Getting In: A Novel (24 page)

“Bullshit,” she muttered to herself. She stormed into the kitchen, filled a bowl with ice, carried it into the bathroom, filled the sink with cold water and dumped in the ice, and plunged her face into it until she felt little pinpricks on her skin. Nana Ree had done this every Saturday night before she went out because she had read that Paul Newman did it to keep his skin taut. Lacking a social life, at least for the moment, Deena did it to cover any puffy traces of self-pity. It was not every day that a mom found out she had no idea who her daughter was. Deena was used to the familiar, dysfunctional Chloe, the one who seemed barely able to string together a set of college applications, let alone set off on a new life. A girl with a book full of sketches might do heaven knew what, might sign up for junior year abroad in Paris or Milan or London or anyplace else that was far away and fashion-forward, never to be heard from again unless she remembered to send her mom a plane ticket and an invitation to the fall runway show.

She lay in the growing dark until the last possible moment, and then she grabbed the papers she had printed, stuffed them in her bag, and headed for the Valley. Deena had told Dave that she liked the Sisley’s in the Valley because it was halfway between the house and his apartment, but in fact she chose it because no one she knew would see her there, and because a public venue reduced at least the decibel level, if not the likelihood, of an argument. When she got there he was already in a corner booth tucked away from the early crowd, not a good sign, for under normal circumstances Dave loved to be at the center of things.

“Hi. You been here long?”

“No. How you doing?”

“Well, I don’t know.” She slid into the booth. There was one stack of papers in front of Dave and another on her place mat. “You tell me. What was I printing if you already had a plan?”

Dave ignored the question. He had long since looked at all the statements online, but he had hoped that if Deena printed them out she might actually read them, might show up in a more cooperative frame of mind. He forced himself not to snap back at her.

“It’s no big deal, Deenie. We’re going to go through it. How about we order first.”

“Sure,” she said. Dave beckoned to the waiter and ordered a chicken Caesar for Deena and the cacciatore plate for himself, iced tea for her, a Diet Coke for him, and made a gesture like a whisk broom to dismiss the kid. It was one of the few peremptory things Dave did that once had made Deena feel special. She used to think he was so attuned to her every desire that he could anticipate what she wanted to have for dinner. Now she found the same behavior insulting—was she so predictable?—and she would have said so, except that she really did like the Caesar here.

She opened the folder and tried to look mesmerized by the numbers Dave had written on the top sheet of paper. “Fourteen thousand dollars—does that mean she’s going to get $14,000 if a school accepts her? That’s pretty good, isn’t it? I mean, $14,000. How’d we get so much?”

Dave adjusted and readjusted his place mat. “Deenie, you got to do the math here before we jump ahead. The number that matters is what they say we can afford to pay.” He tapped the sheet of paper with an instructive forefinger. “That’s this here, the Expected Family Contribution: $33,000.”

She waited.

“So listen,” said Dave, gathering speed. “I’m saying a school costs maybe $47,000, and that doesn’t include money for travel, she comes home for vacation, we go visit her for some parent thing and it’s two hotel rooms, she gets homesick, who knows what, and then you got supplies and books. Spending money. So figure a year, it’s really $50,000. Four years, we’re talking $200,000.”

“Minus $14,000 every year times four years. So.”

“So $200,000 minus $56,000.”

“That’s a good deal.”

Dave smiled. His ex-wife espoused a cockeyed fiscal philosophy that made very expensive sense. She never focused on how much she spent, preferring to revel in how much she saved.

“It is a good deal. But it’s still almost $150,000 out of pocket. It’s kind of like if you found a leather coat that was $3,000, but now it’s a third off, so $2,000, a really good deal except you have to have the $2,000. I mean, a deal’s only good if you can afford it. The chunk you save is kind of invisible.”

“I know that.”

“And we know she’s not getting a scholarship, so it’s loans. We have to pay them back. With interest. It ends up being even more.”

“I was at the meeting,” she said, drily.

“If she went to a UC it would be under $100,000 even if we paid for the whole thing,” said Dave. “Much less.”

“So we’ll see where she gets in and then we’ll know how much it’s going to cost.”

Dave folded and unfolded the corner of his place mat. There was no good way to do this except fast.

“Deenz, we can’t afford a private school. Even a UC’s going to be tight.”

“But she applied to all these places. What am I going to say to her, that she can’t go?”

“C’mon, she applied like you shop—a joke, it’s a joke, don’t go all pissy on me. She applied to lots of places, I mean, she saw lots of things she thought she’d like, but how many do you really think are going to take her?”

