A Most Uncommon Degree of Popularity (5 page)

“At least the sixth-grade girls’ ensemble has fall auditions,” Mary Paige continued. “When I was a student, they were done in the spring of the fifth grade, and a new girl didn’t have any chance at all.”

“Does your daughter sing?” This was from Blair.

“She has a nice little voice,” Mary Paige said with a tone that indicated that we were supposed to acknowledge this as false modesty.

I could sense Annelise and Blair exchanging glances.

Alden’s particular strength as a school is music. All the little kids sing in the lower-school choruses, but in middle school the students with the best voices start getting more opportunities. The sixth-grade girls’ ensemble consists of ten girls in white dresses and violet sashes, and every year they sing at a White House tea. It is quite a big deal.

The girls have to audition, and ten are selected. My kids aren’t musical and so I didn’t have a horse in this race, but I knew that people had expended a lot of energy last spring counting to ten. The conclusion seemed to be that for this grade it would be pretty easy to predict which ten girls would be chosen, and all three of Erin’s friends were on every list.

But Mrs. Barton, the music director of the middle school, while not an alumna herself, had been at the school for almost thirty years, and she had liked the place better before it went coed and all of us motley new people had shown up. To the extent that she could, she ran the sixth-grade ensemble like a debutante ball. If the last spot came down to a choice between an alumnae daughter, as Faith Caudwell was, and another girl, Mrs. Barton would find a reason to give the spot to a girl whose mother had been in the ensemble.

If Faith Caudwell really did have a “nice little voice,” then counting to ten had suddenly gotten a whole lot harder.

There are, no doubt, children
who lovingly confide in their mothers, sharing their secrets, sorrows, and dreams. The rest of us have to rely on the car pools. You sit in the driver’s seat and never say a word. After a while, if you are lucky, the kids forget that you are there and they start talking.

All four of us listened intently for any indications of major bitch-goddess behavior. The girls weren’t angels, but they didn’t seem to be criticizing the other girls endlessly. And at home Erin seemed happy. She was being nice to her little brother. Whenever trouble is brewing in our family, the first sign of it is usually Erin tormenting Thomas.

So maybe the books were wrong. Maybe you could have at the center of a middle-school class a group of friendly, happy, healthy girls who, while a definite group, weren’t predators, who didn’t realize how much power they had, girls whose excellent childhood nutrition had somehow resulted in perfect saintliness.

But what else would you expect the mother of a popular girl to think?

The school’s Spring Fair was
one of its major fund-raising activities. During the day there were pony rides, a moon bounce, a crafts sale, a plant sale, and tons of games. In the evening there was a barbecue with silent and live auctions. Blair and I were chairing the fair this year; it was the first time that non-alums had run it.

Although we were determined not to let planning the fair take over our lives for the next seven months, we sat down to start going over the material from the previous years on Thursday of the second week of school. The auditions for the sixth-grade girls’ ensemble had been on Wednesday, and the results were going to be announced on Friday.

“We’ve got to do something on Thursday,” Blair had said. “Otherwise I am going to spend the whole day fretting. Brittany is going to die if she is girl number eleven.”

The important information about the fair had been put in binders instead of files, and I laid the notebooks out on the kitchen table, wondering which of the previous chairpersons had been loopy enough to cover six three-ring binders with cobalt-and-lemon Provençal fabric. It is true that one day toward the end of my kitchen renovation, Blair and I—who liked art projects as much as our kids did—had covered a pencil cup, a letter box, and a couple of in-out trays with the room’s black-and-white toile fabric, but we knew that we were wasting time, and somehow that made it okay.

That she and I had both gone to law school was a sign of the feminist movement’s growing pains. Like Annelise we had gone to law school because we knew that we “had” to have careers, and it seemed as if going to law school would keep our options open longer. Since we were hard-working and determined, we had done well in law school, and since we were thorough and organized, we were perfectly adequate lawyers.

