“We then have five questions taken directly from the application, with a space for the number value. ‘Parents’ description of child on application.’ Then ‘How parents may participate,’ and ‘Previous school’s description of child.’ So each member of the committee gives a number there after reading the application. Then these bottom categories are notes from the interview. You want to ask questions that give you a sense of the parenting style, the family activities, and any other family information that’s relevant.”
The bottom of the form lists several questions in bold with a line preceding each question for the number value and an inch space beneath for comments. The questions are: “How do you see Evergreen? What similarities/differences between the schools you are applying to? How will you choose?” “Educational philosophy/past school experience: Do parents agree?” “Participation—How? What level?” and “Notes re child from interview.”
“You’re trying to get people to give you information,” Edgar says. “The bottom line is, what kinds of things can you tell me besides what I read in the application?”
Edgar shakes his head. “We may be more thorough than we have to be. I don’t know. I will say this: you don’t need all 3s to get a 3. There’s a place on the bottom of the form that says, ‘What’s your overall score and why?’ So you might look over everything and say, ‘I gave this person two 2s, but this is the best family I’ve met in a long time.’ Like I said, this process is not scientific.”
In every season there are stories:
Mr. Big
Mr. Big sat on the couch in the admissions director’s office. He was well-known, a player, his face frequently grinning haughtily from the glossy city magazine’s gossip pages, his wisdom often quoted in the business section of the paper. He was pushing seventy now and had recently married for the fourth time. This wife had just celebrated a traumatic birthday of her own, her thirtieth.
Mr. Big stretched his arm across the top of the couch. His long fleshy arm traveled nearly end to end. He smirked and puckered his lips as if he were puffing on an imaginary cigar. “Go ahead,” he said.
“Go ahead and what?” the admissions director asked.
“Go ahead and start the interview.”
“How do you think I should start?”
“Convince me that I want to be here.”
The admissions director locked eyes with Mr. Big. “Actually, this is how it works. You need to convince me that I want you here.”
Mr. Big instantly got smaller. Deflated. He withdrew his arm from the top of the couch and let it flop into his lap. “Oh,” he said, as if he’d gotten the wind knocked out of him.
“Now, what we’re gonna do,” the admissions director said, “is focus on your child.”
“I’m not used to this,” Mr. Big muttered.
The admissions director knew what he meant but said anyway, “What?”
“Not being the one who decides.”
The admissions director smiled. “It’s only for a few months, just until March. If I call you next September, you won’t have any idea who I am, nor will you care.”
“You’re a hundred percent right,” Mr. Big said. “And I probably won’t take your call.”
Mr. Big didn’t get in.
Father’s Day
“When it comes to the interview, if I could relay one piece of advice it would be relax,” said Brianna, director of admissions at Hunsford School. “People come in here who are so uptight. They’re literally shaking. I know this process can be overwhelming, but you have to take a few deep breaths and just chill. I sometimes spend half the interview getting people to calm down. I try to connect. I know how much time and effort people put into writing their application. I truly appreciate that. But you have to relax.”
A couple came in for their interview. They were in their mid-thirties and they were both extremely nervous. “Let’s talk about your child,” Brianna said.
“We said everything in the application,” the dad said.
Brianna smiled thinly. She saw that the dad’s hands were shaking. “I’ve read your application thoroughly,” she said. “But hearing you talk about your child is really helpful. I want to hear you describe your child’s personality. Or talk about how you chose your preschool. Anything you want.”
The dad turned ghost white. He looked at his wife. She shrugged. The dad looked back at Brianna. “I don’t know—”
“Okay. What did you do this weekend? Did you do anything with your daughter?”
He lit up. “Well, actually, we were at my parents’ house. They live in this planned community. I thought it would be an ideal place to teach my daughter how to ride a bike. No cars. Very safe. Wide-open areas. So I got her a bike. Got her all dressed. She was wearing these brand-new little red sneakers. She got on the bike and I’m holding the bike. I’m behind her and all of a sudden I let go, and she was riding the bike all by herself. I felt this tremendous sense of pride. I was overwhelmed. I started to cry, watching my daughter ride her bike—”
The dad’s eyes began to well up. He swiped a tear away from his cheek.
You’re coming to the school, Brianna thought. She knew that she had an abundance of girls, but she was determined to take this family. And she did. They currently have three kids at Hunsford.
“I like people who spend a lot of time with their kids,” Brianna said. “That, to me, is a major piece of the puzzle.”
Stay on Target
A couple walked into the admissions office. The wife was extremely attractive, late twenties, laden with expensive jewelry. The husband was older, dressed in a blue pinstriped suit, his fingernails freshly manicured. They sat together on the couch. Dana Optt began the interview. She spoke briefly about Pemberley, and then asked them about their child. The wife began speaking in a monotone about her son. At one point she gestured, revealing an enormous diamond bracelet dangling from her wrist. Dana’s attention veered from what the wife was saying to the jewelry on her arm. The diamond had the mesmerizing effect of a hypnotist’s pocket watch; Dana could not stop looking at it. She had never seen anything so dazzling. It was like the Hope Diamond or something. Try as she might, she could not stop staring at the bracelet.
