Getting In: A Novel

by Karen Stabiner

  Brad poured lemonade and smiled at everyone who approached. He smiled even harder at the girl who had come in late and sat in the far back corner, as though he could will her to look up at him. She had long, liquid black hair that fell in a single, heavy sheet from a precise center part. It swung when she made the slightest move, and he wondered if someday he would design a roof that flowed like that, or if Gehry had cornered the market on liquid architecture, and he would have to do pleats, or maybe organ-pipe tubing, like those chocolate pipes Lauren’s mom used to build a wall around a cake.

  C’mon, he thought. You really need some lemonade or you’re going to be way too thirsty by the end of the next part. C’mon. You need to come over and get a glass of lemonade. Please.

  She did. He wrapped a napkin around a cup to make sure his fingers did not slip on the condensation as he handed it to her.

  “How come you’re here?” he asked.

  “My dad’s working,” the girl replied. “My mom’s at—Katie’s in your class, my mom’s at her house. Dr. Dodson has a party tonight.” The girl flashed a wicked, slicing smile. “For the turkey packers.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Every year she packs turkeys for poor people, and to thank the volunteers she has them over for a party before the packing day. That way they feel too guilty not to show up for the actual work.”

  “Your mom’s a turkey packer?”

  The girl considered the cookie tray and carefully selected a Milano that seemed to her more delectable than its companions, evaluated the amount of chocolate showing at each end, turned it around, and took a small bite. When she looked up her smile was not quite as wide.

  “My mom is Dr. Dodson’s nurse,” she said, as though that explained everything. “Dr. Dodson thinks it’s important for my mom to take part in the effort because that’s the American way, you know. But not really take part. She passes trays of little sandwiches to the turkey packers—”

  “I didn’t mean to—”

  “Little sandwiches made of cheeses from a friend of Katie’s mom who used to be a lawyer until she gave it up to raise sheep and goats.” The girl’s mouth tightened in a little smirk of disapproval. “I know because she gives the leftovers to my mom every year and I have them for lunch. So does my mom. And my dad. He drives a cab. The bread’s really nice, some kind of whole grain with dried cranberries and walnuts.”

  She cocked her head and waited to see what he would say, but before he could get a word out, two moms descended on the table, and the girl stepped aside to make room. Brad just had time to blurt out, “What’s your name?” before one of the women reached over to give him a hug.

  “Liz,” the girl said. “You?”

  “Brad,” he replied.

  “For heaven’s sake,” said Deena, who had embraced him, “don’t you think I know what your name is? Or have you already forgotten me and Chloe, and you figure we forgot you, too?”

  Brad turned reluctantly to Deena and Nora. “Grand, I said grand, Mrs. Haber.”

  Deena winced; she could not decide if she wanted Chloe’s friends to call her Deena, which seemed to diminish her even further, or Mrs. Haber, which might no longer be true but implied that she had honored her commitment and Dave was the jerk, or by her maiden name, Warner, which made too much of her unfortunate change in marital status but asserted her autonomy.

  “Nobody says ‘grand’ anymore,” said Nora, reaching over for her hug, in turn. “You’re spending too much time in English lit, I think. Polishing those As for Harvard.”

  Brad wondered where Liz was going to college. Had Nora spoken loudly enough for Liz to overhear, and would she be impressed or dismiss him as a stuck-up rich boy?

  Nora hung on to Brad’s hand for a moment when he gave her a lemonade.

  “Oh, now, I shouldn’t have said that about Harvard. I’m sorry. You kids are under so much pressure. I didn’t mean to say anything. You must be counting the days. I know Lauren is. But it’s not like you have anything to worry about.”

  “It’s okay, Mrs. Chaiken. Really. I figure what’s going to happen happens, y’know?”

  Deena slung a brave arm around Nora’s shoulders. “It’s us Brad should be careful around, not us around him, for heaven’s sake, how many generations at Harvard, three or four?”

