A Good Marriage(16)
“No way. I’m too scared of your wife,” Amanda said with a grin—a real one—as she slid past Kerry toward the living room. “You should be, too.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” he said with an exaggerated sigh. “I am appropriately terrified.”
As much as she would have preferred to stay with Kerry near the back of the room, Amanda needed to get where Sarah would see her, so that her presence would be counted. Then maybe she wouldn’t need to stay as long. Amanda was feeling rattled from all the calls—more today than yesterday—and being alone in a large group of Brooklyn Country Day parents was stressful in and of itself. Amanda looked around for Maude, but didn’t see her. Her gallery was often open late on weeknights. She was probably at work.
Sarah’s living room was warm and tasteful. Well lived-in and loved, Amanda always thought, the walls crowded with candid family photos through the years—red-faced crying babies, first meals, awkward Halloweens, and finally sullen teenagers. It was so different from the pristine surfaces of Amanda’s gut-renovated brownstone. Her own home was beautiful, of course, but she longed for floors like Sarah’s that creaked in some spots and bowed in others. Not that noisy floors in and of themselves were a good thing. The floors of the trailer Amanda grew up in had made plenty of noise, each heavy, drunken footstep on the yellowed linoleum like the squeak of a mouse stuck on a glue trap. Anyway, the point was, the noises of Sarah and Kerry’s house were nothing like that. They were the sounds of a well-loved family in the brownstone’s bones.
Amanda looked around the room at the usual eclectic mix of Park Slope parents—women in suits next to men in graphic T-shirts; parents who looked old enough to be grandparents next to parents who looked like they could be students themselves; parents of different races and cultures; single parents and same-sex couples. It was a diverse group in many respects, though they were almost all very wealthy and, to Amanda, universally intimidating.
In their corner of Palo Alto, the PTA meetings had mostly been attended by stay-at-home moms, but in Park Slope men and women seemed to share more equally in parenting, and almost everyone had not only a job but a career. People were intelligent and accomplished in Palo Alto, too, but in Park Slope everyone was intellectual. The neighborhood was filled with journalists and professors and artists. People who wanted you to be saying something when you spoke. Politics, art, books, travel—you were expected to have opinions that were informed. As well read as Amanda was, none of her knowledge ran all that deep, and in Park Slope they picked the bone of each matter clean, held it up to the light, and inspected the marrow for consistency. This was true of people, too. If they ever looked inside Amanda they would find nothing.
“Hi everyone,” Sarah began once people had finally settled down. She winked in Amanda’s direction and then looked around the room, allowing the tension to mount. Sarah had a knack for knowing exactly how to keep a handle on the Brooklyn Country Day parents. “So the dreaded contact list,” Sarah finally went on. “First of all: Don’t panic. We are all going to be okay. I promise.” There was an edge to her voice that she wasn’t bothering to disguise. “The PTA is working closely with Country Day to resolve the issue.”
Hands shot up. “Working to resolve it how?” asked a tall man with dark brown skin and a perfectly tailored herringbone suit that Amanda was pretty sure she’d seen on the extra-expensive floor at Barney’s. A Wall Street Journal was folded crisply in his hand. “They aren’t telling us anything.”
“Country Day has hired a firm that specializes in cybersecurity,” Sarah explained. “All they do is figure out what happened in these exact kinds of situations and help come up with solutions. But that can take time.”
“Time, my ass,” a woman next to Amanda muttered angrily. She was frumpy and unkempt, her white skin pasty and veined. Amanda wondered when she’d last brushed her stringy blond hair.
A petite woman with chin-length black hair, light brown skin, and a trim pencil skirt raised her hand across the room. Her high heels barely touched the ground, and she vibrated nervous energy. “I’m sorry, but if Brooklyn Country Day can’t keep our information safe, why are we trusting them with our kids?” She looked around the room for support. Several people nodded in agreement. “Other schools in this neighborhood have had big problems with cybersecurity or cyberbullying or whatever you want to call it. Serious problems. I, for one, chose Country Day specifically because of its high standards. Do those standards only apply to our kids?”
A knowing hum passed through the crowd.
Sarah’s cheeks flushed. “Cyberbullying? This has nothing to do with cyberbullying,” she said sharply. “This has to do with all of us—what—tolerating some extra spam and maybe some junk texts for a while? Because that is what this will be.”
Amanda glanced around at the faces of the other parents. Some looked noticeably graver than the rest.
“But what if it is something more than just a nuisance?” the tiny woman pressed on. “My neighbor works in IT, and she said they could be planning to access all of our clouds.”
She said clouds as she might have said vaginas, like the word itself was slightly prurient.
“I’m gonna second her point,” said a laid-back-looking dad in jeans and a faded Ramones T-shirt. His hair was so gray it was almost white, his skin a similar ashen shade. “Maybe this will get worse, maybe it won’t. But they should at least be open about what’s happening. It’s not cool the way this whole thing went down. Brooklyn Country Day should be an open book, let us all in on the process. We’re supposed to be a community.”