Getting In: A Novel (10 page)

Katie knew two things: whenever her mother began a sentence with “Honey,” whatever followed was not a statement of genuine concern but the thing her mother knew she ought to say, and whenever her father mentioned money the conversation was effectively over. She had nothing to lose. She might as well try to make them feel as bad as she did.

“They had these reading rooms,” she said, a tiny crack in her
voice. “In every building. A quiet room where you could sit and read.” In fact, Katie had not seen a single reading room, because her tour group lingered too long in the library to have time to visit the residence halls, but Lauren had gone crazy for the reading rooms and had sworn that if she had the grades for Yale she would have sat in one of those rooms for a quiet hour every single day before dinner. As Lauren did not have the grades, and Katie did, she felt free to borrow the story.

Dan allowed himself an affectionate chuckle. “I think we can assume that there are similar rooms at Williams.”

The image of herself in a room she had never seen at Yale, sharing a pizza she would never eat with a handsome boy she would never meet, disappeared, just like that. Suddenly, Katie wanted only to be done talking about colleges.

“Never mind,” she said. “I’ll try Williams first. Done. Is there something for dessert?”

At six in the morning, an hour before his shift began,
Steve was at the curb with three soft, clean rags, wiping down the Mercedes and wishing that he had covered parking, or at least a driveway where he could set up one of those aluminum-frame carports. The biggest of the three cottages on the lot got driveway and garage privileges, so the smaller two had to settle for being grateful for a space within a half block of home. It added twenty minutes to his morning routine, but he was not about to pull away from the curb with dew drying in dusty rivulets on every square inch of sheet metal. He wiped, folded the dirty side of a rag to the inside, wiped and folded again, and when he was done he rinsed the dirty rags with a garden hose and spread them on the fence to dry. He checked the cab’s interior for discarded water bottles and crumpled-up protein-bar wrappers, placed a fresh six-ounce bottle of Evian in each of the rear-seat cup holders, and settled into the driver’s seat with his thermos of black tea and a copy of
USA Today
, ready to catch the calls that came too early for his more shift-bound coworkers and too late for the night guys who were already on their way home. When the first call came, an airport run at an address less than a mile away, he told the dispatcher he had it, folded the newspaper and put it in the back pocket of his seat, for the customers, and took off down a side street that was much faster than the main street the other drivers used.

The door of the house was already open, and as Steve pulled up to the curb the man who stood in the doorway turned to yell
“Let’s go” at someone still inside, turned again, and marched toward the cab. Steve was quicker. He had opened the trunk and the passenger doors and was on the sidewalk, arm outstretched to relieve the man of his suitcase, before his fare got the front gate open.

“Two more coming,” Joel said.

Steve hoisted the bag into the open trunk. “Then you prefer to sit in front?” he asked. He had once had a neighbor who drove a town car for Music Express, until the night a couple of DEA agents altered his career path, and when Steve first got the cabbie job he had grilled the young man about the amenities that made a Music Express ride worth more than twice as much as the fare on Steve’s meter, even though his cab was a Mercedes. The morning wipe and dust, the water bottles, the newspaper, the clean passenger seat in front so that a party of three would not have to crowd into the back, these were the extras Steve offered his fares, to distinguish himself from his coworkers and, with luck, to increase his tips.

Joel glanced at his watch and resisted the urge to make a guy’s joke about how long it took his wife and daughter to get out the door. The distinction between him and them, which he thought about often, had nothing to do with gender: he stepped, and they leapt; he managed his time, and they burst through the door with a great antic eagerness. The difference was what he liked the most about them. When he proposed to Nora, he had offered her a deal. She would keep him from getting stodgy, and he would keep her from fretting herself to death.

Steve loaded the rest of the suitcases in the trunk, ran around to the driver’s door, and settled in.

“LAX,” said Nora.

“Delta,” said Joel.

Steve smiled. He had driven his share of eager parents and silent teens to the airport early on a weekday morning. “College trip,” he said. It was an assumption, not a question.

“That’s right,” said Nora.

With that, Steve rolled the Mercedes away from the curb. “My daughter too.”

“On a college trip with your wife?” asked Nora.

“No. She goes to college next year like this girl. Like your daughter.”

“Ah,” said Nora. “But no trip. So she plans to stay in California.”

Steve chuckled.

“No,” he replied. “No need for trip. She want to go to Harvard and not to anywhere else.” He glanced in the rearview mirror at Lauren. “You will visit Harvard?”

