Admission (14 page)

“I wouldn’t,” said Martha. Martha’s tenure in Princeton admissions was easily double Portia’s own. She had seen—and, given
her girth, more than likely tasted—everything. “Hard as diamonds.”

“Oh. They look so pretty. And I’m so hungry.”

“Try those.” Martha pointed. “They came with a note about a vegan cookbook.”

“Vegan?” Portia frowned. She looked into the box on the table. It was a shoebox lined with waxed paper. The squares inside
looked dark, moist, and dense.

“Her own recipe. For her vegan cookbook in progress. They’re called ‘Health Bars.’ Don’t worry,” she told Portia, “they arrived
this morning. By overnight express.”

“I thought you threw the written stuff out,” Portia said, lifting a health bar from the box. Fulfilling her expectations,
it was weightier than it looked.

“Oh, we do, but I always read them first. There might be some information to transfer to the file. Besides, I feel bad for
them. I mean, these kids have gone to the trouble. Somebody should read what they have to say. You know,” she said, eyeing
Portia, “they’re actually better than they look.”

Portia inspected the square, supporting it with two hands. She took a cautious bite, filling her mouth with molasses, honey,
and packed dried fruit. She folded the rest into a paper towel. For later, she explained. “Corinne been in today?”

“Sure.” Martha nodded. “She was here. Loading up for her trip. What do you need?”

“Oh… whatever you have ready.”

Martha nodded. She got up and went to the files, where she pulled about fifty orange dockets identical to the ones Portia
was turning in.

“Where’s Corinne again?”

Martha considered. “Castilleja, I think. Is that just girls?”

“Uh-huh. Silicon Valley.”

“That’s the one, then. And a couple of schools in the East Bay. It was rescheduled from that time in May she hurt her back.”

“Right.” Portia nodded. It gave her some not very laudable satisfaction to think of Corinne Schreiber on a westbound flight
on this clear blue autumn Friday. Corinne, who had taken over the Pacific region with a certain poorly suppressed antipathy
toward her new assignment—indeed, the entire office had been treated to her ongoing and all too vocal resentment—had coasted
for years on the excuse of her young children at home, clinging zealously to her prior geographic area, the Mid-Atlantic.
She’d come to Princeton, her alma mater, from a college-counseling job at a private school in D.C., preceded by a decade in
the English Department at the same school. The Mid-Atlantic, she’d argued, allowed her to travel to schools and still be home
for her kids, a need few of her colleagues (recent college grads, the unmarried, and, like Portia, the childless) could claim.
Portia, naturally, had declined to be persuaded by this rationalization after the first couple of years. She felt penalized
for her childlessness, for her asserted independence, while she was every bit as old as Corinne and every bit—she was certain—as
tired. When Clarence had given her New England, she’d made free to suggest Corinne as her successor.

“Corinne doesn’t like to travel,” Clarence had remarked. “Because of her kids.”

Portia had frowned. But… weren’t Corinne’s kids both at Andover now? Her oldest was in his third year. Her youngest was starting
in September. Or perhaps she was mistaken.

She was not mistaken. The following week, after a high-decibel exchange in Clarence’s office, Corinne had become the admissions
officer in charge of the Pacific: California, Alaska, Hawaii, Washington, Oregon. There would be many long flights in her
future and many school visits, from sunny San Diego to snowy Nome and all points in between. Portia had offered to share her
list of great San Francisco restaurants. The offer was declined.

The Office of Admission, two flights up, was a corridor of small offices with pretty, leafy views. A few of Portia’s co-workers
preferred to take files home during the most intense reading periods, but most spent their autumn and winter months in these
rooms, crawling through their allotted folders and fielding calls from contacts in their regions. At the end of the corridor
was Clarence’s office, notably a far grander establishment than the smaller rooms Portia and her fellow officers occupied.
It had, for example, windows on three sides, a couch, and a small round table, and it came with a nonfunctioning but very
dignified fireplace. It also came with an assistant called Abby, who sat in an alcove just outside Clarence’s door, in a cubicle
plastered with photos of her Russian grandson. Abby, who had also worked for Martin Quilty, possessed an easygoing nature
in combination with organizational skills of military caliber. She had—and this was equally important—a range of phone voices
extending from sweet simulated ignorance to cunning brick wall and an uncanny knack of choosing the correct one for whoever
was on the line.

