Admission

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  “Sure,” said Caitlin. “I’ll just walk over there when I’m done.”

  “Great.” She took her coat from a hook near the door. “Hey, good luck with your baby,” she told the woman. “I’ll see you!”

  And she went outside.

  The day was cold and bright, a classic Hanover day. Portia walked slowly up Main Street, taking deep breaths of the hard air. She did not understand what had happened, how she had lost that time between sitting politely on the couch and eyeing the carpet between her Bigfooted feet. She had a terrible idea that there was some element to the story that eluded her, like an identity—the woman’s identity—known but beyond reach, which had somehow upended her. Faculty? she thought again. Faculty spouse?

  She began, without any real attentiveness, to skim her own remembered directory of Dartmouth personnel, department by department, building by building, across the campus, but it was a pointless exercise. She had been gone for years, ten years, an eternity in college time. And even when she’d been a part of this college community, she’d hardly known every face or every name. It wasn’t a big school, of course, but Dartmouth’s faculty were scattered far afield around the Upper Valley. They lived on winding wooded roads, out of sight of other homes, in old farmhouses in Etna or glass-and-steel boxes up in the hills with views of the Connecticut, and somehow you didn’t run into them at the supermarket or the movies. She abandoned the project as she walked, giving herself over to the diversion of shopwindows. Two days before Christmas the town was empty, and this was a town unused to being empty. Dartmouth functioned year-round as a college, and the students were eternally present, trawling the few streets, queuing up at the same restaurants, trying on the same green T-shirts at the Coop. In any season they dominated the sidewalks, outnumbering the grown-ups, outmaneuvering the Appalachian Trail through-hikers who stumbled out of the woods, stunned to find so many human beings in one place. Looking ahead up the hill, Portia saw no one at all, just a short man in khakis and a down jacket washing the window of Campion’s.

  Without really planning to, she turned down Lebanon Street, which ran behind the massive Hopkins Center, the art and performance building that doubled as Dartmouth’s post office. The street, indifferently plowed, was pocked with holes and ruts and packed with dirty snow. Portia walked, her hands in the pockets of her parka, stepping with care to evade the ice, feeling the cold in her face. She supposed she was headed for the place she had once lived, her first off-campus apartment in the year after her graduation, though she knew the building was no longer there. It had risen three unlovely stories behind an excellent ice cream parlor called the Ice Cream Machine, fondly dubbed the S’Cream Machine, now similarly departed. The S’Cream Machine had been the site of many an evening run while Portia was a student, and after, ostensibly for defensible items like coffee but, inevitably, for double cones of coffee fudge. She was not yet a cook. The first few years of her so-called adult life, she ate pretty much the way she had as an undergraduate: lunches at Collis (the student center), takeout, toasted sandwiches in a grill contraption that looked like a waffle maker.

  She wasn’t sure when it had closed. After they’d moved to Princeton, she hadn’t come back for a year or two, not until Dartmouth hosted one of the annual Ivy League conferences: minority recruitment or debates on the common application, forty or so admissions officers, newly out from under the cloud of April 15, crowded into the Hanover Inn. That first night, she had waited until after the dinner in one of the private dining rooms, then stolen out back for her fix of ice cream (the memory of which, swelled with nostalgia, had assumed ambrosial proportions), only to find a hemp and incense emporium where the S’Cream Machine had once been. Gone, very long gone, she had thought, standing in front of the Hempest, eyeing the coarse purses and dubious toiletries through the window and conjuring for some reason a title from Mark’s library, of a book she had never actually taken down, let alone read. She wasn’t really sure which she was thinking of: the ice cream parlor or herself. Gone from here. Long gone. And not coming back.

  The Hempest, too, had moved on. The storefront now belonged to a hoagie and pizza shop, with loudly advertised free delivery on campus. The building behind it, where she had lived alone and then with Mark, was now a parking garage. Portia, idly reading the ingredients for the Big Green Special (cukes and sprouts), shivered in her parka.

