Admission

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  The paramedics brought her to Dick’s House, the campus infirmary, and only when they left her there in the care of the nurses did she realize that the cloth she had for some time been holding against her eye was actually the once white shirt of the boy who had stood over her. How it had come into her hand was a mystery, but there was no doubt of what it was, not with its monogram—TSW—disconcertingly pristine. She groggily refused to give it up to the nurses.

  The eye was not seriously damaged, thankfully. With a patch, a single stitch in her right brow, and an astoundingly effective analgesic, she floated away from all remaining pain and mortification and woke up many hours later to bright sunlight, still clutching the shirt.

  Over the following week, her eye healed, her bruise faded, her single stitch dissolved, and on the eve of homecoming the bonfire went up in its usual conflagration, sealing the unity of their class for all time. She washed the shirt, intending (hoping!) to return it to its owner, and it was only when the fabric had been finally fully liberated from its stains and then ironed in the damp little laundry room in the basement that she realized she did not know to whom it belonged. That boy, its owner—so real to her in his solid silhouette—had no actual name and no clear face, and as the fall progressed and the accident slipped mercifully into the past, Portia was increasingly reluctant to bring it up.

  Unfortunately, as her chances for resolution waned, her eagerness only seemed to build. She looked for the shape of him constantly as she moved around the campus, scrutinizing boys as she brushed past them in the hallways of classroom buildings, and at the dining room tables in Thayer, and at parties in dormitory rooms and the sticky basements of fraternities. And always as she crossed the Green, as if she might most likely find him here, at the scene of the crime. She tried to remember the specific backlit outlines of his shoulders and head, and strained to recall whether he had spoken, and if so, what he had said. Obviously, he had removed his shirt—this shirt—and given it to her. How had she managed to miss this very interesting transaction and all the information that might have come with it? Because there was little information to be had. He was tall and broad, with hair more flat than thick and curling. There had been a shirt beneath the shirt with the monogram, but it had been too dark to see the collar or the pattern. Mostly, she remembered the lacrosse stick, and she even went along to one of the home games that fall (Dartmouth versus Princeton, as it happened), to try to pick him out among the hurling players. But he could have been any of half a dozen or so, or none of them, and she went home feeling slightly sullied from the whole thing.

  She was (and how Susannah would have raged at this, if she’d known) very much like a reverse Cinderella looking for her prince, with only the clue of the monogram to fit his symbolic foot. In fact, it occurred to her more than once that the monogram itself was taking the brunt of her fixation, that the identity of the man who had hit her—maybe—and felt bad enough about that to remove and pass along to her his clothing, was actually no more and no less than a monogram, and so it was the monogram, and not the man it belonged to, that truly held her.

  Unfortunately, given the circumstances, Portia had had little experience with monograms. Susannah had not seen fit to monogram a single sheet, towel, washcloth, napkin, picture frame, slipper, item of stationery, or article of clothing. Susannah’s friends and their children also lived monogram-free lives, so Portia had no way of knowing that a monogram reading say, T S W—with its central S ever so slightly larger than the T and W that flanked it—represented a person whose initials were actually T W S. And so, when Portia had the bright idea to consult her freshman book, the directory of her class, she had looked long and hard at every boy with a last name starting in W and a first name starting in T. There she discovered Teddy Washington of Columbia, South Carolina (a reedy African-American who had coincidentally been on Portia’s freshman trip), and Theo Westerboerk of the Netherlands (stout and already balding), and Travis Wall of Hanover, New Hampshire (son of a math professor), none of them remotely like the former owner of the monogram. To be even more thorough, she found and searched the freshman books of the sophomore, junior, and senior classes, but the dozen or so TWs that emerged from those were likewise wrong.

