You Should Have Known by Jean Hanff Korelitz

place. That wasn’t a bad thing, she reminded herself. That was a laudable thing. And this new incarnation of the school fund-raiser, which she—snob that she was—found so distasteful, was only a bigger, better version of that laudable thing, raising more money (way, way more money) for its admirable cause. Which ought to make her happy. But did not.
    Grace lingered on in the lobby at her little table. She was moving the few remaining name tags around like a three-card monte dealer and fingering her left earlobe, which hurt just a bit more than the right earlobe, which was also hurting. She was wearing a pair of large diamond earrings, clip-ons that had once belonged to her mother (who, like Grace, did not have pierced ears). Grace had decided that they were more than appropriate for a duplex of staggering size, overlooking a front lawn comprising Central Park, and had built her outfit around them: a silk shirt in basic black (her go-to color, like that of so many of her Manhattan sisters), her highest heels (which brought her to Jonathan’s exact height), and the shantung silk pants in highly hot pink, a purchase that surprised no one more than herself when she found them at Bergdorf’s the previous fall. This was precisely what to wear when cowering before a Jackson Pollock or explaining to some captain of industry, who clearly cared not at all, that she was a therapist in private practice.
    The earrings were part of a collection of somewhat ostentatious pieces that had been presented to Marjorie Reinhart, piece by piece, over the years, by Grace’s father, Frederich, and which Grace still kept in a mirrored vanity her mother had owned, in the bedroom that had once been her parents’ and was now hers and Jonathan’s. There were, among many other items, a pin comprising a large pink rock of something grasped by little gold hands against a misshapen gold surface, a fat jade necklace her father had found who knew where, a leopard-print bracelet of black and yellow diamonds, a sapphire necklace, and a necklace of chunky, oddly proportioned gold links. What they all had in common was their very—how, really, could one avoid this word?—vulgarity. Everything seemed larger than it needed to be: big links of gold, big rocks, a certain quality of “look at me” in the designs. How her father could have chosen so poorly for her elegant mother was almost sweet, it occurred to her. Her father was such an oaf in this department that when he walked into a jewelry store to get his wife a present, he must have been easy prey for any bigger-is-better salesman. The jewels were a representation of someone doing his best to say I love you and someone else doing her best to say I know .
    Tap, tap, tap with her fingernail, manicured for the occasion. Grace removed the clip-on earrings and placed them in her evening bag—she couldn’t take it anymore. Then she rubbed her earlobes in relief and scanned the empty lobby, as if that would somehow move things along. Twenty minutes had passed without a single guest’s arrival, and only five forlorn name tags remained unclaimed on the table: Jonathan and two missing couples Grace didn’t know. Everyone else was upstairs, including the rest of the committee, the headmaster, and the large group he had arrived with (from the pre-event “Cocktails with the Headmaster” party held at the very apartment where Linsey of the Birkins had once told Grace that the doorman could hail her a taxi). She had even seen Malaga Alves come past her table, though she had not stopped. Which was just as well, since there had been no waiting name tag for her. She wasn’t surprised, and she wasn’t upset, that Jonathan hadn’t arrived yet. Jonathan’s eight-year-old patient had died two days before, a horrible thing that never got less horrible, despite the fact that it happened over and over again. The parents were Orthodox Jews and the