Read an Excerpt
A Most Uncommon Degree of Popularity
By Kathleen Gilles Seidel St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2006 Kathleen Gilles Seidel
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-1916-6
CHAPTER 1
Our darling little babies turned into teenagers overnight.
It happened Labor Day weekend, right before the kids started sixth grade. One of the families with a swimming pool was having a party, and I was expecting the sort of event that this family had hosted a number of times before — invite the whole grade and let the kids splash around like happy little unisex puppies. Then my daughter, Erin, changed clothes three times, dashed across the street to lend her friend a shirt, and got six phone calls in thirty minutes.
She now stood at the railing of our wide front porch waiting for her ride. I had never imagined that my sweet child could look so ultrateen. Her dELiA's denim miniskirt rode low on her narrow hips, her tangerine Old Navy flip-flops showed off brightly polished toenails, and her white Express tank top emphasized the glow of her summer tan and the swell of her new, little breasts. She looked healthy, confident, and even — oh, lord — a little sexy.
I had one consolation. I knew that underneath this studied, teenaged ensemble she had on little-girl Limited Too underpants, which were waist-high white cotton and decorated with pink flying pigs. At least we weren't shopping for underwear at Victoria's Secret.
The midafternoon sun was still above the trees. When Erin's ride arrived, she launched herself down the front steps and across the yard. Her flip-flops slapped against her feet as she ran, and her shadow, slanting long across the grass, danced as she waved to her friends in the car.
My name is Lydia Meadows. I'm married with two kids, and we live in Washington, D.C., in a neighborhood with beautiful trees and three too many embassies, so that just when you are dashing madly to get home to pick up a forgotten pair of soccer cleats, one of the embassies is giving a party. This means you run into clogged streets, orange traffic cones, and hired parking valets who want you either to leave your car with them or to turn around and get back on the main road, which you don't want to do because you and the soccer cleats don't live on the main road, but on one of the neighborhood streets beyond the embassy.
My three closest friends have daughters who are my daughter's three closest friends. We live in the same neighborhood, and our kids go to the same school. Because we are always running into people we know while shopping in little stores with wrought-iron bistro tables on the sidewalks, our lives have a pleasant small-town feel. It is a completely bogus feeling — what small town has a dELiA's, an Old Navy, an Express, and a Limited Too, to say nothing (and, indeed, our kids do say nothing) of Congress and the White House? Our neighborhood is a theme-park version of a small town, but having grown up in an actual small town, I like the theme park better.
My daughter's new teenaged thing continued through the rest of Labor Day weekend; the phone rang continually. On Monday, in hopes of making my five-foot-three self look taller, I put on a cotton sweater that was the same shade of bottle green as my twill slacks. Since my eyes are greenish and I had used freckle-avoidance sunscreen faithfully this summer, I thought I looked pretty good. Erin, however, took one look at me and moaned, "Oh, Mom, you match," as if that were some kind of biblical sin. An hour later she asked if she could get her hair highlighted.
She is eleven years old. She isn't getting her hair highlighted.
She and her friends go to the Alden School, a small academically oriented private school with a specialty in music. It used to be a prim all-girls school — it was founded at the turn of the previous century under the delicious name of "Miss Alden's School" — and in those days the students wore uniforms. About fifteen years ago financial woes forced the school to become coed, and the uniforms have been replaced by a dress code that is Byzantine in its complexity. Students may not wear blue denim, but black denim is acceptable. Open-toed shoes may be worn as long as the shoe has a strap wrapping around the back of the ankle. Shirts must have a collar, but girls may wear jewel-necked shirts as long as the neck edge is finished with a contrasting trim or a faggoting or other decorative stitch. "Faggoting or other decorative stitch" is actually a phrase in the official dress code. Fortunately my husband and I are both lawyers, and so with our combined legal training and my knowledge of garment construction techniques — I sew and so unlike most people I do know what a faggoting stitch is — we are able to keep our children in compliance with the dress code. I can't imagine how other families do it.
Erin's first-day-of-school outfit Tuesday morning didn't comply with the spirit of the dress code, but when she came down the back stairs into the kitchen, I could spot no technical violations. She was wearing a little cotton-fleece drawstring skirt and a white collared blouse that was suitably tucked into the skirt's waistband. But the blouse was unbuttoned and beneath it she was wearing a turquoise tank top. The principal of the middle school was not going to like the extent to which the skirt resembled athletic wear, but fortunately we had a new headmaster this year, and I felt sure he would not form a committee for the purpose of adding to the dress code a prohibition against cotton-fleece drawstring skirts.
