Admission (55 page)

“Obviously, he told them that was her name,” Portia said to Rebecca, defending the Jewish honor of this unknown girl.

“Ya think?” Rebecca laughed. “But like I said, he’s a sweet guy. I just don’t want him getting the wrong idea.”

That this would be accomplished by shoving another Jewish girl in his face was a notion that did not occur to her until later,
but by then, of course, she was well over the cliff and unlikely to think rationally about much of anything.

When he arrived, knocking on the open door and cradling a tired cactus by way of a hostess gift, she recognized him right
away, the blank outline filled in, and the colors, shading, texture, voice, in a brilliant, almost violent moment. By the
time he crossed the threshold, he had been transformed from that dark, backlit body to something complex and whole, a fully
assembled eighteen-year-old male who could hit a stranger with a lacrosse ball and then strip off his own expensive shirt
to wipe away the various aftereffects, a careless person who had taken care of her. That he did not experience the same rush
of recognition was actually a boon, Portia felt, because she needed time to recover from the fact of him, appearing, entering,
taking the armchair behind her after giving Rebecca a generous embrace. In just that tiny passage of time, she had found herself
cataclysmically in love, a state she was surprised to recognize so easily, given that she had never inhabited it before. The
ground untrustworthy, the surface of her skin burning for contact, she needed all available restraint to keep from saying
things, touching things, simply flinging herself against him.

By then, others had arrived: theater types, who erroneously (as it would turn out) considered Portia one of their tribe. Conversation
was puttering along, lubricated by wine and a certain jovial superiority, which stemmed from the assumption that all present
had shunned the absurd and anti-intellectual ritual of fraternity rush.

“Those pathetic drones,” said someone, a Thespian from—he had earlier noted—Meryl Streep’s New Jersey hometown. “Trotting
off down the Row with their plastic cups, ready to waste the next four years on beer pong.”

“At least it gets them out of the way,” said someone else, a girl who practically lived at Sanborn, the English Department
library, surrounded by her journals and poems in progress. “I’d rather they barfed on one another instead of on me.”

This comment produced no spark of recognition in Tom Standley, to Portia’s relief.

“Well, I rushed a fraternity,” he said instead, not smugly so much as perplexed. “I’m excited, actually.”

They all looked at him in mild shock, as if he were a newly declared atheist at Bible study. This changed the entire chemistry
in the room.

“Yeah?” said Rebecca. “Which one?”

Again, with no sense at all of its significance, he named the WASPiest, wealthiest, and most thoroughly Republican house on
campus.

“Ugh,” said one of the girls, extravagantly repelled.

“All those
Dartmouth Review
guys are in there,” said another, as if this were likely to dissuade him.

“Yeah,” said Tom. “But you know, they don’t push it on you. They’re good guys.”

“Hitler was very fond of his dog, I believe,” Daniel said in a treacly voice. “And of course, he was an artist, too.”

“Daniel,” Rebecca scolded.

“I look at it like this,” said Tom. “The next couple of years, we’re all going to be running around like crazy. I’m going
to France sometime. Next year or junior year. And I want to do an internship at this law firm in Boston. I keep thinking,
when I come back here, half my friends are going to be away off campus. And it’ll be nice to have a smaller group of guys
to hang out with. You know, not as impersonal as a dorm.”

Unfortunately for the assembled, this was a difficult argument to dismiss out of hand. Many of the campus’s social woes stemmed
from the scheme known as the Dartmouth Plan, which required students to spend a portion of their time off campus, studying,
working, or interning, shuttling back and forth from Hanover like a continually shuffled deck of cards. Portia and her classmates
were newly immersed in this reality, having returned from Christmas break only weeks earlier to find replacement casts of
dorm mates. The fact that rush took place at precisely this point in the year was not, she supposed, arbitrary, and while
Daniel and the others continued to assail the conformist in their midst, she suspected she was not the only one who empathized
with his sentiments. She sat silently, in any case, measuring in millimeters the distance between her hand and his, while
they asserted their moral and intellectual superiority.

