A Most Uncommon Degree of Popularity (4 page)

But some of the women in this circle had houses every bit as big as mine. Why did my kid have to invite their kids over when they didn’t invite her? I had read Jane Austen. There were some situations in which dinner invitations didn’t have to be reciprocated; if you were too la-di-da to slum it in your guests’ home, then they didn’t have to invite you back or something like that. But surely that didn’t apply here.

Or did it? Had Erin’s cotton-fleece drawstring skirt turned her into Lady Catherine de Bourgh?

“As Mr. Goddard said,” I replied, cowardly invoking our new headmaster’s authority, “these kids are her friends. She needs to be able to invite her friends over to her house for casual get-togethers without worrying that it is going to hurt other kids’ feelings.”

“What we parents have to worry about,” preached Diane Sommers, “is the children who
like
to hurt other children’s feelings.” Then she turned to me with a simpering, wildly insincere smile. “Not that that applies in your daughter’s case, of course.”

That did it. I’m going to go to heaven, there can be no question about it. My slate has been forever wiped clean by the fact that I didn’t haul off and slug Diane Sommers. Talk about white suffering. These women were hurt because their daughters had been excluded. The girls might be over it by now, but the mothers weren’t. They felt bad and so they were trying to punish me by making me feel as bad as they did. I felt Annelise press her arm against mine in support.

Some of the alumnae mothers were slipping out of the room. You couldn’t blame them. To endure this conversation, your goal in life had to be keeping your child from ever feeling bad for one single minute of his or her—mostly her—entire life. Boys’ mothers seem a little saner than girls’ mothers, probably because girls’ mothers relive through their daughters every injury ever done to them when they were growing up.

Linda Fairling chimed in. “The books also caution against mothers duplicating the children’s social patterns. One of them calls it the ‘Mothers’ Mafia,’ women who collude or are complicitous in their daughters’ exclusionary actions.”

Collude or are complicitous in
… I hadn’t heard talk like that since I quit practicing law. She made it sound as if we could be prosecuted under the RICO Act when all we wanted to do was get our kids to places on time, which meant not driving with her. No wonder the alumnae mothers thought we were deranged. We were.

But Annelise, lovely, gentle, brown-eyed, please-don’t- criticize-me Annelise, had put her purse on an empty chair to save it for me. Did that make her a blond bitch-goddess mom?

Chris Goddard stepped forward again. “There’s no way that the school—or any other institution or person—can keep a child from occasionally feeling rejected or having hurt feelings. And, to be honest, the school’s efforts are going to be focused on identifying kids, whether bullies or victims, who are at significant emotional risk.”

That was, thank God, a conversation stopper. People were willing to criticize my child endlessly, but no one wanted to identify her own daughter as being at “significant emotional risk.”

“And,” he continued, “the fifth-grade teachers probably would have already spotted the hard-core bullies, but they report that this class is one of the nicest that they have seen.”

I appreciated that. It seemed as if he were standing up for me and my daughter. He wasn’t going to say flat-out that these other mothers were overreacting, but he was coming pretty close.

It was a good note to end on. Mrs. Shot stood back up and reminded us how to log on to the school’s Web site, and the meeting was over.

Fran Zimmerman, Diane Sommers, and Linda Fairling left the room quickly. They didn’t want to talk to us even though Diane Sommers needed to; she had e-mailed me yesterday about wanting to borrow my coffee urns. But Candace Singer was waiting by the water fountain when Blair, Annelise, and I came out of the multipurpose room.

Candace was a gray-eyed, medium-framed woman who wore a lot of navy. She was on the silent auction committee for this year’s Spring Fair. Blair and I were chairing the whole fair, but the auction committee was the most important committee.

I hoped that she wanted to talk to us about the silent auction, but her intent mom-with-a-mission look suggested that we weren’t going to be that lucky. She spoke to Blair. “I didn’t want to say anything at the meeting, but I thought you would want to know—”

My experience is that when people tell you things that they “think you want to know,” the issue at hand is usually something that
they
want you to know, but that you could have been just peachy without ever having heard word one.

“—that Brittany was rather rude to my Suzanne the other day.”

