Getting In: A Novel

by Karen Stabiner

  Getting In

  Karen Stabiner

  For

  SID

  “Life is what happens to you

  while you’re busy making other plans.”

  —JOHN LENNON

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Junior Year

  Chapter 1

  Crestview Academy lacked both a hillcrest location and a panoramic…

  Chapter 2

  The Dodson family rolled up to Crestview in a perfect…

  Chapter 3

  Chloe looked as though she had been drawn with a…

  Chapter 4

  Ted poured himself a glass of the Super Tuscan Dan had…

  Chapter 5

  At six in the morning, an hour before his shift…

  Chapter 6

  Alexandra Kirk Bradley understood from the day Trey slipped his…

  Chapter 7

  Nora should have questioned the order when it first came…

  Chapter 8

  When Dave moved out, Deena donated the old queen-size bed…

  Chapter 9

  Nora surveyed the backyard and automatically started running a tally…

  Chapter 10

  Brad finally sent Liz a text message two weeks into…

  Chapter 11

  Lauren was sprawled on the couch with the television on…

  Chapter 12

  Ted had a tell, like any gambler: he drummed exactly…

  Chapter 13

  No, no, no, not, not, not, the slamming of doors…

  Chapter 14

  Brad had envisioned an escalating series of encounters with Liz…

  Chapter 15

  Katie was tired of being old news. The worst thing…

  Chapter 16

  An idea lodged itself in Ted’s brain like a parasite…

  Chapter 17

  Dave faltered for a moment when he first saw the…

  Chapter 18

  The Chaikens woke up every morning hoping to find that…

  Chapter 19

  At exactly 3:59, the Ocean Heights facilities manager nodded to…

  Chapter 20

  Maintaining the illusion of equality at Crestview was tricky, as…

  Summer and Fall

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Books by Karen Stabiner

  Copyright

  JUNIOR YEAR

  Life, for Nora, had become an endless SAT exam. At seven forty-five on a Saturday morning she stood in her closet in her underwear, paralyzed by a series of multiple-choice questions.

  Question 1: It’s really sunny but I felt a cool breeze when I opened the bedroom window. Should I wear:

  a. A thin turtleneck

  b. A light sweater

  c. A scarf

  d. All of the above

  Question 2: I won’t be home until after one. Should I eat:

  a. Egg whites and turkey bacon

  b. Flaxseed raisin bran with nonfat milk

  c. A carton of yogurt while I drive

  d. A glazed donut

  Question 3: Given Lauren’s stress level, should I say:

  a. “You know I love you no matter what happens, honey.”

  b. “I just know this is going to go well.”

  c. “How six hours of sleep is enough is beyond me, but hey.”

  d. None of the above

  Seven forty-seven. She put on a clean T-shirt, a crewneck sweater, and a pair of loose khakis, slid her feet into her work clogs, and reached for the closet door just as Lauren pushed it open from the outside.

  “Hey, am I supposed to ace this on an empty stomach or what?”

  They pulled into the school parking lot the prescribed half hour before the test was supposed to begin, and Nora drove aimlessly up one row and down the next, marveling at how many juniors seemed to own their own Priuses, and to believe that getting to the parking lot first would somehow give them an advantage. She was about to begin a second loop when Lauren grabbed her purse with her left hand and gestured toward the curb with her right.

  “Mom. Just pull over,” she said. “Here. Right here.” Nora obeyed, and Lauren hopped out before her mother could say any of the things she had rehearsed, which was probably a good thing, as Lauren undoubtedly would have misinterpreted every one of them. Nora settled for rolling down the window to yell, “Call when you’re done” at Lauren’s back, and Lauren waved without breaking stride.

  Nora sat with her hands clenched on the steering wheel.

  Question 4: I have four hours to kill. Should I:

  a. Go shopping for something I don’t need

  b. Drink too many cappuccinos

  c. See if there are movies this early

  d. Call Joel

  She would have picked d, except that he was on an airplane. She had to find something to do, though, as it made no sense to drive a half hour home, and then back again, for no reason. Nora had seen that photograph of the polar bear perched, bewildered, on a melting platform of ice. She was not about to subsidize her own indecision with an hour’s worth of exhaust fumes; not going to ask the poor bear to pay for her lack of planning.

  She should have been thrilled to be stranded without an agenda for four hours, as her usual schedule involved a puff pastry of layered responsibilities, but this did not feel like freedom. Nora had the nagging sense that there were right answers and wrong answers to almost everything these days, and that God kept a running tally of how smart she was about her daily life. Unstructured time seemed like a punishable offense for which she anticipated dire consequences down the line; the lucid ambition that had fueled her twenties and thirties had given way, on the down slope of her forties, to the kind of vague superstition she had once ridiculed in her mother and grandmother and aunt. Her attempts to stick with a rational approach to life met with diminishing success, and she tried not to worry about the possibility that she was genetically predisposed to utter the word “portent” with a straight face, someday.