Portia carried Martha’s fifty files into her office and set them down on top of another stack, this one bound in a rubber
band and bearing a note from Corinne. Each application was reviewed by two officers before going to Clarence, committee, or
both, and Clarence had requested she serve as second reader on Corinne’s folders for this, her first year in the Pacific schools.
With the admissions season only just under way, Portia was already irritated by her colleague’s idiosyncratic spelling and
elusive script, not to mention her evident paranoia about coached applications.

Of course, Corinne was not alone in her antipathy toward paid college consultants and their influence. They all knew perfectly
well what was out there, primarily in the cities and wealthier suburbs, but now also, democratically, on the Internet, where
consultants of every stripe had hung out their virtual shingles, offering some artificial Rosetta stone for top-tier college
admissions. All of them shared her opinion of applicants “reverse engineered” by some self-proclaimed expert. How could any
admissions officer know—truly know—whether an applicant had honestly fulfilled the declaration he or she had signed on the
application itself—the one that read, “I certify that the essays are entirely my own work”—or whether some other person or
persons had advised, revised, or even written their essays for them? It was a laudable but doomed crusade. Yes, it went without
saying that students capable of paying up to $30,000 for a consultant to “work with them” on their essays and design their
applicant profiles had an unfair advantage, but it was also shortsighted to assume that any applicant to Princeton had not
had his or her essays at least vetted by
somebody
. The least savvy among them most likely had a parent check the spelling or an English teacher look over the syntax. Even
overworked college counselors with hundreds of college-bound seniors might take a moment to skim the essays of an applicant
to Princeton, especially if she or he intended to write a recommendation for that student. Trying to detect the sticky fingers
of a paid consultant seemed a poor use of time. And time was short enough.

There were mercifully few e-mail messages waiting for her. Some, from applicants in her region, reporting some new honor or
panicking about a perceived flaw in their applications, had been forwarded from the central admissions account downstairs.
She had e-mail from the college counselors at Boston Latin, Groton, and Putney, wanting to set up phone appointments, and
a message from Clarence asking if she’d gotten to the student from Worcester, Mass., the one the ice hockey coach had been
on his case about. She hadn’t. She couldn’t recall any hockey players at all, so far. This was the only e-mail she returned.

It was near dark by the time she left, that slender interlude when there is no more sunlight and the shadows begin to stretch.
Princeton, always beautiful, was somehow at its best just now, with the faintest smell of pine reaching her. She walked alongside
Cannon Green, so named for the Revolutionary War cannon buried muzzle down at its center—an ironically pacifist statement
for a university that had sent its sons to every American war since. She moved among the students, unable to resist her habitual
curiosity about them. Always, she wondered if she might recognize this petite girl in the oversize Princeton sweatshirt, or
this lanky African-American boy with the ponderous backpack, or the blond young man with a swimmer’s haircut and shoulders
who was laughing into a cell phone, merely from the on-paper selves she might have pored over, one or two or three or four
years before. It was an oddity of her work that she might know these young men and women so intimately from the records of
their accomplishments, their confessed secrets, their worries and ambitions, and yet when the flesh-and-blood applicants arrived
on campus a few months later, they were always strangers. Somehow, the folders turned into these bodies: high-spirited, intense,
beauteous, or plain, usually clever but sometimes quite dull. They looked like teenagers walking the campuses of Notre Dame
or Texas A&M. They sounded like kids at the mall or on the subway. The special, unique eighteen-year-olds, whose applications
had so thrilled Portia and her colleagues, or made them argue passionately for admission over wait list, or wait list over
rejection, had somehow morphed into these strangely ordinary beings. They chatted and texted away on their cell phones incessantly.
They clutched identical Starbucks containers and shouldered identical backpacks. They went to the U-Store and bought their
Princeton garb and so completed their transformations into Princeton students, disappearing into orange anonymity. This was
not, of course, to take away from their brilliance. They were still brilliant, still gifted, still passionate about everything
from Titian to nitrogen fixing in soybeans. They still wanted to give back, make things better, cure disease, and alleviate
poverty. They were good kids, ambitious kids. But they were so ordinary, too.

