Early Decision

by Lacy Crawford

  “Rommel’s been boarded,” said Mrs. Pfaff, barely above a whisper. “You can come in.”

  The dog wasn’t the one Anne was worried about.

  “Gerry has—well, he’s done some work,” explained Mrs. Pfaff. “On the essays. He’s very upset. I thought you should just come see where things stand. I know how hard you and Hunter have been working.” She dropped her head and led Anne through the dark halls to a third-floor study where Hunter and his father were waiting.

  Following up the stairs, Anne inhaled the carpets and paint and wondered at how casually Mrs. Pfaff overlooked the fact that just a few days ago she’d pretended not to know Anne at all. Maybe crisis trumped manners. Or maybe it was just understood that Anne should be ignored, like a therapist, say, or one’s gynecologist at the grocery store. Maybe it wasn’t that Anne was unimportant, but that she was very far on the inside indeed.

  Noting that Mrs. Pfaff was wearing house slippers, Anne concluded the latter.

  The study was low-shouldered at its gabled eaves and lit by a single floor lamp, under which Gerald Pfaff had parked himself in a wide leather chair. Scattered across the carpet were essay drafts and printed copies of the Common Application—the disorganization made Anne start to sweat—and across from Mr. Pfaff, seated with his knees folded up and his back to the wall, was Hunter. Gerald held pen and paper in his burgeoning lap.

  “I’ll be downstairs,” said Mrs. Pfaff, like a nurse. “If you need anything.” She descended silently.

  Mr. Pfaff said, “Anne.”

  Hunter flapped one hand in greeting.

  “What’s up?” she asked, as lightly as she could.

  “We’ve made some changes,” replied Mr. Pfaff. “To the application, here. Some things more fitting for our current situation. Wanted you to sort out the last bits now.”

  Hunter said nothing.

  Mr. Pfaff held out the page in his hand. He wasn’t about to hoist himself from the chair, so Anne crossed the room, stepping around essays as best she could, to take it from him. She cleared a spot, knelt, and began to read. Only a few words in, Mr. Pfaff spoke again.

  “So is that your day job, then?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Working with the poor kids. That’s your day job, and this is just on the side?”

  She might have said “just the opposite,” except that both college-counseling roles were sort of on the side, and since she’d left her doctoral program, there really wasn’t anything to speak of in the middle. But Hunter seemed fragile as blown glass, and couldn’t be made to feel anymore that he was an also-ran.

  “I volunteer at Cicero North,” she said simply, “every Saturday. For years.”

  Mr. Pfaff said only, “Humph.”

  It was an uncertain verdict, but she had been warned: he doubted her motivation now. Her sincerity. She felt him watching her read the page in her hands. It was Hunter’s personal statement, the primary essay, which had been polished to a sincere gleam. Now the last two-thirds were crossed out, with swift arrows tracing down and all around, like a winter weather map, to a new paragraph scribbled in Mr. Pfaff’s hand:

  Like so many young men in American history, I went West and found the way I want to live. I loved the mustangs because they represented the pursuit of my own independence and my own interests. But I realized that they are not useful icons for a young man, because they are not responsible to anyone or anything. The idea of running free is fun to think about but no way to live.

  I’ve spent my time in high school working on activities that I liked. I’m very lucky to have been given the chance to develop these skills and gain an education. Colleges, like all communities, benefit from the participation of all different sorts of individuals. Not everyone can be exceptional, and in fact the foundation of any community is the group of average, hard-working people. Mediocrity has just as much place as anything else, and in fact it is important for a community to boast diversity of achievement. My grades and test scores may not be in the 99th percentile, but this offers value to the institution. Instead I will bring to college my many interests and well-rounded experience.

  Thereafter a long, sinuous line traced back up the page to the original, though the concluding sentence about the mustangs had been vigorously inked out.

