Admission

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  Caitlin was due in May and thinking of staying on, over the summer, to recover and see her baby settled. Also, said Susannah, to lose her pregnancy weight, as she intended to keep the fact of her circumstances private.

  Portia, finding this conversational thread, at least, diverting, asked how this would be possible. “Don’t they know why she’s here?”

  “They know she’s here, but not why. They think it’s a high school exchange. Her father phones her every Sunday to ask if she went to church.”

  Portia smiled.

  “She did go, actually. For the first month. Not that it’s easy to find the right kind of church. She ended up at that awful place in West Lebanon, across from the Four Aces diner. You know?”

  “It used to have a sign out front that said, ‘Are You on the Right Road?’” said Portia.

  “It still does. They’re appalling people. Terrorists, really. Of course, I took her. She’s her own person, and it’s not for me to decide. I just waited for her across the road in the diner. But after the first few times, she came out and said she didn’t want to go back. Somebody said something to her, about her increasingly obvious ‘sin,’ I mean. I offered to help her find another denomination, but she hasn’t mentioned it again.”

  Portia nodded. She still thought of the sleeping girl upstairs—in the room she typically occupied on her visits, no doubt—with some sense of unreality: a teenage incubator for her mother’s absurd idea of late motherhood, a girl for whom this interlude must come wedged between obscure past and obscure future. That Susannah already spoke of the fetus as a child—known to her, dependent upon her, and even loved by her—felt so strange, so off-kilter, as if she had dressed a stone in baby clothes and held it to the breast.

  Looking across the table now, she tested this image and so found herself ruminating, in turn, on the icy marble Pietà she had seen with Mark at St. Peter’s in Rome. Their first summer together. And then, with a certain grotesque flourish, of a poster on the wall of her dermatologist’s office in Princeton, which showed a buxom babe in the tiniest of bikinis on a tropical beach, luscious as a peach from the neck down, but from the neck up a withered crone. It was meant to scare you into using sunblock, and most effective.

  Susannah’s hopes for the child, which she was now elucidating across the table, were, naturally, beyond reproach: love and care, education and glorious self-actualization, music and art and science, organic food (lovingly prepared), and so on, all toward a far horizon of the greater good—for surely, the way her mother envisioned things, this child was born to right the wrongs of the universe. (Why, Portia thought wearily, is every unborn child the lost Einstein or Picasso? The engineer who would have reversed global warming or figured out how to run airplanes on ground-up industrial waste? Why were these aborted or miscarried fetuses never the next Dahmer or Bundy? The anonymous forty-eighth addict to overdose in 2056? The never identified participant in the gang rape? The sociopath executive who takes down an entire company and puts thousands out of work?) Listening, Portia became aware of it gradually, through the fog of her now great fatigue, and sadness, and distress at being here, and fear for the future: the full-on shocking realization that both her long-standing partner and her mother were about to become parents. Again. But not her. Not her. Soon, they would both be taking small hands into their own larger hands and walking into the future, while she… well, did not. While she… what? Began a new application season? Considered moving to a smaller house? Contemplated renewing her gym membership?

  “Portia,” her mother said.

  She looked up. “Yuh?”

  “I said, will you be able to take her?”

  “Take… ?” said Portia.

  “Caitlin,” said her mother. “I need to go to Burlington on Thursday. With Frieda.”

  Frieda was her housemate—her only housemate since the weaver had decamped years earlier—and Burlington meant something medical.

  “Is she okay?”

  “Probably. They’re always finding something to biopsy. If she does get cancer again, it’ll be from all the radiation they’ve exposed her to all these years, from all the mammograms.”

  “Mom…” Portia sighed. “If it weren’t for a mammogram, she’d already be dead.”

  “They don’t trust us to manage our own health, with our own fingers. They don’t believe we can be responsible for our own bodies. If we find it ourselves, they tell us we’re hysterical. It has to come out of a machine to be real.”

  “They,” Portia commented, “are as likely to be female as male, these days.”

  “But the system is male.”

  She gave up. She was too tired and it was too pointless.

  “So you can take her?”

  Portia frowned. “I thought you were taking her.”

  “No. Not Frieda. Caitlin.”

  “Oh. Okay. Where does she need to go?”

  “As I said. To the midwife. In Hanover.”

  “Oh,” said Portia. “Well, if you need me to. Of course. I’m sorry, Mom,” she said, noting Susannah’s exasperation, “I’m so tired. I think I need to go to bed.”

  Susannah got up. She put her mug in the sink, and Portia’s, then eyed the bags by the back door

  “This is food,” said Portia, pointing.

  “Oh, thank you.”

  She lifted the suitcase of files, obviously straining with the weight of it.

  “That one,” said Susannah, “looks suspiciously like work.”

  “I had to,” Portia said apologetically. “We’re all working over the holiday.”

  Her mother frowned. “What a shame. I really hoped you could relax while you were here.”

  She did sound aggrieved, Portia thought, but not entirely convincing.

