A Most Uncommon Degree of Popularity (27 page)

“Of course, she’s not going to be a novelist, but she may well be a mathematician, and the high-school math curriculum is not right for her. I wish we could offer linear algebra or multivariable calculus, but I don’t think enough kids would take it. And while we supposedly have BC calculus, we had one kid get a three on the AP exam. The rest got two’s, so we are clearly doing something wrong.”

I could not follow what he was saying. I did know that the highest score on the Advanced Placement exams was a five, and that colleges usually only gave credits for scores of four or five, but I knew nothing about the math courses at the high school. When I had been on the curriculum committee last year, we’d been working on the social studies offerings. Math had barely been mentioned.

“When it comes to math,” Chris said, “we’re still a fifties girls’ school. Look at this.” He picked up a sheet of thin blue paper out of Erin’s file. “It’s her second-grade report card. ‘Math comes easily to Erin because her handwriting is so neat.’” He flipped the file closed and thrust it back in its place. “Can you believe that anyone would ever write anything like that?”

Erin’s second-grade teacher had been an older lady, gentle and nurturing. I had loved how safe her classroom had felt.

“Math comes easily to Erin because she’s gifted. Look at her scores on the standardized tests.” He picked the file back up. “This year’s ERBs aren’t in, but you saw that SSAT score, and you heard about the math Olympiads, didn’t you? That she got the highest score in the whole grade?”

“Just by two points.”

“Lydia, two points on the math Olympiads is huge. With all that’s been going on, I haven’t had time to check to see if we’ve ever had a sixth grader with her score, but I bet that we haven’t. And this isn’t just about her. It’s about Thomas, too. We don’t have any standardized scores for him yet, and it does not appear as if his handwriting is particularly neat, but clearly we don’t need to explain why he is good at math—and he is very good—since he is a boy.”

I winced. “Surely people don’t think that way.”

“It’s changing, but no boy will ever come to this school because he wants to do multivariable calculus or play any kind of sport. I’ve watched your son on the playground. We are never going to have the kind of athletic program that he will want. If he goes to the high school here, he will hate his coaches for not caring enough, his teammates for not being good enough, and you for everything in general. He needs to be at a school with a strong tradition of scholar-athletes. And let’s not be sexist—Erin is no slouch when it comes to athletics either.”

“But she’s so small.” That was completely beside the point. I knew it. But it was all I could think to say.

“But she’s strong, she’s coordinated, she’s light, and she’s tough as nails. She should try crew.”

Crew? I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. At Alden
crew
always meant being on one of the technical crews for a stage production.

“You know,” he prompted, “the sport, rowing.”

Oh, yes. “We don’t have a crew team, do we?”

“No, and we won’t. We don’t have enough kids interested and that’s not how we want to spend our money. Lydia, as long as I am at this school, every decision I make will take the school farther away from what your kids need. The P.E. department wants a new weight room. Forget it. The dance teachers want to hire a professional choreographer to create a new cutting-edge dance on our kids. That’s what I’m in favor of. We’ve got two kids at the high school who’ve been working on an opera all year. They think they can finish it this summer. If they pull it off, I’m finding money to stage it if I have to pay for it myself. Can you see your son writing an opera?”

No, of course not.

“They got into Sidwell, didn’t they?”

“Only because Jamie is Quaker.”

Chris waved his hand, dismissing that. “Sidwell would never take them if they couldn’t do the work, and Erin might have gotten in on her math scores without any kind of preferential treatment.”

I knew what he was saying. Sidwell did have a strong tradition of scholar-athletes; Sidwell would have every possible advanced math class. “But Alden is a wonderful school,” I protested. I believed that with all my heart.

“Alden is a
great
school … for some kids. But not yours.” Chris sat down on the chair across from me. He reached out as if to touch my hand, but stopped. “Lydia, don’t you know that I would give anything to have this be different? You’re the last person I would want to leave the school community. Unfortunately your kids are the last ones who ought to stay.”

The kids leave Alden? Our
family not be a part of the school anymore?