Oh my God, Dana thought, she’s talking about her son and I’m not paying any attention to her. I’ve lost my focus.
Suddenly, the husband reached over and slapped his wife across the face. “Stay on target,” he said.
It happened so fast that Dana wasn’t sure that it happened at all. She replayed the moment, tried to erase it, but no, it was there, indelible in her mind. It had happened. The husband had reached over and just . . . wham.
The rest of the interview dissolved into a blur. Dana ran through her questions as quickly as she could; she didn’t know what else to do. As soon as the couple left, she called their preschool and told the director what the husband had done.
“Oh no,” the preschool director said. “He didn’t do that in the interview, did he? I coached him to keep that behavior under wraps.”
Dana canceled the rest of the day’s interviews, went home, and took a hot bath.
Job Interview
The night before the Pemberley interview, Lauren Pernice pores over their application as intensely and thoroughly as if she were studying for a final. Sitting at her grandmother’s antique whitewashed pine desk in the corner of the bedroom, she jots down notes, making sure she can instantly recall the exact wording she used to describe Killian’s likes and dislikes, appealing qualities, and challenging characteristics. She underlines key phrases she and Craig chose to relate meaningful family activities, their philosophy about education, and their feelings about Pemberley. Then, with SportsCenter humming in the background, she and Craig fire possible interview questions at each other. They take turns being Dana. They anticipate what she might ask. They try to stump each other, but they are both fast and prepared. Finally, after a half hour, they call off the prep. Craig turns the volume up on SportsCenter and
Lauren walks into their closet. Hands on hips, she cocks her head and confirms aloud what she has been thinking all week.
“I’m gonna wear the khaki slacks and a blue button-down. Simple. Comfortable. Casual but not over the line. What do you think?”
“Good,” Craig says.
“What about you?”
“I’m wearing a suit.”
His choice surprises Lauren. Craig is not a suit guy. He wears a sports jacket, no tie, for even his most important power meetings.
“Really? A suit?”
“I’ve been thinking about it,” Craig says. “This is kind of like a job interview. I think I should wear a suit.”
Lauren smiles. Craig has been typically tight-lipped since Gail phoned two weeks ago with their interview time: four o’clock Monday, the last interview of the day. Lauren, of course, has thought of little else. She has spoken of little else, except for the previous weekend when she and Craig took off for two days for a much-needed mini-vacation.
“One rule,” Craig had said. “We cannot talk about schools. You have to promise.”
Lauren had hesitated. She wanted to strategize. She didn’t want Dana to throw her any curves in the interview.
“I promise,” she’d said, reluctantly.
“The weekend was wonderful,” Lauren related later. “We did not talk about schools at all. We did not talk about anything that would stress us out. It was so relaxing. I so needed that.”
Lauren sits back down at the desk, adjusts her wraparound Calvin Klein frames, and scans the application one more time. Satisfied, she slips the form back inside its plain brown envelope and calls her friend Susan, who had her interview with Dana Friday. She and Susan have traded voice mails all weekend. This time Susan answers. Lauren gets up from the desk and eases into an overstuffed rocker with a floral design, far enough away from the TV so as not to disturb Craig, who has now finished SportsCenter and found Desperate Housewives, a show she would normally watch. Instead, she curls up in the rocker and asks Susan for details.
“It was fabulous,” Susan says. “We ran over.”
“Seriously?” Lauren nervously lassos the phone cord around her left hand.
“All we did was laugh.”
“Wow. Sounds like you kind of had fun.”
“We really did. The time flew. Dana is amazing. But this poor couple who went after us? After the interview you go on a tour with a parent volunteer. The tour takes about a half hour. While we were walking back toward Dana’s office, we saw the other couple leaving, going to the parking lot. They couldn’t have been with Dana for more than thirty minutes. They didn’t look happy. So, yeah, I think it went really well.”
“That’s great,” Lauren says. “I just hope we do all right.”
“Oh, come on,” Susan says. “You guys will be fine.”
“I hope so.” But Lauren notices that she has absently twisted the phone cord into something resembling a noose.
The moment they pull into the Pemberley parking lot, Lauren loses her grip. It begins with an ache that wells up in the pit of her stomach. An unfamiliar taste rises into her throat. She realizes suddenly what she is feeling.
Terror.
Pure terror.
She and Craig walk into the hallway outside Dana’s office ten minutes early. Relieved, Lauren looks for a water fountain. Not seeing one, she is happy just to have a few moments to compose herself, but then Dana appears, her mountain of white hair looming above her, dazzling, unnatural, and unsettling. Dana extends her hand. “Great. You’re here early. Come in and we’ll get started.”
Oh no, Lauren thinks. Dana’s eyes bore into hers like lasers. I feel like she has X-ray vision. It’s like she can look right through me and see into my soul.
Lauren and Craig take the couch. Lauren inches close to him. Sitting in the armchair opposite, Dana takes notice of this. Craig breaks the ice. “I don’t know if you remember but we met at the Private School Expo at Darcy. We’d been looking at different schools and hadn’t made up our minds where to apply until we spoke to you.”