  Portia hoisted the suitcase, then the duffel of clothes, which Susannah insisted on taking from her. They went, one behind the other, into the hallway and up to the second floor, wood creaking beneath every tread on the stairs. At the closed door of the room in which she normally stayed, Susannah turned back and put her finger to her lips—mother and fetus were sleeping within—and Portia was led to the last room down the corridor. This had once been home to the weaver, and two of her works remained, pinned to the walls in dusty accusation. Now the room belonged to Frieda, who used it to write her songs and store her instruments, notebooks, and varied materials connected to her infrequent appearances as a singer-songwriter. Frieda, who had once belonged to a feminist drumming circle (the Different Drummers, they had fondly named themselves), kept her hourglass-shaped drums in one corner. These were African talking drums she had made herself in a weeklong workshop with a drum master in Boston. She had a computerized keyboard for songwriting and a trio of guitars, upright in their stands. There was a distinctly unwelcoming daybed in the corner, heaped with kilim pillows and a rough-looking African tribal cloth. Portia wondered if it had clean sheets. Or sheets at all.

  “Thanks, Mom,” she said, setting down her bag. “You must be tired, too.”

  “I have to be up early,” said Susannah. “Caitlin has one more day of school before the vacation. Should I let you sleep?”

  Sleep, thought Portia, nodding, as if this were an altogether new concept. For the first time, it occurred to her that she might not be able to sleep despite her exhaustion, despite her longing for the oblivion. Sleep, for the first night of her new, unpartnered life, the first night of her new reality.

  Susannah stepped up close to her and, with sufficient warning, leaned forward to embrace. Portia embraced, in return, in her usual way: body moving forward, spirit pulling back. Then she was left alone.

  The room had a vaguely unused air, with its yellowing music magazines stacked on a low table, and the stone cold electric typewriter clad in a film of dust. She wondered if Frieda, whose songs (she had always felt) were not terribly original or particularly melodic, had actually abandoned this career, and if that was true, why? Because her cancer had come back? Because she had begun to feel ridiculous,
singing to clueless schoolchildren about the Bread and Roses campaign or serenading the like-minded with musical moralities they already shared? Perhaps she had simply moved on, from one thing to the next, one interest, one moment in her life. People did that, Portia thought wearily. They changed their minds, their lives. They changed the cast of characters or the scenery.

  This wasn’t the way Portia tended to think about her own life, she realized—as a progression or even a course correction. She had always considered herself fortunate, not only that she had found Mark, a compatible person who had made a home with her, but that she had found, by strange luck, a profession in which she was both competent and rewarded as such. How many people with just her qualifications and just her skills were doing time in some cubicle somewhere, moving numbers around, dying inside? Her life was a port in the storm, a craft in unpredictable waters. Her life, it occurred to her, was a careful refuge from life.

  She sat on the hard daybed and nudged aside the bag of applications with her foot. There was an air mattress, she now saw, on the floor beneath the window, prepped with sheets and a quilt—an accommodation that would have ensured a sore back for herself or Mark, whoever drew it, not to mention the impossibility of sexual contact while in her mother’s house. Not that they had ever had sexual contact in her mother’s house. And now, she thought, trying to grasp the humor of this, they never would have sexual contact in her mother’s house—by no means a terrible thing. Even this briefest levity was painful. She felt weariness in every muscle, weariness even in her skin, her hair, but she delayed lying down, afraid to find out that sleep intended to elude her. For the shortest moment she allowed herself to wonder about Mark: where he was, what, if anything, he was saying or doing. And Helen, whose face, oddly, but also mercifully, Portia could not seem to summon from memory. Was she comforting him for the loss of a sixteen-year relationship? Was she congratulating him on having finally taken action? Had they both, already, closed that very inconvenient door behind them? Thinking of Helen gave her an instant of sharpest misery and hollowed her out with loneliness. She had not felt this kind of loneliness for many, many years, an odd state of affairs, she couldn’t help but think, for a person who had relatively few people of any importance in her life.

  She thought suddenly about Susannah’s travels, her life like a widening nautilus of contact, all of them, it seemed, perpetually in her wake or everywhere around her. She still had bosom friends from her childhood in Great Neck, most of them still living in that green and pleasant suburb. She had friends from college and even graduate school, though she had not given much of her attention to graduate school. She kept up with her co-habitants from the commune in Northern California, her neighbors from Harlem, the women she’d lived and cooked and worked with in Baltimore, and of course the many, many neighbors and collaborators of the Northampton years. They were all in Susannah’s life, all the time, it seemed, writing letters, visiting, talking ceaselessly to her, listening to her, making her evenings hum with the ringing phone. Everyone stayed with her. No one let go. Not the protégées or rivals. Not the sorority sisters from Berkeley, one of whom had later spent a year living in the womyn’s collective in Baltimore. Not the long-ago boyfriend (and dope dealer), now long married and back on his fertile crescent of California soil, or even his wife, the woman he had in fact left Susannah to marry, who had also, somehow or other, become her mother’s confidante.

  It was a gift, thought Portia, like an ear for music or suppleness or skill with numbers, and she had not inherited it. Her gift lay elsewhere, as in the knack for isolation, the ability to make herself perfectly alone in the world—away from anyone she had harmed, and anyone else who might have cared enough to help her, and everyone who hadn’t known, which was everyone.

