Anne wrote her final paper on the whale qua whale. Her professor was thrilled. No one had ever taken this approach before, he said: written about the whale as a whale! Except Melville, Anne thought, in despair. What happened to her college English classes, the brilliant lectures, the shared love of these books? What rabbit hole separated the B.A. from the Ph.D.? Searching for civility, Anne paid a visit to her graduate adviser. The professor nodded her dark curls and smiled. To her, Anne’s malaise was a good sign.
“This means you’re letting go of your primary subjectivity,” she said. “And thus opening yourself to new patterns of signification.”
On the desk was a single photograph of a baby girl in a silver frame. Anne tried again. “She’s beautiful. What’s her name?”
“She’s only eighteen months old!” replied the professor.
Frustration brought tears to Anne’s eyes. “Oh.”
“How aggressive is it to name a child before the child can choose?”
“Sorry.”
“Well, this is why you’re here, right?” The professor leaned in and extended a small ceramic plate. “Breath drop? They’re French. No? To think deeply about all these received narratives that bind us so. Don’t forget the power of that. It will free you.”
“I thought I was here to become a professor,” Anne said. “To teach.”
“Ah, right, the undergrads.” Anne’s adviser sighed. She frowned. “Dear, this is a major research institution. They’re just here for tax purposes.”
Occasionally Anne tried to explain just what it was that she did, as a literary-critic-in-training. At home one Sunday night, her father put down his fork and said, “These are people just wasting their days on this earth.” This from a man who spent his days peering at smeared cells on slides, looking for signs of doom. Her father’s comment should have freed her: it was for him that she had begun the Ph.D. program. Instead it seemed he’d rendered a verdict: her years in graduate school were wasted ones.
Anne’s father was not interested in effort. He was haunted by genius. He looked for it everywhere, as though he’d lost a part of himself. Anne had desperately wished to supply the missing magic, and heaven knows he’d given her opportunities. Once, when she was maybe seven, she’d been summoned to the breakfast table, where her father folded down his newspaper and said, “Sweetie, can you add up all the numbers between one and ninety-nine?”
Anne dashed off for paper and pencil. He stopped her. “No,” he said. “In your head.”
And so she began to add: one plus two plus three plus . . .
His apologetic smile broke her heart. “No, you can’t,” he said.
“Just hang on,” she pleaded.
He shook his head firmly. There was a great mathematician, he told her, who figured out how to do the sum as a boy about her age. The boy genius noticed that one plus ninety-nine equals one hundred, and two plus ninety-eight, and three plus ninety-seven . . . and from there it was simple multiplication.
“You didn’t see that,” he told her. “But it’s okay.”
Then he resumed his reading.
Or the time, when she was even smaller—four? five?—her father had just read of the tests the Soviets used to identify Olympic-caliber athletes as toddlers so they could secrete them away in Siberian training centers. He held Anne’s school ruler, bright yellow and twelve inches long, by one end, pointing down. He positioned Anne’s hand just beneath it, opened her grip, and instructed her: “Catch the ruler when I let go.”
It clattered to the floor.
“Nope,” he said, and then laughed congenially, as though at a cocktail-party joke.
Nowhere was her father’s pining more acute than in the battlefields of chess. Night after night they played. In her little pajamas Anne would face him across the board. He’d castle, he’d back a rook with his queen, he’d chase down her king with a bishop and a pawn, he’d trap her over and over. She understood that he would not let her win, and she thought she agreed with this: why lie to a child? If you can beat her, you should do so. That is how things work.
“One day you’ll beat me,” he told her. “Someday.”
But the finality of checkmate terrified her. It felt like mortality itself, with the added bolt of sadism in the predator pawns, the leering bishop in her father’s quick fingers. Her dad had books on chess openings, many translated from the Russian. He talked of Bobby Fischer. Anne scanned the board and was as careful as she could be, trying to anticipate everything that could come next. By the third grade she could no longer limit her vigilance to the chessboard. In the night, defeated, she worried about school. She worried about life. She worried about everything. In this way, basic social anxiety was converted to mild paranoia. By October of that year, she was throwing up during the three-mile drive to school, leaning, buckled in, out over the curb. Her mother told her to look through the windshield between the trees. Find the horizon, she said. She asked, “How can you get motion sickness in three miles?”
The way college admissions had evolved reminded Anne of her father: as though the schools were hunting for some ghost genius, some Bobby Fischer, a fascination with singularity that in her mind was inextricably tied to thick-spined books in translation and Cyrillic characters like evil spells and the word “Soviet,” and possibly the threat of nuclear war. Her students didn’t have experience with fallout shelters, but they also hadn’t known the days when it was enough to be a good kid. That old Siberia-scoping eye was turned on them now, but in the name of American innovation and the competitive enterprise of a new century. It was the same old crap: the ruler hits the kitchen floor, and a child learns to throw up. Every morning.
