Getting In: A Novel (2 page)

“What did you major in at Yale?”

“Comparative religion.” He read the next question in the dovetailed lines between her brows. “I’m writing a pilot. Sort of a Doctors Without Borders thing, but funny.”

“Like
M*A*S*H
,” she replied, on the happy upswing of the conversation. But the boy had already made eye contact with the man behind Nora, so she slid over to where her drink was waiting. Finally, she had a plan. She would drive to BookWorld, find the Fisk, come back to Starbucks, and read until the exam was over.

She watched the barista hand his business card to the man and wondered what she and Joel were doing, paying $150 an hour for tutors who came to the house to show Lauren how to get the great standardized test scores she needed if she wanted to get into a top college—so that she could graduate and end up like the barista, a tutor who showed kids how to get the great scores they needed if they wanted to get into a top college. The test-prep rep who had spoken at Crestview the previous fall had described the trajectory of students who nailed the SATs, but he had made it sound more like a bird in flight than a dog chasing its tail.

The firing had come without warning, as the publisher viewed the editorial staff the way certain childless people regard children, as charming, peripheral nuisances. Not even Joel had known that he was about to lose 10 percent of his staff, including his wife. On that score, the publisher figured he was doing his executive editor a big favor.

At first, she had no idea how to cope. Lifers ran in Nora’s family. Her father had worked at the local high school in ascending positions since before she was born. Her mother was Sheboygan’s acknowledged queen of needlepoint. Her older brother taught introductory psychology classes at the University of Wisconsin and liked to mutter insufferable little asides—“Hmm,
projecting?”—on the rare occasions when the whole family was together. If not for Nora’s favorite journalism professor, whose career advice had amounted to “Get out of town,” she might have stayed in Madison herself. Until she was told to clean out her desk at the magazine, Nora had assumed that she would run the research department forever.

For a month she alternated between elation and depression, with a few side trips to abject terror, and then she began to bake, a bit too compulsively for her mental health or her family’s nutritional profile. Almost four years and a home equity line of credit later, she ran a small commercial bakery that supplied restaurants and a couple of gourmet food shops. The bulk of her fans, all of whom would be terribly upset to hear the word “bulk” used in reference to them, lived in a crescent of inflated real estate that started in Malibu and ran south along the ocean only as far as Marina del Rey, which lacked the cachet of the other beachfront neighborhoods, never having lived down its early reputation as a haven for desperate singles who refused to wear sunscreen. The customers who preferred the exclusivity of a private pool to a windblown beach lived only as far inland as Brentwood or Beverly Hills, neighborhoods where people hired a private chef and then banished her before the meal to perpetrate the fraud of a home-cooked dinner. These were the people who had made Nora a success. She preferred never to get closer to them than an order form, because they misunderstood her intent completely.

Nora made small desserts because she could never make up her mind about whether she wanted chocolate cake, strawberry shortcake, or a flavored pot au crème at any given meal. She meant them to be served three on a plate, one chocolate, one fruit, and one creamy dessert, a medley for the indecisive. Instead, adamantly svelte hosts ended their dinner parties with individual servings of a single two-inch Nora dessert, amidst appreciative murmurs about minimalist proportions. Restaurants featured a solitary little des
sert shipwrecked on a huge service plate and called it style. Nora retaliated with a line of standard-serving desserts, which the restaurants refused to order. The gourmet shops reported that people occasionally bought them for more casual events—a picnic, a backyard barbecue—and cut them into fourths.

She might not be able to control her demographic, but she had shown herself to be resourceful in a crisis. By the time Nora got to BookWorld, she was back in charge. She rushed into the store as though Lauren had been bitten by a snake and BookWorld had the last vial of antidote, grabbed the store’s one remaining copy of the
Fiske Guide to Colleges
, and marched into the pharmacy next door for a pack of multicolored paper clips. She found a short, fat plastic jar with a twist lid in the travel aisle and dumped the clips into the jar as soon as she had paid for them. Nora was never happier than when she had the proper tools. It was time to get to work.

When she got back to Starbucks, almost every table was full. A man with a laptop had commandeered the oversized handicapped-access table, because apparently he defined handicap as any situation where people did not appreciate how important he was. The two women at the next table were exclaiming loudly about the very big purse one of them had just bought at an equally oversized discount, oblivious, in their retail high, of the laptop man’s occasional glare. A quartet of aggressively cool girls sat at a window table, having long since learned how to disguise their insecurity as aloofness, but Nora was not good at guessing ages, so she could not tell what they were hiding. They could be apprehensive sophomores who were still six months away from taking the PSATs, let alone the SATs, or they could be seniors faking their blasé way through April college notifications.

