A Most Uncommon Degree of Popularity (11 page)

“I’m glad of that,” she said. “I’m not sure why Erin fell through the cracks like that. It seemed that the plans were changing every three minutes, and I guess when Mary Paige called the rest of us to be sure that we knew she was leaving the girls at McDonald’s, I thought everything was set.”

“Mary Paige didn’t call me.”

“That’s where the slipup must have occurred. She only called for the kids who would be in her car. Is Erin all bent out of shape about not being included? Rachel says that she didn’t go over to Blair’s afterward.”

“Erin does feel slighted.”

“I’m sure it will blow over,” Mimi said confidently. “It’s all playground politics. They’ve been friends for too long for something like this to get in the way.”

And that’s what Blair said later in the day, too. That all this would blow over, that everything would be fine in the long run, and that I shouldn’t encourage Erin to dwell on this one little incident.

Erin didn’t need the least bit of encouragement in order to dwell on this incident; she was managing fine all on her own.

The following week I urged her to call some different girls—if not girls from school, then perhaps some from church. But no, she couldn’t do that. If her own friends didn’t like her, why would anyone else like her? She wasn’t ever going to have any friends again for as long as she lived, and no tornado, hurricane, or other gale-force wind would ever blow this over.

What was I going to
do about my annual holiday pictures of the four girls?

Why pretend that the four of them were still a foursome? But if I didn’t take the picture, would that be saying that I thought the friendship had ended permanently? And wasn’t that a suggestion that might become a self-fulfilling prophecy?

I wanted one of my friends to say something about the photo. I wanted one of them to say that she, too, didn’t like this split among the girls and that she hoped that I could rise above the fact that her daughter was being, if not an absolute shit to my daughter, at least not a loyal friend. She would beg, she would grovel, and I would be gracious and accommodating.

That was not going to happen. While Annelise would have been perfectly happy to beg and grovel, she did not want to make me take the photo if I didn’t want to. For their part, Mimi and Blair probably assumed that I was a rational human being who needed to make my own decisions, doing whatever I thought was appropriate.

Were they ever wrong. My daughter’s tendency to whining martyrdom didn’t come from those Quakers on her dad’s side of the family tree.

But good friends are supposed to bring out the best in you. If Mimi and Blair had decided that I was a mature adult, then perhaps I could act like one. As soon as the soccer season was over in early November, I e-mailed the other three about the pictures just as if nothing different was happening this year. We agreed on a date. The girls already had blue jeans with a light-washed finish, and Mimi said that she had time to get four matching white T-shirts.

A few days later my phone rang. “Mrs. Meadows, this is Rachel.”

“Hi, sweetie. Erin’s not here.” It was Sunday afternoon, and Jamie had taken both kids out to a movie. I had some clients coming over in a few minutes.

“That’s okay. The rest of us wanted to know if we could include Faith in the picture this year. She really wants to be in it, and it doesn’t seem right to leave her out.”

Leaving her out certainly seemed right to me. “I don’t know. Let me think about it. It’s not anything personal. It’s that there has always been the four of you.”

I wasn’t just being vengeful—although surely that was part of it—excluding Faith simply because she had excluded Erin. The pictures of these four girls had gotten me my professional start. Even when I was still working at EPA and had only had a few classes at the Corcoran, people would see the pictures at one of our homes and would want to book a session for their own children with whoever had taken these pictures. If anyone now wanted to see a sample of my work, I showed them the most recent pictures of the girls. “This is what I do,” I would say. “I use film, black and white. Very simple clothes on a white background.” My pictures weren’t about the red plaid dresses the subjects were wearing or the Christmas trees they were standing in front of or the bunnies they were holding. I took pictures of children. Individual, interesting children.

So I wanted to continue the series for professional reasons. But refusing to let Faith come would alienate the other girls. This time they had spoken up when someone they liked had been left out. So the solution was simple. I would take two sets of pictures, one with four girls and one with five. Faith could come, but she needed to come late.