Nora tried to change the subject. “The fastest way is down Lincoln,” she said.

“I get you there plenty of time,” said Steve, who proceeded to shoot down a little street that curved over to Lincoln at a stoplight and spared them having to sit at the major intersection through six permutations of turn lights and one-way greens. Joel glanced at his wife and read the thought bubble hovering above her head: in what other ways was their obvious complacency getting them into trouble?

Steve was not done talking.

“My daughter at ten she say to me, ‘Daddy, when I grow up I go to Harvard and you and Mom be so proud.’ I say nothing. It is all up to her, there is no need to push. When she go to high school they call me and my wife to come in. Eleventh grade. We think it cannot be trouble, she get all As, why do they call us?”

He paused to recall and savor the delicious suspense.

“Why did they call you?” Lauren asked.

“It was to say, six AP classes, this is maybe too much even for Elizabeth—that is my daughter, Elizabeth. They worry because no one else in this school ever take so many in one year and what
if she cannot do it? I say, ‘Ask her can she do it, and if she say yes then that is what she must do.’ The principal tell me I can tell her no, I am her father.”

Steve laughed again. “And I say I will not tell her no. I will never tell her no when she wants to do her best.”

They hurtled down Lincoln as Steve described the specifics of Elizabeth’s best. Straight As in all of her AP classes, a 2400 on her most recent SAT, nothing below 780 on each of five SAT achievement tests, two more than required to show that she was well-rounded. Joel stared straight ahead, thinking that the saga of the perfect Elizabeth might end more quickly if he let the cabbie finish his spiel, rather than try to interrupt, and for his silence he got to hear about Elizabeth’s prowess on the violin, her special science research tutorial, and her volunteer work on the pediatric cancer ward, every Sunday after church.

He wondered for an instant if Elizabeth had a sport, but he preferred to assume that she was a klutz, rather than ask and risk finding out that she was all-state champion in the fifteen-hundred-meter. The notion of a pinhole of human frailty, anywhere in her resumé, was a comfort to him—and from the deer-in-the-head-lights expressions on Nora’s and Lauren’s faces, he assumed that they agreed.

When they pulled up in front of the Delta terminal, Steve pointed to a laminated wallet-size photo that was clipped to the cabbie registration next to the meter. “This is Elizabeth, my daughter.
Liz
. She prefers that.” He smiled at Lauren. “Both of you graduates. It is a very exciting time. I wish you all good luck on your trip.”

Lauren gave him a frozen smile, backed out of the cab, and stumbled directly into Nora, who had hopped out and rushed around behind the Mercedes to be at her daughter’s side.

“I know her,” Lauren whispered. “Well, I don’t, but Chloe does. She’s Chloe’s math tutor. She goes to Ocean Heights. She’s perfect.”

“You’re perfect in my book,” said Nora, grateful that the cabbie’s daughter had not set her sights on Northwestern.

Joel paid the cabbie and darted over to them, propelled by his own protective instincts. “Let’s go find a latte,” he said.

Steve waved, got into the cab, and headed back the way he had come until he got to the McDonald’s–Taco Bell duplex that sat on a corner halfway to home. If the day started with an airport run, Steve treated himself to coffee on his return, working his way from one place to another, heading north up Lincoln Boulevard, a broad street that managed to snake through a great deal of prime residential real estate without ever giving up its predilection for cheap eats, lube and body shops, and massage parlors with smoked windows. He rode the wave of all the immigrants who had preceded him: he tried coffee and a bagel, a churro, a cannoli, a slice of strudel, a diamond chunk of baklava, a beignet, a pork bao, and, on the day he got the $50 tip for no reason at all, a mocha latte and a breakfast burrito from two adjacent shops in a mini-mall. One after another plump clerk shook his or her head at the small skinny man who remained a small skinny man no matter how many times he came back for a pastry, and he always smiled—the only part of him that seemed a little worn, for his black hair and his unlined face were as resistant to change as his waistline. Even the clerk who served him the latte, who would never be caught dead more than two pounds over ideal, commented enviously on Steve’s physique. Steve gave each one of them the same answer.

“My daughter,” he said, always relishing the opportunity to refer to her existence, “says I have the metabolism of a hummingbird.” If he got any kind of a response at all, he pulled another copy of the cab photo out of his wallet.

