Early Decision

by Lacy Crawford

  Mr. Blanchard pursed his lips. His mouth’s strawberry fullness embarrassed her and made her wonder how long he’d been married, what he’d been like at her age. He sat back and propped both hands behind his head, spreading his elbows wide. “Very compelling,” he finally declared. “Quite a racket you’ve got going there.”

  Anne waited.

  “I assume my wife has worked out the details of your fee?”

  She had not. “I charge five thousand dollars a student, all-inclusive. No limit to the number of applications. Half payable before we begin working and the balance upon submission of the final application. That’s it.”

  “Oh,” he said, seemingly relieved. “What does that work out to by the hour, I wonder?”

  “Counting or not counting the hours on the phone with moms?”

  He let his head hang back in an openmouthed laugh. “You’re a pro, I can tell. Where do you live?”

  “Lincoln Park. Not far from the zoo.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, but I don’t work out of my apartment. I prefer to meet students at home or elsewhere.”

  “Fine. We’re Gold Coast—Delaware. Margaret will work all of that out with you. And, Anne, listen.”

  “Yes?”

  “Did my wife talk with you about Duke?”

  “No. She did mention that—”

  “Sadie’s got quite a boost there.” He seemed to almost blush. He pulled his arms back down before him on the desk and folded in to demonstrate his humility. “Yes. I’ve been fortunate to serve as a trustee for, oh, going on about five years now. We’re strong supporters of the university’s current capital campaign. So all these applications—well, I don’t really see the point in making too many. Let’s just do what we have to do. Sadie will go to Duke. But I want her to have the experience of gaining admission on her own.”

  Which was impossible, thought Anne, unless Sadie applied anonymously; and more to the point, how was her independence to be assured by hiring a private coach? Christ.

  Still Blanchard had again avoided an easy provocation, and it surprised her. Anne’s own father, a head of pathology at a large city hospital whose tower was visible from this very law office, had gone to Princeton before her. It was a fact easily uncovered online and that she often anticipated would lessen her credentials in the eyes of parents, as in, Of course you got in. Oddly, it seemed to have the opposite effect: as though they imagined her the right sort of person to work with their children, to the manor born. Sometimes they alluded to it, which Mr. Blanchard did now, though kindly: “That’s a concern I trust you can relate to,” he said.

  “I was lucky to be a legacy,” Anne replied, as she always did. “But I believe my college record speaks for itself.”

  “Indeed,” he said, raising a liturgical hand over her CV.

  In fact Anne’s father had graduated smack into a terrible draft number, and four years in the navy had left him among the oldest in his med school class and late getting through residency; she remembered the long nights without him, her parents’ squabbles over money. Her grandfather had gone to Princeton, too, finishing in three years to join up during the Second World War; to his mind college did nothing but keep him from his manhood, and she couldn’t recall his mentioning the place once before he’d died. Family legend had it that his father had attended Princeton for his freshman year, but had withdrawn after his own father died of the Spanish flu. Anne didn’t actually know if this was true. But as a family creation myth, it was accurate: all the men had left college and returned to the deep Midwest, where, in those days at least, one didn’t gas on about East Coast educations. Now, in Anne’s era, there was no boy. Only Anne. And there she was, back in Chicago. Nevertheless she was—probably—fourth-generation Princeton. Did that make her the sort you wanted to have working with your child, or the sort you found it easy to scapegoat?

  Sometimes, of course, parents paid her for the former but retained the option of the latter. This was part of the job, too.

  “And I’m sure Sadie’s accomplishments will speak for themselves,” she said. “I’ll do my best to help her put them forward.”

  “I greatly appreciate that.” Gideon Blanchard rose from his chair. “Listen. Great time chatting with you, young lady.” He rested his palm on Anne’s shoulder, long fingers spread like a squid, and steered her toward the door. “Thanks for coming in. Best of luck to you.”

  Was that luck intended for use with his daughter, or in her own life? Was it that obvious that Anne was a mess? “Thank you,” she said.

  At the door he paused. “Oh, and did I see you chatting with Ewan Monroe out there? He a friend?” His pony grin was wide. He seemed to have too many teeth.

