Getting In: A Novel

by Karen Stabiner

  He pawed through the stack, skimming first lines, more African health care crises, more personal awakenings, a Habitat for Humanity from Fiji, and a note from Lauren:

  Mr. Marshall, I hope you remember I’m going to look at some more schools with my folks. I promise I’ll have a final draft the minute I get back (working on the plane both ways), and I’ll still have plenty of time to make more fixes before the 1st. Thanks, Lauren.

  When Ted first became a college counselor, his more experienced colleague had advised him to arrange the office furniture so that his back was to the door, to buy a moment to compose himself before he had to face a teary kid or an angry parent. Five seasons later, he no longer needed the hedge. Ted had calloused up. He could wrap a consoling arm around a devastated senior’s shoulder while he debated privately whether to have the mozzarella and tomato on a baguette or the deli meats on a ciabatta roll for lunch. It was what made him a success. He had learned to fight for every senior who had a chance, and yet not to care where they ended up, or rather, not to care in terms of a teenager’s broken heart. They mended, even if they did not know it yet.

  All that mattered was the list of college acceptances that appeared in the annual report, the list that parents of prospective students compared to similar lists from competing schools when they were deciding where to send their seventh-graders to school. He reminded himself of that, sternly, when he looked up and saw Brad—saw Harvard—in the doorway. He beckoned the boy in and made great fuss of pulling his essays from the stack and turning to the proper page on his writing pad.

  “So,” he said, hoping that the delay might make Brad just uncomfortable enough to tell the truth, “Mr. Preston Bradley the Fourth, would you like to tell your hardworking college counselor what the agenda is here?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “No, you’re not. If you’re sorry you would have given me a final draft of what I saw last time, like everybody else did.”

  Brad sighed. “Do you like either of them?”

  “I like the first one fine,” said Ted, “but not for a boy who’s headed to Harvard. I only like the second one for a boy who’s determined not to go to Harvard, which would not be you. So we need to straighten this out.”

  “Mr. Marshall, can I close the door?”

  Back when Ted was Brad’s age, he had used that very line on the day he told his father that he intended to major in English lit and become a writer. He had said, “Dad, can I close the door?” in the irrational hope that a sealed room would somehow contain his dad’s disappointment, which it did not, as his father’s definition of success for his son included regular hours, an office, and benefits. Bad news—the betrayal of a family plan—inevitably followed a request to close the door. For a wild moment, Ted wondered if he could prevent whatever was about to happen by insisting that the door remain open.

  “Sure,” he said, and nodded. After about a hundred years, Brad sat back down.

  “Mr. Marshall, we have something like attorney-client privilege, right? I mean, I can tell you something and you won’t tell my dad.”

  Ted felt himself smiling in terror.

  “I don’t want to go to Harvard,” said Brad. “I mean, I really don’t want to go to Harvard. You think if I send in one of these essays they’ll turn me down? Or at least wait-list me? That would buy me some time to figure out what I want to do. Buy my dad some time to get over it.”

  “Isn’t it a little late in the game to change your mind? Where would you go instead?” Ted had applicants lined up at all the other Ivies, and he did not want to be in the same county as Trey Bradley when he found out that his boy had been relegated to the Big Ten, or, even worse, the Pac Ten. Trey sneered at Columbia and Penn, as though there were two distinct tiers within the Ivy League, and he had lately let it be known that he was debating whether to endow Crestview’s new science wing. There was much more at stake here than Brad’s mysteriously revised notion of collegiate happiness. Ted waited while the boy scooped a handful of paper clips from a bowl on the desk, arranged them in the shape of a bird, and sat back to consider his creation.

  “Brad.”

  He looked up, startled and abashed, and Ted saw in the boy’s guilty expression a glimmer of opportunity.

  “Brad. You understand how close you are to making this happen. You understand the advantage you have, I know you do, so you have to explain to me why you would turn away from this.”

  Brad dismantled the bird and dumped the paper clips back in the bowl. “I just think I’ll be happier somewhere else. Maybe I ought to go to art school.”

