A Most Uncommon Degree of Popularity (10 page)

It helped that the coach had gotten upset with how much Faith had distracted the girls during the previous week’s game and had told her that she could talk to the players only during halftime. At first she had tried talking to two injured players, but the coach waved her off even from them. For a minute or so, she was standing by herself—which is, of course, a fate worse than death for a sixth-grade girl; you can’t ever,
ever
let someone see you alone, how geeky is that?—but then she had the sense to go to the playground with the little sister of one of the players.

After the game Erin danced up to me and asked if she could go to Brittany’s the following Friday.

I was a little surprised. I kept track of Faith’s tyrannical schedule and I thought that next week was Faith’s own turn to have the girls over. On those Friday nights Erin was always home alone.

“Of course,” I said, “but I won’t be able to drive you.” I had just made arrangements with Mimi for driving our sons to a birthday party on Friday. “You’ll need to walk.”

“That’s no problem,” she said cheerily and skipped off.

It was nice to see her happy again, but three days later she asked, with an edge in her voice, if I was sure that I couldn’t drive her on Friday night.

“I really can’t, at least not until after eight.” Thomas and Mimi’s son, Gideon, had been invited to a birthday party in Rockville, one of the Maryland suburbs outside the Beltway. The party was from five-thirty to seven on a Friday evening. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would think that was a good time of day to assemble a bunch of second graders, but some parents are clueless. And getting out to Rockville at the height of rush hour wasn’t going to be any fun for the parents, either. The trip was long enough and the party short enough that I had said I would drive out there, drop the boys off, kill some time at G Street Fabrics, and then bring them home. “Is that going to be a problem?” I asked Erin.

“I don’t know,” she muttered and started to leave the room.

I followed her. “I’m doing a big favor for Rachel’s mom. I’m sure she would be happy to run you over to Brittany’s.”

“We can’t ask her to do that,” Erin said instantly. “It’s not fair.”

It certainly wasn’t fair. Mimi would be making a four-block drive in exchange for me investing at least three hours on Friday night, but I didn’t suppose that that was what Erin meant.

I didn’t give Erin’s Friday-night plans much thought the rest of the week. Once the other second-grade parents heard that I was driving both ways to the Friday birthday party, they were determined to get their sons into my car. One of the delights of driving a “big-ass” station wagon is that sometimes you find yourself sharing the car with eight seven-year-old boys, which is the sort of thing that you probably need a day-care license for.

Even at the best of times, being the only adult with eight seven-year-old boys is no fun, and seven o’clock on Friday night with the boys on screeching sugar highs was not going to be the best of times. But long experience had told me that some of these families absolutely were not going to take “no” for an answer. They would, if necessary, go to court, getting an injunction that would force me to take their kid to this party.

I did at least draw the line at having kids share seat belts. “I’ll be on an eight-lane expressway at rush hour,” I said to the families of the ninth and tenth boys. At this rate we could just stage the party in my car. “I’m not double-buckling kids.”

“Well, I would have called earlier,” snapped one of these mothers, “but I was out of town. On
business.
It would have been nice of you to have held some spots in your car for people who
work.
”

The Kennedy Center holds some tickets for senior citizens and students. American Express has a platinum card that reserves tickets and restaurant reservations for really rich people. But since when are the seats in my car such entitlements that the nation needs a system for allocating them to the most deserving?

The other thing that kept me from thinking about Erin’s Friday-night plans was that Blair and I faced our first Spring Fair crisis that week. Once we had seen the list of women on the auction committee, we had known that we were going to have problems. Three people on the committee thrived on confrontation, and two prided themselves on being free spirits and independent thinkers.

Most of the funds raised at the fair come through the live and silent auctions held during the evening dinner. Only ten or so items are included in the live part of the auction; the rest are sold silently with bidders entering their bids on a sheet of paper.

