A Most Uncommon Degree of Popularity (2 page)

Of course, her status had been securely established in the first five minutes of the school day. She was one of the four girls wearing exactly the right clothes.

“Did you know that they were going to dress alike?” I asked Mimi.

Mimi shook her head. “No. Rachel did ask me to get her that skirt last week, but it was very cheap and she had found it on the Internet. I didn’t have to go to the mall.”

That was exactly what had happened in our house, too. The girls had obviously been smarter than sixth-grade kids ought to be. If they had chosen an expensive, logo-studded, designer skirt, chances were that at least one of us moms would have refused to buy it. In fact, I hope that we all would have. But this skirt was completely unobjectionable; the price was reasonable, the design modest. There was nothing at all special about it … until four girls, all of them friends, had worn it on the first day of middle school.

Later that afternoon Chloe Zimmerman’s mother called me, and Alexis Fairling’s and Ariel Sommers’s mothers e-mailed me, asking where we had gotten the skirt. Their daughters wanted one, too.

My husband, Jamie, is a
litigator, and he is preparing for a huge, messy case that will go to trial in Texas in January. It’s pretty clear that the only way I am going to be able to get his attention until the case is over is to talk about the kids.

So after dinner I told him about what I had seen on the blacktop. “I think Erin is popular.”

Jamie is a low-key guy with auburn hair, a dry wit, and a second baseman’s agile build. On the surface at least, he is not your usual prima-donna trial attorney. He deliberately makes a neutral first impression and then gradually allows people to realize how much they like him. This is an asset during long trials. He has done well on several cases because after the first day and a half the jury decides that he is the only lawyer on either side that they can stand.

“That’s good, isn’t it?” he replied to my remark about Erin. “Aren’t we glad that she has friends?”

I waved my hand. “We know that she has friends. Being popular isn’t about having friends. It’s about having power. It’s about being the Pol Pot of the sixth grade.”

“So are we really concerned about our eleven-year-old child turning into a genocidal Cambodian dictator?”

I made a face at him.

“Seriously, Lydia, aren’t you making too much of this? So Erin called her friends to see what they were going to wear on the first day of school. That’s what girls do, isn’t it?”

Of course, they did, and, of course, I was making too much of this. But that didn’t mean that there was no issue.

I probably feel a little guilty because two years ago I quit work. I no longer draw a paycheck; I no longer have my day controlled by the demands of a job. When Jamie is extremely busy, I therefore feel that I have to justify demanding his attention, and so I tend to exaggerate things.
You need to listen to this because it is really, really important.
Then he reacts to my exaggeration, not to the thing itself.

Ah, marriage.

He and I met in law school and as stressed first-year law students, we were equals. We did everything together; we studied together, made course outlines together, and were generally exhausted together. Then, after we were married and both working at law firms, we continued on these parallel tracks, working at jobs that seemed equally important.

We continued to do everything together. We talked about our cases and edited each other’s writing. We grocery-shopped together, we cooked together. We even set aside Thursday evenings to watch TV and fold laundry together. He was my friend, my companion, my colleague, my pal.

But I was the one who had the uterus. I loved Erin when she was no bigger than the vitamin pills I was taking on her behalf. After she was born, I downshifted careerwise and took a job at the Environmental Protection Agency. I believed in environmental causes, but it turned out that I didn’t find them that interesting. I had liked law when it was about people, people trying to live with other people. At EPA, my work was about companies trying to live with government regulations. I didn’t want to come home and talk about what I had done during the day.

Jamie became a partner with associates to manage, and he talked to them about his cases, not to me. We talked about Erin and later Thomas. Our lives became more and more traditional. Even though I was still working, I was in charge of hiring and managing whoever was taking care of the kids and the house. Any laundry that that lady didn’t fold I did, and Jamie became not my friend, companion, and pal, but my husband.

