A Most Uncommon Degree of Popularity (9 page)

Mary Paige thanked me beautifully as I signed the credit card slip, but I knew that talking to her had been a mistake. I could hear what she would go home and tell her daughter.

Mrs. Meadows thinks you aren’t being very nice to Erin.
She would roll her eyes, making it clear that Erin was too pathetic to worry about. That would only make things worse.

Had I just done exactly what Fran Zimmerman and Candace Singer had done at the beginning of the year? No, I was innocent on that score. I hadn’t tried to make Mary Paige feel bad; I was trying to fix this. I was trying to be helpful.

Which was undoubtedly what Fran and Candace would have said that they had been trying to do.

It’s all so different when it is your own kid.

Chris Goddard asked Blair and
me to meet with him about the Spring Fair, but the day we were scheduled to see him, Brittany was having another migraine, and Blair wanted to stay home with her. So I went alone.

Chris’s office was in the old Alden family mansion. Miss Alden had first started teaching young ladies piano and voice in her father’s music room, and then after her parents died, she turned the whole house into an academic school. Eventually new buildings were built for the lower and middle school, but the high school continued to meet in the mansion.

Chris’s office was on the first floor in what had once been the summer parlor. The room projected out from the main body of the house and had tall, white-mullioned windows on three sides. The crooked, spreading branches of a bur oak tree arched over the peaked roof, and its yellowing leaves filtered the thin October sunshine. It seemed almost colder in Chris’s office than it was outside, and not surprisingly he was wearing a black cashmere sweater under his taupe suede blazer.

On the credenza behind his desk was a wood-framed photograph of a boy, almost a young man. The photo was in color, and while there was a little too much shadow along the subject’s nose, the background was nicely balanced—a yellow brick, white-trimmed building that looked familiar.

Chris was sitting at his desk, flipping through a stack of papers. Each page was a handwritten list entered on a preprinted form. His left hand was holding down the lower corner of the stack, and I noticed his watch. The band was leather; the face was thin and gold.

You don’t buy a watch like that on a headmaster’s salary—at least not on the Alden School’s headmaster salary. Both Chris Goddard’s effortless elegance and his son were thanks to his road manager days.

He was shaking his head. “We’re going to get hammered on the early decisions,” he said.

I had been trying to imagine him with a ponytail and a faded T-shirt so it took me a moment to understand. He was talking about the high-school kids’ college applications.

“Half of these lists have no rhyme or reason to them. And they all have the same two safeties, which means neither one is a safety anymore.” He shook his head. “For what our families pay, they should be getting better advice than this.”

I was surprised. It had never occurred to me that the school might not be doing everything possible to get the kids into the best colleges; that was what people expected from a private school. Getting into the right colleges matters more than anything to private-school families. “I hope you aren’t shouting that from the street corners.”

“No, I have some sense of self-preservation,” he said, smiling, “and by this time next year it will be better, maybe not fixed, but at least better.” He closed the file. “I’m sorry. I haven’t asked you to sit down. Please do.”

He had already read the documents that Blair and I had sent, and he was interested and approving, but suggested that we have some activities for the high-school students. “The ones who were at the school as little kids remember loving the Spring Fair. They would come back if there was something for them to do.”

It was a good idea. It really was. He seemed to have talked to more students in his two months on the job than our last headmaster had done in two decades. But provide something that would interest the high-school kids? “What will they like?” I asked. “Isn’t the after-prom party a disaster because the activities aren’t all that interesting?” In the spring the juniors and seniors were supposed to go straight from the supposedly alcohol-free hotel ballroom where the prom was held to the definitely alcohol-free after-prom party at the school. They didn’t.

He winced. “Oh, I hadn’t heard that about the after-prom.” I could sense him making a mental note. That, too, was something that would be improved in the next year or two. “Let me give the Spring Fair some thought. And now tell me, do you know what”—and he glanced down at an actual note—“‘clear elastic’ is?”

