The Admissions (10 page)

“What house were you?”

“Excuse me?” Gabe thought he might have missed the beginning of the conversation.

“What house were you. At Harvard.”

“Oh.”
Gabe’s heart jumped a little bit and he rushed to explain. “My wife is a realtor, so when I hear something about a house…” He wondered if maybe he could persuade Abby to travel down a different conversational path.

A group of young women, maybe six or seven years older than Abby, sat themselves at two of the shorter, light-colored tables. There was a lot of hugging and some localized shrieking. One of the young women had a little mewling baby in one of those front-sling things, which didn’t seem to dampen her enthusiasm for hugging or being hugged. Nora had used one of those; he remembered Angela in it, peering out like a possum with her moon eyes. Funny, he couldn’t recall either of the other two girls in it.

“So…,” said Abby, peering at him from around the rim of her wineglass when she lifted it for her final sip. Gabe still had half of his left. He was not, all things considered, as much of a wine guy as he sometimes pretended to be. He preferred bourbon or beer. Again Abby said, “What house?”

Gabe cleared his throat. Abby’s expression was inscrutable. That was a good SAT word:
inscrutable.
Of course, Angela’s SAT scores were already signed, sealed, delivered.

Carefully, as though he had been charged with pronouncing each letter of the word individually, he said, “Adams.”

Abby said, “I was Eliot.”

Gabe looked around the bar. The shrieking pentagon of women had ordered three half liters. The traffic was still going strong. The light was fading.

“Eliot’s a good one. I had some friends in Eliot.”

“How’d you like Adams?”

“I liked it. I loved it.” He paused, searching for a way to elaborate. Finally he said, “It was a long time ago.”

Abby signaled to the waitress. “I’ll have another,” she said. “Something different this time…let’s see, wasn’t there a Pinot?”

“We have two Pinots: a Sonoma, and a Russian River Valley.”

“I’ll have the Sonoma.” She smiled and turned back to Gabe. “Make my dad proud, you know.” She paused to glance at her phone, then said, “Sorry,” and smiled again. “What was your favorite thing about Harvard? Not the weather, of course.”

Gabe chuckled again; the chuckle was starting to come sort of naturally now. That was good. He could do this. “Actually I liked the weather. Reminded me of home. My wife would move back there if the rest of us would. She’s a New Englander. But I think it’s better here. Everything’s better here.”

Abby’s second glass of wine was a third of the way gone. For a slender person, she could really throw it back. “So then what was your favorite thing? Did you ever pee on the John Harvard statue?”

Gabe shifted. “Once.”

“You’re lying.”

How right she was. “Okay, fine. I didn’t. But I always felt like I should have.” When he took Angela for her Harvard tour last year he had allowed her to rub the toe of the statue’s left foot for good luck.

“It’s not even John Harvard, you know. On the statue.”

“I know. They didn’t have a picture of him so the sculptor used his friend’s face.” Was it getting a little warm in Barrique? Gabe rolled up his sleeves.

“Did you do the Primal Scream?”

The undergraduate streaking, midnight on the last night of reading period. “That,” said Gabe, “I did do.”

Maybe Gabe was paranoid or actually crazy, but it
almost
seemed like Abby Freeman was
quizzing
him. He was starting to sweat. “Didn’t you have some more questions about Elpis?”

The baby in the sling began to cry—it was the sort of cry that rose above the general hubbub of bar noise. A primal scream of its own.

“I did,” said Abby Freeman. “But can you believe it? I’ve forgotten what they were. I guess I should have written them down.” She tipped back her glass and swallowed the rest of the wine. “And I just remembered, I have to meet a friend. But this conversation was really helpful, all the same.”

All of Gabe’s organs seemed to suddenly cave in on him. The thudding of his heart was loud enough that he thought Abby might hear it. He put his hand against the table to steady himself. Abby was squinting at him. He cast about for his poker face and wired it on, secured it as tightly as it would go, and said brightly, “No worries! We can pick this up another time.”

She knows,
he thought.
She knows.

Seven and a half milligrams, the night before.

Butterflies in Angela’s stomach. Edmond Lopez was in the back of the room, tapping his pencil.

Or were they heart palpitations? She wasn’t sure. Could be the pills.

On the way to class Henrietta had grabbed Angela’s arm and said, “Have you finished your Harvard essay?”

“No.” Angela had started it several times, but had yet to get past the fourth paragraph.

