Getting In: A Novel

by Karen Stabiner

  Brad got in his car and turned right out of the school driveway instead of left, meandered in the shadow of the 405 until he got to Olympic Boulevard, and headed west toward the ocean, knowing that every block guaranteed him another deadlocked rush-hour block going east, toward home. He did not care. He drove all the way down to the beach, looped around past Liz’s street, and pulled into the parking lot of a little art supply store, where he bought some single-ply cardboard, a tube of Zap-a-Gap and an Olfa knife, and a set of fine felt-tipped pens. Satisfied, he headed over to Olympic, turned his back on the setting sun, and took his place in the five-mile-an-hour slog toward the center of the city.

  Deena got up from the built-in desk in the kitchen and wandered the house with increasing frequency—what started as half-hour breaks, when she first sat down after lunch, had increased by dusk to a lap every ten minutes. It was hard enough collecting all the bank statements that Dave had asked her for, but every time she went online to find a missing page, the website chastised her for printing what she needed. All around the world, trees were falling over dead because she was trying to get her daughter some financial aid. This should have been Dave’s job; this was Dave’s forest toppling to the ground. But getting him to do it would have required letting him back into the house, so she printed, and fumed, and took another break.

  She walked toward Chloe’s deserted room and told herself she was looking for enough dirty T-shirts on the floor to fill up a load of laundry. Deena had no agenda beyond the vague curiosity of a derailed mom who thought she ought to know more than she did, and when she found a black elastic-bound notebook she had not seen before, wedged behind a boot box behind Chloe’s laundry hamper, she took it out, vindicated, certain that it contained information she needed to know to be a better parent. She would take a quick glance and put it right back.

  To her disappointment, it was not a journal but a sketchbook, page after page of pencil drawings of clothes, not on stick-figure mannequins but on shorter, rounder, more Chloe-like figures. She closed it quickly and put it back behind the boot box, far less pleased than a mother might have been at the discovery of an only child’s unexpected talent. Deena was not focused on the possibility that Chloe had a skill she could use to get a job someday. Deena was stuck on the news that her daughter had a secret life. Most parents who snooped feared discovering evidence of drink or drugs, random sex or Facebook shenanigans. Chloe’s big news was that she could draw.

  Deena corrected herself: the news was that Chloe continued to draw. For a long time, the house had been a minefield of color: fat, greasy crayons, finger paints, watercolors, chalk, until Dave sat down in the wrong chair and stood up to find a peach-colored line across the seat of his good khakis, pastels but only in the kitchen after that, cunning metal trays with six Caran d’Ache wet-or-dry colored pencils, with twelve, with forty, drawing pens with tips so fine they made a dry scratching sound against the paper. But by sophomore year, Chloe’s output had dwindled to the occasional napkin doodle, and her parents assumed that she had lost interest.

  It seemed instead that she had gone underground. She had shut her mother out. Forget Dave, whose definition of fashion involved a clean T-shirt, pressed jeans, and athletic shoes that had never seen a sport. Deena knew something about style, and yet Chloe had never once confided in her about so much as a stand-up collar. She backed out of the room, climbed into her own bed, wrapped herself in Nana Ree’s sunburst-pattern crocheted afghan, and started to cry. No cloudburst, no drama, just the thin leak of reflexive tears that usually came only during a sad movie or that commercial about the two sisters whose dad had Alzheimer’s.

  “Bullshit,” she muttered to herself. She stormed into the kitchen, filled a bowl with ice, carried it into the bathroom, filled the sink with cold water and dumped in the ice, and plunged her face into it until she felt little pinpricks on her skin. Nana Ree had done this every Saturday night before she went out because she had read that Paul Newman did it to keep his skin taut. Lacking a social life, at least for the moment, Deena did it to cover any puffy traces of self-pity. It was not every day that a mom found out she had no idea who her daughter was. Deena was used to the familiar, dysfunctional Chloe, the one who seemed barely able to string together a set of college applications, let alone set off on a new life. A girl with a book full of sketches might do heaven knew what, might sign up for junior year abroad in Paris or Milan or London or anyplace else that was far away and fashion-forward, never to be heard from again unless she remembered to send her mom a plane ticket and an invitation to the fall runway show.