That was some change in subject. “I do know.” It was a sewing product that I’d been aware of for only a couple of years; I don’t know when it was actually put on the market. “It’s what it sounds like. It’s clear, but it’s got much more stretch than regular elastic. It’s very useful. I usually carry some.” I dug into my purse and pulled out the little zippered pouch in which I had two sizes of Band-Aids, Children’s Chewable Advil for Thomas and his friends, Junior Strength Advil for Erin and hers, and maximum-strength capsule-shaped Advil tablets for Jamie and me. The pouch also had safety pins, a little sewing kit, a small pocketknife that I had to replace regularly because I always forgot that I had it until I tried to go through airport security, a book of matches, a twenty-dollar bill, three quarters, an extra battery for my cell phone, and many, many “hair things,” the covered rubber bands that girls use for ponytails. I found the clear elastic, undid the twist-tie wrapped around it, and handed it to Chris.

He stretched it out, regarding it curiously. “You routinely carry this?”

“I’m a mom.” I shrugged. “I used to have this cool little flat packet of duct tape, but it disappeared. So why are you interested in clear elastic?”

He had his hand over his head and was letting the elastic dangle in front of him as if it were an interesting earthworm. “If a high-school girl ties a piece of this to either side of her flip-flop and loops it behind her foot, is the flip-flop now in compliance with the dress code?”

“Oh, my God, I have no idea.” I waved my hand. This seemed so unimportant. “Who cares?”

“Unfortunately a lot of people.”

“Then I would say absolutely, yes, that is compliance, and we should award the girl who thought of it extra credit for inventive thinking, but you’re asking the wrong person. I wish we didn’t have a dress code at all.”

“I have some sympathy for that position,” he admitted, “but I’d also like us to have better diversity recruiting and more AP science classes, and if that means sticking with the dress code, I’ll make that trade-off in a heartbeat.”

“But it’s so much more fun to fight about the dress code.”

“My point exactly. People who like to fight can fuss endlessly about the dress code while the rest of us can outflank them on the minority recruiting and the AP science.”

I smiled. Chris was obviously a “fixer,” a person who likes to get things done. “You think like my husband does.”

Chris thought for a moment. “I haven’t met him, have I?”

“No, and you probably won’t, at least not anytime soon. He’s involved in a big court case, and we won’t be seeing much of him until it is over.”

On the surface my husband
is your normal, all-American, resourceful, reliable, pigheaded guy. He gets annoyed with drivers who tie up rush-hour traffic because they don’t understand how the lanes change at 3:45 p.m. He gets outraged when the poor schmo at the other end of the 1-800 customer-service line can’t answer his questions. When he plays tennis, he wants to kill his opponent. There is nothing gentle about him; he is alert, ambitious, and competitive, looking and sounding like every other successful D.C. lawyer.

But there is a difference. Jamie is a Quaker. The kids and I go to St. Peter’s Episcopal, and sometimes Jamie comes with us, but just as often he goes to Meetings by himself. As far as I can tell, he never says anything at the Meetings; his faith is personal and private.

But it is strong and has given him a fundamental decency that is based on respect for other people’s individuality. It’s part of why he is successful with jurors. He knows that every person wants to be treated with respect and dignity, and he believes that everyone is entitled to that.

His being a Quaker fascinates the wives of other driven, successful men. “Your husband is a Quaker,” they will marvel. “That’s so unusual.” Sometimes highly successful men seem completely defined by their jobs. Their self-respect comes out of their professional success; their moral code is indistinguishable from their professional ethics. But Jamie, so like such men in manner, dress, and habit, also has a spiritual life. He never talks about it to other people, but simply the fact that some mornings he gets up and chooses to go to a Meeting by himself gives him depth and mystery.

Because of his Quaker heritage, Jamie wanted the kids to go to Sidwell Friends School, a private school on Wisconsin Avenue affiliated with the American Society of Friends. I, on the other hand, did not want the kids to go there because I think that it is one of the least Quakerish places on the planet.

Sidwell is a fabulous school. At Alden we have great music and lousy sports. Other schools spend more money on their athletic fields than they do on their science labs. Sidwell is great at everything. Theater and science, sports and language, you name it, Sidwell offers its students every opportunity.

