Getting In: A Novel (22 page)

He divided the sheet of paper into columns labeled Income and Expenses and filled them speedily, because he knew his family’s finances as well as he knew his ever-expanding inventory of addresses and alternate routes. The government might look at his finances and determine that he had almost $12,000 available to spend on a single year of college, but Steve worked and reworked the numbers in both columns and came up with less than $7,000.

Beyond that, he was left with the kinds of strategies that appeared in advice columns aimed at recent college graduates, for whom forty years without gourmet coffee might actually amount to something. He could never again stop at a fast-food restaurant,
Yoonie could eliminate Liz’s latte allowance, they could spend more on gas to get over to the big-box store to buy bulk paper goods that they had no room to store. He could cancel Netflix, although he hated to do so before Liz left for Boston. They could sell the car and he could drive Yoonie back and forth to work in his cab, but what was a 2001 Sentra worth?

Everything that might be considered an extra, in his family’s circumscribed life, and not enough trade-in value to close the gap for one year, let alone four. Steve tore his worksheet into vertical strips and tore the strips into bite-sized pieces, which he wrapped in a paper napkin and buried under a layer of carrot peelings in the kitchen garbage can.

A merit scholarship was the key, one of those tantalizing stipends dangled in front of the most deserving applicants to lure them to School A instead of School B, thousands of dollars that never had to be repaid, a tool used more and more frequently to snare the best kids. A gift. There was no way to apply for a merit scholarship, though, so Steve could not depend on it. He decided that he would borrow the limit on his two credit cards if need be, as distasteful a high-interest solution as that was. This was a puzzle. Not figuring it out was not an option.

Dan wandered down the hall toward the kitchen, drawn by habit more than anything else. Sunday night was Joy’s version of his childhood chicken dinner, the same roasted trinity of chicken, potatoes, and carrots, the components acquired at a little French bistro every Sunday morning on her way home from the gym and extracted from the refrigerator an hour before dinner. She called it
cucina al fresco
to make disregard feel like preference.

Not that he had loved having dinner with his parents, but he had enjoyed the anticipatory smells.

He instinctively stepped to the left at the sound of Katie bar
reling down the stairs.

“It’s dinnertime. Where are you off to?”

Katie waggled her towel in his face.

“I don’t know, Dad,” she said. “What’s your guess?”

She turned away without waiting for an answer, left the sliding glass door open behind her, and switched on the pool lights. A moment later he heard the very specific sound of Katie entering the water—not a splash, not a plop, but a more precise sound that reminded him of a piece of stationery being torn in two.

He headed to the back of the house to close the door. Dan did not enjoy swimming. His parents could have lived downstate, landlocked, for all their interest in Lake Michigan; they only visited the lake in street clothes for the occasional picnic, and by the time they thought to sign twelve-year-old Dan up for summer swim camp he had outgrown a little boy’s oblivious courage. He knew the camp counselor was lying when he said that everyone floats, because his arms and legs started to sink every time he tried.

He quit camp after a week. “They call it
dead-man’s float
, don’t they?” he told his dad. “Don’t you think there’s a reason for that?”

When he met Joy, who swam with a baffling and offhanded ease, he bartered coherent poli sci essays for swim lessons from his roommate, and by the end of the semester Dan could impersonate a recreational swimmer. Now he did weekly laps with his wife in the pool that had made buying the tear-down on the adjacent lot such a smart move. No one would have guessed that his internal metronome beat to the four-four rhythm of “do not drown now, do not drown now.”

He stood in the doorway and watched Katie, although there was little of her to see. She moved through the water like a torpedo, silent and unwavering, and when she came out of the water for the breaststroke or the butterfly she did so with little of the fuss that hobbled the slower swimmers. Freestyle, she sat right below
the water, the only signs of life a bouquet of exhaled bubbles on every fourth stroke and her bent elbow surfacing and disappearing along the length of the pool.

Like a baby shark’s fin, he too often thought, both delighted and mildly disturbed by her discipline in the water. He closed the door behind him and went into the dining room to set the table, vowing to start a list of things he and Joy could do once both kids were at Williams. He had considered and dismissed learning Spanish and taking a wine appreciation class, and was debating whether they could retain a private yoga instructor without feeling like fools, when Katie appeared at his side and leaned over to correct the alignment of a water glass.

“I am going to miss that pool,” said Katie, who in fact had decided not to swim for the team second semester simply because she no longer had anything to prove. “What a waste, I mean, you guys almost never use it. Hey. You could pave it over, put in a tennis court.” She giggled. “Ooh, no. A putting green.”