  She lay in the growing dark until the last possible moment, and then she grabbed the papers she had printed, stuffed them in her bag, and headed for the Valley. Deena had told Dave that she liked the Sisley’s in the Valley because it was halfway between the house and his apartment, but in fact she chose it because no one she knew would see her there, and because a public venue reduced at least the decibel level, if not the likelihood, of an argument. When she got there he was already in a corner booth tucked away from the early crowd, not a good sign, for under normal circumstances Dave loved to be at the center of things.

  “Hi. You been here long?”

  “No. How you doing?”

  “Well, I don’t know.” She slid into the booth. There was one stack of papers in front of Dave and another on her place mat. “You tell me. What was I printing if you already had a plan?”

  Dave ignored the question. He had long since looked at all the statements online, but he had hoped that if Deena printed them out she might actually read them, might show up in a more cooperative frame of mind. He forced himself not to snap back at her.

  “It’s no big deal, Deenie. We’re going to go through it. How about we order first.”

  “Sure,” she said. Dave beckoned to the waiter and ordered a chicken Caesar for Deena and the cacciatore plate for himself, iced tea for her, a Diet Coke for him, and made a gesture like a whisk broom to dismiss the kid. It was one of the few peremptory things Dave did that once had made Deena feel special. She used to think he was so attuned to her every desire that he could anticipate what she wanted to have for dinner. Now she found the same behavior insulting—was she so predictable?—and she would have said so, except that she really did like the Caesar here.

  She opened the folder and tried to look mesmerized by the numbers Dave had written on the top sheet of paper. “Fourteen thousand dollars—does that mean she’s going to get $14,000 if a school accepts her? That’s pretty good, isn’t it? I mean, $14,000. How’d we get so much?”

  Dave adjusted and readjusted his place mat. “Deenie, you got to do the math here before we jump ahead. The number that matters is what they say we can afford to pay.” He tapped the sheet of paper with an instructive forefinger. “That’s this here, the Expected Family Contribution: $33,000.”

  She waited.

  “So listen,” said Dave, gathering speed. “I’m saying a school costs maybe $47,000, and that doesn’t include money for travel, she comes home for vacation, we go visit her for some parent thing and it’s two hotel rooms, she gets homesick, who knows what, and then you got supplies and books. Spending money. So figure a year, it’s really $50,000. Four years, we’re talking $200,000.”

  “Minus $14,000 every year times four years. So.”

  “So $200,000 minus $56,000.”

  “That’s a good deal.”

  Dave smiled. His ex-wife espoused a cockeyed fiscal philosophy that made very expensive sense. She never focused on how much she spent, preferring to revel in how much she saved.

  “It is a good deal. But it’s still almost $150,000 out of pocket. It’s kind of like if you found a leather coat that was $3,000, but now it’s a third off, so $2,000, a really good deal except you have to have the $2,000. I mean, a deal’s only good if you can afford it. The chunk you save is kind of invisible.”

  “I know that.”

  “And we know she’s not getting a scholarship, so it’
s loans. We have to pay them back. With interest. It ends up being even more.”

  “I was at the meeting,” she said, drily.

  “If she went to a UC it would be under $100,000 even if we paid for the whole thing,” said Dave. “Much less.”

  “So we’ll see where she gets in and then we’ll know how much it’s going to cost.”

  Dave folded and unfolded the corner of his place mat. There was no good way to do this except fast.

  “Deenz, we can’t afford a private school. Even a UC’s going to be tight.”

  “But she applied to all these places. What am I going to say to her, that she can’t go?”

