people just submit a file, it will save us so much time.”

“But what if people can’t submit a file? What if they don’t have digital cameras?”

The thought hadn’t occurred to her. She was a lower-school parent, and half of the kids in the first and second grades had had Web sites created for them within eighteen hours of their births. Grandma and Grandpa would log on to the Internet (assuming that Grandma and Grandpa could log on to the Internet) to see the pictures of the newborn. This mother couldn’t imagine a family without a digital camera any more than one without a DVD player, a fax machine, or toothbrushes.

I would loathe being a scholarship family at this school.

I raised the possibility of not having pictures in the catalog. Last year had been the first year we had had pictures. In fact, until three years ago, there hadn’t even been a catalog. People just roamed through the tables looking for something that they wanted to bid on.

“We can’t do that. We can’t have pictures of some items and not of others.”

I didn’t see why not.

Eventually I got them to admit that the .phb files weren’t mandatory, but they were unwilling to send out a note saying that. If people called and asked, they would say that it was all right, but people had to call them.

Or people could just not donate. That was what was going to happen.

•  •  •

Then Chris Goddard blew his
first snow-day call.

The Washington metropolitan area does not handle snow well. We don’t get heavy snowstorms often enough for people to learn how to drive well in the snow. Some drivers happily barrel along at sixty-eight miles an hour and then are startled to discover that the road is turning and their car isn’t, or vice versa. Others start driving five miles an hour at the first snowflake, which drives the people going sixty-eight miles an hour nuts, and people going sixty-eight miles an hour on ice really ought to remain as calm as possible.

The big suburban school districts close a lot. The outer edges of their jurisdictions are virtually rural with narrow, winding roads that quickly become impassable. So if the kids along those bus routes aren’t going to be able to travel safely, the suburban schools take a snow day.

The District of Columbia—the city—tries never to close. Most of its students walk to school or take public transportation along well-traveled roads. Furthermore, too many of those kids are dependent on the school-provided breakfasts and lunches for their daily nutrition. For middle-class kids, a snow day means a fun day of sledding and watching videos, but a lot of kids in the city public schools aren’t middle class, and a snow day for them means a cold apartment and an empty refrigerator.

The private schools in Northwest each make their own assessment, and when I got up Thursday morning, two days after my cooking adventure, I logged on to the Web site and saw that Alden was opening two hours late, which seemed like a good call. That’s what Sidwell, Maret, and the Cathedral schools were all doing.

But at 7:35 a.m. which is much, much too late for this kind of decision to be made, the phone trees and the e-mail lists got activated. The Alden School would be closed for the day. The parking lot hadn’t been plowed. There was nowhere for the teachers to park and nowhere for the parents to drop off the kids.

Two of the reasons that it was much, much too late for this decision were sitting in my kitchen—Jake Rabern and Charlie Carruthers, two second-grade boys. Their mothers both worked full-time, and they had an agreement to trade snow days. But for delayed openings they often dropped the boys here, which was fine. I didn’t mind having them for two hours. I didn’t really want to have them for the whole day.

It was Jill Rabern’s turn to have stayed home, but she was a reading specialist in the Arlington County schools, a system that was opening on time. By the time I had finished my share of the phone tree, I knew that Jill would already be in her classroom. Unlike the classrooms at Alden, Jill’s didn’t have a phone or Internet access. Any message I left for her she wouldn’t pick up until lunch, and then she wouldn’t be able to leave until a substitute could be found.

So I called Sue Carruthers, who worked at a trade association, but she said that it was Jill’s turn to take the kids and so she was not coming home. I should call Jill. I pointed out that it was impossible to call Jill. No, it wasn’t, Sue replied. All I had to do was reach the principal of the school and persuade him that this was an emergency. He would take the message to Jill, and he would cover her classroom himself if she truly needed to leave.

I did not want to make that call. I didn’t think I should have to make that call. But Sue said that she was in a meeting. She couldn’t call Jill. I would have to. After all—and she came very close to actually saying this—I wasn’t in a meeting; I wasn’t at work.

I try very hard to fight the idea that working mothers and nonworking ones are adversaries, but at the moment I did feel adversarial. Sue was trying to take advantage of me, and she was going to get away with it because I wasn’t going to call Jill’s principal. There was no point. I would have to lie my head off before I would be able to convince a principal that this was a true emergency.

A half hour later Sue called back. Her son might be at my house, but his noon dose of Ritalin was at school.

“Do you have anything you can give him?” she asked. “He does best on short-acting Ritalin, but if you only have long-acting, that’s probably okay. Even Focalin would be all right.”