Getting In: A Novel

by Karen Stabiner

  “You go,” said Lauren, who wanted to avoid the instant replay. “Go have a nice lunch. I’ll meet you back at the hotel.”

  “Are you sure? You have your cell phone, right? You okay?”

  “Mom. I’m not brokenhearted. I really never figured…”

  She trotted off before Nora could suggest that they at least ride the subway together.

  Ron’s friends and enemies alike called him Flap: his friends because of the way he liked to bend his arms at the elbows and herd the oarsmen toward the boat before a race; his enemies because he flapped when he was on dry land as well. He gestured with both hands when he talked, and the more obscure the point he was trying to make, the more he waved his hands around, so that sometimes it looked as though his fingers were about to break off and fly into space. His lips were what the women who came into his mom’s office for plumping injections were after. His hair bounced when he walked. His friends were not really friends, but math and science geeks who held him in awe. The kids who hated him—and they were legion, because he inadvertently made everyone feel as dumb as toast—liked to stand behind his back and mouth “flap flap flap flap flap” while he talked, safe in the knowledge that they could do so without him noticing. When Ron was deep into an idea, there was no such thing as distraction.

  He said he loved quantum physics, and no one at Crestview had challenged him or inquired further, because he was the only one who understood what he was talking about, except for the UCLA professor who had worked with him twice a week once he outgrew the Crestview curriculum. Katie was mortified to be related to him and extremely relieved when he left home. She had confided to Lauren that her brother might very possibly have Asperger’s syndrome, even though her parents had taken him to a specialist years before who confirmed that he did not. It was the cruelest rumor she had ever planted, far worse than the one about Brad, which had only enhanced his reputation, but Katie had to find some way to distance herself from her brother.

  Lauren never repeated what Katie said, but as she walked down Broadway and saw Ron having a flapping conversation with a tall, thin girl, she wondered if there was any chance of getting into Gray’s Papaya for a hot dog without him noticing her.

  No. He had some sort of radar.

  “Lauren,” he hollered, lifting his arms higher and waving as she crossed the street.

  “What’re you doing in New York?” she asked.

  “What’re you doing in New York?” he replied.

  “Looking at colleges,” she said.

  “Little late for that. You don’t have the grades for Columbia, so is it Fordham? Hofstra? NYU? New School has some neat classes.”

  The exhausting thing about talking to Ron was that he was not malicious, so Lauren could hardly get mad at him for being hurtful. Her dad said that Ron lacked an internal censor—his exact words were “That kid needs an in-house editor.” The easiest thing was to ignore him. Lauren stuck her hand out in the girl’s direction.

  “I’m Lauren,” she said. “I go to school with Ron’s sister, Katie.”

  “The great-ee Miss Kate-ee, quite beleaguered Ivy Leaguer. I’m L’Anitra, glad to meet ya.” She slapped Lauren a low five.

  Ron wrapped his arm around the girl’s waist.

  “L’Anitra’s a spoken-word poet,” he said.

  Lauren was dumbfounded. All she could think to say was, “L’Anitra. That’s a very unusual name.”

  L’Anitra’s smile made Lauren think of a Discovery Channel lion right before it tore a zebra into edible chunks.

  An enraptured Ron continued to address Lauren as though L’Anitra did not comprehend English—which Lauren found entirely possible, at least as a first language, as the meter of her verse was a little bit forced. “How great is she?” he said. “She came to Williams for a performance poetry weekend and it was, it was, it was love at first adjective.”

  “Love at first electron, baby,” said L’Anitra. “Entanglement.”

  She and Ron laughed as though that was about the funniest thing anyone had ever said, and Lauren wondered for a long moment what drug they had taken. But then Ron got flappy serious, all of his familiar energy in his fingertips, his eyes locked on Lauren, and she understood that he was merely high on acceptance. L’Anitra could stand to be with him for more than ten minutes, which was sufficient cause for elation on his part. He had no need of pharmaceuticals.

  “Swear to me you won’t say anything to Katie. Don’t say anything to your parents. You didn’t see me, okay?”

  “Why? What’s the big deal?” said Lauren.