As he took on more and more challenging cases, I started spending more time with the other moms whom I met on Saturday afternoons at the playground or the park. When Jamie was going to be out of town for a long stretch, I hired a baby-sitter one night a week and took photography classes at the Corcoran, an art museum with an extensive adult arts-education program. Whenever I was in a boring meeting, I would imagine taking pictures of the participants, mentally arranging the light and cropping the shot so that the portrait would be as unflattering as possible.

Like so many working mothers, I had assumed that things would become easier when the kids started school. Instead life became more difficult. The kids started having activities—activities that I had to sign them up for, activities that I had to get them to, activities that I also had to get myself to. Having a child in the first grade is a full-time job. No one tells you that, but it is true. Schools love to use Ivy League–educated lawyers and tenured college professors as classroom aides and temporary clerical support, and the lawyers cut out alphabet letters and the professors stuff envelopes because they desperately want the teachers to think that they are really good parents. The whole time I was growing up my primary goal had been to please and impress my teachers. I wasn’t about to let go of that objective just because the teachers were now my kids’ teachers.

I was always rushing. I liked to cook, but it seemed as if there was never anything in the house to make, and so either I stopped at the Safeway on the way home from work or I made pasta. Or both—stopped at the Safeway and bought pasta because I was too tired to think of anything else that everyone would eat. We live in an old house, and yes, it is grand and gorgeous with twelve-foot ceilings, leaded-glass windows, and two staircases, but the stupid thing is always falling apart. We had a nanny-housekeeper, but she was not going to call the plumber and negotiate with the electrician, and even though she kept the house cleaner than it ever would be under my care, she didn’t deal with the mounds of mail that arrived every day. So there was mail everywhere in our house. Every available surface had mail on it.

How could I work when we got so much mail?

I hated feeling that I never had time for anything. I was always having to leave one place early to get to another place late. There were so many things that I liked to do that I never could do. I liked to sew. I liked to futz around home-decorating stores. I wanted to take actual photographs instead of just imagined ones.

Quitting work had felt like a hard decision, the hardest decision that any woman on the face of the earth ever had to make … which was demented. Quitting work is a hard decision if it means that you have to move from a house with a yard into a terrace apartment with a little patio. It’s hard if it means that the kids would have to give up music lessons and summer camp. But when the worst consequence of quitting work is that when people at parties ask “What do you do?”—which is the only thing anyone ever asks at Washington parties—and you have to say “Nothing,” that’s not really hard; that’s what Jamie calls “white suffering,” the agonies of the affluent.

But the message I had always received was that a woman has to have a career, that work is her identity, not her relationships, not her children, not her home or her hobbies, but her work. If a woman doesn’t work, she is nothing. My mother hadn’t had a career, and she had become frustrated and angry, unwilling to engage in anything that she considered beneath her intelligence, but unable to find any volunteer or housewife activities that weren’t.

I was afraid I would disappear if I quit work. I was afraid people would stop seeing me.

I finally made the decision standing in the pediatrician’s office. My son Thomas had an ear infection. I had soccer carpool duty that day, and I wanted to get his prescription filled before I picked the girls up. So I hurried him out of the examining room, went to the front desk, and presented his fee slip and our fifteen-dollar co-pay to the receptionist. All she needed to do was take the slip, pick up her pen, write “$15” in a little box, rip off my pink copy, and hand that back to me. But she had a long-sleeved shirt underneath her smock, and apparently there was something deeply troubling about the cuff of this shirt. She needed to twitch it into place before she took the paperwork from me. So she twitched her cuff, took the fee slip, looked at it, and picked up her pen. Then I heard someone ask what time she was leaving and before she answered,
she laid her pen down.
I wanted to choke her. Surely she accepted payments and separated fee slips a hundred times a day. Surely she could do this while she said what time she was leaving, surely a little multitasking here wasn’t too much to ask, but no, she had to say “five-fifteen” empty-handed. And then, just as I knew she would do, she adjusted her cuff before picking up her pen again. Do you know how long it takes to adjust a cuff?

