A Most Uncommon Degree of Popularity (8 page)

“It won’t do any good. Faith set up this schedule. Brittany had everyone last week. This week it’s Elise’s turn, then Rachel’s and then Faith’s again.”

A schedule? A schedule of “everyone” that did not include Erin? To say nothing of the other seven girls in the ensemble? I could not believe that my friends were going to tolerate that. “Elise invited you to her house, didn’t she?”

“Yeah, but I didn’t know if you would let me go.”

Not let her go? Where had that come from? Why wouldn’t I let her go to Annelise and Elise’s house? “Of course you can go.”

“It doesn’t matter.” Erin was mumbling, not looking at me. “Faith isn’t allowed to come to our house.”

I couldn’t believe that I had heard her right. “What do you mean, she’s not allowed to come to our house?” Why would anyone not be
allowed
to come to our house? There’s always a parent here. We don’t have guns. The bathrooms and the dishes are clean … or clean enough.

“I don’t know, that’s just what she’s telling the others, that she is not allowed to come here.”

“She’s telling everyone that?” How must that make Erin feel, having some holier-than-thou kid implying that there was something so wrong with our house that she couldn’t set foot into it?

“Don’t get into it, Mom.”

Don’t get into it?
Fat chance of that.

I called Mary Paige Caudwell that evening and asked her if she would like to get together for coffee one morning after we dropped the kids off at school. Normally I would have asked her to the house, but since she might be afraid of my house cooties, I suggested that we meet at Starbucks.

“I’d love to get together,” she trilled, “but wouldn’t you rather go out to lunch?”

Going out to lunch is still a symbol to me of women who are at home without enough to do. “Sure, we can do that. Do you want me to come over to Virginia?” A lot of us District residents have a phobia about going into Virginia because it always seems so far away, but Faith and Mary Paige lived right across the Chain Bridge, and Annelise and Blair had exclaimed several times how close their house really was.

“Oh, there’s nothing over here.” And Mary Paige named a place in Georgetown.

I agreed even though this meeting was now going to be a gigantic pain in the ass. I only live five miles from Georgetown, but parking is a chore. And the restaurant she named was not one that you went to in your meet-at-Starbucks sweats. So I was going to have to get dressed up, and, since I had initiated the invitation, no doubt pay for a very nice lunch.

That afternoon Pam Ruby stopped by the house to return a stockpot. Pam, an alumna and a mother of sons, was a gossip, but she—unlike my friends and me—was sane enough not to be interested in the social activities of a bunch of eleven-year-olds. She gossiped about the lives of the adults, which meant that she must never talk about me because I clearly have no life.

I asked her about Mary Paige.

“Her sister was my year, but Mary Paige was a couple years ahead of us,” Pam answered. “So I didn’t really know her that well.”

Which was not going to stop Pam from talking. Apparently Mary Paige had spent her married life in Houston, but she and her husband were separated and getting a divorce. “The money part really surprised her,” Pam said. “She saw lots of other women stay in their houses and keep their lifestyle after a divorce, but she wasn’t going to be able to. I guess the economy of Texas is really in the toilet.”

Indeed it was, and my gun-for-hire husband was defending the men who had helped put it there.

“So she came back here and she’s just renting that house in Virginia. The other gals say that it’s nice, but it is rented. And it is in Virginia. She says she’s just there temporarily, but I don’t know what her plans are. The judge is saying that she ought to go back to work and she doesn’t want to.”

“Her not wanting to work may not go very far with a judge.”

“Everyone’s working these days,” Pam agreed. She was a realtor. “But Mary Paige’s trying to build this big case that having to drive Faith to and from school all the time keeps her from being able to have a job.”

I reminded myself of the source. Pam exaggerated. Surely it wasn’t possible that a woman could feel so entitled to being supported that she thought that a judge would award her alimony because she didn’t have a good car pool?

Or was it?

“And she was really unhappy about Faith not getting on a certain soccer team,” Pam continued. “Your daughter runs around with that bunch, doesn’t she? When Mary Paige first got back into town, Kate Collins had a little luncheon for her because they were in the same class, although luck of the draw, all of us with sixth graders had boys. Mary Paige wanted to know who the popular girls were. She really wanted to be sure that Faith got in with that crowd.”

