Class by Lucinda Rosenfeld
To public schools everywhere
White people cannot, in the generality, be taken as models of how to live.
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
The poor are despised even by their neighbors, while the rich have many friends.
Proverbs 14:20
Karen Kipple had always been an early riser. She relished the quiet, the calm, the way the light filtered through the sycamore tree in front of her south-facing kitchen window, and the sensation of having the house to herself, if only for an hour or two. Was it terrible to admit that she never loved her daughter and husband so much as when they were asleep? She also liked studying the forecast while she drank her first cup of coffee of the day—checking projected temperatures against monthly averages and feeling appropriately blessed or outraged. As a child, Karen had made fun of grown-ups who were always going on about the weather; what could be duller? But as she’d gotten older, she’d found herself endlessly diverted by the seeming randomness and unpredictability of the sky overhead.
Karen had been married for ten years and, for the last five of them, had been the director of development for a small nonprofit devoted to tackling childhood hunger in the United States. For the past two years, she’d also been trying to write an op-ed, which she hoped one day to publish in a major newspaper, about the relationship between nutrition and school readiness. Like many women, she struggled to balance the demands of motherhood and career, always convinced that she was shortchanging one or the other. But it was also true that, insofar as she’d long conflated leisure with laziness, her eight-year-old daughter, Ruby, provided her with a permanent alibi in the criminal case of Karen Kipple versus herself. Thanks to Ruby, Karen always felt busy and needed even when she wasn’t officially working. And the permanent sense of obligation came by and large as a relief.
The only part of Karen’s domestic routine that she consistently dreaded was getting her daughter up for school. Not only was Ruby a heavy sleeper who was almost always comatose when her alarm went off, but Constance C. Betts Elementary had recently moved up its start time to eight a.m. to accommodate the schedules of the teachers who lived in faraway suburbs and wanted to beat the traffic. Never mind that Betts was only three blocks away from the family’s spacious two-bedroom condo in a converted nineteenth-century macaroni factory. Or that plenty of the students seemed to have no trouble arriving an hour early for the free breakfast, having commuted from parts of the city that, in some cases, Karen had never been to. Although Betts was a neighborhood school, it welcomed those from outside Cortland Hill as well, if only because it struggled to fill its seats with families who lived in zone. To Karen’s shame and chagrin, Ruby often arrived late.
The morning in question, an unseasonably cold one in mid-March, began typically. Karen walked into Ruby’s bedroom at 7:20 and found her daughter stock-still with her goldfish-motif quilt pulled over her head. Karen placed her hand on the lump below the quilt and gently rotated her from left to right. “Sweetie, it’s time to get up.”
There was no answer. Karen jostled and cajoled some more. Another three minutes went by, then four. Finally, there was movement, then a voice: “Leave me alone.”
Karen had learned not to take Ruby’s morning grumpiness personally. “I wish I could,” she said. “But school is starting in exactly thirty-five minutes. And I’ve already given you an extra five. Plus, I made you eggs, and they’re getting cold.”
“Eggs are gross” came the reply. “They come out of chickens’ butts.”
“Well, then, you can just eat the toast,” said Karen. There was more silence. Losing patience, Karen yanked the quilt off her daughter and said, “Get. Up. Now.”
Finally, with a deep groan, Ruby rolled over, rubbed her eyes, and said, “What day is it?” Her flyaway brown hair looked like a bird’s nest.
“Friday.”
“I have gym today. I need to wear sneakers.”
“Do you want me to get your sparkly ones?”
“Mr. Ronald is so strict,” said Ruby, ignoring Karen’s question. “He’s always yelling at everyone, and he blows this whistle in your ear if you don’t do what he says.”
Karen sat down on the edge of the bed and leaned toward her daughter. “Don’t tell anyone I told you this,” she said, tucking a section of tangled hair around Ruby’s ear. “But all the mean kids in school become gym teachers when they grow up.”
Ruby seemed confused by the pronouncement. “All of them?” she asked, wrinkling her nose.
Karen considered the idea that, just maybe, she should have qualified her comments. What if Ruby repeated them to Mr. Ronald? Or—God forbid—what if Ruby became a gym teacher when she grew up? “Well, not all of them, but many of them,” she said. “Now, come on! It’s the community-unit celebration this morning, so Mommy is actually coming to school with you.”
This piece of news seemed instantly to alter Ruby’s exhaustion level. “Yay!” she cried, bolting upright and throwing her legs over the side of her twin bed. In fact, Ruby’s third-grade teacher had invited all the parents into the classroom that morning to view the breakfast-cereal boxes that, in keeping with a study unit on community, her students had decorated to look like civic buildings and storefronts.