With Friends Like These: A Novel (11 page)

“Quincy was a little cold,” Chloe said with uncharacteristic certainty. “Jules had gone to all that trouble to make dinner.”

“Come on. That show was pure calculation. I was waiting for Placido Domingo to serve the pasta. Jules guilts you into letting her have her way. Maybe Quincy’s sick of it.”

“What went on back there wasn’t about where we’d go on vacation. I can’t imagine Quincy cares that much. I don’t.”

I did. “You’re not annoyed we didn’t pick Vegas?”

She turned toward me. “Of course not,” she said. “I can go there some other time, with Xander…. Are you happy we picked Maine?” she asked after a few miles of companionable silence. I could hear her smile.

“Of course,” I said. Still, Maine meant another mountain of work. Tom and I hadn’t visited since the previous summer, and it was entirely possible that the locals might have appropriated the place for firewood. I’d need to drag my tush up there at least three days before my gang arrived. That would mean renting a car, driving nine hours, cleaning like a one-woman sanitation crew, stocking the cupboards beyond my in-laws’ cocktail olives and soggy Ritz crackers, and shopping for extra towels, sheets, and blankets. Mousetraps, too. Chloe was thousand-thread-count royalty. Jules and Quincy liked their creature comforts, too, though not the small, furry ones, which last year had invaded the linen closet, partied, and multiplied.

“The weekend when we’re gone Tom and Henry could do the natural history museum with Xander and Dash,” I added. “All four boys together. How cute is that?”

“Maybe Sunday. Jamyang would appreciate the break.”

“Isn’t she always off for the weekend?”

“You know Xander—all work, all the time—so I hired her for the days I’m gone. We offered double salary.”

What would Tom say about that? Nothing as nasty as what Mean Maxine was thinking. We’d be better off talking about work.

“You did an incredible job on the storyboards for the cream cheese account.” Chloe’s pitch was so smooth that after seeing it, you’d never again dream of reaching for mascarpone. I was able to keep a conversation going about the campaign until we reached the Brooklyn Bridge, surprising myself with my knowledge of butterfat and lactic acid bacteria—because the other major topic I hoped to steer away from was school.

When Tom had started in about wanting to see Jackson Collegiate, I was dumbstruck. “One thing I felt we were hard-wired for was going public,”
I said the day he sprang the tour on me. “I’ve barely set foot in a private school.” I’m a proud graduate of the Santa Monica–Malibu Unified School District. I still know the words to “Dear old SaMoHi,” which I warbled. For an encore, I waxed eloquently about my two years at UCLA—no regrets at all, except the bite Astronomy 101 took out of my grade-point average. How did I know I’d be expected to distinguish Andromeda from Cassiopeia? I’m from southern California. I thought it would be like reading tarot cards.

I rattled on about public schools’ indisputable superiority until Tom got us back to Jackson. “It’s an exceptional school and Betsy O’Neal is an extraordinary educator.”

Still, I persisted. “Brooklyn’s public schools are why people who could live in Manhattan buy here. You teach in a public school. This decision should be simple.” I was exasperated by Tom’s seemingly deviant behavior—and suspicious. With a fancy WASP background like his, did a latent private school gene eventually kick in, an academic equivalent of adult-onset diabetes? Before he topped things off with an Ivy League diploma, he’d attended the same boarding school where two previous generations of Wells men had followed the family tradition of playing rugby until they tore every ligament and needed knee replacements by the time they were sixty.

“Sometimes you’re rigid to the point of ridiculousness,” he said. “All I’m asking you to do is have a look-see.”

That’s when I decided to play the money card. “How would we ever pay tuition when we’re having a hard enough time with rent and the occasional bottle of shiraz?”

“Have you never heard of a scholarship?” His voice was calm, worse than yelling.

I wondered what kind of conversation Chloe might be having at that moment with her husband. Deciding how huge a trust fund to establish for Dash, perhaps.

Who says he doesn’t already have one?
Mean Maxine asked.
You’d better go after that job, missy
.

  
Chloe

“When you take Dash to music class, don’t forget his Goldfish, please.” I went into our fully stocked pantry and pointed to several packages.

“Yes, Mrs. Keaton.” Jamyang nodded politely

“And a change of clothes,” I added. “And please don’t forget his jacket.”

“Yes, yes.” In the three weeks Jamyang had been looking after Dash, not only had she captured my son’s devotion, she’d displayed the managerial capability required to run a chain of day care centers. Still, I couldn’t resist reviewing the basics. I knew I was being annoying.

In less than an hour Xander and I would be touring yet another nursery school, the last of seven visits set up by Hannah McCoy. By next week, she’d want us to start filing applications. The pressure was mounting, and Xander wasn’t helping. At the end of each tour, he bombarded the director with questions.
How does the education here foster intellectual independence? What do you do to stimulate a child’s imagination—examples, please? Could you explain why your theories are considered to be progressive? Or not
. We’d started to have a nodding acquaintance with parents on the circuit, and I cringed to think that they’d pegged my husband as a fast
talker in a well-cut suit. They didn’t know the man I did, a hardworking perfectionist who only wanted the best for our son.

I, on the other hand, rarely peeped, except to praise the tidiness of a block corner or to ask if the children were supervised on the swings. We’d sat through Mrs. McCoy’s tutorial on how to handle a tour—ask questions without speaking too loudly, she advised, which apparently some parents needed to be told. Every pre-K classroom looked like the one I remember from my own childhood, with a bored bunny twitching in a cage, dress-up clothes, and a bathroom whose toilet barely clears an adult’s ankles. The only substantial change since my day was the names. Theo, Ariel, Dylan, Aspen, Charlie, Brett, Alex, and Morgan—were they boys or girls?

