Early Decision (9 page)

“Right,” he said. He was studying his words. “It's in this part, about wanting it to be, you know, a secret. It's like, if you say anything, you risk it not being real to yourself anymore.”

“Amazing how hard it is to protect our own desires, isn't it?” asked Anne.

Hunter thought for a moment. She watched his chest rise and fall, the brim of his cap low over his chest.

He looked up at her. “Do you deal with that?” he asked. “Like, are your parents psyched you do this? With us?”

Anne flinched. Teenagers had unfailing aim.

“I think they're proud that I'm earning a living,” she told him. Then she added, unthinking, like the lonely fool she was: “But I think, actually, they'd like me to be married.”

He heard the truth. “Would you like that?”

“Soon,” she lied.
Yesterday
.

“Wow. But makes sense. Like, aren't you, like, thirty?”

“Twenty-seven. But thanks.”

Hunter guffawed into a closed fist. “Sorry. So do you have a boyfriend?”

“No comment,” said Anne. “Back to your mustangs. I think there's a great essay in there about discovering your own wishes versus delivering on the hopes of others. It has something to do with school, and something to do with parents, and a lot to do with college, which is where you have to start switching from the one to the other. Choosing your own major, making your own schedule, getting wasted or not getting wasted. You know? So it's important. And timely.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Okay. I see that.”

“So that's the essay to write for next week. Just see what you can do. Don't be afraid to keep those mustangs in there—they're gorgeous, we want to see them. But also say what's true. What they make you think and feel.”

“Okey-doke.”

“Cool,” said Anne. She stood and smoothed down her skirt. She felt Hunter watching her body, and felt naked from her knees down. She crossed her arms over her bag.

“See you,” he said, and lay back in the grass. Then he called, “Go round to the driveway. Doors might be locked.”

From somewhere came the sound of shears in a hedge. Anne scanned briefly but saw only Hunter, prone in the emerald lawn. For a moment she wanted to stalk back and slap him across the face. Then in front of her a small browned man emerged from a shadow, clippers in hand, and moved hunched, almost furtively, toward the far privet. Sweat drenched his shirt. Princes and princesses in their towers, all of them, Anne thought. Did money ever do anything other than make children lonely?

 

H
ERE IS WHAT
was going to happen: Anne was going to wake up one morning in full possession of the authority she needed to go out and start her life. To acquire the position she really wanted—whatever that was—and succeed. Like Gregor Samsa in reverse, she'd reach her two feet to the floor and head into the world a whole person.

She did not know how to explain why it hadn't happened yet. She had been careful and diligent. She'd earned terrific grades. There had been classes in college about which she was passionate, and books she underlined so hard she tore the page. She was desperate to understand how stories worked, and poems and plays;
how
did they make one feel? She vivisected Virginia Woolf, line by line, and the book's heart kept beating. Her professors loved her, but none of them shared with her the knowledge she needed: How did such work lead to a life full of days? What, exactly, did one
do
? Her peers, meanwhile, seemed to discover their futures easily and completely, on any given day, as though they'd reached into their pockets and found a key on a ring—appearing at breakfast senior year in suits for corporate recruiting events, or already prepping for the LSAT or MCAT. Anne sat flummoxed in a carrel full of novels and realized, come June, she had no way to make a living.

So she interned. As a student teacher, as a radio reporter, once for the blocked writer-wife of a famous film director. In the afternoons and evenings she tutored grade schoolers so she could pay rent on the bedroom she shared in an apartment that was, per the lease, to house three young, college-educated women, and which in fact sheltered four women, a stray tomcat, a guy they found on Craigslist, and the guy's pet rat.

None of the internships took. But tutoring: now,
that
she could do. In fact, she was damn fine at homework. School had been her glory; why not go back? There was always the option of doing a Ph.D. It was perfect. A long project, several years in which to dig herself deep into a subject; not an internship, but an apprenticeship. Anne wanted to go the distance. She wanted to fall in love.