  Ron’s eyes got wide. “Are you kidding me? I am standing on a street corner in Manhattan because L’Anitra goes to Barnard and she can’t afford the train to Williams….”

  “Couldn’t you pay for her ticket and take turns?”

  “Lauren. Let me finish.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Where we are is beside the point…”

  “Since we’re always in the same place,” said L’Anitra, and then she kissed Ron for long enough to allow Lauren to count out the exact change for the hot dog and papaya drink she regretted ever wanting.

  “Say, Ron, I have to go meet my folks.”

  He broke away from L’Anitra slowly, his eyes darting furtively toward the subway, hoping her roommate would keep her promise to be out of the room by two.

  “Anyhow, you can’t tell them you saw us. You have to promise.”

  Lauren shrugged. “Fine. What do I care?”

  “Great.” Ron searched his mental list of appropriate behaviors until he found the one labeled “favor done/gratitude expressed.” He fixed Lauren with as sincere a gaze as he could muster. “So, Columbia.”

  “Or Northwestern or Vassar or NYU or none of the above,” said Lauren. “I’m just looking, Ron. Shopping. You don’t say anything, either.”

  “No problem,” said Ron.

  And then L’Anitra did something Lauren had never seen before—she snaked her arm across Ron’s skinny torso and tucked her fingers into the front of his waistband, eliciting a high giggle from Ron that Lauren hoped never to hear again. She was used to people lacing a finger into the back of someone’s waistband as a way to assert proprietary rights, or to propel them toward the door, but L’Anitra had long fingers, and all four of them were tapping a secret code on the inside of Ron’s zipper. Only her thumb remained in view, and it looked impatient. Lauren looked for another point of focus—the little mole above L’Anitra’s left eyebrow, the purple butterfly tattooed in the well above her collarbone—but it was impossible not to watch the disappearing hand.

  “Gotta go,” said Lauren.

  “Suh-weet,” said L’Anitra, dismissively. Her slightly threatening tone made Lauren decide not to mention that no one used “sweet” as an adjective anymore, something a poet ought to know.

  Lauren was halfway to the hotel, numb, when she remembered the hot dog she had forgotten to buy, so she settled for a handful of hard candy from a bowl in the lobby and went upstairs to collapse on the bed, trying to make sense of her distress. Lauren was not a prude; she simply had never found “everybody else is” a compelling reason to have sex, especially as she knew of too many girls who supposedly were but in fact were not. Lauren’s last boyfriend had dumped her at the end of junior year in favor of a more compliant girl. Since then, Lauren had come to agree with Katie: any senior who still had a boyfriend was not spending enough time working on her college applications. They never once stopped to wonder if they were missing out on something. Fun in high school was as outmoded a concept as pajama parties, and a good time was likelier to be a 5 on the AP world history exam than a pep rally. This generation was all about purpose, at least until the fat envelopes arrived. Boys, like introduction to sociology or a survey course on Western intellectual thought, were something to look forward to freshman year.

  She told herself that it was perfectly reasonable for two college sophomores to be indulging in foreplay on the way to the subway. The proble
m was that Ron was half of the happy couple, Ron, who failed to find a date to his senior prom despite the efforts of the crew captain, who had pimped Ron to his twin sister and her pals at the nearby girls school. Ron, who went to prom anyhow, got two girls to dance with him, once each, and spent the rest of the night hanging out with the photographer, pretending he was the guy’s assistant. Lauren subscribed to the sustaining notion that freshman year was going to be full of all the happy experiences she was in the process of denying herself, but Ron’s new life implied that the path was not necessarily a straight one. If he could turn into a sex object, there were no guarantees.

  She turned on the television set, but her only options were a talk show about a husband and wife who each had had a sex-change operation (“Saves money on a new wardrobe,” joked the husband-to-wife), a talk show about a couple suing their grown children for fraud (“They said the money was safe”), and three local news shows that featured breaking news on puppy mills, a raid on a store that sold knock-off Vuitton handbags, and a wedding photographer who collected his fee and never delivered the photos, respectively. Lauren curled up tight and put her hands over her ears. Sometimes it seemed to her that these particular stories ran in a continuous loop all over the country. She could have sworn that she had already heard them back home.