“Me either.” Pause. “Ever wish you had a dead parent to write about?”

“No!”
said Angela, genuinely horrified. “Of course not. Have
you
?”

“Of course not, me either,” said Henrietta, a little too quickly. “I’ve just heard kids talking like that, that’s all.”

“What kids?”

“I don’t know. Just kids.” Because Henrietta’s hair was pulled back into a ponytail Angela could see that the tips of her ears were turning red. This was Henrietta’s tell, a sign that she was embarrassed.

Ms. Simmons was wearing clothes that looked like they came straight out of the laundry hamper. And not the clean laundry hamper. Rumpled tan pants and an off-white sweater with a gray smudge on one sleeve. Angela felt embarrassed for her, but she liked Ms. Simmons (liked her a
lot,
actually, she was smart and super-engaging) so she tried her hardest not to notice.

Ms. Simmons had young children—she talked about them all the time. A boy named Orvis (seriously) and a girl named Charlotte. (“After Charlotte Brontë,
natch,
” said Henrietta.) Orvis went to a progressive preschool in the city and Charlotte was too young for school. Apparently Mr. Simmons was a stay-at-home dad. She had mentioned that to her mom once and her mom said they must have a trust fund: so close to the city on a teacher’s salary!

One of their first assignments, an in-class exposition of two poems, had earned Angela the word
Marvelous!
in Ms. Simmons’s red felt-tip pen. (Henrietta had gotten
Good work.
With no exclamation point. Angela had never asked Maria.)

They used a book called
Joy of Vocabulary
to study for biweekly quizzes. Angela was such a nerd that she really did get joy out of the vocabulary. She
loved
vocabulary. Correction. She
apotheosized
vocabulary.
Dichotomy. Tithe. Inchoate.
Beautiful, specific words with beautiful, exact meanings.
Antepenultimate:
coming immediately before the next to last. I mean, come on. What a perfect word.

Ms. Simmons cleared her throat and rustled some papers on her desk. Then she said, “So far this quarter we’ve been reading deeply for meaning
and
pleasure. And in particular the pleasure that comes from understanding meaning. I want you to think about that, when you’re choosing your topics for your extended essay. Really
think
about that.”

The extended essay was due the Friday before Thanksgiving.

“Just my luck,” Henrietta whispered. “Right after my birthday.”

Angela didn’t approve of the phrase
just my luck.
In her view, luck was negligible. You made your own luck.

Angela wouldn’t turn eighteen until February. It sort of drove her crazy that Henrietta was older. In the row behind her she heard Edmond Lopez tap-tap-tapping on his desk with a pencil. She tried not to notice. She definitely tried not to think about his beautiful full lips and the way he looked in a baseball cap. Which he was not allowed to wear in class, but usually he did it anyway until a teacher asked him to remove it. Ms. Simmons hadn’t asked yet; maybe she hadn’t noticed.

Angela turned around once. Edmond grinned at her. She thought for a second about how nice it might feel to lay her head on Edmond’s muscled chest (it would be smooth and caramel colored) and stay there for a long time. And then…well, who knew. She grinned back and tried to maintain her
tenuous
hold on her equilibrium. Her equilibrium had been questionable all day, maybe all week. All month, really. Maybe it had been tenuous forever and she was just starting to notice. Or more likely it was the pills.

(“What’s the
matter
with you, Angela?” her mother had said to her just the day before, when Angela dropped a water glass on the kitchen floor, then burst into uncharacteristic tears and stomped off to her bedroom. It was bad behavior, uncharacteristic, but she couldn’t help it. The glass shattered, but she didn’t even clean up the mess. She’d been a total jerk. But it wasn’t her, not the real her. It was some other being that took over sometimes, since she began taking the pills. A jittery, unfriendly alien.)

“Angela?” said Ms. Simmons. “Did you have a question about the essay?”

“Nope,” said Angela. “Sounds great.”

“Good,” said Ms. Simmons. “My expectations are high for all of you.” Was it Angela’s imagination, or did she fix Angela with a look that was especially meaningful? Angela swallowed hard. What was it like to be Edmond, with way fewer expectations on him?

What was it like to be anyone else, anyone at all?

She’d have the Harvard application off in less than a month. She was almost done. She had her test scores (enviable), her two letters of recommendation (stellar). Transcripts (to die for, obvi). She had to finish the Harvard questions and the essay. The essay was rattling her. (What would it feel like to press
Submit
on that application, to have it out of her hands? Then she could settle down, relax. Nail the extended essay for Ms. Simmons. Run her heart out. Graduate. Move on with her life, away from high school. And etc. She tried to quiet her heartbeat. She was almost there.)

