Clearing the Room

My Rachel Cusk Moment

The holiday party was different this year. The room was small and cold, and the lights were too bright. The table was filled with a selection of sweets, but no one had made anything, and there was no salad. A few people stood in the main room, and a few others were hanging out in the kitchen.

Last year, there was a neighborhood potluck at another neighbor’s, and her house had been packed. There were more dishes on the table than one could count, and lots of music. I’d stayed for a while, talking with one of my neighbors about her PhD on immigration and her years teaching in Sweden. So I had expected more of the same, but not this kind of more.

When I walked in, a couple was guarding the door.

“I came empty-handed,” I said as I shrugged, and they had grudgingly let me through, but not before quizzing me on which house on the block I could call mine.

“Oh, the place which is over the old deli,” one said, and then noted that there used to be a sign that called Zinfandel a white wine.

“Is it a red?” I asked. “I do actually always get that confused.”

They let me in anyway, and I walked into the second room where I made eye contact with one of the five people there whom I recognized from last year.

“It’s been a while,” he might have said, and I agreed.

I said, “I think last year we talked about sailing.”

It turns out I was confusing him with someone else. We oriented a bit without much luck in remembering what we had talked about, and he asked how my year had been. I thought back to the highlights.

“(O) and I went to the volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii.”

Before I could go on, the other person we were standing with said 10 different facts about that volcano, including his own experience of stepping onto the cooled lava, which he referred to by the scientific name. I knew what he was talking about and said so, noting that we had gone to the ranger talk at the edge of the park.

The first guy, who had not talked about sailing, clarified that we were talking not about hot lava but about cooled lava that became earth, and that it was safe to walk on because while it was part of the volcano, it was no longer above a part that was active. We talked over each other, describing how a volcano might spurt out in different places even though the center was warm and flowing inside.

“That’s how I feel,” this guy said.

“Huh?” I said.

“You know, we’re talking about a volcano that might explode out of the sides.”

“Oh,” I said. “That’s how you feel?”

“Don’t you feel that way sometimes?” he might have asked.

“No,” I said. “I mean, of course, I feel a central heat, but I like that. But no, I don’t feel like it’s going to burst unpredictably at any moment.”

He turned away, and I think this was my moment when I started to retreat inside of myself a bit and thought Oh, these are neighbors, but that doesn’t mean they are like me.

I stood in my body and also listened, much quieter now, as my neighbor asked me about my daughter, which he remembered I had talked about last time. Was I still driving her up to the same school?

So I assumed we had pivoted to a more neutral topic: kids, school, the mechanics of the city that make both together a challenge. We went back and forth a bit about that - they were much older and had kids who were in their 20s, and then one of the guys, the not-sailing one, said: Well, I’m the cofounder of [a very big website dedicated to school reviews], and I said, as a joke: NEVER HEARD OF IT.

He looked very taken aback that I’d made a joke, and so I made it again. DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT.

It was a joke because if you use the internet and you have a kid and you’ve had the privilege of thinking about whether they might go to any school at all, you know this site. Also, I said it in a Jewish accent, very New York, which was to imply I’d spent quite a bit of time on that website, in fact.

I think neither of my new friends got the joke. Or maybe one did.

“How is X’s Hebrew?” my one friend asked the other.

The conversation shifted more toward that topic and then again back to schools, after which I asked one of the people about how he’d made decisions about his kids’ school, and he said his ex-wife had done all that.

I started feeling almost completely retreated.

The solution, both these men concluded, to ALL the difficulties around school was to join the PTA.

“That’s how you do it,” my not-sailing friend said, “I’ve seen it so many times before. You just get very active and close on that board, and then you say on the sly, and when it’s appropriate, can my kid get into this specific teacher’s class next year?” You must also say you understand that it’s not guaranteed.

“But that,” I said, “is a problem of equity.”

And they both said it was.

And I then said, “And that’s something my daughter understood when she was five.” And then I began to go to bat for my kid’s charter school, which, frankly, though I’m grateful for, I’m sure comes with no less of a political downside.

But I had already realized that the people I was talking to were not my friends.

“Well,” I said. “Thank you for entertaining me.” And then I walked away.