“Thank God it’s so quick now,” said the twenty-something next to her. “Wouldn’t it be great if manicures were that fast?” They both laughed.
As they traded phone numbers and emails, insisting their five-year-old whiz kids really must get together for a playdate one of these days, the door behind the receptionist’s cubicle swung open. A woman walked out, clutching an envelope close to her rather ample mid-pregnancy bosom. She had wisps of gray curling around her temples and faint feather lines at the edges of her lips. Easily forty, I thought. Maybe older. Ms. Perfect Makeup and Ms. Manicure looked her up and down, following the woman as she crossed the waiting room and exited hurriedly through the street door.
“What was she thinking?” Ms. Makeup said. “At her age.”
“I wouldn’t even try it after thirty-five,” the other one came back. “No way.”
“They’re saying now that even thirty is too late. I was reading this article the other day, and—”
“Saw it. Way too much science for me.”
I’d read the article, too, because Malcolm had left the magazine open on my pillow one night. A subtle hint and convenient timing, given we’d had yet another postdinner talk about the geometric decline of a baby’s Q score as the mother’s age increased.
The women stopped their conversation long enough to look across the room at me. Glances were exchanged; lips pursed. I could practically hear their thoughts: Bad luck for her. Wonder if she’ll keep it. Has to be pushing the envelope on the big three-five. And there could be other problems. No need to mention the D word.
Not many issues outranked a low Q score, but trisomies were on the top of the list of lousy outcomes. Down syndrome, in particular.
When the receptionist called my name, a thing happened. My baby, my little-person-to-be who I had already named and loved, already sung to sleep with old lullabies my grandmother had taught me, stirred somewhere deep inside my swollen body. I thought: Screw nature. Nurture counts more. And I knew I had a hell of a lot to give in the nurturing camp.
So I walked out the way I’d come in, eighteen weeks full of baby-to-be, no envelope with a magic number inside it, no fodder for a decision that would end up being more Malcolm’s than my own. I spent two hours that afternoon looking up Google images of prenatal Q reports and forging the one I’d later show my husband. It would say, I decided, 9.3 in large, silver-toned ink. A good number. A fine number. And it was the first time I made the right kind of choice after a series of poor ones.
Six
I’m halfway down my driveway, fiddling with the Acura’s windshield wiper controls and cursing the defogger that’s been on the fritz for months now, when the yellow bus honks. It’s a different sound than the light but piercing ping of the silver and green buses. This is a sound that shakes you, like when you’re rolling steadily down a highway, humming along to top forty or classic vinyl, and out of nowhere a tractor-trailer driver yanks hard on his cord, blasting its horn at you. Most of the time, I think they do it for no reason at all.
The yellow bus, though, seems to have a reason.
It’s moved one house farther along and isn’t parked in front of the Campbells’ house anymore but in front of the blue and white colonial where Judith Green lives. It honks again.
I’m already late, so I tap in the school secretary’s number and hit send.
“Davenport Silver School,” the secretary chirps. “This is Rita. How can I help you?”
I tell Rita a lie about my car’s battery and ask if she’ll send a substitute to my morning biology class. “They can work on their chromosome mutation essays,” I say, thinking that first-year high school students in my day were still memorizing phases of the Krebs cycle, not working out advanced genetic theory. “I’ll be there as soon as I can get the car jumped.”
“No problem, Dr. Fairchild. Your freshman class is performing way above the benchmarks this semester.” A tapping of keys as she checks numbers; a pause as she seems to be considering the kindest way to remind me of the cost of tardiness. “And your Teacher Q can handle a few tenths of a point. Nasty weather to have car trouble in, though.”
“Yeah,” I say. Then I end the call and wipe fog from the driver-side window with my sleeve as the front door of the Greens’ house inches open. Judith’s mother comes out first, arms wrapped around her body so tightly her hands almost meet at the back of her waist. She’s got a terry-cloth robe on—not nearly enough protection from the rain—and her face moves in small, chipmunk-like motions, like she’s chattering from the cold.
Except it isn’t cold today. Only pissing rain.
