Admission (9 page)

“I think you might.” He smiled. “I’ll work on Jeremiah. And I wouldn’t be surprised if you got Simone, eventually. I think
she’d do fantastically well at a place like Princeton. Despite her bluster.”

“Maybe because of her bluster,” Portia said. “Look, if you have questions about the process, please call me. College guidance
is such a well-oiled machine at most private schools. I don’t want your kids to miss out because this is the first year for
you.”

“That’s really kind of you,” he said. He looked as if he meant it. “We should have had you sooner,” he said. “And I’m so sorry
about Deborah. I will scold her when I see her.”

“Oh, not on my account,” Portia said, thinking that a scolding was certainly in order. “Hey, can you tell me how to get to
the lovely Keene Best Western?”

He could, and did. She wrote down what he said and tossed the piece of paper onto her passenger seat. Then she closed the
car door. “Well, good-bye,” she told him, forcibly ignoring, once again, that clear discomfort.

“Portia,” said John, who wasn’t taking her outstretched hand, “before, when I said I remembered you, I didn’t mean that I
remembered the appointment. I meant that I remembered you. I remember you,” he said. “I went to college with you.”

Still, ridiculously, she held out her hand. Only the ground wasn’t quite there anymore, just a slightly tilted thing underfoot.
She frowned at him. “You were at Dartmouth?”

“Yes. We didn’t know each other. But I knew you. I knew who you were.”

Who she was? It was nearly unbearable to think about who she was.

“Yes?” Portia managed.

“I knew Tom. I was in his fraternity.”

She nodded glumly. She looked at him again, trying to imagine him younger, but he already looked young, and with more hair,
but that brought nothing back. It had been one of the bigger fraternities, with, thanks to Dartmouth’s quarterly sessions,
an eternally shifting population in the house, not that she’d ever noticed anything when she was around Tom, on her way to
Tom, in retreat from Tom. She hadn’t thought about Tom in a long time.

“I’m sorry, I took you off guard.”

“No, it’s okay. I don’t remember you.”

“Oh, I was a year behind you. And everybody was always coming and going, right? That crazy Dartmouth Plan. I went to France
for almost a year. And you left for a while, too, I think.”

“Yes…” Her mind raced. “I was in Europe.”

“Ah. When I came back from France, your class had graduated, but then I started seeing you around campus again.”

She nodded dully. “I was working for the admissions office.”

“You know,” he said, “this is sounding a little stalkerish. I apologize. It wasn’t like that. But I always thought you were…”

She looked at him sharply, and he seemed to take control of himself.

“Anyway, it’s nice to see you again.”

“Nice to see you,” she said heartily. “Nice to meet you.”

“Yes.”

They stood for too long a moment. Portia was nursing a sick feeling that began to rattle through her abdomen, dissipating
as it radiated. She was forgetting where she was, not physically so much, but in the span of her life, as the curtain she
had strung across her wake began to flicker and then ripple, showing little views of herself as she’d been in that fragile,
dangerous time. She was no longer in contact with anyone who’d known her then, and for good reason. Now, ambushed, she was
surprised by her anger.

“Maybe I should have mentioned it sooner,” he said quietly.

“Yes, maybe you should have.”

She reached for his hand and gave it a brisk, cold shake. Then she turned her back on him and went to the driver’s-side door
and got in. She made a point of not looking back, but she couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Once she was clear of the
driveway, with the crude, homemade sign in her rearview mirror, she drove without direction through the woods, turning and
turning as the roads forked and met. She was greedy for the darkness, which grew as she drove, and the cold, which she would
not alleviate. It took nearly fifteen minutes to feel safe, but when she did, she pulled off into a stand of white pines,
and stopped the car, and covered her face with her hands.

In the middle of my sophomore year, my father was hospitalized with depression. This event affected every aspect of my family.
For one thing, I found that I was required to be in charge of my younger siblings after school, which meant that it was impossible
for me to continue to play on the softball team. I also had to give up my volunteer services at the hospital, a great disappointment
to me. My father is back at work now, and I have tried to make up for the time I missed in my extracurricular activities.
I wanted to explain this lapse in my participation, in light of the situation in my family.

W
hen the call came, she was sitting at the round table in the corner of her room, with the heavy floral curtain mostly drawn.
There was a grievously overpackaged application unfurled before her on the table and some tasteless tea from the in-room carafe,
cooling rapidly in its plastic cup.

That would be him, she knew right away. Anyone else would have called her cell. Anything else could have waited.

The ring was shrill, almost metallic in this anonymous room. She sat up in her chair and placed her palm flat on the cool
plastic of the laminate tabletop, her fingers splayed beside the plastic cup, listening to its irritating chirp. Oddly, she
was thinking mostly of the applicant, this rigorously organized, prepped, and groomed seventeen-year-old. There was a rule,
instilled in her early on—back at Dartmouth, actually—that you didn’t start a folder if you couldn’t finish it.
Applicatus interruptus,
one of her old colleagues had called it, and he’d been right, because it always happened when you came back to the essay
or the recommendation, after the call or the trip to the bathroom or the Girl Scout at the door, that the person you’d been
conjuring out of the words and numbers seemed to have slipped away, leaving behind a muddle of the previous application, and
the kid from earlier that day with the sort of similar name, or the one who also had a mom who worked as an electrical engineer
but who wanted to be a journalist—not, like this one, a pediatrician.

The phone continued to ring. She looked across to the table between her two queen-size beds where it was shrilling, bleating,
and blinking, then down at the essay before her, instinctively finding the sentence she had just read: “… I realized that pediatric
surgery would best combine my love of children and science, and my profound need to give back to my community.” She could
ignore the call, and who was making it, and what that meant.