  By winter, Portia had let this particular preoccupation recede. She was happy with her classes that term and attempting to write a play for the annual student one-act competition (she never finished this), and she had taken up with the astounding Marrow siblings, who had evidently brought with them to college the boisterous intellectual ambience of their family’s apartment on the Upper West Side. The freshman class had three sets of twins, two of them disconcertingly identical, and Rebecca and Daniel Marrow. The Marrows were, individually and collectively, extraordinary. Rebecca (already a novelist) and Daniel (a Westinghouse finalist for his work on staphylococcus) had followed their brother Jonathan (chess champion) to Dartmouth. (Another super-high-achieving brother, Benjamin, was cooling his heels elsewhere in the Ivy League.)

  Rebecca was a force of nature, a flower of Ashkenazi frizz in a sea of limp WASP coiffure, a vintage double-breasted men’s herringbone tweed in a crowd of down jackets and vests. Only a few months into their college career, Rebecca had established herself as the nexus of creative people on campus. At her self-termed salons, salmon (shipped, from Zabar’s, by Mom) was served on black bread and sprinkled with red onion, and wine was dispensed from bottles with French labels and actual corks. Most of the poets and writers dropped by at least once (the more sensitive flowers among them put off by the din), as well as the Latinists and the theater crowd, and all seemed more than relieved to have found one another, even in a charmless cinder-block room with a view of an access road. Portia had blundered into the scene, falsely declaring (falsely believing) that she would be doing something theatrical at some point in her Dartmouth career.

  One Sunday afternoon in February, as the campus nursed a collective hangover from the exertions of fraternity and sorority rush, Rebecca announced that she had invited Tom Standley, from her seven a.m. French drill, over for coffee, and would Portia please come, too, because she didn’t want him thinking that she, you know, liked him, and he kind of had this thing for Jewish girls.

  What did that mean? Portia had asked, a little alarmed.

  It meant that he had already taken two home to Mom, who was apparently quite the anti-Semite, which was apparently quite the point.

  Rebecca, who knew every Israelite on campus, including faculty and staff, and seemed to assume that Portia did as well, was acquainted with both of these girls from Shabbat dinners at the student center. One, she reported, had gone to visit the Standley family over Christmas break and returned to campus reeling, half with the hilarity of it, half in horror. The parents, she reported, had been under the impression that her surname—Applebaum—was Appleton, and all had been well until all had been revealed.

  “Obviously, he told them that was her name,” Portia said to Rebecca, defending the Jewish honor of this unknown girl.

  “Ya think?” Rebecca laughed. “But like I said, he’s a sweet guy. I just don’t want him getting the wrong idea.”

  That this would be accomplished by shoving another Jewish girl in his face was a notion that did not occur to her until later, but by then, of course, she was well over the cliff and unlikely to think rationally about much of anything.

  When he arrived, knocking on the open door and cradling a tired cactus by way of a hostess gift, she recognized him right away, the blank outline filled in, and the colors, shading, texture, voice, in a brilliant, almost violent moment. By the time he crossed the threshold, he had been transformed from that dark, backlit body to something complex and whole, a fully assembled eighteen-year-old male who could hit a stranger with a lacrosse ball and then strip off his own expensive shirt to wipe away the various aftereffects, a careless person who had taken care of her. That he did not experience the same rush of recognition was actually a boon, Portia felt, because she needed time to reco
ver from the fact of him, appearing, entering, taking the armchair behind her after giving Rebecca a generous embrace. In just that tiny passage of time, she had found herself cataclysmically in love, a state she was surprised to recognize so easily, given that she had never inhabited it before. The ground untrustworthy, the surface of her skin burning for contact, she needed all available restraint to keep from saying things, touching things, simply flinging herself against him.

  By then, others had arrived: theater types, who erroneously (as it would turn out) considered Portia one of their tribe. Conversation was puttering along, lubricated by wine and a certain jovial superiority, which stemmed from the assumption that all present had shunned the absurd and anti-intellectual ritual of fraternity rush.

  “Those pathetic drones,” said someone, a Thespian from—he had earlier noted—Meryl Streep’s New Jersey hometown. “Trotting off down the Row with their plastic cups, ready to waste the next four years on beer pong.”

