Fourth Comings (15 page)

    tuesday: the fifth

thirty-seven

L
ately I can’t shake the feeling that I’m supposed to be doing…
something.
Preparing for…
something.
Getting ready for, and maybe even a little excited about…
something.
I’ll be microwaving half a burrito, reading
The Journal of Abnormal Psychology,
or writing in this very notebook, when I’ll violently jerk with a jolt of anxiety over tasks undone and unknown.

Can you blame me? For the past eighteen years, early September has meant one thing: back to school. This year it means something else entirely: back to school for everyone but me.

I was reminded of this via today’s six
A.M.
wake-up call from Marin. I only answered because her name came up on my caller ID. She has her own cell phone for emergencies, and I’m number two on the auto dial. (After Bethany but before G-Money.)

“Auntie J! It’s me! Marin! Why can’t I see you today?”

Yesterday Marin wanted nothing to do with me, but today I’m worthy of a before-dawn phone call.

“I’ve got a job interview,” I croaked.

“Does that mean you won’t come over to play with me anymore?”

A certain lower lip–jutting peevishness crept into her voice, and I couldn’t bring myself to tell her the truth. “Don’t worry. I’ll still see you all the time….”

Fortunately, Marin has the zigzagging, ping-ponging attention span that is a defining characteristic of being four years old. She had already moved on to the next subject.

“Auntie J!” she squeaked. “You know? I start school today!”

“You excited?”

“Duuuuuh,”
Marin said. “Of course I’m excited! St. Ann’s is the awesomest school in the whole wide world.”

“Most awesome,” I corrected.

“That’s what I said! The most awesomest! And I’m going there! Today!”

Marin is only slightly exaggerating. According to the
Wall Street Journal,
St. Ann’s is the most awesomest private pre-K-to-12 school in the whole country.

“School, school, school,” Marin sang.

I’d sing, too, if I had gotten into St. Ann’s pre-K program. It is not hyperbolic to say that with her acceptance to the “fours,” our little Marin is set for life. I’m proud that my bright, expressive niece charmed her way into the hearts of the St. Ann’s office of admissions. And I’m even prouder of my sister, who stayed remarkably levelheaded throughout the admissions process and didn’t pay a pre-K application packager to mold Marin into “the model four-year-old, an asset to the most selective classroom.” Marin got in on merit, however the hell the “merits” of a four-year-old can be quantified.

“You know? I’m wearing my shiny tap-dance shoes!” she said. “Just listen!” And then I heard the muffled fumbling of the phone, followed by some indistinct shuffling and scraping sounds. “Did you hear that, Auntie J? Did you?”

“I heard.”

“You know what else? I’m wearing my spotty leopard shirt. And you know? My mom says I can’t wear the sweater with the fur because it’s too hot, but I told her that summer is over and it’s back to school and that means sweaters.”

I used to think the same thing. I still sort of do.

“And I’ve got my new backpack, and you know? St. Ann’s is the most awesomest school in the whole wide world for art, and that’s awesome because I’m so good at painting, right? And…”

Lapses in judgment like The Fun Chart™ aside, Bethany has done an amazing job at making sure Marin acts her age, and not like one of those prematurely jaded sophistikids. But I can’t help but worry what will happen now that she’s in the most awesomest school in the whole wide world.

“But I’m also really good at counting. You know? I can count all the way to one hundred! I can do it by ones, fives, and tens. What one do you want to hear today? By ones, by fives, or by tens?”

For as excited as she sounds now, I’m afraid that this early success, when coupled with a desperate and scary need for achievement among her peers—the most privileged kids in this world—will only set her up for future unhappiness. I’m worried that no matter how brilliant and accomplished Marin proves herself to be over the next fourteen years of school, she will feel like a worthless loser if she’s not in the .5 percent of applicants who get accepted for the Harvard Class of 2024.

“Okay! I’ll pick! I’ll do it by fives because I’m going to be five on my next birthday. Five, ten, fifteen…”

The OTB nursery school is the portal to all things OTB. Actually, it starts even earlier with the OTB Mommy & Me. Then moves on to the OTB Pre-K. OTB K. OTB Primary School. OTB Secondary School. OTB High School. All this OTBing is just to get into the OTB University, a distinction that is forever bestowed onto Harvard. Seriously. There was a recent study conducted by a consortium of educational institutions that asked five thousand college applicants to name the one college that was perceived as the best in the country, and the Crimson Tide tsunami-slammed the competition. I can’t remember the numbers exactly, but it wasn’t even close. So all the rest who are less than Only the Best can just look on, and up, with envy. And how do we know this? From the romans à clef written by former nannies, private-school packagers, and college coaches. From celebratory essays in the
New York Times
Styles section, or critical exposés in
Time
magazine. From status car commercials, talk-show segments, and subplots on family dramas.

