“I’m telling you,” said Diana, “it’s a good thing I didn’t listen to Kevin and give him the rest of the money up front. He wanted it, you know.”
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” said Mrs. Halsey. “You put one glass or one plate down a tiny bit too hard and it smashes to little pieces. I think you’re much better off with Corian. Ours looks exactly the way it looked when it went in.”
Her husband nodded. “Can’t destroy it.”
“Mom,” John said suddenly, “did I tell you that Nelson wrote an essay for a state competition?”
“Black History Month,” Nelson said affably.
“He’s a finalist,” John went on. “We’re going to Manchester next week for a ceremony with the governor.”
“Well,” said his mother. “Nelson, congratulations.”
“What’s your essay about?” Portia asked.
“Buck Jordan,” said Nelson. “And the Negro Leagues.”
“Baseball,” John said helpfully.
“Yes, of course,” his father said. “Eve, is there any more of the wine?”
“I can open another bottle,” she said, rising.
Portia felt an unmistakable chill settle over the table, or at least their end of it.
After a moment, John’s father turned to Deborah. “Sure you shouldn’t go after her?” he said.
“I’m thinking about it,” she said uncomfortably. But even as she said it, they all heard the front door click heavily open. There was a conspiracy of silence as Simone stalked in, surveyed the table and its open setting, and sat down heavily. Without a word, Jeremiah passed her the roasted potatoes. John’s mother returned and handed the open bottle to her husband.
“Portia,” she said with a deliberate brightness, “can I ask you, how did you get into admissions work? Is it something you go to school for?”
“Oh… no. Well, some people get degrees in education. I haven’t done that. I just fell into it, actually.”
Portia felt Diana’s disapproval all the way across the table. “Fell into it,” she repeated.
“I worked at the Admissions Office at Dartmouth when I was an undergraduate. I gave tours, and then I worked the desk in the office. They offered me a job just before graduation. I really had no idea what I was going to do after graduation. I wish I’d been like John,” she said, happy to imply that she and John were in fact old friends, old comrades, that her being here was not the bizarrely sudden event that it actually was. “I’d say most of us had figured things out by senior year. But I wasn’t one of them. I thought I’d stay on and work for the college, and maybe lightning would strike. So I said yes.”
“Well, that was good luck,” Diana observed.
“Yes,” said Portia, willfully ignoring the implications.
“And lightning never struck?”
“It turned out I liked the work,” she said evenly. “I had an aptitude for it. I liked the mix of solid guidelines and creativity. And I loved the kids.”
“That’s funny,” said Simone, the first time she had spoken since her return. “I mean, you don’t have any kids of your own, right?”
Deborah looked at her daughter in horror. Then, to Portia’s great dismay, she apologized on her behalf.
“What?” said Simone, all innocence. “She doesn’t, right?”
“That’s right,” Portia said, sounding unnaturally bright. “Maybe that’s the reason I can enjoy keeping company with thousands of teenagers a year. Because none of them are mine.”
“Touché,” Deborah said under her breath and with the faintest of smiles.
“You must get bombarded wherever you go,” said John’s father. “Everybody wants to know the magic formula.”
“If only there were one.” She laughed with forced mirth. “We’d just set the computer to make all the decisions, then we’d go off to Bora-Bora with a nice beach book.”
“Where’s Bora-Bora?” said Nelson.
“French Polynesia,” said Jeremiah.
“But I’m sure you get tired of answering questions,” John said pointedly.
“The same questions,” Portia said. “Over and over. Yes. Sometimes I think I should have cards printed up, with my answers, and just hand them out.”
“Like what?” said Diana.
“Like… ‘What’s the SAT cutoff for Princeton?’ Answer: There isn’t one. Which nobody believes. No cutoffs. No limits. No quotas. Or, ‘How many hours of community service does Princeton require?’ Answer: None. Not one hour. Not that we don’t think it’s great to serve the community. But when you make it a requirement, and that’s just what’s happened in so many schools, it does undercut the impact. How could it not?”
