Admission (34 page)

“Really?”

“Yes. Really. And I didn’t even have your excuse. Susannah made sure I had a thorough sex education years before I needed
it.”

“So is that why you freaked out in the doctor’s office?”

Portia considered this carefully. “My life is a little intense right now. I don’t really want to go into the details. Look”—she
straightened in her chair—“Caitlin. I’d appreciate your not mentioning what I just said to Susannah. To anyone, actually.
I had a tough decision to make, just like you. I didn’t share it with her at the time, and I don’t particularly want to now.”

“Oh.” She nodded energetically. “Yeah, no problem. So… ,” she said carefully, unwilling to let go of this entirely, “I guess
you do believe in abortion, then.”

“Well, I believe in it, yes. I’m not in
favor
of it. I mean, it’s not a
good
thing. But not having the option is worse. Better not to be in those circumstances in the first place.”

“Totally. Hey, should we go back?”

“Oh. Yes, I think so.”

Portia stood and picked up her coat. Caitlin took her parka off the back of her chair. The bottles in her plastic bag clanked
together as she picked it up. “What’s that?” she asked Portia as they crossed to the door. She was looking at the dark green
folder Portia carried.

“It’s an application to Dartmouth.”

“You’re applying to Dartmouth?” Caitlin laughed. “I thought you already went to Dartmouth.”

“No, I just, I like to keep up with what other Ivy League schools are doing with the application format. Of course it’s all
online, but I just keep them in my office at school. Hey, would you like this?”

Caitlin stopped. They were outside on the pavement now, in the quickly fading light. “Really?”

“Why not? There’s no harm in looking. You can apply next year if you want. You can even apply in the next few days if you
get going.”

“Are you kidding? They’re not going to take me. I’m having a baby!”

“You’re having a very unusual life experience for a teenage girl, one which is testing your character. It’s already changed
your life. What you have to say about that could make for a very interesting essay. Of course, I don’t know what your grades
were like.”

Dumbfounded, Caitlin could manage only a nod. “Good. I mean, I didn’t have much to work with.”

“Okay, we can talk about that. Here,” she said, holding out the green packet.

Caitlin took it. She stared at it. She seemed dazed. “Are you sure about this?” she said finally.

“Well, no.” Portia laughed. “But stranger things have happened.”

READING SEASON

My primary extracurricular activity is reading science books. I’m not an athlete, and I find groups a little frustrating,
as it’s difficult to identify peers who are interested in the material I’m interested in, and who are capable of discussing
science and mathematics at my level of activity.

S
he came home, the day after New Year’s, to take inventory.

The house, from without, was dusted with unbroken snow. Mail was heaped on the porch chair, and frustrated slips from UPS
and FedEx were stuck into the outer storm door. Clearly, no one had been here for over a week, and she indulged herself in
a moment of extra bitterness over the message conveyed to the neighborhood:
They’re out of town, come on in and make yourself at home!
Mark’s car was gone.

Portia let herself inside, wary and prepared to be bruised, but no major changes were immediately apparent. The house seemed
intact, furniture and works of art in place, one early stack of mail neatly on the hall table. He had spent time here, then,
closer to the beginning of her trip than to the end. He had gone about his routines, fulfilled his ordinary duties, even as
he extracted himself from the premises. Perishables had been removed from the refrigerator and the breadbox, with plastic,
glass, and metal rinsed out and placed in the recycling bin. A copy of
The New York Times,
dated the day before Christmas, had also been responsibly recycled. There was a local number written in pen on one corner
of the front page, but Portia resisted the brief urge to dial it. Real estate agent? Moving company? Surely he knew Helen’s
number by heart. Oh, thought Portia, wounded by a new thought: Attorney?

Obviously, they weren’t married. They had talked about it once or twice, then let the subject drift away without resolution.
It seemed clear that neither needed the ceremony, but at the same time, there was a wealth of documentation between them.
They shared ownership of the house and the checking account and served as primary beneficiaries of each other’s wills and
life insurance policies. They had been more responsible, she had sometimes thought, than many of the married couples she’d
known, in which one or both partners had such anxiety or control issues about money that they couldn’t meld accounts or titles,
couples in which his paycheck went to him and hers to her, in which he held title to the condo while she kept the weekend
place in her name. She and Mark had shaken their heads about these couples, over their shared breakfast at their shared table.
They had felt superior to the husbands and wives they knew who seemed not even to like each other. She had always liked Mark.
She had not, of course, always wanted to tell him everything, and she’d supposed that was all right. Was it not all right?
Had he not, as she’d assumed, told everything to her, or at least everything important? He had an ex and a child and complicated
relationships with both. He had a sister he did not like, who had a husband he did not like even more. He had a sense of frailty
about his body (which, when they’d first met, had been a very English body, thin chested, gangly… scrawny, she supposed, though
she had always found it comfortingly awkward), an atonal voice, teeth that had not benefited from fluoride, in the water or
anywhere else. He had a secret appetite for whodunits and became irritated if the mysteries were too obscure or too obvious.
He had a tender loyalty to the sound track of his youth, a truly shameful parade of Top of the Pops offenses: Culture Club,
Spandau Ballet, Bananarama. Even, God forbid, Wham! She had been known to come home to these affronts, opening their door
to George Michael, informing her (at his most repellent) that he wanted
her sex
. Mark kept this stash of small embarrassments by the CD player in the kitchen.