  Ted saw the science wing vanish.

  “I just don’t want to be the fourth anything.”

  Ted pounced.

  “Hey, that has nothing to do with where you should go to school,” he said. “It’s like the girl I had last year who was thinking about Barnard until somebody said the Columbia kids look down on the Barnard girls, and all of a sudden she’s not going to apply. Not going to let anybody tell her she was second class. I asked her, if some nitwit said they looked down on the surfers from southern California, or they looked down on the Jewish kids, what would you do? And she said I’d write that person off, never speak to them again. Okay, if that’s the case, then you have to ignore the person who looks down their nose at a Barnard girl. Not you, Brad, but her. But she got so caught up in what people were going to think that she didn’t even apply, ended up at Wash U in St. Louis. That’s not you. Your job is, anybody who treats you like the newest branch on the family tree, you ignore them. It’s their narrow-minded problem, not yours. You’re not the fourth anything. You’re the first you.”

  Ted only wished that he came across more kids who were named after their parents, because that business about being the first you was one of the best lines he had ever come up with on the fly. He would have loved the chance to use it again.

  “Makes all the sense in the world, I guess,” said Brad.

  “Besides, you think they give you a sign to hang around your neck that says ‘legacy’? For that matter, do the math: They don’t take every legacy that applies. They don’t have the room.”

  “Okay, but what if I’m right? What if I’d be better off someplace else? I don’t think it’s a good strategy to send in a great app and hope I’ll be one of the legacies who doesn’t get in, I mean, that’s kind of leaving my future to chance, don’t you think? And besides, if I want to be an architect…”

  “I see,” said Ted, “and somehow a school that spit out your guy, Gehry, and Philip Johnson, that’s too old-school for you, okay, Thom Mayne, a school that has what’s-his-name Koolhaas on the faculty, somehow this is not up to your standards?”

  “How do you know all that?”

  “It’s my job to know all that.” Ted moved in for the kill. “So tell me what could possibly be wrong with going to Harvard if architecture is your—”

  “You don’t get it.” The tone of Brad’s voice rattled them both. “I’m sorry, Mr. Marshall. Really. But listen. I can’t go to Harvard and be an architect, don’t you see? If I go to Harvard I’m going to be a lawyer. Everybody in my family who goes to Harvard ends up a lawyer. You have no idea, I’m sorry to say that, but you don’t. I mean, I go there, my life is set for the rest of my life.”

  He took a deep breath.

  “I am not going to be a lawyer,” he said.

  Ted reeled it in. “I believe you. Look, this is a stressful time. Let’s get you in and then you can stand up for yourself, which I know you will. What do you think your father’s going to do—show up in Cambridge to help you register? Pull the plug on tuition if you’re not prelaw? Come on. Let’s get some perspective here. Have you looked at their fine arts curriculum?”

  Brad reached for a smaller handful of paper clips and lined them up left to right.

  “Not really. No, not at all,” he said, without taking his eyes off the paper clips. “Y’know, I’m not really working on the double helix so much anymore. Not so much. Not
at all, really. There’s not a whole lot of time for…”

  “Clean up the first essay you showed me and send it in, okay?”

  “Okay,” Brad lied.

  Ted came around the desk and clapped Brad on the shoulder. “I’ve got to tell you, Harvard’s always seemed like the right match for you.”

  “You’d say if you didn’t think so.”

  “I would,” Ted lied, in return.

  Dan Dodson was one senior partner’s retirement away from a corner office with a view of the Hollywood sign, but until the guy came to terms with reality, Dan had to settle for the standard Century City consolation prize, an office with an endless bank of windows that opened onto a vista of other endless banks of windows. He did not care about the view, because at his level there was no time for staring out the window. He did mind the positioning, and if he had a business lunch near Decorator’s Row he occasionally stopped in at one of the showrooms to consider the latest styles in desks and credenzas, so that he would be ready when the inevitable happened.