Angela glanced over at Maria Ortiz, who was smiling in a way that seemed private, like Angela was trespassing just by looking at her.
God.
There it was, that little burst of jealousy that popped out around Maria. Not that her poetry even
rhymed
or anything, not that people necessarily
understood
it, at least Angela didn’t. But still, she’d been published. She was an actual published poet. Angela felt weird and inferior whenever she thought about that. Thank God for her GPA, and for her math talent. She was going to hold on to that valedictorian position if she had to grow claws to do it.

11:16 p.m.

M—

Remember that time I went out to see you and Mom and Dad with Maya when she was tiny? Well, of course you remember! It’s not “that time,” it’s “THAT TIME,” in caps and bold. I was so stressed out back then. (Not like now, when I am the picture of calm and serenity, right?) People said so many things to me in those days. Sometimes I got the honest: “You look exhausted.” Sometimes it was the misguided rallying cry: “I don’t know how you do it!” Or even the downright bitchy (just that one lady in Safeway, really, she was awful): “If you can’t get off your cell phone long enough to control your children, miss, maybe you shouldn’t have so many.” (It was a work call! I was submitting an offer!)

But nobody ever said, “I’m afraid you’re going to hurt the baby.”

How come nobody ever said that, Marianne? I would have listened. I would have paid attention. I would have.

Nora was in the middle of the inspection for the Watkins home. She was so happy about these buyers that she felt like singing. This would make the Marin dwarf flax situation infinitely better; when (if?) she told Arthur about the Miller house, she would have the Watkins sale in her back pocket. The biggest sale the office had seen in some time.

In California this—the days-long period between when an offer was accepted by a seller and when the buyer signed off on the inspections—was called the
investigation
period, which Nora always found a little over the top, as though they were all members of a secret government organization charged with uncovering foreign terrorists. But never mind: it was what it was. It was October, and autumn in the Hawthorne house was clicking along on schedule. Well, mostly. There was the reading thing, for Maya. Seamus O’Malley had increased the practices for Cecily’s ceili team. Angela was like a seventeen-year-old ghost floating through the house with gray circles underneath her eyes.

The sellers had to vacate the premises, so Lawrence and Bee drove off in Lawrence’s midnight-blue Mercedes.

“Take your time!” said Nora, waving them off. “Go have a picnic or something.” The old Nora, the better Nora, might have shown up with a basket filled with goodies and a list of three or four wonderful picnic spots within a thirty-minute drive. But she had to stop by Cecily’s school before the inspection to drop off her forgotten violin (third time in as many weeks), and then she had to run a check by the Irish dance studio that she knew Maddie would forget to deliver if asked, and they were completely, totally out of food, so she grabbed a few groceries and ran them back to the house, where she noticed a load of laundry that she’d forgotten to start the night before, so she did a quick sort and threw it in, but then she saw that the lint catcher in the dryer had gone dangerously unemptied—there was almost enough lint in there to knit a sweater for an overweight adult—so she paused to clear it, and while doing that she snagged a nail on the lint catcher (did that thing have an official name?) and it broke so close to her finger that it drew blood, so she had to go in search of a Band-Aid in the bathroom that the girls shared. There, appropriately bandaged, she stopped herself from straightening Cecily’s hair accessories, strewn over the bathroom like rice at a wedding, the lovely little boxes she’d purchased from the Container Store unused. She was almost late for the inspection (an offense of the highest order), and there was certainly no time to organize a picnic for anyone. Though it would have been nice.

Lawrence and Bee waved back; they were jubilant and assured, like grandparents at the height of enjoying their retirement, before it sank in that life was long and there really wasn’t, at the end of the day, all that much to do with it.

The buyers were a technology couple (Google stock, Apple stock, Facebook stock: the Triple Threat of the Bay Area) who were now heavily involved in a venture capital firm whose name was not familiar to Nora but that had, when passed by Gabe, elicited a knowing nod and two fingers rubbed against his thumb: the universal signal for bricks of money. It was not a signal Gabe typically employed, but no matter. Money was what they wanted in this case.