  Anne took a deep breath and let her eyes travel up. Mr. Pfaff’s words swam in her brain like little piranhas, toothed and quick. Offers value to the institution, writes the private equity chief. Useful icons for a young man, writes the one just fifty. And cruelest of all, yes, there it was—the word “mediocrity.” A word Hunter would never use, perhaps didn’t even know, applied to himself in his father’s hand. Anne blinked several times. The study was overheated and the lamp’s shadows made it hard to see. Her body seemed to be failing to get things right. She was hot, tearful, panicky.

  “So this is the new version we’ve got, then,” said Mr. Pfaff. “We’re just wanting your spell-check before we send it in. Marion thought you should come by rather than do it on the phone.”

  What Anne was feeling, of course, was rage. But she was not familiar with that emotion, which she habitually twisted like hanger wire into prodding self-doubt, and she was certainly no good at using it. So she stalled.

  “Okay. It’s really late—could we take a day or two? I always think it’s best to do that after a major revision.”

  “Nope,” he replied. “We leave for Jackson in the morning, and I want this done.”

  “Right,” she said. “It’s just that if—if the mustangs are useless as a symbol, then they don’t really belong in the essay, is all. Logically speaking. So we should take those out, which really leaves us with not much to ground the setting in the first place. It doesn’t need to be about Montana, or anywhere else.”

  Mr. Pfaff narrowed his eyes at her. The lamp highlighted the deep pouches of his face and neck and shone off his protruding belly, where his shirt was stretched tight.

  “Good point,” he said.

  From deep in his throat Hunter let out a smack of sarcasm. He was out of words.

  Hoping to establish camaraderie, Anne looked at him, but he kept his gaze level at the far wall.

  Anne might have hated them both, the rich boy with his long legs coiled, his bags packed for the ski slopes. His father, who was an ass. But what was Gerald Pfaff searching for that hadn’t been handed to him, and to his father before him? Hadn’t the sons of privilege always been expected to inherit their fathers’ kingdoms? And hadn’t the sons always chafed at the narrow chute opening before them as adulthood dawned? Anne wondered if college madness in contemporary America wasn’t, after all, the problem, but rather a poor solution to the problem: it was intended to give a young person the opportunity to pursue any professional life he could imagine for himself. These boys weren’t facing recession or depression or war. College was four years to spend looking for something that was just right. It was a great idea, and a fine time to live it. But such an opportunity presupposed imagination, and fathers had always been the gatekeepers of their sons’ dreams. You could turn that opportunity into just another chance to fail, if you were entitled enough and careless enough and far enough from your own boyhood self. Anne felt, in that stuffy, crow’s-nest room, that she was in the presence of a crisis much older than college admissions.

  Mr. Pfaff was making further decisions. “So I’ll just cut that part, too, then,” he said. “All the horse stuff.” He held out a square paw for the page in her hand.

  “Then we’ll have not much left at all.”

  “How many words it have to be?”

  “I’m not really thinking of word count.”

  “How many?”

  “Five hundred limit.”

  “We’re well under that. Is there a minimum?”

  “Not technically, no, but it should be—something—”

  “We’ve got plenty.” Mr. Pfaff licked his lips, propped the page on one thigh, and drew lines through additional text.

  “
We really had that in pretty fine shape, I think,” Anne said. She let him hear her sigh, let him see her check her watch. Ten more schools. Ten more schools that needed this application, and it was—what—ten at night now, and the family was leaving in the morning. And the essay had been months in the making, and Hunter, exhausted, seemed hung from his shoulders like a whipped dog. She thought of the elaborate display of Christmas lights across the boxwood hedge all along the front of the house—thousands of white fairy lights, and larger bulbs in the dogwood trees lining the lot. Of course they’d paid to have this done, not mounted ladders themselves, but why? The lights would shine all night long in front of an empty house while the family skied and didn’t talk to each other out in Wyoming. You couldn’t see any of it from the road. No one would even know. What role frivolity in the face of revisions like this?

  “The essay was a strong one,” she added, feeling braver.

  He raised his eyebrows at her. “Well, obviously not.”

  “The essay did not keep him out.”

  “Sure as hell didn’t get him in.”

  “Neither will this one. Trust me.”

  “Should I?”

