A Most Uncommon Degree of Popularity (26 page)

Faith hadn’t damaged just our community, she might have damaged others, giving people a reason not to listen to children.

I longed for a simple answer.

There were two big things
on the calendar for the short week after Spring Break. The Spring Fair was on Saturday, and the Thursday evening prior to that was the middle-school Curriculum Night, at which student projects were put on display.

We have a problem at Alden with parents helping the kids too much with their schoolwork. When the second graders are doing PowerPoint presentations and the fifth graders write in Johnsonian sentences filled with series of perfectly parallel, impeccably punctuated dependent adverbial clauses, you have to wonder if maybe the parents aren’t doing a shade too much. I now think that the primary reason that Erin was admitted to Sidwell was not that her father was a Quaker, but that her essay had a sentence fragment. However bad we at Alden are, Sidwell parents are bound to be as bad—if not worse—and the admissions office was undoubtedly thrilled to find a parent so stunningly well-adjusted as to let her child’s essay stand or fall on its own merits, and as a result that kid was moved to the top of the list.

So the projects displayed at the Curriculum Night are done entirely at school. It’s the only way to keep some parents from getting involved in their children’s educations, which is, of course, sometimes a euphemism for doing your kid’s work and showing the world, not that your kid is smarter than everyone else’s, but that you, with your joint M.B.A./Ph.D., are really good at sixth-grade assignments.

Curriculum Night was an adults-only coffee-and-dessert event, and even though the eighth-grade families were providing the dessert, I arrived early. Unfortunately six bales of hay, designed to give a rugged Western atmosphere to the Spring Fair pony rides, had also arrived early and I had to spend twenty minutes talking to the driver, trying to figure out if this was a duplicate order and, if not, where we should store the hay in the meantime. So by the time I got to the middle school, the central corridor was crowded.

Martha Shot was reigning supreme in the lobby, greeting parents with queenlike confidence. I knew what she had been saying about her role in the Faith affair. Oh, yes, the incident was unfortunate, but she had taken the side of a student, and at Alden we always put our students first. What on earth did she have to apologize for?

I wondered how Chris could stand to be in the same room with her.

The sixth-grade projects were a joint assignment from the English and history teachers. The students had each researched a different time in history and had then written a first-person narrative about a day in the life of a twelve-year-old living in that time.

Parents were already crowded around, reading the pieces, and I could hear them exclaiming how wonderfully imaginative the narratives were, how full of detail and life. Many of the dads had come straight from work, but had left their suit jackets and ties in their cars. The light colors of their open-collared business shirts, white, pale blue, and butter yellow, made the space feel more airy and springlike than if the men had been in their dark, formal jackets.

The essays hung on the wall of the sixth-grade corridor in an alphabetical loop. The first half of the alphabet ran down the left side of the corridor and the second half came back on the other. So Erin and the mid-alphabet kids would be at the far end of the hall. Rather than push my way down there right away, I stopped and read a few others. The first essay on the right side of the hall was Chloe Zimmerman’s. It was set in twelfth-century Britain. Although the girl in the essay had the authority-challenging sensibility of a twenty-first-century kid, the essay was full of striking auditory detail. The straw on the floor of the Great Hall rustled as the women crossed the room in their heavy-hemmed long gowns. The water in the girl’s washbasin had a thin coating of ice on it each morning, and the ice cracked with a quick, high-pitched, silvery sound. Chloe was a very musical child, and it was interesting to someone as visual as me to see how her imagination had engaged with sounds as much as sights.

I crossed over the hall to read Brittany’s essay. It wasn’t as sensorily rich as Chloe’s, but Brittany had obviously been struck by the amount of responsibility that twelve-year-olds had among the Incas. Although she didn’t quite put it into words, she was starting to understand that adolescence was a modern concept. I glanced at a few other essays, noting how some kids had managed to find topics that reflected their own interests. One boy wrote about the domestication of dogs in the New Stone Age. Everyone else in the community tolerated the dogs because they ate the trash, but the boy in the narrative loved one of the dogs and had discovered that letting the dog curl up next to him at night had real advantages now that the nights were getting colder. Rachel’s essay was set in fourteenth-century France; her character, a peasant, was seemingly cold and hungry most of the time.

