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 tohappen. 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 covetednamedparking 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’slast seasonwhisperings). Di had never been late for a thing in her life. Matcha latte for Di, hot chocolate for Mary,pain au chocolatand a regular coffee for Anna. A notebookout, 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 addedbook driveto 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—andshe 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.”
“I think that means they feel like they haven’t been heard, to be honest,” Anna said. They had already filled two notebooks in three months of meeting here at Honeycomb. Two notebooks with ideas both large and small, suggested by all different kinds of parents, some of them friends with Mimi and others not. It would be impossible, of course, to include every single idea in any kind of new version of the PTO. Reframing would take time. What were the most important changes she wanted to make? What were the things that needed to happen to make the PTO better, to make Hamilton better?
“You’d want to start with the dance, anyway, right?” Di said. Allow everyone in, was what she meant, but, no, that wouldn’t be Anna’s first change, not that. She would get rid of the preferred membership, eliminate the ability for any parent to spend more to cut the line, prioritize the actual kids, which had been the point in the crusade to begin with.
“It’s the memberships that irk me,” she said. “That people can just skip ahead if they pay more. How many people have complained about the memberships?”
“A lot, actually,” Mary said. “I don’t have the information here, but I have a spreadsheet at home. I can share it with you. I’ve been going back through the notes and keeping them organized and tracking which issues are most popular.”
“Which I guess leads me to another question,” Anna said. “Do we think we have any idea what the vote looks like? We’re just over three weeks away, and I think we’ve done good outreach. We have more to do still. But it’s not like a normal election. We’re not polling people.”
Di and Mary exchanged looks. Mary started to laugh.
“I guess I’m missing something fundamental here,” Anna said.
“Maybe we’ve been asking around,” Di said. “On your behalf.”
“That feels extremely against the rules, but fine. What have you come up with?”
Mary took out a separate notebook, a small black leather one. Anna had never seen it before. She flipped past the first few pages. “To be honest, we’ve been keeping a tally,” she said.
“Like, you’ve been asking people who they support?” Anna said.
“Pretty much exactly that. Don’t act so surprised.” Di grabbed the book from Mary and flipped through, pretending to look shocked at some of the information. “You wouldn’t believe it,” she said. “Simply scandalous.”
“What do I actually need? To accomplish this?” Anna asked.
“We think a better question is: How do you get every single person in Hamilton to come to your side?” Di closed the book before she tallied the numbers. “Look, we have every reason to believe that you are in a position to be elected the next president of the PTO.”
Anna tugged an earlobe. “I didn’t hear you right. It sounded like you just said there are enough votes for me to be elected,” she said.
“That’s what the lady said,” Mary repeated. “A round of beers!”
