Chapter 20
SOMETIMES, ANNA FELT like she and Denny were two big orbs overlapping in the same world.
She loved her husband. She could not imagine a world without her husband.
But then: She knew the women who would peel themselves back like an onion, tell their spouses every single thing.
Denny went off to his work shed in the morning, hat on, insulated mug full of coffee.
After she got the kids on the bus, she, too, retreated.
Hague Blue office. Fall had come and gone so quickly she had barely had a minute to think about the rustling maple leaves; pretty soon they were dead and scattered beyond the wood.
It wasn’t so much that she hadn’t told Denny about the PTO as much as she assumed he didn’t want to know.
How could he have walked past her office without hearing the commotion?
Without seeing the little placards with her name on them?
ANNA PLUMMER FOR PRESIDENT. He’d have to be half blind.
So she didn’t say anything, just told him she was going out with Di, meeting friends at Honeycomb, trying to make friends, whatever she needed to say to make him happier in their cloud of suspended belief.
She wasn’t living a secret life, exactly.
Or: She preferred not to think of it that way.
It was true: Denny had never met Mary or some of the other women from South Hamilton.
He didn’t know about some of the meetings, the ones where she wore long dresses and knotted her hair up into a banana clip, twisted a rope of pearls close into the nape of her neck and looked convincingly like the Stepford wives version of the Hamilton Mommies that she had always made fun of.
Would Denny have cared? Probably not. He might have taken the opportunity to rib her slightly, and he would have been justified, given all the times she had sworn up and down that she would never turn into the women she hated.
And she would have bitten right back, anyway.
Wasn’t the best way to get to the heart and soul of an institution through infiltration, anyway?
In order to actually win the presidency, Anna had to get the votes of the majority of the Hamilton PTO by a secret ballot, and although there was no definitive way to determine who was or was not siding with her, in a small town there were always signs.
Since the August garden party, she, Mary, and Di had made it a point to stop by Honeycomb once a week, on Wednesdays, taking the table right by the window—prime seating, everyone knew that—and staying from 10 a.m. well into lunchtime.
They waved at the moms who came in, started small talk, complained about the weather, asked about which teachers were assigning too much homework.
Was the soccer schedule unusually erratic this year?
Oh, definitely. (Anna had signed Ben up, for good measure.) Had anyone noticed that the Hamilton-Wenham Trunk or Treat at Pumpkin Fest had a particularly poor showing when it came to nut-free candy?
(On our list to address for next year, of course, Anna wanted everyone to know; she herself suffered from a nut allergy.) The risers in the gym needed replacing; they seemed like an accident waiting to happen.
Could the PTO start a fundraiser in 2023?
And then there was the annual PTO Spring Silent Auction.
If you asked about the hot gossip in the wet, cold months before the daffodils and forsythia pushed, you were sure to get whispered talk of the auction.
Which rich families were putting their Nantucket houses up for bidding this year?
Who was outbidding whom for the coveted named parking spots at Winthrop?
Anna had heard these rumors, of course, about the auction and the legacy families who bid, about how you could spend up to $100,000 for—and this was true—a parking space with a little placard that said your family’s name on it.
But no one had ever confirmed it, not to her.
Now the women were coming to her in droves, whispering their equal discontent.
It was surprisingly easy to catalogue the grievances of the local women, who arrived breezily each Wednesday for the unscheduled-scheduled chats.
Hamilton was unequal, they realized, and they, too, disapproved of it, but before now they had no one with whom to conspire.
Mimi had never lent much of an empathetic ear, had only ever governed by force, but Anna was there to hear the gripes, however mundane. Finally, in Anna, they saw an ally.
By the first week of January, Anna had built up a substantial amount of goodwill with the Hamilton moms. There was a routine by now; in the mornings, she waited in her long parka by the bus, kissed the kids goodbye, and came back in and watched the morning pass in front of her desk while she sent emails and attempted to draft copy for clients while her mind wandered.
A few minutes before ten, she drove over to Honeycomb, where Di was always waiting, always in head-to-toe Prada, her preferred brand, the kind of thing that women with means loved to say (every once in a while, you could catch Mary in a hand-me-down, and Anna herself only knew this from Di’s last season whisperings).
Di had never been late for a thing in her life.
Matcha latte for Di, hot chocolate for Mary, pain au chocolat and a regular coffee for Anna.
A notebook out, going over anything they had learned from the meeting the week before.
And then, gradually, it was office hours.
“Good to see you, Anna,” said a woman wearing a pom-pom-topped hat and a puffy down parka.
Her hair was short and nearly scarlet, just a crescent of it peeking out from under the hat.
Anna couldn’t quite remember her name—maybe Casey or Carly — but she remembered that her son was a year older than Ben, who was now in first grade.
“And you!” Anna said.
“I wanted to run an idea by you. For the PTO,” she said.
One thing that had amazed Anna was how many people were treating her as if she was already president of the PTO, even though the elections had not yet taken place.
It was as if they had merely wanted permission to put another person in office, but they had been too afraid to ask for what they needed.
“I’m all ears,” Anna said. Di handed over the notebook.
“I was thinking that maybe we need to organize a book drive,” Carly or Casey said. “I’d love to help get readership up in the community.”
She added book drive to the increasingly long list of actionable items that had been requested from the moms of Hamilton.
The ideas were not bad. Many of them were thoughtful.
Some parents were concerned about students who could not afford extracurricular activities.
They wanted to host a fundraiser to help fund a PTO “scholarship,” which could be awarded to students who might not have the same advantages.
Anna liked the idea, but she wondered how she would be able to make something like that work without embarrassing students and their parents.
No one wanted a handout, particularly in Hamilton, where the common denominators were money and status.
Anna’s own vision for the PTO was complex.
She envisioned a space where everyone had a stake in the future of the town and the public school system.
She wanted to put the kids’ needs first—and she really wanted to dismantle the privilege that seemed to govern the current way of doing things.
Mimi Mar’s PTO focused on high-octane events.
Parents were often asked to donate their summer homes for “charity biddings,” and the donated monies were then held by the PTO for future events, to entertain wealthy community members.
And so on and so forth. It had always seemed to Anna like a giant circle jerk: the wealthy families of Hamilton putting up their assets as golden trophies, just so that other wealthy families could step in to put money in the coffer.
But none of the money was going anywhere.
It wasn’t making it to the kids, at any rate.
Anna wanted to change that. In a wealthy community, there was no reason that the people at the top couldn’t give more to the people at the bottom—and there were plenty of those, Anna knew.
They could buy new risers for the gym, sure, and, yes, even support a yearly Ziti Dance, but why not also start a fund to support school supplies, sports, and after-school programming for students who needed extra assistance?
Why not establish a confidential scholarship program in which students and their parents could ask for assistance for items not covered by the district—without having to disclose their level of need?
Anna could see, quite plainly, the level of disparity between the people with wealth and the people without in Hamilton, and she felt that the PTO could act as an intermediary instead of an antagonist. The question she kept asking herself was: Why can’t we help fix this?
Her friends, of course, were more focused on the immediate outcome, which was winning the race.
“I think we’re having what you might call a breakthrough,” Mary said.
She wasn’t wrong. The Wednesday meetings had become unofficial town halls, PTO compilation sessions, opportunities for everyone to stake their claim, should there be a regime change.
“It’s like everyone has been waiting around with all of these ideas for years and now they’re just rushing out. ”