So much for her feeling of mastery, which seemed today—what section of the test were they on by now?—to be in a big hurry to desert her. Nora got in line for another cappuccino, wondering if she would be able to walk past a bunch of girls at Starbucks at
any point in the coming year without triggering a meteor storm of college nerves. When it was her turn to order, she held up the BookWorld bag so that Sam the barista could see that she had taken his advice. With the jazzy snap of a blackjack dealer, he flipped another business card at her, having forgotten their earlier conversation the moment it ended. Chastened, she paid for her drink, did not leave a tip, collected her cup, and took a seat at the end of the counter, away from prying eyes. She propped the
Fiske Guide
on her crossed knee, hidden behind a copy of
Food
magazine.

Nora was overwhelmed by the time she got to the
G
’s—who knew there was a George Washington as well as a Georgetown? And who was George Mason? She decided to stop reading. She had started, that was what mattered, and she felt better about certain things, like Lauren’s test scores so far, and worse about others, like the fact that obscenely expensive schools felt the need to describe the rescue services they offered when their incredibly intelligent underclassmen got stupid drunk just like anybody else.

She put the book in her bag just as a sea of kids spilled across the intersection and onto the sidewalk, shrieking and chattering away their accumulated nerves. A dozen of them jammed their way into Starbucks and scattered toward the two women shoppers, the laptop man, and the cool quartet of girls, and as they peeled off, Nora saw Lauren at the back of the pack. She had not even bothered to call when she got out; she was carried along on the tide of probability to Starbucks. Wordlessly, she plopped down in the chair next to Nora’s, grabbed her drink, and took a long slurp. She twisted up her face.

“Sugar, it needs sugar. I’m so thirsty and I didn’t bring anything. Where’s your wallet?”

She started to dive for Nora’s purse, but Nora threw a shoulder in her way and pulled the bag onto her lap. She had no idea
how Lauren would react to her mom reading a college guide book, whether she would consider it a big help or meddling, and she did not want to find out five minutes after the SATs.

“What is wrong with you?”

“Nothing. Nothing. I’m getting money for you.”

“I can do it myself.”

“Yes, you could. But I’m closer.”

“Only because you tackled me.”

Nora held out a twenty and did not quite let go. All around her she heard a chorus of “great, great, it was great, just great,” delivered with varying levels of conviction. She looked at her daughter. “So how did it go?”

“Great,” said Lauren.

“Well, that’s terrific,” said Nora.

“Yeah, it was great. You want another of whatever that is?”

“No. Go ahead.”

Lauren got in line to order a drink that involved far more whipped cream than coffee. Nora collected her bag and jacket, happy that the ordeal was over, happy that Lauren thought it was great. It was too soon for either of them to understand that great was what kids said to keep their terror, and their parents, at bay.

Lauren was asleep before they got to the freeway, asleep all the way home, asleep even after Nora pulled up in front of the house and turned off the ignition. Like most of their friends, Nora and Joel could fit only one car into their two-car garage. The rest of the space was occupied by two sets of grandparents’ housewares waiting for a resurgence of interest in ornate silver platters and asparagus tongs, souvenirs from Nora’s and Joel’s childhoods, and a growing assortment of Lauren mementos. The fact that the older boxes remained sealed in no way discouraged Nora from packing
up everything, from Lauren’s favorite books to a large stuffed elephant. The first generation to move far from their parents did not travel light, after all: for Nora and her husband, half a garage of unused possessions provided welcome ballast, a movable sense of place.

There was no good reason to wake Lauren up, so Nora sat, grateful for an excuse to hold still, and watched her sleep. Lauren’s long black hair tumbled over her face; what a peaceful face, Nora thought, no impatient glare, no pout, no scowl, just intersecting planes of pale skin and a rosebud mouth that looked like it was about to smile. Joel had called her Snow White when she was little, because of her coloring, but he stopped before she started preschool because he did not want anyone else to do it. No kid of mine, he told Nora, gets named for a girl who is dumb enough to take unwashed fruit from a stranger, wanton enough to live with seven little guys, passive enough to need a handsome man to straighten out her life. They adored Lauren with the abandon of two adults who had been raised in tailored households. They liked the idea that there was nothing they would not do for her.