“I do remember,” Dana says.
She begins talking, describing Pemberley, touting the school, selling it as if they’d never heard of it. She speaks for a good ten minutes, maybe more. She speaks about Pemberley with such intelligence and passion that Lauren feels there is no better school on earth.
After what seems like forever, Dana wraps up her sales pitch. She shifts her position in her chair and says, “Okay, tell me about Killian.”
As they’d agreed in the car, this is Lauren’s cue.
Except she freezes.
She had everything planned. She knew exactly what she was going to say. She’d studied the application, committed all of the words, phrases, descriptions to memory . . . but now she draws a complete and total blank.
Finally, she blurts, “He’s a terrific kid.”
She searches her memory. Nothing. Zero. She wants to talk about how smart he is, tell her that he is gifted in math, but . . . nothing. The silence lasts only a couple of seconds but to Lauren it feels like an hour.
And then she hears herself speaking. It is almost as if she were watching this scene in a movie. She is saying, “Well, Killian is very bright but what really stands out is that he’s a nice kid. He doesn’t have a malicious bone in his body. He’s genuinely happy for other kids when they do well. He is other people’s champion.”
She gives an example how in preschool he was the special-activity child last week. She and Killian prepared an activity for his classmates to do and he would be their teacher for an hour.
“He was very excited about this,” Lauren says. “He was incredibly helpful to all the other kids. He kept bringing their papers over to me and saying, ‘Look what so-and-so did, isn’t that great?’ He was so encouraging. I was very proud that he was my son.”
Lauren finishes with a sort of cleansing breath. Somehow I got through that, she thinks. She smiles at Dana, not for approval, but for a response.
There is none.
Dana shifts position in her chair again and Lauren sees for the first time that she is holding a form of some kind on her lap. But Dana doesn’t move a muscle. Doesn’t lift a finger.
That’s when Lauren knows things are going south. She remembers that Susan told her that Dana was writing madly during their interview, taking notes, circling numbers on the form. Not to mention how they laughed and carried on the whole time.
Lauren feels her heart sinking. She closes her eyes for the briefest moment and reminds herself, Breathe.
Then Dana begins talking about Killian. Thankfully, Craig takes over. At one point, she hears herself say, her Virginia drawl grating in her head, “Killian is academically advanced but socially he might need a little extra help.”
“Sounds like he’s smart but he also needs organizational skills,” Dana sums up. She nods gravely and describes a couple of kids at Pemberley. She could easily be describing Killian. “Kids like Killian need to learn how to think outside the box,” she says. “They need to explore other areas. A structured place might stifle him. He needs to be nurtured, to have his intelligence acknowledged, because he’s a kid who can figure out that there can likely be more than one way.”
Lauren thinks, This woman is so insightful and so kind and that makes it awful because I love this school and I am bombing.
The interview ends abruptly. Dana rises and escorts Lauren and Craig into the hall, where they meet an exuberant Pemberley mom who proceeds to take the Pernices on a quickie tour. The woman is annoyingly perky so it’s easy for Craig to engage her in a running dialogue. Lauren barely says a word. At one point the perky mom says, “You can ask me anything at all. I don’t report back to Dana.”
Yeah, right, Lauren thinks. It’s fairly obvious that you’re a spy.
The tour ends. Lauren and Craig return to the admissions office and say their good-byes to Gail and Dana. Lauren does the best she can to sound upbeat but inside she is devastated, on the ve
rge of tears. Walking to the car, she says, “Well, how do you think that went?”
“About a nine out of ten,” Craig says.
She stares at him. “What? Where do you get that? It went horribly. I was dull and nervous and our interaction with Dana was flat as a board. I think I just cost our child his education.”
“I don’t see it that way at all,” Craig says. “I think she was really engaged. I thought we articulated a clear philosophy and she reinforced it. We were very honest about our kid and she was responsive. And she sold the school to us. She wouldn’t have wasted time doing that if she weren’t interested in us.”
“There was no spark. I got no sign of interest at all.”
“Lauren, it was her last interview of the day. We were number seven out of seven. She was tired. She wasn’t in a ‘let’s have a party’ mood.”
“This has to be a gender thing. That’s the only explanation. I mean, it’s amazing. I think it was a total bust. You think it went well.”
“Yeah. I’m optimistic.”
“And I don’t think we have a chance in hell.”
Dressed to Kill
Sealed into the corner of the white wicker couch in the admissions office of Meryton School, Trina D’Angelo waits to be called for her interview. According to her Swatch, she has been waiting for just under eleven minutes. She picks up last month’s Cicada magazine from the white wicker coffee table and begins leafing through it. Outside of Pier 1 Imports, Trina has never seen so much wicker in one place. Twin white wicker chairs flank an egg-shaped wicker table strewn with Cicadas and Highlights. A wicker love seat angles weirdly into a back wall. An annoying wicker lampshade dangles overhead, offering diffuse light and the promise of crashing onto the love seat at any moment. Trina sighs heavily, as if she’s just received horrible news. She takes another peek at the Swatch. Twelve minutes now. God damn. This waiting is torture.
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