She felt for her sad plastic cup of tea, only to find she didn’t want any. Already, she was fighting the urge to know if she
had remembered his voice right—not deep, not steady, and with a vein of uncertain intimacy. And besides, she had already forgotten
whether the girl from Sudbury, Mass., wanted to be a pediatrician or a surgeon or a journalist, and whether she was a girl
at all. So what would it matter, now? Then it occurred to her that he had to know she was here. Who would let the phone ring
so long in an empty hotel room? This changed everything. She charged up, knocking the table as she crossed the room.

“Hello,” she said.

“Portia?” Whether from the recent or—less likely, but, she supposed, possible—deeper past, she confirmed the familiarity of
his voice.

“Yes?” she pretended.

“This is John Halsey. I’m not sure I told you my surname.”

“Halsey,” she said aloud, stalling. In fact, it wasn’t a familiar name. But then, it hadn’t been a familiar face.

“From the Quest School. From earlier.”

Portia nodded, as if he could see that. “Yes,” she said.

“Look, I just feel badly. I’m not sure exactly what happened, but I know I upset you, and I’m very sorry. I probably shouldn’t
be doing this.” He gave a forced laugh. “I mean, I’m probably breaking some sort of college admissions protocol.”

That’s very possible, she thought. “It’s fine,” she said neutrally.

“I remembered where you said you were staying. I thought… well, I hoped I could…”

He seemed to hit a wall and stopped, waiting for her to rescue him. She waited, too, but she didn’t help. “Have you had dinner?”
he finally said.

It was past seven. She had not had dinner. She hadn’t wanted it. She didn’t particularly want it now.

“No,” she said.

“Well, can I take you somewhere? We don’t have much here, but there are one or two places you might not find on your own.”

Entirely unannounced, the tiniest lick of hunger popped to life inside her. She ignored it.

“Or for a drink, if you’d prefer that.” He was sounding frankly uneasy now. “Or Brewbakers, if you’d like some coffee.”

“Only cappuccino in town,” she heard herself say, instantly regretting even this concession.

“That’s right!” He sounded so eager, so grateful to her for remembering.

Then more hunger. Two little matches, alight, joining forces.

She didn’t want coffee. She wanted to ask him what he remembered about her. She wanted him to go away, but first to put his
hands on her, if he could do that very carefully, without pissing her off. “Where are you?” she asked him.

“Downstairs.”

She listened for a long moment. There is a sound to waiting. It sounds like held breath pounding its fists against the walls
of the lung, damp and muffled beats. Or was that her own breath? she wondered.

“I don’t want coffee,” Portia told him. “Give me a few minutes.”

She hung up the phone. She was wearing what she’d worn earlier, but only the top half of it, only the cashmere sweater, and
underwear. Her tweed skirt was flung across the foot of one of the beds, the crumpled stockings beside them, the brown boots
kicked off on the floor. She had only a change of clothes for tomorrow, a pair of green khakis, formal enough to represent
Princeton but laid-back enough to connect with Northfield students. She didn’t want to put the skirt back on again.

It was hard to resist the urge to rush. She was not late, she was not keeping him waiting, he was not a date. She refused
to look at herself in the mirror, to fix anything about herself. She pulled on her boots again, closed the application (
journalist, Sudbury, girl
), and placed it on top of the unread pile, resigned to starting it again when she came back. Then she looked at the folders.

They were not to be seen. They were secret, private. To leave them out like this, when there was the smallest chance of someone
seeing them—someone
not disinterested
seeing them—would be negligent. But to put them away was to concede the possibility of another person here, in her hotel
room, which was worse than negligent. Which was calculated. She stood, looking at this sad tableau: roughed-up plastic table,
orange files, some thick, some thin, in two stacks, abandoned cup, crumpled bit of hygienic cellophane.
You are not to do this,
she heard herself think.

Then she opened her suitcase and zipped the files inside. And left.

He—John Halsey—was in the lobby, perched on the arm of a chair covered in murky green fabric. He had his hands, his fists,
actually (she could see them clenching and unclenching, even across the room), in the pockets of his brown corduroy jacket.
He stood up as she reached him and extended one of those unfolding hands. “I’m sorry to surprise you like that.”

I wasn’t surprised,
she almost said.

“No, it’s all right,” Portia told him. She was looking at him, gathering information, testing her earlier impressions: earnest
young schoolmaster adrift among New Age flocks. No, that wasn’t right, she could see that now. He had a kind of calm beneath
the current fluster. And a beautiful throat, indifferently shaved. He dressed to please himself, because no one else cared
in the slightest, and what pleased him were these still very crisp chinos and this still very white button-down shirt. He
hadn’t changed his clothes, a fact that reassured her, though she wasn’t sure why. On the other hand, she couldn’t understand
how he could manage to look so clean at the end of a day. A day that had, at the very least, included an outdoor class on
a working farm. “It’s very friendly of you to call.”

“I’m sure I’m breaking some kind of rule. Taking the admissions officer out to dinner, I mean. I suppose people try to butter
you up.”

She burst out laughing. This was, of course, such a vast understatement that it could only register as ridiculous. She had
been buttered up by any number of acquaintances, alumni, college advisers, endless parents, of course, often with attendant
flattery, invitations, offers, not to mention those desperadoes, the applicants themselves. Buttering up, as John had called
it, was thoroughly understandable, but it was never a good idea and somewhat akin to slipping the cop a fifty: dubious upside,
cataclysmic downside. But then, he had said it so cluelessly, it was strangely beguiling. “Well, that does happen, yes.”