They were gone. She discovered this after she had stopped looking for things that were gone, things she thought he might have
taken with him, that she could be angry or bereft not to find in their places, but those things were all where she had left
them: the watercolor of dunes they’d bought the summer they rented a cottage in Wellfleet, the huge and heavy copper stockpot
he’d found at the Lambertville flea market, an insane bargain at ten bucks, even the 1820 edition of Shelley’s
Prometheus Unbound,
which Mark had bought from an Oxford bookseller with the windfall from some student prize. Portia was amazed to find this
last item in its place. And when she did find it, on the bookshelf in their bedroom, she sat on the bed, stunned by an intense
feeling of relief.

Past the anger at his betrayal, the humiliation of knowing he was already—or would soon be—squiring a visibly pregnant Englishwoman
around campus, the as yet unexplored jealousy she had desperately been holding off, it was only at this moment clear to her
that she wanted him not to have left, or at any rate to be coming back now that he had made his point. (His point? Portia
thought. That he was finding her lacking in some way? That he wanted another child? Perhaps, as Clarence Porter had so succinctly
put it, that she required a little “shaking up”?) She doubted very much that this would happen. Mark was nothing if not decisive.
Every decision they had ever made—from their moving in together, to accepting jobs at Princeton, to far less significant things
like whom to invite for dinner or what movie to see—had been made deliberately and not revisited. He wasn’t leaving her, in
other words. He had already left.

Portia, not surprisingly, soon discovered that she did not much like being home. The house, despite its eerie absence of absent
things, was not a comfortable place, and there was nothing compelling her to be here. She had no wish to stay and face the
obvious tasks: doing laundry, making shopping lists, clearing a path to the front door through settled, heavy snow. The number
of messages glowing in red on the answering machine could not yet be faced, and she wondered if it wasn’t possible to just
start over with a new machine and a new number. (Surely the phone company was well versed in domestic upheaval. Surely the
abandoned were eternally lined up at Verizon and Sprint, claiming they could never start fresh without seven altogether different
digits, or at least the same digits in a different order.) Failing this, she could simply toss both and decline to replace
them.

Standing in the dull silence of her foyer, Portia understood that she had no clear idea of what to do with herself, except
to get away from this place. Methodically, she considered and rejected other places to be, including the gym, the supermarket
at the end of her street, any public space downtown. At any of these, Mark and Helen might be lurking, ready to display their
happiness and gestational glow. With each locale, indeed, came a jolt of distress, like a shot of black ink through the system,
feathering out to each extremity before fading. It was the return of pain, its forces rested and restored during her short
distraction and ready with a reconsidered battle plan. Considering her new circumstances, there seemed to be only one place
she could retreat to, and realizing this, Portia duly began her retreat, locking the front door behind her and picking her
way over the hard snow, back to her car. She had been home less than half an hour. She had been able to stand being home for
only half an hour. She had the sense, suddenly, of running before a wave.

Moments later, she was cruising downtown for a parking spot. The town was wide open, and she pulled in opposite Nassau Hall,
telling herself that it was really a rational, laudable thing to go to work late in the afternoon on a day when the rest of
the campus was still and stony silent. This time of year, after all, was not a vacation for
her
. The application deadline had only just come and gone, and so had commenced reading season, a tunnel of stress and weighty
decisions, ringing phones, an e-mail in-box that filled at a rate of four messages per minute: students terrified they had
mistyped their Social Security numbers, guidance counselors duty bound to report that the applicant (along with the rest of
the football team) had just been given a citation for disorderly conduct, and always—
always
—parents. Parents! Susannah had been entirely uninvolved in Portia’s own college search. She remembered one heated discussion
about applying to Smith—reactionary playground for future Republican wives or hotbed of radical lesbianism?—but apart from
that, it had more or less been her own show. Had Susannah read her essays, checked for spelling errors? Had she offered to
hunt down friends or cousins of her own friends or cousins with connections to the various admissions offices (misguided though
that surely would have been, even back then)? Had she, God forbid, herself called up the offices, demanding to speak to whoever
was in charge about the brilliance and promise of her daughter?

Compared with the parents Portia was dealing with now, Susannah looked like a saint.

Portia hauled her bags of folders through the FitzRandolph Gate. Nassau Hall, Princeton University’s nerve center and, for
a few heady months in 1777, home to the infant U.S. government, looked majestic in the failing light, with its great preening
tigers and fluttering ivy, and behind it the campus unfurled, stalwart buildings linked by deserted walkways. Looking up at
West College, she saw no lights at all: not Clarence’s corner office (he and his partner were in New Haven with friends),
not Dylan’s (visiting his parents in Houston), not Corinne’s (with the kids on some island). That she was here after nightfall
was not in itself unusual. In January, February, and March, as the intense period of reading gave way to the still more intense
period of committee meetings, all of them frequently worked late into the night, percolating along in a fittingly collegial
rhythm. She had sometimes, certainly, been the last one out the door, intent on making it through western Oregon or the Archbishop
Mitty School or the imperious baseball coach’s most urgent requests before allowing herself to head for home. But coming in
like this, alone, in the darkness, to an empty building—in all these years, it was a first. The unbroken line of dark windows
was definitely disconcerting, but at the same time she felt some relief. There would be no one up there to question her.