Getting In: A Novel

by Karen Stabiner

  He had hated parties since the days when he and his brothers sat halfway up the curving stairway of his parents’ house, each of them in powder blue pajamas with navy piping that were just like their father’s, while below them the adults washed down the workweek with martinis made by a white-jacketed bartender. He could never make sense of it—the random noise, the milling people, the unexpected outburst from a friend’s mom best known, during daylight hours, for her generous dexterity with a waffle iron. Parties seemed to him an unpredictable and inefficient waste of time, and large ones, like the Dodsons’, were the worst, because the odds of getting caught talking to an idiot increased with the size of the crowd.

  He gestured to one of the little bistro tables and settled in with Nora and Joel.

  “So,” he said, debating whether to use the pair of chopsticks as intended or a single one as a spear, “you decided to wait it out. Interesting choice. May work to Lauren’s advantage in the end.”

  Joel felt Nora reach for his hand under the table.

  “You think so?” Nora asked. She had no idea how failing to file could possibly be a good move, but she had been a researcher for too long to lead with her own ignorance. The trick was to inquire as though you already knew the answer and were merely being polite enough to seem interested. That was how you found out things you wanted to know and kept yourself from giving anything away.

  “Sure I do,” said Trey. He picked up a single chopstick, impaled the slice of sushi roll that looked to contain the most chocolate, and popped it in his mouth whole. He swallowed without much chewing. Nora shuddered slightly. Trey would have been the first member of the Donner party to take out his collapsible picnic ware, she was sure of it.

  “Think about it,” he went on. “The early apps are all valedictorians, all ranked athletes, all legacies, you’re swimming with sharks. Sharks. How do you distinguish yourself in that rarefied environment?”

  “But Ted says they fill a quarter of the class early,” she replied, feebly, “maybe more.”

  “Let them have the first slots,” said Trey. “They would have gotten them anyhow. Those spaces were never really in play, I don’t care what Ted says. Never.”

  Nora felt Joel lean forward slightly. “But if she waits for regular admissions she’s at the top of the heap for the rest of the class,” he said.

  “Exactly,” said Trey. “Now she stands out. Now she’s one of the ones they really want. Long shot for the early spaces or stand-out for the rest. What makes sense to you?”

  “Then why would Ted push so—”

  “Yield,” said Trey. “The colleges aren’t the only ones who want their numbers to look good. The more kids Ted gets locked in early at the top schools, the better his year looks. What does he care if Lauren’s a long shot? Maybe she gets lucky, and if she doesn’t, he hasn’t lost a thing. Besides, once he has the earlies socked away, he knows where he can lobby. If Northwestern doesn’t take an early, it’s a clear field.”

  “They took two kids,” said Nora, mournfully. Whiplash, this was all whiplash, no better than the studies that said do not take hormones, except whatever you do, take hormones. Trey was making an utterly logical argument that contradicted everything Ted had ever said.

  “Two? Who?”

  “The boy who’s in all the musicals…”

  “No competition. Different department. The other one?”

  “Boy,” said Joel. “The kid who wins the Latin prize every year, what’s his name?”

  “Irrelevant,” said Trey. “Minority candidate. And no girls. This is a great opportunity. Did she interview?”

  “When we visited last spring.” Nora’s head was spinning.

  “Doesn’t matter. Get her an alumni interview out here. Here’s the thing,” said Trey. “You can agonize over what was the right thing, or you can make this the right thing. Take advantage of all the time you have before April 15. Mount a campaign for Lauren.”

  He speared another piece of sushi, but the combination of dried fruit and rice was too sticky, and he mutely waggled a finger in the direction of Nora’s iced tea, which she pushed toward him. Trey took a drink, swallowed hard, and waited a moment to see if he could breathe—which gave Nora enough time to locate what was left of her sanity.

  “Sometimes,” she said, “sometimes I’m just not sure about doing that. I mean, sometimes I think why break her heart investing so much in a single school. We’re not even sure who else is applying there. I mean, we hear rumors but she can’t go up to some kid she barely talks to and ask what her GPA is and whether Northwestern’s her first choice.”