All of the items for the auction are donated, and some of the donors are extremely generous. At the live auction last year we offered a private tour of the Supreme Court chambers and lunch with one of the justices, who was the grandfather of an Alden student. People also could bid on a week in a five-bedroom house in a French village; airfare for eight people was included in the package, as one family owned the house and another dad had an extremely senior position at the airline. Last year the organizers had put together a package of tickets to a home game for each of our major sporting teams with all the seats being in the owners’ boxes. Most of these live auction items sell for more than ten thousand dollars.

But this year a grandmother, who had, during the fifties, a small career as an artist and still fancied herself a marketable professional, had donated five of her paintings to the auction with the understanding that the grandest one would be in the live auction. It would, needless to say, have a reserve price that corresponded to the grandmother’s sense of her value as an artist. One of the “freethinkers” had agreed to this without clearing it with the rest of the committee, having done so because her own best friend was the daughter of this artist.

I couldn’t imagine that someone would bid on any of the pictures, especially the one in the live auction. The silence that would follow its introduction would depress everyone’s spirits and embarrass the donor’s family. The rest of the committee, now pretty upset with the freethinker who had not been assigned to solicit live auction donations, wanted her to tell the grandmother that her grand painting wouldn’t be in the live auction and that at most only one of the other works would be in the silent auction.

She refused to do that, and so in the end, Blair volunteered to do the dirty work. Summoning all of her semifaux Southern graciousness and some of her University of Pennsylvania art history training, she called the artist.
Oh my, but your paintings are so striking, such vivid instances of early fifties realism—and your use of space and light—
Blair really could shovel the lingo when she put her mind to it—
that’s almost Hudson Rivery, isn’t it? The difficulty, of course, is that people will have been drinking, and the stark dignity of your work blurs …

And somehow Blair managed to persuade the artist that her work had too much depth and intelligence to be appreciated by the blithering, drunken mob that would populate this event.

So with these grand operas chewing up my week, I didn’t ask Erin about her plans until I picked her up after school on Friday. I winced as I did so because now it probably was too late to ask Mimi to run her over to Blair’s, though I didn’t understand why that was needed in the first place.

“I decided that I didn’t want to go,” Erin muttered.

That was hard to believe. “Oh, sweetie, was it just not having a ride?”

“It’s okay, Mom.”

Her voice didn’t sound as if it was okay. I tried six different ways to ask the same question and got the same response.

So I left her at home as I set out to round up my little army of birthday celebrants and transport them to the wilds of Rockville. On the way there the boys amused themselves by taking off their seat belts to see if I would notice, which fortunately I did. On the trip home they amused themselves by yelling. Then one of the boys wet his pants, and that provided a whole new dimension of fun.

Back home I took Thomas right up to his room although I had no great hopes of him calming down. Erin was in her room reading. Now when she felt abandoned by her friends, she read rather than watching the Disney Channel, choosing books from a series of paperbacks written for middle-school girls. I had read a few, and they depicted girls solving mysteries that I thought would be better left to the police, but the girls had really cute clothes, and I suppose that that made their disregard for all laws about trespassing and privacy okay. It was a good thing their villains ended up confessing because no prosecutor could have gotten admitted the evidence that the girls had so charmingly collected. The Disney Channel might actually be more morally uplifting than these books, but I was enough of a snob about the printed word that I was just glad she was reading.

Jamie got home as I was getting Thomas settled. I could see that Erin had already made herself some macaroni and cheese, and so I switched on the Jenn-Air indoor grill to prepare some deboned chicken breasts for Jamie and me.

We were just about to sit down when the phone rang. I could see from caller ID that it was Blair’s cell phone.

I wondered why she was on her cell. If the girls were at her house, surely she was home.

I could hear a lot of background noise. “Where’s Erin?” she said, her voice rushed.

“She’s here, upstairs, reading.”

“But she was supposed to be at the movies with the other girls.”

