Getting In: A Novel (18 page)

What does what matter, indeed, thought Nora. For an instant, she considered letting Lauren play out the charade, because in the next scene, there would be no Lauren on the stairway at all, which was the part of the college plan that nobody talked about much. Right now, at this exact moment, they were together and she was a happy kid—a liar, but a happy liar, and maybe a happy liar was better than an honest but miserable child. That made no sense, of course, unless Lauren had lied because her parents put too much pressure on her and it was the only way she could keep from collapsing under the strain. If lying was self-defense, then Nora and Joel were the guilty ones for not realizing how tense Lauren was. That made no sense, either: what was the point of working so hard at Crestview if not to get to the next step? And what would they do on December 15 if they said nothing—pretend not to notice that there was no letter, fat or thin, from Northwestern?

“Y’know, I don’t care if you never get these things to look right as long as you keep making samples,” said Lauren, sliding into the booth and grabbing a little cake. Brad had texted Lauren to warn her about what Chloe’s mom had said, but he could not say for sure if Lauren’s mom had actually gotten it—so there was
no point in confessing right off the bat, not until she had a better sense of how much her parents knew. The smart move was to act as though everything was fine, and to hope that too many college-era rock concerts had blown out her mother’s high-range hearing, about as realistic a hope as imagining that Ted would engineer a last-minute save, which was what had kept her from confessing so far. If only a miracle had happened, and Northwestern had rolled back the hands of time for her, she would have retired the truth for ten or fifteen years, by which point it would have aged into funny. That had been her plan until she got Brad’s text. Now she had to wait for her parents to make the first move.

They did not, which was a bad sign.

“Aren’t the two of you sitting down?”

Nora and Joel slid in on either side of Lauren, and for a long moment there was no sound except for appreciative chewing and swallowing.

“Honey, you’re all set at Northwestern, right?” Joel asked the question without raising his eyes from his plate.

The room had been quiet before Joel said anything, but now it was tomb silent, soundless for miles and miles and miles down toward the center of the earth.

“What do you mean?” asked Lauren. When confronted with the accusation of fraud, no matter what the circumstance, the accused always asked first for clarification, in case the interrogator knew so little that evasion was still a possibility.

Joel sighed. “Deena said to your mom that you were applying regular like Chloe, and I said she must be mistaken…”

Nora put down her fork with unnecessary force. “Which makes me the only one who thinks Lauren lied to us? Great, Joel.”

“That’s not what I meant and you know it. We have to consider the source, is all.”

“Of course, but can’t we ask a simple question and get—”

“Excuse me. If the two of you are going to argue I can go back upstairs.”

“Never mind,” said Nora, determined to get a straight answer. “Did you file? You said you filed.”

“No,” said Lauren, dividing her remaining cake into microscopic wedges. “Yes, I did, but I missed the deadline. And I didn’t actually say I filed. I sort of didn’t say anything.”

“How could you miss the deadline?” asked Nora. “You were done when you came in to say good night. All you had to do was submit it.”

“I know that. I finished but I didn’t send it, and then I missed the deadline.”

“Dad said he came in to say good night…”

“And why did he walk into my room without knocking?”

“I did knock,” said Joel. “It was five to ten. You still hadn’t filed?”

“Does Ted know?” asked Nora.

Lauren rolled her eyes. “I went in to see him the next day. I went as soon as I got the email saying thanks and we’ll let you know in April. I’ve been to see him three or four times. He said if I have great first-semester grades it could end up being a good thing, which just means he wouldn’t call them.”

“He’s known all this time?” asked Joel.

Lauren ignored him. “The very next morning, I said please can’t you call them, say we had a power surge, say the clocks were wrong,
say my parents thought dessert mattered more than college
. But I’m not Katie. Why should he bother with somebody who took regular science?”

“You can’t expect him to ask them to take a late application,” said Nora, who had no idea why she was defending a man who had not bothered to call her or Joel. Why should he call them? He probably assumed their daughter shared this kind of news with her parents. “I mean, if they did it for you they would have to do
it for everyone. A deadline’s a deadline. I really don’t understand how—”

Lauren cut her off.

“I know why Dad came in. Because he figured I was going to screw it up.” Lauren’s eyes got huge as she realized where her bobsled logic was taking her. She recoiled from Nora as though her mother were wearing a sandwich board that read, “I have an antibiotic-resistant staph infection.”

