The Admissions (7 page)

But she was so close. A little over a month, she was almost there. She just had to get through a little more. The first-quarter grades would be sent on to Harvard just as soon as they were ready. She didn’t want to work so hard and come in second,
geez.
Angela just had to
marshal
her forces and show some
tenacity.
Valedictorians were made, not born.

When she’d turned seventeen Aunt Marianne had sent her,
wow,
a gift certificate for JetBlue for $500. Angela didn’t even know airlines did gift certificates.

I don’t know where you’ll land after your senior year,
the card said.
But I want you to be able to get home anytime.

Sometimes Angela felt like taking that gift certificate and flying far, far away.

(What did Aunt Marianne mean, though, that she didn’t know where Angela would land? Didn’t she think she could get into Harvard?)

“Okay,” Angela said, sighing mightily, tearing at a cuticle with her teeth. “Friday night? I can’t stay out late, because of the meet Saturday. I want to be asleep by eleven. But I’ll do it.”

Cecily could tell by the look on her mother’s face that this wasn’t the best idea in the world.

Actually she thought Maddie was picking them up, and that would have made things easier. But now she remembered that Maddie was going away for the weekend so her mother was taking the afternoon off work. Maddie probably wouldn’t have noticed what Cecily had with her, literally. Maddie never noticed anything.

Still, Cecily was in it now, so she kept on going.
Keep on keeping on
was what her father always said. Maya was already in her booster seat, looking out the window, wiping at her eyes.

Her mother’s mouth was a straight line in her face. She definitely wasn’t smiling. She lowered the passenger window and stretched across the seat to lean out of it.

“What’s wrong with Maya?”

Maya swiped at her nose. “Stupid boys,” she said.

“Nothing,” said her mother. “Some idiotic kids made fun of her for her reading. For her
not
reading.”

“They called me dumb,” confirmed Maya. “I don’t care though.” But her eyes were wet and bright and she was blinking rapidly.

“I am outraged,” said Cecily’s mom. “I might talk to their parents.”

“No!” said Maya, horrified. “Don’t do that!”

Cecily’s mom took a better look at Cecily and said, “Cecily. What is in that cage?”

Cecily looked at the cage as though surprised to find it in her hands. She shifted and tried to open the door but she couldn’t do both so she set the cage down on the ground.

Maya unbuckled and spilled herself out of the car and crouched on the ground and crowed, “It’s
Roland
! From the science lab! Hey, Roland, come here, you little cutie. Is he coming to
our house,
Cecily?”

Now Cecily’s mom was out of the car too. Someone in the car behind her was starting to honk. You were supposed to keep moving in the turnaround line. Cecily’s mom shot that car a look and the honking stopped.

“Cecily. Is that a
rat
?”

“No! It’s Roland. He’s a
hamster.
I signed up to take him home for the weekend. He can’t stay alone. I mean, he can, but he’d rather be with people. He’s really social, he gets lonely on his own.”

Her mother sighed and definitely did not crouch down to look at Roland. “Don’t you need permission from your parents for that? Isn’t there a form?”

“I forgot it. But Mr. G. let me take him anyway.”

“What do you mean, you forgot it? I never signed a form.”

“That’s what I mean. I forgot to have you sign the form.”

Her mother was frowning at the cage. Roland hopped on his wheel and showed off a little bit.

“He’s nocturnal,” said Cecily. “But I guess he’s up now because of all the excitement.”

“Wonderful,” said her mom. “Nocturnal, perfect. Get in the car, girls, I think this car behind us is going to run us over if we don’t get out of the way.”

“With Roland?”

Her mother frowned again. “Well, I guess so. We can’t leave him at the turnaround, can we?”

“No. And I think Mr. G. already left.”

“Perfect.” Her mother put two fingers in the center of her forehead and pressed.

They loaded themselves into the car, and Cecily put Roland’s cage on the seat between her and Maya. She held on to it with one hand and twisted her body to look at him.

“He looks a little bit like Frankie, if you look closely.”

“He does,” said Maya. “He does look like Frankie. Aw, his little nose. I love him. Roland, I love you.”

Her mother, from the front seat: “How can he look like Frankie? He’s a
hamster
and Frankie was a
dog.
”

“Best dog in the world,” said Maya softly.

“They have the same expression,” said Cecily. “They really do, if you look closely.”

Roland hiked himself up on the wires of his cage and studied Cecily, twitching his nose. His whiskers.

“If that thing gets out,” said her mother. “We’ll never find him.”

“That’s because he’s a dwarf hamster,” said Cecily. “He’s tiny. That’s what Pinkie has too. I won’t let him get out, I promise.”