Brittany is Blair’s older daughter. She and her husband Bruce had given both their girls names that start with
B.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Blair said. “I shall certainly speak to her about it.”

“Oh, no, don’t—at least don’t say anything specific. Suzanne would die if she thought that I was interfering. But surely you will want to discuss the general need for politeness with her.”

Semifaux Southerner that she is, Blair did not like being lectured about the importance of good manners. “You will need to be a little more specific.”

Candace glanced up and down the hall as if there was something intensely secret in what she was about to say. “At lunch yesterday Suzanne was talking about a new dress that we got her, and apparently Brittany completely snubbed her and didn’t say one word about it. Brittany was sitting right in the middle of the table and refused to participate in the conversation. Just refused. Didn’t say a word. She made it very clear that she didn’t like the dress, and now Suzanne thinks that we should return it.”

I stared at her. This kid got a new dress. She liked her dress. But Brittany Branson did not say anything about the dress when it was described to her so Suzanne didn’t like the dress anymore.

“Yesterday?” Blair sounded relieved. “That explains it. Brittany had a headache yesterday. No wonder she wasn’t very chatty. She felt terrible. I had to pick her up early.”

“But is that an excuse for spoiling another child’s pleasure in a new dress?”

“I’m sure she didn’t mean to,” Blair apologized. “When she gets one of those headaches, it’s all that she can do to hold herself together.”

That explanation wasn’t good enough for Candace Singer. She had come into this conversation with a story—her daughter had been the victim; popular-girl Brittany had been the tormentor. Candace didn’t want a rational explanation for Brittany’s behavior; she wanted to make Brittany’s mother squirm.

Blair wasn’t squirming. She was furious. “I would suppose,” she said, her voice very slow, very Southern, “that—”

I didn’t think any of us needed to hear what Blair was supposing. Like me, Blair used to practice law, and she knew how to fight dirty. I upended my purse, letting its contents scatter across Blair’s feet.

“Oh, Lydia, you klutz,” Annelise said brightly. She, too, was an ex-lawyer and had clearly understood the intention behind my maneuver. She took Candace by the arm and started down the hall. “Tell me, Candace, where did you buy this dress? I never know where to take Elise anymore.”

Blair knelt down to help me gather up what had been in my purse. “Brittany had a migraine,” she whispered angrily. “She wasn’t rude. She was sick.”

I winced as I saw my cell phone on the floor next to the zippered pouch in which I carry Band-Aids and safety pins. Why hadn’t I thought about my poor phone before I started throwing stuff? I picked it up tenderly and was relieved to see that its little green window was still glowing.

“Apparently popular girls aren’t allowed to be sick,” I said, standing back up. It was so strange to talk about Erin and her friends this way. “Everything they do will be interpreted as a criticism of the less-confident kids.”

“Because their mothers are telling them to interpret it that way,” Blair snapped as she handed me my car keys.

All of this was ironic because Blair had had her own bad experiences with popular girls. On her first day of junior high, the girls she had eaten lunch with all through elementary school had pretended that there was no room for her at their lunch table. “Those little bitches wouldn’t even look at me,” she had reported.

And now someone was thinking of her daughter as one of the little bitches. Things do look different when your own child has a seat at the table.

Annelise was waiting for us at the door, and the three of us started walking toward the parking lot.

“Do our girls really have that much power?” Annelise asked. “Where do they get it from?”

“Maybe it’s our fault,” I said. “Is there a feminine for mafiosos? Mafiosas? Because apparently that’s what we are, the Mothers’ Mafia.” I also had seen this in one of the books on raising teenagers. “Conspiring to keep unworthy children from being included in birthday parties, play dates, and Scout troops.”

“That’s definitely me.” Annelise was rarely sarcastic, but she was now. “Trying to keep kids out of the Scout troop.”

Annelise had been the girls’ Brownie leader, and she had wanted to keep the troop together, but Girl Scouts seemed so uncool that at the end of Brownies it had fizzled. Keeping kids
out
of the troop had not been her problem.

We were heading toward her car. She had borrowed my 178-inch tablecloth last week. On her way to school this morning, she had picked it up from the dry cleaner’s, and it was in her car now.

