Primates of Park Avenue (15 page)

T
HE INVITATION
came by email. “I don’t know if you got my voicemail on your cell,” the mom from my son’s class wrote. “But I haven’t heard from you. I’d love to have you join for dinner next Thursday night at my place. Some fun girlfriends. LMK, Rebecca.”

Oops. No, I hadn’t heard her message; all my friends knew I rarely used my cell for anything but texting and email. But I still felt anxious and remiss, like a bad guest already, as I puzzled over what “LMK” might mean (“Let me know!” a friend explained later, surprised I didn’t already K) and dialed Rebecca’s number. After leaving a message apologizing for not responding sooner and saying I’d love to attend, I sent her an email, too. How should I sign off? I wondered. “Xx”? No, Rebecca hadn’t, so I wouldn’t presume.

It wasn’t the first time I’d sent an email to Rebecca, a beautiful, dark-haired mother of four whose husband was one of the most successful financiers in the city. But it was the first time I’d received one. Previously, my email correspondence with her had been notably one-sided: obliging my little son’s requests, I sent friendly suggestions that our sons might play and had never gotten a response. Sometimes I was able to flag her down in the hallway to set something up for our kids, particularly after she saw me chatting with the high-ranking dad who had lifted my status and my son’s with his attentions. And, as I ran into Rebecca around the city—at exercise class and at Michael’s—a midtown restaurant I thought of as the campfire of the tribe I studied—and in other clubby contexts that suggest we might have something in common (both of us shopping for clutches at Bergdorf Goodman for the same event one day; encounters at a few fund-raisers) she became friendlier.

When word of my book project got out (“I’m studying what it’s like to be a mother on the Upper East Side,” I explained to anyone who asked), Rebecca and a number of other mothers had become decidedly more open and interested in saying hello and chatting. Some even suggested we have lunch or coffee to discuss their take on how one lived and mothered here and what it all meant. They weren’t all warm or friendly—perhaps they didn’t trust me, in spite of my assurance that I wasn’t writing a tell-all or a satire, but a memoir of my own experience, inflected by sociology and anthropology and a sense of humor, too—but many were. They wanted to talk about more than what we usually chatted about in the hallways—what we were wearing and where we were going on vacation. Some of them told me stories about rough patches in their marriages, or about growing up poor, or about feeling on the outside (“I’m from San Francisco. To a lot of these people, that’s sort of like I’m from Mars. They’ll never really accept me.”). I had more in common with them than I expected. Away from the school hallways and the luncheons and the galas, they were approachable and comfortable. As one told me, “I think the issue is that a lot of these high-achieving, hard-driving, highly competitive mommies and daddies can be perfectly nice one-on-one. But something about the group dynamic makes some of them awful.”

It was nice to see a new friendly face or two at drop-off; in spite of the bump in rank Alpha Dad had given me and my son, those school hallways, jammed with steely-eyed alpha mommies in heels, could still feel daunting. My downtown life and connections continued to ebb as I poured more energy into caring for our children and my work, so having friendly relationships with the women at my older son’s school and my younger son’s playgroup, a social life that paralleled my children’s, felt at once efficient and utterly necessary. Moreover, in the status and hierarchy-obsessed tribe I was studying, having Rebecca invite me to her apartment was something like an endorsement, a grown-up version of sitting at the lunch table with the cool kids. Part of me knew it was ridiculous to care, but another part of me—the one who had worked hard to understand this group of women, get some playdates for my little boys, and make a friend or two myself—was gratified to be invited in by a gatekeeper as influential as Rebecca. And if these women wanted to explain their world to me, as I was hoping they might at Rebecca’s, all the better. I just prayed the Queen of Queen Bees would not be there. I had my limits.

“What are you going to wear?” Candace asked me over lunch a few days later. She was a fluent interpreter of our town’s cultural codes. “I have a doctor’s appointment on the East Side later, that’s why I bumped it up,” she had explained as we sat down and she noticed me noticing her Chanel jacket and bouncy blowout.