“Thirty-five, forty…”

Surely the woes of the super-rich have been manipulated into a “phenomenon” by relentless media coverage. I honestly didn’t think that these people really existed in the real world. The real world is filled with families who have two mortgages, never consider private school, and can’t afford to pay a pimply thirteen-year-old babysitter five dollars an hour, let alone hire a live-in nanny. (The real world is where Bethany and I grew up, even after my mom returned to work when I was about twelve, and my dad made his way up the pay ladder by putting in about twenty-five years as a teacher, then as an administrator, with the Eastland School System.) At best, these hyperpriveliged families represented just a teeny, tiny fraction, and those top one-percenters surely didn’t come in contact with the lower ninety-nine….

Until I met them at Columbia. Marcus, you’ll meet them at Princeton, too, the ones who are merely putting on a brave face for the next four years and beyond. They’ll trash-talk at the annual Harvard-Princeton grudge match. They’ll attend the Princeton reunions, don the orange-and-black beer jacket worn by the rest of the members of your graduating class, and strut down Nassau Street in the obnoxious celebration of Tiger pride known as the P-rade. But deep down, they know that there is something missing, the certainty of being OTB.

It would be funny if it weren’t so sad and totally true.

And it doesn’t even matter that Princeton technically ranked ahead of Harvard this year. Education experts have to mix up their annual “Best College” rankings because hysterical parents wouldn’t bother buying their guides if they knew Harvard was going to be number one again. This is why these “Best College” publications are divided into so many inane categories: Best Colleges Named After Important Historical Figures. Best Colleges Seen on TV. Best Colleges That Accept Anyone—and We Mean
Anyone.
Duh. Even the poorest, podunkiest school gets to be the best in its own unique way. Everyone is a winner! Hooray! It’s not all that different from those end-of-the-year ceremonies in nursery school, when even the dumbest, sloppiest, meanest, clumsiest, ugliest kid in the class walks away with a certificate celebrating his Satisfactory Effort.

Of course, Marin is attending a nursery school where none of the children are dumb, sloppy, mean, clumsy, or ugly. The hyperambitious and affluent have never bought into the bargain-bin theory of education, because they could afford not to. For those born into families bred to believe in OTB, nothing else will do. Especially when it comes to privately educating the flesh of their dewy, aerobicized flesh. Again, this is not the reality for most families. Most families cannot afford to pay thirty thousand dollars for preschool, or any of the other stages of OTB. Just look at what happened to my former employer—the Pineville branch of the Accelerated College Coaching and Educational Preparedness Tutorial. ACCEPT! closed within a year of its opening because our hometown population still sports way more blue collars than white.

But OTB
is
the reality for Marin. Privilege, you see, has its membership.

“Auntie J? Are you even listening? You’re so quiet!”

“I’m quiet because I’m listening.”

“Oh! Sixty-five, seventy…”

I don’t begrudge my niece for being born into money, if not class. (Class is far less important than money these days, anyway.) Bethany is naturally inclined to be ambivalent about academics, so perhaps Marin has a fighting chance to actually have genuine fun and not the trademarked variety. I would hate it if she turned into one of those automatons whose achievements are taken for granted as givens, and never fully appreciated or enjoyed. I don’t want everything for her to be the means to an end, only without end, because there will always be another OTB to put on her curriculum vitae.

As the babysitting aunt, I’m allowed to slack off, to skip The Fun Chart™ and cue
Grease 3.
It’s okay to occasionally show her an alternative to OTB. But as a parent, the number one influence in her life, leading by my example would be considered a road to ruin. After all, who am I but a marginally employed idiot who could only get into one of the lesser Ivies?

All of this reminds me of another study I read for
Think.
A UK economist posits that within the next thousand years, humans will divide into two subspecies. As the result of superior interbreeding, the upper class will evolve into seven-foot-tall, supermodel geniuses with pneumaboobs for the ladies and rocketcocks for the gents. The underclass will downgrade to a class of dim-witted, mini-titted, raisin-dicked hobgoblins. It’s not just sci-fi, it’s really happening. I challenge you to spend fifteen minutes in Barneys followed by another fifteen at WalMart and still deny it.

“One hundred! See? I told you I could do it!”

“I never doubted you,” I said.

“Okay! I gotta go now! I love you! You’re the best aunt ever!”

“Maybe not the best,” I said. “But I do okay.”

“You’re the best because you’re miiiiiiiine,” she said before abruptly hanging up.

