Admission (51 page)

“Can I be excused?” said Nelson.

His grandmother said, “Yes,” and his father said, “No,” simultaneously. Nelson, weighing his options, stayed put.

“Okay,” Diana said. “I don’t want to be the heavy here, but can I just say, as the mother of a prospective applicant—I mean,
to places like Princeton, if not Princeton itself—that it’s very frustrating. We’re all trying to figure out what you want.
And it feels like every time we figure out the rules, you just change them. One year it’s ‘well-rounded students.’ The next
it’s minorities who play the flute,” she said bitterly. Then, as if remembering that it wasn’t supposed to be about her, she
rephrased her conclusion. “These kids want to be able to give you what you
want
.”

And therein, thought Portia with a regretful look at her cooling dinner, resided the problem. Or one of the problems. She
took a sip of her wine and decided she might as well say it, pearls before swine though it almost certainly was. But there
was always a chance that Jeremiah, Kelsey, Simone, or even Nelson might hear it and take it to heart.

“We’re very much aware of that,” she told them. “We understand the frustration. And I don’t think there’s anyone in my field
right now who isn’t worried about what this is doing to the kids. And I don’t just mean the competition, though that’s bad
enough. I mean what the process is doing to them psychologically.”

“Psychologically,” said John’s mother, as if she were unsure of the word’s meaning.

“We’ve got twenty-five percent of all college applications in this country going to one percent of the schools. And that one
percent includes the only fifteen American colleges who accept less than twenty percent of their applicants. We know there
are parents who are doing everything they can to game the system. They’re having their kids diagnosed ADHD or learning disabled
so they can get extra time on the SAT. Now that ETS has stopped denoting which students have been given extra time, there’s
no reason not to. But the
message
. To the
kids,
” she said, looking at them. “They’ve been tutored in everything, for years, whether they need it or not. So what they come
to understand is: I’m not good enough to do it on my own. I need help to be successful.”

“That’s terrible,” Deborah said emotionally.

“Yes. And how can that not carry forward into their adult lives? I think it already impacts their experience as college students.
We have students who freak out when they no longer have that support. They’re e-mailing their tutors and sending them their
papers for review. They feel fraudulent.”

“What do you mean, fraudulent?” said Diana.

Portia sighed. “I had a pretty scary conversation last year with one of my friend Rachel’s babysitters. She’s a senior at
Princeton now. She told me a lot of her friends have a kind of disassociation. They’ve spent years assembling this perfect
self to display to us—to people who are going to make these important decisions about them. But sometimes they don’t feel
they’re that person at all. They don’t feel smart or capable in the least, and of course when they get to Princeton they’re
surrounded by their peers, who have done just as good a job of assembling this competent veneer, so then they feel as if they’re
the only fake in the bunch. This girl, Samantha, was telling me there’s so much self-doubt. When I heard that, I suddenly
felt as if I’ve been doing these kids a disservice.”

“They expect a lot from themselves,” John said.

“Oh, my God. So much. I honestly wonder if we’re not creating, or at least abetting, this surge of anxiety and depression
in college-aged kids. And then there’s the other side of the coin, which the babysitter also pointed out to me. Which is that
some of them get to college and they just let all those balls they’ve been juggling for years fall out of their hands. They’ve
worked themselves into the ground to get in. They feel like they missed out on slacking off. So now that they’re in, they’re
going to have that lazy teenager thing they never had in high school. Seriously, the whole system. I wonder about it sometimes.
But this is where we are. In a few years, it will probably look different.”

John smiled. “Maybe you should evolve in the direction of taking slackers,” he suggested. “Video game players.”

“Yeah!” Nelson grinned.

“Comic book readers. Recreational shoppers,” said John.

“Facebook addicts,” said Kelsey.

“They’re
all
Facebook addicts,” said Diana, sounding almost likable.

“We call these people ‘late bloomers,’” Portia said, smiling.

“I was a late bloomer,” Deborah announced. “I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with myself when I graduated from college.
I sort of let myself get recruited by Procter and Gamble. I spent two years in Cincinnati working on Cascade detergent.”

“This is a little-known fact about Deborah,” John said fondly. “She is directly responsible for the fact that the background
color on the Cascade box is green.”

“That’s true,” Deborah said. “It was a remarkable accomplishment. I had to fight off the blue and orange factions. But strangely,
even such a compelling victory was not enough to keep me in product management. I decided I wanted to teach.”

“I think it doesn’t matter how you get there,” John said. “Just that you get there. If you get to the right place, you’re
lucky.”

“Which means,” said Simone, who had made a meal entirely of potatoes, “that you suppose you are.”

“Good God, I hope so.” John’s mother laughed. “We had to sit through Africa and inner-city Boston. I was terrified about where
he’d be going next.”

“Gaza!” his father said grimly. “Sierra Leone.”

John shrugged. “Don’t they need teachers in Sierra Leone?”

“But not you,” his mother said, alarmed.

“No.” He sighed. “Not me. I like where I am. And I’m not taking Nelson to Sierra Leone.”

His mother and father both looked at Nelson.

“No way,” said Nelson. “Can I be excused now?”

The stage creaked under my feet as I strode across the wooden boards. I had prepared for this moment my whole life, from the
first scales my little fingers were drilled to make, to the trembling solo pieces, the Etudes, Nocturnes, Marches, Minuets
and finally the very difficult piece, Liszt’s Waldesrauschen, that I was about to play. I could see my parents and grandmother
in the front row of the theater, and my teacher and his wife beside them. If I succeeded, I would win the concerto competition
of the New England Piano Teachers’ Association. But my fingers wouldn’t move.