“Baldwin has a community service requirement,” Diana said defensively. “We feel it’s important for our students to give back.”
“It is important,” Portia assured her. “But it’s not a requirement. For admission. We don’t penalize kids if they don’t do it. We’re mainly interested in what they’ve done in the classroom.”
“But I imagine the lion’s share of your applicants have done just great in the classroom,” said John’s father. “Then what do you do? Do you have some kind of points formula to compare an A from Andover to an A from… I don’t know, a public high school in Mississippi?”
“You don’t have to answer that,” said John, glaring at his father.
“No, it’s okay. We have a big staff, Mr. Halsey. And we’re each assigned to a different part of the country. My colleague in charge of the South has been able to get to know the schools in her region very well. She knows exactly what an A from a public high school in Mississippi means. She also knows how many applicants we have from schools in Mississippi, how many have come to Princeton in the past, and how they’ve done at Princeton. A student from Mississippi has a lot to offer a northern school.”
“As opposed to those Andover students,” Diana said tersely. “Who are a dime a dozen.”
“And fantastically prepared,” said John. “I’m sure.”
“Yes. And wonderful kids. From all over the world, you know. The prep schools have changed, too. They’re hardly the all-white, all-Christian, even all-American bastions they were. Today, a prep school student could be from any kind of background at all. For that matter, so could a legacy. We’ve had coeducation and diversity long enough to produce legacy applicants of all different ethnicities. It always surprises me when people assume legacies are always white. Do they think our black and Asian and Hispanic graduates aren’t having children? And the kids themselves are great applicants, because they come from families that value education very highly.”
“But,” said Mr. Halsey, “you have to forgive me, I still don’t understand how this works. If you’re not going to use the SAT and if you don’t set some kind of standard that ranks an Andover A against an A from an underserved school, then it’s hard for an outsider to figure out what goes on behind the curtain. There must be a formula.”
“There isn’t,” she said, beyond joking.
“But—”
“My dad,” said John, “is an engineer. Can you tell?”
“Oh.” He looked chagrined. “Am I being rude?”
“Only slightly,” said John.
“No, not at all,” Portia said quickly. “I know it looks mysterious from the outside, and it’s definitely more art than science. But that’s the way it should be, because if we made it just about one standard—any standard, like a GPA or a test—we’d have a very different campus environment. From our perspective, what we’re doing works beautifully. What we’re doing produces spectacular undergraduate classes, and a very vibrant campus environment. For us, that’s the most important thing—and the academics, of course. Which is not to say that we’re complacent about it. The whole thing is like an animal that’s constantly evolving. I mean, we just got rid of Early Decision—that was a course correction. In a few years, it might have changed again.”
“Can I be excused?” said Nelso
n.
His grandmother said, “Yes,” and his father said, “No,” simultaneously. Nelson, weighing his options, stayed put.
“Okay,” Diana said. “I don’t want to be the heavy here, but can I just say, as the mother of a prospective applicant—I mean, to places like Princeton, if not Princeton itself—that it’s very frustrating. We’re all trying to figure out what you want. And it feels like every time we figure out the rules, you just change them. One year it’s ‘well-rounded students.’ The next it’s minorities who play the flute,” she said bitterly. Then, as if remembering that it wasn’t supposed to be about her, she rephrased her conclusion. “These kids want to be able to give you what you want.”
And therein, thought Portia with a regretful look at her cooling dinner, resided the problem. Or one of the problems. She took a sip of her wine and decided she might as well say it, pearls before swine though it almost certainly was. But there was always a chance that Jeremiah, Kelsey, Simone, or even Nelson might hear it and take it to heart.
“We’re very much aware of that,” she told them. “We understand the frustration. And I don’t think there’s anyone in my field right now who isn’t worried about what this is doing to the kids. And I don’t just mean the competition, though that’s bad enough. I mean what the process is doing to them psychologically.”
