Getting In: A Novel

by Karen Stabiner

  Nothing. What Mike had failed to take into account was the difference between a spontaneous outburst by a bunch of impatient Ocean Heights seniors and a constructed joke at the end of a speech that left everybody out except the winners. He had no constituency. Any senior who had ever had an original thought resented the fact that a human tote board had been named valedictorian, and every parent whose child was not on Mike’s winner’s list had stopped listening before he finished reciting the athletic honors. The handful of parents who straggled to their feet to applaud, now, did so either out of pity or to persuade Mike to make this the end of his speech, whether it was or not.

  When Nora started to get up, Joel put an urgent hand on her arm.

  “What are you doing?” he asked. “You can’t think it was a good speech.”

  “I can’t see her,” she said, shaking free. “With people standing up, I can’t see her. I just want to see her.”

  Chastened, Mike mumbled a final farewell and abandoned the podium, and Dr. Mullin quickly took his place, lowered the microphone, and awarded the diplomas with daunting speed. Once the graduates had filed past him, paused for the photographer, and taken their seats again, he gestured to the choir to stand. The choir always ended graduation with “The Wind Beneath My Wings,” because the musical director had made the first round of callbacks for the Harlettes in 1982, and because it was an evergreen on the private school graduation circuit, right up there with “Stand by Me.” Parents sometimes needed help letting go, and there was nothing better than a ballad about eternal love, preferably love in the face of separation, to get the stalled tears flowing. As the choir sang, a confusing set of synapses began to fire, old, unused connections, distant sparks of all the emotions that had gotten this generation of parents to reproduce in the first place. Even Nora and Joel got misty, testimony to the enduring power of the song, as Lauren had practiced the alto part so often at home that they were frankly sick of it.

  When the song was over, the choir director stepped to the baby grand and began to play “Pomp and Circumstance” and the choir, on cue, filed offstage, followed by the new graduates and the Crestview faculty. The members of the audience stood again to bear witness, their digital cameras held aloft, and headed for the reception on the front lawn. Joy forgot aisle etiquette and bashed several sets of knees with her purse in her haste to get to Katie. Boredom was Joy’s enemy, and the ceremony had given her far too much time to consider and reconsider the women’s whispered exchange, which she was now sure was about the valedictorian. Try as she might—surely there were numerous other members of the graduating class who were capable of having too much to drink—she could not dismiss the notion that Katie had been deprived of the valedictory for cause. Clearly, Joy had been duped by the story about Chloe and projectile vomiting and Katie’s Good Samaritan tendencies, and sleeping over at Lauren’s for old time’s sake should have been the tip-off. There had not been a sentimentalist on either side of the Dodson family tree for generations. The only reason for Katie to end up at the Chaikens was to avoid coming home.

  Joy stepped past the puddle of graduation gowns that the seniors traditionally left in a heap at the edge of the stage and found Katie in a Medusa’s knot of sniffling, hugging, overheated girls who seemed suddenly to think that being apart next fall was the emotional equivalent of amputation. They clung and sighed, and it was difficult to figure out which intertwined arm belonged to whom, but Joy tapped on the wrist wearing a Tiffany gold cuff, and Katie extricated herself.

  “Yeah,” she panted. “Can you believe it? Done!”

  Joy took her elbow and guided her a few steps away.

  “Done, yes,” she said. “I just wanted to ask you, though. I was thinking. About your prom dress.”

  “Except that this would be the moment to congratulate the graduate, don’t you think?”

  Joy gave Katie a perfunctory hug and held her at arm’s length.

  “I meant to ask you then and life got in the way,” she said, trying to sound as though the answer did not matter as much as it did. “Chloe was drinking what?”

  “God, I don’t remember. Some mixed drink in a can. Why?”

  “I’m just amazed it didn’t leave a stain. And it swam back into my mind while I was sitting there.”

  Katie kissed her on the cheek and darted toward a friend who was assembling a group photograph.