When Lauren was a baby, Joel sometimes took her for a drive in the middle of the night to help her fall asleep, which worked fine until he pulled into the driveway and turned off the engine, and the sudden absence of noise and vibration woke her right up again. A pitying friend bought them a contraption that hooked onto the side of the crib and mimicked the hum and soft motion of a car, ending the late-night commute, but it was a story they told once too often, so Lauren made contradicting it an element of her growing autonomy. If her parents thought she always fell asleep in the car, she would make sure she never fell asleep in the car. Sometimes she stayed up so late doing homework that Nora begged her to sleep on the half-hour drive to school the following morning.

“I don’t sleep in cars,” Lauren said.

Nora considered waking her daughter up, considered letting
her sleep, and realized that it made no difference. Lauren would be embarrassed and defensive either way. Nora sank into the angle of her seat and the door, trapped, and quickly gave in to her own exhaustion. When Joel got out of the airport cab a half hour later, he found both his wife and his daughter asleep in the car. He put his bag and briefcase inside the house, grabbed the mail out of the box, and sat on the front stoop, sifting through the junk mail for anything that might require attention, wondering whether the driver’s or the passenger window was the right one to knock on.

Crestview Academy lacked both a hillcrest location and a
panoramic view. The school sat in the curve of a Culver City slough, on land that the Los Angeles River had carved out and then abandoned in its reconsidered meanderings down to the beach, and the vista from the school’s west-facing windows was not of rolling hills but of the concrete swoop of a freeway on-ramp. Its founder had come up with the name Crestview when he moved west in the late 1960s, intending to put it on a plaque above the gated entrance to the hillside mansion he would purchase once he left Pittsburgh and high school English lit classes behind for a new life as a Hollywood screenwriter.

He had three speculative scripts and the name of a studio executive whose nephew had been in his advanced placement class, but the closest he ever got to the movies was a series of meetings with men who were far more interested in his educator’s past than in his story pitches. They wanted to buy his expertise, to stake him to a new prep school, because they could not get their children into the city’s old-guard private schools, where “entertainment money” was code for Jewish. Those men liked the name Crestview, despite the gully location they eventually found—but then, grandiose names were common in their line of work. The would-be screenwriter accepted his fate, deposited their checks, and built Crestview, which, like the hyperbolic Paramount and Universal, like Fox laying claim to an entire century, would have to live up to its advance billing.

After forty years and half a dozen capital campaigns, Crestview looked the part of a century-old East Coast private college preparatory school. A hulking set of earthquake-reinforced Tudor buildings nestled at the center of lush, landscaped grounds, a stand of climate-challenged sugar maples on either side of the entrance and a pool, tennis courts, and athletic fields behind the main buildings. The wood-paneled lobby featured at its center a bronze bust of the school’s founder, its patina hastened chemically to enhance the notion that Crestview had been doing things right for a very long time. The students wore uniforms designed by an employee of the Fox costume department and ate lunch at massive oak tables trucked over from the Paramount lot after production had wrapped on a World War II drama set in London. Teachers were prohibited from wearing T-shirts, anything made of denim, and athletic shoes, and were encouraged to exploit their role-model appearance for a meaningful dialogue with any girl whose hemline was too high or any boy whose waistband was too low. Skeptics called the place a shark tank, but the number of new applicants rose every year along with the number of satisfied customers, those being families whose children went on to a handful of prestigious colleges and universities. They knew what the critics said, and they knew which of those critics had tried and failed to get their own children into Crestview. In response, the luckier families thought, “Sour grapes.”

Ted Marshall and the four other college counselors on his team met with every one of Crestview’s 120 senior-class families during the first two weeks of the new school year to reconsider the initial list of twenty schools they had created the previous spring, to review test scores accumulated since that meeting, to find out how the application essays were going, and to come up with a final, ranked list of ten target schools. Each counselor had his own distinctive style, but Ted, the head of the department for the last six years, was the counselor everyone wanted, the one
with perfect pitch. Time after time, he came up with strategies that worked.