  “We were at high school together,” she told him. “Haven’t seen him since I was sixteen.”

  “Ah. Well, that can’t have been that long ago. Lucky girl. Off you go. Many thanks, then. Have a great Labor Day.” And the door was closed.

  THE SUPPLICATION ALWAYS stung. Anne told herself she did it because she felt sorry for the kids, which was true, and she believed she could help them. She thought a good deal about their odd paralysis. She’d read somewhere the description of a horrifying lab experiment in which dogs were locked into cages and made to suffer shocks whether they tried to move or not, and before long the dogs learned to just lie there and take it—they stopped even trying to escape. Similarly, she imagined her kids trying to take their steps into the world, and being told at every turn that they needed to do it bigger, better, or more publicly, their parents not knowing the difference between encouragement and domination. Worse, the parents hired specialists to address every aspect of these kids’ lives—SATs and calculus and French verbs and baseball throws and volleyball serves, which was a way of saying, Whatever you can do, it’s not good enough. The trick was that the kids were trained to ask for extra help. They saw their peers gaining through private arrangements, and they understood that they needed to keep up. So the kids themselves often requested the extra credit, more tutoring, special mentoring. What parent would say no? Finally, there was the harrowing new ritual of having one’s child diagnosed with a delay of some sort—reading/processing/seeing/thinking—or the basic inability to sit still, and then petitioning the College Board for untimed tests. And there it was, in black-and-white ovals: You can’t do what thousands upon thousands of other students can do. Can’t show up in a gymnasium on a miserable Saturday morning, take your test, and go home. Can’t suffer the nausea and the exhaustion and the overwhelming boredom, fret over the last fifteen questions, mix up your lines and have to go back and erase your bubbles. Leave trashed and with a lead-shined fist. All of these most basic indignities of secondary education had been supplanted by the graver insult of relieving students of the notion of independent challenge in the first place. By the time the children got to her, they sat warily in their chairs with hunched shoulders and waited to be told what to do. College was just the next thing—that was all. It was Anne’s goal to shake them awake and alert them to the fact that real life was just around the corner. That they had four years to transition from being told what to do to choosing what to do, and that the world after college was unforgiving of indecision. When she finally did manage to get through to her kids, then it was as though a person who had been absent decided to show up—a voice appeared on the page in their essays, and a new energy drove their search. They started keeping their own deadlines and doing their own dreaming. And almost without fail, this new sense of self-possession, coupled with some insight and reasonable scholarly ambition, was rewarded by the admissions committees. In five years and seventy students, all but two of Anne’s kids had matriculated at their top-choice schools. Anne was passed down from year to year by parents who refused to breathe her name until their own children had finished the process. They flew their kids in from all over the country to see her, and they flew Anne everywhere to be with them—Manhattan, Marin, Snowmass, Siena. She was sure she could help. In fact, she s
ometimes believed she was the only person left who could.

  Unless, of course, she was just the next turn of the screw, the most elaborate device yet for robbing kids of their autonomy, and this is what worried her as she returned home from the offices of Blanchard, McHenry, Winsett & Blair. She always felt a little bit dirty after a parents’ meeting, and Mr. Blanchard had been one of the worst. Plus it grated that Ewan Monroe from Modern Novel was up and coming, squirreling through those corridors as a second-year associate, while she was treading water with high school seniors. The difference in their occupations seemed a measure not of aptitude but of virtue, and also somehow of heart.

  But this isn’t forever, she told herself. “Not forever,” she said aloud as she circled her block, looking for parking. In her father’s own words, her work was an “excellent stopgap” for a young woman waiting for her life to start. Though if she were honest, it was more precisely a stopgap for a young woman waiting for her boyfriend’s life to start. While Martin was out in Los Angeles breaking into television and scouting places for them to live, which was where he’d been since the New Year, when his latest show at Steppenwolf closed and he took a sabbatical to try for the next big thing. An agent had seen him in Stonewater Rapture and taken him for a drink; turned out they’d almost overlapped at Yale, and he thought Martin had the look. God, did he; his height, his breadth, his wide, clean shoulders; the deep brown curls he wore pulled back in a ponytail, gladiator-style. But what could they do? It didn’t make sense for Anne to go west with him; he was crashing on floors and living by his wits. She needed to keep something cooking in Chicago until he got his foot in the door.