She chose English literature. Several universities offered her fellowships. At home, at her parents' house in the suburbs, she unfolded her thick acceptance letters on the kitchen counter. Her mother smoothed the pages with her palm, dish towel balled in the other hand, and let tears shine in her eyes. Her father paused to survey the notes. He skimmed their opening paragraphs, then set a hand hard on his only child's shoulder and said, “I'd pick
that one
.” He'd never admit his choice was based on his wish to keep her close by; they made the best offer, he said, had the best job placement and faculty. So the University of Chicago it was.

There she walked the new halls like a trainee surgeon in a hospital, given access to the brightest rooms and the sharpest tools. She signed up for Cold War and the Creation of the American Backyard and an entire seminar on the year 1851 in England. She loaded up her canvas tote at the Seminary Bookstore and dragged it home. Year one turned to year two turned to year three. Martin was proud. Mitchell loved all the free time she had to walk with him. And there she was, at play in the fields of the word, except that the amber reading rooms revealed themselves to be a sort of Neverland, where nothing ever happened, and nothing ever would. What baffled Anne was that so much passion should come to nothing; and that her former college classmates who were, say, derivatives traders, did the same thing she did with words,
only with numbers,
and thanks to capital investment and a market as bizarre as a Rube Goldberg machine, they were making millions. Literally, millions. For three years Anne stood in line once a semester to pick up her fellowship check, some thousands, a rich offering for the humanities. She appreciated that the Marxist students were always first when the office opened at nine. The very same ones who argued, in their seminar on
Moby-Dick,
that the whale signified a commodity and that the book was an allegory of the industrial revolution. To which point the queer theorists took great exception: the whale was a phallus, an argument the feminists agreed with but for violently different reasons. The postcolonial theorists claimed the cetacean was an animation of statehood, and the theory-of-aesthetics folks considered anality relevant to the discussion. The disability studies student—who herself was rumored to have chronic fatigue—stopped conversation with her assertion that the enormous whale signified the longed-for bodily wholeness, a comment she made while leaving class early, as she often did.

Anne wrote her final paper on the whale
qua whale
. Her professor was thrilled. No one had ever taken this approach before, he said: written about the whale as a whale! Except Melville, Anne thought, in despair. What happened to her college English classes, the brilliant lectures, the shared love of these books? What rabbit hole separated the B.A. from the Ph.D.? Searching for civility, Anne paid a visit to her graduate adviser. The professor nodded her dark curls and smiled. To her, Anne's malaise was a good sign.

“This means you're letting go of your primary subjectivity,” she said. “And thus opening yourself to new patterns of signification.”

On the desk was a single photograph of a baby girl in a silver frame. Anne tried again. “She's beautiful. What's her name?”

“She's only eighteen months old!” replied the professor.

Frustration brought tears to Anne's eyes. “Oh.”

“How aggressive is it to name a child before the child can choose?”

“Sorry.”

“Well, this is why you're here, right?” The professor leaned in and extended a small ceramic plate. “Breath drop? They're French. No? To think deeply about all these received narratives that bind us so. Don't forget the power of that. It will free you.”

“I thought I was here to become a professor,” Anne said. “To teach.”

“Ah, right, the undergrads.” Anne's adviser sighed. She frowned. “Dear, this is a major research institution. They're just here for tax purposes.”

Occasionally Anne tried to explain just what it was that she did, as a literary-critic-in-training. At home one Sunday night, her father put down his fork and said, “These are people just wasting their days on this earth.” This from a man who spent his days peering at smeared cells on slides, looking for signs of doom. Her father's comment should have freed her: it was for him that she had begun the Ph.D. program. Instead it seemed he'd rendered a verdict: her years in graduate school were wasted ones.

Anne's father was not interested in effort. He was haunted by genius. He looked for it everywhere, as though he'd lost a part of himself. Anne had desperately wished to supply the missing magic, and heaven knows he'd given her opportunities. Once, when she was maybe seven, she'd been summoned to the breakfast table, where her father folded down his newspaper and said, “Sweetie, can you add up all the numbers between one and ninety-nine?”