  The right answer, or the least wrong answer, was b, so Nora drove the short block to a Starbucks in the lobby of an office building in the nearby neighborhood business district, a Starbucks that this weekend would owe most of its profits to the parents of the juniors who were filing through the gates of Crestview School. She strolled toward it with her best approximation of a carefree air, and when her feet hit the sensor the automatic door swung toward her with a slight pneumatic sigh, not unlike the sound that would soon be generated in the Crestview auditorium, library, and four history classrooms as four hundred hands, on cue from the clock-watching proctors, simultaneously opened their SAT test booklets.

  Nora got stuck in line behind a woman with a written list of twelve custom coffees and a sweaty middle-aged couple reaching loud consensus about the biomechanical advantages of their new sneakers. She stared at her reflection in the dessert case and found fault with everything. On most days her tousled brown hair shot this way and that in two-inch bursts of energy, but this morning it fell on itself in deflated little parentheses. Her eyes, large and gray like her daughter’s, looked as startled as they always did, a nice quality when she needed to feign attention, but not so much of a plus when she was striving for calm. Another customer might have admired her straight, sculpted nose, had plastic surgeons not eliminated all the excesses to which a nose with discretionary income could fall prey, making Nora’s seem less remarkable by comparison. As for her mouth, it was so tight that Nora instinctively let out three little breaths—whoo, whoo, whoo—to force it to relax.

  Joel liked to say that his wife was too energetic to be merely pretty, and too sexy to be considered handsome. Nora appreciated the effort on his part; he was trying to protect her fro
m the prevailing belief that pretty was the exclusive province of women under thirty, while handsome belonged to women with an income in the high six figures. She did not look the way her mother had in the shadow of fifty, resigned, designed, with the muscle tone of a baked potato, and under normal circumstances that was good enough for her. This morning it was not. The face in the dessert case looked manic in a way peculiar to postmillennial mothers about to launch their daughters into a world that was larger than it had been when the moms were in college, but smaller, and less yielding, than the girls imagined it to be.

  She forced herself to change focus. She flirted with the idea of ordering an apple fritter, but as she looked at the tray of knobbly, glazed pastries she suddenly imagined other SAT moms considering other, identical apple fritters at Starbucks from coast to coast, an infinitely replicating population of apprehensive moms rationalizing a 400-plus-calorie sugar rush by concentrating on the amount of fresh apple they were about to consume. The knowledge that she was not alone—that she was far from alone—failed to comfort her. Nora was not normally a Starbucks person, any more than she was a McDonald’s person; she had a natural distrust of chains. She liked the local, the mom-and-pop, the neighborhood business, just as she liked short hair, the clogs she wore more and more outside of work, the baggy khakis that sat closer to her waist than to her crotch but were nothing like the dread mom jeans, and the same brand of T-shirt she had worn since before Lauren was born.

  All of her choices were of a piece, as she saw it, and she told herself that the common denominator, the theme of her inner life, was a search for authenticity. Her friends admired her for the thoughtfulness required to find an alternative to the chain coffee boutiques, and for the important ideas that must be rattling around in her head in the space they consigned to losing five pounds and getting a weekly blow-dry, though privately they felt she could do a bit more with her hair. They considered her to be a valued friend. They used the word “genuine” when they spoke of her, and believed that they acquired a little spiritual heft by association.

  The warier, more competitive moms at school considered Nora’s stated preferences to be a quirk, if not an affectation—an artificial means of singling herself out when there really was not much she could claim as unique. What she saw as nonconformity and her friends prized as originality, they saw as a lack of standards. In the thin air on the west side of Los Angeles, where appraisal was a contact sport, everyone had an opinion.

  Joel teased that her love of the individualist might evaporate if a conglomerate ever offered her millions for her little bakery, and he had a point. Still, she was suspicious of the scripted enthusiasm of the corporate coffee scene.

  “Next guest in line,” said the barista. The man behind Nora cleared his throat loudly so she would wake up and realize she was it.

  The barista had dyed the tips of his brown hair blond, and when he spoke, Nora could see the stud in the center of his tongue. He wore those new earrings, not studs but half-inch plugs embedded in his earlobes, which she was sure would leave gaping holes that could not possibly close up completely, ending any chance of a career in politics or constitutional law or even medicine, because no one in their right mind would go to a brain surgeon with big holes in his ears. Then again, if you were seeing a brain surgeon, you were unfortunately not in your right mind, in which case he might have a future. For a moment Nora pitied him, this dead-end boy in a dead-end job, whose parents should have explained to him that certain mutilations might hamper his job search. Then she berated herself for being shortsighted, for assuming that he was lucky enough to have options and parents who pointed them out. Maybe his mom and dad did not care, maybe he lacked the grades for a decent college, or for any college, or even to graduate from high school. Maybe he was in rehab, or supporting a ruined brother who had been thrown out of rehab, stepping in to care for the boy because his parents had long since moved up to Mount Shasta, if indeed they had not split up weeks before he was born. Running the counter at Starbucks might be a good job for this kid.

