Admission (19 page)

A
t the age of sixty-eight, Susannah Nathan was still, somehow, a firebrand in the making. Despite committed attachment to a
long series of social, political, and creative endeavors, Portia’s mother had never found the vector capable of transforming
her into a Gloria Steinem, Alice Waters, Wilma Mankiller, or Twyla Tharp. She could last only a brief time in any setting
before becoming convinced that she was needed elsewhere. She had campaigned for women and immigrants, early sex education,
and subsidized housing, sanctuary for victims of male violence and of mandatory drug sentencing. She had toiled against consuming
the flesh of animals and the slaughter of virgin forests. She had marched and rallied and fund-raised and lent her considerable
energies to any number of efforts both local and global, but always as a foot soldier, never a general—forever the woman holding
the sign in the background, as some astonishing beacon of energy and inspiration stepped up to the microphone. Outwardly,
over the years, very few things had remained constant in Susannah’s life. In fact, there was only one thing that had traveled
with her wherever she went. That thing was money, and lots of it.

Regrettably, for an aspiring revolutionary, she had been born into a family of materialism and privilege, and unlike some
of the others, she had never quite had the wherewithal to let it go. Initially, she had stuck to the proven path, commuting
to Barnard from her parents’ home in Great Neck and making a real effort to do the great work expected of her, which was to
secure a Columbia-educated future physician or attorney and marry him. Even as graduation neared without her having accomplished
this basic goal, no one in her family admitted to any apprehension about her. Susie was an excellent student, and her parents
were modern people: Didn’t Judaism celebrate the intelligence of women? Why shouldn’t she get another degree? A master’s,
or a… teaching thing? (It was good to work with children before you had your own. It showed you what to expect.) The alarm
bells failed to ring as Susannah made her application to a university far, far away in California, an about-to-be-roiling
university, a university already uncomfortably odd. Ostensibly, she had gone west to study psychology, but her interest, already
tenuous, did not survive the realization that graduate work in the field focused less on feelings than on dry assertions tested
with live mice. Also, she was not personally courageous. During her first year on that soon-to-be-tumultuous campus, she joined
a sorority, the only graduate student in the university to do so. At best, she was fixed in place. At worst, moving backward.

Then, finally, she got the jolt she was waiting for. That spring, only months before Mario Savio would seize a microphone
on Sproul Plaza and declare Berkeley, California, the center of the new universe, Susannah, who was manning a fund-raising
stand on Shattuck with some sorority sisters, was noticed by an artist (also dope dealer) from St. Louis, whose street sculptures
were arrayed for sale on the pavement. The artist (and dope dealer) had cast aside his own familial trappings and invested
his tuition money (originally intended—O irony—for Princeton) in a particularly fecund patch of Northern California, where
a hale and potent strain of cannabis grew as cheerfully as the kudzu back home. He beckoned Susannah to his makeshift stall
on the pavement. So much for that elusive Jewish physician. So much for psychology.

He, at least, was entrepreneurial. Many years (and two prison terms) later, he would still be living on the proceeds of that
thwarted Princeton tuition and that very prosperous hectare of soil. With him, the following year, Susannah would leave Berkeley
and move north to live at peace with nature. With him, a couple of years after that, she would try urban homesteading in Harlem.
Without him, when that went south, she herself would head south to attempt life as an emancipated human in a womyn’s collective,
in Baltimore. Then north again, first to tidy up odds and ends (and collect the lion’s share of her fortune) in the house
her parents had left her in Great Neck, and so to Northampton. Ah, Northampton. Home of the listing Victorian painted some
unusual color. Home of the rigorously divided household responsibilities and rotating cooking duties. Home of the Bluestocking,
the deconstructing genius scholarship girl, the earth mother therapist who moonlighted with her guitar at the Iron Horse Music
Hall, singing, “There’s something about the women in my life…” In Northampton, Susannah picked up a legal mate and produced
a daughter, not that those two acts were at all connected, and continued to pass from stand to stand, from purpose to purpose,
from partner to decreasingly viable partner, before, at last, migrating north to the eventual destination of not a few of
her friends: Vermont. But through every outward change, she held on to her money. And despite the chorus of disapproval, the
dressings-down at consciousness raising, the patient counseling of gurus and sisters, not to mention the pointed and powerfully
articulated views of the men she sometimes cohabited with, Susannah declined to consider that a problem.

