A Most Uncommon Degree of Popularity (7 page)

So when the school had sought a new head, one unstated assumption was that if it were a man, he should have once been like these guys.

And we found him. Although he now had neat close-cropped hair and well-shaped wire-rimmed glasses, Chris Goddard had, for three years in his youth, been road manager for a rock band, quitting because—at least this was his public explanation—he was tired of being the only person who wore a watch or thought that watches mattered. Since then he had acquired all the appropriate educational credentials. He had finished college, gotten an M.A., taught, been vice principal at one private school and director of academic affairs at another. While alumnae families held the majority on the search committee, the new families made the case that Chris had the demonstrated commitment to music that we wanted and if any person could make the trains run on time, it was the road manager of a rock band.

I approached him and murmured my name. I didn’t expect him to recognize me. The school had hundreds of families, and even once people had an approximate read on me, they still often confused me with Annelise.

He smiled. “I know who you are. Erin is in the sixth grade, Thomas is in the second. You’re on the curriculum committee, and you’re running the Spring Fair.”

“You’re good,” I said.

“No.” He shook his head. “Your family is important to the school, and you are the person everyone borrows stuff from.”

“My claim to fame,” I said with a flick of my hand, and the discouraging thought that what I had said was true.

He was surprisingly well-dressed. He wasn’t wearing a tie and there was nothing flashy to his garb, but the pleats on his trousers hung perfectly, and the legs broke symmetrically over his narrow loafers.

I didn’t know much about Chris’s personal life, but the people who had interviewed him while on the search committee said that there wasn’t a lot to know. He had never been married, but he wasn’t gay. It took only a moment in his presence to sense his heterosexual charm. He did have a college-aged son, the result of a brief “on the road” relationship. The boy had been raised by his maternal grandparents, and Chris had not even known of his existence for the first few years of the boy’s life. Chris had concealed none of this from the search committee, and because the backyard of a member of the committee butted up to Annelise’s backyard, we had gotten all the dirt.

“Your daughter’s not in the ensemble, is she?” Chris asked now.

“No, I’m here to pick up her friends.”

“Is that an issue for her, that her friends are in the ensemble?”

“Oh, no,” I said lightly, “she didn’t try out. There was never any question of her being in.”

“But does she feel excluded in other ways?”

Suddenly I wasn’t sure of the answer to that. Last year Erin would certainly have wanted to come to school with me. She had always grabbed any chance to see her friends. “I don’t know,” I admitted.

“The one thing that gave me pause about enlarging the ensemble,” he said, “was Martha Shot saying that if we had more than ten girls, the ensemble would take over the social life of the sixth grade. The ensemble girls would be on the bus, and the rest wouldn’t. It’s hard to imagine that one girl would make such a difference, but she said one could.”

“I’m sure it depends on the mix of kids.” The bond between Erin, Elise, Brittany, and Rachel was so strong, their lives intersected in so many ways with so many shared activities, that I couldn’t imagine the ensemble changing their friendship.

He nodded. “Of course. I hope you’ll keep me posted if there are problems.”

I had assumed that Mimi’s ranting and ravings had been the force behind the ensemble increasing in size. Now I wondered. Perhaps it had as much to do with a power struggle between a new headmaster and a teacher with thirty years’ tenure. If so, I was a little surprised that the headmaster had won.

Oh, well, we would never know. The faculty and staff do a good job of keeping parents out of their own civil wars, probably because they know the parents would start by filing lawsuits and end up in negotiations with a Third-World nation that had nuclear-weaponry capability.

The rehearsal was ending. The eleven girls had been arranged by voice, but as soon as they were dismissed, they sorted themselves out into smaller groups. Elise, Brittany, and Rachel were together, of course, and as they crossed the music room toward me, they were joined by the girl I now knew to be Faith Caudwell, the alumnae daughter who had moved back from Texas and been given the tenth spot in the ensemble.