“I don’t know. What if it’s just one but it’s the one she likes the best?”

The food arrived, and Dave, grateful for the interruption, took his sweet time considering the waiter’s stock query about whether
he could get them anything else. After considering and rejecting offers of white wine, red wine, grated Parmesan, and fresh-ground pepper, he dismissed the kid and turned back to the work at hand.

“One thing we can maybe do,” he said, “is talk up the UCs a little, point her in the right direction.”

“Because you feel like we have a lot of influence with her at this point, is that it? If I say UC you know what she’s going to do? Decide she has to go anyplace but.”

Deena had a point. Dave speared a chunk of chicken.

“OK, look,” he said, “if it’s so important there’s one way maybe we can pull it off, but you’re not going to like it.”

“How do you know?”

Dave smiled. “Because the one way is we sell the house and find you an apartment until we have to buy something else because of taxes, but we get two years to figure that out and then we look for a condo for you, maybe Mar Vista. That way we can send her wherever she wants, except I have to check how that screws up financial aid. Equity in the house they don’t care about, remember, but if one year we’ve got profits from selling it then I’m not sure. But if it’s so important to you, I’ll find out. She won’t know from all the schools for a month. We can figure it out by then. Should I do that?”

Deena moved her fork around the salad bowl as though it were a ouija board and the spirits were going to tell her what to do. What would Nana Ree say? She had lived the way she wanted to live, sent the bills to her ex-husband, and told Deena it was time to practice her phone-answering and message-taking skills if she did not feel like having Saul yell at her. Nana Ree had refinanced the house to send Deena to UCLA, sold it and rented a lovely condo for years with the profits, and had the good sense to expire before she ran out of assets.

Short of dropping dead, Deena had no idea how to respond to Dave’s suggestion. Zip codes were destiny in Los Angeles. It was
bad enough living in upper Sunset Park, where the only single guys were divorced or gay or both. Mar Vista had not caught up with the news that half of all marriages ended in divorce and Birkenstocks were on their way out for the second time, so there was no potential for a new life in that neighborhood. As for Palms, that was merely the name someone had slapped on the blocks and blocks of dingbat apartments that sat on real estate’s Death Row, waiting for the day that developers tore them all down and invented a new beachside community, beachside meaning anything on the sunset side of the San Diego Freeway. These were the only west side neighborhoods left that were cheaper than where she lived, and Deena was not prepared to consider any of them.

“I am not moving out of the house,” she began.

“Well, look, I know it’s a tough thing but think about it. When Chloe’s gone you got three bedrooms, three baths, I mean, c’mon, how many showers can one woman take?”

“It’s not funny.”

“Nobody’s saying you should move into some hole someplace…”

“And I should be grateful for that, right?”

“Hey, let’s take it down a notch.”

“No, I mean, I don’t see why I’m supposed to move out of my house. Maybe the solution is, you make more money and then we do everything we’re supposed to do.”

“I make plenty of money.”

“You’re a successful guy,” said Deena, cautiously. “So be a little more successful and then we don’t have to have this conversation.”

“What do you think, I can go to Jay and say hey, Jay, I need a big raise this year? Have you maybe seen the headlines about the economy? Nobody’s buying air time, so the price goes down, so I make less, so how am I supposed to do this?”

“Well, maybe if they advertised more they’d sell more stuff.”

“Great, I’ll call somebody right now,” he said, brandishing his cell phone, “and tell them my ex-wife says they ought to spend more of the profits they don’t have on thirty-second spots.”

Deena stared at her plate. “When we got married you never said we can only do this much and no more.”

“When we got married I didn’t figure to support two households.”

“More like two and a half households. Do we get to talk about how much you spend on Linda, or is that not open to discussion?”

The busboy had been lingering nearby with a water pitcher, waiting until it seemed safe to approach the corner booth, and when the silence lasted for ten seconds—he counted to himself—he made his move. He filled both glasses and was about to make his getaway when the woman picked up her plate and held it out to him.

“Can I get this packed up right away, with some extra dressing, and are there any more breadsticks?”

He nodded and backed away.

“What are you doing?” asked Dave.

“I am taking my dinner home where I can eat in peace and quiet. I think I should stay in the house and Chloe should go to school where she wants and you should figure it out. No, you know what? You talk to Chloe. You break her heart and tell her she has to go to a UC.”

“Deena, what the hell is wrong with a UC? You went there. I went there. How is that going to break her heart when she never said there’s someplace she’s dying to go?”