Every director made sweeping statements. “Here at the Whatever School we help our students grow within an atmosphere of civility…. We embrace both an ethical and developmental perspective…. It’s our rich heritage that encourages well-rounded individuals…. The depth and breath of our program nurtures a student’s desire to make connections between the classroom and the larger world.” Whenever these declarations began, my mind would meander. Other parents might nod knowingly, but I was tempted to say,
Huh? English, people
.

No tour guide addressed what I was afraid to ask: Would this be a school where boo-boo kissing was practiced or forbidden? How would a teacher treat Dash if he couldn’t tie his shoes properly? Was the school going to help him become a nice person or was “nice” obsolete, like—I speak from the humiliation of personal experience—innocently referring to your Chinese college roommate as Oriental? I was already worrying that Dash was at the beginning of a long life on the slow track, that lonely line that crawls below the spiking EEGs of brighter, more aggressive little boys, boys like Henry Fisher-Wells, who was only four months older but did everything ahead of schedule. Henry could already recite the alphabet. Every letter!

“You go now,” Jamyang urged. Apparently I’d been frozen in place. “Dash and I fine.”

I knew I shouldn’t be imposing my insecurities on my nanny, and especially not on my child, who’d hit every mark—sitting up, walking, holding a sippy cup—exactly on schedule. “Thank you,” I said, and turned from her to Dash. “Give Mommy a kiss, sweet prince.”

He giggled, touched his lips, and danced his fingers, miniatures of Xander’s, in my direction. I quickly pressed my mouth to his rounded cheek and forced myself to walk out the front door, moving briskly in my flats. I wanted to present myself as a respectable young matron, an image I hoped was amplified by my yellow cardigan and pearls.

Jackson Collegiate School, five blocks from our home, was near the wide cobblestone promenade that overlooks the East River. For more than a hundred years, Brooklyn’s finest, along with children who lived across the river in the Village, had begun their education here. The school, originally girls only, took up a row of six tall, matching brown-stones connected like a chorus line of dignified spinsters.

I pushed open a heavy wrought-iron door and entered a wood-paneled hall heavily scented with lemon oil. The walls were hung with many portraits, mostly of tightly cinched, high-breasted women in buns and starched white collars. These ladies had been dead a hundred years, yet I could feel their narrowed eyes judge me as I walked toward a young redheaded man seated at the corridor’s end. “Here for the open house?” he asked.

“Chloe Keaton. Please tell me it hasn’t already started?”

He checked off my name on a list. “We’re still waiting for all the parents,” he said, and gestured. “Right this way.”

I entered a room with a wide view of the Brooklyn Bridge, which stood like heavy black lace against the sky. As many as forty other parents—mommies and daddies, daddies and daddies, mommies and mommies—filled rows of straight-backed chairs. Xander had five minutes in which to arrive. While I looked for a seat toward the back, I heard a familiar voice stage-whisper from several rows in front of me.

“Chloe!” Talia was waving her hand like a traffic cop, forming the words “sit here” and leaning over Tom to tap an empty chair.

What was Talia doing here? She was supposed to be at our office today. I walked over to see my friends and showed them a smile as big as a poodle.

“Sit down,” Talia said after the three of us kissed hello.

“I’m waiting for Xander,” I said, seeing only one empty chair next to them. “I’ll look for you during the tour.” I couldn’t bring myself to ask Talia why she hadn’t mentioned that she’d be here. Preschool was a subject we’d been discussing since our breast-feeding days, but our conversations politely sashayed around specifics. I hadn’t planned to admit—ever—that I’d hired a professional to guide me through the school application process. That was like confessing I needed to pay a personal shopper—Jules, for instance—to pick out my clothes. But there was more. I’d gotten the impression that Talia and Tom wanted to wait another year before enrolling Henry anywhere. “Does a four-year-old really need school?” had been her exact words just last week, which had shut me up fast. What surprised me more was, why Jackson Collegiate? Hadn’t Tom and Talia made a commitment to public school, on account of Tom working, as he likes to say, “in the public sector”?

I didn’t have to speak. Talia read my mind. “Tom’s adviser at Columbia is married to the head of the lower school,” she offered. “Her name’s—”

“Betsy O’Neal,” Tom said. “Her husband’s my thesis adviser.”

I kept my smile going while a thought snuck up like a burp. Was that the thesis Tom Wells had never finished, the one Talia complained about with regularity?

“Betsy nagged us to check out the school …,” Talia said, and lifted her eyebrows ever so slightly to telegraph to me that she was a skeptic.

“Jackson’s got a great reputation,” I said. It was the most sought-after private school in Brooklyn, I’d learned from Hannah McCoy, and enrolled students from as far away as Gramercy Park and Chelsea.

“We’ll be the judge of that.” Talia laughed. “Let’s see how they deliver the goods.”

I wasn’t used to feeling flummoxed around my best friend. Fortunately,
I spotted Xander walking through the door. “Do you want to have coffee later?” I asked Talia.

“I have to get back to the office,” she said. “There’s a limit to how long a faked eye doctor appointment lasts.”

“Then let’s talk tonight,” I said, and walked to the back of the room, where Xander had carefully folded his black overcoat over his arm as he found two chairs.