Anne actually admired the kids who pushed back. Their smart-alecky teenage gall, the willingness to, say, quit crew or drop that fifth AP or just sleep one extra goddamned half hour: she hadn’t had that kind of spleen. Instead she did as she was told and tucked away her excellent grades and then emerged into the world beyond college like a mole shot out, blinded, at the edge of an unanticipated crevasse. Her friends read the currents and hopped on in: school-work-love-life. While she teetered there, paralyzed.
To fail was to fall. To plummet. Probably to die.
And because she understood this, she understood the anxiety of the parents she served, and because she understood their anxiety, she sympathized with their kids. And this made her good at her job.
There was also in her heart the darkest, smallest, cruelest fear of all, a burrowed, vicious thing with a fierce bite: the certainty that she had no contribution to make. That she had nothing to offer the world. So perhaps, Anne concluded—trying here to be brave—the best thing she could do was turn her sights to the next generation, the ones coming up just behind her, the ones with their feet newly in the door.
ALEXIS GRANT, THOUGH she had spent every one of her seventeen years in Minnesota, had recently gained conversational Somali, the mother tongue of a small group of refugees whose children she tutored on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. Her gift for languages had emerged early, when she demonstrated familiarity with the Latin mass her mother dragged the family to. At twenty-two months she’d sat in her car seat and called out bits of the psalms. Recalling it for Anne, her mother shuddered: the car seat had been facing forward! They just didn’t know then. The danger!
Anne looked across the table at Alexis’s father, who was shaking his head gravely. Alexis wore the same smile she’d had since she’d arrived at the café, fresh from her tour of Northwestern, ponytailed and clutching a tiny notebook with a pen through its spiral coils. A little sister sat quietly, diligently shaping her paper napkin into a pulpy ring.
Their mom went on.
By the fifth grade Alexis had French and Spanish. The gift lent itself to music, too, as such facilities often do, you know; she had to choose between the cello and the French horn when it came time to sit for the high school orchestra, because even Alexis couldn’t play both at once! (Her friendship with Michael Schleinstock was
born of her choosing the cello, leaving them both first seat in their respective instruments; this information Anne had alone, having read it in the peer recommendation Mr. Schleinstock had written for Alexis, part of the Williams application since time immemorial.) And there was math, of course. High school had scrambled to think of something to teach Alexis once she finished calc two honors. She found an advanced logic course at U Minn with a sympathetic professor who agreed to argue on her sixteen-year-old behalf to the registrar. Michael had kept up in calculus, but he couldn’t follow her to logic. Wednesday evenings, after class, she called him to describe the lecture. He answered with pen and paper to hand. She seemed to slip through complex analyses like a hot knife, leaving them laid open for even an idiot to see. Once he told her this.
“Sharpness is only a function of thinness, isn’t that something?” Alexis had said.
Michael had thoughtfully written that Alexis was thin. Indeed she was narrow as a bird, with pointed elbows that flaked in the wintertime, which in Minnesota was most of the time. Alexis had explained this part in one of the essay drafts her parents had forwarded along in preparation for their visit. She was careful to keep her sleeves pulled down, even in the overheated common room of the residential facility where she volunteered. The Somali children, she noticed, suffered even worse, their dark skin blue with winter scales. So Alexis brought a tube of organic shea butter in her bag and later learned it ended up eaten on toast. The resourcefulness of this thrilled her, she wrote. Not that they were hungry; that they were willing. To recognize food where she had been taught to see a cosmetic! It was like seeing nature in a highway median, a hill of trees instead of a berm. Everything about her volunteering position was illuminating. To learn Somali, which was not represented in her high school’s language library, she’d had to send away to Great Britain for actual discs. They arrived wrapped in craft paper with a feathery customs form in triplicate. It might have been posted straight from Victorian England. She imagined Darwin. She felt touched by Empire. These people knew how to take care of things. Alexis thought her young charges had much to teach her about how to live.
Alexis Grant had given college as much thought as she’d given everything else, which is to say quite a lot. Night after night, she read through course syllabi on the Internet and fell in love. Professors had Web sites! And links to their work! She wished she could cobble together a school composed of the faculty she most coveted. She had written a dozen college essays already, because the prompts, if you thought about them for a moment, were really quite good; Princeton had this fun one about the most important discovery in all of human history (fire was the gimme, of course; and from there the atom; Euclidean geometry; perhaps language. She considered writing about Lascaux or Chauvet, whose images haunted her, but settled for justice, believing it not an instinct but an adaptive, if evolutionary, behavior). And Alexis’s parents had read her many drafts. Many, many drafts, as they explained to Anne. Hence their concern. She had too many ideas; she was all over the map. And there were grammatical problems, some fragments, areas where Alexis went too fast. Plus it was unclear whether the colleges were looking for her to give full rein to her imagination. Mrs. Grant’s Wellesley roommate lived in Chicago, and had a daughter who went to school with a boy whose older sister had worked with Anne three years before. (Ellie Wishman, Georgetown early.) They’d heard such good things; was she free?
“I do have some availability,” Anne replied. Before her was a faxed document listing Alexis’s grades, coursework, APs, and extracurriculars, all neatly recorded in a nonadolescent hand. “But I’m not sure your daughter needs any help from me.”
Alexis blushed. The little sister’s brows shot up, but her gaze stayed low.
