Getting In: A Novel (40 page)

A boy in Seattle was diagnosed with mononucleosis in
August, two weeks before he was supposed to move into his residence hall at Yale. He decided to take a gap year so that he could sleep eighteen hours a day, which opened a spot at Yale for a boy who worried about whether the theater department at Middlebury had decent contacts in New York, which opened a spot at Middlebury for a girl who had been hysterical all summer about drowning at a school as big as Penn, which opened a spot at Penn for a boy who was equally hysterical about being in the middle of nowhere at Oberlin, which opened a spot at Oberlin for a boy who worried despite everything the University of Chicago said about its campus security, which opened a spot at Chicago for a girl who preferred the gritty reality of the south side of Chicago to the suburban sprawl of Northwestern’s lakeside campus.

Which opened a first-quarter slot at Northwestern for Lauren Chaiken.

Thanks to a boy who had to take a nap if he got up to brush his teeth, six disgruntled teenagers and their revisionist parents got exactly what they had been trying for weeks to convince themselves they no longer wanted. Nora and Joel had made a pact to plan family distractions for late August, when Lauren’s friends started heading off to school, but a single phone call from a solicitous Northwestern admissions officer changed all of that. They had three weeks to plan a move that had occupied most of their friends since July.

Nora and Lauren trolled the aisles at Bed, Bath & Beyond with a scanner, pointing it at every item they thought Lauren might need and several they were skeptical about. There was no time to debate whether she would get a lot of use out of a steel floor-to-ceiling shower caddy with four mesh baskets. It showed up on several must-have lists supplied by parents of older children, so they ordered it. They priced full-length down coats at REI and Patagonia and had a fight on a street corner in downtown Santa Monica about whether a wool coat and a sweater might do as well. They bought rain boots and underwear and socks. When Joel pointed out that there were stores in Chicago, they stormed out of the room in opposite directions, but not before reminding him that the whole point of shopping at Bed, Bath & Beyond was to have the order transmitted and filled by the store in Evanston. He did not have the nerve to explain that he was only talking about clothing. He went to Costco and bought two more suitcases.

They bought three plane tickets, one of them one-way, which caused Nora to take refuge in the kitchen and not emerge until she had put a gâteau basque with cherry filling into the oven. Joel visited the websites of all the hotels within a five-mile radius of Northwestern, only to find that they were full during move-in week, so they settled for a hotel eight miles away from campus and rented a car, which they reconsidered and upgraded to an SUV.

Lauren emailed her newly acquired roommate, who turned out to be a musical-comedy star from Newark who had never imagined ending up west of NYU, and who seemed to feel about Evanston the way Lauren had felt about Santa Barbara.

“No matter,” said Nora, blithely. “She’ll be out auditioning all the time. You’ll be busy making your own friends.”

She did not mean a word of it. She was intimidated by the roommate on Lauren’s behalf, but there was no time for ambivalence. Nora had time only for cheerleading, the acquisition of
color-coordinated extra-long twin bed linens, and late-night conversations with Joel about the best way to underwrite their dream come true.

Nora thought she was awake. She was about to call downstairs to ask Joel to turn on the coffeemaker, but when she opened her mouth to speak, she heard, instead, a little girl’s faraway laugh. It was not Lauren. Nora knew that laugh. This one was different, higher, younger, and coming toward her. Someone else began to laugh, and then Nora heard an unfamiliar deep voice, one that she would recall with a start in eight years, when Lauren brought home a man who sounded exactly like that for a significant visit. She heard Joel’s voice, too, and her own intake of breath as she hoisted a little girl, the laughing girl, higher than she thought she was able.

Nora was on a beach with all these people, along with a dog who ran down to the ocean and back, down and back, chasing the waves until the waves chased him. But then Joel turned off the shower, and the sound of the surf ceased, and she began, slowly, to surface.

In that sprung moment between sleep and waking, when it could be any day at all, past or coming, Nora saw her family in what might be right now or might be the future, because she could not tell for sure until she was fully awake. Everything she thought she knew as daily life could be a sleep story; she had dreamt of herself as a grown-up, after all, when she was only eight. The moments she believed she had experienced, before, could all be far ahead in time.

She might not have given the useless floor-to-ceiling bathroom caddy to a friend of Lauren’s roommate who seemed to think she could not live without it. She might not have stood in the middle of the street and waved good-bye to Lauren’s dorm
window. She might not have gone out to dinner with Joel that night and burst into tears when a woman with a baby sat down in the next booth. This might not be the third day without so much as a text message from Lauren, which would require an intervention if they still had not heard from her by dinnertime. All of that might not have happened, not yet.

Joel turned on his electric razor and Nora woke to the sound with a happy, confused jolt, wondering how she had managed to sleep through an alarm clock that in fact would not go off for another ten minutes, wondering how they would ever get Lauren off to Crestview on time—when at that very moment Lauren was settling into her seat for her freshman world literature survey lecture, and the boy who had sat next to her for the last three classes in a row was leaning over to ask if he could borrow a pen. Another blink, another moment, and Nora would realize exactly where she was.

After many years of making sure that every detail was fact, I am grateful to the singular Lynn Nesbit for standing by, as supportive as ever, while I made sure that every detail was fiction. Thanks to Ellen Archer and Pam Dorman for inviting me to do so, and to Barbara Jones and Sarah Landis for their attention and enthusiasm.

The people who read this book or advised me along the way include a friend I have yet to meet in person, a friend who has encouraged me to write fiction since we were applying to college, and astute young readers who served as experts on the high school scene. I am indebted to them all: William Whitworth, Harry George, Nicole Allen, Lesly Gregory, and Benjamin Odell. Special thanks to Ginger Curwen for pretty much everything she ever said about this book, including “Just keep writing.”

Marcie Rothman has been a great and caring friend for a very long time, and I thank her, simply, for that. I’m also grateful to Lori Rifkin, Jo Ann Consolo, Phyllis Amaral, and Vicky Mann, in this case for maintaining group sanity during our stint as the parents of college applicants, and to Sam Freedman for his long-distance support. Thanks as well to the admirable Patty Williams and Annette Duffy Odell.

Given the topic, I’m grateful to my mother and my late father for insisting that I finish freshman year at the wrong college, which enabled me to transfer as a sophomore to the right one; one of their many smart moves.

Thanks to my friends in Sullivan Canyon for continuing not to care what I do, unless it involves a horse. And doting gratitude to Clark and Cassidy, cofounders of the carbonial dog-share program.

More than thanks to the only person I would ever allow to refer to me as “My little chicken.” She knows how much I love her.

My husband and daughter know how much I love them, too, but here are a couple of pertinent reasons why:

Larry Dietz somehow maintains absolute faith in me, even when my own is flagging. I thank him for pretending it’s normal—fun, in fact—to have a wife who expects him to listen while she speculates on whether a fictional girl would or would not do a fictional thing, and further expects him to pretend, convincingly, that such questions have definitive answers.

And Sarah, ever the reader, was my new editor on this project; she took notes and flagged pages and reviewed her comments with me, and I have her spiral-bound copy of the manuscript on my desk, as precious a family heirloom as there can be. I am happy every day because of her, and that was true even when she was applying to college.