Free A Most Uncommon Degree of Popularity by Kathleen Gilles Seidel Page A

who had helped put it there.
    “So she came back here and she’s just renting that house in Virginia. The other gals say that it’s nice, but it is rented. And it is in Virginia. She says she’s just there temporarily, but I don’t know what her plans are. The judge is saying that she ought to go back to work and she doesn’t want to.”
    “Her not wanting to work may not go very far with a judge.”
    “Everyone’s working these days,” Pam agreed. She was a realtor. “But Mary Paige’s trying to build this big case that having to drive Faith to and from school all the time keeps her from being able to have a job.”
    I reminded myself of the source. Pam exaggerated. Surely it wasn’t possible that a woman could feel so entitled to being supported that she thought that a judge would award her alimony because she didn’t have a good car pool?
    Or was it?
    “And she was really unhappy about Faith not getting on a certain soccer team,” Pam continued. “Your daughter runs around with that bunch, doesn’t she? When Mary Paige first got back into town, Kate Collins had a little luncheon for her because they were in the same class, although luck of the draw, all of us with sixth graders had boys. Mary Paige wanted to know who the popular girls were. She really wanted to be sure that Faith got in with that crowd.”
    How casual she was about calling my daughter “popular.” “She wanted her kid to have designer-label friends?”
    Pam laughed. “That’s what happens when you move to Texas. You start caring too much about designer labels. That’s Texas for you.”
    Oh, great, here Erin was so unhappy because someone had stuck the label “popular” on her forehead, a label that, in Erin’s case, had lasted for all of three weeks.
    We all wanted our kids to be happy. I couldn’t fault Mary Paige for that. But wanting to be sure that she was “popular”? Did that really arise out of concern for the girl’s needs or out of the mother’s own image of herself?
    Well, look at me. What a hypocrite I was being. I was quick to stereotype Mary Paige as a my-daughter-will-be-popular-at-all-costs mom in exactly the way I did not want people stereotyping me.
    But my child had been made so unhappy. I wondered if Mary Paige understood what was happening, that the result of trying to get Faith included was that Erin was being excluded. I was going to give Mary Paige the benefit of the doubt and assume that she hadn’t known enough about the kids’ relationships to understand.
    But her daughter had to know, and her daughter had to like it.
    If all these jillions of books about raising teenaged girls knew anything, then girls like Faith Caudwell were the dangerous ones. Faith had lost her father and her home. She had something to prove, and often the only way some teenaged girls know how to build themselves up is to tear someone else down.
    Mary Paige Caudwell was one of the Old Guard families who had assumed too much. She had assumed that she could divorce her husband and keep her country-club lifestyle. She had assumed that she could move back to D.C. and that her daughter could slide into the place that she once had. She had assumed that being a descendant of Mrs. Chester T. Paige still meant something.
    So I decided that I was not going to fuss about the price of lunch. I certainly minded being maneuvered into something, but the money itself wouldn’t mean anything to me, and if Mary Paige felt that the only way she could go out to a nice restaurant was to finagle someone else into paying for it, then I should feel some compassion.
    That high-minded generosity disappeared as I sat in the restaurant for twenty-five minutes with only a glass of iced tea for company. I had failed to remember what Faith had said about her mother always being late, and I arrived at the restaurant my usual five minutes early. Twenty minutes after our agreed-upon meeting time, Mary Paige arrived, a sorority-sister type sweater tied