I called Mary Paige. She
sounded pleased and grateful … having apparently forgotten how exquisitely painful it would be for anyone in her family to set foot in my house. “We couldn’t be happier that you’re including her. She is so fond of the other girls.”

Not of mine. She wasn’t fond of my girl. “There is one thing.” I explained to her how I used the foursome in my portfolio. “So could you bring Faith at eleven o’clock?”

“Of course,” Mary Paige said. “That’s fine, I will bring her over at eleven.”

But Faith showed up with the other girls at ten.

“Why is she here?” I whispered to Annelise, who had been driving.

“I don’t know. Is it a problem? Mary Paige just called and asked if she could drop Faith off at nine. She had a hair appointment.”

A hair appointment on Saturday? Women who didn’t have jobs shouldn’t have Saturday hair appointments. That wasn’t fair to the women whose schedules weren’t so flexible, who could only go on Saturday. “I told her to bring Faith at eleven.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” Annelise was her ever-apologetic self. “I didn’t know that.”

“I’m not blaming you.” I just felt sorry for all the women who needed to get their hair done on Saturdays.

My capacity for self-delusion is breathtaking.

Our house had a finished attic. Much of the space wasn’t very usable as the roofline slanted sharply, but the back half was a playroom and the front half was where I photographed. I had a large soft light, two strobes on stands, and a twelve-foot-wide roll of white seamless paper that served as a background.

As I predicted the minute I saw Faith, the session with the four girls didn’t go well. Faith talked only to the other three girls and ignored Erin. The amount of boy-girl talk startled me. “He
likes
you,” Faith said to Rachel about a boy whose name I didn’t recognize. I guessed he must be a seventh grader. To Elise she said, “You know you like him; you know you do.” That boy was
definitely
a seventh grader. She teased Brittany about a sixth-grade boy who was easily five inches shorter than she was. Faith said nothing to Erin. She made it very clear that no boy was interested in Erin.

Did I want boys interested in Erin? No, not yet. Did I want Erin to be the only one of her friends whom no boy liked? Of course not.

And seventh graders! Since when had our girls started hanging out with older men?

I was finding Faith’s chatter distracting, and the other girls could think about nothing else. I was about to send her downstairs to watch TV with Thomas when she started imitating the teachers. She really was very good at it, and soon even Erin had to laugh. But there was an uneasiness to the laughter. None of them were used to disrespecting their teachers; their expressions would, I knew, reveal their uncertainty.

I reloaded the camera and told Faith to join them. She skipped over and the other three girls clustered around her. I didn’t push Erin too hard about making herself a part of the group. I didn’t care about these pictures. I simply needed one that was good enough to give Mary Paige.

I developed the pictures that afternoon. I held my magnifier up to the contact sheet and examined the pictures of the four girls, marking which ones to enlarge.

Then I scanned through the ones with all five girls. Mary Paige would like them because Faith was in the middle and she looked pretty. I continued looking. And suddenly stopped.

The ninth picture was fabulous. Everything about the composition, the balance, the proportion … technically it might have been the best picture I had ever taken. Once I enlarged it, I could see a series of interlocking isosceles triangles. The bend of Rachel’s elbow was a triangle that was the exact size as a triangle formed by the crossing of Faith’s and Elise’s arms. Elise’s, Brittany’s, and Faith’s heads made a triangle that was mirrored exactly in one formed by the hems of Faith’s, Rachel’s, and Erin’s jeans. I could have posed and reposed the girls for days on end and I would have never gotten this.

It was also strong emotionally. The message wasn’t blatant. It wasn’t like the cover of a book on childhood mental illness with one somber-looking kid standing alone in the foreground while in the background is a group of other kids laughing. This picture conveyed its message in a more subtle way. All of the lines of the picture flowed away from Erin. In every triangle in which she had part, the triangle was long and narrow, and she was at the apex. The two girls at the base of the triangle were close together, but distant from Erin. It formed a starkly beautiful portrait of exclusion.

I looked at their faces. They all looked quiet, even a little weary. That was no surprise in the four original girls; they had been tired of posing, but even Faith looked weary.