  Remembering Martin cheered her. Just the image of him in her mind countered that beaked boy, Ewan, and his happily plodding life. She imagined their future life in L.A., a bungalow behind a jasmine hedge, eventually a child asleep upstairs. For now, Anne’s home was in the lone apartment building on the block, her flat sandwiched, appropriately enough, between a gorgeous married couple on the ground floor and a batty singleton called April upstairs. On bad days, she thought Fortune was offering her the choice in starkly proximate terms. On good days, she felt perfectly poised over the happily grounded life awaiting her.

  But April. My God, was she getting bad. April Penze was her name. Irritating in every way. A perennial paralegal hunting for a husband, esquire, or anyone really who would keep her in Candies wedges and highlights. She played singles volleyball on Monday nights and singles foosball on Thursdays and in the summer took singles booze cruises along Lake Michigan, Bud Light and watery G&Ts departing from Navy Pier on the half hour. Even her name was bothersome: Was that pence or penzey? Pen-zay? Or just plain pens? The word on the buzzer was like a piece of grit in Anne’s days. Anne understood that her irritation was born of her terror of ending up like April: midthirties, with tinseled hair and tapping nails, like a freezing alley cat, alone. Being conscious of the origin of her aversion only heightened Anne’s ire. She clung to the fact that Martin once referred to April as “that trashy chick upstairs.”

  April and Anne had coexisted, however, until a recent episode that had revealed that Anne’s distaste was more than reciprocated—which was fascinating as well as troubling—and which had escalated matters considerably. Anne had just been returning from her morning run with Mitchell and had paused to read the headlines of her New York Times. She insisted on receiving the paper in hard copy for two reasons: for the ability to do the crossword in pen; and for the pleasure of the moment when she and Mitch came in puffing from the lakefront air and stood in the vestibule, the first thin sun coming through the streaked glass, while Anne slid the paper out of its plastic sleeve and saw the day’s headlines revealed. As silly as it seemed, it did actually feel like the world in her hands: the paper’s dire tone was like an invitation to an important event. With all that was so distant—Martin on the West Coast, her friends grasping brass rings all over the country, her parents sitting in their lonely chairs out in the suburbs, her life seemingly perched just beyond where she could reach—the immediacy of the paper in her sweaty hands made for a moment of belonging every morning.

  And often, just at that moment, April Penze would burst through the vestibule door on her way to work. She never said hello or good morning in reply to Anne; just gave her an odd look and bashed out onto the street, letting the door slam on a haze of department-store perfume. It went without saying that April didn’t stoop to gather up one of the many papers on the floor. She didn’t read the Tribune or Crain’s or (of course) the Times. Maybe this was the source of her frustration; maybe she resented the daily pile of papers between her and the door. Maybe Anne simply took the brunt of that.

  But one morning late that spring, on one of the first truly warm days, when May 1 had passed and all Anne’s students had checked in to confirm they’d mailed deposits to their top choices, she had come in from an especially good run and was heading up the stairs to the second floor as April was flying down from the third, and where they passed, on the first landing, Mitchell shinned by April’s wobbly heels, and although Mitchell was gentle as a lamb, April narrowed her eyes at Anne and said, “Keep that dog away from me.”

  “What?” asked Anne. In years of sharing those stairs, this was the first time April had spoken to her.

  “Keep the damn dog away from me.”

  “He’s going up to our house,” Anne replied, flustered. Her heart resumed its pounding. “We live here. He’s on his leash. He’s just going up the stairs.”

  “Yeah, no shit,” April hissed. Then she passed, and said again, “Just keep him the hell away from me. Filthy mutt.”