  He always planned ahead in that way, envisioning the future as he wanted it to be, in great and specific detail, as though a definitive dream would be likelier to materialize than a vague one. He did not even see these internal dramas as dreams, really, but as documentaries. Anticipatory documentaries. He occasionally rehearsed lines of dialogue to determine in advance how best to tell the story of his life.

  “I have two kids at Williams.”

  “Both of our children are at Williams.”

  “My son and my daughter attend Williams.”

  He took stock twice a day—once right before he left his office, and again right before he went to sleep, even on Sundays, when he had to fight the soporific effects of what Joy called sex night. The office session enabled him to compartmentalize and make the transition from attorney to family man. The bedroom tally, which involved a nightstand notepad, ensured that he would wake up with his priorities intact.

  When Ron had applied to college, all the Dodsons cared about was finding a school that appreciated an extraordinarily smart boy who on a good day aspired to nothing more than flatlined social skills. Anyone who accepted Ron was going to do so in spite of his personality, not because of it, so the Dodsons had endorsed Ted’s strategy of focusing on small, prestigious schools outside but equivalent to the Ivy League—Williams, Swarthmore, Wesleyan, Amherst. Once Ron got in and Dan could relax, he embraced Williams with all the fervor of a man intent on building the family brand.

  He defined success in terms of status and status in terms of money, a nicely quantifiable formula for happiness. Dan had grown up on the second floor of a Chicago three-flat near his father’s liquor store, and when he was in junior high, old enough to stock the snack shelves, he got his first good look at people who had it better than he did. Every weekend a parade of snooty kids from Northwestern University and Evanston High, sentenced to spend their adolescence in a dry town, would drive down to Howard Street to make a buy. They pulled up in front of his dad’s store and handed a ten-dollar bill to the nearest drunk, who reeled into the store for them and got a pint for himself with the change. Sometimes the kids waved at Dan and hollered that they were going to call the cops because he was too young to be inside a liquor store. He spent a lot of time inventing replies that he never had the nerve to deliver. He met Joy at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, and by the time they reached senior year, their combined ambition had jelled into a plan. He would go to law school, she would be a doctor, they would marry and pursue lucrative specialties, and together they would buy their way into exclusivity, one component at a time.

  He used reverse volume as his leading criterion of value: the best things were those that the fewest people could acquire, which was why an AMG Mercedes was better than a standard model, a custom piece of jewelry was better than anything of which there was more than one, no matter how expensive it was, and a small school, preferably one that was hard to get to, was better than even the most prestigious university in a major airline’s hub city. By his standards, Williams was collegiate paradise, a bucolic campus nestled at the base of the Berkshire mountains—Yale did not have mountains—with a cute little neighboring town—Yale did not have that, either—and intimate classes taught by the professors themselves. The life of the mind—the Fiske had used that very phrase—taught in an idyllic, East Coast setting.

  He tried again.

  “You can’t do better than Williams. Unless you care more about brand names than education, right?”

  Having both his children at Williams would be like having a wine locker full of bottles with nothing less than a Parker score of 92. It was knowing what lardo was—and knowing that no one else at his table would stoop to making jokes about eating pig fat. It was proof of his success, essential when what he considered failure, what he called the Howard Street era, was only years, not generations, in the past. After some debate, he decided not to argue relative merits with Katie, not unless she got headstrong about Yale. He had rehearsed his dinnertime presentation in the car on the way to work, as he was about to in the car on the way home. It was unassailably simple: on an objective level, Yale was no better than Williams, so he saw no compelling reason to endure the logistical inconvenience of having two children at two separate schools.

  Tuesday and Thursday nights were the Dodsons’ workweek family dinner nights, and Dan and Joy remained firm about that schedule, as well as a traditional Sunday night meal, despite ever more imaginative excuses from Katie. They had read articles that credited the family dinner with everything from improved SAT scores to higher lifetime income, they had read critics who with equal fervor debunked the claims, and they had decided to split the difference, just in case. Joy amused her friends by claiming that she and Dan did not have a kitchy-koo gene between them. They preferred an evidence-based approach.