Deena retrieved the statements from her bag and shoved them across the table at Dave. “Maybe she’s just afraid to say she likes a school because she thinks you’ll let her down,” she said. She slid out of the booth and headed for the door without waiting for her
leftover salad. Dave watched her retreating back, ordered a tiramisu to go despite the vow he had made that very morning to lose twenty pounds and get into better shape, and left with it and the bagged Caesar and his notes and the statements. He waited until he was at a red light, on a busy section of Ventura Boulevard, and then he opened his window and hurled the container of salad with enough force to startle both himself and the Labradoodle that was starting to pee on a bicycle chained to a parking meter. The dog skittered sideways, stepped in its own urine and stepped on its owner’s foot, leaving a paw-shaped spot on a brand-new suede boot just three hours out of the box. The woman stared at her foot and at the scattered salad, and when she looked up to see where the missile had come from, Dave gave her a jaunty little salute. She held her fist aloft and ceremoniously raised her middle finger, one of the legions of people who used sexual references—middle fingers, cocksucker, fucker—when they were angry.

Deena always wondered why men who loved blow jobs acted like “cocksucker” was an insult. She thought they might be worried about their own sexuality, about whether they’d be happier gay, getting blow jobs all the time. Or maybe men used “cocksucker” as a putdown—she had come up with this theory after one of her own displays of prowess—to keep women from thinking that they ruled the world for any longer than it took to perform the act.

She said things like that every so often, out of the blue—not often enough for anyone to mistake her for an original thinker, but it was the very unpredictability of her pronouncements that Dave enjoyed. He corrected himself: that he had enjoyed, back when conversations had lasted long enough for her to have the opportunity to surprise him.

The driver behind him sat on the horn. Dave roused himself to yell “Fuck you” at the dog owner, but she was already huffing down the block, her traumatized pup in tow, stopping every few
steps to hold up her left toe and evaluate the drying stain. Dave looked long and slow in his rearview mirror, held up his middle finger, and edged into the intersection at a crawl to let the other driver know that he was moving forward because he wanted to, and not because he felt anything like remorse.

Ted had a tell, like any gambler: he drummed exactly as
many fingers on his desk as there were seniors likely to be admitted to the school whose admissions director was on the phone. College admissions people never answered their phones in March, using voice mail as a filter to control the timing and rhythm of their disclosures, so anyone Ted called would have to decide to call him back. If they did, it usually meant a measure of good news, although everything was relative these days. Good news might mean a single probable acceptance among five applicants. More and more, admissions people modified whatever they said with the word “probable.”

Ted never picked up his phone during the month of March either, but to provide the illusion of eager accessibility he relied on the college counseling receptionist to field his calls, rather than use voice mail. Every morning he gave Rita a prioritized list of the calls he was waiting for, and if the first school on his list called while he was talking to the eighth school on his list, she scribbled the name of the first school on a Post-it, walked silently into his office, and placed the note on his desk. She never stood there long enough to hear how he finessed hanging up on the eighth school, but he was always ready for the more important call by the time she got back to her desk, after which he somehow managed to get back on the phone with number eight without playing a new round of phone tag.

The first year on the job, Rita concentrated on working the list quickly and efficiently, and at the end of the season Ted handed her a Nordstrom’s gift card that turned out to be worth $300. The second year, she merely let a particularly pushy set of parents know that Ted had heard from Bowdoin, in return for which she received a gift certificate for six sessions with a personal trainer. Soon after, discreet notes and small gifts from other parents began to appear on her desk (“Why wait until graduation to thank you for all your help?” “Dear eagle eyes, if Donny ends up at Brown we’ll have you to thank for watching out for him.”), until she had enough high-end skin-care products to stock a small boutique. All that they wanted in return was a quiet heads-up when Ted took a call from their children’s first-choice schools, so that they could coincidentally call to check in later the same day.

It was easy enough to accommodate them, as she was not being asked to divulge content. Rita was an ambitious girl who had lost her development job at Paramount because she believed an article about office romances posing less of a risk than they used to. Now she dreamed of being made a full-fledged counselor just in time to derail the college aspirations of the current ninth-grader whose father had cost her the studio job. While she bided her time, she looked for ways to be even more indispensable than she already was.

She always knew which school was on the phone. The next step was to watch Ted as he talked, to look for clues—and once she noticed the tapping, to look for a pattern. At the end of her second year at Crestview, she had drawn up a list of presumed acceptances, which she compared to the official list the school published every June. Based on Ted’s tapping, Rita had been right on twelve of the fifteen calls she had tracked. This year, her third, she was sure enough of her technique to share information with a very select group of parents.

Ted was on a call with Skidmore when the phone rang.

