Chapter 15 #2
A weird note but I think it’s just from a kid.
But it gave me an idea. I think I should run for president of the PTO.
She thought about writing more to her friend.
What if the note really was from someone else?
What if it was serious? But Anna held back.
The less energy she devoted externally to these things, she felt, the less she allowed them into the fabric of her life.
It was almost as if she was preventing them from being real by limiting how she spoke about them within her tight circle of friends and confidantes.
Di didn’t fall for the bait. What exactly did the note say, she wrote back.
Stupid threat that sounded like it could have come from the PTO or also a teenager hard 2 say
Maybe you should just back off
I’m telling u I don’t think it’s them
Whatever u say
Let’s talk about the PTO and me being president
You literally hate everything that the PTO stands for and also Mimi has been president for six years
THAT IS EXACTLY WHY I WANT TO DO IT! Change comes from the inside. No one owns president. She can’t be president forever!
I thought you had to be a member of Chi Omega to be president, Di wrote.
Is that true I don’t even know what Chi Omega is or what the difference between any sorority is that’s definitely your expertise and not mine you’re the one who was in a sorority hahahaha
Idk, pretty sure everyone who has ever been president has been a sorority sister from Chi Omega
There’s no way that’s a real rule that’s just some dumb thing that someone made up
Three dots. Anna hated it when her friend did this. A rumination. Di needed to make sure Anna got the point, whatever the point was. Look if u really want to do it I will help but u know it’s the fuckin hornets nest, she finally wrote back.
Now that is exactly the kind of support I needed to hear today, she wrote back.
And it was true. Also true: She was scared, not only by the idea of the large-scale project she had undertaken, but also by its inherent challenges.
She had to win over strangers, make them love her, overcome a fan favorite, prove her case to a crowd.
If she was honest with herself, her chances of dodging defeat were not particularly great.
She didn’t know that many people in Hamilton to begin with, and the ones she did know appeared to hate her.
So why was she doing this? Could the force of conviction be enough to move things?
Could she be a vehicle for change? She wasn’t quite sure, but she was willing to find out.
Anna Plummer needed a plan. She had never run for anything.
Not class president. Not homecoming queen.
And definitely not president of the fucking PTO.
And no, she had never been a member of a sorority, least of all Chi Omega, the largest sorority in the National Panhellenic Conference (she had looked it up).
Before Mimi—she had looked this up, too—Laura Cox had been president for a record-holding sixteen years.
Cox’s predecessor, according to the PTO’s website, was Pamela Jansen, 1992–2000.
That was as far back as the site provided.
Anna googled them both, and, yes, Di was right: Both had been Chi Omega sorority members, just like Mimi Mar.
But obviously this was a coincidence, and not, as Di had implied, a requirement.
Anna had known a few sorority girls herself in college—maybe even Chi Omega girls, though, to be honest, she hadn’t kept track.
The PTO attracted a certain set: women who cared about how they presented in society was how Anna might have defined it.
Those same women were more likely than not to have pledged, if she was honest. She didn’t need to ask what else Laura Cox and Pamela Jansen and Mimi Mar had in common, because she already knew, and it was a totally unique tribal tattoo on the small of their backs, the kind you got on spring break to define yourself as the kind of girl who got a totally unique tribal tattoo that would later be referred to as a tramp stamp.
And anyway, like any other position, it appeared to be a popularity contest, and Anna was not convinced of her own popularity.
But she was convinced that she was smart and determined enough to be able to convince people to come along with her.
She just needed a good campaign. She needed good ideas.
She needed a compelling message. She needed people to know that she was running and that her vision for the PTO was a smart, viable, and inclusive vision.
And then, she reasoned, people would be on board. Why wouldn’t they?
Of course, she envisioned, too, a Tracy Flick–like competition, election in its most divisive and terrible form, Mimi Mar coming at her with all the serpentine desire of a woman who never intended to give up the gig.
If Anna brought cookies for a crowd, she could bet that Mimi would follow that move with hand-decorated cupcakes draped with fondant and bespoke lettering.
If Anna made posters, Mimi would surely be at the printer with an order for custom booklets about what she had accomplished during her past term as president.
Still, she shouldn’t let that discourage her, and she knew that Mimi was a force—Anna wouldn’t deny it—but it was time that someone stood up to the woman in her own home court.
Also, Anna felt sure that there were allies out there, even if she didn’t yet know about them: other Hamilton moms who had been berated or terrified or bullied by Mimi, and who were scared to come out and say what she was saying right now by offering to throw a hat in the ring, which was really just that she refused to lie down when someone punched hard to the jugular.
And, also, that she believed in more for the community, more for Hamilton, more for her kids.
(Even in her own head, she could hear the slogans beginning, which was good, she felt.)