  “I would be fourth,” he said, in the smallest voice imaginable, wishing that Liz would go back to her seat.

  “Four then,” said Deena. “I sometimes think they tell people like you early, on the sly, I mean, you don’t have to tell, I’m just saying. Our poor girls, four more months and no idea what’s going to happen. That’s who needs sympathy.”

  She stopped, as though she had suddenly remembered something, and turned to Nora. “I told Chloe she’s crazy. Why would Lauren change her mind? But…Wait. There’s Ted. Maybe he’d answer a question for me for old time’s sake.”

  An electrical current of hot prickles shot from Nora’s shoulder blades to the crown of her head. Lauren changed her mind? About applying early? Why else would Deena say the girls had four months? But if Lauren had changed her mind, then Lauren, beloved Lauren, their only child—being a distracted parent was no excuse, how could Nora have missed this?—had lied, over and over again. Everything she had said about college since midnight on November 1, even the slightest offhand exchange, had been a deception.

  Suddenly, Nora could not remember Lauren saying anything about college since November 1.

  Lauren changed her mind. It was not possible, it was not feasible on any level. Then why did Deena say the girls had four months?

  The prickles exploded in Nora’s brain like firework stars, and she began to sweat. She drained her glass and held it out to Brad for a refill, drained it again and waited for her thermostat to drop, to no avail. She could have sucked on ice cubes without making a dent. This was flop sweat, not heatstroke, and the only thing that would make it go away would be for Deena to apologize for getting Lauren confused with someone else.

  Instead, Deena came back over to the table, gave her friend a scrutinizing look, and leaned over to whisper in her ear.

  “Are you having a hot flash?” she inquired.

  The second half of Ben’s presentation was an utter blur to Nora. She spent most of her energy figuring out how to get to Ted first when the event ended, in much the same way that she charted the fastest path to the nearest exit door whenever she got on a plane. She evaluated the obstacles, identified the competitive sprinters, and defined the quickest route, which might not be the shortest. She had a strategy in place, only to watch Ted slip out of the room as the conversation about need-blind aid got heated. She had to clamp her hands to the folding chair to keep from running after him.

  She listened to the rest of Ben’s presentation in a daze, preoccupied by the new question of what she would say when she got home.

  “…highly emotional, very stressful time…”

  “…big checking account balance—will they think we’re too rich?”

  “…small checking account balance—will they think we’re too poor?”

  “…sixty-five years old? Great. The government thinks you’re retired.”

  When Nora got to the point where she thought she might burst into tears, she nudged Deena, mimed getting a text message, and whispered that she had to leave.

  This was the first year that Liz had not been home doing homework on the night when Yoonie passed sandwiches to the turkey packers, and as she drove up Carmelina Street, looking for the Dodsons’ house, she wondered if she might catch a glimpse of her fashion benefactor when she picked up her mom. If Katie seemed pleasant enough, Liz might attempt a careful, mutual compliment, something about sharing National Merit and probably valedictorian, as well as sweats. There was a good basis for potential friendship here, she thought, surely a likelier connection than with too many of the girls at Ocean Heights.

  Liz pulled up in front of the Dodsons’, hurried to the door, and rapped the heavy bronze lion’s head aga
inst it twice. Her first thought, when Katie opened the door, was that they were not the same size at all. Katie was a good four inches taller, bigger-boned, with the shoulders of a girl whose parents had put in a pool and hired a private instructor when she was a toddler. The business about Dr. Joy giving Katie’s fashion mistakes to Yoonie to give to Liz was a hoax. Liz stared at Katie and wondered if she and her mother were co-conspirators. When they went shopping, did Dr. Joy steer Katie toward the sale rack to see if there was anything the anonymous Liz might like? The inherited clothes had always made Liz feel ever so slightly superior—her mom’s boss might be rich, but she did not even know how to dress her daughter—but now she saw the discards for what they really were, charity disguised as fashion errors to hide the element of pity. For an instant she wondered if her own mother had known about the charade, if Katie had dropped by her mother’s office one afternoon, or come out of her room during an earlier turkey packer meeting, confronting Yoonie with the two-size gap between her boss’s daughter and her own. Liz would not be able to bring herself to ask, because she thought it entirely possible that Yoonie would have endorsed the deception, would have pretended not to notice, in the name of providing for her only child. It was all she could do not to bolt and leave her mother stranded.