  Trey let out a short, impatient breath. “She’s a great girl. Don’t assume she’s going to get her heart broken. Stand up for her.”

  “It’s not that,” said Nora. “I wish she didn’t have a first choice, to tell you the truth. Everybody gets so caught up in having a first choice. I mean, it’s different for Brad.”

  Trey allowed himself a dry little smile and tried not to think about his older son. “Yes, I think for us the challenge was simply to make sure he didn’t do anything so bizarre as to draw attention,” he said. “The boy was born on the on-ramp, I guess you could say. He would have to work awfully hard to lose his place in line.”

  He mistook Nora’s wide-eyed expression for admiration until he felt a hand on either shoulder.

  “Wow,” said Brad, who had come up behind his father with Lauren and Chloe in tow. “I thought I was born on the donor floor at Cedars. Who knew?”

  Trey flinched and berated himself for talking about Brad without looking around first to see where his son was. Ever since the clarinet conversation, he had been careful to provide at least the illusion of taking Brad’s concerns to heart—an admiring comment about a professor at another school who had won an architecture prize, or, better still, days in a row when he made no reference to Harvard at all. Now he had let down his guard for a moment and betrayed his real feelings, which boiled down to a collegiate version of manifest destiny.

  He was scrambling for a clever response when Nora came to his rescue.

  “Everyone should have such a problem,” she said. “On-ramp to Harvard. Must be on the freeway past the bakery, because I haven’t seen it.”

  “I can’t believe you guys are sitting here figuring out our futures for us,” said Lauren. “Can you give Chloe’s mom a ride home so we can take her car? We’re ready to leave.”

  They were gone, and Trey was trying to change the topic to football. Nora excused herself to collect Deena, who was standing in front of the desserts but not taking any.

  “Please,” said Nora, with surprising exasperation. “Just eat the damn things.”

  “Easy for you to say,” said Deena. “Joy said I looked great, considering. What the hell does that mean?”

  “Look at it this way,” said Nora. “You probably burned a couple hundred calories just torturing yourself, so you’re even. Eat the dessert. We want to go home.”

  “Nice,” said Deena, wolfing two pieces before her taste buds had time to process the flavors. “Let’s go.”

  Joel was silent all the way to Deena’s, grateful to have her around, for once, because she, like Chloe, talked more when she was nervous. They sat in front of her house for five minutes while she finished a tirade about Dave and the financial aid forms, but happily she ran out of breath as Joel was about to run out of patience. He waited until she had closed her front door, and then he took off down the street, ignored a yield sign, and roared through a yellow light that turned red before he was halfway across the intersection.

  “Joel.”

  “Sorry.” He jerked the wheel toward the curb, pulled up at a bus stop, and pounded the steering wheel a couple of times. Joel rarely lost his temper, so when he did get angry he tended to overdo it; no point in settling for being slightly miffed if it only happened a couple of times a year.

  “Feel better?”

  “How many legacies you think there are at Penn by now?” he a
sked, not expecting an answer. “Or Wisconsin, if you want to be helpful here. Hundreds of thousands? Millions?”

  “She doesn’t want to go to either of those.”

  He hit the steering wheel again, and Nora jumped. “I know that. I’m just saying, we are not exactly a huge help. I knew a guy at Northwestern’s journalism school. Maybe I should have called him, but no, wait. I forgot. He got fired for thinking new technology meant an electric typewriter.”

  “You’re exaggerating.”

  “Maybe.”

  A shadow, a knock: a large, uniformed gut blocked the afternoon sun, and a black-gloved hand rapped on the car window and made a rolling gesture to get Joel to lower it.

  “Good afternoon, sir. Is everything okay?”

  “Good afternoon, officer,” said Joel. “Everything’s fine. Did I do something wrong?”

  The officer rested one hand on the roof of the car to steady himself as he leaned over.

