Chapter 3
Refresh. Refresh. Refresh. Anna had spent over half an hour clicking on the stupidfuckingbuttons before she was allowed into an 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 about early ticket releases or whatever it had said.
She was in her first-floor office, on a cold and rainy day.
It was painted Hague Blue, Farrow 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, the big playground, the nice playground, the playground where all the parents 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 very Gucci belt 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, it would have killed her, except that, somehow, Mimi’s daughter was still the most popular, and captain of the elementary cheer squad (a thing Anna did not know existed until she moved to Hamilton), and a blue-ribbon equestrian, and the 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 drove up 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 from the south, unless Pittsburgh qualified.
Some kind of can. Not a can of worms. What kind of can was this, Denny?
But she knew, by instinct, what he would say, that this would be difficult, that she was only going to make living in a small town harder, that she was always getting herself stuck in things for no good reason.
Mimi Mar’s precious little third grader was going to be at that Ziti Dance, of course, dressed up like a drag queen under layers of tulle, and there were kids—Anna was sure of it now—who had missed out on the opportunity to do any of it.
Hi Mimi, she wrote, but erased it. She erased everything, typed out a million introductory sentences, started over, wished she still smoked the Parliament Lights that she gave up years back, because they always offered a fresh start, a new perspective, and anyway, weren’t writers meant to smoke?
Even if she was only a little bit of a writer—the kind who worked as stringer for the local paper, the kind who wrote obituaries of people who had lived somewhat small and ordinary lives, the kind who mostly made a living through soulless copywriting—wasn’t she supposed to keep a stash of cigarettes crumpled in a desk drawer somewhere?
When they moved, she threw the last pandemic pack in the trash, and that was really it, for smoking, for the old life, for the dream of being an artist, or any real kind of journalist. Parting with dreams: not so hard. Parting with the notion of everyone getting the same shake: much harder.
We should talk about the PTO, she finally wrote. It’s starting to become a real problem. — Anna Plummer