Admission (21 page)

Sighing, she closed the folder.

“Portia?”

She still had her finger in the file, as if she had the option of declining contact. “Hey, Mom.”

“Mark tell you I called?”

“I got in late, I’m sorry. I didn’t have a chance. You know, you can always try my cell if it’s important.”

Instantly, she regretted this. What was she saying? That her mother shouldn’t call unless it was important? That there had
to be an “it,” and it had to be “important”?

“So did he tell you?” her mother asked. Even from this distance, she sounded on the edge of some hysteria. Was it a disease?
Was that it? And Mark had known and somehow forgotten to mention this? Because he was angry at her? Because she had supposedly
been rude to a woman who was rude to her first? And in her own home!

“He didn’t tell me!” she said, sounding a little hysterical herself. She was bracing herself for words with Greek roots: metastasis,
diagnosis
. Things ending in
oma
. Technical terms that everyone understood.
Stage three. Stage four. Palliative. Hospice
. But her mother was talking instead about a girl who had a baby. Or wanted a baby. Or—no, this was it—had a baby she didn’t
want. What did it have to do with anything? And she was laughing about this now:

“It’s been years since I changed a diaper! But I’m telling you, I can’t wait.”

Portia, who knew only that none of the words she had been expecting were part of this, found herself tuning out the manic
buzz from the other end of the line. She looked at the file in her lap. “Terry Wang,” it said. She had no memory at all of
Terry Wang, despite the fact that she had nearly reached the essays when the phone rang. In theory, many numbers and letters
and words of great importance to Terry Wang had already wafted from these pages, coiling up into the great cauldron of her
own presumably adequate intellect and capacity for judgment. Something about a mother? She had a deceased mother. Mandarin
spoken in the home. She was in a choir, yes? Or a… chorale of some kind. Likely major: molecular biology. Or… Latin? Was she,
in fact, a she at all? Portia had many times been pulled up short by a pronoun at the very end of an application. Sometimes
with a name like Chris or Terry. More often with names foreign to her, Debdan or Meihui. She would nearly have a fixed idea
of this girl who played speed chess to relax, or this boy who had broken every freestyle record his high school could throw
at him, only to have some teacher remark, “He is such a pleasure to teach.” Or, “She is the only girl presently in my advanced
calculus seminar, and refuses to be intimidated.”

“Portia,” her mother said shortly. “Can you believe this?” Clearly, she was relishing some kind of moment.

“He didn’t say anything,” Portia said apologetically. “Are you okay about all this?”

Her mother laughed. She laughed, Portia thought, without context, for the sheer, inappropriate pleasure of it. Portia sat
on her bed, her finger inserted between the pages of Terry Wang’s short, focused life, listening to her mother laugh, far
away up north. She saw Susannah in her warm, messy kitchen, an ancient cat under the table, four days’ worth of Boston Globes
on the counter, dangerously near the stove. Where was Frieda? Portia wondered. Frieda was her mother’s remaining housemate.
Why didn’t Frieda stop her laughing?

“Tell me,” said Portia, reaching for the safest thing, “how did this happen?”

“You remember Barbara? Teaches anthropology at Cornell? We stayed with them when you were looking at the school.”

“Sure I remember,” Portia said, though it had been two decades ago. “Them” had been a houseful of women, very messy women,
some affiliated with the university, in the College Town section of Ithaca. She and her mother had slept on a miserable twin
mattress on the floor, in a room off the kitchen. No wonder she hadn’t wanted to go to Cornell.

“Barb’s been working in Wyoming,” said Susannah, as if this were some sort of explanation.

“Mom?”

“She’s doing a book about feedlot culture.”

“For cows?” Portia asked, baffled.

“No, Portia. For people. It’s a new economic model. No one’s looked at the social impact yet.”

“But…” Her head was meandering. She was actually fighting an urge to reopen Terry Wang’s file, to solve the now thorny issues
of major and gender. “Mom, Barb from Cornell is writing a book about feedlots in Wyoming. What does that have to do with… did
you say you were getting a baby?”

“So she’s been mentoring at Planned Parenthood, like she used to do in Ithaca. One abortion provider for a thousand miles,
and surrounded by the crazies, you know? And this girl came in a few weeks ago, but she seemed ambivalent about terminating.
This girl wanted to finish school and go to college, but she couldn’t continue the pregnancy at home.”

“Why not?” Portia asked.

“Various disapproving family members, I assume,” Susannah said shortly. “Anyway, Barb called me. This is two weeks ago. And
I said send her here. So Barb put her on a plane.”

“Wait…” Portia was shaking her head in disbelief. “When you say ‘girl,’ how girl do you mean? You didn’t kidnap a middle schooler,
did you?”

“No, no. Caitlin’s seventeen. She wants to go to college next fall. Her parents think she’s on a high school exchange program.
Which she is, more or less. I enrolled her at Hartland Regional. It’s like Harvard compared to the lousy school she went to
in Wyoming, you know?”

Portia was briefly distracted by her own internal review of Hartland Regional, which was unlike Harvard in every way she could
think of. “Well… ,” she faltered. “Good for you. You took in an unwed mother. That’s great. And what happens when the baby’s
born?”

“Oh,” said her mother with maddening nonchalance. “She thinks I’m adopting it. But it won’t come to that. Not that I’m opposed
to taking care of the baby. I’d love having a baby around again. Frieda’s giving me a hard time about it, but she’ll come
around.”

Now Portia was reeling. Somewhere between “she thinks I’m adopting” and “won’t come to that” and Frieda needing to “come around,”
there was a crisis afoot. But what specific breed of crisis?

“Mom,” she managed, “you’re”—she frantically did the math—“sixty-eight.”

“I know how old I am,” her mother said tersely. “And very healthy, I’m sure you’ll be happy to hear.”

