Getting In: A Novel (16 page)

9:55.

A knock, followed by a thin shaft of light and her father’s waggling fingers. His voice came from the other side of the door, the era of barging in having ended the day he walked in before she had properly adjusted the first bikini she ever owned.

“I thought I saw a light,” came his disembodied voice. “Want a coffin and milk?”

She slid the laptop under the covers and dove for her pillow.

“Already brushed my teeth. Thanks anyhow.”

He opened the door wide enough to poke his head in.

“How about an abject apology before you fall asleep.”

It would be quicker than an argument, she thought.

“I’m really tired, Daddy.”

He stepped in, and when she did not snap at him he came over to sit next to her.

“I meant well, I really did,” he said, brushing a nonexistent lock of hair off Lauren’s forehead.

“It’s okay, really it is,” said Lauren. “G’night, Dad.”

“Mom and I only want—”

“Daddy,
please
. I have a calc test tomorrow and I want to study some more before breakfast.”

“Okay. I just needed to say I was sorry, and I hope you accept the apology.”

“I do.” She sat up quickly and kissed him on the cheek. “I have to go to sleep.”

“Right.” He smiled again and she tried very hard not to scream at him to get out. “Okay. I’m going to go have my dessert. There are only maybe twenty of them left for you.”

She closed her eyes and turned toward the buried laptop. “Night.”

“Night.”

She listened to make sure he was headed downstairs, and then she dove under the covers, flipped open the laptop, repositioned the cursor, and clicked
SUBMIT
.

An eerie stillness sank in at Crestview on the following morning. The inland heat sucked a blanket of moist ocean fog over most of the west side, and the thick, dull gray dampness made more than one Crestview senior decide that getting out of bed was too much of an effort. Ted saw more of it every year. “Bird flu,” he called it, as in early birds, which was what his predecessor had called the early-decision applicants, since shortened to Birds and used by everyone who had to deal with them. There was always a slump associated with the filing of a single, high-profile application. For twelve years—fourteen for the kids who were on Mommy and Me waiting lists before their mothers went into labor—Crestview seniors had been told that they were the masters of their fates. And then, with a single keystroke, they handed their futures over to a bunch of overworked strangers who might or might not fully appreciate how special the candidate was. For the first time in
their lives, they ceded control. Sometimes the effort wore them out, and they spent a day in bed.

Regular-decision applicants like Brad came to school because they had no reason not to, but the Birds who came to school had something to prove. Katie showed up to remind everyone that she had nothing to worry about. Lauren, who might have stayed home if her parents had not worked so hard to act as though it were just another morning, took advantage of the fact that seniors did not have to show up for free periods that fell at the beginning or end of the day and skipped the early-morning anxiety stampede. She slipped in at ten, fully intending to sit out the morning break as well, and headed up to the computer lab to send her mother an email.

The fastest way to make a mom happy, all the girls agreed, was to talk to her when there was not an issue on the line. Moms figured you had to talk to them, or at least pretend to listen, when the topic was drinks in open containers or the four thousand excuses boys would use, not any time soon, of course, but someday, to avoid having to wear a condom. Random communications were something special. A daughter who instigated even the most mindless chat was a daughter who had not yet gone over to the dark side—and the comfiest refuge Lauren could think of, at the moment, was to email her mom to find out what she was going to make for dinner.

When Dave moved out, Deena donated the old queen-size
bed to the Salvation Army and splurged on a Tempur-Pedic California king, a bed big enough to accommodate a suitor the size of a basketball star, an outsized and life-embracing bed that had yet to welcome any guest but Chloe when she had cramps. At the moment, the side where Deena did not sleep was covered in clothing. When Deena rummaged around in the closet, it was a genuine hunt for identity. She was what she wore—or rather, she wanted to be what she wore, which was why finding something that fit was such a challenge. She blithely bought clothes that ignored the passage of time, childbirth, and anything resembling propriety. She was quite possibly the most disgruntled size 4 on her block, and surely the only one over forty who owned a pair of burgundy velour sweatpants with the words “Class Act” appliquéd across the seat.

