Page 4 of Valley of the Moms
Chapter 3
BACK IN THEdark space before she had children, she would have told you this:I will never spend an afternoon hitting refresh on my computer to sign up for a fucking school dance. And yet there she was, refreshing, trying to get past what was some kind of nightmarish virtual line for the Ziti with Your Sweetie Dance for her second grader, a dance that she wished she knew nothing about, except that, unlike Denny, she read the bulletins sent out by the PTO. There had probably been one bulletin, actually, where she gleaned something about early ticket release, but it had slipped through her soft mothering brain, like so many other things did these days. And somehow, her daughter also knew about the dance. The kids: They talked. Why there are not just traditional sign-ups like back in the ’80s, well, Anna would never understand. She remembered a time when permission slips used to make it from backpack to kitchen counter and seamlessly to a teacher’s desk without question or recrimination, even with a check attached. The Internet changed all that.
Refresh. Refresh. Refresh. Anna had spent over half an hour clicking on the stupidfuckingbuttons before she was allowed intoan even more ridiculous waiting room. Queue after queue. That should be a band name, by the way. She went to select four tickets, but, wouldn’t you know it, the fucking thing glared an angry red slogan back at her: SOLD OUT. How could a dance for elementary school students, hosted by the PTO, be sold out? On sale at noon, sold out five minutes later, in a town where not one woman she knows appears to have an actual job. Click, click, click. Lost to the stay-at-home moms. Maybe she should have paid more attention to that newsletter, with all of those technicalities aboutearly ticket releasesor whatever it had said.
She was in her first-floor office, on a cold and rainy day. It was painted Hague Blue, Farrow & Ball, maybe appropriate, she sometimes thought. The Hague. Who would name a color this, anyway? Okay, fine, it’s a blue-gray city in the Netherlands, but that’s not what anyone thought of when they thought of theHague.They thought of the International Court of Justice, or, more appropriately, they thought of war crimes, of people doing terrible things, of nations holding one another accountable. Still, her office looked like one of those rooms that might appear in an issue ofArchitectural Digest:glossy paint running all the way up to the crown, all the way up to the ceiling. Her desk faced the yard, one-hundred-foot pine trees that grew taller here than they did in New York. One bad storm, Denny always liked to say. Whoosh. They could take down the whole house. Sitting in one place too long could make you start thinking the kind of thoughts that did no service to anyone. On Facebook, Anna looked up the PTO’s page. Everyone was complaining about the tickets. They had sold out in minutes. In seconds. In nanoseconds.
“This is why you have to get the premium membership,” one woman had written. “The pre-release was yesterday, over email.”
Anna could hear Denny in her ear.Don’t respond. Don’t get into it. Let these idiots have their premium PTO membership and just LEAVE IT ALONE.
“Oh, shut up, Denny,” Anna said to the empty room. She typed in a comment. Deleted it. Typed it again.
“Do you mean that in a public school u can pay more to get early access 2 events that all kids shld b able 2 attend,” she wrote.
Five minutes. No response. Anna stared out the window. Probably not worth the irritation. A cardinal had appeared out of nowhere, had perched itself on a teak chair—Denny had meant to cover it but never mind—outside her office window. The bird was motionless, stark red against a gray January landscape. They were supposed to be mean, she seemed to remember. Or was that the blue jays? Or the robins? All the birds you saw in Disney movies, the ones that flitted about: You’d never want to encounter them in real life.
A red number appeared.
“Uh yeah that’s what PREMIUM MEMBERSHIP means.”
Wow. Just wow.
“That seems insane 2 me,” she wrote back. “Not everyone can afford a PREMIUM MEMBERSHIP.”
It was more than that, too, of course. It wasn’t just the parents who couldn’t afford the premium membership, but the kids who were left out. She thought back on the kids who had been left out of things when she was small herself, the ones she knew were from poorer families, who wore secondhand clothes, who lived in houses down along Washington Street. Their parents rented, didn’t own, and you weren’t supposed to talk about it, because you weren’t supposed to talk about money. But those same kids had grown up with less opportunity, and it was always apparent, from the time they were seven to the time they turned seventeen.
Anna was thinking of those kids now—the ones she knew from childhood who would never be able to recapture the things they had lost, or the ones who would be edged out of the Ziti with Your Sweetie Dance due to some pretentious and unaffordable membership. Now she was off and running. The messages camefast and furious.Premium Membership Hamilton PTO,she typed into her browser, and there it was, staring back at her, just a few hundred dollars every year for early access to events, better seats at the graduation, and possibly even a rental house on the Cape for the summer if you won the raffle. It hadn’t been an accident, all those people crammed into one virtual queue at the same time for the dance tickets scraps. It had been organized mayhem. Want a better shot? Pay the money. Feed the machine.
It was a horrifying idea, of course, that in order to gain equal footing in second grade, of all places, you would be required to pay the piper. That kids had to suffer as a result. Anna folded her hands in her lap. She felt a familiar rage unspool, a fire flower, like the kind Mario ate in Super Mario Brothers, except this one did not make her shoot hot balls of supersonic flame from her hands; all it did was make her burn hot from the inside. If she could rip everything from the walls of her Hague Blue office, she would (what was stopping her besides pride?). Comment after comment defended the PREMIUM MEMBERSHIP as some genius hack. Why stand in line for hours when you can just toss a little money at the system, her mothers-in-arms reasoned.
She looked at the time at the top of her computer. Two o’clock. She had been at this, she realized, for over two hours, fighting back and forth with other moms—under her real name—about the stupidfuckingschooldance. There had got to be a better way! Finally, she decided to put an end to it.