I picked up the magnifier again to look into her eyes.

The game this girl was playing was exhausting.
Pick me. Don’t pick her. Here is our schedule of whom we invite when. Be sure and tell me when your games are so I can come. Will you call Erin’s mom and get me in the picture?

She was twelve. She had lost her father and her home. She was an unhappy child, and her mother had given her a mission—to be one of the popular girls—and she was doing it the only way she knew how.

I had taken the pictures
on Saturday morning, and as she always did, Blair had us over to tea Sunday afternoon to look at the proofs.

For all that we thought of ourselves as a unit, it was rare that the four of us ever sat down together in a room by ourselves unless we were counting the school’s Sally Foster gift-wrap orders or processing new library books. But once a year Blair got out her set of beautiful hand-painted cups and saucers, unique because instead of being porcelain, they were glass. I think this was the only occasion from one year to the next that she used them.

The day was cool but bright, so Mimi and I walked over to Blair’s with me carrying the proofs in a canvas tote bag decorated with hand-drawn stick figures who had huge heads and spiky hair. Thomas had made it for me for Mother’s Day two years before. As we walked, Mimi and I talked a little bit about the new second-grade teacher; neither of our sons had him. We were sorry; we wanted the boys to have a male teacher.

The girls’ relationship was the big pink elephant in the corner of the room that we were trying desperately not to talk about.

I was dreading this tea. Blair might have invited Mary Paige. Twice these teas had occurred when Mimi’s mother had been in town, and, of course, Bubbe—as we all called her—had been included. But Bubbe never spent the afternoon complaining about the price my family had paid for Mrs. Chester T. Paige’s house.

As always Blair had set out her ornate silver tea service on the skirted table between the two windows of her Tiffany-blue living room. I was pleased to see four—and only four—glass cups.

Blair had decorated her house without any professional advice, and she had done a spectacular job, following the style of Dorothy Draper, who had—as I now knew—freed American interiors from dim, cluttered Victoriana. Each of the first-floor rooms was painted a vivid, cool, almost piercing color—periwinkle, melon, saffron—the kinds of colors that Blair wore herself. The colors were unified by the mirrorlike gloss of the stark white moldings and by the cabbage-rose fabric that tumbled through the rooms. Personally I prefer to live in a more restful style, but I always find myself smiling whenever I walk into her house.

I wondered what Mary Paige Caudwell, an “interior-design professional,” thought of Blair’s house. She must have seen it. They must have had the sort of conversation about it that Blair and I had always had.

I present my proofs to people in silver-toned binders with plastic page protectors. Each of the pictures is framed with a thick black line that duplicates the effect of a frame. Once Blair had poured the tea, Annelise and Mimi moved their chairs closer to Blair’s while I sat on the other side of the skirted table, looking at the pictures upside down.

The pictures of the original four girls came first, and I knew that they were not as good as the pictures I had taken the year before. Three of the girls had braces, and none of them felt as comfortable with themselves and their bodies as they had the year before. All the boy-girl talk had made them uneasy, and the ridicule of their teachers had made them additionally uncomfortable.

But that’s what preteen girls were—uneasy, awkward, and hesitant. When compared with the marvelous leapfrog picture of last year, whatever picture we chose would make a poignant statement about how hard adolescence was going to be.

In the second half of the binder were the pictures of all five girls. No one spoke as they looked at those pictures until they came to the one that I had taken ninth. They glanced at it, each probably checking how her own daughter looked. Mimi was about to turn the page when Blair, who had a better eye and more art training than the others, stopped her.

She looked up at me, her hand on the plastic-encased proof. “This is really good.”

“Yes.”

The others bent their heads to look more closely. Blair started talking about the lines and the balance. Then she noticed the triangles and was beginning to explicate that when Annelise interrupted her.

“That’s not it. What’s important in the picture is the emotion. It’s—” She stopped.

She didn’t know how to say this. But I did. “It’s the relationship of Erin to the rest of the group.”