The money, which had been tied up in trust until Susannah was twenty-five and was hers outright thereafter, came from two
sources: first, a maternal grandparent who had been consumed by anxiety all through the summer of 1929 and finally given way
to it in early October of that year, fleeing the stock market to the derision of his friends; second, her own father, who
had a (not quite aboveboard) knack for knowing where most of the postwar Levittowns on Long Island were going to get built.
The fortune these visionary men would leave to Portia’s mother was not of immense proportions, but it was unignorable money.
Safety-net money. Property-in-the-community-of-one’s-choice money. It was don’t-have-to-work money, fuck-you-I’m-out-of-here
money, and at-least-I-know-my-kid-can-go-to-college money, just the thing for a responsible citizen who needed to make art
or wanted to give everything to the poor. But Susannah was not an artist, and though she dutifully raised funds for the poor
in their many guises, she never gave away any of her own money. Instead, she put it into quite a sophisticated portfolio,
had it managed by a series of extremely smart young men at a white-shoe firm on Water Street, and directed a laudably modest
percentage of the interest to be deposited regularly into her checking account, where it mimicked a subsistence wage or welfare
stipend.

She refrained from telling any of this to her daughter, who was accordingly stunned, years later, to happen upon a $20,000
check for her college tuition, printed in an old-world typeface on a pale beige check and from an extremely WASPy-sounding
bank in New York Portia had never heard of. It would shame her, later, that she had just assumed she was on financial aid
at Dartmouth, like everyone else up there who didn’t come from obvious wealth. When she confronted her mother it all came
out, and without shame. So she had some money saved. So what? Was Portia implying that she had led a life of deprivation?
Was there some terribly important thing she had been denied? Some crucial possession she had been forced to forgo? Had she
suffered terribly?

Of course, she had not. In fact, Portia had some difficulty articulating the sense of dismay, of… well, almost
betrayal,
she was feeling. It went without saying that their life, the life of her childhood, had not been one of suffering and deprivation.
It hadn’t been luxurious, of course. Their bookshelves were salvaged boards and cinder blocks, like the bookshelves of everyone
else they knew (and, for that matter, laden with most of the same books). They ate their own tomatoes, and Susannah bartered
baby-sitting for the services of a handyman when the ceiling started to bow. Her mother hit the yard sales and rummage sales
for every thread Portia wore, every toy she played with and book she read. Food came in bulk from the Co-Op. Gifts were handwritten
cookbooks containing Susannah’s recipe for wheaten bread, her brown rice stir-fry. She also knitted a lot. But while there
were utilitarian things around them, things they needed, things to make life simpler or better organized, Susannah seemed
thoroughly averse to the idea of acquisition for its own sake and terribly proud of her abstemious character. (Portia had
sometimes heard her mother proclaim, with glee, that an entire society of consumers like herself would bring the economy crashing
down within days.) She and her mother did not take the kinds of vacations her future classmates at Dartmouth were taking,
to winter sport meccas, capitals of culture, white beaches. On holidays, mother and daughter visited friends and Susannah’s
former lovers in their mindful communities or off-the-grid last stands. It helped that Portia was not covetous herself. But
the oddity of it, the irony of it, was something she had never been able to stop chewing over. After all, it was one thing
to
have
money and something else
not
to have it. But to have it and, as far as she could tell, ignore it? For all that time? This paradox would preoccupy her
for years. If you had money and didn’t want to spend it, why not give some of it away? On the other hand, if you had it and
didn’t want to give it away, why not, you know, buy yourself something nice every now and then?