A year earlier he had orchestrated a letter-writing campaign for a boy who got turned down at Brown University for no apparent reason except that there were plenty of other boys just like him. At Ted’s instruction, every single member of the senior class had written a heartfelt letter on the boy’s behalf, yielding a last-minute acceptance accompanied by a handwritten note from a Brown admissions committee member who bemoaned the fate of so many highly qualified applicants. Deciding which families to assign to Ted was perhaps the hardest job the college counseling staff faced. If he took the strongest candidates, he could improve Crestview’s college acceptance profile, a potent sales tool with incoming students. If he got the less than sterling candidates, he might be able to get them into a better school than they deserved, but it would not necessarily be a school that impressed prospective families.

He kept a private list of students he never took, which included any beautiful girl who might scream sexual harassment if she failed to get into her first-choice school, any overtly gay boy who might do the same even though Ted had had a fairly serious girlfriend until the year he was named director of the department, anyone with a recently divorced mom who might take a more than parental interest in him, anyone whose parents happened to send him a gift in the week before the department met to make assignments, and any but the most talented minority candidates, to avoid the subterranean accusations of partisanship that had accompanied the placement of a black tennis player at Princeton his second year on the job. Princeton had been chasing the girl ever since she made the national amateur playoffs in ninth grade, and was far more interested in a nationally ranked black female tennis player than in her Bs in science, but a trustee had been heard to mutter, “What is this guy, our minority priority counselor?” as he
walked into a board meeting, and after that Ted had reeled it in. He was Crestview’s first—and so far only—black college counselor. He had to make sure that the minority candidates on his roster were bullet-proof, as performance-perfect as their majority counterparts.

He stuck with the students who needed him the least, if he was going to be honest about it, a strategy that had its own unique rewards. Ted had just reached a milestone in his career that was all the more significant because he had never heard of it happening to anyone else. He had gone to the annual fall convention of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, as he always did, one of fifteen hundred high school counselors facing off with an equal number of college admissions representatives, surrounded by what he liked to call the sucker-fish industries: the test-prep companies, the guidebook publishers, the testing companies jockeying for national supremacy, and even
U.S. News & World Report,
which dispatched a team of researchers to maintain its rankings supremacy. He had visited the booths of the colleges and universities his students were interested in. He had slipped each rep a business card on which he had printed the name of a special candidate. One card for each candidate, and never more than four at any given school, to avoid seeming presumptuous about Crestview’s standing in the general applicant pool.

On the second morning, it happened: for the first time in his twelve years as a college counselor, a handful of Ivy League admissions reps quietly slipped their cards to him, inscribed with the names of candidates they wanted to encourage, though not officially. Each one of them warned him not to say a word and cautioned him that this was in no way a commitment. Still, he came home with eight cards in his wallet, cards that he clipped together and put in his locked desk drawer. Eight kids on the fast track and he was hardly warmed up yet. Nine, if he was being honest. He had the equivalent of a card from Harvard, which was
never going to stoop to such behavior. All he had to do was mention Brad’s name to the rep and he got a chuckle and a smile, which was just as good.

He came home happy, and aware that only a fool would allow himself to feel secure. As far as Ted was concerned, there was no such thing as good news as early as September. He dismissed all the peripheral chatter about how the end of the college application madness was surely in sight, and any day now there would be less emphasis on standardized tests, more attention paid to the individual candidate, and a new commitment to more reasonable behavior from all the involved parties. He knew better. The forecasted easing of tensions was as likely to materialize on the college circuit as it was in the Middle East. Ted approached each application season anticipating that it would be more difficult than the years that had preceded it, not less, and so far life had met his expectations.

He was at the center of a perfect storm. The west side of Los Angeles was the applicant equivalent of the strawberry fields up the freeway in Oxnard, packed so tight with succulent fruit that it was almost impossible to reach for one gorgeous berry without bruising a couple of others. The luckier candidates attended a handful of prep schools that were proud to call themselves elite, and each one of those schools had a team of warrior counselors like Ted.

Most of the private school parents were wealthy, or serious enough about time management to reassign the budget for a nonexistent, standard-issue second child to the enhanced education of a first—or both. Ted believed that there was no one more ambitious than the parents of an only child. It was simple math: If each parent represented one unit of ambition, and if they invested those two units, combined, in their offspring, then an only child demanded twice the payoff of two siblings, and three times the payoff of three.