“He has the head of school in his office,” she lied. “But he did ask me to let him know when you called. Just a moment, please.” She did not take the time to write. She got to the doorway of Ted’s office, held up one finger, and he nodded and got off the phone.

It did not take long. Ted talked, Ted listened, Ted drummed on the desk, Ted hung up and smiled. Rita took a small Moleskine notebook out of her purse, pulled the elastic strap out of the way, and wrote down, “Harvard—2. 1/1?” She had a hunch that gender played a role in Ted’s tapping, that he tapped one-handed if it was all girls or all boys, and two-handed, like a typist, the phone cradled against his shoulder, if both girls and boys had gotten in. She had yet to figure out if he always used the same hand for the same sex, but there was no rush. Parents were satisfied to know that he had made contact. The rest of her sleuthing, the attention to gender-specific tapping patterns, was a puzzle for Rita’s personal entertainment. The more sophisticated her code-breaking skills, the greater the risk she would be found out.

She pulled up the final application list on her computer screen and found the five students who had applied to Harvard. One set of parents always called her Rhonda, so they would not be getting a call. The remaining four had been attentive to her in varying degrees, but two of their children were long shots, so only two sets of parents would hear from her.

At this time of year, her calls always went through.

“Hi. How goes it?”

“He just got off the phone with Harvard,” she said, “and he was smiling. There may be two yeses. I’m sorry I don’t know more about who it is.”

“That’s fine,” said Trey. “Thank you.”

“No problem.”

She hung up, put the notebook back in her purse, and glanced up just in time to see Ted riffing with two fingers on each hand as
he chatted with the rep from Skidmore. When he finished the call, he dialed another number and swiveled his chair so that he was facing the back wall, and Rita assumed that he was making his own call to Trey.

The University of California schools dumped notification emails throughout the month of March, as though being first gave them any meaningful advantage over the East Coast schools. Crestview parents who had grown up in Los Angeles wanted to send their kids east to prove that they were cosmopolitan, that they appreciated the existence of a larger world, where men shaved every day and women of a certain status and zip code dressed as though they were on their way to either a funeral or a foxhunt. Parents who had fled the East Coast and migrated to the promised land, on the other hand, had to prove that they had not gotten lazy, that they still appreciated the character-building aspects of frostbite and vertical architecture, and they dreamed of sending their children back to the very cities they had fled. For most Crestview families, a UC application was little more than a sunlit insurance policy against the unthinkable on April 1.

The single exception was UC Berkeley—Cal to the people lucky enough to go there. Cal, a vestige of the time when it was the one and only UC, the first, the sufficient, the definitive, the model for the satellites that followed. Berkeley was as difficult to get into as a private school, the site of an ongoing and escalating battle between white and Asian students, each of whom thought their acceptance rate was too low and the competition’s too high. A Crestview senior might bide his time in March by bragging about a Cal acceptance, but most of them tallied their UC acceptances with the same nonchalance that enabled them to fill up their cars with their parents’ credit cards and never once look at the price.

There were no surprises for Lauren, as she had checked off only three UC campuses. Three emails popped up on a single evening, a rejection from Berkeley and acceptances from UC Santa Barbara and UC Irvine. She reported the news to her parents without disappointment or relief. As far as Lauren was concerned, there was little difference between a no from a great school like Berkeley and a yes from a school she had picked because Ted said she needed three Best Chances.

“But it’s your first yes,” said Nora. “Yeses, excuse me. We could stop for a second and think about that.” She tried to put her arms around Lauren. “You’re going to college.”

“Not in Santa Barbara or Irvine I’m not,” said Lauren, backing off.

Joel stopped loading the dishwasher. “You would have preferred getting turned down?”

“Stop it. Don’t pretend to be happy about something we’re not happy about. I mean, what do you think I should major in, surfing? Antiques? I’m going back to work. We don’t want Northwestern to accept me and then take it back because I flunked out.”

She disappeared, leaving Nora and Joel to finish cleaning up the kitchen. Joel waited until he heard Lauren’s door close before he leaned over to whisper to his wife.

“What are we, living with Groucho Marx? ‘I don’t want to go to any school that would accept me as an undergraduate’?”

“Something like that.”

Disdain, ingratitude, tempests of self-hatred and rage and sarcasm, and the occasional ultimatum that equated UCLA with prison, UC Santa Cruz with summer camp, and UC Davis with the boonies: as April 1 got closer and closer, Crestview seniors began to fall apart. With Ted’s fingers poised in midair more often than they made happy drumming contact with his desk,
there was precious little good news, or even good rumor, to go around. Worse, everyone assumed that the acceptances and rejections were by now loaded into every school’s outbound email bins, waiting for a bureaucrat to launch them at the end of business on March 31, or at a minute after midnight on April 1—cruel inconsistency—so that heartbroken families would have to wait overnight to call to appeal. Like cows being herded into the slaughterhouse chute, like dead men walking, seniors lived the  last days of March with a cold inevitability, knowing that there was not a single thing they could do to alter their fate. Bad news was coming to someone, but no one knew how much or to whom.