I can’t save the human race. But I wish I could protect Marin from harm. If only I were able to guarantee that Marin would thrive under my guidance, and that she would always be as self-confident and happy as she was this morning when she counted to one hundred by fives.

thirty-eight

S
o I’m a little jealous of a four-year-old. And she’s not the only one.

You’re at Princeton. Hope is doing her graduate work at Pratt. Len, MIT. Bridget and Percy are finishing up their hers ’n’ his B.A.’s in Metropolitan Studies (hers with a concentration in art and public policy, his in urban ethnography and economics). Manda is also going to NYU part-time for her M.S.W. at the School for Social Work. I’d even heard Shea rapping about enrolling in some sort of deejay-apprenticing program to “perfeck” her “mad turntable skillz,” not that it matters, since I’ll never be seeing her around these parts again.

Most of my friends from Columbia are going on to get advanced degrees. And why not? A Ph.D. is the new M.A., a master’s is the new bachelor’s, a B.A. is the new high school diploma, and a high school diploma is the new smiley-face sticker on your first-grade spelling test. You don’t know most of these people, but again, indulge me as I provide some cogent examples:

Former high school crush-to-end-all-crushes, obsessive object of horniness, and gay man of my dreams Paul Parlipiano is getting his Ph.D. in Sustainable Development at our alma mater’s School of International and Public Affairs. (I have only the vaguest idea of what that even means.) Tanu is at the University of Chicago Law School (“Where Fun Comes to Die!”), which I guess turned out to be an acceptable substitution for medical school in her parents’ estimation. Similarly, Kazuko’s parents both have multiple advanced degrees and will happily fund their only daughter’s efforts to match them diploma for diploma. She’s in the “rhetors” program at Berkeley, a totally esoteric discipline that will never lead to a real job, which I’m sure is just fine with her. ALF (because he—duh—looks like ALF) still has two glorious undergraduate years left at Columbia. As does my ex Kieran, who is still in sad, sad, so very, very sad emo love with the Barnard ’09 Regirlfriend he started sleeping with before he—oops!—stopped sleeping with me.

Just to prove that I’m not exaggerating, here is my complete list of friends/acquaintances my age who
aren’t
going back to school:

1–2. Scotty
(Pineville ’02; nine credits short of Lehigh ’06)
and Sara
(Pineville ’02; ninety credits short of Harrington Country Club and Occasional University ’06)

Babymamadaddy are booked for the next eighteen years.

3. Dexy
(two years at Columbia; six months at Bellevue; twenty-eight credits short of Columbia ’06)

She’s apparently in a state of permanent deferment since the bipolar breakdown she had the summer before our junior year. She works at Eros, an upscale sex shop in SoHo, and—surprise, surprise—she brought her work home with her. Or rather, her work bought her a home.

“I moved in with Daddy!” Dexy yelped the last time I saw her.

“You…what?”

Dexy pouted. “If you read my blog, you would know that. I thought you read my blog. You
said
you read my blog.”

I had stopped reading “Dex and the City” when I kept turning up as the priggish supporting character, the anonymous “girlfriend from Columbia,” scandalized by the leading lady’s reckless inhibition and bacchanalia. (It’s also when we stopped hanging out with any sort of regularity.) Dexy has always been hell-bent on grabbing Manhattan by the balls (both actual and metaphorical). I had always hoped that her blog was 99 percent Bushnell hyperbole, but never more than when she took up with “Daddy.”

“I’m a kept woman.” The throwback expression fit both her appearance and our surroundings. She had insisted on meeting me for drinks at Bemelmans Bar, a sumptuous Art Deco watering hole located at the stately Carlyle hotel. As usual, she was in costume, a houndstooth suit with broad shoulders and a cinched waist that drew attention to her hourglass curves. As she posed at the black granite bar—the wave in her platinum wig dipping low over one knowing eye, crimson Cupid-bow lips sipping a champagne cocktail—she looked just like a troubled dame straight out of 1940s film noir.
I
looked like the anachronism, the chainstore clearance-rack naïf, which was exactly as she had orchestrated it.

“Please,” I begged, “please tell me you’re making this up.”

“I’m making this up.”

“You are?”

“No!” she cheered gleefully, face alight with the scandalousness of it all.

“I don’t want to hear about this,” I said, nursing a club soda because I couldn’t afford anything on the menu and wouldn’t allow her to use “Daddy’s” money to buy my booze. It was the principle of the thing.

“Yes you do,” she insisted.

“No I do not,”
I said emphatically.