“You told him to come in, didn’t you?” Lauren said. “You said, ‘Honey, I bet she fell asleep or she’s not watching the clock, go be a good dad and pretend you just wanted to say good night.’ That worked really well, didn’t it? Maybe if the two of you acted for once like I wasn’t going to blow it, then maybe I wouldn’t have blown it. Except now that I have, you get to say I told you so.”

Her parents were too stupefied to reply.

“I’m going to go finish my homework now.” She glared at Nora. “I need you to move,” she said, and Nora, not knowing what else to do, dutifully got up and let Lauren out. Without another word, Lauren shuffled toward the staircase, slogged up the stairs, and quietly closed her bedroom door.

“Well, that’s that,” Nora spat. “I give up.” She, too, headed for the staircase, though she did not bother to be quite as careful about how she shut the bedroom door.

Joel rubbed his scalp with the fervor of a Boy Scout trying to pass the kindling test, hoping to spark an inspiration, and when none came, he trudged up the stairs, still rubbing, still hoping. He stood outside his daughter’s room and listened to the kind of abandoned sobbing that guaranteed this episode a slot on her psychotherapy top ten, and then he knocked.

“Go away.”

He headed for the other end of the hall, leaned against the bedroom door, and listened to his wife’s remorseful weeping, an
infrequent but bottomless sorrow specific, as far as he could tell, to women who thought too much. During the fall and winter holiday season, an exhausted Nora joked about wanting to be Deena in her next life, not working and not caring, so that she could spend her days shopping and exercising and beautifying and trying new recipes, without ever feeling that she was wasting time. During the slow months, she spoke admiringly of Joy’s initiative and made up seasonal promotions to keep from having too little to do. Occasionally, she preferred to be herself, but never without self-doubt. Sometimes it seemed to Joel that baking was what Nora did to occupy herself while she questioned her life—but now he wondered if a bit more introspection on his part might have given him a clue about how to behave at this exact moment in time. He was of no use to either of the crying women in his life; he knew better than to knock on his and Nora’s bedroom door, because behind it was the kind of second guessing that defied intervention.

“Well, I’ll be downstairs,” he announced in a loud voice, “if anyone feels like talking.” He retreated down the stairs, wrapped up the remaining cakes, and washed all the dishes. No one was moving upstairs, so he collapsed on the couch and turned on CNN, in the hope that one international disaster or another would help him put all of this in an appropriate context. A few hours later, he awoke to the latest on the first high-profile heterosexual male prostitute to surface inside the Beltway, surely a blow for gender equity. He took a few notes for the following day’s editorial meeting, turned off the lights, and headed upstairs, to find Nora awake in the dark.

They confessed to wondering the same thing: Was Northwestern—was any school—worth all this arguing? Whether Lauren had lied to them was beside the point. All that mattered, finally, was whether she would talk to them in the morning—or
had they unwittingly stepped over a line that only became visible as the parental foot landed on the far side?

“There’s a happy thought,” whispered Nora, reaching for a matted tissue. “Our daughter? Oh, yes. We’re very proud. She got into her first choice, Northwestern. We haven’t heard from her since.”

Nora surveyed the backyard and automatically started
running a tally in her head. Not a canopy but a drop-sided tent, a tuxedoed three-piece combo, a portable dance floor to protect the lawn, bistro tables on the patio and around the pool, a full bar and two bartenders, glassware not plastic, flatware not plastic, china not plastic, cloth napkins and tablecloths, not paper. She was at $4,000, and still adding, when a moonlighting aspiring actor appeared in front of her with a tray.

“Pigs in blankets,” said the server, who had just been told by a pretty female guest that he looked like the young coroner on one of the cop shows. “Actually not, since it’s Niman Ranch organic beef and pigs in blankets are pork, aren’t they? Anyhow, it’s artisanal garlic mustard, and besides, how weird would it sound to say cows in blankets? Big old cows. Not a tasty image.” Nora took three just to make him go away and handed two of them to Joel. Lauren, who had been at her side a moment ago, had already taken off in Chloe’s direction.

“You have to admire the chutzpah,” said Nora.

Joel raised an eyebrow.

“What if Katie hadn’t gotten into Williams?” asked Nora. “I mean, you have to have a pretty positive outlook on life to schedule a party the weekend after the early kids find out.”

“I don’t think they spend a lot of time on what-if,” said Joel. He peeled off toward the bar.