But we were more suited to girly work, the kind that “hear me roar” women weren’t supposed to do. We could sew and we liked looking at wallpaper books. We were each slowly establishing second careers for ourselves. Blair had taken a number of classes in landscape design and was now working with a few clients on their yards. Enough people had raved about the pictures I had taken of my kids and their friends that I was now photographing children professionally.

Neither of us, however, thought of ourselves as “working.” If we had to join one team or the other, we would join Annelise, who was definitely not working, rather than Mimi, who was running a successful business.

We examined the workmanship on the notebook covers. Blair thought that we could have done a better job, and I said that yes, we could have, but I hoped that we wouldn’t have done it in the first place, much less have done it better. Once we stopped looking at the notebooks’ pretty clothes and started looking at the information enclosed, we realized that it wasn’t organized usefully.

“Wouldn’t it make more sense,” I said, “to have all the financial information in one, all the food contracts in another, and so on?”

Blair agreed. “Otherwise we are going to be flipping through six notebooks.”

We started opening the binders’ rings and lifting the pages out. My kitchen table was a refectory one so it was easy to pull out an extra leaf so that we could make many different piles.

I loved my kitchen. I survived my last year at EPA by going to work and thinking about the remodeling plans. The kitchen extended across the entire width of the house, and we had gained yet more space by taking out the separate butler’s pantry. My kitchen was now only slightly smaller than an F-14 fighter jet and had about the same amount of technology.

The walls and cabinetry were a butter yellow, and the granite countertops were charcoal. On the walls were oversized black-and-white pictures that I had taken of the children. A big reading chair was upholstered in the black-and-white toile, and the toile was repeated in the roman shades at the windows. The table nestled into the bay window, and a padded bench—my son, Thomas, was incapable of sitting still in a regular chair—curved along the wall underneath the window. A narrow shelf near the table held the pencil cups and storage boxes that Blair and I had covered, as I had assumed that the kids would do their homework at the kitchen table.

They didn’t. They did their homework on the kitchen floor. And not on the open carpeted space in front of the television. No, they stretched out on the slate between the island and the sink so that I had to step over them, their binders, and their backpacks if I was doing something as silly as trying to make dinner. And despite the enormity of this kitchen, they invariably managed to position themselves so that they got not only in my way, but in each other’s, thus giving themselves something else to fight about.
He kicked me, Mom. He did it on purpose…. Yeah, but she looked at me funny.

During the daytime, the side door to the kitchen was never locked when we were at home, and everyone knew that. So if my station wagon was in the driveway, close friends came around and let themselves in just as if we all lived in Mayberry or on Walton’s Mountain. Back when a more elegant family had lived here, this door was probably the “tradesmen’s entrance” to the house, but it was now the door all our friends used. In fact, the only people who came to my front door were the actual tradesmen—the delivery guys and the repairmen.

Once Blair and I got the papers reorganized, I opened my laptop, and we started entering numbers in a spreadsheet—the previous chairs had been too ladylike to know how to use Microsoft Excel—when we heard the door open.

It was Mimi. She was flushed and her lips were narrow. “I can’t believe it; I’ve never been so angry in my life.”

With her short, spiky haircut Mimi always looked a little aggressive. Now she was on whatever the Jewish equivalent of a warpath is. I got up, moving toward the door. “What’s wrong? What happened?”

Behind me, Blair rose more slowly. “Is it the ensemble?”

“It sure is. Brittany and Elise are in. Rachel is not.”

So Blair’s and Annelise’s daughters had made it into the ensemble. Mimi’s had not.

I looked back over my shoulder at Blair. Her shirt was ultramarine, and she was wearing a thin silver necklace. Normally the most poised of us, she looked startled now, uncertain how to react. This was good news for her family, but still. …

You weren’t supposed to find out from someone else that your daughter was in the ensemble. She was supposed to rush in from school and tell you herself. It was her news. You weren’t supposed to find out about it as a sidebar to someone else’s drama.

I took over. “How do you know? I thought they weren’t going to announce it until tomorrow.”

