Early Decision (27 page)

Anne did not know that.

“Like, for
basketball,
” Sadie continued. “It's just embarrassing. I mean, I'm proud of him, but it's a lot.” She wiped at her cheeks again, and then something over Anne's shoulder caught her attention. “What is that woman's deal?” she asked.

Anne turned just in time to catch the faux fur ahead of them swiveling fast, but not fast enough to avoid revealing a tangle of highlighted curls and large, scrolled earrings hovering like a kind of mania. The face was thickly made up and sour.

“April,” Anne said, not in greeting.

“She keeps staring at me!” Sadie said.

April Penze narrowed her eyes. She looked from one to the other, then settled on petite Sadie.

“I'm not staring at you, kid.” Her voice was a tinny sneer.

Anne's body tensed up. Her appetite fled. “This is my neighbor,” she told Sadie, as calmly as she could.

Sadie was still staring back, shaking her head slowly. Fearless, thought Anne. Then she said one word, “Weirdo,” with enough poise in her voice to set April to strike. She seemed to rise from within, like a snake preparing. She huffed a tight little “Tah!”—sending a spray of saliva out over the glass deli case before them, and split the line, shoving her way through the crowd and out the door. The little bell on the hinge jingled behind her.

“What the hell?” Sadie asked.

But the moment was broken. She'd forgotten Duke, her parents, Anne's casting around for some calm place of authority.

“She's this crazy bitch who lives upstairs from me. She hates my dog. She makes my life hell.”

Sadie laughed. “Oh my God. What a nightmare.”

“Yeah. We're in a huge fight.”

“I can tell.”

“What do you think I should do?”

Sadie smiled and held up one finger while she gave her order to the counter girl, a green salad and some carrot soup. Anne followed.

“Move,” Sadie told her.

“I wish I could.”

They took their number and wound their way back to their tiny, drafty table. “No, seriously,” Anne said. “What would you do if you were me?”

“Honestly?”

Anne nodded.

“I'd just totally ignore her. Path of least resistance. That's a chick looking for a fight. Did you see her, the way she, like, spat at us? The whole thing—she's just . . .
nasty
. Like, ghetto nasty. Like, you aren't going to be her friend, no matter what. I've seen that sometimes. I'd just totally ignore her. Rise above. Do what you gotta do and get on with it.”

Anne was quiet.

“Look. She was totally staring at me because I'm rich,” Sadie continued, spreading her fingers on the table to demonstrate. A Cartier tank watch, a little ruby ring on her right hand, some narrow enameled bangles on the other wrist. Even the manicure, clear, buffed to a shine. Anne hadn't noticed any of this. She figured she must be used to it by now. “She hates me for it.”

“Well, plus you're with me, which makes you extra heinous,” Anne said.

Sadie smiled. “Totally.”

Anne leaned in. “You know better than anyone that some people are just going to resent you, no matter what. Right?”

“Yeah. That's my point.”

“Mine, too. So don't let that get in your way. You know? The gymnasium. Who cares?”

Sadie studied her hands. As she did so, Anne observed her. Her hair was freshly blow-dried and fell straight, the chestnut tips in military rows on her cashmere shoulders. She sat with her hips squared and her ballet flats pressed to the floor. Her tiny body seemed perfectly proportioned, immaculate, and contained. How did an adolescent come to project such a total absence of need? Anne thought of Hunter, who was always underdressed, as though announcing:
I need a mother.
His huge, trip-on-things sneakers, better designed for the moon than the burbs. Even William Kantor, in his sartorial displays, revealed a desire to be seen. But Sadie was wrapped up tight. A done deal, wholly committed, fed from within. She drew circles in her carrot soup with a flattened spoon.

“Okay, you're right,” she said.

Anne imagined those hands on the Miserable Children of the World Tour. Did she remove the watch? The ruby ring? She'd had years of enforced gratitude. Surely this created a child who knew to ask for nothing. And, of course, to confess to a problem was to risk her mother's life-coaching the very blood out of her own heart. The family was its own little cult of correctness. Sadie just wished to be invisible, for fear of being fixed.