  “C’mon, she applied like you shop—a joke, it’s a joke, don’t go all pissy on me. She applied to lots of places, I mean, she saw lots of things she thought she’d like, but how many do you really think are going to take her?”

  “I don’t know. What if it’s just one but it’s the one she likes the best?”

  The food arrived, and Dave, grateful for the interruption, took his sweet time considering the waiter’s stock query about whether he could get them anything else. After considering and rejecting offers of white wine, red wine, grated Parmesan, and fresh-ground pepper, he dismissed the kid and turned back to the work at hand.

  “One thing we can maybe do,” he said, “is talk up the UCs a little, point her in the right direction.”

  “Because you feel like we have a lot of influence with her at this point, is that it? If I say UC you know what she’s going to do? Decide she has to go anyplace but.”

  Deena had a point. Dave speared a chunk of chicken.

  “OK, look,” he said, “if it’s so important there’s one way maybe we can pull it off, but you’re not going to like it.”

  “How do you know?”

  Dave smiled. “Because the one way is we sell the house and find you an apartment until we have to buy something else because of taxes, but we get two years to figure that out and then we look for a condo for you, maybe Mar Vista. That way we can send her wherever she wants, except I have to check how that screws up financial aid. Equity in the house they don’t care about, remember, but if one year we’ve got profits from selling it then I’m not sure. But if it’s so important to you, I’ll find out. She won’t know from all the schools for a month. We can figure it out by then. Should I do that?”

  Deena moved her fork around the salad bowl as though it were a ouija board and the spirits were going to tell her what to do. What would Nana Ree say? She had lived the way she wanted to live, sent the bills to her ex-husband, and told Deena it was time to practice her phone-answering and message-taking skills if she did not feel like having Saul yell at her. Nana Ree had refinanced the house to send Deena to UCLA, sold it and rented a lovely condo for years with the profits, and had the good sense to expire before she ran out of assets.

  Short of dropping dead, Deena had no idea how to respond to Dave’s suggestion. Zip codes were destiny in Los Angeles. It was bad enough living in upper Sunset Park, where the only single guys were divorced or gay or both. Mar Vista had not caught up with the news that half of all marriages ended in divorce and Birkenstocks were on their way out for the second time, so there was no potential for a new life in that neighborhood. As for Palms, that was merely the name someone had slapped on the blocks and blocks of dingbat apartments that sat on real estate’s Death Row, waiting for the day that developers tore them all down and invented a new beachside community, beachside meaning anything on the sunset side of the San Diego Freeway. These were the only west side neighborhoods left that were cheaper than where she lived, and Deena was not prepared to consider any of them.

  “I am not moving out of the house,” she began.

  “Well, look, I know it’s a tough thing but think about it. When Chloe’s gone you got three bedrooms, three baths, I mean, c’mon, how many showers can one woman take?”

  “It’s not funny.”

  “Nobody’s saying you should move into some hole someplace…”

  “And I should be grateful for that, right?”

  “Hey, let’s take it down a notch.”

  “No, I mean, I don’t see why I’m supposed to move out of my house. Maybe the solution is, you make more money and then we do everything we’re supposed to do.”

  “I make plenty of money.”

  “You’re a successful guy,” said Deena, cautiously. “So be a little more successful and then we don’t have to have this conversation.”

  “What do you think, I can go to Jay and say hey, Jay, I need a big raise this year? Have you maybe seen the headlines about the economy? Nobody’s buying air time, so the price goes down, so I make less, so how am I supposed to do this?”

  “Well, maybe if they advertised more they’d sell more stuff.”

  “Great, I’ll call somebody right now,” he said, brandishing his cell phone, “and tell them my ex-wife says they ought to spend more of the profits they don’t have on thirty-second spots.”

  Deena stared at her plate. “When we got married you never said we can only do this much and no more.”

  “When we got married I didn’t figure to support two households.”

  “More like two and a half households. Do we get to talk about how much you spend on Linda, or is that not open to discussion?”

