A Most Uncommon Degree of Popularity (6 page)

But if Blair and I were breaking that rule, Mimi was breaking a more important one. We had never spelled it out, but didn’t we have a pact that we were all working together, all pulling in the same direction? That one of us would not sabotage the others? That no one would be unusually permissive, providing extra treats so that her house would be more fun than the others?

Mimi was violating the pact, declaring that what happened to her child was so much more important than what happened to anyone else’s.

This was how a diva-cheerleader mom would behave, and I didn’t find the thought very funny.

Blair flipped open the notebook that she had just closed, making it clear that she was done talking about this, even though it was still clearly on her mind. We worked the rest of the morning with grim efficiency, stopping only when Bruce, Blair’s husband, called her on her cell phone, saying that he couldn’t find his American Express card and could she go home and look for it.

I had some clients that afternoon. It was a pair of siblings, a baby and a toddler, and it was clear within five minutes that the shoot was going to be a disaster. The baby was cutting a tooth and would not be consoled. This upset the mother, which in turn upset the toddler, and I wasn’t bringing much serenity to the table myself. So I quickly offered to reschedule, saying that, of course, there would be no additional sitting fee or charge for the film I had already used. That’s what I always did in cases like this. I got as many clients from being nice as I did from the quality of my work. But as I was helping the other woman gather her things, I felt as if I were standing a distance from myself, hearing myself being nice.

I couldn’t stop thinking about what Mimi was doing.

Despite how soft and slow Blair’s accent is, despite how perfect her manners are, there are some hard edges to her. If her own daughter was not in the ensemble, Blair would put the best face on it, setting an example for Brittany about being gracious and forgiving in defeat. But unbeknownst to the girls, she would draw a line and have as little as possible to do with Mimi.

A few years ago ago the husband of a teacher in the lower school had died suddenly. The funeral was going to be enormous, but there was no money for caterers. Someone had called me, her voice hurried. “Could the four of you”—she hadn’t needed to name who she was talking about—“handle the fruit and cheese platters for the reception?”

“Of course, we can.” My kitchen had been in renovation hell at the moment, but that didn’t matter. I knew where my friends kept their knives. I could cut up fruit in their houses just as well as I could in my own.

“I don’t need to call the others, do I?”

“No. They’ll be glad to help.”

And, of course, they were glad to help.

I love stuff like that, having other people think of my friends and me as generous and reliable. I like that one of us can speak for the others, that we are a team. These women weren’t simply my friends; we were also professional associates, all in the business of raising children and maintaining a community.

Our friendship was like a lighthouse. Each of us was piloting a boat that carried our individual families, our houses, our marriages; steering that boat on its journey was the central mission of each of our lives. But our friendship provided navigational guidance. When I wasn’t sure on which side of the rocks to guide my family’s craft, talking to my friends gave me a map. And when I thought one of them was headed toward the rocks, I dumped my purse on her feet.

The lighthouse spread out a circle of light because it had four windows, but at the moment Mimi was seeing only the light from one window—her own.

It was my day to pick up the older girls at school and take them to soccer practice. The conversation in the car made it clear that the results from the ensemble auditions hadn’t been announced yet.

When I do this half of the soccer drive, Mimi picks up the younger kids—her son and mine, Blair’s and Annelise’s younger daughters. If Mimi gets back before I do, she holds on to Thomas until I get home.

As I drove down our block, I could see Thomas and Mimi’s son, Gideon, playing in the small grassy space in front of the Golds’ house. In such cases I usually get out of my car, check our narrow street for traffic, and wave Thomas to come home on his own. Today I crossed the street.

Mimi’s house has a covered entry instead of the deep, wide porch that we have. I could see her through her screen door, standing in the front hall, looking through the mail. Her screen door served as a scrim, blurring her outline.

When she saw me, she pushed aside Banjo—her family’s big, gloriously stupid dog—and opened the door. “I am a crazy woman; I’m on a mission.”

She was vibrating with energy. One of the things that I liked about her was how willing she was to fight the good fight. Confrontation didn’t make her sick and miserable; she thrived on it.