  She went into the Hopkins Center by the back door and was surprised to find the cafeteria open, if deserted. She bought a cup of Green Mountain Coffee to warm her hands and continued on, through the arts center and out the front door onto the college Green.

  The Green, of course, was one of Dartmouth’s glories. Descended, like Harvard’s Yard, from the town’s once communal livestock grounds, it was Hanover’s historical pedigree, its link to many other New England towns of its vintage. Once, the cows and sheep of local farmers had grazed here; now, the great open space had been swallowed by the college and was ringed with its administration and classroom buildings, its library and arts center, and the Hanover Inn. It was lovely in every season (except for mud season, in which nothing could be lovely) and was today especially brilliant, glittery with snow under this bluest sky. It was the one place on campus that had never grown shabby and lost its grandeur for Portia, the place she had always paused to appreciate, even in haste, even while rushing for a class or, later, a meeting. There had been picnics here, rallies, her own graduation, outdoor classes on days too sunny to stay inside, sunbathing under the anemic New Hampshire sun, endless hanging out. In the fall of her first year, she had gathered with her classmates to build their towering bonfire of railroad ties—one for each number of their class year—just as the previous year’s freshmen had gathered the October before, on the day she and Susannah arrived for an interview and a tour.

  Sometimes Portia thought—and this was not an uncommon pastime for an admissions officer—of the seventeen-year-old applicant she’d been then, the shaky essays declaring an entirely artificial sense of self and an intellectual identity she had no real claim to. She had perfect recall of her SAT scores (just fine before the upward ETS “recentering” in 1994, substandard today), the English and biology teachers who had written her recommendations, the (thinly fictionalized) short story she had sent along at the last minute, about attending a pro-choice rally in Boston. Portia remembered her interview in the small office upstairs in McNutt Hall (the same small office that would, amazingly, become her own small office only a few years later), in which she had been so shy, so terrified about not being good enough, not getting this thing, this chance, which she had only just discovered she wanted very badly. She remembered—oddly, for a woman who had begun paying attention to clothing only when it had become humiliating not to—precisely what she had worn the day of her visit: a blue velour turtleneck and a pair of Levi’s jeans, tan Frye boots passed down to her (about five years after they had left fashionable in their wake) by a friend of Susannah’s. She remembered the simulated enthusiasm she had summoned when the interviewer asked what mattered to her.

  What mattered to her? Nothing, at that time, mattered much to her, except getting into college and away from her mother. There was no passion, no dream of what she might do in the world. Certainly there was no great purpose to her life or profound imperative writ upon her soul. The truth was that Portia thought of her seventeen-year-old self with deep humility, because she had too clearly been one of those late bloomers the current system was not primed to recognize. Or perhaps, she thought now, turning at the center of the Green to set a course for McNutt itself, she had not bloomed at all, only landed where she had landed, wherever that was, through a combination of chance and passivity. It had to be said that, when she read applications for Princeton, she was not looking for students like the student she had been then, who had no clue what they might accomplish in time. Not, of course, that she would have revealed this basic truth about herself in her Dartmouth application—even then, the imperative of college admissions
was to present oneself in the best possible light. She would not have actually announced that she had no particular talents, no extraordinary intelligence, no burning desire to excel in some academic field or profession, and that in the absence of a life plan or goal, her intention was to wait until something happened to her, or some opportunity presented itself, and hope that she was perceptive enough to grab it. Her deep fear of her own mediocrity was compounded, at first, by the students she would meet when she matriculated: happy, easy people, athletic and academically capable. But slowly, over the years that followed, cracks began to appear and widen. The lacrosse star who dropped out without warning. The petite girl from Georgia, last seen on a winter morning loading her family’s car in front of the dorm. The plunging depressions. The pervasive smell of vomit in the women’s bathroom on her floor. The alcohol—Christ, the alcohol!