“They called me in special. And it wasn’t just Mrs. Barton.” She was the director of the ensemble. “The fifth-grade music teachers were there, too. They wanted to
explain.
” Mimi was sarcastic. “They said they wanted me to
understand.
”

This seemed odd, but maybe this was always done with the close calls and we hadn’t known about it. “What did they say? What were you supposed to understand?”

“That she doesn’t have an ensemble voice. That she sings as well as the other girls, but she is a soloist.”

Now I didn’t know enough about singing to know if, at age eleven, one can be typed as having an ensemble or a soloist voice—it certainly sounded odd—but I did know that Rachel Gold didn’t have an ensemble personality. Brittany whined a bit too much, Elise was too much of a follower, my Erin could be a martyr, but Mimi’s Rachel needed to be in charge. I had helped Annelise with the Brownie troop back when the girls were in Scouts, and Rachel always wanted to be at the center of things. She had to be patrol leader, she had to sell the most cookies, she had to have every decision go her way. She was as hard-working and energetic as her mother, but she could be tiresome.

The fifth-grade chorus had had one behavior problem after another last year, and Rachel had been somewhere between a ringleader and a scapegoat.

“It’s that the teachers don’t like her,” Mimi said. “That’s all it is. They don’t like her. I admit that she has trouble with authority figures that she doesn’t respect. And if that’s what Alden wants, blind, unthinking obedience, then it is not the school we think it is.”

As Rachel’s former assistant Scout leader, I did not appreciate the remark about unworthy authority figures, but I was sure that was the last thing on Mimi’s mind.

“I know she could have behaved better last year,” Mimi continued. “They all could have. But who would have thought that it would have this effect?”

“Then don’t you think this will be a good lesson for her?” I said. “Kids have to understand that being disruptive has consequences.” This far in her young life Rachel Gold had learned that the consequence of being disruptive was that you got your own way.

“Of course, they need to learn that. But not on something as important as this. Have them stay after school; have them write ‘I will not talk in chorus’ a jillion times, but don’t keep them out of the ensemble. I’m going to fix this, and I’m going straight to Chris Goddard because you know this is just about the Caudwell girl being from an alumnae family.”

I did not know any such thing. “Don’t you think you should go to Martha Shot first?” She was the middle-school principal.

“People have been going to Martha Shot for years about the ensemble. She and Grace Barton are great pals. She’ll never interfere.”

She had a point there.

“I’ve got to go,” she continued, turning toward the door. “I just wanted to come here first and calm down.”

I was about to say that she might not be completely calm yet and that maybe she should sit down and have a cup of coffee, but before I could figure out how to say tactfully something so obvious, she was gone.

Blair and I looked at each other. “She’s going to try to get them to change the results, isn’t she?” I asked.

Blair nodded.

“That’s not right,” I said. “Why do we try to fix everything in our kids’ lives? Why can’t we ever let them take their lumps? Our parents didn’t act this way. They just told us to deal with things.”

Blair nodded again.

“You have not,” I pointed out, “said one thing since Mimi walked in here. What are you thinking?”

Blair sat back down at the table. As she moved, her black hair swung and I could see that she was wearing silver earrings that matched her necklace. My kitchen didn’t get direct light until the afternoon, so the silver of her jewelry had no sparkle or depth. She carefully closed and straightened a notebook. “I’m wondering why my daughter might have to learn how to deal with rejection just so Mimi’s daughter doesn’t have to.”

I sat down, too.

Blair went on. “Mimi is so angry that she is just thinking about this as a simple switch between Rachel and the new girl, but the new girl—Faith—may be in there for good.”

“Leaving someone else to get axed,” I finished. “Do you think it might be Brittany?”

“Actually it’s more likely to be Elise since Mrs. Barton might not like how short Elise is, which just makes me angrier because Annelise will turn into a major doormat if this happens.”

How unlike her to call Annelise a “doormat.” God knows it was true enough, but that wasn’t the sort of thing that we ever said about one another. That was one of the “rules” of our friendship—that among the four of us we did not talk behind one another’s backs.