Rich and Pretty(22)

Mike and Bella Brooks deemed the small indignities of life as a scholarship parent worth what was gained in exchange: visions of impressive extracurriculars (an archaeological dig over spring break!), college acceptances, graduate degrees, financial liberty. Before the sixth grade, Lauren had delivered straight As across the board, a matter more of competence than brilliance, though no one would figure that out for many years. So she went to the school, the special school, the well-endowed school, the sought-after school, and came out six years later as much a stranger to her parents as Grace Chang was to her Fujianese fishmonger father and seamstress mother. Grace had gone off to Harvard, naturally, then on to Columbia, and worked in the city government. Lauren has seen her on television.

The cumulative effect of the cool air and a longer-than-necessary walk: She’s cold. It’s one of those nights Lauren wishes she could take her brain from her skull and rinse it off. The day—its complaints, the celebrity chef—sticks to her, and there’s the attendant guilt—if this job is so silly, so meaningless, how can she let it affect her this deeply? What did her own mother do, when she was Lauren’s age, with a toddler and newborn at home? Did she sigh this same kind of sigh, did her shoulders slump in precisely this manner? Lauren looks like her mother, and they share mannerisms, as happens in families; she’s recognized it, the way they say hello on the telephone, the way they cross their legs, the way they rub the backs of their heads when they’re tired, and there’s probably more. It’s hard to observe yourself. She showers, the warmth returns slowly to her body, and she tries to picture her mother, imagine what she’s doing at that very moment, Wednesday, a little after 7:30, October well on its way, the air cool and dry. Is she in the house, reheating something for dinner? Is she at the Khans’ office, catching up on paperwork? Is she stuck in traffic, is she auditioning for the next show at the community theater, is she volunteering and delivering meals to shut-ins, is she grocery shopping, is she taking the car in to be serviced, is she on her way to the dentist, did she stop at the library after work, is she meeting Lauren’s dad for an early movie? Lauren has no idea.



Karen is Lauren’s only work friend. The rest of them are fine. Antonia is sweet, if odd, forever bringing up subjects unrelated to anything being discussed (her mother’s foot surgery, the city council elections, the new security guard in the lobby). Dallie talks too much, but generally means well. Hannah is not much younger but somehow of a wholly different generation, and Lauren can never relate to the things she talks about (late nights out, social media, bands Lauren’s never heard of). Kristen has a strange habit of speaking too often in question form, not a terrible character flaw but one Lauren finds very irritating, though she’s inclined now to think charitably about Kristen because it’s her absence that has made possible Rob’s presence. Mary-Beth and Miranda are her bosses, and therefore can’t be considered friends, though she’s fond of them both. Mary-Beth is unglamorous in a way that’s almost glamorous: She wears black and navy blue together, walks around with a pencil behind her ear, has hair streaked with silver. Her not caring makes Mary-Beth seem somehow chic. The office, like every sample group of humanity, breaks into its smaller components. The art directors are friendly with the photo department. The bosses go out to lunches together.

Lauren and Karen are stuck firmly in the middle of this together, a marriage of convenience, though as luck has it, she quite likes Karen and the feeling is mutual. Karen is two years younger than Lauren but acts a decade older. She evinces weariness with the world, vocally dismissing whatever annoys her: the foibles of the bosses, the fawnings of their underlings. Lauren is aware that she’s two years too old to be in the middle of this totem pole—too old for that “Associate”—and that the same weariness, coming from her, feels sometimes like bitterness.

She works at keeping that bitterness at bay. She never wanted this particular turn in her career, so she can’t begrudge not having climbed higher. It would be dishonest. She’s still planning, still plotting, still keeping her options open, though to what end she’s not entirely sure, not yet anyway. She has options but she also has insurance, and the occasional Balenciaga bag.

“This is good, but this isn’t a meal.” Karen is quite expert with her chopsticks. A new restaurant, an all-dumpling menu, and she’s not wrong: The food is fine but unsatisfying.

Lauren knows it’s small of her but she doesn’t like going to a restaurant alone. She supposes this is a measure of her failure as a human being, a certain kind of human being, an evolved human being. How can you claim comfort with yourself if you can’t sit and read The New Yorker while dunking something into a tiny plastic cup of inky soy sauce? You can’t. Maybe she can’t. But don’t we all have those memories of hesitating, plastic tray in hands, while scanning the cafeteria for a friendly face, and aren’t friendly faces hard to come by when you’re eleven? She’s always needed a friend. At eleven, at the new school, she was panicked. Who wouldn’t be? The teachers didn’t make her stand up in front of the class and say something about herself, nothing like that, teachers don’t actually do that, do they? But eleven is old enough to understand a lot more than some might think, and Lauren understood, eyeing the queue of taxis and town cars that morning, that things were going to be different.

Her mother had held her hand, then it was her mother who let go of it, her mother who understood she needed to not risk coloring her classmates’ perceptions of her daughter. There were other parents in evidence, fathers and mothers who similarly sensed that they should play it cool for the good of their child’s social capital. But there were unattended children as well: They’d gone to this school for six years together, this was not a first day, merely a return. Lauren took her place among them: They lined up, as they’d been taught to for half their lives, and disappeared inside the school’s actually-ivied walls and Lauren said nothing, not even to the chubby girl who pointed out they had the same model backpack. She would need to make friends, but she would need to be discriminating. She saw the desperation on that girl’s face and was not going to let it pull her into its orbit.