A Most Uncommon Degree of Popularity (28 page)

“But it would be fun to be like those big girls; it would be fun to be able to sing with them.”

Erin would always feel that way as long as she was at Alden. She would always judge herself by the school’s standards, thinking that it would be better if she could sing. I put my arm around her, pulling her close so that our foreheads touched.

“If I go to Sidwell,” she asked, “will Rachel and Elise still invite me to their bat mitzvahs?”

“Yes.” I had a feeling that now we were talking about the important stuff. “And Jacob and Suzanne will, too. And you’ll probably get a lot of invitations from the Sidwell kids.”

She liked the sound of that. “And will I be able to have a sweet-sixteen party? That’s what everyone says. The girls who don’t have bat mitzvahs have sweet sixteens.”

“Of course, you can.”

She pushed back so she could look at me. “No, Mom, I mean this. A nice party, not the usual thing here at the house, but with a DJ if I want.”

“Yes, you can have a nice sweet-sixteen party.”

“Then it will be okay.”

I needed to reread my books on raising teenaged girls. We were supposed to be talking about the crew team and whatever-that-upper-level algebra was, and instead we were talking about a birthday party to be staged four years hence. But the thought of such a party comforted her, made her think that she would still have friends.

Maybe I needed to have my own sweet-sixteen birthday party.

“I still need to talk to Dad, but I would appreciate it if you didn’t say anything at school tomorrow. If you tell Rachel, she will tell Gideon, and then Gideon will tell Thomas that Sidwell keeps live carp in their toilets.”

“Okay.” And then she smiled. “I want to be the one to tell him about the fish.”

I rarely call Jamie. I
let him call me. He has been sleeping so badly that I don’t want to risk waking him up, but as soon as I was in our room, I called him.

He picked up immediately, and at the sound of his voice I suddenly sagged under all the pressure of the evening, the strain of trying not to mind too much about Erin’s essay, the effort of trying to say just the right thing to her, and then the awful awfulness of leaving Alden. My eyes burned. I could feel myself starting to cry.

Why wasn’t Jamie here? I needed him here. This was no way to be married, to be a family.

“Lydia, what’s wrong? The kids … they’re okay?”

The rising worry in his voice made me get control of myself. “They’re fine. Nothing’s wrong.”

Except with me. I thought about all the wonderful things Chris had said about the kids, how smart they were, how athletic they were. I should have been thrilled—who wouldn’t want to hear that?—but when I spoke again, my voice was leaden. “I did tell you that they got into Sidwell, didn’t I?”

“Actually, you didn’t. But I knew. Some of my partners send their kids there. One of them is on the board and saw Thomas’s name on the list.”

“Oh, Jamie …” I was mortified. How could I not have mentioned this to him? I had seen the envelopes when I had gotten home from Houston, and the next morning Faith had gone to Martha Shot. From then on, the school’s problems had been all I had thought about. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“Because you already knew what I thought. I don’t have anything new to say, and I don’t fight losing battles. Lydia, what is this about?”

I told him what Chris had said although I knew so little about upper-level math that I couldn’t remember the details of the curriculum. “And he talked about athletics, not just for Thomas, but Erin, too. He said she ought to try out for the crew team. They have a women’s crew team at Sidwell. We don’t.” Jamie was athletic. He would want the children to try a variety of sports.

“That was very generous of Chris,” he said slowly. “It can’t be in his self-interest to have you leave the school.”

If Jamie had been being careful about his words, he would have said “us” or “our family,” but he was tired. He had said what he meant. “It isn’t me leaving the school,” I said stiffly. “It is Erin and Thomas.”

He didn’t say anything.

My eyes started to sting again. “Do you honestly think that I would have kept them at Alden because I have friends there, that I would have deliberately sacrificed them for me?”

“No, not deliberately. But it did seem that you didn’t want to see the problems. How do the kids feel about it?”