The girls hardly reacted to seeing me instead of one of their own mothers. They were so used to being driven by any of us that they probably didn’t even notice that I was there without Erin. Faith Caudwell stuck with us all the way to the car almost as if she were coming along.

“Do you have a ride?” I asked her.

“Oh, yes, but my mom’s always late. That’s the way she is.”

Okay, one more person whom I, intolerant bitch that I am, didn’t want to drive a car pool with.

The three girls said good-bye to Faith, they all promised that they would call one another the minute that they got home, and then in the car they talked about her, saying the usual sorts of things that kids said about other kids, that she was really really nice and really really fun and they really really liked her.

Jamie’s parents came down from
Pittsburgh for the weekend, and we were out and about so much that I didn’t think about whether the phone was ringing. Erin always checked the messages as soon as we got in, and so I don’t know how many she got.

The following Friday afternoon she was again on the sofa watching the Disney Channel. Earlier in the week she had declared that the Disney Channel was for babies, and since her brother watched it, he must be a baby.

I donned my helpful-mother cap. “Do you want me to call Mrs. Rosen”—that was Annelise—“and have her drop the girls off here after rehearsal? We’ve got time to get a movie before they would get here, and then we could call for a pizza.”

“No.” Her tone suggested that my helpful-mother cap was a black ski mask.

“Well, honey, why not?” I chirped. “Isn’t that better than just sitting here?”

“They’re all going to Faith’s after the rehearsal. They’re spending the night with her.”

“Oh.”

I hadn’t meant anything by that “oh.” I was surprised, that was all, but clearly Erin assumed that I had meant something, and of course, whatever I meant was the Wrong Thing.

“Faith and I don’t know each other,” she snapped. “We don’t have any classes together. Why would she have invited me?”

She was right, of course she was. And Faith’s mother probably only had enough seat belts for four girls. Even if she had more, she would have taken other girls from the ensemble, not Erin.

But still Erin had been left out; she had been excluded. Her friends were all at a sleepover to which she had not been invited.

Oh, did I know that feeling, the feeling of having not been invited. That’s what my life had been like at her age.

Erin is quiet at school. She is like her dad, reserved and observant. But when she is with her friends, she gets carried away; she squeals and chatters with giddy exuberance. They all do. Their voices are high-pitched, and they talk reallyreallyfast, and their braces slur their speech. Adults can barely understand them, which is fine because they aren’t speaking to us.

Today, however, Erin was silent and sullen.

I wanted to know more. Was this just a one-time thing, or did we have a problem? At lunch who was sitting with whom? And in the halls, who was speaking to whom? But there was no way that she was going to tell me. I could ask pleasantly, I could badger endlessly, I could withhold food, she was not going to tell me. I thought I could help if I knew more, but she didn’t think so, and whether or not she had the right to remain silent, she certainly had the power to do so.

I expected one of my
friends to say something. We were all at the girls’ soccer game the next afternoon, and I waited for one of them to mention the previous evening’s activities.
It was so odd not to have Erin in the car this morning. … Did Erin mind not being invited? … Never occurred to me that Erin wouldn’t be there. …

Or even if they didn’t express regret at Erin’s not being invited, I would have expected whoever had picked up the girls on Saturday morning to have described Mary Paige’s house to the rest of us.

But the sleepover at Faith’s house seemed to be a taboo subject. That was odd. It was if the lighthouse had suddenly gone dim.

The following Friday Brittany was
having a sleepover with the four girls from the ensemble, and this time, of course, Erin was invited—Blair wouldn’t have allowed Brittany not to invite Erin. Blair picked up the four ensemble girls after rehearsal, but since she drove a sedan with five seat belts, she didn’t have room for Erin. The seat belt that had always been Erin’s was now Faith’s. Even though the Bransons lived only four blocks from us and so Erin often walked over there, I drove her. I sensed that she felt odd about coming separately from the other girls, and I thought that my magical mother-presence would help her feel better.

If it did, she hid it well.

