Early Decision

by Lacy Crawford

  There came a shout from inside. “A freaking Muslim, Mom? Are you serious?”

  This was Hunter, somewhere on the ground floor. Anne checked her watch. It was Tuesday, wasn’t it? It was. She was supposed to be here.

  “It wasn’t—I didn’t—” sputtered Mrs. Pfaff. Anne recognized her whimpering from the phone. She considered backing out to her car, but even if they’d forgotten about her completely, the spray of gravel in the drive would give her away.

  “Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid,” came a man’s baritone, deep and almost melodic in the variation of each repetition. He was a baron of disapproval. He seemed to be savoring it.

  “For Christ’s sake, Gerry, back off!” Mrs. Pfaff shouted back. “You’ve had precious little to do with this. Don’t think you can start now.”

  “And what, a job at Jewel? Or what was it, Mom? Did you at least give me Whole Foods?” yelled Hunter. His voice hit adolescent skids at the top, edging his anger with shame. They were just past her view, down the hall, in the kitchen. Anne heard a sob, and a chair scraping across the floor. She shifted from foot to foot. Through the screen she studied the odd grandfather clock in the corner of the entry hall, which revealed itself to be, in fact, a very tall gun cabinet with bronze fretwork on the door. Just then the dog, sensing her, came trotting into view. It was a large, hairy, deliberate mix, a Rotterdoodle or something, and it looked almost alien. Behind it, Hunter peered around the doorway.

  “She’s here,” he groaned.

  As usual Anne scrolled feverishly through her memory to determine if she had done something to cause this uproar. The mustangs? They weren’t so far out, and in any case she hadn’t invented them. But Muslims—well, they were nowhere in the application, so far as she had seen, at least—and she could only be responsible for what she had seen, right?

  “You must be Anne,” said Mr. Pfaff, approaching her in the hall, led by his round gut, which was exactly halved by a needlepoint belt: mallard ducks, flapping round his equator. He hoisted his trousers and Anne snapped her eyes up to his.

  “I can come back?” she started.

  “Nonsense,” he barked, and extended a plump hand. “Gerald Pfaff. We seem to be in the middle of a thing, here. Maybe you can help us make some sense of it. Please do come in.”

  WASPs were so good at feigning inclusion, especially to distract from real conflict. Not for the first time Anne realized that her fair ponytail was a considerable boon with some clients. The rangy dog followed his master, knocking Anne to the hand-glossed corridor wall.

  The kitchen she had only seen through doorways: a vaulted space hung with gleaming copper pots. Except for an elaborate seasonal centerpiece, there was no evidence of food anywhere. Mrs. Pfaff sat at the end of the long refectory table, all in a heap, twisting a Kleenex in her manicured hands. Her blond hair was limp. She looked very thin and very clean, as though her features had been recently detailed. A laptop was half open before her. Hunter was kicked out atop a seat at the opposite end of the table, his feet and his head seeming miles from each other, in a flagrant display of uninterest that wasn’t remotely convincing. He wagged a few fingers to greet Anne.

  “What’s up?” he said. “Change in plans. I’m a chick.”

  “Stop it, Christopher,” snapped his father.

  “Whatever, Dad.”

  “Sorry?” Anne said.

  “Ask Mom. She’ll explain everything.”

  Marion Pfaff shook her head. “I really don’t think we need to go into—”

  “Oh, heavens, Marion, just let’s out with it,” said her husband. “You can’t be the first one.”

  “Oh, she can,” said Hunter.

  “And say what?” his mother wailed. Then she sniffed hard, and adjusted her small face toward Anne. “Hi, Anne.”

  “Have a seat,” said Mr. Pfaff. He lowered himself over a ladder-back chair, which, as he leaned back, caused his flesh to bulge through the rungs at even intervals. He hitched up his trousers. His socks had ducks on them, too. “Coffee?”

  “Nope, thanks, I’m good.”

  “So it seems,” he began, “that Marion here took a turn at filling out this Internet form—”

  “The Common App,” supplied Hunter.

  “—and made a few changes that we find suspect.” He chuckled to himself. No one else was smiling.

  “Like, I’m an Arab chick who works at a grocery store,” said Hunter. “How’s that for changes?”