“I already know half the guys in the frat,” Tom said. “I went to school with some of them, and I played lacrosse against a
bunch of the others. I went to camp in Vermont with two of them.” He shrugged. “It’s like moving off campus with your friends,
only the house is a frat house.”

“What’s your last name again?” said Daniel.

“Standley,” Tom said affably.

“Oh.
Well,
” said Daniel.

“Thomas W. Standley,” Rebecca chortled. “Ask him what the
W
stands for.”

“Nah,” said Tom, grinning. “It’s not a big deal.”

“No, no,” Rebecca said. “Of course not.”

“What?” said one of the Latinists. “Winthrop? Wigglesworth?”

“Wharton?” said Daniel.

“Winslow?” said a girl.

“Wheelock!” Rebecca crowed, unable to contain herself.

There was a stunned silence.

“As in… ?” said the girl, meaning the Reverend Eleazar Wheelock, sent north from Yale two centuries earlier to educate (that
is, convert) the Indians of New Hampshire, founder of Moor’s Indian Charity School (later Dartmouth College) in Dresden (later
Hanover), New Hampshire.

“Wow,” said Daniel. “No kidding?”

“No, actually,” Tom said. “Not Eleazar. His cousin, also named Wheelock, but far less distinguished. Hey,” he said, “did you
choose your middle name?”

“What, Irwin?” Rebecca laughed. “What makes you think he didn’t?”

The party, having soured irrevocably, broke up soon after, though Tom seemed not to take offense. He gave Rebecca a big hug,
waved affably at the boys, and turned a luminous face to Portia, who still had not spoken in his presence. After he was gone,
she helped Rebecca rinse the glasses in the chilly kitchenette at the end of the corridor, then went to Sanborn to stare pointlessly
at her notes for a paper on
The Winter’s Tale
. Five months after arriving on campus, she felt, for the first time, that there was a cohesion to the experience, more than
just a jerking along to class, parties, activities in which she could not find traction. Already, just in her first term,
she had tasted and spat out too many potential selves, learning only what she was not and did not want, but never what she
was or did. As an exercise in least resistance, she had tried out for the soccer team, only to discover, among her potential
teammates, women who cared passionately about the sport, which—she simultaneously discovered—she did not, nor ever had. Someone
on her floor had suggested she come along to crew tryouts, and that she had loved for the river at dawn and the rhythm of
the boat and the magic of the balance and glide, which were so much more difficult to attain than they appeared, until she
noted the broad, muscular back of the team goddess, a senior girl trying for the Olympics, and superficially decided that
she had no desire to look like that. Afterward, she had cast herself as a playwright and a literary type, though already these
selves were beginning to chafe. But now, brilliantly, suddenly, Portia had the rushing, thrilling sense that her life was
migrating into order, forming around a point, starting to make, if not actual sense, then at least a point of embarkation.
She had fallen in love, and that was the fact of her.

Portia had graduated high school a virgin, despite Susannah’s best efforts to instill in her a joyful ownership of her sexuality.
This comprised frank and open conversation from an early age, an arsenal of what-a-girl-should-know information on matters
of contraception, disease, and the somewhat more elemental emotional composition of heterosexual teenage boys. It also featured
a series of concerned interventions as Portia’s high school years began to pass without her having begun (or, at any rate,
told her mother she’d begun) her wondrous personal sexual journey. Portia, who by then had years of experience deflecting
Susannah’s interest, did not find it hard to fend off her mother on this matter, but she was becoming concerned herself. To
be a virgin in high school wasn’t, even in the omnisexual milieu of the Pioneer Valley, such a social black spot. But leaving
for college that way seemed downright negligent, sort of like going off without being able to write a critical paper or operate
a washer-dryer. She chose well—a fellow counselor at the summer camp UMass ran for soccer players—and had a reasonably good
experience. At the end of August the boy decamped to Reed, which was comfortably far away, and they petered out after only
a letter or two.