  She decided to like him. Nora made a point of pursuing instant and unexpected friendships, even if they lasted no longer than it took to order coffee. She loved to strike up conversations with strangers as much as she disliked it when strangers tried to initiate an exchange with her. She preferred to decide whether she felt like talking, which gave her the illusion of control.

  “Let’s see,” she said. “I’d like—well, if it’s a cappuccino is the Venti more milk or more espresso?”

  “Than what? Than a Grande or a Tall?”

  “No, I mean the proportion in the cup, is it—never mind. I’d like a nonfat Grande cappuccino,” she said.

  The boy turned toward the girl at the espresso machine and yelled, “Grande nonfat cappuccino.”

  There it was. Nora had failed to master Starbucks’ ordering syntax on the very day that her daughter was taking the SAT exam for the first time. This was not a good omen.

  “Your kid doing the SAT?”

  “Oh. Yes, she is. She’s a junior.”

  “She do All-Prep?”

  “She did. Yes.”

  The boy reached into his apron pocket and handed a business card to Nora. “Sam’s SAT Slam,” it read, above a raft of email addresses and cell phone numbers.

  “I work for All-Prep three nights a week,” he said, “but the rest of the time I’m freelance. If she blows it this time. You know, if she needs any extra help.”

  Why would he say that? Everyone remembered the girl who had fried her circuits with too much prep, cried through much of the SAT she was supposed to ace, and was now at a local junior college, the educational equivalent of a halfway house—but everyone assumed that such things happened to other people’s children. At Crestview, not sending a child to test-prep classes was considered negligent behavior.

  “She did very well on the sample tests,” Nora replied. “Very well. We just wanted her to learn the strategy. She did very well.” She seemed unable to think of anything else to say.

  “Great. If she wants to take ’em again right away in May, I’ve got some slots open.”

  “You did well on your SATs, then.”

  “I got 2380—1600 on the part you remember.”

  “That’s very impressive. Good grief, 2380 out of 2400. May I ask where you went to college? Or are you still in school?”

  “It’s went. Yale. You got the Fiske yet?”

  Nora might have started to cry, right then, if not for dollar bills and exact change to distract her. Fisk was a black university in the South. Was this some kind of slang, to get the Fisk? A moment earlier she had been merely anxious about Lauren’s future, in the reassuringly linear and slightly giddy way of parents who had paid for the first round of test prep and considered this, the day of the first SAT exam for juniors, to be the official start of the college application season. She had been the Zen master of moms, relatively speaking, until a Yale graduate with holes in his ears as big as her espresso mini-truffles confronted her with her own ignorance. Suddenly Nora was alone in the universe with a new fear—that despite love and good intentions, she would fail to do what Lauren needed to help her get into the right college, fail even to figure out what she needed until it was too late.

  She took a deep breath. For a woman who had spent most of her working life confirming fact and discarding fiction, there was nothing worse than an informational ambush. Nora had felt this way when one of her competitors beat her to the punch on red velvet cupcakes, and she had to revamp the whole fall product line at the last minute to feature mini–sticky buns topped with fruit. For that matter, she had felt this way when she got fired from her magazine research job the week after Lauren started high school, rendered obsolete by search engines that enabled anyone to find out anything without the help of a human being who required health benefits and a pension plan. She stared at the barista and reminded herself sternly that she knew how to cope with the unexpected, as long as there was not too much of i
t.

  “Ah, the Fisk,” she said, trying to sound like someone who had an assistant to run such errands, an assistant who might be fired on Monday for having forgotten such an important acquisition. “Not yet…”

  “There’s a BookWorld over on National,” he said.

  It was a book. Relieved, Nora resorted to a small fib to cover her momentary confusion. “The store near me was out.”

  “Yeah, it’s time, it’s more than time.”

  “What did you major in at Yale?”

  “Comparative religion.” He read the next question in the dovetailed lines between her brows. “I’m writing a pilot. Sort of a Doctors Without Borders thing, but funny.”

  “Like M*A*S*H,” she replied, on the happy upswing of the conversation. But the boy had already made eye contact with the man behind Nora, so she slid over to where her drink was waiting. Finally, she had a plan. She would drive to BookWorld, find the Fisk, come back to Starbucks, and read until the exam was over.

  She watched the barista hand his business card to the man and wondered what she and Joel were doing, paying $150 an hour for tutors who came to the house to show Lauren how to get the great standardized test scores she needed if she wanted to get into a top college—so that she could graduate and end up like the barista, a tutor who showed kids how to get the great scores they needed if they wanted to get into a top college. The test-prep rep who had spoken at Crestview the previous fall had described the trajectory of students who nailed the SATs, but he had made it sound more like a bird in flight than a dog chasing its tail.

  The firing had come without warning, as the publisher viewed the editorial staff the way certain childless people regard children, as charming, peripheral nuisances. Not even Joel had known that he was about to lose 10 percent of his staff, including his wife. On that score, the publisher figured he was doing his executive editor a big favor.