The older moms and dads, who had protested the war in Vietnam or marched in Chicago, were fed up with the way life had dwindled from macro to micro and all too eager for a new cause. The younger ones, who had missed out on social protest because they needed a nap after kindergarten class, had convinced themselves that the right college for the right kid was going to make the synergistically large difference they had so far failed to make in the world. And those were the liberals. The more conservative ones, who had always chafed at their generational identity, focused on accruing accomplishments of enduring value. Either way, they all got to the same place, an obsession with their children’s college choice as empirical and irrefutable proof of their own worth.

On those two counts—too many qualified candidates and too many heavily invested parents—Ted was under no more pressure than hundreds of counselors at dozens of urban prep schools all over the country. What set him apart, what made his victories uniquely sweet, was that he was dealing with a pack of gamblers, no matter what they did for a living. Crestview parents might pretend to admire the diligent dad who worked his way through Stanford Law and up the ladder at a prestigious firm, but in truth they found him boring, the equivalent of a big tropical storm you could track for days in advance on the Weather Channel. They were not impressed by the institutionalized risk of Wall Street, not when everyone knew someone who had made a fortune in a more surprising and nonlinear way. They preferred the stories of the ex-junkie who sold a screenplay, the gang member who became a rap star, the newspaper beat reporter who picked up the phone right before he got fired to find out that any one of a dozen buff young actors wanted to option the rights to his final, pre-layoff story and make him an associate producer as well.

They chose to live in a city where the defining weather disaster was the earthquake, which said something about their tolerance for, and infatuation with, the unexpected. Crestview parents
went to bed each night knowing that they might wake up before dawn to find the bed in the backseat of their car—but if surprise could turn a two-story faux Georgian into a one-story ranch, surprise could just as quickly, just as randomly, turn a life around. The issue, for Ted, was that at some point millionaire ex-junkie screenwriters conflated with earthquakes to yield a dangerously why-not mentality. West side parents embraced the inevitable jolt. If fate was a matter of fluke and denial, it was all too easy for Mom and Dad to imagine a beloved but ever so slightly unqualified child catapulted into Harvard Yard. Stranger things had happened, and look at what Ted had done for that kid at Brown.

Nora sat down in one of the plaid club chairs that were supposed to make the college counseling lobby not feel like purgatory, while Joel studied the biggest piece of furniture in the room—a standing, revolving, six-foot-tall bookcase full of college literature, arranged by topic. Standardized testing and prep, college brochures, financial aid and planning, and, on the side that had been facing the wall until Joel nudged it into view, as though Ted and the others were trying to hide them, sheaves of articles on surviving the stress of the application process. One of them was about seniors who slipped in their second semester and had their acceptances revoked; another was about perfect students who went to perfect schools, only to fall apart once they got there. “Eggs,” the admissions directors called them, or “teacups.” They were too fragile; they tended to crack. He spun the bookcase back to its original position and hoped that Nora would not ask him what he was looking at. His role in the college drama, as far as he could tell, was to defend against this kind of peripheral information, to edit out any stressful data that did not directly pertain to Lauren.

Joel had designed his first magazine when he was eight, a single-issue, four-page, hand-colored and-lettered publication called
Pet,
full of pictures and articles he had drawn and written about the dog he did not own but wanted his parents to acquire for him. He had worked on the student newspaper in high school and college, and, after a brief stint writing news items for a restaurant trade magazine, he had settled in at
Events
, where he had been ever since. He had been the west coast editor for ten years, which meant that he knew a small amount about a great number of subjects, information that had served him well until very recently; he could sit next to anyone at a dinner party and keep the conversation afloat through Nora’s dessert course.

And then, for reasons he could not name, gradually, imperceptibly, Joel had shifted his focus from what he knew to the gaping maw of what he did not know, most of which had to do with his daughter. He had plenty of research at his fingertips—school rankings, acceptance rates, online slide shows of dorm rooms, average financial aid offers, all of his daughter’s statistics—but it refused to congeal into anything resembling a point of view on what Lauren ought to do about college. He worried that the true curse of middle age was not thick yellow toenails or progressive bifocals or sore knees. It was not the creases in his long, thin face, because men could get away with craggy. It was not his salt-and-pepper hair, because George Clooney had single-handedly made gray desirable. No, Joel feared that middle age brought an absolute and terrible clarity: he understood, finally, that information was not the same thing as wisdom, no matter how much of it he compiled. He wanted Ted to help them create a plan almost as much as he wanted print media to survive until after he was dead. He could only hope that the odds of the former were better than the odds of the latter.