  Dan always started the conversation while Joy dished up one of a revolving set of takeout meals from the Italian restaurant in the lobby of her building. The latest management team had divined that authenticity mattered not as much as political correctness to their clientele, so tonight’s entrée was what the menu called “chicken osso buco,” even though chickens lacked shank bones, to say nothing of edible marrow. Real osso buco was veal, and veal was beef, adorable baby beef with its hooves nailed to the floor. A smart restaurateur responded creatively to customers averse both to the cholesterol level of veal and the torture of baby cows, but accepting of chickens bleeding out through the neck. Joy served the chicken with broccoli and a small scoop of generic pasta salad, chosen for color accent rather than flavor and measured out with a doctor’s precision, grateful for the mindless task. She had spent her afternoon doing full-body skin cancer checks, and the dainty prodding of the skin behind people’s ears, on their balding pates, at an obsolete bikini line, always left her worn out. Bad news could lurk on the skin between one’s toes. Joy had to start referring these patients to someone else.

  Dan started to speak as soon as she put down the serving spoon.

  “So, Katie. You met with Ted today.”

  “Did you call him? You promised you wouldn’t…”

  Joy sat down and reached a conciliatory hand toward her daughter. “Katie, please. It’s on the college calendar. Your father did not call anyone, and I think you owe him an apology.”

  “Sorry,” Katie grunted.

  “Accepted,” said Dan, who in fact had confirmed the date and time of the meeting with Ted days before, when he dropped off the bottle of wine. “And he’s happy with your essay.”

  “Sure.” Katie shrugged. She would have replied in exactly the same way if Ted had fed her essay to his shredding machine. She had written him off when her parents pushed for Williams instead of Yale and he failed to push back hard enough. The absolutism that made her such a successful student, the belief that there were right answers in lit and history as well as in math and science, informed her attitudes about people as well, and once she assigned th
em a category she was unlikely to reconsider. Ted had proven himself her parents’ ally when he was supposed to be hers. Every one of his suggestions about her essay was clearly suspect and stemmed somehow from his desire to see her at Williams.

  Dan attempted a supportive smile. “So the only thing left is to resolve…”

  “Katie, what your father’s trying to say…”

  “I’m saying what I’m trying to say, Joy. We need to resolve this Yale business once and for all and talk dispassionately about what approach is going to yield the best results.”

  “The best results?” Katie slammed down her fork and a globule of chicken osso buco sauce catapulted onto her T-shirt. Reflexively, Joy dipped her napkin in her water glass and reached over to wipe it off.

  “Mom, stop it.” Katie knocked her mother’s hand away and started to push her chair back.

  “Excuse me,” said Dan. “People who storm out of rooms have a great deal of trouble figuring out how to walk back in, so we do not storm out in the first place, and you know that. We are going to talk this through.”

  “No, we’re not,” said Katie, inching her chair back into place. “Talking would mean I get to say what I want, which is not to go to Williams, but I can tell already I’m not going to get to say that. Or I can say it but neither one of you is going to listen to me. This isn’t a conversation. Maybe my idea”—and here she mimicked her father’s measured tone—“of yielding the best results is to figure out how to get me into Yale.”

  “Sarcasm does not help, Katie,” said her mother.

  Katie speared a chunk of broccoli so that she would have an excuse not to talk. She had always liked her parents better than anyone else’s. Lauren’s parents were nice enough, but they never seemed to know what to do, not like Katie’s folks, who were always a good six months ahead of the curve. Chloe’s parents were too busy fighting and Brad’s parents were too smug to think about what was really best for their kids. Katie’s parents had always told her she could do anything she set her mind to—and yet they refused to yield on Yale. They acted as though she could not possibly know what was best for her, having raised her to believe the opposite, which made her dig in simply for the sake of being obstinate. There was no good reason for Katie to insist on Yale—surely she could navigate Williams without running into her brother, she knew that—but the more her parents insisted, the harder she pressed. It was exhausting, and she had begun secretly to wish that she could figure out how to give it up without hating herself.