  “I’m here to pick up my mom,” she said.

  “Right,” came the uninterested reply. Katie turned to head back down the hall, yelling, “Yoonie, your daughter’s here,” as she did so. She pointed to the left—“In there”—and peeled off to the right, leaving Liz to wonder what would happen if she left off the “Doctor” in “Doctor Joy” some day. At that moment both mothers appeared in the doorway, and Dr. Joy held out a Victoria’s Secret bag to Liz.

  “Tomorrow’s lunch,” she said.

  “Thank you,” said Liz.

  She and her mother drove home in silence. Yoonie was tired enough to accept without question Liz’s suggestion that they save the financial aid report for dinner the next day because it was so late and Steve would already be asleep. Liz sat on her bed in her clothes until the sound of her mother’s footsteps stopped, and then she sat for fifteen minutes more, to give her mother time to fall asleep. She tiptoed to the end of the hall, where her father had wedged a tiny stacking washer and dryer and a set of shelves into what had been a closet, and pawed through the folded clean clothes until she found the hoodie and sweats she had worn on the day she filed her Harvard application. She would miss their softness, but she congratulated herself on what she was about to do. She stuffed them into her backpack behind the textbooks, so that she could deposit them in the lost-and-found when she got to school the following morning.

  Nora dropped Deena off at home, pulled into the parking lot of the first mini-mall she saw, and called Joel.

  “Where’s Lauren?”

  “Upstairs, want me to get—”

  “No. Listen to me. She lied to us.”

  “About what?”

  “She didn’t apply to Northwestern.”

  A loud computerized voice filled the ensuing silence, bleating, “Cross Ocean Park Now, Cross Ocean Park Now” into the empty crosswalk. The city of Santa Monica, the institutional equivalent of a helicopter parent, watched out for all of its citizens in all aspects of their daily lives, including the unsighted pedestrian who might appreciate a sound cue to avoid being run down by a silent hybrid. Nora watched the traffic light’s signal count down the seconds of her husband’s surprise, 15, 14, 13, as the mechanical voice continued to bleat into the void.

  At 3, Joel finally cleared his throat. “Honey, sure she did. I saw her.”

  “You saw her.”

  2, 1, flashing orange hand, solid orange hand, and then the little white man who always crossed from left to right. Nora wondered: Didn’t he ever want to cross back the other way, to go home?

  “I went in, it was almost midnight, in Chicago, I mean, it was almost ten. I was seeing if she wanted dessert, remember, you said to. I’m sure she was done.”

  “But you didn’t see her.”

  “No.”

  “She wasn’t sitting in front of the laptop?”

  “Stop. Let me think this through.” Joel had been raised by a father who thought he was a prince and a mother who thought he was a god, but all their loud talk of his perfection had had an unintended effect. While he might be smarter than almost all of the occupants of any given room, on any given day, he was quicker to doubt himself because no one could possibly live up to his parents’ expectations. Even Marv and Sheila seemed to know that. Having deified their son at an early age, they spent the rest of their lives questioning their faith, enumerating the ways in which Joel’s day-to-day execution fell short of the perfect abstraction they worshipped. They had a list of the superlative things Joel could have been or done if he had not married so young, if he had gone on to graduate school, if he had picked law or medicine, if his wife had not lost her job, if Joel and Nora had not spent all that money on a private school, to say nothing of real estate in California, when Pittsburgh had such beautiful homes for less than half the price.