Getting dressed had gotten even harder since Dave moved out, because he took with him the two sure ways to stop Deena: one was to say that whatever she had on made him want to rip her clothes right off, and one was to thrust his wristwatch in her face and say he was leaving without her. Either way, she had to walk out the door or risk missing the very event she was dressing for.

Chloe had not yet devised an equally effective tactic, but she had set a time limit of fifteen minutes for these episodes, ten if she heard profanity, after which she staged an intervention. She perched on the edge of the bed, next to a pair of jeans that Deena
had not worn since Chloe was in middle school, even though they were almost always part of the selection process. They seemed to exist only so that her mother could try them on and reject them.

“Mom.”

Deena wrestled herself free of a black V-neck sweater without ever letting it come to rest on her hips. “Hand me the red top. No. Next to it, over, over, that one. Quick. I’m going to be late.”

“I forget where you’re going.”

“Financial aid meeting.”

“Wow. I didn’t know we had a financial aid person.”

Deena pulled the turtleneck over her head, faced the three-way mirror, and turned this way and that, smoothing the sweater over imaginary bulges. She yanked it down and sucked in her stomach, clasped her hands where a belt would be, sighed, and ruched it up for a softer profile. It was too long, and that was the irremediable sadness of Deena’s life. At five feet tall when she stood up straight, she would never be willowy. She was cute, tiny, even—heaven forbid—petite. She was officially small, despite a mane of highlighted and low-lighted blond hair and a closet full of four-inch heels, and she worried about not having much of a presence.

“Mom. I’m talking to you.”

When Deena turned around there were tears in her eyes and little dots of mascara on her cheeks.

“It’s at Crestview,” she said, in a tone of voice more appropriate to the discovery of a large red wine stain on a favorite blouse. “Thanks to your father, who just so happens to have a prior engagement tonight, ha ha, and we know what her name is, I get to go back to Crestview to humiliate myself by reminding everyone that, also thanks to your father, we don’t quite see how to come up with the money we should have to send you wherever you want to go. I’m going to sweat to death in this.”

Chloe reached for a blue silk top, which she handed to her mother as the red sweater landed on the floor.

“But, Mom,” she said. “Rich people won’t be there. How can you be humiliated if everybody else is in the same position you are?”

“Because I’m not supposed to be in that position,” said Deena. “And I don’t need Katie’s parents looking down their noses at me to feel humiliated, thank you. I can manage that all by myself.”

“Efficient,” said Chloe.

“Brad’s father organizes it, so he’ll be there,” said Deena, as though he put out a newsletter identifying everyone who attended. “Hand me the black shirt.”

Chloe picked it up. “Is this new? Wow, Miu Miu? Where’d you get this? I’ve never seen it.”

Deena snatched it away, put it on, and started to feel better before she got to the third button. “Seventy percent off, thank you. I would never pay full price for something like this,” even though she had, the day she found out that Dave’s girlfriend’s age was a full 30 percent discount off of her own.

“I didn’t ask you if you did. And you say
I’m
defensive.” Chloe considered the black top, which looked nicer than anything that had preceded it. “Of course if the speaker knows anything about fashion, he’s going to throw you out. Or tell you to stop shopping.”

She hopped up, cried “Homework” a bit too gaily, and left Deena to finish getting dressed. She was back to inflating her extracurricular activities when Deena appeared in the doorway, a triumphant look on her face.

“Looks nice,” said Chloe, who felt vaguely guilty for baiting her mother about the price tag.

“And just for the record, I know what you think. You sit there watching me, and you think, God, my mom is the biggest walking cliché on the planet. My mom is a shopaholic. How totally dumb is that?”

“I do not,” said Chloe, who did, absolutely.