Now Judith steps out. She’s dressed in jeans and a windbreaker, not her usual Harvard Crimson uniform with the knife-pleated skirt and vest, ivory blouse freshly pressed. Her mother hands her a flat yellow card, then steps back inside for a few seconds. When she returns to the porch, she’s carrying a single suitcase, which she sets down so she can fold Judith in her arms. The terry-cloth robe sags open and slips off a little, but Sarah Green doesn’t seem to notice.
Then the bus honks again.
I want to put the Acura in gear and race toward it, scream at the driver. Give them five more fucking minutes, will you? Just five minutes! It wouldn’t do any good, just like it wouldn’t do any good to go running after the Child Catcher, begging for more time. So I sit here with a drenched raincoat sleeve from wiping down the condensation on my window. Helpless.
Judith breaks the hug first, picks up her suitcase, and walks down the brick path, the same brick path she’s walked down since she and Anne started school, the same brick path Sarah Green lines with begonias in the summer and chrysanthemums in the fall. She presses her yellow card up to the bus door, and it folds open. A few blurred shapes through the front windows tell me Judith isn’t the only pickup this morning—I can’t make any details out through the rain. But I don’t imagine there are many smiles in that bus today.
As the bus pulls away, I throw the car into reverse, back out onto the street, and pause. Even after the time change, darkness lies over our neighborhood like a dreary blanket, mostly thanks to the rain. My phone tells me it’s seven forty-five, enough time for me to make it to school before first period ends and my Q rating goes down another tenth of a point.
Fuck it, I think, and I drive in the opposite direction toward Sarah Green’s house, past the empty playground with its perfect layer of shredded tire rubber, undisturbed by the scuffs of Keds and Reeboks. Even in the wind and rain, the swings are as still as broken pendulums, and the metal slide is a dull gray, never having been polished by the bottoms of children. I don’t remember ever seeing a child inside the enclosure’s fence. Kids appear in the morning when the buses come, then in the late afternoon when the buses return. They hurry inside and bend over books until dinner. If they’re anything like Anne and Freddie, they eat like hungry soldiers in a mess hall, and bend over their books until bedtime. Most of them are bleached pale, even in the summer months.
Sometimes I think all of childhood has disappeared.
I stop the car in front of the Greens’ colonial. Sarah is on her knees, robe fallen open to expose a thin nightgown. She’s pulling out the mums she planted only a few weeks ago, fists digging into the earth, flinging mud and roots in every direction. A few clumps of dirt stick in her hair, and a smudge of brown mars her face when she tries to wipe away tears.
“Sarah?” I say, stepping out of my car. “What’s going on?”
She doesn’t raise her head, and she doesn’t answer me directly, only claws at the ground, shredding mums until the brick path is coated with a blanket of yellow petals, leaves, and dirt. “I hate this fucking color. I hate it.”
I’ve always liked yellow. It’s a happy color; neither tranquil nor overwhelming. Not in your face, like red, which only reminds me of danger and pain and evil. I think of the butter yellow curtains Malcolm and I hung in the nursery before Freddie was born, the gold of fresh straw they used to feed horses before the farms turned to housing developments, sunshiny yolks smiling up from a frying pan on lazy Sunday mornings.
All of a sudden, yellow is the ugliest color on Earth.
Sarah finally stops her garden destruction and looks up at me. “She couldn’t have slid all the way down to seven-point-nine, El. There’s no way. You have her in two classes this year, right? Advanced bio and anatomy. She’s on time, she’s never sick, and she aces everything.”
I nod. Judy Green has been at the top of her class since I’ve known her. “She outranks Anne,” I say. “And Anne’s good.” I’m not bragging, only stating a fact, although if Judy lost more than two points, I suppose I’ve got my tense wrong.
Now Sarah stands up, pulling her robe around her, belting it with mud-caked hands. She doesn’t seem to care that she looks as if she’s been wallowing around in a pigsty. Her voice, normally soft, hardens. “Then how did she lose the Q points? Tell me that, El. Did you know something? Did you hold anything back from me?”