Of course, Dexy ignored my wishes and told me much more than I ever needed to know about her courtesan-keeper courtship, right down to the last gray hair on his desiccated testicles. I will spare you such specifics. (Only I just didn’t. Sorry.) All you need to know is that “Daddy” is (a) rich, (b) sixty years old, and (c) newly divorced with four kids all in Dexy’s age bracket, and (d) offered to let her move into his pied-à-terre with views of Gramercy Park after wooing her with the purchase of the two-thousand-dollar One-of-a-Kind Hand-Sculpted All-Natural Volcanic Glass Diletto.

“You’re sleeping with a sexagenarian for money!”

“He prefers sexygenarian!”

My mouth went sour with pregurgitive spit.

And then, as is her custom, Dexy broke into ear-shattering song. “‘Money makes the world go round, of that we can be sure…’” She blew a Bronx cheer. “‘Pfffffft! On being poor!’”

I covered my ears to protect both my hearing and my sanity.

“And it’s not just the money,” she said. “It’s
also
the apartment….”

So there you have it: Someone I consider a friend doesn’t need to go back to school because her living expenses are covered by a Viagra-popping geezer. While Dexy’s drama was kind of vicariously amusing in college, her post–bipolar breakdown behavior is scaring me. And yet I stay friends with her, in part because I feel obligated to serve as a normalizing if totally ineffectual influence in her life. I already regret inviting her to Thursday night’s Care. Okay? karaoke party thrown by…

4. Cinthia Wallace
(too many private schools to list here; GED ’02, Harvard ’06)

Cinthia, aka Hyacinth Anastasia Wallace or Hy, is too busy being the most famous face behind the hipster philanthropic organization called the Social Activists, which has taken the old-money fund-raising model (i.e., black-tie balls, silent auctions) and given it an A-list new-money twist (i.e., stripping for charity, poker tournaments). This doesn’t require an advanced degree, just a grand inheritance from a father she commonly referred to as “that jagoff.”

I sound like one of the haters. Cinthia is routinely mocked for her charitable efforts—you know, trying to shelter the homeless, feed the hungry, and cure the sick, one celebrity-studded Care. Okay? karaoke party at a time. In her defense, she could’ve started a line of “aspirational handbags” or opened a “lifestyle boutique” that sells denim for a grand and plastic rings for a nickel. She could have decided to what-the-fuck? it, drugging and whoring her way back to her roots and re-creating her reign as the underage ur-Hilton of her day. But she didn’t. And that’s admirable. Of course, if I had a fifty-million-dollar inheritance, I could do something pretty damn admirable, too.

But alas, I don’t have fifty million. I have negative sixty-five thousand dollars.

And I not only long for the higher degree that I will never have, but the final semester that never was. Keep in mind that I actually piled on the credits and graduated
one
semester early to minimize my loans by another fifteen thousand dollars or so. This is unheard of in an age when the typical student completes four years in
five and a half.
(My sister was part of that vanguard.) Seriously, it was wise of you to choose a school that has altogether eliminated student loans in favor of grants and work study. Perhaps that’s one advantage of entering college at twenty-three instead of eighteen. You will never know how it feels to owe various lenders approximately sixty-five thousand dollars for your Ivy League diploma, or what it’s like to pay them off in increasingly expensive installments for the next 360 months of your life. One doesn’t have to be a multimillionaire, but it’s a lot easier to be an idealist when you aren’t so deeply entrenched in a hellhole of debt. Because no matter how I consolidate or reconsolidate my loans, I feel like I’m digging out the entire New York City subway system with my Phi Beta Kappa pin.

What I envy most about you and everyone else heading back to school is the certainty of it all. You’ve got a prescribed set of requirements to guide you through the next few years. Focus your energy on the completion of those assignments and you will succeed. Guaranteed. Where’s my syllabus to guide me through life?

But there is hope in the air. Early September is the season for fresh starts, complete with turning-a-new-leaf metaphors and all that. And I’ve got my most promising job interview in months. I’m wearing a featherweight cashmere shell, an impeccably tailored gabardine pencil skirt, and the most sumptuous boots that have ever graced my calloused feet (all on permanent loan from Bethany because I didn’t have the fortitude to fight the crowds of back-to-school shoppers nor the patience to piece together a proper interview outfit from H&M). I’ve got my résumé and sample issues of
Think
stored inside the buttery leather messenger bag my parents bought as a graduation gift. I’ve rehearsed my anecdotes about what it was like to work for the CU Storytellers Project collecting “oral narratives” from total strangers on the streets of New York City. Yes, preparing myself for this interview was almost an adequate simulacrum for the back-to-school rituals of years gone by, when I still naively believed that with the perfect outfit, the perfect backpack, the perfect how-I-spent-my-summer-vacation story, with the perfect reinvention of my former self, my less-than-perfect life could be changed for the better, forever.

(
FOREVER
didn’t arrive in this morning’s mail. Perhaps tomorrow?)