But this was what the entire exercise had been for, thought Portia that night, uselessly shuffling the pages of her sorry
Winter’s Tale
paper. She was ready for it, she crowed to herself, her heart pounding. She had made herself ready. And while she had never
before had cause to see herself as a passionate woman, it was wondrous, shimmering, to find that she actually was. Obviously,
she was! Every nerve ending seemed to be singing, every synapse firing simultaneously. She had an object and a clear goal,
and from that night, all that mattered was to summon him.

Wistful leaves fluttered over me as I sat overlooking the azure Pacific ocean and pondered the great gift I had been given
the first time I was inspired to write a poem. In fourth grade I wrote my first poem, and ever since I have journaled everyday,
filling countless journals with my stories and verses. My goal is to one day publish a book of my writings, and last spring
I took a step toward that goal when my poem “Vortex” was selected for publication by the League of American Poets for an anthology
of the best poetry by American teens.

N
early a year of this would follow, a year in which Portia could do nothing without looking first for Tom (at the student center,
and the library, and for one precious term in the immense geology class she had taken to fulfill a science requirement), and
then, if he was miraculously, luminously, present, choosing carefully where and how to position herself, always weighing the
angle at which his gaze might fall on her. If it ever fell. Which it never seemed to do. A year in which she could not bring
herself to actually approach him, but attended every party at Tom’s socially unassailable fraternity (where, nonetheless,
the beer was just as stale as it was everywhere else on Fraternity Row, the furniture just as shabby, the basement floor just
as sticky, the boys just as single-minded, and the drinking games on continual loop in the bar just as inane). A year of lying-awake
torment in which imagined touching alternated with imagined conversation, invented smells and tastes, and great insights,
reached with the catalyst of his undoubted brilliance. But nothing actually happened, and none of this brought her any closer
to Tom than the outer periphery of his orbit, which was itself many light-years from the source of her designated light.

It might have been easier to bear had he remained as high-minded (read: celibate) as she, but this appeared not to be the
case. Whenever Tom was not surrounded by his fraternity-brothers-slash-rugby-teammates (despite the incident that had, in
her view, brought them together, he had actually abandoned lacrosse for the even less restrictive mores of the rugby team),
he was in the unwelcome company of girls. And far from those Jewish girls of his supposed preference, these girls always seemed
to be blond, stick-figured specimens, clad in Fair Isle sweaters and white turtlenecks with patterns of tiny frogs or hearts
or strawberries. Indeed, there was such a sameness to them that only a very, very close observer (like Portia) could detect
the small discrepancies that meant there was not, in fact, one particular well-groomed and springy female in Tom’s life, but
multiple, sequential girlfriends. They were uniformly pale, straight of spine, short, and giggly, but one had blond hair to
her shoulders, another to her chin, another to a clavicle protruding from anorexia, and a fourth was short enough to fit comfortably—wrenchingly—beneath
Tom’s sinewy arm.

Portia might have been raised in the nurturing bubble of the Happy Valley, fed on the I-have-a-dream-of-a-common-language
utterances of poets and sages, but she knew right away what she was dealing with here. She was not quite a dolt who supposed
there was no such thing as class in America, but the few WASPs she had actually contended with were those who had—like her
mother—renounced privilege and resolved to tend their own gardens, whether on or off the commune. Amherst and Northampton
and the even more hippie-infested hill towns to the north and west were one great muddle of altered surnames and handmade
musical instruments, reused plastic bags from the Co-Op, and clothing made on someone’s loom. For her, students of other races
and nationalities did not offer the much vaunted collegiate experience of “diversity”; for her, diversity came personified
by a boy with whales imprinted on his salmon-colored slacks and a girl with a hairband carefully, precisely holding back her
rigorously straight blond hair. People like Tom and the little girls under his arm were exotic fauna to her. How had they
evolved? What did they eat? Why did they dress like that? And how could she be more… well, like them?