  The busboy had been lingering nearby with a water pitcher, waiting until it seemed safe to approach the corner booth, and when the silence lasted for ten seconds—he counted to himself—he made his move. He filled both glasses and was about to make his getaway when the woman picked up her plate and held it out to him.

  “Can I get this packed up right away, with some extra dressing, and are there any more breadsticks?”

  He nodded and backed away.

  “What are you doing?” asked Dave.

  “I am taking my dinner home where I can eat in peace and quiet. I think I should stay in the house and Chloe should go to school where she wants and you should figure it out. No, you know what? You talk to Chloe. You break her heart and tell her she has to go to a UC.”

  “Deena, what the hell is wrong with a UC? You went there. I went there. How is that going to break her heart when she never said there’s someplace she’s dying to go?”

  Deena retrieved the statements from her bag and shoved them across the table at Dave. “Maybe she’s just afraid to say she likes a school because she thinks you’ll let her down,” she said. She slid out of the booth and headed for the door without waiting for her leftover salad. Dave watched her retreating back, ordered a tiramisu to go despite the vow he had made that very morning to lose twenty pounds and get into better shape, and left with it and the bagged Caesar and his notes and the statements. He waited until he was at a red light, on a busy section of Ventura Boulevard, and then he opened his window and hurled the container of salad with enough force to startle both himself and the Labradoodle that was starting to pee on a bicycle chained to a parking meter. The dog skittered sideways, stepped in its own urine and stepped on its owner’s foot, leaving a paw-shaped spot on a brand-new suede boot just three hours out of the box. The woman stared at her foot and at the scattered salad, and when she looked up to see where the missile had come from, Dave gave her a jaunty little salute. She held her fist aloft and ceremoniously raised her middle finger, one of the legions of people who used sexual references—middle fingers, cocksucker, fucker—when they were angry.

  Deena always wondered why men who loved blow jobs acted like “cocksucker” was an insult. She thought they might be worried about their own sexuality, about whether they’d be happier gay, getting blow jobs all the time. Or maybe men used “cocksucker” as a putdown—she had come up with this theory after one of her own displays of prowess—to keep women from thinking that they ruled the world for any longer than it took to perform the act.

  She said things like that every so often, out of the blue—not often enough for anyone to mistake her for an original thinker, but it was the very unp
redictability of her pronouncements that Dave enjoyed. He corrected himself: that he had enjoyed, back when conversations had lasted long enough for her to have the opportunity to surprise him.

  The driver behind him sat on the horn. Dave roused himself to yell “Fuck you” at the dog owner, but she was already huffing down the block, her traumatized pup in tow, stopping every few steps to hold up her left toe and evaluate the drying stain. Dave looked long and slow in his rearview mirror, held up his middle finger, and edged into the intersection at a crawl to let the other driver know that he was moving forward because he wanted to, and not because he felt anything like remorse.

  chapter 12

  Ted had a tell, like any gambler: he drummed exactly as many fingers on his desk as there were seniors likely to be admitted to the school whose admissions director was on the phone. College admissions people never answered their phones in March, using voice mail as a filter to control the timing and rhythm of their disclosures, so anyone Ted called would have to decide to call him back. If they did, it usually meant a measure of good news, although everything was relative these days. Good news might mean a single probable acceptance among five applicants. More and more, admissions people modified whatever they said with the word “probable.”

  Ted never picked up his phone during the month of March either, but to provide the illusion of eager accessibility he relied on the college counseling receptionist to field his calls, rather than use voice mail. Every morning he gave Rita a prioritized list of the calls he was waiting for, and if the first school on his list called while he was talking to the eighth school on his list, she scribbled the name of the first school on a Post-it, walked silently into his office, and placed the note on his desk. She never stood there long enough to hear how he finessed hanging up on the eighth school, but he was always ready for the more important call by the time she got back to her desk, after which he somehow managed to get back on the phone with number eight without playing a new round of phone tag.