There were fewer people at the end of the corridor so I moved quickly to Erin’s and started to read.
I am twelve years old and I live in Spain in 1492. I am a Jew.

The essays had been written by hand, which seemed odd because all these kids could keyboard and the school had plenty of computers. Erin’s handwriting was beautiful. The slant of her letters could have been used for a geometry lesson on parallel lines, and the spacing between each word was so exact that it looked as if she had used a ruler.

But the essay itself was horrible.
Back in 1492, our houses were
… My dear sweet beautiful child had simply not been able to do this assignment. Her research was extensive, but she was supposed to have imagined a character, she was supposed to have created a fictional world, immersing herself in the character’s point of view.
Our primary diet consists of …

Why were these put on display? Why did we need to humiliate kids like this?

I knew the answer to that. At any school everyone always knows who the good athletes are, and at Alden everyone also knows who the talented musicians and actors are, so it is only proper that the kids who could write should have their work on display, too.

And who exactly was being humilated at this moment, the child or the parent? I struggled to read on.

“Mrs. Meadows?”

I turned. It was Erin’s English teacher.

“Erin worked so hard on this project,” she said quickly.

“Erin always works hard.”

“But I’m not sure that she relished this as much as some of the other kids. This particular assignment did not allow her to show her strengths.”

I smiled weakly.

Erin’s essay wasn’t the worst. There were kids who obviously didn’t care, and theirs were worse than hers. But among the kids who did care, who had tried, hers was the worst.

She wasn’t stupid. She would have known that hers was not like the others. After all my poor child had been through this year—the phone not ringing, her friends inviting her only because their mothers had made them—she had had to endure this. She had copied out her final draft so perfectly, knowing all the while that what she had written was bad, knowing that she was not measuring up.

Slowly I walked back up to the central lobby where the dessert was laid out. The fluorescent lights dropped a flat, directionless blanket of industrial light, giving everyone’s skin a greenish cast. The lobby was tiled and its front wall was glass. Noise bounced off these bright hard surfaces, and the conversations, the laughter, the “excuse me’s,” and the “Oh, yes, we must get together’s” reverberated in a single lawn-mowerish whine. People were balancing white foam coffee cups and thin paper dessert plates. Those who had chosen pies, cakes, or tortes were trying to eat with white plastic forks, and their elbows jostled the crowd.

The first person to stop me was Candace Singer. She had been the person who had waited outside the sixth-grade parents’ coffee last September to complain to Blair about Brittany not gushing over Candace’s daughter’s new dress. I wondered what little treat she had in store for me, what imagined offenses she would repay with patronizing remarks about Erin’s essay.

I decided not to find out. “Excuse me,” I said before she had said a word.

I wanted to be with my own friends. Usually they aren’t easy to find in crowds as none of us is tall. So I had learned to look between people’s shoulders and waists, searching for the flash of Mimi’s flamboyance or the distinctive cool, clear colors of Blair’s wardrobe. But tonight the husbands had come—everyone’s husband except mine, of course—and Joel, Annelise’s husband, is so tall that he is easy to spot.

The others were with him. Blair held out her arm as I approached, as if creating a passage for me through the crowd. She touched my shoulder, pulling me in. That was rare; she was not one for touching.

Don’t be nice. Don’t be sympathetic. If you do, I will cry.

Mimi’s husband, Ben, spoke first. “Hi, Lydia! We were wondering what had happened to you. Weren’t all the essays—”

He broke off, his expression suddenly startled. Mimi must have pinched him, stopping him from raving about the essays.

Why shouldn’t he rave about the essays? Most of them were remarkable.

No one said anything.

Finally Bruce spoke. “Did any of you have this cherry pie with the little things on top? It’s really good.”

Oh, come on. This is a sixth-grade essay. Why are we all standing around embarrassed and talking about pie as if Erin had been arrested for selling drugs to the fourth graders?