  Mrs. Pfaff had her head in her hands. She spoke from between her palms. “I was just playing around. This application is so . . . well, have you seen it?” She looked up at Anne, pleading. Anne nodded. She let her head fall again. “It is just so . . . sterile. And you hear, you know, about how hard it is for white kids to get in, and especially white boys, and especially white boys from the suburbs, and I just thought, you know, what would it look like if I made it, like, the exotic application they’re looking for? You know, some extreme ethnic person with no money who does all the right stuff. The slam dunk. The home run.”

  She paused. Hunter’s eyes were fixed out the French doors at the back lawns, glazed orange with the late light. The dog clicked over and stuck its nose in Anne’s crotch. She shifted.

  “Rommel!” yelled Mr. Pfaff. “Sorry, dear, he’s a bird dog.”

  By which he meant the dog was a tracker, not a letch.

  “ ’S’okay,” Anne said. “I like dogs.”

  The interlude gave Marion Pfaff new strength. She sat up to face them. For all her crying, her forehead was smooth and her face dry, not a furrow or streak in sight. “Look, I’m sorry, okay?” she said. “Hunter left his computer open here, with the application up. And I was reading it. So shoot me. It’s not a secret, is it? And I saw all these great things he’s done, but I just . . . it just . . . it seemed so . . . thin. And that made me, makes me, so angry. All these years, all your work—” Here her voice broke, and her face looked as though she was going to cry, but it remained still as glass. Anne was terribly confused. “I wanted to just shoot the moon for a moment, you know, as a ‘fuck you’ to them.” Anne watched the expletive send a shiver over Marion’s preserved skin. “To just see what it would look like to make you the perfect applicant. The one they all say they want. Just because I think you deserve that.”

  Still staring out the windows, Hunter explained: “Right. So she changed my bio info to make me a Muslim chick who works at the grocery store. I think I’m a bagger. Or am I a checker, Mom? Did you promote me?”

  “Hunter, it was not for real!” she hissed at him. “Cut it out. Now.”

  “Mom, it’s my application!”

  “And Christopher happened upon his computer, here,” explained Mr. Pfaff, finishing the story for Anne, “and saw these unfortunate changes.”

  “The phone rang,” wailed Mrs. Pfaff.

  “What if that had got submitted, Mom? Jesus!”

  “I was going to change it right back!”

  “That’s not the point. What the hell are you doing on my application?” He was glaring at her now. “There’s a reason I have a password. It’s my application. Do you even get that?”

  Mr. Pfaff was bouncing his round fists softly on the table, biding his time. Mrs. Pfaff glanced at him, and then at Anne, and then stood up from her chair, trying to gather force. She leaned across the long table. “Do you think,” she asked her son, “that you alone are going to college? Do you think this is only about you? Your life? Your future?”

  There was a silence. Mr. Pfaff’s eyebrows were halfway up his head.

  “Um, yeah, I do,” said Hunter. “That’s exactly what I think.”

  “Because you’re wrong. You are my son. Our only child, Hunter. For the last eighteen years, I have done nothing but try to raise you and give you everything. Everything! And when they tell me that you don’t have a prayer at Amherst . . . well, have you told your father that? Would you like to tell your father that? Because we have some skin in this game, too, you know. What you
put down on that thing, there”—she gestured toward the laptop—“it comes from all of us. You work hard, and I am very proud of you, but do not for one second think that you came into this world with manners and a one-handed backhand.”

  Oh, but she’d just missed it! Been so close to a real, tender spot—the true measure of a mother’s projection onto her only child, which Anne knew so well she couldn’t decide if she sympathized more with Hunter or Mrs. Pfaff. It confused and upset her, that cataract of feelings. It made this big, gabled house seem almost Gothic as the fall afternoon gave way to dark. But Mrs. Pfaff had taken a perilous turn in her expression, away from what she had expected of her boy and toward what she now claimed of his life. There was no surer way to alienate him. Anne watched Hunter steel himself. He balled up his enormous hands and cracked each knuckle.

  “That is a disgusting habit and you know it,” his mother said.

  “Marion, not now,” said Mr. Pfaff.

  “Well, I’m sorry you had to work so hard and all you got was this white kid,” Hunter snarled. “I’ll try harder to be an Arab. I will.”

