Class(6)
For all these reasons, Karen preferred to be financially extorted at the artisanal ice cream shop up the street that offered weird flavors like Rooibos Tea and Maple Fennel than to contemplate the number of chemical compounds that were entering her daughter’s body via the neon-colored, artificially flavored, no doubt corn syrup–enhanced Italian ices that were sold outside her daughter’s school for a dollar a pop by an older Hispanic lady in a gingham smock. The woman was clearly just trying to make a living. Karen nevertheless resented her for forcing parents like herself to engage in constant battles with their children over its purchase. The fact that a scoop of artisanal ice cream likely contained more calories in it than a small Italian ice didn’t undermine her conviction.
“Why not?” the child moaned.
“You know I don’t like all the chemicals in that stuff,” said Karen.
“That’s all you care about—chemicals,” said Ruby.
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Then why don’t you let me eat icies?”
“I’m not going to talk about this anymore.”
A glint appeared in Ruby’s eye. “Mommy—if you were stuck on a desert island and you had to eat at one chain restaurant for the rest of your life, would you choose Burger King, Taco Bell, KFC, or Wendy’s?”
“Wendy’s, because they have a salad bar,” said Karen, who also recognized that her life was ripe for mockery. “Anyway, I really need to go.”
“I thought you didn’t have to work on Fridays.”
“I have to work from home.” With a quick kiss to Ruby’s forehead, Karen walked out of the classroom and back down the hall. Typically, Friday mornings were among her favorite times of the week. But something about the Maeve-Jayyden melee had left her with a palpable sense of foreboding, as if she’d successfully fled a house fire but forgotten to close the door behind her.
Soon, she found herself back on the main floor of Betts, a tidy if depressingly low-ceilinged expanse of beige brick with a trophy case on one wall and the obligatory display of student-made tissue-paper collages decorating the other. As Karen passed the collages, her eyes scanned the names written on the bottom left corners. The newfangledness of the black ones with their apostrophes, dashes, purposeful misspellings, and randomly added letters (Queen-Zy, Beyonka, Yisabella, Jayyden) stood in stark contrast to the antiquation and preciosity of the white ones (Prudence, Violet, Silas, Leo). The disheartening thought suddenly struck Karen that Ruby fit snugly into the latter category. But she quickly pushed the idea away, assuring herself that it was a family name, since it had also been the name of her great-grandmother.
Just past the collages, the school’s uniformed security guard sat at a wooden desk at a remove from the main entrance. Which had never made any sense to Karen. Wasn’t the whole point of having a security guard to deter homicidal maniacs who might try to enter the building in possession of semiautomatic weaponry? Karen had considered scheduling a meeting with Principal Chambers to express her concern. But since she lived in fear of sounding like one of the rBGH crusaders—that is, another uptight white mother with a petty complaint—she’d decided against it, trusting fate, if barely, to deliver her daughter home safely each day.
On her way out of the building, Karen nearly collided with a late-arriving student. The girl probably wasn’t much older than Ruby. But to Karen’s eye, she appeared to be dangerously overweight, with early breast development and a prominent gut. She was also clutching a half-eaten jelly doughnut. In a series of flashes, Karen imagined the rest of the girl’s tragic life. No doubt there would be a teen pregnancy, followed by a failure to graduate high school, a dead-end cashier job at a fast-food restaurant, more babies with unaccountable men, food stamps, diabetes type 2. She felt pity for the child on all fronts.
But at the sudden appearance of a woman who Karen assumed was the child’s mother—she was walking behind the girl and ordering her to “Hurry your ass up!”—Karen felt her pity turning to disapproval. It wasn’t just the woman’s crude language or the fact that she was very large herself (her hips reminded Karen of the side hoops worn under dresses in Velázquez’s paintings of seventeenth-century Spanish royals) yet was wearing skintight jeans with rhinestone studs down the sides, as if to call attention to her size. It was that she’d given her overweight child a doughnut for breakfast.
As if, seconds earlier, in order to win the affection of her own borderline chubby daughter, Karen hadn’t promised Ruby a sugary treat as well. In that moment, Karen couldn’t see that the doughnut might be an act of love on the part of this mother too, for whom it was quite possibly an affordable gift in an unaffordable world. She also managed to forget that sometimes, while in the car with Ruby, she f-worded other drivers—and that she owned a pair of skintight jeggings herself, which arguably looked no better on her own distressingly flat backside than on this woman’s large and shapely one.
“If it gets any later,” Karen heard the mother say as she passed her, “I’m gonna miss Education Partners orientation.”
Karen blinked back her surprise. Education Partners was one of April Fishbach’s pet projects, a volunteer program in which parents helped out in the classrooms, doing everything from putting away supplies to assisting children who were struggling to read. Karen herself was too busy/lazy/selfish, depending on your perspective, to donate her Friday mornings. But other heroic parents apparently had decided to do it—parents such as the Mother in the Rhinestone-Studded Jeans.