  “Well, sir, the yellow light was a judgment call, but you hauled over to the curb pretty hard, you’re occupying a marked city bus zone, and I notice you’ve been hammering that steering wheel.” He leaned forward, so that his eyebrows and mustache were inside the car. “Are you okay, ma’am?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, she’s—”

  “Excuse me, sir. Are you okay, ma’am?”

  “I’m fine,” said Nora, who was desperately afraid she was going to start laughing. The last time a cop asked her if she was okay was two nights before they got married, when they were inspired to consider sex on a darkened side street as the best antidote to an influx of relatives. Happily, that cop had shone his light in the car before they got around to anything for which they could be hauled in, but Nora was thinking about it, and she knew Joel was, too, and she prayed that this cop would give up before one or the other of them fell apart. The officer did not strike her as someone who would enjoy the joke.

  “Officer, really, I’m to blame,” she said. “My contact lens slipped, it’s so painful if you’ve never had that happen, and my husband didn’t know what was wrong, just that I was sort of shrieking.” She smiled. “And then of course once he found out it was only a lens, well, that’s the pounding on the steering wheel part. Because it scared him, you know, the shriek, never a good thing when someone’s driving. I’m so sorry.”

  Joel almost choked. Nora had conned the previous cop into believing that her disheveled appearance was the result of wild grief, something to do with a nonexistent but credible and ailing maiden aunt. Where did she get this stuff?

  “Even so,” said the cop, “driving your feelings. Very bad thing.”

  “You’re right, officer. I should be more careful.”

  “Okay, then, folks. You have a good day, and drive safely.”

  He got back on his motorcycle and roared off. Joel pulled into the first mini-mall he saw, parked the car, and rested his forehead on the steering wheel.

  “I liked the first bust better, somehow. Poor Aunt Bertie.”

  “I knew you were thinking that,” said Nora.

  “Maybe we should have pushed her harder,” said Joel. “You’re supposed to push girls, up to a point, aren’t you?”

  “Stop,” said Nora. “We did what we did. It’s my job to second-guess, not yours.”

  “But if we didn’t make a mistake, then the schmuck’s right,” said Joel. “We have to figure out what else we can do.”

  Chloe chased dusk north past Topanga, past the Malibu Colony, out to Zuma Beach. She was not one for the big, smog-tinted summer sunsets that drew people to the beach like so many pilgrims to Mecca; she preferred the way a winter sky deepened to indigo, and when she had the car she liked to drive the coast to watch it happen.

  The problem was that eventually the sun set, the sky stopped changing color, and three goal-oriented seniors found themselves driving aimlessly, not something that a senior was supposed to do, not even on winter break.

  “Hey, turn around and we’ll go to La Salsa,” said Brad.

  “How can you be hungry?” asked Chloe.

  “Because, I don’t know, I am.” He rolled down the passenger window and stuck his head out like a dog collecting scents. “Pull over and we can turn around. And then you can drop me at the on-ramp to Harvard.”

  Lauren leaned forward from the backseat. “I should go home,” she said. She had seen the concern in her father’s eyes as they approached the table. She was used to that look from her mom, but her dad was a master of the poker face, an occupational hazard, he said, born of too many years of trying not to look rattled when publishers in $2,500 suits announced more budget cuts. If her dad was worried, then life was not so good, a notion that folded right into her doubts about getting to the first week of April in one piece. When Lauren got upset she deflated like yesterday’s birthday party balloon, at which point she needed to be off by herself.

  “It’s winter break,” said Chloe. “What’s this ‘should go home’?”

  “I have apps,” said Lauren.

  “And you have weeks still,” said Chloe, “so stop it.”

  They doubled back and drove to La Salsa, and the girls waited in the car while Brad ordered. He emerged moments later with a cardboard drink caddy and a bag too big for a single meal, handed each of them an order of chips and guacamole and a Diet Coke, and went to work on his chicken taquitos. He adjusted the passenger seat backward, reclined, and sighed with satisfaction. Chloe lowered her seat as well, Lauren lay across the backseat, and they ate in silence, staring out the windshield at the huge plaster gaucho who towered over the little restaurant, perched on a T bar as high as the roof, holding out a plaster tray of plaster food visible only to the gulls flying overhead.