“No. Of course not.” This is one hundred percent true. I spend half my time at school on weekly reports, prepping for the test, compiling results, and contacting parents of what we call “borderliners”—any student who scores below an A on the previous week’s practice tests or who might be in danger of sinking below a Q of nine for other reasons. I’ve heard of teachers in the green schools, like the one Freddie attends, who lose sleep over the numbers. One-tenth of a point makes all the difference.
Freddie’s geometry teacher explained it all to me at our last meeting.
“It gives them a chance, at least,” she said, rubbing her eyes. “And if they don’t have a chance, it gives everyone in the family time to deal with it. They can spend their last weekends together going on picnics, taking a final trip to see the grandparents, riding a roller coaster at the Six Flags park. All that shit they haven’t been doing for the past few years. That way, when the Q sinks below eight and the yellow bus comes, they’ve had some quality experiences. Memories.”
It wasn’t always this way.
In the first wave of the tier system, the yellow schools weren’t much different from the green and silver schools. They were farther out of town, of course, and they weren’t equipped with state-of-the-art science labs or staffed with teachers who had strings of letters after their names. Still, the kids came back home every afternoon.
Until last month, when Madeleine Sinclair made the decision to move the yellow schools. To change the system.
“It’ll be better this way,” Malcolm said after the girls had gone to bed. We sat on the sofa like bookends, a bowl of popcorn keeping us at a distance. The remote was balanced on my lap, and Malcolm reached over to turn up the volume so we could hear Madeleine’s press conference.
“You really think that’s a good idea?” I said between handfuls of popcorn. It was the unbuttered kind, the no-salt, no-fat “light” version, because Malcolm liked that better. Me, I wanted the extra grease and salt, but you pick your battles.
“Sure it is, El. You have any idea how crowded those schools have gotten? Not enough teachers, either.”
“They’re only crowded because the pass rates have dropped,” I said. I didn’t know whether the tests had gotten harder or what, but I’d suddenly been losing a student every few months at the silver school, and I’d heard the same from my colleagues.
Madeleine, dressed in her usual blue power suit, paused before answering another question. “The fact is,” she said, smiling at the press audience, “we’re facing overcrowding at our third-tier institutions.”
Institutions, I thought. What a fucking word.
That voice, that smooth educator’s voice, continued, louder now that Malcolm had upped the volume again. “We’re running out of real estate in the urban areas.” Madeleine shook her blond bob. “No. That’s not entirely true. We’ve run out of room.” She silenced an interruption from the audience with a flat palm. “Our cities are overpopulated. Our suburbs are overpopulated. But”—now a smile unfolded on her face—“there’s a bright side to everything. A solution.”
One of the younger reporters asked what that might be.
“Farmland,” Malcolm said, nodding next to me.
“Our farmland,” Madeleine answered.
Malcolm tossed another handful of popcorn into his mouth. “That was my idea, actually.”
I looked at him. “What was your idea?”
He shushed me with a wave of his hand. “Listen. She’s about to explain it.”
A close-up of Madeleine Sinclair, now the secretary of education, filled the screen. “We’ve decided the best route forward is to give our children—all of our children—the room they need to grow.”
I let her drone on, talking about how the new yellow schools would have more space, more amenities, more activities, more teachers, more everything. The way Madeleine put it, they sounded more like vacation-lands than schools.
The only downside was that they wouldn’t be close to home.
“Families will adjust,” Madeleine said, fielding another question from the press room.
I moved the bowl of popcorn to the table and stood up, blocking the television from Malcolm’s view. “They’re boarding these kids? Where? In Iowa?”
Malcolm stared at me. “Well, yeah, El. And other places around the country. Wherever there’s room. Think of it as a kind of Outward Bound. Get the kids out of the crowded city and into the fresh air. They’ll thrive.”
“More like Downward Bound,” I said, not holding back my sarcasm. “Anyway, what you mean is wherever land is cheap, right? And you’re telling me this was your idea?”
I went to bed early that night, hoping I’d be asleep before Malcolm came in.
Seven
I put Malcolm and Madeleine and the whole stinking Department of Education behind me, and now I’m back on what used to be Sarah Green’s neat brick path. It looks like a land mine went off.