PTO elections ran in January. Anna would have to run a stealth campaign throughout the remaining month of summer in order to convince sitting members to vote for her, and that would take time and dedication.
She would have to do outreach, make friends, make alliances, prove her dedication to the cause.
She would start at Honeycomb, which she had been avoiding ever since the disastrous coffee date with Mimi all those months ago.
Make it her new satellite workstation. Park there in the mornings once the kids started school.
Introduce herself properly to all the Hamilton women.
Ask about their sons and daughters. Get to know their peccadilloes.
Their lives. What made them tick? What aggravated them about this small New England town?
What would they like to see improved? She would take notes, would sit in a corner and watch the season change the way Richard Russo always said he did when he was writing down bits of dialogue and studying language and cadence, preparing for books like Nobody’s Fool and Empire Falls in rusty old Maine diners.
She could count on one hand, after all, how many times she had actually sat around and listened to the people in Hamilton—listened to what they wanted without judgment, actually sunk in and stopped and waited to hear the answer without springing to life with an accusation or a thought about how she wished she were somewhere else.
It was time, she realized, to give them a chance.
When Anna Denton had moved to Newburyport, Massachusetts, in 1988, she was just about to turn eight.
Her parents, desperately trying to save a tumultuous marriage, had sold off a brownstone on Tenth Street in Park Slope, Brooklyn, a house that would become a specter in their family.
“If we had stayed in the Slope, the house would be worth over a million now,” her father would say in the heat of an argument.
By the time Anna was in her thirties, that value had risen to over three million, and her parents’ arguments had charted the upward rise of its value in tiny increments.
They stayed together all those years, moving into a heaving, yellow Colonial that had been on the path of the Underground Railroad, half a block from the Merrimack River.
At night, when the house was settling, Anna could hear scratching in the walls.
“Maybe mice, but nothing to worry about,” her mother said, but Anna did worry, not just about mice, but also about ghosts, the hauntings of enslaved people who had never made it to freedom, and the hauntings of whoever else had lived in this place, built so long ago that it had to have seen death in many forms. She wasn’t sure that her family, unhappy as they were, was bringing many good vibrations—a word her mother loved to use—to the house, and so she worried that she, too, was contributing to another layer of misfortune.
A house can only hold so much before it throws its disagreeableness back onto the owners.
Well, that’s what Anna Denton believed, anyway.
Newburyport, in the late 1980s, was not much like Hamilton.
Anna lived in one of the bigger homes. Her parents made more money than most of the parents of kids she knew, drove nicer cars, took nicer vacations.
When she said that she liked the New York Yankees, she was ostracized.
When she flattened her vowels, the kids picked on her; they dropped their Rs and spoke sharply, the way their parents always had.
All kids played sports: soccer and football in autumn, basketball and hockey in winter, softball in spring and summer.
The kids who abstained had no true shot at popularity, and when Anna decided to go out for track and field, she knew she was committing social suicide.
A solitary sport? Not a sport, as far as the New England kids were concerned.
But she liked the feel of the rubber track beneath her feet, the way it bounced back in return, energy in for energy out, not like the house near the Merrimack, which seemed to suck from her everything she had.
After a year in town, she had made no friends. After school, she came home to that house and sat in a room that her mother had wallpapered in a pattern with tiny pink flowers and played with Barbie dolls and stared out at the street and thought about what the other kids were doing.
“Do you want to do after-school programs?” her mother asked.
“I hate it here. I hate the people and I hate the town,” Anna said.
“Maybe you just haven’t given it a chance.”
But Anna felt the opposite, that she had given it a chance and that there was nothing else to do but wait it out.
At night, she could hear her parents’ arguments, rising in crescendo each time, each argument louder and angrier, each argument more pointed.
They argued about their unhappiness, about the house in Brooklyn, about Anna, about whether every decision they had made together had been a mistake.
She was wrapped up in their bad choices without any way out, mired in the middle of someone else’s stupid battle.
Changing her parents was impossible. Changing the intractable people at school, with their narrow view of the world and their narrow view of her was equally impossible.
All she had, then, was the large, gloomy old house, where from the roof she had a perfect view of the rushing blue river, though her parents did not know that she could climb up through the attic window.
For a while, it felt hopeless. Then, a few months later, when summer was once again ceding to fall, she met Diane at a cookout with her parents.
Diane, who never seemed bothered by anything, and who had the infinite capacity to allow in more friends, even though she already had plenty.
By then, Anna was going into the third grade.
She had felt lonely for long enough, had lived a life excluding hope for long enough.
And although she hated to concede any point to her mother, she decided to ride this one wave to completion.
Maybe the woman had been right this time. She could give the town a chance.