Class(5)

“Who’s that?” Ruby asked—a question that Karen had found less charming.

Later, Karen learned that Caesar salad was actually named after the restaurateur Caesar Cardini—and felt foolish herself and a little more forgiving of her daughter and her school.

Yet during parent-teacher conferences, when Miss Tammy informed Karen that Ruby was the strongest reader in the class—or, in Miss Tammy’s words, the “most awesome reader in Room Three-oh-three”—Karen’s first thought was not pride but paranoia that Ruby’s classmates must all be behind.



Moments after Nurse Smith led a still sniveling, now bandaged Maeve out of the classroom, Principal Chambers appeared in the doorway in a black pants suit and low heels, her expression stern. After a low-voiced conference with Miss Tammy in the corner, she took Jayyden by the back of his shirt collar and marched him out of the classroom. The other students looked on in stunned silence. The mood had shifted from celebration to sobriety.

“Fun morning,” quipped Lou.

“What that kid needs is a serious whupping,” muttered Sa’Ryah’s mother, Desiree Johnston, an attractive single mother in her late twenties who worked in a Medicaid office.

“With all due respect, violence is not the answer to violence,” demurred Ezra’s mother, April Fishbach, a late-life PhD candidate in cultural anthropology as well as the president and sole active member of Betts’s Parent Teacher Association.

Desiree rolled her eyes.

Marco Cicetti, who was the father of Maeve’s other best friend, Amanda, seemed similarly unimpressed by April’s argument. “Yeah, wait till it’s your kid who ends up in the ER,” he said.

“I completely agree—he needs to leave the school,” said Bram’s mother, Annika Van Den Berg, a five-foot-eleven Dutch architect who dressed in avant-garde fashions that resembled crumpled sleeping bags and who was clearly just slumming it for a few years before the family moved back to a canal house in Amsterdam filled with ultramodern molded-plastic furnishings.

“The whole Jayyden situation just makes me sad,” muttered Karen. It was the only thing she felt it was permissible to say, striving as she always did for a tone of compassionate neutrality that would counteract any suspicions that she was just another white parent wishing the school would gentrify more quickly than it was.

“But where are these parents of Jayyden?” asked Annika in her stilted English.

“Mom in jail—dad, who knows,” Lou said, shrugging.

“Trash begets trash,” said Marco. “End of story.”

Karen cringed at Marco’s comment, while Mumia’s father, Ralph Washington, who was the editor of a small hip-hop and black politics magazine, stepped into the fray. “Except you left out the beginning,” he said hotly. “Where the legacy of slavery and the white hegemony begets the vicious cycle of black poverty.”

There was an uncomfortable silence. Even April, who was never at a loss for sanctimonious words regarding social justice for poor minorities, seemed tongue-tied. Karen stared at her shoes.

Luckily, Miss Tammy chose that moment to return to the front of the classroom and say, at a marginally lower decibel level, “I’m sorry about the disruption, parents. But we’re still totally pumped to have you here. And your children have worked awesomely hard on their buildings. So please continue to explore our community. But if you have to leave, don’t forget to sign our guest book.”

Suddenly conscious of time passing—and keen to escape the tension—Karen touched Ruby’s arm and announced that she had to go.

“Maeve left early. Can I go home early too?” asked Ruby. As if the two children’s disparate dismissal times were the real injustice.

“No, you cannot,” said Karen, exasperated by the question.

But the sight of Ruby’s wounded face undid Karen. Fearing she’d been too harsh, and even though both Ruby’s pediatrician and dentist had urged her to cut back on the sweets, Karen said, “But I promise we’ll go out for a treat after school—before gymnastics.”

“What kind of treat?” asked Ruby, who was in the 25th percentile for height and the 80th for weight.

“Maybe ice cream.”

“Awwww,” Ruby moaned. “I’m tired of ice cream. Can’t I have an icie?”

“No, you can’t,” said Karen, wondering if she had only herself to blame for her rising irritation.

In truth, Karen’s complex and often contradictory relationship to eating had grown more so in recent years. This was due not only to her current job—to the truly hungry, all food was in some sense good food—but to the outsize importance that her particular demographic group had placed on the business of consuming calories. Along with weight, teeth, and marriage, food had somehow become a dividing line between the social classes, with the Earth Day–esque ideals of the 1960s having acquired snob appeal, and the well-off and well-educated increasingly buying “natural” and “fresh” and casting aspersions on those who didn’t.

Karen herself had grown up in the 1970s and ’80s eating Ring Dings and washing them down with cans of Tab, and so far, health-wise, she didn’t seem any worse for it. But she also had a history of neurotic eating that dated back to late adolescence. It had never risen to the level of an eating disorder—she didn’t have that kind of willpower—but it had left her overly preoccupied with every morsel she ate and, recently, what her husband and daughter ate. Unlike the majority of her female friends, Karen actually disliked cooking. Yet she took an almost maniacal level of pride in doing so and in presenting various fresh and healthy options that would provide her family with the nutrients they needed.