  I spent much of last year in an intensive treatment program for an eating disorder. But I don’t have an eating disorder. I have never allowed others to impose their ideas of who I am on me, and I never will.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THIS CONCERNS YOU

  Caitlin, as it turned out, was a quiet girl with short brown hair and a look of perpetual diffidence. Four months along, she had reached that point in her pregnancy where a general thickness prevailed: thickness from ankle to wrist and through the middle, which had not yet morphed into the classic profile. Pregnant? in other words. Or merely fat?

  Portia, who had finally fallen asleep in the still middle of the previous night, had missed the girl’s departure for school in the morning, but she was alone in the house at dusk, reading folders at the kitchen table, when a school bus creaked to a halt outside and a girl in a dark blue parka descended the steps. Portia watched the girl pull tight her coat, crossing her arms over her chest. On her shoulder she carried a heavy book bag, which thumped at her hip as she came up the drive, and in one hand she held a thick roll of oversize artwork, fastened with an elastic band. When she reached the kitchen door, she stopped and stamped her feet to dislodge the snow. Portia, reflexively, shut her folder.

  “You must be Caitlin,” she said to the startled girl when the door was opened.

  The evident Caitlin did not respond but looked perplexed.

  “I’m Portia. Susannah’s daughter?”

  “Oh.” She looked thoroughly relieved. “I forgot you were coming today.”

  “Yesterday, actually. I got here last night.”

  “I must have been sleeping,” she said, noting the obvious. She took off her coat and hung it up on one of the hooks by the back door. She seemed disinclined to talk but rummaged in her backpack.

  “You’re on Christmas break?” Portia asked.

  The girl nodded without looking up. She was wearing a zipped red sweatshirt and baggy jeans. Normal jeans, just big.

  “You must be glad to get out.”

  Caitlin turned and looked at her. She seemed affronted. “I like school.”

  “Oh,” said Portia. “Well, that’s good.”

  “This school is better than my school at home. There’s a decent art class. And the English teachers read the occasional book, you know?”

  “They don’t read books in Colorado?”

  “Wyoming,” Caitlin corrected her.

  “Sorry.”

  “I guess some of them do. I had one last year, though. I swear, she didn’t even read the book she was teaching us. I went on the class Web site once, to get a homework assignment. And there was this place where she wrote: ‘Do not spend to much time on your rough draft.’ She spelled ‘too’ t-o. And she was, like, the English teacher!”

  Portia, who had also encountered the occasional illiterate English teacher, nodded.

  “Is that normal tea?”

  She frowned. “It’s Constant Comment.”

  “Is that normal? Or herbal?”

  “Oh.” Portia smiled. “It’s normal. I like normal tea.”

  “Good. I can’t stand that other stuff. Can I have some?”

  Portia got up and took a mug from the cupboard next to the stove.

  “Where’s Susannah?”

  “In Hanover,” said Portia. “She had a meeting. Upper Valley Women’s Health.”

  “She has a lot of meetings,” said Caitlin.

  “She’s a busy girl.”

  They experienced, over their tea, a brief moment of silent accord.

  “She talks about you a lot,” said Caitlin.

  “Oh?” said Portia. She was torn between wanting and not wanting to hear what her mother said.

  “She thinks you hate her.”

  Portia, looking up abruptly, was so surprised by the indelicacy of the comment that she failed to note—for a brief moment—how much it hurt her.

  “That’s silly,” she managed to say, as if she needed to say anything at all.

  “Probably normal, though. My mom thinks I hate her. She can’t imagine why else I’d want to leave home in the middle of my senior year and go live with a stranger. They don’t think there’s anywhere better to live than Cheyenne. I kind of pu
t it in those terms, though—that I needed some time away from them. I’d rather she think I hate her than know the real reason. I don’t like it, though.”

  She dumped several spoons of Susannah’s raw sugar into her mug and stirred. She had a broad face, with high cheekbones, hair tucked behind her ears. “Are you, like, the black sheep or something?”

  Despite herself, Portia laughed. “I don’t see how I could be. I mean, I’m gainfully employed. I’m a card-carrying member of NOW, and I tithe to EMILY’s List. I don’t harm animals or children. If I’m the family black sheep, everyone else must be a saint.”

  “I am,” Caitlin said, deftly returning the conversation to herself, as any teenager would. She sounded more than a little smug. “I’m totally the black sheep. Though actually, my family have no idea how black I am.”

  “You didn’t feel you could tell them what you were dealing with?” said Portia.

  Caitlin gave her a look of thorough disbelief. This, Portia supposed, meant something like: No. Or possibly: Duh.

  “Any special plans for your vacation?” she asked.

  “I’m going to sleep. I’m tired all the time. And make zimsterne. We always make that at home. Cinnamon stars,” she said, noting Portia’s cluelessness. “My family are from Germany, originally. Well, my mother’s side. My father’s side goes back to Missouri, then they have no idea. We’re LDS, you know.”

  Portia, who hadn’t known, had a sudden deepening of respect for Caitlin. For a Mormon girl to leave home and lie to her family in order to first bear and then give away an illegitimate child, that took spine.