Joy and Dan threw their annual holiday party on the first Sunday of winter break, before any of their close friends left for Vail or Napa or Santa Fe. Their other dinner parties involved no more than twelve people, seating charts, and multiple catered and served courses, and the most highly prized invitation among those choreographed events was the spring dinner, which always involved an unusual theme and the hosts in appropriate costume. The holiday party was a clearinghouse event: the Dodsons got to reciprocate for every invitation they had received during the past year, catch up on what everyone else was doing, and remind the guests that their life was hard to beat.

Nora wandered over to the dessert table, as she did every year, to see who had won the job. Fugusweet. Of course. Little desserts designed to look like sushi rolls, with Rice Krispies and flavored marshmallow paste replacing the rice, and chocolate, fruit, flavored cream, or all three in place of the fish. Standing in for the nori wrapper, a thin, brittle band of chocolate that melted almost immediately, which was why they were served with miniature chopsticks and plated on a tray inside a tray, surrounded by a moat of ice that had to be refreshed on the half hour. Nora hated high-maintenance food, but Fugusweet had a publicist and three celebrity investors, women who never ate an entrée, let alone a dessert, but who hosted the launch party and provided quotes to the food magazines. They had been featured in
InStyle
. She should have guessed.

Joy came up next to her and adjusted one of the platters a half inch to the left. “I know. I know. I order the desserts and then at some point at three in the morning I always wonder why I didn’t call you. We have this conversation every year, don’t we?”

“We do, and then you say, ‘Because I think of you as Lauren’s mom who happens to bake, not as a baker who happens to be Lauren’s mom.’ It’s okay. Really.”

“Oh God, do I say exactly the same thing every year?”

“Pretty much,” said Nora. “But seriously, if I did the food I wouldn’t have a good time, which is what I say every year.”

Joy smiled, adjusted the tray back to its original position, fixed her gaze on a row of mango and papaya rolls with green-tea marshmallow filling, and waited for Nora to say what she was supposed to say.

“Oh, listen, forget dessert, congratulations on Katie and Williams. It’s great, really great. Sort of makes this a big celebration for all of you.”

“Well, we’re thrilled for her, I must say. You holding up okay?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Well, Lauren not filing at the last minute like that. It must’ve made you crazy. Having to wait now with everybody else must…”

“We talked it over.” Nora was amazed at how easily the lie slid out of her mouth, how nimbly she and Joel and Lauren had transformed a foolish error into a consensus strategy. “She wanted more time. I understand that. We’re fine. She’ll have a nice choice in April.”

“I’m sure she will. I just don’t have the stamina, I have to tell you.” Joy reached over to grab a chunk of white-chocolate roll and pointed her laden chopsticks in Nora’s direction. “Want to give me your professional opinion?”

Nora shook her head. “No, no. Too many good appetizers before I get to dessert. Where is Katie? I should congratulate her in person.”

Joy waved in the general direction of the house. “Do I know? Changing her dress or something. Making an entrance. Where’s Lauren? I’m going to tell her to hang in there.”

Nora made an equally vague gesture toward the tables by the swimming pool, betting that the demands of being the perfect host would keep Joy from following through. There was no such
thing as privacy midway through senior year, and she might as well stop trying to act as though there were. She could be more productive saving Joel, who was being bored silly by the tax attorney who lived next door to Dan and Joy. They saw him every year at the party, and every year he assumed that they had forgotten him.

“It’s easy, really,” he always said. “I’m the only guy from my class at Yale who didn’t join the CIA,” and they would laugh and talk about spook movies until an empty plate or an empty glass gave them an excuse to move on.

Katie was ready to go as soon as the little dashes of blood dried. She had almost made it out the door, but she lingered a moment too long in front of the mirror, and it hit her, as it did on an almost hourly basis, that she was the envy of pretty much everyone but herself. She was in early at Williams, she was the other seniors’ dream come true, except that she would always wonder if she would have been happier at Yale. No. She would always wonder if she would have been happier with a choice she had made herself.

She sat on her desk chair, the skirt of her dress hiked up and wrapped around her waist and her underwear down around her ankles, and considered her fingernails, which was where the trouble had started. A week before the beginning of junior year, Katie had decided that shredded cuticles and battered nails were no way for a college applicant to present herself to the world. Her stubby nails barely made it to the end of the nail beds, and ellipses of dried blood marked the places where she had tugged too hard on a hangnail. An Ivy League admissions officer was not going to want to shake hands with those mangled paws, so Katie had announced to her parents that the bad habit ended that day. She never did it again.

