Class(13)

“I totally agree.” To Karen’s mind, it was her and Matt’s shared political outlook and commitment to social justice, combined with their willingness to impugn those who didn’t share it, that had kept them more or less happily partnered for ten years. Also, they still had fairly decent if infrequent sex.

After their chat, Matt and Karen went back to their computers, as they tended to do in the evenings after Ruby went to bed. Since there was no word from Laura, Karen briefly considered sending her a hope everything is okay–type e-mail. Like other mothers thrown together on account of their children’s affection for one another, and even though it was quite possible that Laura secretly disapproved of Karen as much as Karen secretly disapproved of Laura, they went through the motions of being happy to see each other on the rare occasions when they did. They also regularly Liked each other’s Facebook photos of their children doing cute things, though Karen posted far fewer than Laura did. For no discernible reason, they also occasionally shared incredibly intimate details about their personal lives. The previous December, while at a birthday party for a classmate of Ruby and Maeve’s, Laura had revealed to Karen that for a year or more after giving birth to Maeve’s younger brother, Indy, she’d lost control of her bladder, regularly peed in her pants, and had at least once accidentally done so on her husband while they were having sex. It had been a detail too much for Karen, who hadn’t quite been able to get the image out of her head.

But in the end, Karen decided to hold off on sending anything. She wasn’t sure what tone to strike and was concerned about coming across as either nosy or inappropriately blasé. There was something about Laura that made Karen feel like she was one of those overinvolved, overprotective mothers who had no lives outside of their children—or like she was totally negligent. There was no in-between. Besides, Karen was fairly certain that despite her tears, Maeve was just fine.



On Saturday morning, Matt announced he had to go back to the office. Keen to work on her essay about nutrition and educational outcomes, Karen gave herself a temporary dispensation to remove all limits on screen time enjoyed by her daughter. As it happened, Karen ended up reading the paper and falling asleep. But the three of them went on a family outing to the zoo on Sunday morning, which Karen didn’t exactly enjoy, since it was still freezing outside and, at that point in her life, animals were not of particular interest to her. But returning to their warm home, she was happy to have gone, if only because, for once, the whole family was together and because it seemed like the kind of thing families did on weekends. And there was still a side of Karen that wanted to do things right, even though she felt haunted and repulsed by the sight of the baboons, whose bulbous red anuses suggested to her in a dispiriting way that we were all just animals whose sole purpose on the planet was to create offspring and then die.

On Monday, Karen met an old college acquaintance named Clay Phipps for lunch. Having tagged him as a potential Hungry Kids donor and possibly even a candidate for its board of directors, she’d e-mailed him cold and asked to meet. From what she’d read in the financial press, he’d founded his hedge fund, which used a new quantitative trading strategy, while he was still in business school. He was now worth hundreds of millions of dollars, if not a cool billion, and had homes in Jackson Hole, Bermuda, and probably three other places. Though he’d hardly started out in life poor. His father had been high up at Morgan Stanley and his mother—Karen remembered someone in college telling her—was related to the Vanderbilts. Or maybe it was the Astors.

It had never been among Karen’s life goals to suck up to rich guys and cajole them into parting with fractions of their fortunes—far from it. After college, she’d actually considered becoming a social worker. But a hands-on job leading arts-and-crafts workshops at a battered-women’s shelter had convinced her that her talents, such as they were, lay elsewhere. She’d felt awkward around the women, and they didn’t seem to connect with her either. Though a few did ask for money, which made her feel even more uncomfortable. As a result, Karen changed direction and lent her passion for social action to various left-leaning advocacy groups in Washington, DC, where she became expert at press releases.

But after Bill Clinton more or less killed welfare in ’96, Karen realized that the groups she worked for had pretty much no influence whatsoever. She pivoted yet again, pursuing a master’s degree in public health, which also led nowhere. It was mostly by default that she wound up in the world of philanthropy. A job offer to help raise money for a national reproductive-health and -rights organization came through a friend of a friend. Needing employment in any case, Karen decided it was better to help by some means than not to help at all. She also came to believe, contrary to the mantra of the hippie era, that everything important was predicated on money. Love and good health could not always be purchased, it was true. Nearly everything else could be.

During Karen’s first two years at Hungry Kids, she’d concentrated her efforts on grant writing, submitting elaborate proposals to faceless and secretive nonprofit organizations as well as the charitable wings of multinational corporations. But in the past few years, it had become clear to her that members of the .01 percent with autonomy over their own fortunes and family foundations were a far more expedient source of cash. In an ideal world, the IRS would be collecting enough taxes from these very people to feed the nation’s poor. But to Karen’s mind, the U.S. government had long ago stopped taking responsibility for the needy, so it was left to people like her, and organizations like Hungry Kids, to lead the effort.