“What happened to the whole ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ thing?” she continued. “Why does working together turn us into organized criminals?”

“Because the mothers of popular girls are supposed to be even worse than the popular girls themselves,” I said.

“I don’t know how you can say that.” Blair sniffed. “I thought we were a whole lot nicer to Candace Singer than she deserved.”

“That’s only because Lydia dumped her purse on your feet,” Annelise pointed out. “If we had let you, you would have confirmed every awful stereotype about mean, bitchy popular girls.”

“She criticized my daughter,” Blair defended herself. “What was I supposed to do?”

“Be glad that you have friends who dump their purses on your feet,” I said. I took my tablecloth from Annelise. “Do you think there’s any chance that our girls are as nasty as we always thought the popular girls were?”

“I just can’t believe that,” Annelise said. “Not about our girls.”

Our girls weren’t mean. They were lively and good-tempered, they were generous and confident, secure in their relationships with one another. That’s why other kids liked them. That’s why other kids noticed what they wore and wanted to be invited to our homes.

And that’s why the mothers of those other kids were accusing them of inappropriately exclusionary behavior.

The three of us were perfectly capable of standing here for another half an hour, saying the same things over and over, but coming toward us across the parking lot was Pam Ruby, one of the few boys’ mothers present at the coffee. She was accompanied by the new blond woman whom Pam introduced as Mary Paige Caudwell.

“Mary Paige and her daughter, Faith, just moved back to town from Texas,” Pam said, “but she went to school here. Her grandmother was Florence Paige, Mrs. Chester T. Paige.”

It took me a minute to place the name. The Alden School’s dreary and inadequate gym was named the “Mrs. Chester T. Paige Gymnasium.” So Mary Paige Caudwell wasn’t just an alumna; she was an alumna from a family with “a history of giving.” Having a history of giving scored a lot of points with the school’s development office.

Blair and Annelise shook hands with Mrs. Chester T. Paige’s granddaughter. My arms were linked under the folds of the plastic-swaddled tablecloth so I had to make do with a nod. I tried to make it an incredibly friendly nod; I didn’t want anyone thinking me the stuck-up mother of a bitchy popular girl.

We chatted about nothing for a moment, and then Mary Paige asked about getting her daughter—Mrs. Chester T.’s great-granddaughter—onto the soccer team.

“Oh, goodness,” Blair answered. “I hate to say this in light of that meeting, but the team’s been full for years.”

For all that we are supposed to be meritocrats, the soccer team that our girls play on is as closed and restricted as a debutante ball. Our kids “earned” their place on the team not because of their talent, but because we, their parents, had been good with speed dials and fax machines back when they were five.

The weekend soccer teams are organized not by the school, but by the city. A parent-coach assembles a bunch of five-year-olds who spend at least one season swarming randomly around the ball as if they were a little pack of honeybees. Then if the kids—and more important, the parents—get along, they pretty much stay together for years. Because the league wants the kids to be playing, not sitting on the bench, there is a limit to how many can be on a team. Until a player leaves, the coach can’t add additional players just because the potential new player is an exceptionally talented athlete or, as happens more often on the girls’ teams, is everyone’s best friend. Otherwise the cool teams would have forty girls on them, and the players would be better prepared for beauty college—as they would spend their time playing with one another’s hair—than for an athletic competition.

“There are other teams with vacancies,” Annelise said.

“But this is the team that she wants to be on,” Mary Paige said. “Don’t you think that the league would understand the difficulties associated with moving into the area?”

“They may understand,” I said. The tablecloth was getting heavy, and my arms were starting to sweat against the plastic. “But they won’t do anything. Every year someone tries to get them to change their mind, and it never works. We’ve had some of the city’s finest legal talent threatening to sue to get their kids on a particular team, and it doesn’t work.”

“It can’t hurt to make the call, can it? Perhaps asking nicely will be more effective than threatening to sue.”

There was a little edge to her voice. I hadn’t intended to be flip, although it was true about parents threatening to sue, but apparently my new self—stuck-up bitch-goddess mom—had shone through.