Class(49)
The sound of clinking glass turned Karen’s attention away from the macaroons and toward the curb, where a homeless man with a filthy dreadlocked beard and a bum leg scrounged through a blue trash bag, presumably in search of redeemable bottles. Tuesday evening was when residents of the neighborhood put out their recyclables for Wednesday-morning pickup. At the sight of the man, Karen felt competing desires: to reach out and to run far away, to sympathize but also to condemn. As if there were no history, no mitigating circumstances that had led to his situation in life. When had she grown so callous, she wondered—in life, in her marriage? As the man began to hobble away with his giant clanging bag of recyclables slung Santa-style over his rounded back, Karen guiltily thrust a five-dollar bill into his hand. “May God bless you,” he muttered after her.
“Good luck,” she told him.
As if luck had anything to do with it.
After crossing the neighborhood’s main commercial thoroughfare, Karen started down a leafy street lined with handsomely proportioned, history-rich nineteenth-century brick row houses with brass hardware on the doors. She’d crossed the line that separated the Betts school district from the one zoned for Edward G. Mather. Here, the homes featured plaques claiming to have been the birthplaces of important but now obscure figures from the Civil War, from literature, and from architecture. Staring covetously through their elongated windows, she could make out chandeliers of various vintages, beginning with the introduction of the gas lamp and continuing into the present, with sleek steel, brass, and glass versions from Design Within Reach. Karen’s wealthy friends, like Allison, called it Design Out of Reach, even though they readily dove their hands into their wallets in order to purchase home furnishings from the place. (They also referred to Whole Foods as Whole Paycheck, even as they continued to buy their heirloom tomatoes there.) But then, in the city in which they all lived, feeling poor was apparently intrinsic to the experience of being rich, unless you were incredibly rich. Allison and her family actually lived just around the corner. It was another of the ironies of the area that the real estate had gotten so expensive, and the people moving into it so moneyed, that they didn’t necessarily even use the public school that had made the neighborhood so sought after just a few years before.
The block was deserted except for a Caucasian man with a shaved head, walking a French bulldog. The man was dressed in the casual uniform of the Euro elite: dark-wash jeans, a black suit jacket, a crisp white dress shirt, and black loafers with a silver horse bit on each toe. Karen guessed he was a private banker, or maybe an art consultant who advised bankers. In any case, he exuded a compelling type of confidence. And as the two passed each other, she smiled what she imagined to be her most beguiling smile. But the man stared blankly back at her—really, through her. Reminded again of her reduced desirability, being a woman over forty, Karen felt ashamed and embarrassed and turned her eyes toward the curb, where clear plastic bags filled with paper trash formed high-class hillocks beneath the streetlamp.
Through the plastic, she could make out back issues of Bon Appétit magazine and various official-looking envelopes that bore the insignias of financial institutions like PricewaterhouseCoopers and Fidelity. It was that kind of neighborhood, filled with those kind of people, she thought—the kind she’d spent her life both shunning for their sense of entitlement and trying to keep up with, in roughly equivalent proportions. But in that moment, the latter impulse was in ascendance. Although Karen was aware that, compared to the vast majority of city dwellers, she and Matt were greatly privileged, she also saw her own family as being at a distinct disadvantage. Why should the children on this block get to walk the hallowed halls of Mather instead of the higgledy-piggledy ones of Betts? It seemed as unfair as—well—cancer. Also as random.
Of course, the disparity in privilege between Karen and Clay Phipps was surely many times greater than it was between her and the public-school parents in the neighborhood who sent their children to Mather. But Clay’s wealth was so beyond the realm of imaginable that it somehow didn’t merit comparison, whereas walking down Pendleton Street, which was only four blocks from Karen’s home, she had the uneasy feeling that she’d taken a wrong turn a hundred miles back, and now it was too late to turn around. She’d never find the exit in time, never catch the train. It had already left the station without her. And there wasn’t another one coming any time soon. Karen had never considered herself to be a particularly competitive person. But even if winning wasn’t her life’s goal, it was also true that she hated to lose.
As she continued down the block, her eye caught the familiar periwinkle-colored font of the local gas company, then the word NONE printed in large caps. Probably a utility bill tossed out by a resident who owed nothing, Karen figured. It seemed like the perfect metaphor for the people who lived there. She kept walking. She walked all the way to the corner. Then she paused, an idea unspooling in her head: Why couldn’t that utility bill be hers and, by extension, why couldn’t she pretend to be a resident of Pendleton Street, in which case she’d be legally entitled to send her daughter to Mather?
In truth, it wasn’t the first time Karen had contemplated lying about her address to secure a better school. Once or twice, it had even crossed her mind to ask Allison if she could borrow hers. Allison probably wouldn’t have minded. But the loss of pride to Karen had seemed potentially detrimental to their friendship. Despite their intimacy, she relished the ability to quietly dangle her woman-of-the-people credentials in Allison’s face. What’s more, Karen had never stolen anything in her life other than a towel from the Yucatán resort where she and Matt had spent their honeymoon. And even that breach, the pettiest of crimes, had caused her heart to palpitate. She could still recall how, while checking out, she’d been half convinced that the man behind the front desk could see into her luggage. She’d also half expected the police suddenly to appear.