“Well, think about this,” said Deena. “Think about how a cli
ché doesn’t exist unless there are lots and lots of people who behave that way, because otherwise no one would have thought it up in the first place. A cliché is just lots of reality. Volume reality.” She giggled. “I am the Costco of truth. No. I’m better than that, and you know why?”

Chloe shook her head.

“Because I know I act like a cliché, which just maybe means I’m smarter than other people who act like me.”

Deena stood up a bit taller, not easy in four-inch heels, and felt her knees compress and complain. “I might be one of those women caught in a web of circumstance. By a society that didn’t prepare me for life as a single parent.”

Chloe smiled. Deena had been watching too many daytime talk shows.

“You could go back to school,” said Chloe, in her best supportive voice.

“Honestly, I’m late,” said Deena. “You have any tests tomorrow?”

“G’night, Mom.”

“G’night, Miss Smarty.”

There were not enough Crestview families to fill the school library for a financial aid workshop—or rather, there were not enough Crestview families willing to admit publicly that they could use a little help coming up with the over $200,000 price tag for an undergraduate degree at a private school, not even with their retirement accounts shrunk to pre-offspring levels and pundits predicting a flat year, or two, or decade. So Trey, who provided the expert and the refreshments, insisted that Crestview open its annual program to the overtly less privileged public school parents from Ocean Heights, whose Odyssey mini-vans and Chevys the security guard discreetly directed to Visitor Parking, a section of the lot a safe
distance away from the Crestview parents’ pristine BMWs and Mercedes.

Even with the open invitation, fewer than thirty people showed up. Ocean Heights families worried about their image as well. The ones with money or home equity stayed away to show that their public school altruism was not merely a cover for being broke. The ones who lived paycheck to paycheck and would no more pay private school tuition than they would purchase a Sub-Zero refrigerator—cold was cold, after all—had been socking money away since the kids were born. They defined the college universe as the UC system, and they wondered what was sillier: paying more than twice what the UCs cost for a private university or a tiny private college in the middle of nowhere, or wasting an evening learning how to fill out forms.

Every year, Trey drafted Brad to help set out the Pepperidge Farm cookies and powdered lemonade, and every year, Brad arranged Milanos on plastic platters, ran the wheeled trolley back and forth to the school cafeteria to refill the pitchers with lemonade, and invented a new excuse to leave early. As people began to file into the faculty dining room, he took his place behind the refreshment table, next to his dad, and leaned over to explain that he could not stay until the end.

“I’m cutting out at the break,” he whispered. “Calc test.”

His dad nodded. Like all of his friends, Brad used “calc test” as a generic excuse for getting out of other obligations, whether there was a test or not. Parents never asked a follow-up question about calc tests, the way they might about an in-class essay on
Hamlet
or a multiple-choice exam on World War II. Nobody remembered enough to be able to drill a kid on calculus. It was the world’s safest excuse.

Ben Miller, who ran the workshop, was in charge of retirement planning at Trey’s firm, earning four times his previous salary as director of financial aid for the Claremont Colleges. The
financial aid workshop was his way of thanking Trey for a lucrative midlife career change; once everyone was seated, he cleared his throat and smiled his most practiced and benevolent smile.

“How many of you have been to the doctor in the last six months? Almost everybody. Great. Then pay attention. Paying for college is like going to the doctor. I had a colonoscopy recently, I’m fine, thanks, it’s something we all should do, but I got a bill from the facility for over $5,000, and from the doctor for over $2,000, and from the anesthesiologist for $800, which is a pretty good hourly rate when you consider I was out for twenty minutes, tops.”

He had been using the colonoscopy anecdote for so long that it was almost time to make an appointment for another. “So I called the doctor’s office and you know what they said to me? ‘Ben, you’re not supposed to pay those amounts. That’s what we bill your insurance company for, because we know they’re only going to pay a tiny percentage of the total. So the more we charge, the more we stand to get back. You’ll get an adjusted bill, and that’s the real bill. We don’t expect you to pay the first amount.’