The inspector was from New England—Nora picked out his accent at once. Massachusetts, he said, north of Boston, and immediately Nora felt like they were in good hands. He was like the men she had grown up near, friends of her parents, ruddy, good, solid men, salt of the earth, men who had one suit and one set of manners for both weddings and funerals.

“I never go back there,” he said, as he whipped out a bunch of forms and offered them to the buyers for signing. Disclosure after disclosure after disclosure. Release from indemnity. God forbid anyone in this industry take responsibility for their own actions, ever. And if a specimen of Marin dwarf flax had been standing there with them, and if plants had heads, surely it would have nodded. “With the weather.” (He said
weathah,
and Nora experienced a small shudder of nostalgia and recognition.) “What’s the point? I make everyone come to me. Who doesn’t want to visit California, right?”

“Right,” said Nora.

The female buyer had just the barest pregnancy bump showing through her fashionably fitted tunic, and though to Nora’s eye neither she nor her husband looked much older than Angela—they both had taut, glowing skin and glossy dark hair that suggested a variety of expensive pomades and straighteners—she knew, of course, that they were. They would have to be, to have earned all that money. (She couldn’t help it, she put “earned” in air quotes in her mind, though honestly she recognized that her own business would have suffered long ago were it not for the tech dollars around here.) When they entered the home the woman looked at Nora’s stockinged feet—she had left her shoes carefully lined up in the entryway—then down at her own knee-high boots, and said, “I’m sorry, I just can’t…the bending…these are impossible to get off.”

“No worries,” said Nora, though when she pictured Bee’s face if she ever found out about the boots she was tempted to kneel down, Prince-to-Cinderella style, and get them off herself, buckle by expensive buckle. The woman put her hand on her belly in the self-protective gesture of early pregnancy, and Nora refrained from asking her how in the world she’d gotten the boots on in the first place.

“Okay, then,” Nora said brightly, sociably. “I’ll leave you all to it, and I’ll be right here if you need me.”

One hour, then two hours, then three. Nora was starving. She settled in at the kitchen island with her laptop. She helped herself to Lawrence’s wifi—not password protected, very surprising—and tried to look extremely busy, though in fact she was keeping an ear out for all that was going on during the inspection.

The gardens outside the Watkins home were in full bloom, and the sun had emerged from the morning fog and was obligingly outdoing itself, sparkling over the bay, illuminating the Golden Gate. Nora could not have asked for a more perfect inspection day if she’d ordered it out of the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog.

Goodness, she was hungry. Had she eaten breakfast? She’d made scrambled eggs for the girls, which they’d consumed enthusiastically (Cecily) and warily (Angela) and not at all (Maya; she’d asked for cereal, which, as anyone knew,
did nothing for your brain
), but Nora didn’t think she’d taken any herself. In her bag she found an elderly Luna bar, which she opened and unstuck from its wrapper. She chewed it very slowly, like a prisoner of war granted her one meal for the day. She opened the refrigerator and pretended to be conducting her own inspection of the appliances, but really she was looking to see if there was anything in there that wouldn’t be missed. Blocks of cheese wrapped in wax paper, a corked partial bottle of Chardonnay, a few jars of pâté, unsweetened coconut milk, and a dark jar of flax oil that looked like something you’d buy at an old-fashioned apothecary. Also a couple of eco-friendly take-out containers. Rich people’s food, and not much of it. This shouldn’t be a shock. Bee was as svelte as a greyhound. That’s what she was thinking when her cell rang.

“Lawrence!” She filled a glass with water from the faucet—maybe water would fill her up, wasn’t that the oldest dieting trick in the book?—and placed it on the counter. No need for Lawrence to hear her gulping. He might think it was the Chardonnay!

Lawrence wanted, of course, to know how everything was going. When they might be done, when the buyers would see the inspection report. And so forth. When they could do the final signoff on the P&S.

“So far so good,” said Nora. “I’m just staying out of the way, you know, letting them do their thing. And it will take a few days for everything to get sorted out. But don’t you worry! Nothing should come up, in a house like this.”

“It’s already perfect,” said Lawrence.

“Exactly. More of a formality, in this case, the inspection, you know.”

“I know.”

From the garage she heard a tap-tap-tapping. Thank goodness Lawrence couldn’t hear—he was the type to freak out at any noise at all, at any hint of a noise.

“What’s that?” said Lawrence. “That tapping?”