“You’re dripping,” he said.

She stood there for an extra count of five to irritate him before she turned for the stairs. Dan took it all in: the squishy wet footprints on the dining-room rug, the trail of water along the hardwood floor in the hall, the threadbare tank suit Katie so proudly wore at home. Her drag suit, she called it, and the first time she did he had Googled the phrase rather than confess his ignorance. Her drag suit: the old, worn suit she wore to practice because it created more resistance in the water than a sleek, skintight new competition suit would. If she was fast in the old suit, she would be faster in a new one without making any additional effort.

He understood the rationale, but he hated the drag suit. It was like the clothes the kids wore when they drove down to his dad’s liquor store, the beat-up khakis and the battered loafers, the dress shirts with frayed collars and cuffs, the clothes that said, I’m so rich I don’t have to bother to impress anyone. Dan and Joy had
managed to spawn an Evanstonian, a second-generation snob, and he had to work hard not to take his daughter and her little jokes as seriously as he had the boys who had tormented him. As though he would ever install a putting green, as though his lessons with the club pro had not made him proficient enough to survive the requisite rounds with clients.

Lauren was sprawled on the couch with the television on
when Nora got home, a flagrant infraction of the rule about no television until your homework is done, which could not possibly be true at six o’clock at night. Nora swallowed the sanctimonious comment forming at the back of her throat. Lauren was not the kind to flaunt. If she was breaking the rule, there had to be a reason.

Or perhaps Lauren had snapped altogether. She was watching
Threesome
, a nighttime soap that she had never bothered to watch before.

“Honey,” Nora began, tentatively, “what’re you doing?”

“Ssshhh,” said Lauren. She hit the
PAUSE
button and shot her mother a long-suffering look. “That’s Madison Ames. Chloe had last season on DVD.”

There was a trio of women on the screen, a blonde, a redhead, and a brunette, each one in her forties and desperate to prove otherwise. Three face-lifts, three bust lifts, three sets of false eyelashes, three shiny, low-cut, strapless dresses held in place by a combination of corset boning, double-sided tape, and sheer will.

“Which one?”

“The redhead,” said Lauren. “Can we be quiet please so I can watch this?”

“But…” Nora was drawing a blank.

“The Northwestern interview. Madison Ames. She’s the one I’m talking to.”

Nora peered at the screen. “She went to Northwestern?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Nora sat down on the couch next to her daughter. “Nothing. Can I watch her with you?”

Lauren shrugged and hit
PLAY
, and Madison Ames’s character continued her conversation with the other two women about whether her second husband was abusing alcohol, cocaine, the new single neighbor, or, in a trifecta of prime-time cliffhanger narrative, all three. The blonde’s housekeeper was threatening to destroy her candidacy for mayor by disclosing that she had never taken out withholding taxes or paid Social Security, and the brunette’s son had run away from home with an ATM card, a jar of peanut butter, a loaf of bread, and his father’s gun, but Madison Ames was the most famous of the three stars, so her fidelity and substance abuse issues took priority. She launched into a long speech about the dreams her character had dreamt, back when she was waitressing to support her first husband, a medical student who had died in a terrible accident but still appeared from time to time in a flashback sequence. Lauren and Nora sat, transfixed, waiting to hear what she was going to do about her current spouse.

“This is really awful,” said Lauren.

“Ssshhh,” said Nora. “Aren’t we supposed to be listening?”

Lauren started to squirm. She turned to her mother, tossed her hair back the way Madison Ames did, and batted her eyelashes.

“But, Mother,” she said, in a breathy voice. “I haven’t yet told you, Mother, about, oh, can I say it? About what Jonathan said to me. Yesterday. When we were strolling through the garden, and…” She flung herself on Nora, racked by phony sobs. “Mother, I didn’t want to tell you, I shouldn’t tell you, but how can I keep from saying it? Mother, I’m pregnant. With triplets. It was the drugs, he said the injections were vitamins, how could I know? Or wait! Do you think, is it possible”—and she broke into a beaming smile—“maybe I’m not pregnant. Maybe it was all that cake, you
know I love your chocolate cake, Mother. Could the test be wrong? Could I just be, heavens, could I just be bloated? Oh, I’m so relieved—but wait. What’s that terrible pain in my head?”

Nora wrapped her in a hug and they sat there laughing until they ran out of breath, at which point they watched a minute more and dissolved again, back and forth until the segment ended, Nora wondering to herself how long it had been since they had had anything that resembled fun.