  “Y’know,” said Brad, his diction compromised by sour cream and guacamole, “that beam he’s on isn’t flat like a balance beam. It’s round. Not easy for him to hold steady like that.”

  Chloe snorted. “Not easy for him to be two or three times normal size.”

  Lauren chimed in. “Really not easy for him to be not a real person.”

  “Harvard’s definitely going to take you,” said Chloe. “You’re very perceptive.”

  Brad bit off another chunk of taquito. “Yes, they are,” he said.

  When they ran out of food and purpose, Brad wordlessly collected and discarded the garbage and Chloe started up the car. The ride back was always a sobering one, like waking from a happy dream; they were at the curve where the Pacific Coast highway turned its back on the ocean and dissolved into the Santa Monica freeway, where the romance of a beachside cruise yielded to unmitigated traffic, when Chloe’s cell phone started to buzz.

  “Want me to?” asked Brad, reaching for the phone.

  “Sure.”

  He flipped open the phone and read the text message aloud. “Liz wants to know are you coming. You’re twenty minutes late.”

  “Shit,” said Chloe, hauling right across two lanes onto an off-ramp. “Can you guys wait ten minutes and then I’ll take you home? I forgot. I was supposed to go by today to pick up a calc thing I did that she graded.”

  “Sure,” said Brad. “Let’s go get it.” He read Liz’s cell phone number twice more, until he was sure he had it memorized, and then he put Chloe’s phone in the cup holder, took out his own as though it had vibrated, muttered, “Who the hell is this,” and input Liz’s number as he pretended to respond to a nonexistent text message. He had not done anything about contacting her since the financial aid meeting, but that did not mean he lacked interest, only that he temporarily lacked initiative.

  “Let’s go, as in sure, before I take you home? You hoping for a glimpse of your future fellow classmate? I could be very helpful here.”

  A giggle floated up from the backseat.

  “You told Chloe you met Liz?” Lauren poked the passenger seat with her foot.

  “He did not,” said Chloe, who slapped at him with her right hand. “I was just thinking Harvard and Harvard. You met her? How could you not tell me
and you told Lauren?”

  “Self-defense,” said Brad. “Fuck you both. I’ll stay in the car.”

  Chloe smiled. “Like I care if the two of you have genius babies someday.”

  When they arrived, Liz’s father opened the door and pointed Chloe down the hall with an efficient, “She’s waiting for you.” Lauren trailed after her, but Brad stood where he was until Steve sat down at the kitchen table and gestured at an empty chair.

  “Sit down, if you would like,” he said. “Liz’s mother is at the grocery, and I am almost done here.”

  “Thanks,” said Brad. He sat, silent, watching as Steve traced his index finger along a page of the Thomas Guide as though he were reading Braille, top left to bottom right. He was about to speak when Steve closed his eyes, which implied a process that was not to be interrupted; he was about to speak, again, when Steve opened his eyes and began scribbling furiously into a spiral-bound notebook. Brad watched, transfixed, inexplicably concerned whenever Steve paused, irrationally relieved whenever the writing began again, hoping, without knowing why, that the girls would stay in Liz’s room until this exercise had ended.

  Finally, Steve put down his pencil and closed both the map book and the spiral notebook, and Brad stared at him, waiting, until his curiosity won out.

  “May I ask,” he began, “I mean, what are you doing?”

  Steve opened the map book again and waved his hand over the open page. “I memorized the area around the Hollywood Bowl,” he said. “I drive a cab, and I set myself the goal of memorizing much of the Thomas Guide. Certainly the areas where cabs are in demand. Many people think it is no longer worth the effort to park for a Hollywood Bowl concert.”

  “You know it by heart?”

  “I do.”

  Brad had no idea how to respond. “Gee, that’s cool” would sound condescending. “Wow, I wish I could do that” was a lie, and “Don’t you have GPS in your cab?” seemed rude. Maybe Liz’s dad had some kind of brain injury and this was rehab.