  “Christopher, cut it out.”

  “Oh, Anne, is it true?” wailed Mrs. Pfaff. “Is it true that all of this stuff—the tennis, the photography, guitar, that it’s just normal that every kid has it? I mean, what do we have to do?”

  Anne tried to get a foot in the door. “What do we have to do?” she repeatedly gently.

  “Tennis is the only thing that counts, anyway, Mom,” growled Hunter. “I quit all that other stuff.”

  “I know!” she cried. “And you showed so much promise!”

  “Boy’s like a carp,” said Mr. Pfaff, focusing on his grappled hands. “Gets only as big as the pond he’s swimming in.”

  Anne felt her skin ice over. Hunter, accustomed, didn’t flinch.

  “So what, Gerry,” said his wife, her voice rising now in desperation. “Should we just send him to New Trier? Throw him in with the big fish?”

  “I’m just saying, maybe then he’d have learned to compete a little bit.”

  “Compete, Dad? What, like play number one on the tennis team? Like that? Or should I just go shoot some retarded stock duck with clipped wings? Is that a better way to spend my weekends?”

  “That’s more than enough, Christopher,” said Mr. Pfaff, hauling himself upright. His belly mashed the table’s edge and pushed it back an inch or so, sending candlesticks wobbling. Mrs. Pfaff shot her arms out to steady her tableau, which included wheat sheaves and a host of tiny pumpkins.

  “Fine,” the boy spat back. “It is enough.” He spoke through his teeth. From his father came a low warning sound, almost a growl. Mrs. Pfaff frantically rearranged her gourds. “You’re right,” said her son. He narrowed his eyes and squared his jaw in that inimitable adolescent way, heaping scorn on everything before him. “It’s more than enough for me, too. Have fun writing my applications, Mom. Best of luck with Amherst.”

  Hunter scrambled from his chair and lurched out of the room, his long, strong stride making all of the adults seem sickly somehow, and spent. Anne recrossed her legs in front of her and sighed, hoping to sound experienced, as though this happened all the time. Par for the course. Somewhere above their heads, Hunter took the stairs three at a time.

  “Oh, Anne,” said Mrs. Pfaff, “will you explain? I just—I just don’t know. I’ve tried everything to get us to this point, I really have.”

  “What does that mean?” asked Anne. “Tried everything?”

  Marion Pfaff pressed her fingers across the bridge of her tiny nose, closing her eyes as though trying to channel spirits. As she spoke, she kept them closed. Anne had the sense that Mr. Pfaff was figuring it all out for the first time. He was silent save for periodic grunts that sounded vaguely gastric, so Anne couldn’t be sure he wasn’t just dyspeptic; but his quiet amounted to an endorsement, that much was clear.

  The thing was, Mrs. Pfaff explained, once, before Hunter was even in high school, she had received a haunting piece of advice: “Every kid has gotta have a hook.” And this was particularly true, everyone knew, for white boys; even more so for privileged white boys. The wisdom had come from a Chicago matron whose two girls had come out at the Passavant Cotillion and whose sons had rowed at Yale, and all of them, Marion Pfaff noted, had returned home to Chicago to live. One Thanksgiving at The Racquet Club, she’d taken advantage of a corner table to study the eldest, Barnett, a right-angled, gold-hued creature with a boarding school ring, and determined that this was within her reach. Her own son was dynasty trust-funded and a forehead over six feet, with an excellent first serve. He was a prize fish in a big, strong net of alumni and family connections that would lead him through every gate he approached.

  And yet, when it came to college in these modern, “multicultural” days—she said the word as though it had bitten her—he was doomed. White suburban boys were everywhere. Rich white suburban boys were everywhere. One read the newspapers, of course, so one wondered: was it worse for California-born Asian boys? Mrs. Pfaff figured that unless you were shooting for Stanford, no, it was not. At least we don’t live in Greenwich! she said. Maybe the Midwest counted for something. And one night when Hunter was nine, she sat up late on the Common Application Web site and scrolled through the questions. If only she could fill it out for him, she realized, she might have a shot at making them see how wonderful he really was. But there were more drop-down menus than text boxes, and the whole thing was user-unfriendly: private equity wasn’t even an option under Occupation for Gerry. She supposed banking-finance came closest. He’d shudder to hear himself called a banker. And what should she choose for herself? Homemaker? Were they kidding?