T
his time, all pertinent parties agreed that he could go, so he left, followed directly by Jeremiah, Simone, and then Deborah.
Soon after, Kelsey and Diana went home. Kelsey stopped at the door to say that Portia had given her a lot to think about (which
Portia found oddly touching), and Diana actually hugged her and said she hoped they’d meet again. In an official context?
Portia thought automatically and cynically, but there was something in the warmth of that hug she hadn’t expected. Approval,
it occurred to her. Of her appearance at the family table and in her brother’s life? Clearly, even Diana had a grasp of the
Deborah dynamic that eluded her. But all seemed, if not overtly well, then at least well-ish, and Portia was surprised, as
she watched Diana’s SUV take off into the winter night, to find that she was feeling strangely content.

The rest of the evening slipped away from her. She seemed to lack the will to make any kind of decision. Every time she thought
she must leave, or at least think about leaving, she let herself be deterred: clearing the table, a game of chess with Jeremiah
(actually three, so quickly was he able to dispatch her), and even an awkward but at least basically good-natured conversation
with Simone about her current obsession with Simone Weil (of whom—happily—Portia knew nothing, which set the stage for Simone
to be strident, which seemed to please her very much). Once, months earlier, she’d imagined Simone to be named in honor of
Simone de Beauvoir, and this turned out to be true. But Simone, contrary soul that she was, had recently ferreted out an amusing
little factoid about her namesake and took a certain pleasure in publishing it: that de Beauvoir had scored second highest
on the French university entrance exams of 1928, the year of her application. Weil, her classmate, had come in first.

All roads, thought Portia, listening and nodding as Simone talked on, lead to admissions. Or was that so only in her own mired
life? How was it that she had come to stand at this one specific portal and all the world had serendipitously lined up to
gain entry? It was a narcissistic way of seeing things, she knew, and that was odd, because she was not a very good narcissist
and had no great need to place herself at the center of the universe. She believed, absolutely, that if she were to abandon
her post, her profession, and turn what talents she had to something else—anything else—the loss of stature would not really
diminish her. She had never, for example, had much relish for the moment of panic-laced fascination that usually occurred
when someone learned her job title. She had never taken pleasure in the undeniable power intrinsic to her work, except where
it gave her the chance to extract some young, gifted person from an environment of limitations. (And who would not take pleasure
in that?) All of it was the job and not her. And the job was so interesting, did it really matter that she herself was not?

By the end of the evening, Simone had started to warm to the idea of Penn, and even more to Swarthmore, which Portia happened
to think would be an excellent place for her. She was a smart girl with her own ideas, prickly in some of the good ways and
certainly promising. Portia thought she would thrive away from home and away from her mother, though her mother had done a
formidable job raising her. She might do anything with herself, as long as it involved advocacy and perseverance, both clear
strengths. Portia did not say so, but she also hoped Simone would think about Princeton, where she would certainly be challenged
and where opinionated women would always be welcome, and she invited the girl to get in touch with her if she wanted any guidance
along the way. This alone, it occurred to her, made her glad she had come home with John and stayed this long. And the realization
that Deborah was someone she might truly like, and that John (if he aged as his father had) would likely be handsome until
the end of his life, and that, in a very general way, it was good to move among people who were basically nice and interested
and welcoming and did not know her very well, and who seemed to at least entertain the idea of her being with him, with John,
without obvious horror.

With John, she thought, reflexively shaking her head at the oddity of this preposition. Two months ago, she’d been intractably
partnered with another man. Two days ago, she’d been adrift in a freezing house with an untended fridge and, to put it kindly,
distracted personal hygiene. She resisted the notion of rescue. She was not particularly interested in rescue. Since the age
of twenty she had supported herself, financially, emotionally. It was one of the few things she was actually proud of, though
she understood it had come at some cost. Like, she thought, the cost of being
with
another person. Surely she was not really capable of being
with
anyone, even this passionate, tender, settled man, at once so solid and so miraculously permeable. She also doubted very
much that she deserved him.

Simone and her mother drifted upstairs, not far behind John’s parents, who said a brisk good night in the living room doorway,
each clutching a matching black mug of tea. John took Nelson up, but Jeremiah lingered to swiftly demolish Portia at chess
one last time. He had grown almost mellow by the end of the day, a different animal from the wired Toni Morrison fan in the
car that morning, and she felt as if she were getting perhaps her first good look at him here, bent over the chess board,
chewing the soft part of his thumb but not, oddly, the nail. She wanted suddenly to last a little longer in the game, not
really to prolong it or even to salve her ego, but to get more time with this Jeremiah. His hair, in the light from matching
chinoiserie lamps, glowed black in glossy, looping curls. That was an Armenian thing, she supposed. Where the almost feminine
mouth, pale skin, and extra-long arms came from had to be closer to home: mom or dad, or grandparents. He was closing in on
her king, tightening the vise, wrapping things up. She resisted where she could, but it was pointless to do more than cast
distractions in his path. Besides, her attention was not on the board. And there were things she wished she could talk to
him about that were ethically out of bounds.

Why had he stayed so long in a school that must have frustrated and disappointed him on a daily basis? Was there not one teacher
he could have gone to for help, one mentor willing to take up a brilliant misfit? Why had his parents not done what they could
to see him accommodated academically? Deerfield and Northfield were not far from Keene, and a school like St. Paul’s might
have found scholarship money for a brilliant New Hampshire student. Why had he not looked ahead to college, at least, as a
goal? Why, overall, did he not seem more… well, ambitious? Surely it was not enough to sit reading forever. Surely he felt
some compulsion to get up and do something with what he’d learned or add to the body of learning in some way. There were plenty
of applicants to places like Princeton who wanted no more than that: a chance to add to the sum total of what was known. And
that was fine. But nowhere in Jeremiah’s application had he indicated such a wish. What did he want? From the university?
From himself?