“Psychologically,” said John’s mother, as if she were unsure of the word’s meaning.
“We’ve got twenty-five percent of all college applications in this country going to one percent of the schools. And that one percent includes the only fifteen American colleges who accept less than twenty percent of their applicants. We know there are parents who are doing everything they can to game the system. They’re having their kids diagnosed ADHD or learning disabled so they can get extra time on the SAT. Now that ETS has stopped denoting which students have been given extra time, there’s no reason not to. But the message. To the kids,” she said, looking at them. “They’ve been tutored in everything, for years, whether they need it or not. So what they come to understand is: I’m not good enough to do it on my own. I need help to be successful.”
“That’s terrible,” Deborah said emotionally.
“Yes. And how can that not carry forward into their adult lives? I think it already impacts their experience as college students. We have students who freak out when they no longer have that support. They’re e-mailing their tutors and sending them their papers for review. They feel fraudulent.”
“What do you mean, fraudulent?” said Diana.
Portia sighed. “I had a pretty scary conversation last year with one of my friend Rachel’s babysitters. She’s a senior at Princeton now. She told me a lot of her friends have a kind of disassociation. They’ve spent years assembling this perfect self to display to us—to people who are going to make these important decisions about them. But sometimes they don’t feel they’re that person at all. They don’t feel smart or capable in the least, and of course when they get to Princeton they’re surrounded by their peers, who have done just as good a job of assembling this competent veneer, so then they feel as if they’re the only fake in the bunch. This girl, Samantha, was telling me there’s so much self-doubt. When I heard that, I suddenly felt as if I’ve been doing these kids a disservice.”
“They expect a lot from themselves,” John said.
“Oh, my God. So much. I honestly wonder if we’re not creating, or at least abetting, this surge of anxiety and depression in college-aged kids. And then there’s the other side of the coin, which the babysitter also pointed out to me. Which is that some of them get to college and they just let all those balls they’ve been juggling for years fall out of their hands. They’ve worked themselves into the ground to get in. They feel like they missed out on slacking off. So now that they’re in, they’re going to have that lazy teenager thing they never had in high school. Seriously, the whole system. I wonder about it sometimes. But this is where we are. In a few years, it will probably look different.”
John smiled. “Maybe you should evolve in the direction of taking slackers,” he suggested. “Video game players.”
“Yeah!” Nelson grinned.
“Comic book readers. Recreational shoppers,” said John.
“Facebook addicts,” said Kelsey.
“They’re all Facebook addicts,” said Diana, sounding almost likable.
“We call these people ‘late bloomers,’” Portia said, smiling.
“I was a late bloomer,” Deborah announced. “I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with myself when I graduated from college. I sort of let myself get recruited by Procter and Gamble. I spent two years in Cincinnati working on Cascade detergent.”
“This is a little-known fact about Deborah,” John said fondly. “She is directly responsible for the fact that the background color on the Cascade box is green.”
“That’s true,” Deborah said. “It was a remarkable accomplishment. I had to fight off the blue and orange factions. But strangely, even such a compelling victory was not enough to keep me in product management. I decided I wanted to teach.”
“I think it doesn’t matter how you get there,” John said. “Just that you get there. If you get to the right place, you’re lucky.”
“Which means,” said Simone, who had made a meal entirely of potatoes, “that you suppose you are.”
“Good God, I hope so.” John’s mother laughed. “We had to sit through Africa and inner-city Boston. I was terrified about where he’d be going next.”
“Gaza!” his father said grimly. “Sierra Leone.”
John shrugged. “Don’t they need teachers in Sierra Leone?”
“But not you,” his mother said, alarmed.
“No.” He sighed. “Not me. I like where I am. And I’m not taking Nelson to Sierra Leone.”
His mother and father both looked at Nelson.
