Class(7)
As Karen exited through the double doors and onto the street, she felt chastened by her apparently gross misreading of the family. That was the thing about clichés, she’d learned—and yet somehow kept not learning. They were often true. Just as often, they weren’t.
Six months earlier, the neighborhood’s newest coffee shop, Laundry, had been an actual Laundromat with perpetually broken dryers, a peeling linoleum floor, and a tiny color TV installed near the ceiling and tuned to one or another daytime talk show catering to women. Now it featured exposed beams, dangling Edison bulbs in wire cages, recovered post-office cabinetry, free Wi-Fi, and whimsical line drawings of farm animals screen-printed onto reclaimed barn wood. Radiohead, Johnny Cash, and the Arctic Monkeys played in a loop on the sound system while the bespectacled patrons leaned stone-faced over their brushed-aluminum MacBook Airs. Karen considered Laundry to be overpriced and pretentious—and the coffee mediocre at best. But the choices were limited: a Dunkin’ Donuts three blocks away or an even more expensive place up the street.
After ordering a five-dollar cup of single-origin organic coffee from Burundi and waiting ten minutes for a guy with a tattooed neck and hair that had been pulled back into a bun to pour hot water through what appeared to be a dirty sweat sock, Karen retreated to a honed-marble-and-wrought-iron table in back. There, she got out her laptop and assumed the facial expression of someone reviewing top secret plans to invade a nation in the Persian Gulf. In fact, she was searching for cut-glass boudoir lamps on eBay, and then for sea-grass throw rugs on Overstock.com, and then for girls’ cardigans at Gap.com, as Ruby had recently lost her favorite bright pink one. Though that was really just an excuse to go to the website.
In truth, online shopping for clothes for her daughter and cheap crap for her home had become one of Karen’s greatest pleasures in life. Lately, that pleasure had begun to resemble an addiction that she was deeply ashamed of and hid from her husband. If he found Karen on her laptop at night, she would always say she was reading the international edition of the Guardian, because it was hard to argue against someone’s catching up on world events from a left-leaning perspective. And when packages arrived, which they did nearly every night—she and the UPS man, Larry, were on first-name terms—Karen would quickly open them, then flatten the cardboard boxes and put them outside in recycling before Matt came home and made comments.
Little wonder that, in recent months, Karen and Matt’s joint checking account had fallen as low as it had. Though it hadn’t helped that Karen had dropped her phone three times in one year, each time purchasing a replacement at full cost. There was also the not-so-small matter of her husband, who still had outstanding student loans, currently earning zero dollars per week. The previous fall, after working for twenty years as a housing lawyer fighting for tenants evicted by greedy landlords, Matt had felt burned out and quit his job. Now he and a few friends were building a one-stop realty website for low-income city dwellers, attaching those in need of housing to lists of everything from rent-stabilized apartments to subsidized-housing waiting lists and even market-rate-but-affordable apartments in lower-income suburbs. A nonprofit foundation had given Matt and his partners seed money to build the website and even provided them with temporary office space, but the funds were already starting to run low.
Secretly, Karen—who liked to refer to her husband’s project as Poor-coran, a joke that worked best with people who had familiarity with the New York and Florida real estate juggernaut Corcoran—thought the website was of dubious utility. In her experience, most poor people didn’t have consistent access to the Internet. Some didn’t even have e-mail addresses. Karen knew this because, as class parent the year before, she’d been asked to collect e-mail-contact info for all twenty-three students and had come up with only seventeen. But she wanted to be supportive of her husband, who was clearly excited about the project and had already put hundreds if not thousands of hours into it. Also, for the first five years after Ruby was born, and before Karen began working at Hungry Kids, Matt had earned far more than she had.
Karen and Matt were hardly indigent. According to Zillow.com, which Karen checked every so often when she needed cheering up about their finances, their apartment had nearly doubled in value in the three years since Karen and Matt had purchased it. As a down payment, they’d used a portion of the money Karen had inherited from her parents, who had died a few years before. In fact, their two-bedroom condo was now worth a cool million, possibly more. And Karen had money in the bank on top of that. But she hated the idea of dipping into her savings to pay for everyday purchases; God knew what college tuition would cost in ten years. Maybe that was why she felt even guiltier than usual that morning as she cardigan-shopped for Ruby. Karen was busily seeking out promo codes to plug into the Gap.com checkout page to mitigate that guilt when April Fishbach appeared in her face, flashing her Volunteer Hero smile. “Fancy running into you again!” she said.
April was dressed as if it were 1973: corduroy bell-bottoms, a frayed jean jacket covered with political buttons offering such dated slogans as NO NUKES, and lots of ugly silver-and-turquoise jewelry. Two slender bobby pins kept her frizzy hair off her lunar-size forehead. It seemed to Karen that, in a certain light, April Fishbach was actually quite pretty, or she might have been if she hadn’t done everything possible to present the opposite impression. Objectively speaking, she and Karen had a good deal in common. In addition to both of them being white late-life mothers at Betts, their children (Ezra and Ruby) had been in class together since kindergarten. And both women had devoted their careers to bettering the lives of underprivileged populations. But Karen had never been able to stand April’s company for more than two minutes at a time. “Oh, hey,” she said, quickly closing Safari lest April see how Karen, in perusing Retailmenot.com, was failing to contribute to the Social Good.