  He had moved as far away as he could without having to flee the country, but his image hung over him at moments like this. When confronted with his own fallibility, his response was always the same: denial, defensiveness, attack.

  “Who the hell says she didn’t file?”

  “Deena.”

  “There’s a reliable source. And she would get this from Chloe, right, the James Frey of her generation. Just come home and we’ll ask her what’s up.”

  “You get to go first,” said Nora, slapping her phone shut, knowing that he wouldn’t. Optimists had it easy. All they had to do was delude themselves a bit longer, and the impatient realists of the universe would step in to figure out what was really going on.

  Lauren was in her room when Nora got home, so she and Joel set the stage for civility: a pitcher of milk, a bowl of apple slices, the maple walnut cakes they had already had three times this week, while Nora struggled to make them not look so unrelentingly tan.

  “Honey,” Nora called upstairs, “take a break. Have dessert with us.” She turned to Joel with a black look. “There. Your turn.”

  “Jesus, Nora, what does it matter…”

  “What does what matter?”

  Nora looked up as Lauren came down the stairs, knowing that they were less than a minute from trouble, and her brain, displeased with the evening’s programming, sought refuge in reruns of earlier episodes. Lauren the eighteen-year-old took a step and became Lauren the birdy twelve-year-old, all eyes and braces and bony angles; took another step and became Lauren the stern eight-year-old, who knew more than anybody about anything, including how much she would hate her mother into all eternity for endorsing a more practical short haircut; became Lauren the five-year-old dirigible, a floaty little pillow with limbs; became Lauren the barely two-year-old, who yelled “I go myself” before she launched herself down those stairs in an extended somersault that required three stitches under her left eye.

  What does what matter, indeed, thought Nora. For an instant, she considered letting Lauren play out the charade, because in the next scene, there would be no Lauren on the stairway at all, which was the part of the college plan that nobody talked about much. Right now, at this exact moment, they were together and she was a happy kid—a liar, but a happy liar, and maybe a happy liar was better than an honest but miserable child. That made no sense, of course, unless Lauren had lied because her parents put too much pressure on her and it was the only way she could keep from collapsing under the strain. If lying was self-defense, then Nora and Joel were the guilty ones for not realizing how tense Lauren was. That made no sense, either: what was the point of working so hard at Crestview if not to get to the next step? And what would they do on December 15 if they said nothing—pretend not to notice that there was no letter, fat or thin, from Northwestern?

  “Y’know, I don’t care if you never get these things to look right as long as you
keep making samples,” said Lauren, sliding into the booth and grabbing a little cake. Brad had texted Lauren to warn her about what Chloe’s mom had said, but he could not say for sure if Lauren’s mom had actually gotten it—so there was no point in confessing right off the bat, not until she had a better sense of how much her parents knew. The smart move was to act as though everything was fine, and to hope that too many college-era rock concerts had blown out her mother’s high-range hearing, about as realistic a hope as imagining that Ted would engineer a last-minute save, which was what had kept her from confessing so far. If only a miracle had happened, and Northwestern had rolled back the hands of time for her, she would have retired the truth for ten or fifteen years, by which point it would have aged into funny. That had been her plan until she got Brad’s text. Now she had to wait for her parents to make the first move.

  They did not, which was a bad sign.

  “Aren’t the two of you sitting down?”

  Nora and Joel slid in on either side of Lauren, and for a long moment there was no sound except for appreciative chewing and swallowing.

  “Honey, you’re all set at Northwestern, right?” Joel asked the question without raising his eyes from his plate.

  The room had been quiet before Joel said anything, but now it was tomb silent, soundless for miles and miles and miles down toward the center of the earth.

  “What do you mean?” asked Lauren. When confronted with the accusation of fraud, no matter what the circumstance, the accused always asked first for clarification, in case the interrogator knew so little that evasion was still a possibility.

  Joel sighed. “Deena said to your mom that you were applying regular like Chloe, and I said she must be mistaken…”