  “At least it gets them out of the way,” said someone else, a girl who practically lived at Sanborn, the English Department library, surrounded by her journals and poems in progress. “I’d rather they barfed on one another instead of on me.”

  This comment produced no spark of recognition in Tom Standley, to Portia’s relief.

  “Well, I rushed a fraternity,” he said instead, not smugly so much as perplexed. “I’m excited, actually.”

  They all looked at him in mild shock, as if he were a newly declared atheist at Bible study. This changed the entire chemistry in the room.

  “Yeah?” said Rebecca. “Which one?”

  Again, with no sense at all of its significance, he named the WASPiest, wealthiest, and most thoroughly Republican house on campus.

  “Ugh,” said one of the girls, extravagantly repelled.

  “All those Dartmouth Review guys are in there,” said another, as if this were likely to dissuade him.

  “Yeah,” said Tom. “But you know, they don’t push it on you. They’re good guys.”

  “Hitler was very fond of his dog, I believe,” Daniel said in a treacly voice. “And of course, he was an artist, too.”

  “Daniel,” Rebecca scolded.

  “I look at it like this,” said Tom. “The next couple of years, we’re all going to be running around like crazy. I’m going to France sometime. Next year or junior year. And I want to do an internship at this law firm in Boston. I keep thinking, when I come back here, half my friends are going to be away off campus. And it’ll be nice to have a smaller group of guys to hang out with. You know, not as impersonal as a dorm.”

  Unfortunately for the assembled, this was a difficult argument to dismiss out of hand. Many of the campus’s social woes stemmed from the scheme known as the Dartmouth Plan, which required students to spend a portion of their time off campus, studying, working, or interning, shuttling back and forth from Hanover like a continually shuffled deck of cards. Portia and her classmates were newly immersed in this reality, having returned from Christmas break only weeks earlier to find replacement casts of dorm mates. The fact that rush took place at precisely this point in the year was not, she supposed, arbitrary, and while Daniel and the others continued to assail the conformist in their midst, she suspected she was not the only one who empathized with his sentiments. She sat silently, in any case, measuring in millimeters the distance between her hand and his, while they asserted their moral and intellectual superiority.

  “I already know half the guys in the frat,” Tom said. “I went to school with some of them, and I played lacrosse against a bunch of the others. I went to camp in Vermont with two of them.” He shrugged. “It’s like moving off campus with your friends, only the house is a frat house.”

  “What’s your last name again?” said Daniel.

  “Standley,” Tom said affably.

  “Oh. Well,” said Daniel.

  “Thomas W. Standley,” Rebecca chortled. “Ask him what the W stands for.”

  “Nah,” said Tom, grinning. “It’s not a big deal.”

  “No, no,” Rebecca said. “Of course not.”

  “What?” said one of the Latinists. “Winthrop? Wigglesworth?”

  “Wharton?” said Daniel.

  “Winslow?” said a girl.

  “Wheelock!” Rebecca crowed, unable to contain herself.

  There was a stunned silence.

  “As in… ?” said the girl, meaning the Reverend Eleazar Wheelock, sent north from Yale two centuries earlier to educate (that is, convert) the Indians of New Hampshire, founder of Moor’s Indian Charity School (later Dartmouth College) in Dresden (later Hanover), New Hampshire.

  “Wow,” said Daniel. “No kidding?”

  “No, actually,” Tom said. “Not Eleazar. His cousin, also named Wheelock, but far less distinguished. Hey,” he said, “did you choose your middle name?”

  “What, Irwin?” Rebecca laughed. “What makes you think he didn’t?”