I took a breath. This conversation should be about them, not about me. “Erin is more positive than I thought she would be. I think she sees more than we realize. I haven’t talked to Thomas, but I think he will be okay. He’s figured out that the best players on his soccer team are from Sidwell, and he already has play dates with those kids a fair amount.”

“So do you want to call Sidwell,” Jamie asked, “and see if they will give us more time? I think that they will understand.”

I spoke slowly. “I don’t think we need more time.”

He was silent for a moment. He had never imagined that this would happen, that I would actually consent to sending Erin and Thomas to Sidwell.

“A couple of weeks ago,” he said, “when I said that there wouldn’t be any more trials like this, you didn’t believe me, did you?”

“Jamie, let’s not talk about that now.”

I didn’t want any empty promises. I wasn’t making a deal with him—
if I do what you want with the kids’ school, then you need to be home more.
I—we—were doing this because it was right for our children. That was all.

But as he does so often, Jamie surprised me. After all, he made a very good living knowing what convinces people and what doesn’t. “I’m not leaving my firm.”

“What?” That seemed to come from nowhere. “Is that even an issue?”

“My partners think it is. The feeling is that if I want to take on another criminal case like this, I should go to another firm or start my own. It’s not personal. No one’s in a snit about it, and I can take anyone who wants to leave. But this press conference at every lunch break, make your case in the media, that’s not us. We do good, solid legal work. We’re always prepared, better prepared than anyone. We don’t fight our cases in the media. So either I leave the firm or I lie low for a while, working behind the scenes and not taking on cases that might come out of this one.”

Jamie might be desperately weary, but his partners, back here in D.C. working on other cases, weren’t. They were thinking clearly. If they had already declared that this was not the direction that the firm was going in, I could believe them. At a minimum, this meant that Jamie couldn’t back into a career of criminal work. He would have to make a deliberate decision about whether to stay with the firm. He couldn’t take “just one more case,” and then just one more and one more.

So even if I did lose all my girlfriends, even if my phone never rang again, at least I would—if he decided to stay with his firm—have my boyfriend back.

That was something.

With the Spring Fair being
only a day away, I had a million things to do on Friday, but as soon as I thought someone would answer the phone, I called the admissions office at Sidwell. The receptionist put me right through to the head of admissions. He knew who I was and professed to be delighted to hear from me. He said that with Jamie being in the middle of a high-profile trial, they would never have given our places away without speaking to us. The school was used to parents in public life.

I wouldn’t have thought of us as having a public life, but I supposed this year Jamie had. I took a breath. “It isn’t like us to leave things to the last minute, but we would like to submit the enrollment contracts.”

“That’s wonderful, and as long as we get the contracts sometime next week, that will be fine. Just put them in the mail when it’s convenient.”

But I wanted to have it done. I didn’t want to tell people at Alden that we were planning on doing this next week. I wanted to say that it was done. So I filled in the contracts, wrote out the checks, and drove over to Sidwell, crossing over on Van Ness to Wisconsin Avenue.

I didn’t know where to park. At Alden when you have to pop in the school for something quick like this, you park in the fire lane. I didn’t know how Sidwell felt about its fire lanes … or even where the fire lanes were. Should I try to find visitor spaces in one of the lots? Or park in the neighborhood? But wasn’t the campus fenced? If I parked in the neighborhood, would there be a back gate, or would I have to walk all the way around the school to the Wisconsin entrance?

This was all stuff I knew at Alden.

I did park in the neighborhood behind the school, and I did find a gate, but as I crossed the campus, I didn’t see anyone that I knew. Not a soul. No one from the neighborhood, no one from Thomas’s team or Jamie’s firm, no one from church. That never happened to me at Alden.

I would be starting all over. People would ask me to bring the paper products to the school potlucks. That’s what the organizers do when the phone list has a name that they don’t recognize. They ask that person to bring the paper products. Walking into a potluck with the plastic cups is a sign that no one knows you, that no one can trust you yet.