While her mother marveled at her self-discipline and her father praised the quality of her handshake, Katie cast about for a replacement activity to soothe her nerves. She found it by accident one day, when her brand-new Tweezerman slipped past her left eyebrow and nicked her left hand, which was pulling the eyebrow taut for easier tweezing. A single drop of blood bloomed in the space between her thumb and forefinger. It hurt, enough to notice but not to last, enough to be exactly the kind of wicked little thrill she was looking for.

It felt good and bad all at once, and the only question was how she might do it again without drawing attention. Because she spent a lot of time in public in a tank suit, she had few options—and because she had far more self-respect than the real cutters she heard about, the ones who went at themselves with no regard for the possibility of permanent scarring, she was not going to slash hash marks on the insides of her thighs, even if she could. This was not that. This was her own private joke until she left home. She settled on the line between her pubic hair and her belly, which she punctured with the point of the tweezers, not often, but every now and then, never more than two cuts at a time, none of them longer than a quarter inch. She waved her hand back and forth over the two little marks and pressed a finger against them to make sure they were dry. Almost.

She ought to be happy. She knew she ought to be happy, which made everything worse. She got no pleasure from being better off than friends who had to wait until April to find out where they were going. She took no solace from Ted’s sermonette about the seniors who went to “Whew U,” which was whatever school accepted them, because the fate of kids who were lucky to go to college at all had nothing to do with her. That was like saying she should be grateful for soggy French fries because people somewhere were starving—not that Williams was the equivalent of soggy fries, obviously not, but the point remained. If the world as
her family defined it was the Ivy League universities plus Williams, and if her personal rankings put Yale ahead of Williams, then in a way, she had failed.

Katie stopped herself. She would feel better, she knew she would, as soon as she got out of this house and away from Crestview and the circle of friends that was beginning to smother her. She had no idea that it was possible to be seventeen and happy, because she mistook her chronic dissatisfaction for ambition and assumed that true happiness was by definition farther down the road, after she had reached some of her goals. Anyone who seemed to be enjoying herself now—Chloe, or even Lauren—was not working hard enough on her future.

She rubbed her hand more vigorously across her belly and turned her palm up for inspection.

Done. Good. She pulled up her new ivory lace bikinis and smoothed her dress. Time to get downstairs and accept congratulations. Some of the guests probably were not aware that Williams was number one on the
U.S. News & World Report
list of liberal arts colleges.

This year’s party was a particular minefield, because so many of the guests had children at Crestview. The seniors took refuge at the far end of the pool; whenever Nora looked over she saw Lauren, Brad, and Chloe huddled at a table, joined occasionally by Katie and her posse of early-decision friends, Mike at Williams, Jim at Wesleyan, Jeanie at Penn, the latter allowed into the inner circle because she posed no threat to Katie in terms of the boys, not until she got her complexion under control. If a parent veered in their direction they scattered like nervous prey animals, pretending to need more food or drink, settling back in their seats only after the threat had faded. And it was all too easy to distinguish parents of earlies from the rest: they mingled aggressively, trolling for adults
who had not yet heard the good news, while the parents of deferrals and regular applicants gravitated toward the dance floor or tried to engage a server in small talk.

“I’m thirsty,” said Nora, to the strains of “White Christmas” with a salsa beat. “How’s the bar look?”

Joel peered over her shoulder at the bar. “Trey’s just ordering a drink, Deena’s up next, and the guy who always says his son is on the Harvard track is drinking something blue.”

“This is crazy. We have nothing to be worried about. Do we?”

“I like the way you phrase that. ‘We’re fine. Aren’t we?’”

“I just hate it when Joy noses around.”

“Oh, please. What’s the second-best thing about your kid getting in early, other than your kid getting in early?”

Nora drew back to look at him.

“I’ll bite. What’s the second-best thing about your kid getting in early?”

“Somebody else’s kid’s not. People don’t put decals on their cars because they need to be reminded where their kids go to school. They put them on to impress the person behind them at the traffic light. Joy’s happy about Katie going to Williams, but she’s happier”—and he pushed the
er
for emphasis—“because Lauren doesn’t know what she’s doing yet.”

Trey did not believe in luck, but he did appreciate coincidence, and he was pleased to see Alexandra walking toward him with a plate of desserts as he started talking to Lauren’s parents. Now he had a reason to stay put for a while, and they had an obligation to sit with him, because Alexandra could be counted on to flit right off again and it would be rude to leave him there to eat alone. Ten minutes earlier and he would have been stuck talking about financial aid with that daft woman whose kid had left Crestview before
junior year. Ten minutes later would have put him who knows where. He was grateful for his wife’s timing, if a little sad that it in no way illustrated a special sensitivity on her part.

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.