  “Well, let it swim back out again,” she called, over her shoulder. “Do the backstroke. It’s fine.”

  Joy stood there, immobile, until Dan caught up with her.

  “I could have done without the valedictory,” he said.

  “If Katie hadn’t gotten drunk at prom we would have done without it, because she would have given a decent speech. Honestly. You think you know your kid, and all you really know is the lies she chooses to tell you.”

  “What exactly are you talking about?”

  Joy took a deep breath and pushed a flare of anger back into her stomach, which was where it usually lived, tyrannized on a less stressful day by a daily dose of Prevacid.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Temporary insanity.”

  “You cannot possibly believe that she was drinking at the prom. Where would she…”

  Dan continued his defense of their daughter, but Joy had stopped listening. She did not know what she thought, except that she did not perceive herself as the kind of mother who would raise the kind of daughter who would allow herself to be stupid in this kind of way. The closest Joy ever got to flamboyance was the costumes for their Summer of Love theme dinner a few years back, and she expected a similar rigor from her children. She disdained the easygoing moms who swore that all they wanted was their children’s happiness, because it sounded like a euphemism for spoiling a child instead of raising her properly. Joy loved Katie ambitiously—which implied the setting of standards and the evaluation of performance.

  Katie had no trouble expressing her disappointment in her parents, ranging from the dubious quality of their first offspring to their taste in friends. For the first time, Joy wondered if a parent ought to be allowed to express disappointment in a child. Unconditional love did not seem like much of a parenting strategy.

  “Drinking, not drinking, it is what it is what it is,” she said, waving at Brad’s mom and striding off in her direction. “I’ve got my college degree already, thank you. She can do what she wants.”

  Alexandra waved back at Joy from the edge of a phalanx of Bradley men—her father-in-law, who had driven down from San Francisco, two of Trey’s brothers and their two sons apiece, three of the boys in law or medical school and the fourth getting both degrees sequentially, and Trey. The Bradleys turned out in force for family events, in case anyone had failed to make the connection between a boy with a roman numeral after his name and the existence of a dynasty. They assembled to impress, which was why Trey’s youngest brother, the one who had spawned a lobster fisherman and a party girl, was kind enough always to construct an excuse and stay home. Trey’s mother and Alexandra’s two sisters-in-law flitted at the periphery of the family circle in watercolor prints as vague as their auras, while the menfolk—a term frequently hauled out of mothballs to describe the Bradley men—moved toward the refreshment table like a rugby scrum. Alexandra, suddenly alone, straightened the silver silk lapels on the jacket of her knit suit and stared enviously at Joy’s outfit, a champagne silk dress with a deep neckline and a fitted coat that was one, and only one, shade deeper. To Alexandra, Joy seemed like a woman who was capable of having an affair—not that she would, but that she could. Late at night, when Alexandra could not get back to sleep, she sometimes wondered if she could possibly be any lonelier living alone. She was somehow not surprised when Joy veered off to talk to someone else, and she stood there for a long moment, wondering what she ought to do next.

  “Hey, Alex,” said Trey’s eldest brother, waving a skewer of fresh fruit up and down in front of her nose. “Where are you, daydreamer?”

  “Right here,”
she said, on cue. “But my goodness, don’t they all look so grown-up.”

  “As they should.” Trey’s voice startled her, for she had not sensed him coming up behind her. What was it about the Bradley men that made them instinctively surround their prey, even when the prize was as insignificant as having the last word? He clapped his brother on the back and addressed him as though Alexandra were not there.

  “I don’t know what it is with the girls,” by which he meant the wives. “Was Ginny like this when Bud and Jack left home? It’s as though they don’t see it coming. Brad’s nineteen in July. I figure if we get him home winter break next year we’re ahead of the game. After that, I think it’s calls on our birthdays.”