Her mother looked in the rearview mirror. Cecily couldn’t see her face but when she spoke next it sounded like there might be a little bit of a smile creeping into her voice. “He doesn’t look like Frankie,” she said. “I do not accept that comparison. But he is a little bit cute. For a hamster.”

Cecily missed Frankie so much that sometimes when she thought about him she felt like her stomach was crawling into her throat and choking her. Cecily had never known the world without him, and then suddenly he was gone. And she had to get used to a whole new world.

She was never bothered by his gas attacks the way everyone else was, and she didn’t even mind when he drooled on her hand. Which—by the way—he did a lot. Cecily could tell by his eyes that he trusted her and that he believed that Cecily would do whatever he needed for him. Which she would, because she understood him.

Empathy,
her mother called it. Her mother always said Cecily had empathy spilling right out of her.

4:37 a.m.

Dear M:

Auction night. You would hate the auction, dear sister, champion of the underdogs. And if you came to the auction you would be an active participant in the

odd

unsettling

fascinating

exhilarating

disturbing

world of privately funded California public schools.

Don’t ever go to the auction, Marianne.

P.S. Did I tell you about the hamster?

There was a cocktail hour with an open bar, purposely held at the same time as the silent auction bidding. There was a four-course sit-down dinner served by the country club staff in bow ties and cummerbunds. There was a professional auctioneer with a bald shiny head and a vest. (Nora read in the auction program that he’d started his career doing cattle auctions, and she squinted at him, imagining him in Gabe’s old Wyoming stomping ground, wearing flannel and pointing out the merits of a Texas Longhorn. What did this guy think, transported from a
cattle auction,
of all places, where he literally had to
step over shit
to get his job done, to a country club ballroom filled with some of Marin’s finest?) There was lots of cheek kissing on the part of the women, as though they hadn’t just seen one another the day before in the pickup line, and hearty handshakes on the part of the men. Nora looked around, accepted a cheek kiss from Melanie Schubert and doled out one to Jules Morris, the room parent in Cecily’s class. They sat with Skip and Cathy Moynihan, Pinkie’s parents. Angela and Cecily and Maya were home together—this was rare, but the fact that Angela was home was saving Nora approximately eighty dollars in babysitting costs. They were eating pizza and watching a movie that Nora was sure was inappropriate for Maya, but she hadn’t thought to ask about it until it was too late. Was that why Maya couldn’t read, too many inappropriate movies at a young age?

No, Angela could be trusted. Couldn’t she? Of course she could. She had just sat for the Fletcher boys the night before. But she’d be exhausted from being up early for the meet, and Nora knew Angela was kicking herself over a very respectable second-place finish—a bit of a surprise, but everybody has off days. Angela might not even be sitting with the girls, she might be in her room, working on the Harvard application. Should Nora call to check in? Was that what a respectable parent would do, or was that what a helicopter parent would do? Oh, God, was Nora a helicopter parent?

Nora inhaled deeply. School auction night.

The live auction began. In her head, Nora started an email to Marianne.

First,
she wrote,
there was the farm-to-table dinner.

The farm-to-table dinner for twelve people went for $8,000. A week in Tahoe, summer or winter, winner’s choice: ten grand. A weekend in the Mulholland Suite at the Huntington: $5,000. A ride on a Rose Bowl parade float. Scuba diving lessons. A getaway in Carmel with two days of spa treatments. A shopping trip to Dubai! The big-ticket item. Twenty-five grand for three couples.

Under the glare of the lights over the stage ballroom, the auctioneer was beginning to sweat. Perhaps, after all, the cattle were easier.

Nora sipped from her wineglass and looked at Gabe. Had Gabe been distant lately? She knew he was involved in a big project at work, a company called Bizzvara.
Ridiculous
name.

Gabe was dressed to kill, in a Brioni jacket Nora had given him for Christmas the previous year. It looked just a bit looser than it had at Christmas. Had Gabe been working out more than usual? Was he trying to impress someone besides Nora? She remembered when Melanie Schubert’s husband had left her the previous year; Melanie had cried on Nora’s shoulder at a PTO meeting and said, “How’d he have
time
for an affair? I would never be able to fit infidelity into my day.”

Gabe reached for her hand and squeezed it. No, she was being crazy. He wasn’t distant; he was merely entranced. He held his paddle at the ready. Every year he bid on a variety of items, and most of the time he lost out to someone else. But he kept up the volley, valiantly, energetically, cheerfully, like a tennis pro from a middling club transported suddenly to the courts at Wimbledon. It was sort of adorable.

Principal for a day for one lucky child went for a cool $2,500.
That’s two thousand, five hundred,
Nora mentally typed to Marianne. Reserved parking in front of the school for a year nearly incited a riot; it was decided, eventually, that it would be shared between the two highest bidders. The shining parental faces, the strapless dresses, the perfume, the alcoholic buzz that pervaded the room like campfire smoke at Yosemite.