The administration of the school does all that it can to foster Quaker values. The problem comes from the families. Although old-line Wasp traditionalists think of St. Albans as the most prestigious school in the city, up-and-coming annoying strivers like us worship at the Sidwell shrine. Sidwell is where the political—as opposed to social—elite send their kids. Its prestige attracts families who care about being first in all things, all of the time, and the atmosphere is, as a result, tense and competitive.

We started the kids at Alden, which was my choice, because its location virtually makes it a neighborhood school for us, but I had agreed that we would periodically review this decision. The first reassessment was coming up. Third and seventh grades are “entry” years at Sidwell, points at which the class size is increased and additional students are admitted. Thus we had long ago agreed to file applications for the following year when Erin was in sixth grade and Thomas in second. At the beginning of the school year, I had suggested that we talk about it before we went through the stress of applying—since I couldn’t imagine we would ever take them out of Alden.

“I’m not ready to rule out transferring them yet,” Jamie had said. “We don’t make a final decision until April. A lot can happen between now and then. Let’s just have them apply.”

So stipulating that I was only agreeing to have them apply, I initiated the process.

Of course, since the whole world was also applying to Sidwell, the school was impossibly hard to get into, but being the children and grandchildren of active, committed Friends would give my kids the same advantage given to a student whose great-grandparent’s name was on the gym.

Erin needed to take the SSAT, the secondary-school version of the SAT that had gotten me out of Indiana and into the Ivy League. She took it on a Saturday morning. She had a noon soccer game, so when I picked her up afterward, I had her soccer uniform with me. If she changed in the car, we would make it to the field for the start of her game. Her coach got angry when kids missed practices, much less actual games.

“How was the test?” I asked.

“It was okay, I guess,” she said as she pulled off her shoes. “Some of the math seemed so easy that I wondered if I was on the wrong track. But I couldn’t figure out how to make any of the other answers make sense, so I don’t know.”

I wasn’t entirely sure that I followed that. “It doesn’t matter. This isn’t the be-all and end-all of your life.”

While I had been waiting for her to emerge, I talked to the other mothers in the waiting room. For some of them, this test did feel like the be-all and end-all. They had hired tutors, bought vocabulary flash cards, and critiqued practice essays. They had described what they had done in detail designed to make the other mothers feel inadequate for not having gone to these lengths.

“Oh,” I had said with studied casualness, “Erin didn’t need any of that. We have confidence in her own natural abilities.”

Now that was a pretty bitchy thing to have said. If I wanted Erin to go to Sidwell, I would have done what those women had done and probably more, but I didn’t think either of the kids should change schools.

Erin pulled her soccer shirt over her head, but kept her arms inside it so that she could worm her way out of the shirt she had worn for the exam. “You do know that I’m not going to Sidwell, don’t you? Not ever.”

“No one is going to force you to do anything. We’re just exploring options.”

“You promise you won’t make me, that it’s my decision?” She thrust her arms through the sleeves of her soccer shirt.

“I wouldn’t go that far.” I wasn’t going to lie to her. “In the long run, it is Dad’s and my decision for both you and Thomas, but you certainly have a voice. We will listen to you, and your preferences will probably be the biggest factor.”

“Well, if it’s the biggest factor, then can’t we just say that it will be the only factor?”

She was trying to get into an argument with me, but I remembered the advice from my books on raising teenaged girls and avoided engaging in the battle. Of course, when the books demonstrate such techniques through italicized passages of dialogue, the authors have the kids ending up saying, “Oh, yes, now I understand, and I love you, too.” Erin didn’t get anywhere close to that, but when we got to the soccer field, she didn’t slam the car door shrieking that she hated us, the house, the potted plants on the back deck, her little brother, and all her clothes, so I guess I had not been a complete failure.

She had a great game, scoring every goal that our team made, and her teammates flocked around her, hugging her just as if she were still one of the four drawstring cotton-fleece skirts. And maybe, to all eyes except hers, she still was.