Private schools can be spectacularly absurd in their attention to detail.
The school is housed on the grounds of an old estate near Sibley Hospital. The high school and the administrative offices are in the seedily grand white mansion, which faces a broad, green lawn that we have not yet turned into a soccer field. Sloping behind the mansion are wooded grounds whose trees soften the lines of the two modern buildings that house the lower school and the middle school.
Normally my friends and I carpool to the kids' many activities with a schedule that makes both the school's dress and the nation's tax codes look straightforward, but on the first day of school each family takes and picks up its own children. So in the afternoon I parked on a neighborhood street — rules governing the formation and behavior of automobiles in the carpool line take up two and a half pages of the school handbook — followed a well-worn path through the trees, and emerged into the rear parking lot that was between the lower- and the middle-school buildings.
In good weather the students wait for their rides outside, and I could see my seven-year-old son on the lower-school playground in the midst of some sort of controlled seven-year-old rowdiness. I waved to him and then turned to the middle school to look for Erin.
Although this was not specified in the handbook, the eighth graders always wait for their rides near the big oak tree, the seventh graders take over the steps, and the sixth graders are on the blacktop. I didn't see Erin at first, but as I moved closer to the blacktop, I spotted her in the middle of a group of sixth-grade girls.
Indeed she and her three closest friends — the daughters of my three closest friends — were right in the middle of the group, and they were dressed virtually identically in these sweatpants- like skirts, unbuttoned but tucked-in white blouses, and vividly colored tanks. The other girls, none of whom had on this precise combination of garments, were hovering around the four of them. The farther a girl was standing from our four, the less animated she was.
If I hadn't known better, I would have said that my daughter and her friends were the popular girls.
Erin? Popular?
I had been a smart girl in the middle of Indiana. There was no way that I had been popular. I had had my place, I hadn't been a complete outcast, but on a normal day I had felt that every other girl in the school — at least among those worth thinking about — was prettier and better dressed. So I certainly wanted my daughter to feel better about her clothes and her friends than I had. I didn't want her to feel as if she didn't belong. I didn't want her to be the one standing at the edge of a group, not knowing whom to talk to. I didn't want her to feel left out, but I had never expected her to be popular.
Popular girls were manipulative little blond bitch-goddesses. Erin's hair was an unhighlighted brown.
I saw my friend Mimi coming across the parking lot. Her daughter, Rachel, was also wearing the drawstring skirt, white blouse, and bright tank.
I met her halfway and asked, "Were you popular in school?"
"Are you kidding?" She gestured toward herself. She was short, Jewish, and overweight. She did a great job of putting herself together; her dark hair was short and spiky, and she was not afraid to use her breadth as a canvas. Some days she was a walking art gallery. Today her jacket was hand-painted silk, with cascades of vermilion lilies and lime accents. Her jewelry was richly colored fused-glass pieces from the artists at the Glen Echo studios. She had perfect skin: flawlessly smooth without a single freckle or acne scar. I like thinking about texture, and so I had encouraged her to emphasize the loveliness of her skin by wearing smooth, finely woven fabrics. She had taken my advice and so her clothes and scarves floated around her with a wonderful liquidness. You would no more ask whether she looked fat than you would ask that about the Capitol. But she couldn't have had such confidence in her teen years.
I pointed toward the girls, wondering if she saw what I did.
She did. "Holy crap." Mimi shook her head, looked at me, her dark eyebrows arched in surprise, and then looked back at the girls. "I would have never expected this."
"Me neither."
"This explains why Rachel won't talk to me anymore. The popular girls never talked to me."
In the seventy-two hours since discovering that my daughter was a teenager, I had read about forty thousand books on parenting teenaged girls. I wasn't sure how much they were going to help. One had suggested that if my daughter became pregnant, we should first decide who had ownership of the issue. I have no idea what I would do in such a situation — Erin hadn't started menstruating yet — but a calm discussion of who "owned" the issue probably wouldn't happen right off. Another book had warned me to be aware of the "dark side" of raising a child in an affluent home; apparently extreme anxiety about being thrown in the poorhouse builds character.
If you believe these books, teenaged girls are confused, anxious, depressed, and destructive. We need to teach our daughters how to identify their pain, the source of which is skinny fashion models, high-achieving parents, and above all else, popular girls.