  She turned off the set when Nora and Joel walked in.

  “Boy, I would do a lot for a lemon cupcake right now,” said Lauren.

  “Oh, sweetie,” said Nora, snuggling up next to her. “Feeling a little overwhelmed?”

  Lauren hopped up off the bed and tromped toward the bathroom.

  “I was feeling hungry. Could we not read something into every single thing I say? I’m going to take a shower and work on my essay.”

  They went to NYU, which confirmed Lauren’s preference for a rolling campus. They rented a car and drove to Brandeis, which made her feel insufficiently Jewish, and to Trinity, which had the opposite effect despite her father’s joke about Curly, Moe, and Larry. They went to Bard, which made her feel like a Republican, and to Sarah Lawrence, which made her feel nothing at all, and then they headed north to Vassar, each of them careful neither to mention how many times they had doubled back, nor to raise the question of whose job it should have been to consult a map and create a more linear itinerary. Nora insisted that she loved the chance to see the same autumn leaves a few days apart and swore that she could see a difference in the colors, which was her way of putting her family on notice: she would not tolerate a single moment of strife over the curlicues they were driving.

  Ted had suggested Vassar at the last moment because he felt that Vassar was in flux, eager to be considered competitive with the Ivies, not a consolation prize for their rejects, but not quite there yet. Better still, no one from Crestview was applying this year. Ted sold the gorgeous campus hard, and reminded Nora that the nearby Culinary Institute promised higher quality local restaurants than they would otherwise find in a rural setting.

  Best of both worlds, he said, jotting that phrase next to Vassar on his personal crib sheet. He added the school to Lauren’s list, in a vague open space that might be the bottom of the Stretches or the top of the Even Odds, depending on one’s point of view and her first-semester grades.

  So Lauren and her parents checked into the Crystal Lake bed-and-breakfast, whose brochure inflated the adjacent stream into a waterfront location and referred to the lobby as the living room, where the hospitality staff offered a full afternoon tea. Crystal Lake had started out as a flagship in the Nite-E-Nite economy motel chain, until outsourcing dried up the steady stream of satellite-office managers and sales reps who had been its dependable clientele. The bank manager who handled the foreclosure sale bought the place for a song and retrofitted it to serve the growing number of families who came to town for the college tour, as well as the lucky return visitors who came back straight through graduation. He replaced the monochromatic executive palette with the decorating equivalent of comfort food: floral prints and overstuffed chairs and his mother-in-law’s scenic watercolors to give the walls some needed warmth. The only vestige of the previous regime was a slightly distorted flat-screen TV in every room.

  Lauren and her parents arrived after dark, too late to appreciate the adjacent lake or the afternoon tea, and overslept the following morning because Joel had set the alarm on his cell phone but forgot that he had it on silent mode. Happily, hospitality was as endemic as chintz in Poughkeepsie. There was coffee and tea and fresh apple cider and what looked like homemade donuts in the cozy admissions office from which the tour embarked.

  As the tour group set off for the freshman dormitories, a dad in full L.L. Bean autumn regalia strode up next to Joel, because having a son for whom Vassar was considered a safe school meant nothing without sharing. A woman who struck up a conversation with Nora made a pitying cluck when Nora said that Lauren had taken six AP classes.

  “This year?” the woman asked, and Nora changed the subject to those marvelous donuts.

  No one at all spoke to Lauren, because a hardened high school senior on tour knew that autonomy made a stronger impression than camaraderie.

  At eleven, having visited several identical dormitory rooms and a bunch of empty classrooms, the two tour leaders herded their two dozen charges toward an auditorium in the oldest building on campus, which bore dignified witness to the amount of time that Vassar had been doing things right. A tall, slender, stern woman stepped to the podium and introduced herself. She was second-generation Vassar admissions, dressed in a first-generation uniform of silk blouse and sensible skirt; she wore pearls without irony and oversized bifocals, the ones with the earpiece attached to the bottom of the frame instead of the top, without shame. She smiled without sincerity.

  “My mother liked to say that she would’ve rejected every single girl Mary McCarthy wrote about in The Group,” she said, with a parched New England chuckle. “And I have inherited that high standard for Vassar’s incoming class.”