She drove home along Nassau Street, the bag of new files on the seat beside her and the window down. Now only minutes from
her house, she let herself feel, entirely feel, the stress and fatigue of the last couple of days—two flights, three school
visits, and a night in which surfeit of emotion had met lack of sleep. And sex. And, not least—though she was only, shamefully,
getting to this part now—the fact of her own transgression. The weight of it all exhausted her, and there was little she craved
more than a hot bath and an early night, to bed with her files, at least, if not early to sleep. She didn’t know what was
in the house to eat or what Mark’s plans were, but she didn’t want any distractions from the plan or, needless to say, any
discouragement. Turning onto her street, with the towering cherry tree in her front yard already visible at the end of the
block, she allowed herself the first hit of relief.

This was their second home in Princeton, the first being a nondescript ranch at the north end of town, not far from the shopping
center: a sterile place, irredeemably ugly. They had moved here five years before, to this neighborhood known as the Tree
Streets for its arboreal street names—Maple, Pine, Linden—but also as the Gourmet Ghetto because of its concentration of good
places to buy food and dine out. In Princeton, sadly, this was saying a good deal. On their arrival, the town had been a culinary
wasteland, with a single dull supermarket and only one other shop of note: an excellent fishmonger. The wonderful Princeton
purveyors she had read about in Betty Fussell’s gastronomic memoir,
My Kitchen Wars
—like the butcher who gamely ground pork and veal for clever, frustrated housewives in thrall to Julia Child—seemed to have
perished, and all good restaurants, if any had existed, had evidently fled along with them. But some small transformation
seemed to have taken hold, much of it in this cluster at the end of her own street: a natural foods market was now open and
a fish restaurant, a good coffee shop, a decent Chinese. These establishments kept Princeton hours, it was true, but Princeton
hours were themselves an improvement over Hanover, New Hampshire, hours. So she wasn’t unhappy. At least, not about food.

The house was a product of the town’s 1920s building boom, and it had a grace that had grown rarer with each passing decade
of Princeton construction. Few twenty-first-century tenants, like few twentieth-century tenants, had had the wit to leave
well enough alone, but this house had somehow managed to survive with what the magazines so annoyingly referred to as “good
bones.” Still, and in spite of the fact that she had postponed caring about things like how nice her house looked until she
actually lived in such a house, Portia could not seem to work up much enthusiasm for it. She ceded the decorations to Mark,
choosing only the deep green couch and the living room rug, which even she now acknowledged clashed uncomfortably with the
walls. Mainly, she kept it clean. Mark couldn’t. He was a tidier, but dirt… dirt was beyond his abilities. He seemed not to
understand the science of removing it. Worse, he seemed not to notice its existence, which frankly baffled her. Once—following
an experiment in which she had left a pile of swept dust in the center of the living room floor for six days, ten days, two
weeks, watching to see when he would, first, notice it and then, hopefully, take action to remove it—they had had a terrible
quarrel. It was the night of their party, the party they usually had in the week between Christmas and New Year’s, mainly
for his colleagues in the English Department, but also for academics visiting from overseas (“strays and waifs,” he called
them), and Mark had spent the day dutifully making the house ready, ferrying glasses from the basement, placing the chairs,
setting up the bar, all the while stepping carefully around the pile of dust on the floor. He didn’t see it. Or he didn’t
register it. Or he didn’t mind it. And as the hours ticked closer to the hour of the party, her nerves frayed. Around five,
she lost it and started screaming. By five twenty-five, she was thoroughly depleted and not remotely in the mood for their
now imminent party, but she had at least come round to his stated view on the matter: that her resentment was displaced, excessive,
not logical. After all, if she was so very troubled by the dirt on the floor, why hadn’t she removed it herself? Why did she
not remove it now? What was the point in being angry about it? And if it was true, as she claimed, that there were certain
things, certain difficulties, he simply failed to note, then weren’t there some synapses in her own domestic perceptions?
That porch fixture bulb he’d asked her to replace the day he’d left for a semester’s sabbatical in Oxford the previous year,
only to find it encrusted by cobwebs and every bit as dark on the day of his return? The fact that she had done not one thing
to implement her own aspirations for the “garden,” as she rather pathetically persisted in thinking of their uncultivated
front and backyards, had in fact done nothing for them at all beyond the overpriced mums she dutifully stuck in each fall
and the pansies from the supermarket she dutifully stuck in each spring? Her gardening aspirations had outlasted her shelter
magazine phase by a few years, but while she had gotten as far as charts and diagrams for the intended plantings, nothing
had come of them. She had made nothing come of them. Nothing grew.