Why me? I felt so sorry for myself as I walked along these unfamiliar sidewalks. Why was this happening to me? Faith should have been expelled. Martha Shot should be asked to retire. Chris wanted to leave. But who was leaving? The one who longed to stay—me.

I spent the rest of
Friday listening to the silent auction committee members fuss about one another. When one member had been unable to get some of her donation forms signed in time for the catalog, the committee—because most of them liked her—had agreed to publish an addendum that they would put together Friday night. Most of the committee members had assumed that this would be a single sheet, but another member had used the additional time to fulfill her own vision of what the auction should be. She felt that everything in the auction was too expensive, that the event had become too elitist, that it should be a “fun” event for all families, not just the most wealthy. So without speaking to anyone else on the committee, she had solicited more than fifteen low-end donations: two McDonald’s Happy Meals, a child’s cut and shampoo at The Hair Cuttery, and the like.

The rest of the committee was furious. Each of these items would take up the same amount of table space as items worth hundreds of dollars.

But what about families who didn’t want to spend hundreds of dollars? The populist committee member was now quite belligerent. There were scholarship families at this school. Shouldn’t there be something for them? Wasn’t it classist and racist not to?

The problems that the Alden School has with racial diversity are far beyond anything that the silent auction committee could fix.

You would think that I would be impossibly sick of these women, and maybe I was. But even if I didn’t like them, I liked who I was when I was dealing with them. I knew all the players, I knew who was friends with whom, who had ideas that she really cared about and who was just running her mouth off, who did the work and who just wanted the attention. That made me able to find good solutions, and I liked being the sort of person who could find good solutions.

The nightmare would be dealing with these people if they were strangers. Who would I know at Sidwell? A few families from church, the parents of Thomas’s teammates, but most of the moms would be strangers.

I told everyone that I agreed with the spirit of the populist member, but her ideas, however laudable, had come too late. The families she was concerned about would have already seen the catalog, and if they were even coming to the evening barbecue, they probably would not come into the library where the auction would be set up, much less pick up the addendum with all these fun items. So this year we would group all these donations into a single basket, and next year alternatives could be discussed.

“You remember that you said that, Lydia,” the populist snapped. “I want you to be sure and remember next year that you said you agreed with me.”

Oh, I would remember, but what good would that do her? I wouldn’t be here.

I got a long, gossipy
e-mail from Blair. She told me about the various Spring Fair fires that she had been putting out and then concluded with news about Mary Paige Caudwell. Mary Paige’s strategy for getting a big settlement in her divorce had been to depict herself as a perfect mother devoting herself to raising a perfect child. Faith’s false accusation blew a big hole in that, and so Mary Paige was frantically trying to re-depict herself as a long-suffering saint devoted to raising a troubled child. Her lawyer said that the “long-suffering” would sell better if she had a job.

Apparently her credentials as an “interior-design professional” weren’t as impressive as she had led us to believe. She had had one interview at a high-end, upscale boutique—the only kind of place in which she would ever consider working retail—and another at a public relations firm, but she had gone into those interviews with such a sense of entitlement that she had not gotten the jobs.

So a friend of her mother’s was getting her a position as a bank teller. She was starting the training next week.

Working the counter at a bank is a safe, clean, responsible, white-collar job, but the work environment would be hierarchical. Mary Paige would be working under people who were younger and more able than she, people who were less well-dressed, less cultured, less likely to belong to a country club, less likely to have parents born in the United States. She would hate it.

And I found that I didn’t care. I wasn’t happy that she had to get a job that she would consider so beneath herself, but my heart didn’t break for her, either. She was a part of the Alden School world, and I needed to stop caring.

Blair and I were scheduled
to meet the custodian at school at six on Saturday morning. Her husband would bring her kids over when the fair started at nine, and mine would come with Mimi’s husband and her kids.

But I arrived at five-thirty. I had awakened so many times in the night that I finally decided to get up. I checked Erin’s alarm clock to be sure that it was set—how marvelous it was to know that I could count on her to get herself and her brother out of bed—and then I got myself ready.