I was truly, truly ready to kill her, and I was even more ready to murder the kind of person that I had become, because it really does only take one point five seconds to adjust a cuff. I was every bit as angry and bitchy as my unfulfilled, nonworking mother had ever been. If that was going to happen anyway, I might as well do it while having fun in the home-dec stores.

So I quit, and I loved it. I loved the freedom and the flexibility. I loved having some order and serenity in our family’s life. I loved not having to go to the office on beautiful autumn days. I loved not having to go on cold, rainy ones.

I’d always been active in the kids’ classrooms, but when I was working, I had never done anything for the school as a whole. Now I had time for that. Last year I had been on the curriculum committee. My friend Blair and I had agreed to chair the Spring Fair, and I would probably run for the board of trustees the following year.

I’m not a perfectionist, so there is still clutter in the house, but it’s no longer hopeless clutter. In three hours, with a little help from the kids, I can make the first floor look as if some magazine-type family lived in it, and since we have a one-day-a-week cleaning lady, we aren’t going to be shut down by the health department.

It’s a very nice way to live, it really is. I have
time.
I can finish reading the books for my book club. I can stand in a parking lot after a school function and talk to my friends for forty-five minutes. I don’t want to kill Erin when she feels that she has to try on seventeen million versions of the same pair of pants. The expiration of my driver’s license does not cause a crisis.

But Jamie and I have become completely traditional in our marriage. He makes the money, and I take care of the house and the kids. He has absolutely no idea what I do all day. He likes the fact that our lives run smoothly; he’s very proud of the kids and recognizes that that is, in some measure, to my credit. But he never thinks about what it takes to achieve this, and he would have no clue how much of it involves relationships—relationships with the kids’ teachers, relationships with their doctors, relationships with the soccer coaches, relationships with the plumber and the electrician, relationships with my friends. Not only do I have to tend to my relationships, I have to monitor the kids’ relationships, how they are getting along with their teachers, coaches, and friends.

I negotiate, I schmooze, I placate. Isn’t that what lawyers do?

At the end of the
first week of school, Erin and her three friends decided to have a sleepover at our house on Friday night. This was quite routine. The four of them were at one house or another at least once every weekend. Around seven o’clock she told me that three of the “guys”—apparently they were no longer “boys”—were coming over to watch a movie. While this was not routine, it seemed like no big deal. She had named the boys, and they were all kids we had known forever.

When the boys arrived, there were five of them, not three, but the two additional ones were also familiar faces, so I thought that, too, was no big deal. We keep plenty of sodas in the basement refrigerator, so whether we have four, seven, or nine kids staring at a TV screen doesn’t make much difference, just an extra couple bags of microwave popcorn.

Oh, silly me.

The Alden School is a
divided community. The largest segment of the school population comes from families like ours. As different as the four of us friends and our husbands are as individuals, we have a lot in common as a sociological phenomenon. We are “meritocrats.” Aristocrats are born into their privileges; we meritocrats have earned ours, or at least that’s what we believe about ourselves.

None of us grew up in D.C. or Boston or New York or whatever cities we have landed in. We got here because we had had great SAT scores.

We benefited from the decision of many private colleges and universities that they would no longer educate only the trust fund–cushioned offspring of the Protestant establishment. So those colleges went looking for socioeconomically ordinary kids with great SAT scores, and they found us in places such as Indianapolis, Missoula, and Arkansas City. Smart, ambitious, and goal-oriented, we spent the next four to eight years getting extraordinary educations, and at the end we married one another and didn’t go home. We moved to the cities and went to work.

Men and women alike, we became lawyers and consultants. We worked in communications and information. We made money and we had power, and we felt that we had earned our place through intelligence, educational credentials, and hard work. Family, breeding, and manners have had nothing to do with our success, and we are simultaneously proud and defensive about that. Commentators who think that we are providing insufficient moral leadership use the term
meritocrats
disparagingly, but none of us can figure out how it can be an insult. We are proud that we have earned what we have.