  Year after year she monitored the evolution of the Common Application, but they never seemed to learn. And more and more colleges capitulated to the form. Then interviews became optional, and then they weren’t even offered by admissions officers anymore, only by alumni, and who knew who you’d draw? Some kid, some nobody with a chip on his shoulder, when a former trustee lived just next door and had watched your child grow up, but could you choose him? Oh, no. Not without seeming to be grasping at straws, not without looking desperate. But the truth was that colleges weren’t interested in the whole child, clearly. She counted exactly two places on the form—three, with an “optional” space for God knows what—where a student could even write a full sentence. In her mind she saw—had always seen—her son, honest and eager, in a wood-paneled office talking with men who would decide admissions; this was the meeting she’d been raising her child for. When had it happened that meeting the child, knowing the child, no longer mattered? Whatever became of the gentleman scholar? Nowhere in the application’s crotchety boxes could she explain what made Hunter special. The form seemed designed to strip him of his dignity.

  So she determined, all those years ago, that Christopher Hunter Pfaff would have a hook. As a nine-year-old, he seemed to choose tennis. She called up the head pro and worked out an arrangement. Before long he was attending Nick Bollettieri’s camps, and with Mrs. Pfaff doing the paperwork, he was steadily earning a north suburban ranking for Illinois boys twelve and under. But Hunter had gotten only as good as he needed to be to play number one on his high school team; like a carp, his father said.

  “It’s true,” Gerald declared now.

  So Marian Pfaff had decided Hunter should travel. And indeed, he had surprised them one morning at breakfast with a question about South America, so that summer she had arranged for him go hiking in Chile and then crew on a Caribbean yacht. The trip came at some expense to his tennis, but that was acceptable because of the language skills he stood to gain. But halfway through the trek, he’d come down with terrible diarrhea, and spent the time holed up with a trip manager who’d flown in from Santiago to look after him. The fiasco darkened when his passport was misplaced—Hunter was sure it had slipped from his pocket as he paid for some bottled water—and it had required Gerry flying down there to sort it out and bring him
home.

  But the trip was a wonderful thing in that while Hunter was so ill, he’d lain in bed and taken photographs out the window of his room, and Mrs. Pfaff could have slapped herself for not thinking of his photography: he’d been taking pictures forever, as long as he could hold a camera in both little hands, and some of them were even pretty good. His high school had only a one-semester photography course, which he took as a freshman. But sophomore year there was a brilliant photographer in residence at the Art Institute of Chicago, Richard Mandalay, and while he hadn’t taught in years, she’d been able, with a little wrangling from a friend in the development office, to talk him into giving Hunter a few lessons. Twice a month she’d driven her son downtown to the man’s River North loft and waited in a coffee shop downstairs while Hunter studied his craft. Once, on the way home, she offered an idea she’d had: “It must be wonderful to work on your gift without having to worry about grades.”

  But Hunter had only shrugged. “I guess so,” he said. In truth, he’d have preferred receiving a grade to the surly brows of the old man Mandalay, who didn’t care for Hunter’s pictures of the girls’ field-hockey games, even the cool black-and-white one from the knees down that showed motion and captured the speed of the athletes. He and the photographer mostly sat in silence in the overheated loft and turned the pages of coffee-table books. Occasionally the old man would point to one and say, “That’s what I mean by balance.”

  Mandalay’s residency ended and he returned to Vermont or New Hampshire or wherever, and Hunter slid his camera under his bed and left it there. At which point his mother overheard him picking at a guitar, which he’d bought secondhand from a kid who took a year off before college and wanted to pack light. He had a certain feel for the strings. So guitar lessons were arranged, and Mrs. Pfaff found front-row tickets to see James Taylor at Ravinia, now that Hunter could appreciate his talent. And so on.

  All of which was set out now in Hunter’s Significant Activities list, and detailed in his résumé. “Why didn’t you keep up with your photography?” Anne had asked him. “Your guitar?” This falling off in his commitments was a bad thing; one wanted to show increasing dedication to singular pursuits, even though that seemed precisely contrary to the natural inclinations of a confident, curious adolescent. “And your Spanish?”