Of all of us, she was the only entrepreneur, the only one who had had the sense not to go to law school. When we had all been working full-time, we had continually been frustrated by how difficult it was to find decent child care. In this nightmare Mimi saw a marketing opportunity. She opened a nanny-placement firm. She specialized in what she correctly assumed would be the truly desperate; she represented only families who had already been through at least two nannies.

One of the keys to her success was her mother, an exuberant but no-nonsense former pediatric nurse from Queens. Bubbe—all of us addressed her by the Yiddish word for grandmother—came in from New York, sat down with the families, and forced them to admit that they were as much of the problem as the nannies. She had worked while raising her children so she was entirely sympathetic to the choices that the families were making, but she could also see that if you lived on a two-acre lot in the far suburbs and you wouldn’t let your nanny put the kids in a car, so that she was there for twelve hours a day with a newborn and a two-year-old, she was probably going to quit unless she was such a lousy nanny that she couldn’t get another job.

“I would not work for you,” Bubbe would tell some of the families. “And, tell me, honestly, would you work for yourselves?”

And if they didn’t get it, she told them she didn’t want her daughter working with them and that Mimi would be giving them their money back, and they were far too desperate to accept that.

Once Mimi’s business got established, she hired two part-time social workers in addition to her mother, and this high-intervention model was changing families who had started out as impossible employers. It didn’t work all the time, but often enough that when the older girls started third grade, Mimi was able to put both kids in Alden, and then the following year she and Ben bought the house across the street from us.

In her brisk no-nonsense way she was a very good neighbor. If she had to go out to the grocery store during a thunderstorm or on a Sunday evening, she would check to see if I needed something. I might not cry on her shoulder, but when I was done crying and was ready to start fixing whatever was making me cry, Mimi would be the first I would call, except that I wouldn’t need to call her. She would be there.

So although she wasn’t going to like me lecturing her, I felt an obligation to warn her on how choppy the waters were going to be.

I glanced over my shoulder to be sure that none of the kids were listening. “Mimi, I’m really afraid that if you succeed in getting Rachel in the ensemble, the repercussions might not be very pleasant.”

She had been holding a handful of junk mail that she was obviously getting ready to throw away. She tossed it back down on the hall table. The Talbots catalog slid to the floor. “Oh, God, I know what you are going to say, and you’re right. I was so pissed off that I was just thinking about this as being between Rachel and Faith, but Grace Barton disabused me of that right away.”

“What did she say?”

“We were walking up to Chris Goddard’s office at the high school. ‘And which of your daughter’s little friends’”—Mimi mimicked Mrs. Barton with a simpering saccharineness—“‘should be expected to step aside? Shall we ask for volunteers?’”

That had to have thrown cold water even on Mimi’s anger. “What did you say?”

“Fortunately, I think very well on my feet. I said that I wasn’t asking someone to be kicked off for Rachel. I was asking why there had to be ten girls. Why not make the size of the ensemble responsive to the size of the talent pool? Some years there should be nine girls, and some years thirteen. They don’t enter competitions; there are no rules governing the size. Why not have eleven girls this year?”

“That does make sense,” I admitted.

“I know. It makes me think that if I’m always going to be this brilliant on my feet, I ought to exercise more.”

“But Mrs. Barton couldn’t have liked that idea. Did her ‘we’ve always done it this way’ cut any ice with Chris Goddard?”

“Those words never came out of her mouth,” Mimi said. “I’m guessing that the staff has already realized that argument doesn’t work with him. She said that the issue was the sashes.”

The girls in the ensemble provided their own white dresses and the school lent them violet sashes.

“The sashes? This is about the
sashes
?”

“Yes, darling. That’s what Mrs. Barton says. She’s lying, of course, but she says the problem is that there are only ten sashes, and how could we ever find exactly the same fabric to make another?”

“You couldn’t—why do I feel that sometime in the next month Blair or I am going to be making a whole bunch of new violet sashes?”

She smiled wickedly. “Because I said you would.”