Google: Who is the president of the Hamilton PTO?
Answer: Mimi Mar, elected January 2016.
Bingo.
Of course, now that she had the answer, what exactly was she going to do with it? She did know Mimi Mar. Everyone knew Mimi Mar. Not two weeks ago, Anna had taken the kids over to the Ackerman Playground at Boy Scout Park, over in Boxford, thebigplayground, theniceplayground, the playground where all theparents dressed up, like it was some agreed-upon precept. You had to wear your best boots, your fanciest puffer, and put on makeup and two-carat diamond studs before stepping out of the damn house. Yes, she had all of these things. No, she did not dress up to go to the fucking playground in winter, so she sat on the bench in the cold, scarf wrapped around her head, looking like a vagabond compared to extremely well-heeled women with designer fanny packs, and there, of course, was Mimi Mar, blond, fine-boned, in Michael Kors and some kind of very ridiculous Gucci situation, including a veryGuccibelt that could literally strangle a person, it was so thick and wide and strong. She was petite—the kind of petite that came from regularly holding your hand up at the end of a meal.No more for me, please.Salads and Diet Cokes and an hour on the Peloton each day. Housewife thin. Her daughter was in the third grade, not at all Mimi Mar thin. That probably killed her. Well, itwould havekilled her, except that, somehow, Mimi’s daughter was still the most popular,andcaptain of the elementary cheer squad (a thing Anna did not know existed until she moved to Hamilton),anda blue-ribbon equestrian,andthe reigning Top Student at Winthrop, an award given out to the elite academic top performer in each grade every year. Harper Mar had snagged it every single year since kindergarten.
Mimi held a coffee—not Dunkin’, probably because it was somehow beneath her—and chatted with other women who also wore designer outfits that were meant to be seen at the playground. Anna could hear words here and there.Playdate. Dance. Soccer. Vacation plans. Skiing.Small-town repartee. Louisa had found a friend near the swings and they were imagining an entire world for their dolls. A world, Anna guessed, where Barbie goes camping in extremely expensive boots.
Anna could have made small talk. It’s not as if Mimi wouldn’t have played along. A lot to be said for that, after all, in this kind of town—playing along, inventing some kind of role for oneself.Maybe Anna was the problem and not Mimi. Ask the other women, who had assumed their roles in the Hamilton rankings with alacrity, and that would have been their take. Anna had befriended one or two. Ellen Wilson, who seemed like she was the most down-to-earth, who pulled her hair back into a ponytail, and wore—God forbid—a pink Red Sox hat to soccer practice, and who didn’t even have a gunite pool or a very expensive SUV. She was the mother of one of Louisa’s friends, and every once in a while, they texted back and forth.
I just can’t get into the whole scene, Anna wrote one time, looking for solidarity.
They’re not so bad!!!Ellen wrote back. It was a lot of exclamation points. Ellen was a classroom mom, someone who voluntarily signed up to go into the school and set up parties for the kids, which was a nice gesture, Anna had to admit, and something that she herself didn’t have the bandwidth for.Everyone just wants to fit in here I think!!! Is anyone even really from hamilton?
Maybe not. Maybe everyone suffered from the same condition. It was like living through high school all over again, except they were supposed to know better now, since they were older. Tolerance, acceptance, letting people into a widening circle. Those were the values you learned once you went out into the world and came back to settle in a small town that looked and felt a lot like the small town that you yourself had grown up in. But, of course, the guys were all just grown-up jocks who liked to play sports on the weekends and the women were all competing for some kind of award for best-dressed or most-liked.
One thing most of these women also had in common was that they were somehow involved with the PTO. Anna was compulsively adherent to an adage she had learned from old Groucho Marx movies: Never become affiliated with a group that would have you as a member. It went something like that. If you were a child of the ’90s who listened to grunge and wore flannel and droveup to Salem, New Hampshire, for underage piercings, chances were you still had a streak of subversiveness running through you. Growing up, you were either Contempo Casual or J. Crew, and it was unlikely that you traveled seamlessly between these two definitions of self. Were preppy people self-actualized? Had grungy people truly found themselves? Who was to say? But there was a certain truth scratched out beneath the grimy CDs they listened to in basements or in attics, achy, melodious, filled with the rawness of being teenaged and a little unloved.
You don’t really leave that part of you behind, the part where you’re the outcast and dig metal tacks into your shoes, tap dance down the abandoned hallway that no one gives two fucks about because it’s just a place where the undesirables go at lunchtime, the dark hallway that only matters during Friday Night Lights—yeah, it’s that kind of town. Anna hadn’t, anyway.
Now, in her Hague Blue office, midday January light streaming through, Anna considers all of this: the chatty mothers at the playground who had never once asked her to participate; the text messages from Ellen, who had always been straightforward and kind; the blinking messages on Facebook, alerting her, over and over again, to the mounting crescendo of the school dance; the imbalance of all of it, the place they had chosen, the circles on the map they had drawn and the school districts they had researched, and the inevitability of landing somewhere that was both a choice and an accident. Were there any accidents? Nothing is ever an accident, nothing is ever a coincidence: That was something that had been burned into Anna’s brain from childhood.
In her email, she fumbled, opened a message, closed it, typed a sentence, deleted it, typed it again. Angry mothers have words with administrators all the time, but was she going to write to Mimi Mar? That was the question.Opening up some kind of can,she could picture Denny saying. He liked to take a well-loved expression and turn it on its side. It wasn’t even like he was fromthe south, unless Pittsburgh qualified. Some kind of can. Nota can of worms. What kind of can was this, Denny?
