A Most Uncommon Degree of Popularity (18 page)

They were running from me. I wasn’t their rescuer. I was the bad guy, the eternal, ever-spying, East Berlin mom. Humiliated, knowing that Jamie and Erin had seen this, I went into the bookstore.

The store has three levels and most of the racks were five feet high. The girls could easily hide from me if that’s what they were trying to do, and clearly that was what they were trying to do.

I took out my cell phone. I knew that Blair and Bruce were taking his parents to the Kennedy Center, and I had seen Mimi’s car pull out just as we did. So I called Annelise.

“But they can’t be in Bethesda,” she said, “they are at Faith’s tonight, and they were going to go to a movie in Virginia.”

I didn’t want to hold a meeting about this, not with my family across the street glowering at me. “Annelise, I know what these girls look like. They were in front of Barnes and Noble, talking to a group of older guys.”

“Then tell them not to move. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

“I’m not with them. As soon as they saw me, they dashed into the bookstore.”

“Lydia! You let them wander off?”

Why did I have to defend myself? “There was no ‘let’ about it. They think that I am pursuing them and they are hiding from me.”

“Could you go look for them?”

“No, Annelise, I can’t. They are safe inside the store, and I am not going to humiliate myself even more. You can call the store’s security and have them paged.”

“But that will embarrass them,” Annelise said. “They will hate that.”

“Annelise! Don’t you think that they deserve to be embarrassed?”

“I suppose.” Then Annelise came to her senses. “Oh, my God, they deserve to be strung up by their thumbs.” She ended the call quickly, and I went back across the street.

“Is everyone ready for ice cream?” I tried to sound lively. I wanted the rest of the family to believe that we were having fun. Wasn’t that part of my job? To make sure that everyone was having fun?

If so, I was failing. Erin and Jamie were silent as we walked toward the ice-cream parlor. Jamie didn’t order any ice cream, and Erin didn’t finish hers.

My compromises were terrible. Just as my going to Blair’s party without Jamie had appeased no one, this plan just to speak to the girls had alienated absolutely everyone except my sweet Thomas. He told me twice that his ice cream was yummy, and back at home, he was more cuddly than ever.

“I love you, Mommy,” he said when I went in to get him organized for bed.

My heart melted and my stomach turned—if your body cavity can have that much going on at the same time. My son thought that no one else loved me so he needed to love me extra hard.

Monday was Presidents’ Day. Jamie went up to see his parents and would fly straight to Houston from Pittsburgh. The kids were, of course, off school, and in the middle of the morning Mimi’s son, Gideon, came over to play with Thomas. Mimi followed him and filled me in on what had happened.

Annelise had the girls paged, and so they were sitting in the manager’s office when she arrived, every bit as mortified by this public roundup as Annelise predicted they would be. “At first,” Mimi said, “they told us that they had been planning on going to a movie near Faith’s house in Virginia. But they arrived late, and the movie was sold out. Mary Paige had already left, and so they decided to get on the subway and go to Bethesda to see the movie there. At least that was the first version of the story.”

“They took the Metro?” Late last summer we had let the four girls take the subway by themselves from Tenley to Friendship Heights, a five-minute trip with no intervening stops. They had walked across the street, bought themselves ice cream, and come back home. We had figured that as city kids they needed to know how to get around, and they had been thrilled with themselves. But that carefully controlled daytime experiment was very different from a long, after-dark trip that involved changing trains at Metro Center.

“Yes, they took the Metro,” Mimi said with such a steel-eyed look that I knew her daughter was in a whole peck of trouble. “But it gets worse.”

As soon as Annelise had made it clear to Elise that she was calling the movie theater to verify that the movie had sold out, poor Elise had caved and spilled the whole story. The girls had never planned on going to the movie in the first place. After Mary Paige had dropped them off, they had gone directly to the Metro station.