We both laughed, and I bent down to help her pick up the mail she had dropped. I felt light and happy. I was relieved. Nothing was going to change among the four of us.

I was glad that Jamie
was out of town that evening. Not only could we eat dinner at five-thirty when the kids were actually hungry, but I knew that if he had been in town, I would, in the name of healthy marital communication, have attempted to explain why I had been so upset all day, and he would never, not in a hundred million years, ever have understood.

You felt that your life was falling apart because Mimi Gold was going to talk to the music teachers? What does that have to do with us? Erin didn’t try out.

And he would have indeed said
“us.” “What does that have to do with us?”

Where was the
“us”
? He was so completely wrapped up in this trial that he had no idea what was going on in this house. My friends knew much more about my life than he did.

The sixth-grade girls’ ensemble did
indeed have eleven voices this year, but the director Grace Barton did a phenomenally bitchy thing when she typed up the list. All of the girls from Brittany Branson and Faith Caudwell to Elise Rosen and Chloe Zimmerman were listed alphabetically, except Rachel Gold. Her name was last.

Ensemble rehearsals started immediately. The girls were going to be rehearsing three times a week right after school. That meant that we had to redo all the carpool schedules. I keep my Monday and Tuesday afternoons clear for clients, so on Thursday and Friday afternoons I went to school and picked up Erin and the little kids—my Thomas, Blair’s and Annelise’s younger daughters, and Mimi’s son. It was unusual for Erin to be the only one of the older girls in the car, and she complained about it. Then on Wednesdays, I had my two kids and Blair’s younger daughter because all the Jewish kids—Annelise isn’t Jewish, but Joel is, and they are raising their kids Jewish—had to go to Hebrew School and there was another car pool to take care of that. That left Blair without a car pool for Brittany on Wednesday afternoons since Elise and Rachel dashed off to Hebrew School after rehearsal, but in truth, it hardly mattered since we all lived within a few miles of school, and most of the time it took longer to figure out who was going to drive than it did to make the actual drive.

We survived the first week of rehearsals with everyone following the new schedule, but then on Friday of the second week, the last week in September, Annelise called me from her cell phone. She had gotten confused about the schedule and now she was stuck in traffic. She couldn’t find Mimi or Blair. Was there any way I could go get the three girls at rehearsal? “It’s a special trip for you, I know, I know, but I will never get there.”

“It’s no problem.” I meant that; it really wasn’t a problem, and none of us kept score about who was doing how many favors for whom. I hung up the phone, grabbed my purse, and called out to Erin, who was in the sunroom, watching TV. “I’ve got to go to school and pick up the other girls. Do you want to come?”

It never occurred to me that she would say no, but she did. Surprised, I went through the living room and looked into the sunroom. She was lying on the sofa, watching the Disney Channel. She had gotten braces in August, and they had changed the shape of the lower part of her face. She was a little squarer, a little swollen. I still wasn’t entirely used to it.

“Oh, come on, honey,” I said. She was old enough to stay home alone, but this seemed strange. We were picking up her friends. “It’s a pretty day, and you aren’t doing anything,”

“I said I didn’t want to go.”

And I probably should have accepted that on the first go-round. “Okay. I should be home soon. If Elise doesn’t have a key, I’ll bring her here. Her mom’s in traffic.”

“She has a key,” Erin muttered.

The rehearsal was still in progress when I got to the middle-school music room. Chris Goddard, the new headmaster, was standing in the doorway, listening.

Because our music and arts are so strong and our sports facilities so secondary, Alden draws families with unathletic sons. The boys in our high school are remarkable. Misfits at other schools, they flourish here; they are witty, talented, and proud that they can’t catch a football. We are one of the few high schools in the country able to stage Shakespeare’s history plays. No one else has enough boys willing to wear tights. The talent of these young men is raising the school’s profile, taking it far beyond its original image of refined girls singing prettily. They produce graphic novels. They create award-winning Web sites. They make music out of their computers. They get into great colleges. The gratitude of their families is being expressed in significant financial donations.