“Of course I’m happy to hear it,” Portia said, in shock. “Why would you want to do this, at this time of your life?”

“Because I can, right? And I happen to think it’s important. And it needs doing. There you go, three excellent reasons. And
you only asked for one.”

“But you can’t adopt a baby!” she said, baffled that she had to be saying this at all.

“I’m not adopting. Didn’t you listen to what I said? Caitlin isn’t going to let that baby go. She doesn’t know it yet, but
when the baby is born, she’ll see. And I’m happy for her to live here. She can finish high school here. She can even start
college in Vermont if she likes. She has no idea how she’s going to feel once the baby is actually here and she can see it
and hold it. And even if she doesn’t feel that right away, she’ll come home and stay with us, and she’ll bond with the baby.”

Portia felt ill—physically ill. She was now sitting bent forward, hands wrapped tight around her knees, as if bracing for
an unsurvivable plane crash. She wanted to slap her mother, or scream at her, at least, but what would she say? How dared
Susannah assume to know how a seventeen-year-old would feel about a baby she wanted to give up? How dared she lie to a pregnant
girl about something as critically important as this? Once, she might have been able to say these things to her mother. Now
just the idea of them filled her with horror.

“Mom, don’t.” This was all she could manage.

“Don’t? Don’t what?” Susannah said tersely. “Don’t open my home to a young woman who needs help? Don’t give her the opportunity
to change her mind about something this profound? You know, Portia, you may have decided not to have children, but that does
not diminish the mother and child bond for the rest of us. I happen to feel it’s quite powerful.”

Portia was shaking. Bent over, the phone mashed to her ear with a clammy hand.

“She thinks she can just give birth to a baby and get on a plane and leave it behind. Back to her life and her family, whatever.
And that’s understandable. She’s a baby herself. She has no idea how it’s going to feel, but I do. And any mother does. I
know, when she sees her child, it’s going to change. And when it does, the door will be open for her, to take back her child.
All I’m doing is making it possible for Caitlin to change her mind.”

“And what if she doesn’t?” Portia heard herself say. “What if she has her baby and gets on that plane and doesn’t change her
mind? What if you’re left with a baby to raise?”
At your age!
she almost added, but fortunately caught hold of herself.

“You must think of me as very frail,” Susannah said icily. “I had no idea.”

“No, no,” she objected, but feebly. Susannah had never been frail. Susannah was the opposite of frail. “Obviously, you can
do this.”

“Well, thanks for that,” her mother said with abundant sarcasm. “Look, there’s no point going on about it now. I get that
I’m catching you off guard, and you’re finding it difficult to pretend you’re happy about this.”

She was certainly right about that, Portia thought.

“Why don’t you just call me back when you’re ready to have a real conversation. In the meantime, we’re not going to do Thanksgiving,
in case you were thinking of coming up. We’re just getting Caitlin settled in. I don’t want to overwhelm her. I’d rather you
and Mark waited till next month. Then you’ll get a chance to meet her. She’s very intelligent, by the way. I mean, maybe not
Princeton
material, but still intelligent.” This last was said with a definite sneer—identifiable even across the miles and the less
than state-of-the-art telephone connection.

“That’s not fair.”

“Well, life isn’t fair,” her mother said, and hung up smartly.

As an ninth grader, I was fortunate to win a scholarship to Andover through a program that prepares minority students for
college. The first year here was very difficult for me. I felt alone. I was one of very few Latina students on campus. The
other students tended to be from very privileged backgrounds, and though they weren’t unkind to us, it was clear to me that
they didn’t really have an ability to communicate with us in any meaningful way. In my sophomore year, however, I joined the
crew team, and gradually crew became a common language. Some of my crew teammates became my friends, and while none of them
have ever come to visit me in my hometown of Holyoke, Massachusetts, I have spent a lot of time in their homes. The father
of one of my teammates is a Princeton alum, and he first talked to me about the school. I want you to know that I am aware
my SAT scores are significantly lower than what is typical for a Princeton student, but I am used to working very hard, and
I am determined to thrive in college.

M
ark seemed to take the news of their Thanksgiving banishment with equanimity, if the shrug he offered in response might be
termed equanimity. In fact, there was a certain reserve of emotion in the days that followed the dinner party, days in which
they woke and spoke and made plans and shifted them without ever having what might be termed an important conversation. Certainly
they never returned to the crucial moment, the moment she would later know to be a definitive kind of rift, but only seemed
instead to lay a walkway over it and get on with things. Portia considered this, if not precisely satisfying, then oddly mature,
as if they had somehow arrived at a place in their life together where not every moment of conflict required a deconstruction
and then a reconstruction of souls, individual or entwined. Like silence in a long conversation, what had happened felt, in
its immediate aftermath, like a sigh, a shake of the head, or perhaps even the shrug Mark himself had offered when she’d told
him—not, perhaps, in these particular words—that Susannah did not want them after all, that they were off the hook. Surely
he was glad not to face that grueling drive, eight hours at the mercy of their fellow travelers on the wintry roads, the odd
American ritual at this even odder American table in this oddest of all American households. It meant even less to him than
it did to her, surely. Why he had even tolerated it all these years… well, it testified to his general forbearance, she supposed.

But then again, he didn’t seem relieved. He carried this dismissal like a very small but accrued burden, part of an ongoing
increase in small burdens. He made no suggestion for an alternative plan for the holiday, nor did he ask whether she cared
to make a plan. She had just begun to feel real concern for the situation when, three days before the holiday itself, Mark
came home in a state of some agitation and reported an unfolding crisis within his department, one that had been consuming
him—as it turned out—for the better part of a week, and which, reassuringly, had nothing whatsoever to do with him, with her,
or—most important of all—with them.