“What movie?” I asked carefully. “I don’t know anything about a movie. At the beginning of the week she was going to spend the night at your house and then suddenly she wasn’t.”

“After rehearsal Mary Paige took the girls to Mazza.” That is a mall on the D.C.-Maryland line. “They were going to eat at McDonald’s and go to the movies. I was picking them up. It was all planned. I assumed that Erin would be with them.”

“Well, she’s not. She’s here.”

“Then does she want to meet us at the house? We’ll be back in fifteen minutes.”

“Let me talk to her. Call me when you get home.”

I went upstairs. This did not add up. There was no way that Blair could have been planning to pick up all five girls from the movie theater; she had only four extra seat belts. If she had given the matter any thought, she would have realized that either someone else was also driving—which she would have heard about—or Erin wasn’t being included.

But she hadn’t thought.
You’re my friend; you are supposed to think about my child, you should have noticed whether she had been included.

I knocked on Erin’s door. “That was Mrs. Branson,” I said when she told me to come in. “I realize that there was some sort of confusion about the movie, but do you want to go over to Brittany’s now? Dad or I can run you over right now or as soon as we’re done eating.”

“Was it Mrs. Branson on the phone or Brittany?”

I took a breath. How I wished I could have said that Brittany had called, that Brittany had grabbed her mother’s cell phone.
Oh, Erin, I am really really sorry, I don’t know what happened but we really really did mean you to come and it really really wasn’t any fun without you and you just have to come to my house for the night. You just have to.

But the mom had been the one to call. Erin didn’t want an invitation from one of the moms; she wanted the girls to invite her.

And indeed twenty minutes later when the call came reporting that they were back home, it was again Blair calling, not Brittany.

Erin was still upstairs, so I could speak frankly to Blair. “She says that she doesn’t want to come, but I think that she feels slighted about not being included.”

“But she was included,” Blair insisted. “In the car Brittany said that they sort of thought that Erin would be there.”

We are not families that “sort of” make plans for our children; all the
i
’s are dotted, the
t
’s are crossed, the seat belts counted. I would never simply drop my daughter at the mall, assuming that she would get a ride home.

And Blair knew that. She continued quickly, “Brittany also said that she wasn’t sure Erin wanted to come.”

That was nonsense. Of course, Erin would have wanted to come. This would have been an exciting outing—the girls being dropped off at a mall by themselves, ordering and paying for their own food, then going up the escalator and purchasing their own tickets. It would have been quite an adventure for these kids. There was no way Erin wouldn’t have wanted to go.

So what had happened? Had the other kids not noticed that she didn’t have a ride? They were so new at making their own plans. Or had they noticed and not cared enough to mention it to one of their mothers? It didn’t particularly matter because the message was the same to Erin—she had not been wanted.

Annelise called in the morning, tracking me down on my cell phone because I, loyal member of the Alden community, had taken the big-ass station wagon to the varsity girls’ volleyball team’s fund-raising car wash. Although we were a lower- and middle-school family, we supported the high-school kids’ fund-raising.

Annelise was full of the endless apologies so typical of her. “Oh, Lydia, I feel so awful. I don’t know what happened. Erin was part of the plan at first, and then I thought everything was all arranged. I really don’t think it was deliberate. I don’t think any of them were trying to exclude her—”

“But when she couldn’t come, they didn’t do anything.”

The rasping bitterness in my voice surprised me. Maybe the varsity girls’ volleyball team was using such harsh chemicals to clean the cars so that all their supporters would sound like hostile shrews for the rest of the day. Or maybe I was managing to sound like a hostile shrew all on my own.

“Yes,” Annelise gasped, “and I feel so awful, but it can’t have been on purpose, Lydia. It just can’t have been.”

Mimi was more blunt when she called later in the day. “I’m going to murder you if you knew that Erin needed a ride to and from the movies, and you didn’t ask me.” She has no patience with people who set her up to be in the wrong.

“I didn’t know anything about it, or I would have asked you.”