Class(69)

“Hey, Ruby,” she heard him reply in a neutral voice. “How come you don’t come to school no more?” If he was embarrassed to be there, waiting in line with his aunt for a free meal in a church basement, he didn’t show it.

“I go to a new school,” Ruby told him.

“Why’d you leave ours?”

“My mom wanted me to.”

“Oh.”

“What are you guys doing in math?” was Ruby’s next question.

“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Just stuff. Like fractions.”

“Oh. At my new school, we’re doing multiplication.”

Just then, Jayyden’s baby cousin fell onto his bottom and began crying. Not untenderly, Jayyden turned around, picked him up, and dusted him off—and for the moment lost interest in Ruby.

But the two joined forces a half an hour later for the egg hunt. Karen watched as Ruby and Jayyden playfully tussled over a purple plastic one that had been hidden under the church pews. In the end, it was Ruby who claimed it. But after she separated the two halves and discovered the raisins inside, she made a face and handed the reassembled egg back to Jayyden, who opened it and popped a raisin in his mouth. And hadn’t that been Karen’s goal all along—to get poor children to eat fruit and vegetables? It was true that Ruby’s dentist had recommended staying off the dried versions. Even so, Karen hadn’t stopped believing that raisins were nutritionally superior to Milky Ways.

“Mommy, why were there raisins in the Easter eggs?” was Ruby’s first question on their way home.

“Because they’re healthier than candy,” Karen told her.

“So the Easter Bunny wants poor people to be healthier?”

Karen had forgotten about the Easter Bunny. “Something like that,” she said, already uncomfortable with where the conversation was going.

“But then, why do other people get chocolate? The Easter Bunny doesn’t care if rich kids eat healthy?”

“I think he wants everyone to be healthy. But a little chocolate isn’t that bad,” Karen said unsteadily.

“Mommy, can I ask another question?” asked Ruby.

“Of course!”

“Why did all the people getting free food have dark skin? And also, the people you see on the street who are asking for money, they always have dark skin too.”

“Well, that’s a complicated question,” said Karen, struggling to come up with an explanation that would be intelligible to an eight-year-old. “You see, in the olden days, even after slavery was outlawed, people with white skin wouldn’t give people with dark skin jobs or let them buy houses or, in some places, even let them vote. So, even though things are a little better now, thanks to Martin Luther King and others, a lot of people with dark skin are still very poor, because they don’t inherit anything. And it’s hard to join the middle class when you start off with nothing.”

“What does inherit mean?”

“It means that when someone dies, they leave you money.”

“Like Grandma and Grandpa left us money?”

“Exactly.”

“But the president has dark skin.”

“Yes, but that’s the first time a president ever has.”

“I have one more question.”

“What’s that?”

“Why does everyone at my new school have light skin?”

“That’s a complicated question too,” said Karen. “Unfortunately, most schools are very segregated. That means that they are all one kind of people or all the other.”

“But Betts wasn’t like that,” Ruby pointed out.

“No, it wasn’t, that’s true,” said Karen, who could do nothing but agree.



And then there was Clay. Now that she’d asked him to go away, and it appeared that he had, Karen couldn’t stop wishing he’d get back in touch. She couldn’t stop dreaming of their next encounter either, even as she regretted the one they’d already had and forbade herself from initiating a new meeting. Karen’s emotions were so confusing to her—his silence felt like another death in the family—and also so consuming that they left little room for thinking about how she could improve her marriage.

And yet, confoundingly, Matt didn’t seem entirely unhappy with their current marital détente. Karen had always suspected that he had intimacy problems that were as bad if not worse than her own. Now she wondered if their fight had given him an excuse to further retreat into himself and indulge his antisocial tendencies. On those rare occasions when they were at home together and interacting, he’d answer Karen’s questions monosyllabically, a blank expression on his face, after which point the two of them would retreat back to their respective electronic devices. Or was she projecting? Maybe Matt was as discontented with the status quo as Karen currently was.

On Monday morning, while eating a croissant at her desk—every now and then, Karen couldn’t help herself and indulged in refined flour—she happened on an article in a local newspaper about the Winners Circle charter school chain’s co-location in Betts Elementary. According to the article, which described the co-location as “controversial,” parents there were protesting on the grounds that it would deprive general-education students of their music studio and special-ed kids of their physical therapy room. In paragraph three, it was noted that Winners Circle had the backing of many prominent figures in finance, especially in the hedge-fund world, including Clayton Phipps III. At the sight of his name, spelled out in all its establishmentarian glory, Karen found herself startled and disoriented. It seemed almost impossible that the person she was reading about should be the same one she spent her days and nights dreaming about—and she quickly closed the article, telling herself that neither Clay nor Betts qualified as her problem anymore.