“No idea,” I admitted, explaining that I couldn’t ask any moms at school or playgroup, since I didn’t know who was invited to Rebecca’s and who wasn’t. Candace agreed, nodding as she sipped her iced tea, taking in the scope and delicate nature of the task at hand. “Dress to fit in, not to stand out,” she suggested. “You want to let the hostess shine, right? Like at a wedding.”

“Actually, it’s sort of a moms’ night
in
,” I mused. “No husbands. So it will probably be a little more casual.”

Candace looked dubious. She had listened dutifully and sympathetically for months now to my stories about the incredible over-the-topness of my new tribe’s outfits and attitudes. Something of a socialite herself—“but in quotation marks,” as she always said—she knew these women and their ways firsthand, too, from nights out at charity events and restaurants, and from luncheons for causes. Having grown up in California and married a native New Yorker whose parents were fixtures on the social circuit a generation earlier, Candace viewed the world I studied with irony and humor, and was an outsider/insider after my own heart, a natural anthropologist. “It’s
not
going to be casual,” she pronounced flatly.

She was right, I realized, about “low-key” being a foreign concept in this world. The perfect bodies honed from hours at Physique 57 or Soul Cycle would be complemented by high-caliber wardrobes and airbrushed-looking faces and perfect but never fussy hair, whether men were present or not. Everyone, it seemed, was forever ready for the close-up, prepared for the photo op, with never a wrinkle or a wisp out of place. This “always beautiful”-ness wasn’t the same as natural beauty—it was natural, effortless beauty’s polar opposite. The Upper East Side women I knew worked as hard at looking perfect on the playground as they did at the Playground Partners Luncheon, and made no secret of it. This commitment, this unwavering determination to leave nothing to chance when it came to their faces and wardrobes, this
studied-ness
was as much a part of their daily uniform as their expensive flats and cross-body bags. Indeed, they were so prepped and primed that some days I expected there to be a “step and repeat”—an area where one stood, like an actual celebrity, to be photographed—outside the playgroups, the schools, the coffee shops around them, the five-thousand-dollar birthday parties for five-year-olds, and anywhere else the tribe gathered.

Looking perpetually photo ready cost them significant time and not a little bit of anxiety—this I knew from getting myself together most mornings, having realized early on that I was the only person showing up for drop-off with a scrunchie in my hair and lines from the sheets still pressed into my face. I started to get a weekly blowout, upped my sunblock to tinted moisturizer, and added pinkish lip balm to the mix. Even jogging clothes should look nice and flattering and yes, fashion forward, it seemed. On days I couldn’t jump into my running togs due to a meeting after drop-off, I found myself mulling over the right look, snapping at my husband that I didn’t have
time
to get our son ready for school—I had to get
myself
ready. I knew how absurd this was as the words came out of my mouth, yet I was swept along by the cultural tide of high expectations, the hot- and cold-running Prada, the flawless faces and dazzling daily displays all around me. All before 9:00 a.m.

The fact that these women basically had several “uniforms” made the daily task of getting dressed a little easier. Other than lululemon for drop-off and playgroup, the Upper East Side clothing lexicon was remarkably consistent, with minimal and very subtle variation, if any. For starters, there was the bag. Favorite brands and styles were Céline (Luggage Bag, Nano Luggage Bag, or Trapeze Bag); Chanel (large Boy Bag) and Hermès (Evelyn, small Jypsiere, or Kelly worn cross-body; Garden Party tote in spring and early fall; holy-grail Birkin 30 or 35cm in black, blue jean, or gold). The Valentino rockstud bag is beautiful and fashion forward, but no one in the tribe I studied and hung out with had one. It was not comme il faut
;
it was not done.

