Class(48)

“I don’t particularly want to. But I’m not a hundred percent opposed to the idea,” said Karen.

“Well, I am,” said Matt. “This is my home, and I have no intention of leaving it.”

“It’s my home too,” said Karen. “And please don’t make me point out who actually put down the money for it.”

Matt’s jaw visibly tensed. For a few seconds, he didn’t speak. Then he said, “Are you seriously going there?”

“Sorry, that was unnecessary,” said Karen, already regretting the gambit.

“Thank you for your apology,” said Matt.

“So we’ll stay here. Are you happy now?”

“Happy enough.”

Well, you’re the only one who is, Karen was tempted to reply, but this time she stopped herself. “I’m going to shower,” she said instead and walked out of the room.

Undressing in the bedroom, she caught sight of her reflection in the full-length mirror. Although she was forty-five, it still came as a surprise and a disappointment to find that her body no longer resembled her youthful image of herself, which she continued to cling to despite all evidence to the contrary. Instead, she appeared in the mirror that evening as bulky in all the wrong places and hollow in the others, like a banana split that had been left out in the sun for too long. A part of Karen understood that it no longer mattered what she looked like without her clothes on, since she was (a) already married and (b) at the end of her childbearing years and therefore not expected to resemble a totem of fertility.

But in that moment, it did matter. She felt old and irrelevant and, as with many women in moments of insecurity, began to mentally flagellate herself for her lack of self-control—for her failure to go to the gym often enough and eat sparingly at all times. Her diet may have been largely organic, but it was also frequently excessive. The problem was that the salads never filled her up. And the smoothies only left her craving something smoother, like ice cream.

Once in the shower, the simple joy of hot water streaming down her scalp and back soothed and distracted her. But when she emerged from the downpour, her dissatisfaction both with herself and with the world returned. For Karen, negativity was like a wisteria vine that, if left to its own devices, would creep into every last crevice of her conscience and wind itself around every last limb until she felt strangled by her own discontent and desperate to escape. “I’m going out for milk,” she called out over the voice of the sportscaster.

“Don’t we have some?” Matt called back.

“Not enough,” she answered. It seemed like the easiest explanation.

Karen locked the door behind her and headed to the elevator.



It was far from warm outside, but the dampness had lifted. And the air felt cool and fresh on Karen’s face. Pausing outside the front door of her building, she looked around her. The doggie-day-care center next door was dark. So was the Vietnamese sandwich shop that had recently taken over from a bail bondsman. Only the Korean deli and the bistro on the corner appeared to be open for business. The latter business was so cool it didn’t even have a name. What it did have was greasy comfort food with a gourmet flair, like cheeseburgers made of dry-aged beef with cave-aged cheddar. In the new culinary economy, it seemed, everybody wanted food that had been sitting around for a long time. Karen marveled that it wasn’t the other way around. Out of habit more than anything else, she began walking toward it.

Peering into the bistro’s handsomely canopied windows, she saw tables of white people in their twenties and thirties, their faces elastic with the effects of alcohol, their clothes just the tiniest bit rumpled, their hair unkempt, their heads thrown back in laughter. Every Wednesday—Karen had seen the posters in the window—the bistro hosted a bingo night, which was clearly meant to be ironic. Karen had always hated board games, even as a child, finding them dull and fundamentally pointless. She had a far more ambivalent relationship with the bistro itself.

When Karen first moved to the neighborhood, there had been a decrepit bodega in the same spot. Karen had almost never shopped there, choosing to buy her staples at the more upscale Korean-owned deli nearby or to order them online. But once in a while, when the deli had run out of milk or orange juice, she’d find herself walking on the bodega’s broken black-and-white-vinyl-tiled floor while a tabby cat with green-gold eyes darted in and out of the aisles. The Tunisian immigrant family who owned the place must have been trying to capitalize on the first wave of gentrification to hit the neighborhood when, one day, they erected a new marquee promising ORGANUK FOOD. The misspelling had made Karen cringe. Not surprisingly, a year or so later, the bodega was shuttered. For six months, the store sat empty. Then the bistro guys arrived in their black leather motorcycle jackets. While they stood out front smoking American Spirit cigarettes and talking on their phones, a crew of Central American construction workers began yanking out the vinyl tiles and chucking them into a dumpster, exposing the original wide-plank subfloor—and ultimately increasing the property value of Karen and Matt’s condo.

And now, next to the Bistro with No Name, where there had previously been an African American barbershop—until the barber was shot dead in what the local papers called a personal dispute—there was a store that sold macaroons and nothing more. It was closed for the night, but the display window was still lit, revealing Easter egg–colored disks laid out in rows in an old-fashioned oak-and-glass case with cabriole legs. Beneath the sweets were handwritten note cards advertising exotic flavors like passion fruit and champagne. Karen thought of jewels in a jewelry store. She also thought that, whatever it was the macaroon people were selling, it had very little to do with eating. But then, for people in a certain milieu, a milieu that surely included Karen, this was what food had increasingly become—a luxury item, rather than a means to stay alive.