Along the way, he developed a strong preference for McDonald’s hot apple pie. After he ate his first one and bought a second, he pulled a worn copy of the
Thomas Guide
to Los Angeles County out of his bag, turned to a page with a folded corner, and began to
read. From west to east—he used the ocean as his starting point—Romany Drive and West Romany Drive, Lucca Drive, D’Este Drive. From north to south, Umeo Road, Amalfi Drive, Sorrento Drive, Monaco Drive, San Remo Drive, down to Sunset Boulevard. Not quite; the streets above Sunset wiggled and folded back on each other, and he had to turn the map at an angle to get a sense of the layout. He read each name aloud three times, and then he closed the book and drew the grid from memory on the small notepad he always carried in his pocket, labeling each street as he went. He opened the book to make sure he had gotten all of them right, and, satisfied, he closed the book, covered his drawing with a napkin, and recited the names again in order. He lifted the napkin to check his work. Only then did he eat his second apple pie.

Steve intended to work his way through the
Thomas Guide
, week by week, to become a living map of every street between downtown and the ocean, between Pacific Palisades and the airport. Other ambitious drivers used a computerized navigational system and made fun of him for being so old-fashioned. His more passive colleagues refused to learn either the street names or enough English to facilitate a conversation about directions, and depended for success on a wearying array of hand signals, shrugs, and exclamations from their passengers. To Steve, it seemed as though they wanted to punish their American passengers for the fact that they were no longer the engineers, lab technicians, or doctors they had been at home. Steve harbored no such bitter feelings, nor any nostalgic longing for his prior life as an engineer. He and Eun Hee had invested their ambitions in Elizabeth before she was old enough to vote on the matter, and driving a cab was better than painting houses or being the night manager of a convenience store. So he went to Thomas Brothers University, determined to be the best possible cabbie, if that was his fate. No passenger was ever going to lurch forward and poke a finger under Steve’s nose, yelling, “Left. Left, there, God, you missed it.”

Anyone who lived with the chronic fear of rejection—which to  Nora meant every parent of a high school senior, with the possible exception of the Dodsons, the Bradleys, and now the cabbie and his wife—remembered occasionally to entertain the opposite possibility, of stunning good fortune. It was the only way to keep from being too depressed to function. Nora made a mental note every time she heard a come-from-behind story: the unseeded player who trounced the reigning champ at Wimbledon, the dark-horse candidate who beat the incumbent, the dark horse, period, who passed the entire field to deprive the favorite of the Triple Crown. Tommy Lee Jones, for heaven’s sake, who started out somewhere she had never heard of in Texas and ended up Al Gore’s roommate at Harvard and an Oscar winner.

Of course, coming from a small town in Texas must have been an advantage for college admissions.

Nora forced herself to concentrate. What about her own life? A fired researcher one minute and a successful baker the next, without so much as a single week spent in Paris learning the proper wrist cock for cracking an egg one-handed. Tenacity, creativity, an indefinable spark: the unquantifiable parts of a personality had to matter as much as the numbers did, every now and then. No one trafficked in analogies anymore, now that the SAT had abandoned them, but surely it was possible to see:

Nora: Baker

AS

Lauren: _______

“Mom, this is the stop.”

Nora obediently edged her way toward the door of the subway car. She had not even had time to create the multiple-choice
options for Lauren’s happy future. She would have felt better starting the tour if she had.

They climbed upstairs and found themselves right next to Columbia’s massive iron gates, swept onto campus by a tide of people dressed like winter trees, as though someone had found a statistical link between primary colors and applicant rejections. Lauren turned toward the balloon clusters that were the universal symbol for prospective student events, and Nora scurried after her, distracted by a burnished leaf or two on the quadrangle maples, imagining how perfectly still the quad would be on the morning of the first snowfall. She hesitated outside the auditorium to take another look—and in that instant Nora was a freshman again, surrounded by memories. Not the boy who threw up on her new pea coat or the girl who stole her earrings but swore she owned an identical pair, not the day she started to sob because she had no idea what building her philosophy class was in, not the dizzy loneliness that occasionally sidled up behind her in the cafeteria line, or all of those things, but it no longer mattered. The point, really, was the skittish joy of knowing so much all of a sudden, without knowing anything at all in terms of how all this information was going to jell into a life. That great, bewildering excess, that experience, was what they wanted for Lauren.

“Now, this is a campus,” she said. “I think I’m getting smarter just breathing.”

“Mom, there is no way on earth I am going here.”

“Did I say you were? I just said it’s a campus, capital
C
.”

“They take six percent of all applicants. Line up the whole Crestview senior class, pick the best six, maybe seven, and send everybody else home.”