  His brother managed a tight smile, for the secret question in his household was whether Bud would get it together for the final year of medical school or make good on his threat to move back into his old bedroom to think things over. “You never know,” he said, with a false heartiness. “It may not turn out to be that extreme. Bud shows up more than—”

  “There he is,” Alexandra squealed, in a tone Trey rarely heard and always disliked. “Brad, Brad, we’re over here.”

  “Like I could miss them,” said Brad to another boy, as he considered the imperative that was his family. He raised his arm and waved back so that his mother would stop yelping, and made his way across the lawn. Preston Bradley IV was the only member of the Crestview senior class to be going to Harvard, thanks to the girl who had chosen Stanford instead, and as he walked he was aware of attention he did not want, of heads turning and the occasional admiring, envious murmur. He tried to limit his focus to his family, which was why he did not see Katie’s dad until he stepped right in front of Brad.

  “So,” said Dan, that single syllable dripping with a familiarity Brad had never felt for either of Katie’s parents. “Some speech. Where were you and Katie when we needed you?”

  Brad smiled. Lauren always cut Katie slack because her parents were so impossible, but a good lawyer would say that her parents’ behavior was immaterial.

  “Oh, I tanked a math test,” Brad said, which was almost true. “That’s why I wasn’t up there. It wasn’t the prom with Katie, was it? I told everybody, I bet she didn’t even know what was in that bottle. Hey, there’s my folks. See you, Mr. Dodson.”

  He strode off, feeling as better as a boy can feel when he is about to embark on someone else’s version of his future. Brad had settled some accounts in the last days of his senior year. He had refused the valedictory on principle and told his father the truth about why they would not see him at the podium. He had confessed the business about the Harvard wait list to Lauren, which made him feel better and helped her decide to take a chance with Northwestern. He had failed to stand up to Katie at prom, but he had finished the model and given it to Liz, which was as close to apology as he knew how to get and made him happy despite her guarded text—“It’s lovely. Mom’s crazy for it. Thanks. Luck at Harvard.” And he had planted a seed of doubt in Mr. Dodson’s brain, which held real promise in terms of the erosion of trust over time.

  Brad was at his mother’s side before it hit him that such glancing pleasures might be the most that a reluctant legacy could hope for. As she wrapped her slender arms around him, and he wondered why a hug from her felt more like a brush than an embrace, he imagined his father telling the story of the valedictory address and the obvious GPA glitch that had robbed his son of the honor—telling it even though it was a lie, as though it would become true by repetition—to a handful of admiring associates, young lawyers not so far removed from their own grade-grubbing days, who were struck by the level of privilege, of presumed success, that enabled Trey to tolerate such an injustice with a bemused grin. Worse, for a moment Brad could imagine telling the story himself. He might tell it forever, rewriting it over time until its edges were as clean and hard as the facets of a diamond, as he settled into the life he had sworn he would never live. The fact that he saw the possibility made him nervous. He sank against his mother for a moment, until she raised her fluttery hands to his chest and Trey grabbed his shoulders from behind.

  “Enough!” he said, with what passed among the Bradley men as a playful tone. He pulled Brad backward. “Come on. You’re going to wrinkle your mother’s suit.”

  Nora was capable of bad behavior when overcome by motherhood, and she threw a discreet elbow or two, and used her shoulder as a driving wedge, in an attempt to part the sea of people that blocked her access to Lauren. Her daughter was not standing near the pile of discarded graduation gowns, so Nora hurried out to the lawn, where the crowd fanned out in all directions. It was hard to pick out a specific senior—no, a graduate—in a sea of white dresses, and at first she did not see Lauren or any of Lauren’s friends.

  For a moment, Nora felt an odd sensation that she had felt only twice before in her life, once on the day Lauren was born and once on the day she got fired: faces she knew she ought to recognize were suddenly unfamiliar, not completely so, but skewed just enough to unsettle her. She stared at people and waited for their features to resolve themselves into a familiar layout, even as some of them smiled and reached over for a quick kiss. Her brain was not cooperating. Her brain was on a quest to find Lauren, and until she did so, the rest of the world was reduced to a quivering mass of unprocessed information.