  She proceeded to recite what she called the “recipe for success” at Vassar, which involved straight As, being in the top 5 to 10 percent of one’s class, community service, extracurricular activities, an application essay about an absolutely unique topic, and incomparable test scores. She frequently mentioned her own version of the holy trinity, Harvard, Yale, and Vassar, as though Princeton, Columbia, and a half dozen other impossible schools no longer existed, as though these three schools bestowed the only diplomas worth having. Her job was to change the perception of the L.L. Bean dad, to make Vassar a destination college.

  “If you don’t have straight As,” she said, “then perhaps you need to ask yourself if you should be in this room. Or will you be happier at a school that doesn’t set the bar quite so high? As for the rest of you, the ones who’ve met every criterion I’ve laid out, I look forward to reading your applications in the coming months. And now, off you go to enjoy this beautiful fall day. Thanks so much for coming.”

  Lauren and her parents headed for the nearest exit and walked to the main gates without saying a word. Once they were safely on the street, out of view of the other tour families, Joel wrapped his arms around Nora and Lauren.

  “You cannot tell me that every kid in that room had straight As,” he said.

  “That’s for sure,” said Lauren. “I don’t.”

  Nora’s voice was as bright as stainless steel. “They can’t have you, is what I say. Let’s go get free tea.”

  The full afternoon tea, as it turned out, involved two plastic domes, one covering striated multicolored cheese cubes and the other red grapes, alongside a carafe of coffee and another of hot water. There was a cereal bowl full of assorted tea bags, another of slightly dehydrated lemon wedges, individual plastic tublets of cream, sugar, and artificial sweetener, and a plate of bulbous muffins. A set of white plastic tongs hung from the lid of the cheese dome.

  Joel went through the motions and took his plate over to the couch in front of the fireplace. Nora stud
ied the contents of the cheese dome as though there were a difference between one cube and another, and Lauren drifted over to the picture window to stare at the Lilliputian puddle that imagined itself a lake. Five days, and all she had succeeded in doing was make Northwestern seem even more alluring. Evanston did not feel like a small town the way Poughkeepsie and some of the other towns did, and Chicago did not feel harsh the way New York sometimes did to her. Northwestern was the best of all possible worlds, which was exactly what she had come on this trip to stop thinking. She glanced over at her dad, who could not find a thing in the local newspaper worth turning the page for, and at her mother, who seemed to have decided that late-afternoon hunger was preferable to any of the muffins. Lauren rested her cheek against the glass.

  “Are we close to anything at all?” she asked.

  chapter 6

  Alexandra Kirk Bradley understood from the day Trey slipped his great-grandmother’s engagement ring onto her finger that her job description involved administering certain of the Bradley traditions. She considered herself a highly qualified candidate, third generation in everything that mattered, from the Pasadena Junior League to the mansioned hillsides of La Cañada to the dressage finals at the annual Flintridge charity horse show, where her father and grandfather had always purchased two ringside tables apiece to accommodate any last-minute guests. She knew a small sliver of life very, very well, and she was perfectly content to leave the rest to others who were as experienced in their specialties as she was in hers. Alexandra might not be a commanding physical presence—the first time Trey met her, he had the eerie sense that he could see right through her to the other side, she was that frail, that pale, that dainty—but she knew how to do what she knew how to do. Her oldest girlfriends, who had called her Birdy in high school, insisted now that she reminded them far more of a dove than a sparrow.

  Privately, she felt more like a little chicken, a poussin, darting this way and that, trying to get her bearings. That was what Trey had called her on their Paris honeymoon, or had tried to, except that petit poussin came out petit poisson, and he had spent several days apologizing for calling her a little fish. It was the first and last time he behaved in a deferential manner. Trey was never harsh, but he was definitive, on everything from her family’s recipe for leg of lamb, which he summarily rejected, to the benefits of living in Hancock Park rather than near her folks in Pasadena, to the disposition of family names. Their first son, Roger, was named after Trey’s maternal grandfather, and their second son was Preston Bradley IV, always to be called Preston and nothing shorter.