  The door slammed behind April. Anne felt heat rising along the sides of her neck and up into her scalp. Insults gathered on her tongue. But it was too late. Mitchell sat by their door, glossy and calm, waiting to be let in to his water and breakfast. It did not occur to Anne that April might be afraid. She could not find a shred of sympathy. April was just a flat-out bitch. As aggressive as Mitchell was mild. Rabid.

  After that, they had managed to avoid each other for most of the summer. But Anne fed off of the trails of crap perfume she left in the halls, and pored over misdirected mail for clues to April’s depravity. Travel brochures for Acapulco. Carpet-cleaning coupons. Something from “North Shore Cupid,” who advertised to “Businessmen and Professional Ladies” and boasted of “thirty-two bull’s-eyes and counting!”

  But then, midway through August, Anne’s paper had begun to go missing. It would be there in the pile when she left for her run at six, but it was gone by six forty-five. Monday through Friday, only, and only the Times. All the other papers remained. Anne imagined April taking but not reading it; one morning she even went so far as to check the trash bin on the corner, expecting to find the furled Times there atop the heap. No luck. Every morning, it just vanished.

  So this was war. Anne let it escalate. She stepped neatly over her paper every morning, and as she ran the summer lakefront, white sun on still water, she worked over and over the problem of April. She always meant to think carefully about the conversation she’d had with Martin the night before, if in fact he had called—often he complained that it got too late Chicago time before he was able to take a break—but his words, as confounding as they were, were too passive to take the stage from April. What’s more, to best April, Anne had to have Martin in her life, even though Martin had commitment problems, to put it mildly. If she’d been wise, she’d have sorted out Martin. But to hear her thoughts, to feel the churning in her belly as she pounded out five miles along the waterfront, you’d have thought it was not Martin but this strange, sad woman April she’d been thinking she’d marry for—what was it?—five years now.

  THE MORNING BROUGHT three e-mails, two of which sported little red exclamation points. Anne clicked on the first, from WinnetkaOrion, and noted to ask Hunter if he’d ever studied astronomy.

  Hey Anne,

  I thought about the assignment you said, but I can’t wr
ite an email to someone else and send it to you. Sorry, but it feels bogus and weird. Plus I had a long talk with Nicole about all the stuff we talked about, and she thinks I should write about Montana more and less about the community service stuff, and I wanted to know what did you think of that?

  Thanks,

  Hunter

  Hunter was pushing back. Excellent. Clearly there was something he felt worth protecting. She tapped back:

  Dear Hunter,

  Nicole’s idea is excellent. I look forward to reading. Please, if you can, send through to me before we next meet. Don’t sweat spelling/punctuation. I’m not your English teacher.

  Best,

  Anne

  She skipped over the second message, from MarionCPfaff, because the third was from Martin:

  Annie,

  Sorry I didn’t call last night. Peter’s got me lined up with a manager, which is crazy. Like a social secretary, a butler and a babysitter all rolled up into one. Have two auditions today so heading out for coffee and cigs. Will try later.

  How’re your kiddoes shaping up? Tell them you’ll be taking Columbus Day weekend off. I don’t want the pitter-patter of little elites to distract us.

  xM

  PS Remind me to tell you about crazy burlesque show!

  Martin had nailed a certain genre of missive capable of unsettling Anne in every line. Concise and harrowing, possibly catastrophic. He was the Stephen King of romantic correspondents. Nothing was safe: not the news of the new manager, who kept him from calling her; not the cigarettes, which disgusted her; not even the sweet innuendo of his impending visit—potentially confirmed here, though who knew for sure—which was followed by an insult to her students, and thereby to her. That lone x, too formulaic for affection. And a postscript to leave her, kindly, with visions of naked women in her head, as they clearly were in his.

  Martin’s notes glided in under her radar, roughing up her heart but, on their surface, appearing ordinary and even sweet. She was left thinking that she was the one making things complicated. This dovetailed nicely with a larger sense in society around her, among dating singles at least, that women were generally the ones who made things complicated. So then she felt guilty and a little bit ashamed, and decided, again, that she’d stop thinking about it altogether. She clicked on Mrs. Pfaff’s e-mail instead.