Jamie thought that he had a good chance of getting some key evidence excluded early and so—fun guy that he was—he worked that Friday evening. One of Thomas’s friends came over. Both boys were yummy little things, serious, sweet, and extremely interested in all things violent and destructive.

After Thomas’s soccer game Saturday morning I picked up Rachel and Erin at Blair’s house. The girls hardly spoke to each other. I couldn’t tell if they were fighting or if they just hadn’t had enough sleep. Erin spent the rest of the day on the sofa, watching the Disney Channel until it was time for her afternoon soccer game. Thomas got more phone calls than she did.

Faith Caudwell came to the soccer game even though her mother had not been able to get her on the team. She talked with whatever girls weren’t on the field. Erin is one of the better players on the team so, as always, she played most of the game, but at halftime it looked as if all the conversation was about the ensemble. Erin stood at the edge of the group without a lot to say.

And the conversation among us mothers was about the ensemble as well. Mimi was outraged that Grace Barton was picking on Rachel. “Chloe asked Rachel what page they were on, Rachel answered, and Rachel got yelled at.”

What did you expect?
I wanted to say.
We knew that Mrs. Barton was petty. We knew she played favorites. We could have predicted this. And can’t any of you see what Erin is going through? Don’t you think her suffering is worse?

The lighthouse was dark indeed.

Back home after the game
I carried Thomas’s clean laundry upstairs. As I put it away, I found a pair of Jamie’s socks mixed in with Thomas’s so I headed toward the front of the house where our bedroom is. Erin’s door was shut. I paused, listening. She was crying.

I moved close to the door, pulling my shoulders in as if trying to wedge myself into the angle created by the door and the casing trim.

I knocked lightly. “Erin, sweetie …”

“Go away, Mom.” Her voice was thick and muffled. “Just go away.”

My hand dropped to the doorknob. I could go in. The keys necessary for locking the bedroom doors had been lost years ago. I could go in and scoop her up in my arms and hold her and let her cry until everything was all right again.

But her crying in my arms wasn’t going to fix this. It would make me feel better, not her.

I was not going to barge in. I knocked once more.

“Leave me alone. Please leave me alone.”

So I did. I put Jamie’s socks away and went down the front stairs.

Our front hall is painted a pale, cool sage green, and descending the stairway wall is a series of pictures I had taken of Erin and her friends. I had started taking them when the girls were six—the first year I had taken a class at the Corcoran—and have taken one a year since then. Identically framed in silver-toned wood, the pictures were black-and-whites of four barefoot girls in white against a white background. One time they were all dancing. Another time they were perched on a series of black stools. Sometimes they were laughing, sometimes they were sweetly serious. Last year they had rejected the idea of four matching white dresses, so they had worn faded denim jeans and white T-shirts, and they were playing leapfrog. Brittany and Rachel were crouched while the two smaller girls, Erin and Elise, were in midair, their arms down, their legs spread, their hair flying. I had used a wide-angle lens with a two point eight f-stop and a shutter speed of 1/500 seconds on that one. To my eye the early pictures, taken with my old Nikon, were amateurish, but whenever I went to take those first ones down, I would stop seeing them as a photographer, and I would get weepy at how exquisitely textured very young children were, and I would leave the pictures hanging.

Every year these pictures were my holiday gift to my friends, and we all have them hanging in prominent places in our houses.

What kind of picture was I going to be able to take this year?

•  •  •

Later in the week I
asked Erin if she wanted to have everyone over that Friday evening. “You could certainly have Faith, too. We could pick them all up from the ensemble.”

I drive what my son, with his expensive private-school vocabulary, calls “a big-ass station wagon” so I can transport more kids than anyone else.

“No,” she said. “They won’t want to come.”

“Erin! These are your friends. They have been your friends since you were four. Why wouldn’t they want to come?”

“They just won’t. I don’t want to call them.”

If Erin was being as prickly with them as she was with me, they might not want to come. Her reaction to being excluded from a few things was probably going to guarantee her being excluded from many more. I had to figure out some way to break the cycle.

“I can call their moms. There’s nothing strange about that.”