It was why her writing was so insipid. It was why she wasn't a standout student. She shied from proving grounds, wherever they lay.

Anne picked up half her turkey club. “You know, I don't know that I have anything to offer you about this college thing.”

Sadie looked up, puzzled.

“Except that I am good with grammar. Commas, etc. So whatever you want to do, it's fine with me. I'll just help you out with the words bit.” Anne took a huge bite and chewed slowly, as if formally out of commission.

Sadie puffed air from her bottom lip to clear her bangs from her brow. After a moment she asked, “What was that woman's name, again?”

“April Penze. Pen-zay. Pence. I have no idea how it's pronounced.”

“Hmm.”

“Do you have your essay with you?” asked Anne.

“No. Sorry.”

“It's okay.”

“Maybe I should write about April,” Sadie mused. “More interesting than what I've got.”

“What would you say?”

“I don't know. Something about resenting strangers. Or kindness to strangers. Or, I don't know. I'm just sick of all of it. Wish I could do something new.”

“You can,” said Anne. “That's sort of my entire point, here. You can do this however you want to do this.”

Sadie set her spoon down carefully against her bowl and laced together her little hands.

“What if,” she began, smiling askance, deep in thought, “what if I did write about April? But April as a person and as a metaphor? You know how, like, at first I had that star metaphor but I took it out? Well, I think my essay needs something like that. And April is April, but it's also the month when the colleges send their letters. So, like, maybe I can play on that somehow? I can write about this woman who has all these ideas about me and is really mean even though she doesn't know me, which is kind of like the colleges who have to, you know, guess based on just some grades and things?”

Anne felt helpless and panicky, as though a bounding dog had just bolted into traffic.

“Um,” she stalled.

“You think that's stupid,” said Sadie. She let her hands come apart and placed them in her lap.

“No, it's not stupid. I just don't want my crazy neighbor to get any airtime in your essay. She'd put a copy of it on her fridge.”

It was a punt, but it worked.

“Oh.” Sadie nodded. “Got it.”

“But certainly the month of April, and all that that portends for a high school senior—certainly that's a terrific subject, I think.”

As she spoke, Anne imagined the directions Sadie might take. She saw that this subject could be made to solve everything. The kids who applied early admission heard from their schools in December; there was no long winter wait for them, no April week of stiff spring winds and shivering by their in-box. In writing about April, Sadie could address her choice not to apply early, thereby putting to rest any uncertainty about her focus on Duke, and maybe even placate her parents about her shifting intentions. She could explain it all.

Sadie wasn't intending any of this, of course. But what harm was there in showing her the chance? The idea had been hers, after all. And it was much, much better than writing the damn thing for her.

Sadie was still riffing on her inspiration. “So maybe I just write about, like, the process—the waiting, you know, for schools to tell you where you're in. I wonder, can I talk about Duke? Probably not, if I'm writing for all of them, right?”

“Well, you can personalize, if you wish—”

“No, no,” said Sadie, waving her hands over her uneaten lunch. “I've got an idea now. I don't have to be specific. I'm interested in, like, the difference between planning and being told? How you just find out where you're going to be for four years, which, like, changes your life. You know?”

“I do know, yes,” said Anne.

“Cool! This is cool! I'm excited now!” Sadie pushed aside her salad, uncapped her pen, and began to take furious notes. Her handwriting was tiny and straight and perfectly rounded, like a stitch. Anne found herself imagining lost generations of women bent over tiny, delicate crafts, complicated things no one else appreciated and that fell apart.

“Okay,” said Sadie. “I've got it. I'll send it through to you soon.”

For the first time in a while, the girl actually looked seventeen. Eager and clear, with a busy mind.

“Can't wait,” Anne told her.