Ballerina flats were popular in months of little or no precipitation—Lanvin and Chanel and Chloe were favored, especially by tall women. Lanvin wedges and Isabel Marant wedge sneakers were popular choices for “low-key” drop off days, when a mom didn’t have something to rush off to immediately, because these women were always, as far as I could tell, looking for a height advantage, a literal leg up on everyone else. Sky-high platforms and stilettos with bright red lacquered soles said, “I’m going somewhere—and I’m not taking the subway.” There were boots in fall and winter and into spring, of course—high, teetering black boots of softest leather and suede by Manolo Blahnik and Christian Louboutin and Jimmy Choo, some of them open-toed, and fur-lined biker boots by Brunello Cucinelli. Skinny jeans and leather leggings were popular on casual days. On rainy days these were topped with classic trench coats (always with some update that kept one perpetually shopping, like leather arms or a laser-cut lace hem), and accessorized with wildly colorful Pucci rain boots and whimsical Chanel ones with signature camellia flowers affixed. In winter, the mommies donned licorice-black, shiny Moncler down puffers. Fur vests were so popular with haute moms that a friend jokingly suggested there should be a photo essay about them in all Upper East Side school newsletters. And on the coldest days, there were more furs—sumptuous beaver and glossy black sable and indescribably soft (I knew from brushing against it with my ungloved hand in the jammed elevator) chinchilla coats. Lustrous and astonishing to behold, they cost more than my first book advance, I was sure, but were worn with the kind of casual aplomb usually associated with a jean jacket.

And on days when there was a charity or cause breakfast of some type after drop-off or Mommy & Me, it was all-out, full-throttle, dressed-up mayhem. There were simple but stunning long-sleeved leather dresses by The Row and fun, bright, young Chanel jackets with fringe and fringed Chanel dresses underneath, and floral Givenchy ensembles accessorized with intricate lace-up heels and “fit-and-flare” Alexander McQueen numbers that showed off toned legs and flat tummies. There were snakeskin leggings and paper-thin leather jackets and delicious, cream-colored, demure silk blouses to counterbalance their edginess. There was encrusted, embellished everything. Stunned by the bright fuchsia, bejeweled jacket a tall blond mother of three wore as she swept through the halls for drop off one morning, I googled it in my office later—and learned that its price tag was over seven thousand dollars.

But it wasn’t just about being able to pay. There was a premium placed, among a certain rarefied set of moms within the already rarefied Upper East Side setting, on being first. I learned this when a fashion-forward mother of two showed up one February morning in a white cotton dress with what looked like gold leaf on the front, and studded, neon green sling-backs. She was shivering, but she had crossed the finish line before anyone else. And now the rest of us, if we should wear this particular dress, would merely be imitating
her
. This happened in early fall, too—women decked out in their autumnal finery, light wools and new boots and the latest Chanel jacket in spite of the warmth that still hung in the air. Plenty of women in Manhattan love fashion. But this was something else again, this showing up everybody else by wearing it first, this joyless-seeming race to have it before others did, and display it best.

Intrasexual competition—competing with other species members of your own sex—is a widespread evolutionary selection pressure. For many years, primatologists and biologists focused almost exclusively on
male
intrasexual competition, probably because it was so conspicuous. Adaptations like larger body size, weaponry, and ritualized displays used in aggressive contests, and dramatic ornamentation and behavior in courtship displays are all plain to see and pretty easy to interpret. They give the guy of the species an advantage in procuring and keeping access to a breeding female, or several of them, the evolutionary endgame for males of every stripe, feather, and shoe size.

More recently, however, biologists and primatologists have shifted their focus to the subtler aspects of
female
intrasexual competition. Mostly, female mammals—be they mice or chimps or
Homo sapiens
—are competing, when they need to, for breeding opportunities and to attract preferred mates, just as males do. But for females, the expression of aggression is context specific. If a female house mouse (
Mus musculus domesticus
) is living without a lot of other female house mice nearby, and there are plenty of males in the mix, her body won’t bother to secrete the special proteins (MUPs) that give her urine a strong scent that clearly communicates “Stay away!” to other female house mice. Surrounded by other female mice, however, her urine changes dramatically so she can get her message across: “This is
my
turf, ladies!” Such plasticity has evolved because competitive signaling, as biologists call it, is
costly
. It takes energy and time to secrete those proteins, energy and time that could otherwise be expended by females on maintaining good nutrition, optimizing fertility, seeking nesting materials, being pregnant, lactating, and caring for one’s young.