Anne dashed off for paper and pencil. He stopped her. “No,” he said. “In your head.”

And so she began to add: one plus two plus three plus . . .

His apologetic smile broke her heart. “No, you can't,” he said.

“Just hang on,” she pleaded.

He shook his head firmly. There was a great mathematician, he told her, who figured out how to do the sum as a boy about her age. The boy genius noticed that one plus ninety-nine equals one hundred, and two plus ninety-eight, and three plus ninety-seven . . . and from there it was simple multiplication.

“You didn't see that,” he told her. “But it's okay.”

Then he resumed his reading.

Or the time, when she was even smaller—four? five?—her father had just read of the tests the Soviets used to identify Olympic-caliber athletes as toddlers so they could secrete them away in Siberian training centers. He held Anne's school ruler, bright yellow and twelve inches long, by one end, pointing down. He positioned Anne's hand just beneath it, opened her grip, and instructed her: “Catch the ruler when I let go.”

It clattered to the floor.

“Nope,” he said, and then laughed congenially, as though at a cocktail-party joke.

Nowhere was her father's pining more acute than in the battlefields of chess. Night after night they played. In her little pajamas Anne would face him across the board. He'd castle, he'd back a rook with his queen, he'd chase down her king with a bishop and a pawn, he'd trap her over and over. She understood that he would not let her win, and she thought she agreed with this: why lie to a child? If you can beat her, you should do so. That is how things work.

“One day you'll beat me,” he told her. “Someday.”

But the finality of checkmate terrified her. It felt like mortality itself, with the added bolt of sadism in the predator pawns, the leering bishop in her father's quick fingers. Her dad had books on chess openings, many translated from the Russian. He talked of Bobby Fischer. Anne scanned the board and was as careful as she could be, trying to anticipate everything that could come next. By the third grade she could no longer limit her vigilance to the chessboard. In the night, defeated, she worried about school. She worried about life. She worried about everything. In this way, basic social anxiety was converted to mild paranoia. By October of that year, she was throwing up during the three-mile drive to school, leaning, buckled in, out over the curb. Her mother told her to look through the windshield between the trees. Find the horizon, she said. She asked, “How can you get motion sickness in three miles?”

The way college admissions had evolved reminded Anne of her father: as though the schools were hunting for some ghost genius, some Bobby Fischer, a fascination with singularity that in her mind was inextricably tied to thick-spined books in translation and Cyrillic characters like evil spells and the word “Soviet,” and possibly the threat of nuclear war. Her students didn't have experience with fallout shelters, but they also hadn't known the days when it was enough to be a good kid. That old Siberia-scoping eye was turned on them now, but in the name of American innovation and the competitive enterprise of a new century. It was the same old crap: the ruler hits the kitchen floor, and a child learns to throw up. Every morning.

Anne actually admired the kids who pushed back. Their smart-alecky teenage gall, the willingness to, say, quit crew or drop that fifth AP or just sleep one extra goddamned half hour: she hadn't had that kind of spleen. Instead she did as she was told and tucked away her excellent grades and then emerged into the world beyond college like a mole shot out, blinded, at the edge of an unanticipated crevasse. Her friends read the currents and hopped on in: school-work-love-life. While she teetered there, paralyzed.

To fail was to fall. To plummet. Probably to die.

And because she understood this, she understood the anxiety of the parents she served, and because she understood their anxiety, she sympathized with their kids. And this made her good at her job.

There was also in her heart the darkest, smallest, cruelest fear of all, a burrowed, vicious thing with a fierce bite: the certainty that she had no contribution to make. That she had nothing to offer the world. So perhaps, Anne concluded—trying here to be brave—the best thing she could do was turn her sights to the next generation, the ones coming up just behind her, the ones with their feet newly in the door.