There was a break. The room itself seemed to sigh, releasing palpable quantities of tension. Nora saw the auctioneer gulping water off to the side of the stage. Someone handed him a napkin, and he mopped at the top of his head.

“Do you think he’s okay?” she whispered to Gabe. He was absorbed in the program, but then he looked at her and smiled and he was the same man she’d fallen in love with in that bar in Noe Valley: the bright-eyed sexy optimist with the old sneakers and the beat-up Subaru. “I think he’s fine,” he said. “Look, he’s ready to rock and roll.”

“I’d bid on the Adirondack chairs myself,” said Cathy Moynihan, leaning so close to Nora that Nora could see the remnants of a pomegranate seed (salad course) wedged between two of her molars.

Dear Marianne,
thought Nora.
Hold on to your hat while I tell you about the shopping trip to Dubai…

Marianne might read Nora’s email in the wee hours, before she went off to her job as a public defender in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, making the drive up 95 from Narragansett, where the scenery got grimmer and grimmer after you passed the crown jewel of the state, the Providence Place mall (fantastic mall, by the way; if that mall had existed when Nora was a teenager she would have happily become a mall rat). Marianne was currently defending a man accused of stabbing his girlfriend sixteen times and then leaving her for dead. Sixteen times! Try as she might, Nora could not wrap her mind around the specifics of this crime. The girl had lived to tell about it, but only barely. And there was Marianne, pulling on her Talbots suits each day, hopping in her battered Toyota and going off to defend him, innocent until proven guilty and all that. (If Marianne were telling this story she would say carefully that the man had
allegedly
stabbed his girlfriend.) If Marianne were at this auction she would grab the microphone from the auctioneer and ask everybody why it was okay that each child in the fifth grade at their school had an iPad for their own personal use while kids in Concord and Vallejo sometimes struggled to find a pencil or a notebook. People would look around uncomfortably, not knowing what to say, so Marianne would answer for them. Marianne’s answer would be: It’s not okay! So let’s do something about it! She had always been a rallier, an organizer, the Energizer Bunny of social justice. Marianne was good and pure, the champion of the little people, while here Nora sat, transfixed (literally) by the lights of the chandelier.

“But it wouldn’t be right,” continued Cathy Moynihan, and for a second Nora thought she was talking about social justice. “Since you and I practically made the Adirondacks, right, Nora? Give someone else a chance!” Cathy laughed merrily and inspected her manicure.

Nora wasn’t sure if she would be friends with Cathy if Pinkie and Cecily weren’t so close. They were like blood sisters, those two, with a friendship so effortlessly deep that Nora sometimes felt an unwelcome twinge of envy watching them. Nora felt that way only about Marianne, her actual blood sister, who lived nowhere near her.

Nora felt then a tug of nostalgia for Rhode Island that was so strong it caused her eyes to fly open. On the other side of the cavernous room, from a faraway table, her old friend Amanda Hill, whom Nora hadn’t seen for ages, not since Amanda and her family moved out of their neighborhood and into a gorgeous four-bedroom, three-bath a few miles away. Beautiful pool, with the Tahoe-blue tile that turned the water the color that made you feel like you were always on vacation in Mexico. (Nora hadn’t been back at work yet when they sold the house in the old neighborhood; they had chosen someone in Sally Bentley’s office, and secretly Nora thought they had taken less than they needed to—if they had been her clients she would have told them to hold firm, patience should trump volume and speed.)

At one time, when the kids were young, and before Nora had gone back to work, Amanda and Nora had been very close. Amanda had a daughter Cecily’s age, and a son who was Maya’s age, and after Nora shipped Angela off to school for the day Amanda and Nora would do those things that nonworking mothers did, like push their strollers up and down the bike path for hours and sit outside Starbucks while their toddlers babbled to one another and spilled overpriced crunchy organic snacks all over themselves. Talking about nothing, everything, sex, their younger selves, working versus not working, whose husbands left wet towels where. How nice it was to see Amanda.

“Were you sleeping?” Gabe whispered to her.

“Of course not,” Nora said. “Don’t be daft.” She didn’t normally say things like that but she’d been binge-watching
Downton Abbey
when she couldn’t sleep and the phrase slipped out of her, unchecked. She rubbed her eyes. The auctioneer was nowhere to be seen—changing his shirt, maybe, in the men’s room—and that’s what accounted for the low buzz of conversation that had taken over the room, broken by the occasional female shriek of delight or surprise.

Amanda drew closer. She wore a look of barely contained glee, like someone who has just discovered that her child has won a prize but is waiting for somebody else to make the announcement.