“No way,” said Nelson. “Can I be excused now?”
The stage creaked under my feet as I strode across the wooden boards. I had prepared for this moment my whole life, from the first scales my little fingers were drilled to make, to the trembling solo pieces, the Etudes, Nocturnes, Marches, Minuets and finally the very difficult piece, Liszt’s Waldesrauschen, that I was about to play. I could see my parents and grandmother in the front row of the theater, and my teacher and his wife beside them. If I succeeded, I would win the concerto competition of the New England Piano Teachers’ Association. But my fingers wouldn’t move.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
ONCE THERE WAS AND WAS NOT
This time, all pertinent parties agreed that he could go, so he left, followed directly by Jeremiah, Simone, and then Deborah. Soon after, Kelsey and Diana went home. Kelsey stopped at the door to say that Portia had given her a lot to think about (which Portia found oddly touching), and Diana actually hugged her and said she hoped they’d meet again. In an official context? Portia thought automatically and cynically, but there was something in the warmth of that hug she hadn’t expected. Approval, it occurred to her. Of her appearance at the family table and in her brother’s life? Clearly, even Diana had a grasp of the Deborah dynamic that eluded her. But all seemed, if not overtly well, then at least well-ish, and Portia was surprised, as she watched Diana’s SUV take off into the winter night, to find that she was feeling strangely content.
The rest of the evening slipped away from her. She seemed to lack the will to make any kind of decision. Every time she thought she must leave, or at least think about leaving, she let herself be deterred: clearing the table, a game of chess with Jeremiah (actually three, so quickly was he able to dispatch her), and even an awkward but at least basically good-natured conversation with Simone about her current obsession with Simone Weil (of whom—happily—Portia knew nothing, which set the stage for Simone to be strident, which seemed to please her very much). Once, months earlier, she’d imagined Simone to be named in honor of Simone de Beauvoir, and this turned out to be true. But Simone, contrary soul tha
t she was, had recently ferreted out an amusing little factoid about her namesake and took a certain pleasure in publishing it: that de Beauvoir had scored second highest on the French university entrance exams of 1928, the year of her application. Weil, her classmate, had come in first.
All roads, thought Portia, listening and nodding as Simone talked on, lead to admissions. Or was that so only in her own mired life? How was it that she had come to stand at this one specific portal and all the world had serendipitously lined up to gain entry? It was a narcissistic way of seeing things, she knew, and that was odd, because she was not a very good narcissist and had no great need to place herself at the center of the universe. She believed, absolutely, that if she were to abandon her post, her profession, and turn what talents she had to something else—anything else—the loss of stature would not really diminish her. She had never, for example, had much relish for the moment of panic-laced fascination that usually occurred when someone learned her job title. She had never taken pleasure in the undeniable power intrinsic to her work, except where it gave her the chance to extract some young, gifted person from an environment of limitations. (And who would not take pleasure in that?) All of it was the job and not her. And the job was so interesting, did it really matter that she herself was not?
By the end of the evening, Simone had started to warm to the idea of Penn, and even more to Swarthmore, which Portia happened to think would be an excellent place for her. She was a smart girl with her own ideas, prickly in some of the good ways and certainly promising. Portia thought she would thrive away from home and away from her mother, though her mother had done a formidable job raising her. She might do anything with herself, as long as it involved advocacy and perseverance, both clear strengths. Portia did not say so, but she also hoped Simone would think about Princeton, where she would certainly be challenged and where opinionated women would always be welcome, and she invited the girl to get in touch with her if she wanted any guidance along the way. This alone, it occurred to her, made her glad she had come home with John and stayed this long. And the realization that Deborah was someone she might truly like, and that John (if he aged as his father had) would likely be handsome until the end of his life, and that, in a very general way, it was good to move among people who were basically nice and interested and welcoming and did not know her very well, and who seemed to at least entertain the idea of her being with him, with John, without obvious horror.
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