“College is exactly like having a colonoscopy, and I’ll leave it to you to make the bad jokes after I’m done up here,” Ben continued. “Nobody expects you to pay the first amount. Go home and look at the websites for the big guys, for Columbia, Harvard, Yale, NYU, Northwestern, you name it. Nobody pays sticker price. Nobody! Upwards of seventy percent of the kids at these schools get some kind of help. So take out your pens and pads, and let’s get to work.

“The question is not, ‘Will I get financial aid,’” he intoned, with a gravity that made everyone write down what he was saying. “The question is, ‘What kind of deal will I get?’ Trust me. If your credit is good, if you pay your bills on time, if you beat everyone else to the punch, you, too, can go further into debt.”

With that, Ben launched into the alphabet soup of financial aid—the government FAFSA forms, which overlapped but did
not duplicate the College Board’s CSS Profile, the Business/Farm supplement for the self-employed, which required even an urban baker to confirm that she did not own any livestock, the letter of special circumstance to explain how a family that looked fat on paper could be really strapped, somehow.

“Which leads me to another family issue that impacts your aid,” said Ben. “I don’t want to embarrass anyone, but how many of you are divorced, a show of hands, please?”

Deena listened for the rustling of clothes in the rows behind her before she put up her hand, and even then she raised it no higher than her shoulder, where the gesture might be mistaken for a hair flip or a neckline adjustment.

“Okay, about half of you. How many of your children live most of the time with Mom? Almost everybody. Great. Next question: How many of those moms work? Almost nobody. Anybody remember that book by what’s-her-name, Betty Freedman?”

“Friedan,” said Nora. “
The Feminine Mystique
.”

“There’s the A student,” said Ben, pointing at Nora. “Anyhow, the good news is that you’re better off not reading it, and your child is better off living with Mom if Mom doesn’t work.” He paused for a moment, savoring the suspense. “Here is why: the government does not consider Dad’s earnings if the child lives with Mom. All you have to do is have a form signed by Dad stating that the child lives with Mom. If your school only asks for the FAFSA, you move to the front of the line as far as financial aid goes.”

Deena clasped and unclasped her purse in happy, nervous disbelief. Here was her life’s silver lining: Chloe would qualify for a lot of money because she spent most of her time living with Deena, who had been so smart to barter time for Pilates instead of asking to be paid. Finally, they had an advantage over their married friends. She hoped that Chloe would have the sense of humor to see it that way.

After the first hour, Ben called a ten-minute break and the members of the audience descended on the cookies, their usual restraint replaced by the need for sugar and fat and chocolate and the endorphins they promised to release. Money was still out there—that was the good news. To get it, though, parents would have to tell strangers about the yawning chasm between their lifestyle and the house of cards that supported it, or simply to confess that they had fallen short despite eighteen years of economic good intentions.

For a generation that had made sexual liberation a social movement, finance was the last frontier of intimacy, and yet schools demanded to see the fiscal equivalent of their genitalia, the most private details of the financial corpus. Worse, they wanted the information online, which meant that it would fly over the same Internet that regularly belched up the sour details of people’s personal lives because they had forgotten the first rule of cyberspace: Never put anything in an email that you would not want to see on a billboard. More than one parent wondered about the odds that someday their sons or daughters would fall in love with a slightly older classmate who had seen the family’s file while holding down a work-study job in the financial aid office.

Brad poured lemonade and smiled at everyone who approached. He smiled even harder at the girl who had come in late and sat in the far back corner, as though he could will her to look up at him. She had long, liquid black hair that fell in a single, heavy sheet from a precise center part. It swung when she made the slightest move, and he wondered if someday he would design a roof that flowed like that, or if Gehry had cornered the market on liquid architecture, and he would have to do pleats, or maybe organ-pipe tubing, like those chocolate pipes Lauren’s mom used to build a wall around a cake.