Mr. Grant chuckled. “Oho, she’s like all of us, needs a little boost here and there.” All four mugs of herbal tea drained, Mr. Grant started passing round a ChapStick.
“Truly,” Anne told him, “I’m not sure what I can do, beyond reading over drafts for basic corrections—which I’m sure you can do just as easily. And for free.”
“We’re comfortable with your fee,” he said.
“That’s not my point.”
“We understand. But Alexis is coming out of a high school with a lousy track record with the Ivies. It’s a big public, they all go to U Minn, the top students go on these state fellowships. Or to Carleton, if they’re really tops. I think one boy went to Cornell, like, four years ago. I doubt the college counselor even knows her name. We had to sign her up for APs on our own.”
“They don’t offer AP courses?”
“They call them honors. But Alexis has taken six of the exams. All 5s.”
“Again, I’m not sure what—”
“Could we just run essays by you? We can fax, e-mail, even just read them to you. You’ve seen those few we mailed . . .”
“I’ll be happy to read and respond, of course. But we’ll arrange something by the hour, because, yes, I have seen those few, and really, you don’t need much help here.”
Alexis spoke for the first time. “I have a lot of essays,” she said apologetically.
“A lot,” chirped the sister.
“Well, we know you won’t be the same way, don’t we, Marlo?” said the father.
Marlo did not look up.
“My sister’s an athlete,” Alexis explained.
“Soccer!” added her mother.
“All-state already,” completed the dad.
“Well, congratulations to all of you,” Anne said. “I don’t mind lots of essays—that’s what I do.”
“And of course we’re thinking Harvard early action,” said Mr. Grant. Alexis smiled and rolled back her eyes as though in ecstasy.
Many of the most competitive colleges preferred the early decision application, which bound a candidate to the school if accepted—it boosted their matriculation rates and took some of the guesswork out of the larger spring pool of decisions. But Harvard, almost alone at the top, had a swashbuckling play called “early action,” which required an early application but did not bind the student to the school if admitted. It was like a suitor offering a girl a diamond ring on the first date but letting her know to take her time playing the field. It was an astonishing feat of confidence. Or of ego, depending on how you felt about Harvard.
“I think that’s a fine idea,” Anne confirmed.
“Alexis looks marvelous in crimson,” said the mother. For Williams’s sake, in his recommendation, Michael had made just this point about purple.
“If you think she has a chance,” added the father.
“Harvard’s Harvard,” Anne told them. “But I think Alexis seems like the sort of student who would do very well there.”
“Or would it be better for graduate school?” Mr. Grant asked. “I know there isn’t that much attention paid to undergraduates, and it’s a little bigger than Princeton and Yale—”
“You know,” said Anne, “why don’t we just see how we go for the next few weeks, and we can talk about that down the line, okay?”
“Yes, sweetie,” said Mrs. Grant. “Alexis may not even want to go to graduate school.”
“Of course she’ll go to graduate school,” deadpanned Marlo.
“Alexis?” prompted Anne.
“I don’t know! There are so many things I want to study, I don’t think I could ever choose!”
“Well, then, let’s get you on your way,” said Anne, bundling her things. “Harvard it is, then, November first.”
“We’ll call you as soon as we get back to the north country,” said Mr. Grant. “Thank you!”
“Yes,” said Alexis. “Thank you so much! Thank you so, so much!”
The four Grants grinned: smooth-cheeked, perfect tile teeth. Only Marlo wore a touch of irony in her eyes. It was rare, but occasionally Anne worked with students who could write their own tickets. First Cristina, and now Alexis, with her border-collie brain, running down ideas like wayward lambs. Sometimes Anne wished, a bit sadistically
, that she could show their files to the other mothers—the Pfaffs, the Blanchards—to demonstrate just what it looked like when a student was exceptional. A necessary corrective. Would disillusionment help them to admire their own children for who they really were?
How odd it was, she thought, that the kids who didn’t really need college were the same ones who would make the best use of those four years. Bring on Cambridge: Alexis would be in a field of clover. She was what those schools were made for.
IN HIS CAPACITY as the incoming chairman of the board of trustees of Duke University, Gideon Blanchard thought it a splendid, and worthy, and timely project to help shepherd Cristina Castello through the financial aid and admissions processes.
In his capacity as Sadie’s father, he thought it even cleverer: “How wonderful it will be for Cristina to have Sadie as a classmate,” he said into the phone. “Assuming it works out for the girl, of course.” Anne was drawing fierce cubes and spheres on a corner of her date book. Why should Gideon Blanchard make her nervous? He continued: “She’ll begin with a peer who understands where she comes from and what she’s facing. The learning curve will be quite steep, I imagine. You know, in terms of social interaction.”
The more odious his words, the more firmly Anne remembered that he was the esteemed civil litigator. Why must she always make everything so hard? It was her mother’s refrain. “Things always seem so fraught for you,” she’d say. “I’m sure Sadie’s public service has made her deeply empathic,” Anne said now, in soothing tones, taking a torch to her own ambivalence. “She’ll be an excellent contact for Cristina.”
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