I couldn’t find my car keys. I was in the parking lot, I needed to get home. Where were my keys? They were supposed to be in the side pocket of my purse. They weren’t there.

The last two eighth-grade mothers came down the sidewalk. One was carrying a red milk crate full of paper products; the other’s arms were cradled under a stack of serving platters. Their cars were on the other side of the parking lot from mine.

I still couldn’t find my keys. I pulled out my wallet and my cell phone, the first-aid pouch and my checkbook. No keys.

Leave Alden?

Erin had started pre-K when she was four. She had seemed like such a big girl to us. Her sneakers had closed with Velcro and had had happy puppy faces on them. She had loved those shoes. Now I see the pre-K students and they seem so much younger and smaller than I remember her being.

You don’t worry about whether a four-year-old is musical or artistic. And she was our first child; we had thought that she was magic, good at everything.

I turned my purse upside-down. The pens and pencils scattered across the hood of the station wagon like Pick-up sticks. I saw the receipt I had signed for the delivery of the hay, an appointment card from Erin’s orthodonist, another from Thomas’s allergist, but no keys. I fumbled through the empty purse, feeling at each compartment, and there were my keys, in the side pocket just where they belonged.

I thought Alden was where we belonged. It was so close to our house, and we knew so many people. We had worked so hard, given so much, cared so much. It wasn’t perfect—this year had shown that—but that was why I cared so much, because I had felt I had a part in making the place better.

How could I quit now? I had already talked to people about joining the Capital Campaign committee and next year I was going to be the first non-alumnae woman to run for the board. Every time I set foot in any of the buildings, I saw people I knew and liked. And those people liked me, too. They knew what I was good at. They valued me. I was important here.

The Alden School was my life, my world. All of my friends were Alden parents; most of my clients were Alden families. Many, many days the only time I spoke to another adult was at school.

But it was not my school. It was my children’s school. They were my children, but this was their school.

How had I let this happen? But leave? I couldn’t imagine it.

I almost never saw people from my old job anymore. We had all promised that we would have lunch and such, but we never did. Would it be like that with Mimi, Blair, and Annelise? Without the car pools, the parents’ coffees, and the committee meetings, would we see each other less and less? I was sick at the thought. These were the closest friends I had ever had, the first time I had ever been so secure in friendships. I couldn’t lose them. How would I manage without them?

I was home now, pulling into our driveway. Thomas’s window was dark, but Erin’s light was on. When we had redone her room over Spring Break, we had bought extra sheets and used them to make new curtains; they were a cheerful teenaged plaid of aqua, teal, and plum. The curtains looked fine from inside the room, but we hadn’t lined them, so in the soft gray shadows of our beautiful tree-lined street, her window was a garish rectangle, an almost clownlike slab of aqua.

Chris had said that the deadline for answering Sidwell was tomorrow. I should call them, he had suggested, asking for more time.

Why would they give us any more time? The families on the waiting list would have been calling the Sidwell admissions office every day, desperate for places. And I never ask for extra time. I always meet deadlines.

I went to the kitchen desk and took out one of the big Sidwell envelopes. Maybe Chris was wrong. Maybe the deadline had already passed. I pulled out the papers and scanned the cover letter. The deadline was tomorrow.

I went up the back staircase and knocked on Erin’s door.

When we had been taking everything out of her room so that we could paint, I had found the cotton-fleece drawstring skirt that she had worn on the first day of school. It had fallen off its hanger, but the drawstring had caught on the button of a dress that she no longer wore. She had seen me shake the skirt out and rehang it, but neither one of us had said anything.

She called for me to come in. Every other time I had come into her room this week I had been jarred by the strong colors, the teal of the walls, the plum of the trim—I had let her pick her own paint—but tonight all I saw was her face. She was pale and her eyes were tense and worried.

Usually when she read in bed, she lay on her side, often falling asleep with her hand still marking her place in the book. But tonight she had been sitting up, hunched forward.

I sat down next to her. I patted her on the leg, then noticed her bedside light. “Oh, you did the lampshade. It looks great.”

