Living Witness(34)
Her mother had stretched out one set of them and said, “Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Dartmouth, Cornell, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania. That’s the best. That’s the Ivy League.” Then she had stretched out a second set and said, “Vassar, Smith, Wellesley, Mt. Holyoke, Bryn Mawr, Barnard, Radcliffe. That’s the seven sisters. That’s almost as good, for a girl, but Radcliffe will be Harvard in a few years. It won’t matter. Then there’s this.” She had flipped over the last book. “That’s Stanford, in California. That’s the only place worth going to in the West.”
Judy had to admit she didn’t understand much of any of this at the time. The whole episode scared her, though, because she had understood that there were conditions on her life going as she wanted it to. She would have to have something to do with these places her mother was showing her, and no other places, if she wanted her mother to go on being proud of her. It was a big looming mountain, right in front of her face. Good people, nice people, people like her parents and their friends, went to these places, and after they left they had jobs in companies that everybody had heard of. Other people didn’t matter.
Judy climbed into the Volvo and put her seat belt on. She put it on automatically, even if she was just going to sit behind the wheel and not drive anywhere, and so did all of her children. She flicked the button on the garage door opener and watched the garage door pull up behind her. She started the car and put the heat on. It was so cold she was finding it hard to breathe.
By the time she was eleven or so, she had it all figured out. The people who did not go to the kind of colleges her mother had mentioned, the people who went to state schools and then went to work in the small local companies that were everywhere, even in the kinds of towns where Judy grew up, those people did nothing important with their lives. “Most men live lives of quiet desperation,” Henry David Thoreau had said, in the book they’d read in Judy’s gifted class, and Judy thought she knew what he’d meant. He’d meant those people, the ones in remedial everything, or the ones who were just average, who didn’t go to lessons, who didn’t care about anything. At least, Judy didn’t see that they cared about anything. They had all sorts of stuff they did, but none of it was stuff that would help them in the long run.
What we have to do here, Judy thought, is make Snow Hill the kind of place children can grow up in and succeed. We need to tear down that elementary school and build modern schools, a primary school and a middle school and a high school. If there were modern schools, there wouldn’t be this problem we’re having with Barbie McGuffie.
Judy’s cell phone was in her purse. It was a pink Razr. Dan had offered to get her an iPhone, but that hadn’t made sense to her. The children all had iPhones. They liked music and looking at the Internet when they got bored with school, which they often were. Honestly, Judy thought. She’d never understood why people were unhappy with the public schools until she’d come to Snow Hill. When public schools were like this, she was unhappy with them, too.
Judy held down the number 6 and waited until the phone started automatically dialing Shelley Niederman’s number. She hoped she hadn’t waited so long that Shelley had already started driving to the school. She looked at her eye makeup in her rearview mirror. She didn’t wear much eye makeup anymore. She used to wear a lot.
“Yes?” Shelley said.
“It’s me,” Judy said, although she didn’t need to. Her cell number was on Shelley’s caller ID. “Did you get a call from Catherine Marbledale?”
“I did indeed,” Shelley said.
“Are you going in to see what’s going on?”
“I don’t know. I talked to Stacey. She seemed to be all right.”
“I talked to Mallory,” Judy said. “She seemed to be more than all right. But I’m going in anyway. I’ve been thinking. Maybe we’ve been going about this all wrong.”
“You don’t think we should be complaining about it when a big thug like Barbie McGuffie beats up on our children.”
“Of course I think we should be complaining about it,” Judy said, “but I’ve been thinking and thinking, and it occurs to me that we’re doing this backwards. We’re being too negative.”
“I’m going to be negative about that ape girl hammering on Stacey,” Shelley said. “Why shouldn’t I be?”
“You should be, you should be,” Judy said. “But here’s the thing. Every time one of these things happens, what do we do? We try to stop it. Yes, yes, of course we should do that, but is that all we should do? Even the lawsuit. The lawsuit is entirely negative.”