Class(82)
To Karen’s knowledge, that organization—to the extent it even existed as a separate entity from April Fishbach—had made a total of six hundred dollars the year before. And all of it had been from the vanilla cupcakes and sugar cookies sold before and during the intermission of the talent show, a vaguely pornographic affair in which two children played the piano and, to Karen’s quiet horror, the rest lip-synched and dirty-danced to that year’s pop and hip-hop hits. But that was a separate issue. To Karen’s mind, the students at Betts were no less worthy of meditation coaches, lice workshops, and ceiling-mounted video projectors than the Mather kids were. Nor would any of the students at Mather be affected negatively if deprived of roughly .05 percent of a money pile that no one on the PTA could even figure out how to spend. In fact, it seemed increasingly clear to Karen that the fund-raising game at Mather was as much about achieving a number as it was about fulfilling any tangible goals. And the Fund in the Sun picnic was on target to raise at least twenty-five thousand dollars more, since two hundred fifty families had already promised to pay a hundred dollars apiece for the privilege of attending.
And were Karen’s inclinations all that different from what her accountant father had done during his lifetime? A closet Lefty, Herb Kipple had once admitted to Karen that, with wealthy clients, he sometimes refrained from employing the aggressive tactics that would have saved them money at tax time, believing that they owed the U.S. government a fair share of their hefty incomes. And who could blame him? Not Karen. And if her motives were not purely altruistic—even if, say, she was seeking to assuage her guilt and atone for her own elitism by throwing a few bread crumbs at the masses she’d already spurned and abandoned—money was still money.
Karen thought of the fixer-upper she’d gone to see on a whim a year earlier in a marginal neighborhood close to her own increasingly affluent one. Prewar town house! Well below market value; needs work, great potential, read the ad, and Karen had wondered if maybe she, Ruby, and Matt should get a proper house and yard—if that was what they lacked and what would elevate their lives from good to great. The price was right. And Karen figured that she and Matt could sell their own condo for a profit and get a home-equity loan to renovate. She’d e-mailed the real estate agent: I’m very interested!
They’d made a date to meet.
The house had potential, all right—the potential to make Karen run screaming. Not only had it been barely standing, with enormous clear plastic sheets tacked to the ceiling to prevent the elements from coming in, but it had been occupied by at least two dozen people. On the first floor, four of them had been seated on a single twin mattress watching TV while a barely clothed woman had lain half asleep behind them with a newborn in her arms. Shower curtains featuring Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck motifs had separated the various mattresses distributed around the area. “So sorry to bother you,” Karen had said, creeping through the tiny sunken rooms, the floors buckling, the walls covered with mold, the inhabitants surely illegal immigrants from foreign lands.
“De nada,” one man had answered, smiling, gracious, desperate.
On other floors, the inhabitants had stared wide-eyed at her but didn’t appear to understand English or Spanish, so Karen hadn’t been able to apologize. Even the basement, with its not-quite-six-foot-high ceiling and concrete floor, had been occupied. There had been a twin mattress parked on either side of the boiler. Karen had felt sick as she’d thanked the agent and explained that it was too big a job for her.
But there were smaller jobs she could take on, she now thought—smaller and more direct ways of creating equity that were far less daunting to contemplate and potentially more effective than writing newspaper op-eds that would probably never be published anyway or convincing financial bigwigs to make tax-deductible donations, thereby starving the government of revenue.
For a few moments, Karen stood staring at the sum she’d written in the ledger. As the recorders honked on the other side of the wall, she wondered how walls had even come into being. They must have arisen in conjunction with the concept of privacy, which itself must have emerged around the sexual act. Or was there something primal about the desire to hide things from others?
Her breath held, Karen carefully added a 0 to the end of the figure, followed by a comma between the 4 and the 8. So the $483 that she’d just recorded as having spent on picnic supplies was now $4,830. Then she held the ledger at arm’s length and tried to determine if the figure would look believable to an outside set of eyes. After deciding that it would, she placed the ledger back in the drawer, then quickly wrote a check to herself on the PTA checkbook for the same amount. She put the check in her wallet, then put the checkbook in the drawer next to the ledger. Then she left the PTA office. As she locked the door behind her, her heart was beating madly.
But as she strode down the hall toward the double doors, she felt powerful and righteous. She also found herself thinking of her erstwhile friend Lou and wondering what Lou would think if she could see Karen now. Karen hadn’t spoken to her since their awkward encounter by the train station a few weeks before. But in the days since then, Lou had somehow become the face of Karen’s remorse—Lou’s beautiful, long-lashed brown eyes reminding Karen of the ideals she’d abandoned in the interest of Ruby and herself…
All morning at work, every time someone approached her desk, Karen half jumped out of her seat, somehow imagining that he or she could see into her purse. Lunchtime couldn’t come soon enough. Karen went straight to the bank, took the check to the window, and asked the teller to cash it. She was concerned that her request might raise the teller’s eyebrows. But the woman said nothing, merely methodically counted out the sum in hundreds, counted them again, then slid the bills beneath the Plexiglas.