A Most Uncommon Degree of Popularity (3 page)

We aren’t social climbers. We aren’t pretending to be of aristocratic summer-in-Bar-Harbor lineage even though we are now the ones who can afford second homes in Maine. We are too well-educated to crave the flashy tastelessness of the nouveau-riche land developers even though our money is every bit as new as theirs. Our middle-American backgrounds show in how informal our lives are. Everyone always answers her own door and serves at her own table. None of us have breast implants, and we wear comfortable shoes. My friends and I are middle-class soccer moms.

With upper-crust incomes.

The other families at Alden are the alumnae families in which the mothers and the grandmothers went to Alden themselves. They do represent the aristocrats, the summer-in-Bar-Harbor old-line money, the Wasp establishment, the traditionally privileged, the people who would have had their heads cut off if we’d had a revolution in 1950.

As individuals the alumnae mothers are as different from one another as we are. Some of the women are delicately feminine; others are jolly hockey-sticks athletic. Some are conscientious and reliable; some whine. Some are intelligent and belong to interesting book clubs; others shop a lot.

But you can always tell them from us. They are mothers; we are moms. Their hair is light and smooth, their cheekbones are good, and their figures are trim. They always put their best foot forward and are much more disciplined about their grooming than we are. There is a confidence to them, an ease and poise that is gradually giving way to bewilderment.

They are bewildered because we have taken their place, a place that they didn’t even know they’d had until they lost it. Sometimes that “place” is literal. Blair and her family live in a house that one of the alumnae moms had grown up in. More often we seem to be living the lives that their parents grew up in. We have money; they don’t anymore. We have jobs with influence; they are realtors. We’ve stayed married; they haven’t.

They have assumed too much. Their parents had always enough money; they assumed that they would as well. When they were girls, they had always been in the right dance classes; they had always been invited to the right birthday parties. As a result, they assumed that those opportunities would come to their children as a matter of course.

But now they are living side by side with us, and we never assume that anything will ever happen as a matter of course. We believe that you have to work for everything. Just as we once studied and studied to be sure that we passed the bar exam on our first try, we now program the speed dials on our phones on the first day that a preschool day camp releases its registration forms. We use our BlackBerries and our fax machines to get our kids on a soccer team with their friends. Our kids don’t just get invited to the right birthday parties; we compete madly to be sure that our kids
host
the right birthday parties.

We are probably very annoying.

Several times during the year
the school sponsors grade-level coffees, giving the parents (i.e., the mothers) an opportunity to network (i.e., gossip). We “new” families attend faithfully because the coffees are another chance to show the school what really great parents we are. Even the mothers who work show up on their way to the office.

Although the alumnae mothers are very active in the school’s many fund-raising activities, they come only to the first of these coffees. Then their attendance drops off. Either they don’t need to have the staff think that they are really great parents or our obsessive interest in our children’s lives drives them nuts.

The first sixth-grade parents’ coffee was Tuesday morning of the second week of school. It was held in the multipurpose room of the middle school. The tables had been pushed against the wall, and the chairs were arranged in a rough circle.

I knew that Mimi Gold would not be there. Although she is just as obsessed as the rest of us, Mimi always has to miss the first coffee. She runs a nanny-placement service, and the first two weeks of September are always devoted to working out problems arising from new placements.

But my other two close friends, Blair Branson and Annelise Rosen, had already arrived. Annelise had her purse on the chair next to her. She was saving a seat for me. We always did that sort of thing for one another.

Of the four of us, Annelise and I met first. The girls were babies, and we were two attorneys desperate to talk about infant poo and sleep schedules. We were also both midwesterners. I am from Indiana, and Annelise is from Wisconsin; she and I are friendly, open, and pride ourselves on our unpretentiousness.

People often mistake one of us for the other. We both are small with boyish builds. We both have our hair cut in short feathery layers, and both of us would be dishwater blondes if we didn’t spend a lot of money on highlights.