 

B
Y THIS TIME
of year, Anne's students were assembling piles of essays—at the core of each application the Personal Statement, a five-hundred-word massif around which were arrayed various shorter exercises, the usual paragraph about a “significant activity,” and any other “supplemental” essays a university wished to request. Though the topics varied from school to school and even from year to year, with a list of eight or twelve schools the average student ended up answering the same questions in one form or another: Tell us about a teacher, coach, or mentor who impacted you in a significant way. Tell us about a work of art that challenged, surprised, or upset you, and why. Tell us where you'll be in ten years. Tell us what is special about our school/program/major. Tell us why you want us.

It really did grow quite dull.

The centrality of the Personal Statement was courtesy of the rise of the Common Application, and in Anne's opinion this did not represent progress. When she had applied to colleges, each school had had its own elegantly printed form that posed specific questions for the applicant to answer. The feeling was of writing a letter to a school, which in turn genuinely wished to hear the answers. Now her students were given the convenience of completing essentially one application, and then, with the nuisance of a few extra questions here and there—and these mostly confined to the most elite schools—sending it to anyone and everyone they wished. It was no longer about making contact with a great institution and entertaining one's dream of attending. There was no longer imagination in the drafting. You didn't envision walking the quadrangles on a snowy day or scanning a packed cafeteria for somewhere familiar to sit. Didn't loll over the phone-book-thick course catalog and wonder at seminars labeled “400.1.” Instead, it was an exercise in self-branding. The schools were secondary. Marketing the student came first.

The intention was to introduce convenience, and as with all leaps of efficiency, the result was to depersonalize what had been a private process. Was it any wonder the professional college counselor cropped up now? Applying to college used to be like asking someone out. Long-considered, long-desired, heart-in-your-throat. Now it was like posting an ad.

Not to mention the monotony. Hunter Pfaff was industriously sending through supplement after supplement: “I believe Bates College is the perfect place for me because of its northern, rural setting, its emphasis on the liberal arts and academic exploration, and its opportunities for close contact with professors”—which, of course, distinguished poor Bates not at all from its dozens of small, rural, liberal-arts competitors in the American Northeast. The truth would have read something more like this: “I believe Bates College is the perfect place for me because my college counselor put it on my list as a yellow-light school, my parents are okay with it, and it doesn't make me write another long supplement except for this one.” Anne and Hunter were complicit in crafting these friendly lies; everyone was.

William Kantor, meanwhile, was just moving commas around in drafts: “The most significant activity in my life, outside of school, is the time I spend performing
tzedakah
, whether it's by sitting with patients in the elder home, preparing meals for the house-bound, or donating from my allowance to our synagogue's ministries in Chicago and beyond”—intuiting, perhaps, that religious and ethnic minority interests, particularly when expressed in their native tongue, were unimpeachable. Sadie Blanchard had yet to send through her new essay, but she was dithering with a question regarding a character in literature with whom she'd like to have lunch (“I'm thinking Scout Finch or Ophelia? Does it matter that Ophelia's dead?”). Only Alexis Grant was seeking to set the world on fire. She overlooked no opportunity to address a desperately complex or traumatic topic: genocide, the failure of public education, the inability to take all the courses Yale had to offer in the four short years she'd be there. Anne read her essays with pleasure, suggested curlicue phrases to cut, and sent them back. From their pruned forms, three more essays would sprout, like old roses in spring.

So she was hardly surprised to find Alexis almost bobble-headed with excitement when she met her at the University of Chicago following her debate.

“Oh my God, so they argued,” Alexis explained fitfully, “that you can
freeze
a person. Never mind the ethics of this, the legality is clear! It's absurd!”

For a moment Anne said nothing. She was suffering from a sort of emotional vertigo to find herself back on the Hyde Park campus, having parked along the Midway, where the long, low light was streaking east to the lake. She'd allowed it to blind her momentarily to the fact that she was about to come through the archway into the same quadrangle where she'd spent several years in graduate school, and which she'd finally walked out of a few years prior. Not that she regretted the decision to leave. But being grateful to be out of there didn't mean that going back didn't stir up her heart. She tried to fast-forward through the afternoon, picturing the long drive ahead, picking up Mitchell in Lincoln Park, and heading north to the suburbs for the holiday. And in the morning, Martin arriving, having booked the red-eye to save money.