Class(12)

“Maybe.”

“Well, did you aim?”

“I did my best.” He kissed her on the mouth, then pressed his groin into her crotch.

“Don’t be disgusting,” she murmured as she kissed him back. It pleased her to think that after ten years of marriage, her husband was still attracted to her. She was still attracted to him too. Though in keeping with male fashion trends, Matt had recently grown a patchy beard, and Karen had yet to grow accustomed to the scratchy feel of it against her cheek and chin.

Just then, Ruby ran into the living room in her pajamas with her stuffed octopus, Octi, filling her arms. “Daddy!” she cried.

Matt abruptly withdrew from Karen. “Hey, Scooby Doobie!” he said, lifting Ruby into his arms. “How was school today?”

“Fine,” she said in the babyish voice she sometimes adopted in the evenings. “But Octi had a bad day. So can you say something nice to her?”

“Sure I can,” said Matt, draping two of the doll’s tentacles over his shoulders. “Listen, Octi—there are more fish in the sea than have ever been caught…”

“My mother used to say that,” said Karen.

“You mean after you brought me home for the first time.”

“Ha-ha.”

Ruby extended her neck. “Mommy, what are my magnet dolls doing over there in that big bag by the door?” she asked, back to her regular voice.

“You never play with them anymore, sweetie,” said Karen. “And we don’t have that much room in the apartment. I’m taking them to the Salvation Army so kids who can’t afford new toys can play with them.”

“But I do play with them!” cried Ruby, squinching up her face.

“The Salvation Army? Seriously? You know they try to convert people over there,” said Matt, a committed atheist whose parents attended a Methodist church.

“Okay. But they also do a lot of food assistance,” said Karen, who was ethnically Jewish but who described herself as an agnostic. “HK even contracts with them.”

“I just think the Homeless Solutions Thrift Store will make better use of Ruby’s old toys,” said Matt, his tone turning serious, “without bringing in all that salvation BS.”

“But why can’t I keep my own toys?” moaned Ruby.

“Maybe they will,” said Karen, ignoring her daughter’s lament. “But the Homeless Solutions donation center is two miles away, and there’s a Salvation Army on our corner. So I can actually drop stuff there on my way to the train instead of having to get in the car to take it somewhere—or instead of asking you to get in the car to take it somewhere, which we both know will mean that bag will be sitting in the hall getting tripped over for the next two years.”

“Touché,” said Matt, conceding the fight and, in doing so, pleasing Karen, who smiled triumphantly.

After Ruby went to bed, Karen and Matt sat on the sofa and shared frustrations from their workdays. Matt told Karen about what a hard time the staff was having getting the city’s housing authority to cooperate with his website. Karen told Matt about how the grant she was writing was taking forever—and also about what had happened at the community-unit party. “Which one is Maeve again?” asked Matt.

Karen didn’t understand how her husband couldn’t keep straight their only child’s few friends, but she chalked it up to a failure of vision above all else. By nature, Matt wasn’t very observant. Karen could get a new pillow for the sofa, and two months would go by before he noticed—if he ever did. “The blond one who looks like JonBenét Ramsey who comes over to our house, like, every weekend?” said Karen.

“She wears heavy makeup and cowgirl outfits?” asked Matt.

“No! I just mean she looks like her. Blond and blue-eyed with a turned-up nose.”

“Oh, right—I know who she is.”

“Or at least it was turned-up until Jayyden got there,” joked Karen.

“So he broke her nose?” asked Matt.

“I haven’t heard,” said Karen, shrugging. “I mean, I assume her mom, Laura, would have e-mailed me if it was that bad. But who knows. She and Maeve’s dad, Evan, are probably out of town shooting an important GlaxoSmithKline commercial and haven’t heard the news about their daughter yet. Seriously, those two are never around. I honestly don’t know why they had kids.”

“Did you know pharmaceutical companies are banned from directly advertising to consumers in every country in the world except the U.S., New Zealand, and Brazil?” said Matt.

“Why am I not surprised?” said Karen, shaking her head. Then she launched into a harsh description of her run-in with Leslie Pfeiffer. “She might as well have said, ‘We couldn’t deal with all the black people at your school so we decided to send our precious firstborn to an apartheid-like all-white B-and-E program in the middle of a poor black school, where she won’t actually have to interact with any dark children because they keep them in their own holding pens.’”

“That sounds charming,” said Matt.

“Yeah, really charming,” said Karen.

“People think Republicans are racists,” said Matt, who had grown up in Tacoma, Washington, where his not particularly warm but refreshingly sane parents toiled as a college secretary and a building contractor. “But I’ve always thought college-educated liberals are actually the worst.”