But her features are broad and Dutch while mine are narrow and Irish. My eyes are greenish blue while hers are an unusual dramatically dark brown. We also don’t carry ourselves the same way. She is gentler than I am, more diffident, more vulnerable. Her husband, Joel, is pretty critical of her. I don’t know why she puts up with it, but she does.

Our fourth friend, Blair Branson, is from South Carolina, and people who don’t know better assume that she must be a debutante from a gracious old Southern family. She is the most conventionally attractive of the four of us—she has shoulder-length black hair and very fair skin—and she dresses almost as well as our daughters do, wearing clothes of a classic, conservative cut, but in colors that are boldly feminine—aqua, periwinkle, persimmon, and lime.

If she were the old-line aristocrat that she looks like, she would still be in South Carolina, divorced and wondering why someone like me was living in her grandmother’s beautiful house.

Blair’s father was a pharmacist, and her mother spent all her time working in his store, never going to white-glove luncheons with the other ladies. Blair had been like me, the smartest girl in the grade, the outsider. Being the outsider was what she knew, what she was comfortable with. When she went to college at Penn, she realized that what made her an outsider there was not being smart and ambitious—everyone was smart and ambitious—but being a Southerner. So she became more Southern.

She is the most guarded of the four of us, the one who has been the hardest to get to know. But if Annelise and I are the most alike in personality and appearance, then Blair and I have the most abilities and interests in common. We had both been art history majors in college and we each have a good eye and a strong design sense. When I set out to waste time in a home-dec shop, I always call Blair to come with me.

Of the nearly twenty-five people who had come to this parents’ coffee, I knew everyone there except for one woman. I nudged Annelise and Blair. They shook their heads. Neither of them knew her, either. She looked slender and fit, and her hair was chin-length and light. Wearing nicely fitting pleated khaki trousers, a sleeveless black silk shirt, and narrow black loafers, she was well-groomed in the understated way that the alumnae mothers have. I would have introduced myself to her, but it was clear that the women who had stopped in on their way to work were eager to get the meeting started so I stayed in my seat.

Eight minutes after the coffee was supposed to begin—which wasn’t bad—the principal of the middle school, Martha Shot, began speaking. Mrs. Shot herself was a graduate of the school, and her manner and dress were a bit too prim for our tastes, but she was the principal and we listened to school principals.

According to her, our darling children were going to start being significantly less darling. That they hated the way we dressed would be the least of it. “They will look you right in the eye and lie to you,” Mrs. Shot said. “If they call you from their cell phone and say they are at Susie’s house and Susie’s mother is there, tell them that you are going to call Susie’s landline and ask to speak to her mother. The story may suddenly change.”

My child would never do that.
Every mother in the circle must have been thinking that. I certainly was, but we were probably all fooling ourselves.

“You aren’t going to be seeing too much of this in the sixth grade,” she said. “What we face in sixth grade are social issues. Friendships realign, and some of the kids are going to feel excluded. What most of them want, at this age, is to be exactly like all the other kids.”

I understood that. My mother had wanted my brother and me to be smart. We had the
Encyclopedia Britannica
and subscribed to the Sunday
New York Times,
even though it arrived in Indiana on the following Wednesday. If she had ever thought about it, Mother would have been proud that I didn’t dress like the other girls. Somehow that proved I was smart.

What I had wanted was to be smart
and
exactly like everyone else.

“The children,” Mrs. Shot continued, “especially the girls, become very cliquish. There is a clear hierarchy, and each child knows her own place even if her parents do not. Unfortunately the system is always in motion, and the individual child can feel deeply hurt.”

She paused, waiting for someone to speak. No one did. I’m a good sport at moments like this, always willing to jump in with a vague, conciliatory remark.

So I said, “Is being eleven as awful as we remember it?”

There was a sudden stirring in the room. At least half of the women were glaring resentfully at me.

What was going on? Why were they looking at me this way? What had I done wrong? The whole point of vague, conciliatory remarks is that they are never wrong.

It was those skirts, those four stupid, cotton-fleece drawstring skirts, four scraps of fabric declaring which girls were in and which were out.