Because that was how I felt, humiliated and embarrassed for my child.

This is not an important failure,
I said to myself,
and if it is any failure at all, it is Erin’s, not mine.

Which only made things worse. I would rather fail myself than have it happen to her.

“Erin’s handwriting is beautiful,” Annelise said. She could always be expected to find something nice to say.

“Yes, it is,” I agreed. “But imaginative writing isn’t quite Erin’s thing, is it?” I couldn’t remember a thing about Brittany’s or Elise’s essays so I looked toward Mimi. “Rachel was trying to understand how those medieval peasants could endure such daily misery. I was impressed.”

“Thanks,” Mimi answered. “But didn’t it seem a little heavy-handed on the religious issues? I hope that no one views it as anti-Christian.”

“I don’t think you need to worry about that,” I said.

I kept my head up, and I participated in every twist and turn of the conversation. Other people joined us, and I said that, yes, I’d heard that Adam’s parents were inviting the whole grade to his bar mitzvah, and yes, that was good of them. And, oh, my yes, it was such a relief that the weather was going to be good for the fair, and Jamie really was hoping that closing arguments would start next week. No, I didn’t know what would be in the judge’s instructions, and yes, having people coming to the fair park in a church lot and take a shuttle to the school might work, but yes, they might all park on the neighborhood streets anyway. I then told a funny story about the hay bales and finally excused myself, saying that I needed to go check on them.

It was just an excuse. I wanted to get away from the noise and the elbows and the politeness. I couldn’t imagine that anything could be wrong with the hay, but there was. The playground gate wouldn’t close. That would drive the lower-school teachers nuts tomorrow. So I pushed and prodded at hay bales. It was stupid, idiotic work, and I started to get angry with the delivery person. Why hadn’t he looked at the position of the gate? And why should I have to fix the mistake when I hadn’t made it? I wanted to cry.

I finally got the gate to close. I was crossing back to my car when I heard a man calling my name. It was Chris. “Someone said that you might be out stacking hay. Do you have a minute?”

He was coming out of the lower school, which seemed surprising as there wasn’t anything going on there this evening. I started to explain about the hay, apologizing, hoping that I had suggested the right place for it to be stored. He shook his head; he didn’t care about the hay. He gestured back toward the middle school, and I followed him. Fussing with the hay had taken me long enough that most of the people were gone, leaving a few eighth-grade mothers cleaning up the food. Chris nodded to them, took his keys out of his pocket, and opened the middle-school office.

“Chris, could this keep? Is this something we could talk about tomorrow or Monday?” I just wanted to get home to Erin.

He shook his head. “I need to talk to you about your kids, and I wanted to look at Erin’s file. I was just at the lower school, looking at Thomas’s.”

Thomas’s file? Why had he been looking at Thomas’s file? What did Thomas have to do with Erin’s essay?

I sat down and watched him open a file drawer. It was packed with manila folders; each folder had a white adhesive label on its tab. He ran a finger along the tabs, stopping when he found Erin’s.

“You read her essay?” I asked.

He nodded as he rifled through the file, looking for something.

Maybe he would have some perspective on all of this. Maybe he would know exactly the right thing to make me feel better. I know it’s horrible and sexist to say this, but sometimes men can do that for you, make you step back from the details and not feel so godawful about what Jamie would call “one data point.”

No, it isn’t
men
who do this for me. It’s always been one particular man, Jamie, my husband. Why wasn’t he here?

Chris had obviously found what he was looking for. He nodded again as if the file said what he had expected it to. Then he looked straight at me. “Lydia, I’ve been accused of crossing all kinds of lines this semester, and now I am going to cross one. You should be hearing this from your kids’ teachers or the counselors, not from me, but I don’t think anyone else would say it. This is not the right school for either one of your children.”

Not the right
… I stared at him. The file-cabinet drawer was still open, and he was standing on the far side of it, looking at me. He had laid Erin’s file down on top of the folders still in the drawer. “What are you talking about? That was just one assignment, Chris, just one essay. She’s not going to be a novelist, but so what? It’s one data point.”