The year after her daughter started college, Susannah sold the Northampton house—at a loss, of course. (That plumber? Whose
services she had bartered for babysitting? He was neither gifted nor licensed, let alone bonded. The resulting mess would
require a massive reduction in the sale price.) Then she resigned her chairmanship of the Pioneer Valley Food Co-Op and her
membership in the Northampton Fellowship of Reconciliation, found a successor to lead the Pioneer Valley chapters of NARAL
and Amnesty, and moved north.

Vermont, it seemed clear to Portia, was destined to become one great retirement complex for lefty seniors, not to mention
an outstanding investment opportunity for the right kind of entrepreneur. (Organic all-you-can-eat buffets? Collectively run
and Hemlock Society–endorsed continuing care facilities? Health clubs pulsating to a Jefferson Airplane sound track?) Specifically,
Susannah was bound for Hartland, where two of her friends had decamped some years before, pooling their funds to buy, renovate,
and generally civilize a hundred-year-old farmhouse on twenty hilltop acres. The friends, both women, were cohabitants but
not lovers. One was a weaver, one a schoolteacher-turned-folksinger, both committed vegans and technophobes. Their domestic
arrangement, in its eighth year at the time of Susannah’s arrival, had lasted longer than both women’s marriages and was,
by any account, a success. Then Susannah moved in.

“Call your mother,” Portia thought, jolting awake the morning after the dinner party, the cold air hitting her exposed shoulder
as it came uncovered. She was alone in the bed but hadn’t been for long. At three she’d been wakened by the suck, slap, of
the refrigerator downstairs and noted then that Mark had only just gotten up. Which meant that he had previously come home,
undressed, and entered the bed—all without waking her. Now he might be anywhere: in the bathroom, the kitchen, his office.
He might be at Small World, drinking his habitual wake-up espresso and plowing through the
Times
. He might be at his desk in McCosh Hall. How much time would pass before they came back to it? And would they come back to
it at all? This sort of thing had happened before, she freely admitted: little jolts of the needle, measuring the years they
had lived together, little dots that had never connected to form any sort of linked narrative but remained in situational
isolation, though Portia could remember each and every one of them, pain-filled nights of no sleep, bleary, acrid mornings.
Somehow they had always passed. And this one, she supposed, would as well.

After all, it came to her, making her way downstairs and pouring herself what remained of the coffee Mark had made earlier
that morning, they had both been tired. Mark had cooked single-handedly to give dinner to his friends and colleagues, and
the evening had mired in… well, not strife. Not acrimony. But there was perhaps an absence of good feeling. It hadn’t been
a disaster, just not a success. Not the warm welcome he must have wanted to extend to his new colleague from the old country.
She ought to have tried harder, Portia thought. Stuck to local real estate (that staple of Princeton conversation) and supermarkets,
the new plan for downtown, the ongoing restaurant black hole in which they dwelt. She ought to have sold the town the way
she sold the university, and she had not done that, and for the worst of reasons: because she was tired and cranky and racked
with… well,
something,
about the fact that she had gone to bed with a man who wasn’t Mark, and she had forgotten about the dinner and was predisposed
to dislike
anyone
who walked in her door and required more than the most modest of effort on her part. She would apologize to him. Then she
would call Helen and offer to take her to lunch, or out to the flea market in Lambertville, or something she might enjoy,
and through this penance she would restore herself and her home.

Reaching into the refrigerator, she looked past the plastic wrap–covered bowl of goopy leftover chicken Marbella, not because
it seemed unappetizing (the dish was, annoyingly, often better the next day), but because it now felt entwined with what had
happened last night and bore a kind of taint. She put milk in her cup and placed the carton back on the shelf.

Portia resisted the unfurled
New York Times
on the kitchen table and took her coffee back upstairs, intent on working through four or five of the weekend folders before
she got up properly. The Wild Oats receipt and its note were on her nightstand, left atop the unfurled paperback novel she
had given up on the previous month. Portia’s heart sank anew. Her mother’s tone of command had an uncanny way of working itself
through all media, no matter the filter or the remove. Even here, on this pink-striped slip of paper, there was a sense of
imperative and imminent offense. How much time had passed since her call? The clock was ticking.