  “Up to you. But the word ‘mediocrity’? Really, do you think that’s the best way to approach this?”

  Half Mr. Pfaff’s face raised in a disbelieving smile. Had he used the word “chutzpah,” he’d have been thinking it now. But his background supplied him with different terms, more like “floozy” and “gall.” He turned to his son. “What think you, Christopher?”

  Hunter raised his eyes, met his father’s, and then looked away. They had broken him at last.

  “Right,” said his father. Gerald Pfaff turned back to Anne, triumphant. “So just give this the once-over, for the small stuff, and then you and Christopher here can type it up and be done with it.” In a series of pulls and shoves, he raised himself from the chair and moved to the door. Before descending the stairs, he said one last thing: “And you’ll see we’re no longer applying to those mountain schools, the U Boulder whatever. We ski on vacation. He’ll go east.”

  They listened to him lumber down a few stairs, waiting for something more.

  “ ’Night, Dad,” called Hunter. There was no reply.

  DID “MEDIOCRITY” STAY? The word settled over Anne like a sort of moral, a key to her days that was as predictive as it was gloomy. She wore it while sitting in the chair by the fire at her parents’ house Christmas Eve, beside her mother with a crossword puzzle and her father with his laptop. She hauled it back down to the city first thing the twenty-sixth, glad the holiday was behind her, watching her sparkleless fingers on the steering wheel as she drove the salted highways home. She’d left Martin’s ring with her parents. She didn’t yet have the heart to mail it back, but she didn’t want it in her apartment either. Fondling the bright diamond over the kitchen sink, her mother had sighed and said, “Do you mind if I wear it out every now and then?”

  For a week Anne lay about in her apartment, flipping through books that had once ignited her—all women, she noted glumly—Isak Dinesen and Adrienne Rich and Shirley Hazzard. She did not know, in the end, which essay Hunter submitted late the night of the twenty-third. When she’d left his house at midnight, she’d convinced him only that there were two choices, his essay or his father’s, and that she could not choose for him. So she tidied up his father’s scribble on the page, explained why she thought the admissions committees still might cotton more to mustangs than to mediocrity, and wished him safe travels. Hunter himself had been mute. She’d left him there, bent over his laptop on the floor, his wide shoulders crowding the useless keys, and concluded that the Common Application was a terrible bottleneck for all the energy and ambition of a young man, no matter how restless and spoiled he might be.

  She’d asked him to drop her a line when the applications were submitted. That note was still forthcoming, but she wasn’t surprised; Hunter was burned out. You couldn’t blame him for not finding time for her administrative oversight.

  She read there were tremendous snowstorms in Wyoming. Anne hoped at least the skiing was good. It was the sort of thing she discovered, idly clicking about online, which is what she was doing on New Year’s Eve, just as the afternoon set in. Outside, the sidewalks were starting to crackle with high heels and the occasional illicit firework. Anne was in blue jeans and socks. She’d been invited to a party hosted by former grad school classmates, a couple who’d met as M.A. students and who were slogging through the Ph.D. together, mano a mano for the same funding dollars in their shared passion, nineteenth-century visual theory. She could already taste the boxed wine and watery hummus, could already see the low lights of Hyde Park out their porthole of a back window. Not sure what she would say when people asked what she was up to now, she’d sent her regrets. But casting about for phantom signs of Martin in the L.A. news was too solitary, even for her, so she leashed up Mitchell and set out to find some pizza.

  Twice her phone rang, and twice she ignored it. It could have been Martin. But she had grown tired of hoping, and exhaustion had brought her closer to reason than careful thought ever had. Her kids were all taken care of. Her parents could wish her a Happy New Year in the morning. Her mother would only be rooting around to discover Anne’s plans, anyway, and could be counted on to say something like, “You should be going to a big party.”

  But the third time it rang, in quick succession, she picked up.

  “Anne, oh my God, thank God.”

  She recognized a breathless Marion Pfaff, on a crackly line from the mountains.

  “Oh my God,” she wailed. “They’re not in. Hunter’s applications are not in. Oh my God, they’re due today, aren’t they? Tonight?”