“Hey!” said Nora, sitting up straighter, holding her arms half open for the requisite half hug, which she’d never seemed to master. Cathy had vacated her seat to go, like an intrepid explorer, in search of more wine, so Nora pulled out the empty seat next to her for Amanda. She couldn’t believe how happy she was to see Amanda, who, though she was dressed in an off-the-shoulder number that included a gold belt buckle, was easy to remember in black exercise pants and a tank, marching determinedly along the bike path, pale hair swinging. They’d gotten along really well, they’d shared the same sense of humor, and they were annoyed by the same things. The latter, to Nora, was one of the building blocks of true friendship.

“Nora.” Amanda smiled. Her smile looked different somehow than it used to back in the fast-walking-stroller days. Tighter. Had Amanda had something done? Botox? But Botox didn’t tighten up your mouth, did it? That seemed like it would certainly defeat the purpose. Nora knew very little about Botox or any of Botox’s brethren. She had once brought the topic up to Marianne, and Marianne had laughed so long and so hard (and really, in an uncharacteristically uncharitable way) that Nora had let it drop. Now she just avoided looking full-on in the mirror when the lights were very bright; it seemed an altogether less expensive long-term solution. “It’s good to see you,” Amanda continued. It
almost
seemed like she said that perfunctorily, a little mechanically, but maybe Nora was imagining that because the buzz in the room had become louder.

“How’re the new digs?” Nora leaned forward eagerly. “I haven’t seen you in for
ever.
”

Amanda seemed to be looking not quite at Nora but at something just behind her and to the left, which, when Nora turned briefly, she could not identify. “Well. Not so new anymore, you know. It’s been three years. But good. We love it over there. It’s a great neighborhood.”

“Don’t I know it,” said Nora. She could have gotten them thirty grand more for their old house, easy.

“A much better fit for us, all things considered,” said Amanda.

“I can see that,” said Nora. Though she couldn’t. She had loved having Amanda in their neighborhood. She had hoped Amanda would stay forever, until they were too old to walk quickly on the bike path—until they were old enough to instead just sit quietly on the front porch. In rockers. Although, truthfully, people in their neighborhood never sat on the front porch, in rockers or otherwise. All of the action, all of the living, happened in the privacy of gated backyards.

Just after returning to Sutton and Wainwright, Nora had sold a home near Amanda’s new house to the Miller family. Nora had pulled the ultimate coup on that one, being the seller’s agent but finding the buyers as well: that was the hat trick, the grand slam, the hole-in-one of real estate. She split the commission with herself! And then handed a good chunk of it over to Arthur Sutton, of course, who was so grateful that he and his wife, Linda, took Gabe and Nora to Saison for one of the most extravagant meals of Nora’s life. It was a win-win. Proof that she’d done the right thing, going back to work!

“How
are
the Millers?” Nora asked now. Gabe was deep in conversation with another fourth-grade dad who was only vaguely familiar to Nora. Golf, probably. Or tennis. Men at the auction loved to talk about golf and tennis. These were the stepping-stones of their friendships, since they didn’t have the school pickup line or yoga over which to bond. Nora didn’t really have the pickup line (Maddie often did that) or yoga either. Nora wished she were the yoga type, but she was too high-strung for it. Far too impatient. Linda Sutton had dragged her along to a class in Cow Hollow once (she called it
girl time
), and as much as she adored Linda, Nora had spent the whole class wondering if everybody else could hear her heart hammering away inside her rib cage because she was so anxious about an open house she was holding the next day at a four-point-eight-million in Tiburon. After, they had gone for green juices at a juice bar near the yoga studio, where Linda had cheerfully forked over twenty-one dollars and fifty cents for two glasses of liquefied spinach and lemon. Nora was so hungry after that she’d stopped at In-N-Out on the way home for a shake.

“Do you ever see them?” Nora asked. “The Millers?” Loretta and Barry Miller had been mildly difficult to deal with. Loretta was one of those red-haired, freckled, slightly pointy women who had about them a semipermanent air of dissatisfaction that seemed neither to grow stronger nor to abate, whatever circumstances they found themselves in. (“A bit of a sourpuss,” Nora’s mother would have called her.) There were some issues over the inspection, if Nora remembered correctly, a potential leak in the hot tub for which a very expensive leak specialist had been called in, on Nora’s dime. But it was nothing that wasn’t smoothed over with the right combination of charm and solicitude on Nora’s part. People panicked right before they bought an expensive property, she understood that. And there had been no leak in the hot tub after all, though the specialist had to empty the whole thing and refill it to verify that. (This, again, had occurred at Nora’s expense: people outside the industry simply did not understand how large the monetary outlay was for real estate agents prior to a sale, when life became one gigantic, expensive gamble.)