“You
heard
that?” Nora moved the phone away from her mouth and drank a quarter of the water. Somehow it made her hungrier. “Lawrence, it’s nothing, they’re in the garage. Probably looking at the fuse box.” She listened to Lawrence for a moment and then said, “I don’t know what he’s tapping at. I’m not out there. Do you want me to go out there? No? Okay, exactly right, I think it’s better if I stay out of the way.” She waited while Lawrence spoke away from the phone, presumably relating this piece of non-information to Bee. “Now, you go off and enjoy your day, Lawrence,” said Nora. “You leave the rest of it to me. You have nothing to worry about, not a thing.” This was absolutely untrue, but Nora said it like a career liar, like a Vegas poker dealer. A sale like this could get derailed by the most minor of issues; in many ways, the home inspection was the biggest nail-biter of the whole transaction. That’s why she felt sick to her stomach: it was a particular kind of torture, waiting here to see what might or might not be uncovered. It was a combination of that and the geriatric Luna bar.

Once Lawrence hung up she checked her email. Arthur Sutton had written back, one word, or really a partial word:
thx.
“That’s it?” she said aloud. “Not even a ‘keep me posted’?”

She began an actual email to Marianne, who had written to inquire about their holiday plans: Were the Hawthornes making the trip east? Or should Marianne ship gifts? Marianne was one of those super-early holiday shoppers who would have been easy to resent if it weren’t for her heart of gold. Marianne never engaged in Black Friday madness, not because the deals weren’t good and not because she didn’t have her list ready but because by the time Black Friday rolled around and people were lining up at Walmart and Target, preparing for the inevitable fisticuffs over forty-percent-off flatscreens, Marianne was
already done.
No wonder the city of Pawtucket valued her so highly.

Marianne wrote her emails formally, with a salutation and a signature and proper punctuation and spacing. Paragraphs, too. Marianne owned an iPhone but rarely used it for texting, even though, three years Nora’s junior, she should have been more tuned in to the power and beauty of electronics. (“Who am I going to text?” asked Marianne. “My dirt-poor clients? Uh, I doubt it.” Marianne had just taken on the case of a man who was accused of setting fire to his low-income housing unit. “Did he do it?” Nora wanted to know. “Innocent until,” said Marianne. “Innocent until.”)

Dear Marianne,
typed Nora.
I need to check with Gabe again. Definitely not Thanksgiving. The flights are outrageous and we are swamped. Maybe Christmas? Not sure yet. Crazy fall here, as you know.

Marianne would understand.

She felt like she should say something more to Marianne, something meaningful and sisterly, but she knew if she didn’t send the email now she’d get caught up in the tide of her day and she’d never send it at all.

Just then Nora heard a ticking down the hallway, followed by a sigh of such self-pity and despondency that if Nora hadn’t known better she would have thought it had come from a child. But it was no child, it was the female buyer, clicking toward Nora in her expensive boots. She ticked into the kitchen and stood for a minute with a slightly pained expression until Nora, pulling her eyes away from her computer, organized her features in what she hoped was an agreeable manner and said, “Want to sit down?”

“Oh,
could
I?” said the female buyer, whose name, Nora knew, was Courtney. But out of a self-imposed sort of superstition she tried to refrain from getting personal with buyers until all papers were signed. Just in case something fell through. She referred to them, in her head, and with Arthur Sutton and the rest of the staff at Sutton and Wainwright, as Mr. Buyer and Mrs. Buyer. Or Mr. Buyer and Mr. Buyer, as the case may be, this being the Bay Area. It was the same principle that lay behind the idea of not getting too attached to the first puppy you saw in a litter, lest you find out he or she was already spoken for.

“Of course.” Nora made a great show of moving the laptop out of the way to make room for Courtney, though truly the island was long enough to comfortably seat a family of ten. “You must be tired.”

“You don’t even know,” said Courtney pleasantly, without blame or judgment, and Nora refrained from saying,
Oh, but I do!
and instead said, “How far along?”

“Five months,” said Courtney, with a toss of her sleek, black, tech-savvy hair. She allowed her left hand to linger on her belly in a gesture that was at once self-protective and show-offy. Even Nora, who knew almost nothing about fine jewelry, could see that the engagement ring and wedding band Courtney was wearing were very intricate and very expensive. Courtney went on, “Everybody says I’m so tiny but I don’t
feel
tiny—”

Oh, Lord. Marianne would have had a field day with this woman. Heart of gold aside, there was nothing Marianne liked less than a person who wedged a compliment someone else had given her into an unrelated conversation.