  The dance band started up a lounge version of a Bruce Springsteen song, which helped somewhat, because the crowd thinned as hyperactive graduates and parents who had remembered to take a prophylactic Aleve hit the dance floor. Nora scanned the horizon. No Lauren. She pointed Joel toward the far side of the lawn and set off past the photographer’s setup, a drop cloth behind a white chair next to a little table and a vase of white roses, for parents who wanted yet one more staged and awkward portrait of their children, looking not like themselves but like generic, hopeful young adults. No Lauren there, either.

  Nora circled around toward the refreshments. Lauren was not at either of the long buffet tables, but one of the girls had seen her near the dance floor. A boy near the dance floor had seen her heading toward the bathroom. Alexandra, who monitored her unchanging hair and lipstick on an hourly basis, came out of the bathroom and said she had seen Lauren near the food table, so Nora began again. Joel caught up with her, and together they completed another unsuccessful lap.

  “If we keep moving and she keeps moving, we will never find her,” said Nora. “I really want to find her.”

  A simple expression of desire was like a magnet. A moment later, Lauren tapped her mother on the shoulder and kissed Nora, and Joel, and Nora again. On the second embrace, Nora noticed that Lauren was trembling, slightly. She tightened her grasp, and nodded when Joel pantomimed the acquisition of cold drinks.

  “You okay?”

  “I couldn’t find you,” said Lauren.

  “That’s because we were chasing each other,” said Nora. “We couldn’t find you, either.”

  “I am so tired of people I barely know asking me what the deal is at Northwestern,” Lauren whispered. Rita, who intended to inject into the college counseling department an enthusiasm she felt it sorely lacked, had seen Lauren in the hallway and called out “Go January Wolverine!” which put an end to the family secret. “It’s like people who never cared about me for one minute for six years only want to hear the entire story of my life.”

  “Tell them anything. Don’t tell them anything. You don’t owe them an explanation. Tell them you’re going to be a master baker.”

  Lauren continued to cling.

  “Will you teach me how to make chocolate ganache?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that little cheesecake thing.”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t want to make anything with bananas.”

  “Oh, good. Are you going to be a diva? I’ll fire you.”

  “Buttercream would be fun, I bet.”

  “Buttercream is fun,” said Nora. “You get into a groove.”

 
They worked through red velvet cake and panna cotta and the little apple charlottes, and still Lauren seemed unwilling to let go and not quite able to relax. It was a nice change from the bolt-out-the-door behavior, but it made Nora feel that she had a job to do here, that she ought to say something maternal. Gently, she held Lauren at arm’s length.

  “Honey,” she began, “it’s going to be fine.”

  “Great! Chloe!” shrieked Lauren. She yanked herself free and ran over to Chloe, who had skipped the ceremony but snuck into the reception to see her friends. This, thought Nora, was transitional parenthood: a mom was as essential as ever until something more interesting came along, at which point she was instantly less than peripheral.

  Joel returned a moment later with three cups of lemonade, only to find Nora standing alone, staring blankly at the dance floor. He handed her a cup.

  “Now what?” she asked. She wandered off without waiting for his reply.

  Less than an hour later, the graduates had changed into their street clothes and were on their way to a club at Universal City Walk that Crestview had taken over for the evening. Most of the parents left as soon as their children drove away, but some of them lingered, confused, trying to make sense of the fact that they would never again need to set foot on the Crestview campus. On one side of the main gate, a woman Nora and Joel did not know tried to guide her sobbing husband toward the parking lot. Another couple walked past, the wife whispering much too loudly to her husband about what she intended to do to him once they got back to their blissfully empty house. Everyone except the sobbing husband seemed to be aggressively, emphatically happy to be footloose, and everyone except the sobbing husband was working overtime to convince onlookers that their delight was genuine.