Even though the plan was unquestionably Faith’s, the other three girls had gone along with it, and their mothers grounded them for two weeks. Not only couldn’t they see their friends, but they couldn’t use the phone or the Internet, either. And my friends didn’t fool around.
You have a question about homework?
they would say to their loophole-seeking daughters.
Fine, you tell me what it is, and I will make the call.

This punishment was the talk of the sixth grade, and at first Faith gloated that she had escaped any consequence. But whatever the sixth-grade kids thought of the punishment, the sixth-grade moms were pleased at how sternly Blair, Mimi, and Annelise were dealing with the escapade.
You see what will happen,
they said to their own kids,
if you go somewhere without telling us.

This was the advantage of being in the village that it took to raise a child. Now it was clear to a greater part of the sixth grade what the standards were, and all the village dwellers were hoping that because three women had enforced the consequences of misbehavior, the rest of them wouldn’t have to endure two long weeks of living with an outraged, sullen twelve-year-old.

But because she hadn’t been willing to face her daughter’s displeasure, Mary Paige Caudwell had not conformed to the standards as the community now understood them to be. She had pitched her tent outside the village wall.

At the beginning of the second week of the girls’ punishment I went to the lower school. The silent auction catalog subcommittee—the lower-school moms who had been insisting on the .phb files—had decided to take a tiny fraction off their huge printing bill by having volunteers collate and staple the catalog. It made no sense; leaving the color graphics off one page of the catalog would have more than paid for the collating and stapling, but the egos of this subcommittee were deeply invested in these color graphics, As a result, five grown, well-educated women were going to be spending their morning collating and stapling. I showed up just to be sure that there were enough volunteers, and when I saw that there were—the lower school always had enough volunteers—I went over to the middle school to see what had been left in the Spring Fair mail drop.

A coffee urn had been set up in the hall outside the middle-school office. A group of sixth-grade mothers was idling around it. There were both boys’ mothers and girls’ mothers; my best guess about the nature of the group was that all their children took Spanish and so the coffee urn had been set up for some event related to the Spanish classes.

Mary Paige Caudwell was among them, and she came straight up to me. “I suppose you’ve heard about what Rachel, Brittany, and Elise are enduring?” Her voice sounded a little forced. “Isn’t it the silliest thing to punish them like that? Hanging out is what teenagers do. It’s so unrealistic to expect anything else.”

Did she expect
me
to publicly criticize Mimi, Blair, and Annelise? Clearly she was hoping that I would.

Not having a village map, Mary Paige hadn’t intended to pitch her tent outside its walls, but now that she realized she had, she wanted back inside. But she was not going to move her tent; she wanted me to move the village wall. She wanted me to say that she was right.

“I think that the issue was the long, unauthorized subway trip,” I said.

“So they forgot to call.” She shrugged, dismissing the elaborate planning that had gone into the escapade. “They’re kids. Kids forget.”

She had no idea whom she was dealing with. I had decades of dealing with a mother who was never wrong, and I knew what to do. It’s impossible to get such people to admit to being wrong, so what you did was just not care. If you stood up to them, trying to show that they had been wrong, they fought harder. What killed them was the notion that you didn’t care.

“I wasn’t involved in this,” I said. “It’s none of my business.”

“Oh, yes, but come on, surely you think their families are being more than a little overprotective?”

“It doesn’t concern me.” Then I looked straight at her. “As you well know, my daughter wasn’t there.”

She blinked, surprised. She hadn’t been thinking about the fact that had any of the other families initiated this plan, my daughter would have been included.

How dare she be surprised? How dare she forget what her daughter had done to mine?

Prepared only to defend herself against being a poor disciplinarian, she was caught off-guard now. She faltered. “Ah … I only have five seat belts.”

Blair only had five seat belts; Annelise only had five seat belts. They worked it out. When there were more than four kids, they both drove. So if this was some sort of belated excuse for what she and her daughter had done to mine, I was not going to listen. “Again I wasn’t involved.” And I turned away, a flat-out snub, and instantly began speaking to another one of the mothers—every one of whom had been listening to my conversation with Mary Paige—inquiring with great interest about the Spanish-language curriculum even though Erin was taking French.