Madison Ames—renamed for her mother’s and her father’s midwestern hometowns, respectively, as Susan Miller did not sound like stardom—sprawled across the billboard at the entrance to the Fox studios in all her forty-foot-long, bathing-suited, airbrushed glory. She caught Lauren’s eye as Lauren edged into the left-turn lane, which caused her to overshoot the double yellow line and forced the driver of the oncoming Santa Monica city bus, who only a week earlier had taken off the open door of an old Volvo, to swerve into the next lane. The driver of the adjacent UPS truck slammed on his brakes, sending his Seven-11 Big Gulp all over the inside of his windshield. From behind a liquid curtain of Mountain Dew, he glared at Lauren and made her grateful that she could not read lips.

Lauren corrected her trajectory and sat through a full cycle of traffic lights, waiting for her knees to stop trembling, oblivious of the honking horns behind her. If she could have pulled out of the turn lane and driven a calming loop around Century City, she would have, but she had five minutes to get to Stage Nine, so she clamped her hands at ten and two, stared straight ahead, and made a left into the driveway that led to the security guard’s little hut.

“Name?” he asked, without taking his eyes from the computer screen.

“Lauren Chaiken,” she replied.

He ran his finger down the list on the monitor.

“And you’re here to see?”

She cleared her throat and tried to sound authoritative. “I have a two o’clock appointment with Madison Ames. On Stage Nine.”

“Well, Lauren who has a two o’clock appointment with Ms. Ames on Stage Nine, I do not have you on my list, so I cannot let you in.” Not a week went by without a kid pretending to have an appointment, in the hope of seeing someone famous once he got onto the lot. The guard had made his one mistake a year ago, with a USC freshman whose fraternity hazing required him to get a spec script for
The Simpsons
into Matt Groening’s hands. The people who worked on the show still gave him grief about it.

Lauren leaned out the window for emphasis. “But I have to be there. In four minutes. I can’t be late.”

The guard was already waving at the car behind her. He pointed toward the curb. “Pull over there for me, please,” he said.

Madison Ames continued to pout rather than respond to the first knock on the door. She was tired of these kids and their attitude, and crankier still because she knew she would have to answer the second knock, and three more like it this week. A whole season of Northwestern alumni interviews, when all she had done was walk over to the twenty-four-hour Gelson’s at two in the morning, in her pajamas, to buy a steak. Everything would have been fine—women walked around in tank tops and penguin-patterned flannel pants in broad daylight in the Palisades and nobody blinked—if Gelson’s had not run out of New York strip steaks, bone in. If she had not crumpled to the floor and started to sob, if the night-shift butcher had not owned a cell phone with a video camera, if the middle-aged cashier with a motherly streak had not
called 911. The next morning, Madison was on YouTube, YouTube was all over the entertainment news, and the show runner was in her trailer talking about damage control.

It was true, what people said: if you took Ambien longer than the label said to and washed it down with a glass or two of chardonnay, you could end up wanting a steak at three in the morning, even if the next day you failed to remember either the craving or the empty refrigerator that had gotten you into so much trouble.

There were people at the cable network who considered “forty-two-year-old sex object” to be an oxymoron, so she did everything the show runner asked her to do to repair her image. Madison appeared on
Showbiz Tonight
to discuss the physical and psychological pressures of being a forty-two-year-old high-definition sex object, while her lawyer quietly investigated the possibility of an age discrimination lawsuit if she got written off the show, and she was tentatively scheduled to testify at a congressional hearing about strengthening federal warnings on prescription sleep aids, depending on whether anyone but C-SPAN intended to be there. The head of production was one of those rabid alums with Northwestern license plate holders, so she signed up to conduct alumni interviews, figuring that a couple of quick chats with some eager seniors would be a small price to pay for getting back in his good graces. She never imagined that there would be so many, and that they would expect her to pay attention.

The second knock. “Come in,” she called.

Lauren stepped into the trailer. Madison Ames was sitting at her makeup table dressed as a member of the Red Guard, probably the only member in the history of the Chinese Revolution to show quite so much cleavage, lining up a row of lipstick tubes in front of the mirror. She did not get up.

“I’m so sorry I’m late,” said Lauren, trying not to stare. “The guard didn’t have my name on the list and I had to…”

Madison held up her hand for silence and gestured toward a chair piled high with bikinis. “Sit down,” she said. “He’s an idiot. Dump them anywhere.” She caught Lauren’s gaze and tugged irritably at her jacket. “It’s a dream sequence. I’m adopting a Chinese kid.”

“Right,” said Lauren. She put her shoulder bag on the floor, scooped up the bikinis with both hands, and looked around for a break in the clutter. She lengthened her arms and pointed with one index finger at the top of a little cabinet. “Is that okay?”