How casual she was about calling my daughter “popular.” “She wanted her kid to have designer-label friends?”

Pam laughed. “That’s what happens when you move to Texas. You start caring too much about designer labels. That’s Texas for you.”

Oh, great, here Erin was so unhappy because someone had stuck the label “popular” on her forehead, a label that, in Erin’s case, had lasted for all of three weeks.

We all wanted our kids to be happy. I couldn’t fault Mary Paige for that. But wanting to be sure that she was “popular”? Did that really arise out of concern for the girl’s needs or out of the mother’s own image of herself?

Well, look at me. What a hypocrite I was being. I was quick to stereotype Mary Paige as a my-daughter-will-be-popular-at-all-costs mom in exactly the way I did not want people stereotyping me.

But my child had been made so unhappy. I wondered if Mary Paige understood what was happening, that the result of trying to get Faith included was that Erin was being excluded. I was going to give Mary Paige the benefit of the doubt and assume that she hadn’t known enough about the kids’ relationships to understand.

But her daughter had to know, and her daughter had to like it.

If all these jillions of books about raising teenaged girls knew anything, then girls like Faith Caudwell were the dangerous ones. Faith had lost her father and her home. She had something to prove, and often the only way some teenaged girls know how to build themselves up is to tear someone else down.

Mary Paige Caudwell was one
of the Old Guard families who had assumed too much. She had assumed that she could divorce her husband and keep her country-club lifestyle. She had assumed that she could move back to D.C. and that her daughter could slide into the place that she once had. She had assumed that being a descendant of Mrs. Chester T. Paige still meant something.

So I decided that I was not going to fuss about the price of lunch. I certainly minded being maneuvered into something, but the money itself wouldn’t mean anything to me, and if Mary Paige felt that the only way she could go out to a nice restaurant was to finagle someone else into paying for it, then I should feel some compassion.

That high-minded generosity disappeared as I sat in the restaurant for twenty-five minutes with only a glass of iced tea for company. I had failed to remember what Faith had said about her mother always being late, and I arrived at the restaurant my usual five minutes early. Twenty minutes after our agreed-upon meeting time, Mary Paige arrived, a sorority-sister type sweater tied gracefully over her shoulders, smiling a little apology. “Parking’s just not what it used to be, is it?”

“No. I don’t even try to find street parking anymore,” I said, sounding extremely pleasant for someone who had spent twenty-five minutes bonding with a glass of iced tea.

She sat down and shook out her napkin with a flourish. “Now shall we have Bloody Marys or were you planning on ordering a bottle of wine?”

I blinked. I wasn’t planning on doing either. I gestured at my iced tea. “I’m fine.”

“Oh, let’s have fun. You aren’t in AA, are you?”

Surely there is a middle ground between not drinking in the middle of the day and being engaged in a lifelong struggle with alcoholism, but I already felt like a frump—I didn’t have a sorority-sister sweater using me as a coatrack—and I didn’t want to compound that by being a goody-goody. So moments later a watery-looking reddish drink appeared before me. One sip told me that it wasn’t water making it look watery. If I drank all this, I was going to be one happy girl.

We chatted a bit. How had the school changed since she had been a student? Oh, the facilities were nicer. But it was hard to get used to the boys and the absence of uniforms.

I asked her about her own interests.

She had been an “interior-design professional,” but hadn’t actually worked since Faith had been born.

“Do you think you might go back to it?” I asked.

“Oh, I still have a hand in it.” She spoke as if I had been trying to insult her. “I always have something going on, either in my own home or at friends’. And, of course, every charity wants to put on a house tour or do a designers’ showhouse. I’ve been
very
involved in organizing those.”

In my experience people who say they are
very
involved in something—as opposed to the people who actually are and just keep their mouths shut about it—express a lot of opinions without doing much work.