I wasn’t a too-smart-to-be-popular junior-high semi-misfit anymore. I was now the mother of a popular girl, and the other mothers were going to make me pay for that.

I know how your daughter feels,
I wanted to hop up on my chair and shriek.
I used to be one of those girls who didn’t know where to stand, didn’t know whom to talk to.

But no one cared about what I knew or understood. They only cared about their own daughters.

“Children are very vulnerable at this age,” Fran Zimmerman, Chloe’s mom, said finally. Although Chloe played on Erin’s soccer team, they weren’t particularly close. In fact, I didn’t think that Erin had ever been to the Zimmermans’ house. Chloe had been to ours, of course, but that was because I was nutty enough to let Erin invite fifty million squealing piglets in for slumber parties. “Exclusionary behavior is never acceptable.”

Fran Zimmerman was angry. Her shoulders were back, her jaw was forward. “Some children exclude other children just to show that they can do it.”

She had better not be talking about
my
kid. Every time Erin had more than three or four girls to something, she included Chloe.

“Cliques are very dangerous,” Ariel Sommers’s mother said. “They can be very destructive.”

I felt Annelise and Blair shifting uneasily beside me. Were these other women calling our four girls a clique?

It’s just a matter of seat belts,
I wanted to explain.
Blair and Annelise drive sedans with only five seat belts so we have to limit our car pools to four girls. The girls aren’t a clique; they are a car pool.

Of course the car pool had a uniform—cotton-fleece drawstring skirts. That might sound a bit like a clique.

I felt sick.

The new headmaster, Chris Goddard, had come in after the meeting had started. He was standing, leaning against one of the counters, his arms folded. I could look at him by shifting my eyes slightly. He was a lean man with close-cropped hair and wire-rimmed glasses. He had a thoughtful look about him, but the lines on his face were deeper than you would expect from a man in his forties. He straightened and spoke. “Exclusion is going to happen. Kids do have friends, and sometimes it is hard to distinguish between appropriate acts of friendships and inappropriate exclusion.”

“No, it is not hard to make that distinction,” Fran Zimmerman insisted. “And it is very, very painful for a child to be left out of something, particularly when the other children insist on flaunting it.”

“But some things are just unforgivable, whether they are repeated or not,” Alexis Fairling’s mom said. “This school year has gotten off to an awful start.”

Now Linda Fairling had no business complaining about her child being left out of things. It wasn’t Alexis who got left out of things, it was Linda herself. She was forever trying to maneuver her way into one of our car pools, but she was always late, always, always, always. I’ll drive a car pool with Genghis Khan if he—or rather his wife—is going to show up on time. With Linda Fairling I won’t.

“I have to agree,” Diane Sommers said. “Some of the girls have been devastated at the level of rejection.”

Blair couldn’t help herself. Her black hair brushed against the yoke of her lemon-colored shirt as she turned to look at Diane. “The level of rejection? What are you talking about?”

“First there was Adam’s party”—that was the swimming pool party the Saturday before Labor Day—“and then there was Erin’s party, and—”

“What?” I interrupted. “Erin’s party? Erin didn’t have a party.”

Now that was exactly the wrong thing to say. “You weren’t there?” Fran Zimmerman almost sounded happy that I was so utterly in the wrong. “You didn’t know your daughter was having a party Friday night? A failure to provide adequate supervision is a cause for grave concern.”

“Of course, I provided adequate supervision,” I snapped, wondering if I had. “It wasn’t a party, just a bunch of kids watching a movie.”

“How many were there?” she demanded.

“Nine.”

The room was quiet.

Okay, that didn’t sound so great. To many people nine kids was a lot, nine kids was a party. But our house is big, and my housekeeping standards are cheerful. The furniture in our sunroom is indestructible, the carpet is the color of spilled Coke, and there is always some kind of salty, greasy junk food in the cabinet next to the refrigerator with the sodas. I had not had to do a thing in order to have nine kids over.