  The party, having soured irrevocably, broke up soon after, though Tom seemed not to take offense. He gave Rebecca a big hug, waved affably at the boys, and turned a luminous face to Portia, who still had not spoken in his presence. After he was gone, she helped Rebecca rinse the glasses in the chilly kitchenette at the end of the corridor, then went to Sanborn to stare pointlessly at her notes for a paper on The Winter’s Tale. Five months after arriving on campus, she felt, for the first time, that there was a cohesion to the experience, more than just a jerking along to class, parties, activities in which she could not find traction. Already, just in her first term, she had tasted and spat out too many potential selves, learning only what she was not and did not want, but never what she was or did. As an exercise in least resistance, she had tried out for the soccer team, only to discover, among her potential teammates, women who cared passionately about the sport, which—she simultaneously discovered—she did not, nor ever had. Someone on her floor had suggested she come along to crew tryouts, and that she had loved for the river at dawn and the rhythm of the boat and the magic of the balance and glide, which were so much more difficult to attain than they appeared, until she noted the broad, muscular back of the team goddess, a senior girl trying for the Olympics, and superficially decided that she had no desire to look like that. Afterward, she had cast herself as a playwright and a literary type, though already these selves were beginning to chafe. But now, brilliantly, suddenly, Portia had the rushing, thrilling sense that her life was migrating into order, forming around a point, starting to make, if not actual sense, then at least a point of embarkation. She had fallen in love, and that was the fact of her.

  Portia had graduated high school a virgin, despite Susannah’s best efforts to instill in her a joyful ownership of her sexuality. This comprised frank and open conversation from an early age, an arsenal of what-a-girl-should-know information on matters of contraception, disease, and the somewhat more elemental emotional composition of heterosexual teenage boys. It also featured a series of concerned interventions as Portia’s high school years began to pass without her having begun (or, at any rate, told her mother she’d begun) her wondrous personal sexual journey. Portia, who by then had years of experience deflecting Susannah’s interest, did not find it hard to fend off her mother on this matter, but she was becoming concerned herself. To be a virgin in high school wasn’t, even in the omnisexual milieu of the Pioneer Valley, such a social black spot. But leaving for college that way seemed downright negligent, sort of like going off without being able to write a critical paper or operate a washer-dryer. She chose well—a fellow counselor at the summer camp UMass ran for soccer players—and had a reasonably good experience. At the end of August the boy decamped to Reed, which was comfortably far away, and they petered out after only a letter or two.

  But this was what the entire exercise had been for, thought Portia that night, uselessly shuffling the pages of her sorry Winter’s Tale paper. She was ready for it, she crowed to herself, her heart pounding. She had made herself ready. And while
she had never before had cause to see herself as a passionate woman, it was wondrous, shimmering, to find that she actually was. Obviously, she was! Every nerve ending seemed to be singing, every synapse firing simultaneously. She had an object and a clear goal, and from that night, all that mattered was to summon him.

  Wistful leaves fluttered over me as I sat overlooking the azure Pacific ocean and pondered the great gift I had been given the first time I was inspired to write a poem. In fourth grade I wrote my first poem, and ever since I have journaled everyday, filling countless journals with my stories and verses. My goal is to one day publish a book of my writings, and last spring I took a step toward that goal when my poem “Vortex” was selected for publication by the League of American Poets for an anthology of the best poetry by American teens.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  THE LOW DOOR IN THE WALL

  Nearly a year of this would follow, a year in which Portia could do nothing without looking first for Tom (at the student center, and the library, and for one precious term in the immense geology class she had taken to fulfill a science requirement), and then, if he was miraculously, luminously, present, choosing carefully where and how to position herself, always weighing the angle at which his gaze might fall on her. If it ever fell. Which it never seemed to do. A year in which she could not bring herself to actually approach him, but attended every party at Tom’s socially unassailable fraternity (where, nonetheless, the beer was just as stale as it was everywhere else on Fraternity Row, the furniture just as shabby, the basement floor just as sticky, the boys just as single-minded, and the drinking games on continual loop in the bar just as inane). A year of lying-awake torment in which imagined touching alternated with imagined conversation, invented smells and tastes, and great insights, reached with the catalyst of his undoubted brilliance. But nothing actually happened, and none of this brought her any closer to Tom than the outer periphery of his orbit, which was itself many light-years from the source of her designated light.