“The floor is okay,” said Madison. “I’m joking,” she said, as Lauren started to lower her arms. “Put them right where you said.”

Madison consulted the list of questions she used for every interview.

“So, tell me a bit about yourself,” she said, much more concerned with finding a lipstick that stood up to the bilious khaki of her costume than with any answer Lauren might give. She held up an open tube of MAC Viva Glam next to the Red Guard jacket. “What are you interested in?”

“Journalism,” said Lauren. It was not true, but it was not exactly a lie, it might be true someday, and in the meantime she knew enough about it to sound convincing. Lauren sensed that being undecided was not a viable response.

“Journalism,” said Madison. She set aside the Viva Glam and reached for Chanel Red No. 5. “You’re not going to be one of those reporters who camps outside my house, are you?”

Lauren had forgotten about the business with the steak.

“Oh, no,” she said, “of course not, I think what those people do is despicable, and…”

“Let’s not get carried away,” said Madison, with a tight laugh. “If they don’t write something, then maybe people forget me.”

“Oh, no,” said Lauren, “but not that kind of journalism. My father’s an editor. I can imagine myself being an editor.”

“Really. Where?”

“
Events.
”

Madison wrote this down next to Lauren’s name on her interview list. “So you’re thinking about the family business. Did you apply to, what’s its name?”

“The Medill School. Of journalism.”

“Right. Did you?”

This was the real reason not to lie, Lauren realized. Tell one and inevitably you had to tell another.

“Well,” said Lauren, trying to remember why her parents made fun of the one guy on the magazine with a degree in journalism, “I can get a summer internship to give me on-the-job experience in whatever aspect of journalism I decide to pursue. I think it’s important to major in something else, or even have a double major, so that when I graduate I’m knowledgeable in my field. Otherwise you end up knowing how to say things but you don’t have anything to say.”

She smiled. Good save.

“And I can always take journalism classes,” she added.

“Yes, you can,” said Madison. She looked at her list of questions, which one of the publicity kids had drawn up for her back in the fall.

“But Northwestern’s not your first choice,” she said, confused. “You didn’t apply early. Why is that?” She remembered the time she had pretended to be on vacation in Fiji so that she could avoid committing to a part while she waited to hear about a bigger one. “Was your first choice someplace you didn’t get into?”

Lauren bit her lower lip. Ted had circulated a list of the twenty things alumni were likeliest to ask, and this was not on it, because not applying early usually had to do with trolling for the best money package, and that was nobody’s business outside of the financial aid office.

“Not at all, no,” said Lauren, flailing about for the answer to the question she knew was coming next. “Northwestern’s my first choice.”

“Then why didn’t you apply early?”

Having credited her parents for her choice of major, Lauren decided to blame them for her timing. In the algebra of falsehood, perhaps two lies canceled each other out.

“My parents feel,” she said, and then she stopped, dismayed at the good-girl tone in her voice. If she was going to make things up, at least she ought to have a sense of humor about it. “You know, parents. They have this notion that senior year’s a big year. My mom says I shouldn’t limit myself in the fall when I’ll be a different person by May. And, well, I mean, parents. They think I’m going to get in wherever I want. They’re so proud of me. My dad says I should let schools fight over me. I mean, I’m not conceited, I know how hard it is, but he has a point—if you have confidence in yourself then why would you limit your options?”

She stopped short. She could not let it sound like she agreed with her parents.

“But I’m going to Northwestern if I get in,” Lauren announced, even though it was clear that Madison had stopped listening back at the business about being a different person in May. A moment later, a production assistant walked in without knocking, on cue; it was her job to interrupt every one of these interviews after ten minutes. Madison Ames stood up and flashed her most apologetic smile.

“Great to talk to you,” she said, “and I’m sorry I’m out of time. I will tell the Northwestern people what a lovely conversation we had. Thank you for coming by.”

“You’re welcome,” said Lauren, edging her way to the trailer door. She turned back before she took the first step. “And thank you. For taking so much interest in my application.”

“No problem,” said Madison.

Nora listened to every grotesque detail, even as she should have been filling four custom Valentine’s Day orders, one of which involved hiding an engagement ring in one of six tiny velvet boxes, each of the remaining five containing a chocolate truffle. It was painstaking work, so she handed it over to one of the bakers whose hands were not as likely to shake with rage and retreated to a quiet corner of the bakery to debrief her daughter. Lauren barely got as far as the bikinis before Nora decided to assassinate Madison Ames.