  Inside every one of her fellow students, she understood now, was a person who didn’t live up to his or her own expectations, a person too fat, too slow, whose hair wouldn’t hold a curl, who had no gift for languages, who lacked the gene for math. They were convinced they were not all they’d been cracked up to be: the track star, classicist, valedictorian, perennial leading lady, campus fixer, or teacher’s favorite. The driven ones she’d known in college feared they weren’t driven enough, and the slackers were sure they’d find out how deficient they were if they ever did apply themselves. Up and down the corridors of the dormitories, behind each closed door, and whether the person within was davening over organic chemistry or drinking himself into a stupor, the Dartmouth she’d attended was populated by young people who were terrified of exposure.

  Twenty years later, it was worse.

  By now, Portia had dwelt in the world of the college-aged, and the nearly college-aged, for a very long time. She knew these kids intimately, more intimately perhaps than when she’d been one of them. She knew that they were soft-centered, emotional beings wrapped in a terrified carapace, that even though they might appear rational and collected on paper, so focused that you wanted to marvel at their promise and maturity, they were lurching, turbulent muddles of conflict in their three-dimensional lives. She knew that they were dying to leave home and petrified to go, that they clung to their friends but knew absolutely that no one truly understood them. When she went out into their world, departing her ivory, literally ivy-clad tower to visit their schools—and it was oddly immaterial if their schools were sticky with wealth or held together by municipal duct tape and valiant teachers—she knew precisely who they were and what they were going through. She knew that their arrogance was laced with self-laceration (sometimes, in the case of the girls, literal self-laceration) and that their stated passions were, more often than not, arid things assembled in their guidance counselors’ offices or at the family dinner table. She knew that the creative ones were desperately afraid they were talentless, and the intellectuals deeply suspected they weren’t brilliant, and that every single one of them felt ugly and stupid and utterly fake.

  This generation, raised with a mantra of self-esteem and extravagantly praised by their parents for every scribble, knew how to talk a good game. They knew how to accumulate accomplishments and present them in CV form (one infamous college counselor actually referred to such an item as a “brag sheet”), how to sell themselves to the teachers who would write their references and the alumni who would interview them. But inside they were crippled with doubt. And though there had been relatively few real scandals in recent Ivy League admissions, few cases in which applicants lied outright and gained admission as a result (any admissions officer could effortlessly cite the Harvard girl who failed to mention that she had killed her mother, the Stanford boy who’d plagiarized articles for his high school paper, and of course Princeton’s own cowboy autodidact, really an ex-con in his thirties), Portia suspected that most applicants had a nagging fear that they were lying, too—or, if not actually lying, then exaggerating their interest in plant biology or modern dance, overestimating their natural aptitude for math, overstating their passion for public service. They feared that they were ordinary kids, in other words, and not the brilliant sparks they had unexpectedly persuaded the grown-ups they were. Ordinary and thoroughly average. Ordinary and undeserving.

  One morning a couple of years earlier, Portia had spent a strange but fascinating hour on the filthy floor of a used-book store in Cambridge (another Ivy League admissions conference) with a pile of Harvard yearbooks, interwoven with dust, covered in flaking crimson leather. Turning the pages, she’d lost herself in the open, handsome faces of the Class of ’28 and their staid, abbreviated biographies: Charles Cortez Abbott (Lawrence, Kans., Browne & Nichols, Advocate, Hasty Pudding, Business). Alfred Reinhart (Lawrence, Mass., Lawrence High, Biology, Medicine). Joseph Parkhurst (St. Paul, Minn., Lawrenceville, Classics, Delphic, Law). The class poem that year had been written by a man not destined to enter the pantheon of American poets, but Portia found it beguiling and terribly current. It told the story of a Harvard student who felt deflated by his college experience, having failed to letter in a sport or graduate at the top of his class, really to excel in any way at all. Determined to recapture this wasted opportunity, the student in the poem had graduated and changed his name, then re-sat the entrance exams (entrance exams! no art portfolios and viola recordings and “brag sheets” back in ’28) to gain another place in the incoming Harvard freshman class, where this time around he determined to make some mark on the university. His fate, however, proved inescapable. Four years on, he found himself precisely in the same position: competent student, athlete, orator, man about town, not a star of his class, not a success in his own mind, merely the very ordinary man he ever was (though no longer quite so young). And this time he departed for good, presumably to become another nondescript alumnus in the sea of Harvard graduates. Because, the poem concluded, all of them—all of us, thought Portia, closing the yearbook in a final puff of dust—were that dreaded thing, the average man. 1928 or 2008—there was no escaping it.