Mary Paige had apparently left this encounter smarting with a sense of defeat. She had gone home—of course, I had all this fifthhand—and tongue-lashed Faith. Then at school the next day Faith, who had inherited the “I’m never wrong” gene, tried to convince the other three girls that they had had a really great time in Bethesda that night, even though I had seen at first glance that they hadn’t.

That evening our phone rang. I answered it, and well-mannered Alden alumnae offspring that she is, Faith Caudwell identified herself and asked to speak to Erin. As far as I knew, she had never called Erin before.

Erin was doing her homework at the kitchen table. I covered the mouthpiece of the receiver. “It’s Faith,” I said. “For you.”

“For
me
?” Erin sounded horrified. Four months ago she would have bubbled with delight to get a call from Faith. “I don’t want to talk to her.”

“Shall I say that you are asleep?”

“No. It’s eight-thirty. I’ll sound like a big dork. No one goes to sleep this early.”

“I could say that you are doing something with Thomas.”

“But he
is
asleep.”

“She’s not going to know that.”

“Okay. That’s good. Then say that.”

So in my best prim secretary voice, I informed Faith that Erin was engaged with her brother, but that I would pass along the message.

“Will she be able to call back afterward?” Faith asked.

“No. We don’t let her use the phone after nine.” That was true.

“I guess I’ll see her at school,” Faith was suddenly not sounding so confident.

“I suspect so,” I said sweetly.

•  •  •

The prosecution case in Jamie’s
trial had gone on way too long. Every single commentator said that. Jamie had just started presenting his case, and he said that the jury was too weary to listen. Someone in the press corps had had a particularly nasty cold, and it had spread to the other journalists, the lawyers, and now the jury. Newspaper accounts recorded that everyone in the courtroom was slumping, looking bewildered and miserable.

And now, after being a media darling, Jamie was getting negative publicity.

Trial observers were seeing what he had sensed all along—as guilty of so many things as the defendants probably were, there was a very good chance that they were going to dodge a criminal conviction. So where Jamie had once been described as “affable,” he was now “slick.” He had gone from being “intelligent” to being “crafty.” “Longtime Quaker roots” had become a “background of traditional privilege.”

He said that it was all in a day’s work. “We fed the media machine every day; we used it as long as we could. We knew there would be a backlash.”

But he did mind. He wouldn’t admit it, but he did.

Talking to him on the phone was getting more and more difficult. I never knew when to expect his calls—he didn’t have much control over his schedule—and then he was so distant from our lives here that I didn’t know what to say.
The kids are fine. I’m fine. The weather’s fine. The house’s fine. And oh, wow, I bought some new hangers for the front-hall closet, and man, oh, man, is it ever great to finally have enough hangers in there.

Sunday afternoon, two weeks after Presidents’ Day weekend, he called. I actually did have news for a change. Rachel, Elise, and Brittany had finished serving their punishment, and right away they had called Erin—not Faith—wanting her to go to a movie. I mentioned that to Jamie, but he did not appreciate the significance of it. So I took the cordless phone over to the sofa and sat down, pulling a pillow across my lap, determined to be a good listener. “So how are things?”

“They just suck.” He had never been so negative before. “There’s no describing what an ordeal this is. It’s like we are all trapped in this horrible thing. We just can’t seem to move any faster. I see the jury. They are completely confused, but they don’t care anymore.”

“You know that in the long run, once they start to deliberate, most juries really do want to do the right thing.”

“But it will be too late by then. They’ll have to go with the last thing they remember understanding, which happened back in January.”

“Or maybe they will just decide that they trust you more than anyone else.”

“Which is the wrong reason for coming to a verdict. I’m never doing another criminal trial again.”

I knew he felt that way now, but I had to wonder if six months after this trial was over, he would find himself missing the visibility and the intensity. He would remember the legal strategizing; he would forget the emphasis on personality. If that happened, then he would do this again. And again. “I wish there was something I could do.”