After we had painted her room and made the curtains, we had used grosgrain ribbon to duplicate the plaid pattern across her bulletin board. We had intended to cover the shade of her lamp with more of the sheet fabric and attach a plum chenille fringe, but then we had gotten interested in the caramel corn. Apparently, after I had left this evening, she had gotten out the hot-glue gun and done it herself.

Good for her.

What would I have done, I wondered, if I had been in her place, knowing that my work was going to disappoint my mother, knowing that in front of all her friends—no, her acquaintances, my mother didn’t have friends, not like I do—my mother was going to have to see that I didn’t measure up?

I couldn’t imagine it. It wouldn’t have happened. I know, I know with all my heart, that rather than have that happen, rather than disappoint my mother about the one thing she cared about, I would have cheated.

But what had my own daughter done? She had copied that hated essay—for I am sure she did hate it—in her absolute best handwriting, putting her best foot forward even though she knew that she had long since lost the race. And then in my absence she had taken out the hot-glue gun and tackled a new project.

I once joked about not wanting to send the kids to Sidwell for fear that they would be eaten alive by the other students, but this year, this year of not being invited, had made Erin strong. Chris had said that she was tough as nails; I would have never said that about her, but he had seen her in the hallways, in the lunchroom, on the playground.

“You saw the essays, didn’t you?” she asked. “All of them?”

“Of course. Some of them were remarkable.”

“Did you read Marissa’s about the bird? I would have never thought of that, not in a hundred million years. Mine was awful, wasn’t it?” The last words came out in a rush.

There was no point in lying to her. Nothing I could say would make her feel good about the essay. “Erin, you didn’t quit. That’s the important thing. The result wasn’t what you would have wanted because you don’t have the kind of imagination that some of those other kids do. But even when you knew that yours wasn’t going to be among the best, you didn’t quit. Maybe you aren’t proud of the product, but you can be very proud of your process.”

I thought that that was a pretty good thing to say, but it made no impression on her at all. “But the assignment was just too hard for me. I was awful. I could see that everyone else could do it, and I couldn’t. Don’t you think maybe I ought to transfer to Sidwell?”

I had to smile at that. “Erin, people don’t transfer to Sidwell because Alden is too hard. In many subjects Sidwell is harder.”

“Oh.” She looked blank, then bewildered. If Alden was too hard for her and Sidwell even harder, what was she going to do? Where would she go? Who would have her?

“Erin, sweetie, but that’s why Sidwell may be right for you because the math and the sciences are harder. Mr. Goddard talked to me about both you and Thomas this evening—”

“
He
saw my essay?” She was mortified.

“This isn’t about your essay. It’s about all the things that you are good at. You know that you are good at math, don’t you?”

“Grandpa Tom says that I am.”

Jamie’s father was a high-school math teacher. “Has he said anything to you about Alden?”

“No, but I did show him how to log on to the Web site. Then he said that maybe we could work together in the summers sometime.”

So he had seen the limitations in the curriculum. “How do you feel about going to Sidwell?” I asked.

“I don’t know. The other day some of the big girls who have parking stickers”—those would have been seniors —“were getting in their car and it had a flat tire. At first they were a little upset, but after they called someone, I guess they decided that it was funny because they lined up and started to sing these silly, sad songs, all pretending to be heartbroken right there in the middle of the parking lot, throwing themselves across the hood of the car, and they were harmonizing without rehearsing, and they looked so cool and like they were having so much fun, and you could tell that everyone wanted to be like them when we are in high school, and then I realized that I couldn’t ever be like them because I can’t sing. I don’t know, Mom, I’m starting to think that maybe I’m just a math nerd.”

“Oh, Erin …” “Popular girl” to “math nerd” in six months? Why couldn’t she just think of herself as Erin?

Because middle-school kids think in labels; that’s how they start to figure out who they are. “You may be very good in math, but you aren’t a ‘math nerd.’ Math nerds do not get the most playing time of any kid on their soccer teams. Math nerds do not care about their clothes anywhere near as much as you care about yours. You’re a scholar-athlete.” If my daughter had to have a label for herself, let it be that one. “And Sidwell does a better job of educating kids like you than Alden does.”