The tunnel vision got worse every day, even among families that had in the past acknowledged the existence of more substantial threats to their happiness than a college rejection: rogue nuclear nations, a global food shortage, phenomena that people with stacked degrees from illustrious colleges and universities were having a great deal of trouble solving. The mood was only slightly more festive at Ocean Heights, where the demographics included families for whom a UC acceptance was heaven on earth, proof that they were about to send a first generation to college, or that they would spend fewer years in debt than they had feared. But the best Ocean Heights students were as crazed as their Crestview counterparts, hopeful that they would show to advantage in the public school population, terrified that an Ivy would discount a public school A because the curriculum lacked rigor. Liz’s Berkeley acceptance registered as little more than confirmation of her competitive status for Harvard.

On April 1, Steve dropped off his last fare at 2:15, complained to the dispatcher of a terrible stomachache, possibly food poisoning, and headed for home, as did Yoonie, who at 2:15 feigned an identical stomachache and left Dr. Joy in the lurch for the first time in her life. They met in the parking lot of the Coffee Bean so
that they could arrive at home simultaneously, and when they pulled up, Liz was already standing on the sidewalk in front of the house, staring at a pile of mail stacked on the stoop. She could have checked her email before she left school, and for a moment she regretted not having done so, but her parents had always talked about what the three of them would do when Liz got her good news, not what Liz would do by herself. The unspoken assumption was that they would find out together. It would have felt like cheating to look at her email.

Steve and Yoonie came up next to her, silently, tallying the number of big manila envelopes. Six. They had a mail slot in their front door, so there was no way to tell if there was a thin envelope without going inside, but for a long moment they did not move.

Six large envelopes.

“We should go inside,” said Liz.

“You said you did not want us to open the mail,” said Yoonie. “We are waiting for you.”

“Right. Okay. I’ll go first and pick up the stuff on the stoop but I’m not going to look at the return addresses. I’m going to open the door and take in the mail and not look either. I’m going into my room. I’ll come out and tell you what happened once I look at everything.”

She could not make good on the business about not looking at the return addresses, but she picked up the outside stack and opened the door to collect the inside stack without giving anything away, and then she disappeared down the hallway into her room, leaving the front door open behind her. Yoonie waited for Steve to move, and Steve waited for Yoonie to move, and neither of them did until a sound behind them made them jump. They turned, as one, and the mailman smiled and saluted as he locked the back doors of his truck and came around to the curb-side driver’s door.

“Lotta mail for you folks,” he said, with a knowing smile. For ten years he had been delivering school news to the families on his route, from preschool acceptances on up to college, and he knew what a pile of fat envelopes meant.

“I can see there’s going to be some celebrating here tonight,” he said as he got into the truck.

Steve and Yoonie waved, mimicked his neighborly smile, and went inside. Yoonie put on water for a pot of tea, but Liz was still in her room when the water boiled, still in her room when the tea had steeped. The optimistic flush that Steve and Yoonie had felt at the mailman’s reference to a celebration began to fade, replaced by the awful sense that the delay had nothing to do with Liz being overcome by joy.

When she did emerge, holding a single sheet of stationery in her hand, there was none of the drama that her parents had anticipated. She simply placed the letter on the table between them and said, “I didn’t get in.” She went to the cabinet, got a mug from the company that made Dr. Joy’s favorite retinol preparation, poured herself some tea, and sat down, so that they could all stare at the letter together.

“Would you like something with your tea?” asked Yoonie, who needed to be busy. Dr. Joy often bought cupcakes for the staff, even though she refused to go near refined sugar and the two younger nurses were on a lifelong diet that only included cupcakes if no one was watching. Yoonie always brought three of them home.

“Sure,” said Liz.

Yoonie cut a double-chocolate cupcake into thirds and put the pieces on a small plate. Steve picked up the letter and studied it, as though he might find a clue to his daughter’s fate in the watermark, or the typeface, or even the cushioned wording of the bad news. A friendly rejection letter had a familiar and disingenuous sting, like the fare who complained about the cab’s air-
conditioning, left a chunk of almond bark to melt into the creases of the backseat, and departed the cab with a cheery, “Have a nice day.”