“You said she was doing fine,” Sarah screams. “Fine! Every single report we got said her Q was almost perfect.”
“It was perfect, actually,” I said.
“Well, it isn’t now. For some reason. Now she’s on her way to fucking Kansas?” She laughs, but it’s not a funny laugh. “Kansas. To a state school with a year-round schedule.” Every one of her words is the verbal equivalent of screaming caps. I don’t even try to interrupt.
“Oh, right, they tell us we can come visit once a quarter. Do you have any idea how much leave David and I have to take to fly to Kansas four times a year? And that’s if we can get the extra time off work. That’s if we want to see our own Qs take a nosedive, which means Jonathan’s Q gets hit, and he’s already in a green school. For a day, Elena. One single day with our daughter. They used to send the kids home for Christmas. Thanksgiving every other year. Summer.”
“You were on the board when the new schedules were approved,” I say.
Sarah stutters and goes silent. Then, she turns and makes for her front door. Her hair is in wet ropes down her back, and the terry-cloth robe is as sodden as a drowned cat. She spins fast and looks at me, hard. “I guess you’ll have more time for your top two percent now, El. Good luck with them.”
Her words hit me like a slap in the face, but it’s a reactionary slap, a quid pro quo return on the slap I’d just served her.
I remember when the schedule changes happened. Another night on the sofa with Malcolm, another press conference with Madeleine Sinclair in her blue power suit and blond bob and that saccharine smile that makes you feel like you’re in kindergarten all over again and need shit explained to you in small words. I remember the reduction in vacation time being another one of Malcolm’s brainchildren.
I also remember parents like Sarah and David Green supporting it.
As little as five years ago, participation in the tier system wasn’t compulsory, not exactly. Instead, a guideline came from Washington. A suggestion that parents pay close attention to their children’s individual needs. This was followed by another, and then by another dozen, all of them coldly clinical and mathematical.
Parents of children with Q scores below eight points are encouraged to consider yellow schools.
Top-tier systems may not be in your offspring’s best interest. Don’t push them!
A panel of two dozen experts has concluded that tier separation benefits everyone.
Of course, there was pushback—PTA meetings where infuriated parents stood up and interrupted the barrage of suggestions, threatening to homeschool their seventh-graders rather than subject them to the constant pressure of tests. The opt-out culture of parents storming from assemblies and plucking their kids from school had started to take a tenuous foothold.
But only in some neighborhoods. Not in ours. Not in Sarah Green’s.
And then the PTA meetings were supplanted by board meetings. The guidelines became directives; the directives included fines for truancy, taxes disguised as penalties, trickle-down effects on siblings’ Q scores. Homeschooling requirements became more restrictive than gun laws, and the forms were ever-changing. A line left blank or a code entered incorrectly meant a red Declined—not subject to appeal stamp from the school superintendent’s office. I wonder sometimes where they found all that red ink.
Women like Sarah Green had their own way, campaigning for a different type of pressure, pressure that came in the form of leaflets with Do not hire this unfit parent! and No benefits for the antisocial! With enough Sarah Greens on your side, who needs laws?
I stand in the rain under my umbrella and watch Sarah, shoulders slumped under the weight of grief and confusion and hatred, go into her house. She turns back once to hiss at me, “Those yellow buses? They’re not supposed to come here, Elena. Not here.” The front door slams shut, and the lock clicks, telling me I needn’t bother taking those few steps onto the porch and knocking, so I walk back to my car, curse at the defogger for the tenth time this morning, and curse at everyone for taking all of this super-child garbage too far.
As I drive away, I look back one more time at the house. Somehow I don’t think there will be much of a garden in the Greens’ yard next year.
But then I think, Maybe she deserves it.
Eight
No one asks what happens to the kids who fall through the cracks—there isn’t a reason to. Yellow school graduates manage the local supermarket; they work at costume jewelry kiosks in the few brick-and-mortar malls that are left. They run 7-Elevens and flip burgers now that immigration quotas have been cut again. They do all those jobs no college graduate wants but that still need to get done.