  The door to the Admissions Office opened as she reached the McNutt steps, and Portia found herself looking up into the florid face of Gale Eberhoff. Eberhoff, a former Dartmouth football player, oversaw recruitment for football and baseball and had done so since before Portia had set foot on campus. Winning seasons were his joy in life and losing an athlete to Yale his particular horror. He looked, for a moment, thoroughly perplexed by the sight of his former colleague. Then the synapses snapped into place.

  “Well! Prodigal daughter!”

  “Where’s my fatted calf?” she said, giving him a hug. She had always worked well with Gale.

  “Visiting your mom?”

  “Yes. I had to come in on an errand. I thought I’d take a self-consciously nostalgic walk through my old haunts.”

  “I’m surprised you can find any,” he said. “This town is turning into the Mall of America.”

  “We’ll always have Lou’s, Gale.”

  “And thank God for it! So tell me, how are our orange friends in the great state of New Jersey? I’m still smarting over that pitcher you stole from me last year.”

  She shrugged. This had been a lanky, prematurely bald boy from Rhode Island. The previous January, with applications in to Brown, Dartmouth, and Princeton, Notre Dame had offered him a full scholarship, which he’d had to accept or decline right away. Telling the three Ivies about this offer had set a flurry of events in motion, sending Portia, Gale, and presumably their Brown counterpart scrambling to process the application and make an offer of admission and financial aid—or decline him. Brown had declined. Princeton’s baseball coach had wanted this boy very badly, and he was burning up the phone line to Portia’s office, pleading and badgering by turns. The pitcher had come to Princeton.

  “You’ll get us back,” she said. “You know, Jerry really wanted him. I thought he was a strong writer, too. I still remember his essay.”

  Gale shook his head. In the afternoon light, his cheeks seemed redder
than ever. “You were always good that way. Every year in April, I feel like I’m clearing the whole cache out of my brain to make room for the next batch.”

  “I know what you mean,” said Portia, but it wasn’t true. Not that she remembered them as individuals—no one could ever do that—but she couldn’t excise them, either. Instead, she sometimes felt as if she were throwing them behind her, into a great sack that grew heavier and heavier every year, and then she dragged them forward with her, all those lives.

  “You ever think of coming back? Harrold is leaving, you know. And a couple of the kids, going to graduate school.”

  “Harrold? Really?” This was news. Harrold, Dean of Admissions for a generation, had both admitted her to Dartmouth and then hired her. “Is he going somewhere else?”

  “No. He says he’s done.”

  “College counselor?” She frowned.

  “Not even that. No, he’s really done. I have no idea what he’s going to do. I don’t think he does. Well, he does seem to mention Hawaii a lot.”

  “Can you blame him?” Portia smiled. “I mean, twenty-five years of Hanover winters?”

  “He did say if he runs through his generous Dartmouth pension, he’ll write a college admissions guidebook.”

  She sighed. “Well, why not? Everyone else seems to.”

  “I’m counting on it myself.” Gale smiled, showing stained teeth. She’d forgotten he was a smoker. “Well, my wife is counting on it. That’s our retirement home, she informs me.”

  “How is your wife?” asked Portia, and they talked about her for a bit. Gale and his wife lived in a vast colonial on Webster Terrace, down at the end of Fraternity Row. It made for a depressing walk home, she had always thought. Their daughters, Dartmouth graduates, were now lawyers in Boston. Their son (to his father’s vast regret, an aesthete) was in his final year at Bard.

  After she had hugged him good-bye and sent love to his wife, she went inside. The McNutt waiting room was not much changed: Windsor chairs with the college crest, coffee tables laden with yearbooks and copies of the Dartmouth, framed photographs of the campus on all the walls. A young woman sat at the reception desk. She looked young enough to be a student, if not an applicant.