Popular girls shatter the self-esteem of other girls; they persecute outsiders, they torment, tease, bully, exclude, and scapegoat. The books were full of advice on how to arm your child against these Queen Bees, but none of the books, not a one, said what you should do if your own child was popular.
Erin looked pretty and happy as she stood in that crowd of girls, and frankly, that made me feel good. I was glad that she was happy. I had worked hard to have her be happy. Chattering away, she was gesturing with her arms, her body moving freely. If her back was turned toward one child, a moment later she was facing that child with her back to someone else. She didn't seem to be torturing anyone to establish her own status.
Of course, her status had been securely established in the first five minutes of the school day. She was one of the four girls wearing exactly the right clothes.
"Did you know that they were going to dress alike?" I asked Mimi.
Mimi shook her head. "No. Rachel did ask me to get her that skirt last week, but it was very cheap and she had found it on the Internet. I didn't have to go to the mall."
That was exactly what had happened in our house, too. The girls had obviously been smarter than sixth-grade kids ought to be. If they had chosen an expensive, logo-studded, designer skirt, chances were that at least one of us moms would have refused to buy it. In fact, I hope that we all would have. But this skirt was completely unobjectionable; the price was reasonable, the design modest. There was nothing at all special about it ... until four girls, all of them friends, had worn it on the first day of middle school.
Later that afternoon Chloe Zimmerman's mother called me, and Alexis Fairling's and Ariel Sommers's mothers e-mailed me, asking where we had gotten the skirt. Their daughters wanted one, too.
My husband, Jamie, is a litigator, and he is preparing for a huge, messy case that will go to trial in Texas in January. It's pretty clear that the only way I am going to be able to get his attention until the case is over is to talk about the kids.
So after dinner I told him about what I had seen on the blacktop. "I think Erin is popular."
Jamie is a low-key guy with auburn hair, a dry wit, and a second baseman's agile build. On the surface at least, he is not your usual prima-donna trial attorney. He deliberately makes a neutral first impression and then gradually allows people to realize how much they like him. This is an asset during long trials. He has done well on several cases because after the first day and a half the jury decides that he is the only lawyer on either side that they can stand.
"That's good, isn't it?" he replied to my remark about Erin. "Aren't we glad that she has friends?"
I waved my hand. "We know that she has friends. Being popular isn't about having friends. It's about having power. It's about being the Pol Pot of the sixth grade."
"So are we really concerned about our eleven-year-old child turning into a genocidal Cambodian dictator?"
I made a face at him.
"Seriously, Lydia, aren't you making too much of this? So Erin called her friends to see what they were going to wear on the first day of school. That's what girls do, isn't it?"
Of course, they did, and, of course, I was making too much of this. But that didn't mean that there was no issue.
I probably feel a little guilty because two years ago I quit work. I no longer draw a paycheck; I no longer have my day controlled by the demands of a job. When Jamie is extremely busy, I therefore feel that I have to justify demanding his attention, and so I tend to exaggerate things. You need to listen to this because it is really, really important. Then he reacts to my exaggeration, not to the thing itself.
Ah, marriage.
He and I met in law school and as stressed first-year law students, we were equals. We did everything together; we studied together, made course outlines together, and were generally exhausted together. Then, after we were married and both working at law firms, we continued on these parallel tracks, working at jobs that seemed equally important.
We continued to do everything together. We talked about our cases and edited each other's writing. We grocery-shopped together, we cooked together. We even set aside Thursday evenings to watch TV and fold laundry together. He was my friend, my companion, my colleague, my pal.
But I was the one who had the uterus. I loved Erin when she was no bigger than the vitamin pills I was taking on her behalf. After she was born, I downshifted careerwise and took a job at the Environmental Protection Agency. I believed in environmental causes, but it turned out that I didn't find them that interesting. I had liked law when it was about people, people trying to live with other people. At EPA, my work was about companies trying to live with government regulations. I didn't want to come home and talk about what I had done during the day.
Jamie became a partner with associates to manage, and he talked to them about his cases, not to me. We talked about Erin and later Thomas. Our lives became more and more traditional. Even though I was still working, I was in charge of hiring and managing whoever was taking care of the kids and the house. Any laundry that that lady didn't fold I did, and Jamie became not my friend, companion, and pal, but my husband.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Most Uncommon Degree of Popularity by Kathleen Gilles Seidel. Copyright © 2006 Kathleen Gilles Seidel. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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