Let’s face it. Sarah Green is a snob. She’s no different from the Callahans and the Delacroix and the Morrises living down the street. These are families who have self-sealed themselves into a bubble of privilege, whose favorite pronouns are We and They and Us and Them, whose theme song is “Not in My Neighborhood,” whose idea of school choice is best translated as I’ll make the choice for you because I know better. So what if some kid from the city gets shipped off to the equivalent of a vocational school, if a country boy from Nebraska doesn’t make the cut to his state university? These are things that happen to Them, never to Us. If I didn’t share a house and a bed with Malcolm, and if I didn’t worry constantly over Freddie, I’m not sure I’d even know they were happening. After all, how many people watch Madeleine Sinclair’s State of Education addresses? The president barely draws fifteen percent of the population for those big talks he gives, so I’m guessing Queen Madeleine gets next to nothing.
As I wind my car down the GW Parkway and cross the bridge into the city, I wonder if we’ve all been playing the old out of sight, out of mind game. I wonder if we’ll keep playing it until the game pieces start coming into view, shifting from Their playing boards to Our playing boards. Like they did this morning, when Sarah Green’s perfect teenager was demoted to a pawn.
I’m late anyway, so I pull over in Georgetown, hold my phone up to the meter, and pay for fifteen minutes’ rental of prime real estate parking. Ch-ching! All done. Somewhere in the radio waves above my head or the fiber-optic lines below my feet, fifty cents move from a bank account in one state to another account in a different state. No one even needs to empty the coins.
At Starbucks, my caffe latte is waiting at the mobile order pickup counter. Two-percent milk, half decaf, light foam, one sugar. Grande sized, whatever that means. The barista-robot chirps an automated Have a great day, Elena! Hope your drink is perfect! as I pick up the coffee. See you tomorrow morning! she says. Sometimes, the barista-robot is a he. They like to mix things up.
There’s a girl at the window, tucked up on one of those deep sofa things with lots of pillows, legs folded under her, reading. She’s almost young enough to be in high school, but she’s here in Starbucks, and she doesn’t look like a dropout or a truant. One of those career-guide bibles that’s supposed to tell you what you want to be when you grow up is open on the table, pages facing down, next to a pile of college guides and SAT prep manuals teetering by her coffee, partially obscuring her face. She has a brightness in her eyes, the kind I see in my best students, but I know she doesn’t stand a chance in the college admissions game.
She’s using a yellow ID card as a bookmark, and no college has admitted a third-tier student for at least a few years, according to Malcolm’s latest dinnertime report.
“Hi,” she says, catching my eye when I reach the door.
“Hi.”
“I was top in my class two years ago,” she says. “Numero uno. Gave a valedictorian speech and everything. I mean, it wasn’t the best school. Kids from my neighborhood don’t go to the best schools. But still. I figured being first would count for something.”
I’m so late. But I let the door swing shut and stay. “It’s hard now.”
She closes the Barron’s bible with its lists of statistics for everything—admissions, average SAT scores, demographics, nearby bars, number of athletic fields, all that quantifiable shit. “What do you do?”
“I teach.”
“Oh, yeah? Where?”
“Davenport.”
The girl sweeps her eyes over me, taking it all in. The suit, the strappy heels, the calfskin purse slung over my shoulder. “Figures. You look like one of them.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
She laughs. “White. Rich. Perfect. Bet you have a super-high Q.”
“It’s okay.” Actually, it’s 9.73, but I don’t want to tell her this.
“Anyway. I’m trying one more time for college. After that, I don’t know what. Used to have a job here, but, well, you know.” Her hand moves in a game-show-hostess gesture. “Lost it a few months ago. I still hang out, though.” She points at the books. “Reading’s not a real popular hobby in my hood.”
There’s a lull while I wait for the right words to come to me, and another lull when I realize there are no right words for this girl or this situation. I blurt out a lame “What do you want to major in?”
“Math,” she says, closing the book. “I’m wicked at math. Go ahead, ask me anything.”
My phone pings. It’s Rita from school. “I’m sorry—I’m really late this morning.”
She looks at the coffee in my hand. “Yeah.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, meaning it in all the ways, knowing she doesn’t believe me, and I open the door.