  “Tomorrow . . .” interrupted Anne, feeling immediately ashamed but determined not to sound it. “Why on earth—”

  “Oh my God,” continued Mrs. Pfaff. “I just asked him, thinking, you know, of course they were done—I’ve been staying out of it all since, you know, Gerry stepped in—and today on the lift I just asked, because we were sitting there and I thought, ‘How nice that all of that is behind him, he must be so relieved,’ and he said, ‘No, Mom, I haven’t done it yet.’ And I near about fell off that thing but I couldn’t do anything and thank God Gerry was in the one behind us. I mean, he knows now but I think he might have pushed the kid right out of that seat.”

  “None of them are in?” asked Anne. “But they’re all finished. They’ve been finished—all he has to do is hit submit. It’s really nothing.”

  “The thing is, Anne, I don’t even ski anymore, I really don’t, I hate it. I get cold. But something told me, ‘Today, Marion, you should go up.’ And I wondered, was it that Hunter was going to get hurt? Was today the day he breaks a bone? But then when I asked him and he answered, I thought, that’s it. Mothers always know, Anne. We always know.”

  “Okay. It’s all saved on his Common Application. All he has to do is log in, and choose each school’s application, and—”

  “I mean, he wouldn’t have gone to college next year! At all! Anywhere! Can you apply late? You can’t, can you?”

  “No, you can’t. Is he there?”

  “No no, they’re still up on the mountain. But here’s the problem, Anne, here’s why I’m calling you. I came down to call you. I’m just standing here in the lodge now! Still in my boots and everything! The problem is, the finished essay—you know, the one he and Gerry pulled together—apparently that’s on a piece of paper, not in the computer, is that right? And Hunter’s got his laptop out here but not that. So he can’t submit.”

  Anne was quiet. There seemed no solution. Not to the problem of the applications, but to the problem of stupidity. Gerry Pfaff wanted his essay, and Hunter had neglected to type it in. Of course he had. Clever boy. But what could she do now? Maybe the kid would finally get his way. His dad’s essay was in Chicago! What was he to do? No way they could make it back in time.

  “So what I need you to do,” said Mrs. Pfa
ff, “is go to our home and dictate it.”

  “Uh—” Anne began, casting for an excuse. She didn’t have one.

  “I’ll tell you how to get in, don’t worry about that. Hunter said it should be upstairs, do you remember where? So listen. I told him I’d have you call his cell once you’ve got it in front of you. Then you can just read and he can type it in. Okay?”

  “Now?”

  Mrs. Pfaff sounded shocked. “Yes! Now! When else?”

  Anne felt pitted against Hunter. On this side, a crowded and cowed only child, almost eighteen. And on this side, his insane parents, with their trusty sidekick, Anne. Off she goes now, to throw the last punch! The knockout blow! To dictate his father’s essay into his ear so he can type it into his application as though his fingers doing so, rather than hers, or his father’s, made it true.

  “Anne?” pleaded Mrs. Pfaff. “We can’t do this any other way. I’m sure you understand.”

  “Okay,” Anne said. At least she could talk to Hunter, tell him again that he could submit whatever he wanted. Maybe he could take the bull by the horns here and just tell his father no. “Okay, fine. I’ll call when I have it.”

  Anne hit the freeway. There was no one heading north out of the city, but the inbound lanes were choked. For a short while the gray expanse of asphalt was brightened by the feeling that she alone was escaping, with Mitchell, curious and patient, in the seat beside her. She exited at Willow Road and headed east toward the lake, deeper and deeper into the suburban shadows. There was the feeling of socking in. She saw no one. The sidewalks ran out, and tall hedges walled the road.

  It was all as Mrs. Pfaff had said. The gate rolled open obediently when Anne punched in the code. The privacy of the driveway was broken only by the flight of a crow startled by a spray of gravel beneath Anne’s tires. She counted four paving stones to the right of the front steps and located the gray rock that was not a rock. She slid out the key. The door wasn’t even bolted. The way the knob turned, she figured a credit card or bobby pin would’ve done the trick.