“But you must feel as I do,” she continued. “The women who are working have no control over their time. It can be hard to find anyone to have lunch with because everyone’s at the office.” She drawled out the word “office” as if mocking her friends’ self-importance.

I don’t like it when people try to divide women into opposing armies of working mothers and nonworking mothers. “But wouldn’t interior design give you a lot of flexibility?” I asked.

“Not creatively. I have such a definite vision that compromise is painful.”

So she couldn’t work with clients. That’s what interior designers do—work with clients.

“I’m taking some transition time right now,” she continued. “My number one priority has to be Faith and her needs, not my own.”

That gave me the opening I needed. “My daughter says that Faith isn’t allowed to come to our house.”

“Isn’t allowed? Oh, no, no, no,
no,
” she trilled. “It’s not a case of not being allowed. Why on earth would I forbid her to come to your house? I think it’s more a case of not wanting to.”

And that was supposed to make me feel better? That the kid just didn’t
want
to come to our house?

“You see,” Mary Paige continued, “my grandparents lived in that house, and I spent a lot of time there growing up since it was so close to the school. I really have so many wonderful memories that I just don’t think that I could stand to go inside. I helped my mother clean it out, and it was so horribly sad. I had really hoped that we would keep it in the family, but my uncles insisted on selling it. And then everyone was so disappointed at what it finally sold for. It was so awful to let it go that I just can’t imagine going back in and facing all those memories again. I hope that you don’t think that I am horribly fragile.”

I guess I could respect her feelings, but on the other hand, she had lost her husband, her own home, and apparently all financial security. Surely, having someone else living in her grandparents’ house was a minor loss in comparison to those.

And, anyway, what did her wonderful memories have to do with Faith coming? We bought the house when Erin—and therefore Faith—had been three, and it had been sitting on the market for at least six months before that. Faith would have no memories of the place.

“It may feel like an altogether different house,” I said. “We have made a lot of changes.”

“I had heard that. You got the house for such a good price it’s no wonder you felt that you could do a lot.” She shook her head as if she couldn’t believe how little we had paid for the house. That offended me; we had negotiated a fair price, but we had not done better than that. “My grandmother had such wonderful taste. I think that’s why I became interested in interior design, because my grandmother’s house was so exquisite. Tell me you didn’t strip the dining-room wallpaper, do tell me you didn’t do that.”

“We did.”

She winced. “It was hand-blocked in China; it was more than a hundred years old when my grandmother put it up. It was so valuable. I don’t suppose you realized that or you wouldn’t have acted so precipitously.”

I didn’t say anything. Both her grandparents had smoked. From their first potty trip in the morning to turning out the light at night, the pair of them had had cigarettes going. The house sat on the market so long not just because of its absurdly high asking price, but also because it had reeked of tobacco. All the carpets and window treatments had to be ripped out before we moved in. The walls—even the ones that had been papered—had to be coated with a sealant to kill the smell.

“Of course,” I said, “I can’t insist on Faith coming to our house, but Erin really minds that Faith is telling the other girls that she is not allowed to come.”

“Oh, it’s just girls.” She waved her hand. “They won’t pay any attention.”

I wondered how I could take a picture of her that would be wildly unflattering. The woman didn’t have even a trace of softness under her jaw, but I knew that if I positioned the camera and the light right, I could make her look as if she had a double chin. And there was a streak of makeup caught in the two delicate lines at the outer corner of her eye. The lines were years away from being crow’s feet, but I could make them look like the Red River Valley.

“No, Mary Paige.” My secret vindictiveness gave me enough serenity to keep my voice calm. “This is really making my daughter uncomfortable.”

“Well, if it is that important, of course, I will speak to Faith. But you know, teenaged girls. One word from their mothers and they do the exact opposite. Now tell me about Grandmother’s azaleas. I can’t wait to see them again this spring, although I suppose they were a little overgrown.”

Like everything else in the yard, the azaleas had not been pruned in years. They had been big and showy when they bloomed, but underneath the outer layer of blossoms, they had been full of spindly branches. Blair had finally taken over and pruned them ruthlessly, warning me that it was going to be two years before they would fill out at the appropriate proportion.