Admission (33 page)

“How is your wife?” asked Portia, and they talked about her for a bit. Gale and his wife lived in a vast colonial on Webster
Terrace, down at the end of Fraternity Row. It made for a depressing walk home, she had always thought. Their daughters, Dartmouth
graduates, were now lawyers in Boston. Their son (to his father’s vast regret, an aesthete) was in his final year at Bard.

After she had hugged him good-bye and sent love to his wife, she went inside. The McNutt waiting room was not much changed:
Windsor chairs with the college crest, coffee tables laden with yearbooks and copies of the
Dartmouth,
framed photographs of the campus on all the walls. A young woman sat at the reception desk. She looked young enough to be
a student, if not an applicant.

“Can I help you?” she said brightly. The waiting room was empty.

“Oh. No,” said Portia. “I’ll just take an application.” She took it from a pile on one of the faux Chippendale hunt cupboards.

“We have one more tour, at three-thirty.”

“No thanks. I’m just passing through.”

She looked around, wondering if any of her other former colleagues might show themselves. When they did not, she left.

As she stepped back outside, she saw that the light had become suddenly elusive, an early dusk settling over the snow. It
was a familiar dusk, with a known glow, lavender in color, and she stood for a moment, appreciating it. There was without
question an intense beauty to this place, a specific juxtaposition of white clapboard, brick, and open space ringed by winter
trees. It made her think of that song they had all been taught as freshmen. Not the raucous, silly alma mater with its awful
line about “the granite of New Hampshire / In their muscles and their brains” and its shifting pronouns to accommodate coeducation.
But the pretty one, the one that—despite her best efforts to sing it stoically—always ended with her choking up:

By the light of many thousand sunsets,

Dartmouth Undying, like a vision starts:

Dartmouth, the gleaming, dreaming walls of Dartmouth,

Miraculously builded in our hearts…

It was, as someone far cleverer had once said, only a small college. And yet there were those who loved it.

Caitlin was waiting for her in the café, at a table by the window, stirring sugar into her tea.

“I’m so sorry,” said Portia. “I completely lost track of the time. Is that normal tea?”

“What?” Caitlin looked up at her. She looked, suddenly, terribly young to Portia. She moved a white plastic bag from the tabletop
onto one of the chairs. There was a clanking sound inside, of glass knocking together, as she set it down.

“Sneaking soda back to the house?” Portia teased.

“No. It’s this stuff they gave me. I have to drink it before my next appointment. It’s for a test.”

“Gestational diabetes?”

“Yes.” Caitlin frowned. “How did you know that?”

“There was an article in one of those magazines.”

“Oh.”

She went to the counter, ordered herself a coffee, and stood waiting for it, not exactly avoiding conversation with the girl,
but perhaps minimizing it.

“Last time I was here it was jam-packed,” Caitlin said when she returned. “There weren’t any seats at all.”

“Well…” Portia sipped her coffee, then blew on it. “That was probably in term. All the students are gone for the holidays.”

“Yeah,” Caitlin said, and awkward silence hung between them. “You know,” she said after a minute, “sometimes I can’t believe
we’re the same age.”

“We?” Portia looked at her in alarm.

“The Dartmouth students and me. I mean, what are they, eighteen? Nineteen? I’m eighteen in June.”

She nodded, waiting.

“It’s just, I mean, I look at them and they’re, like, having a good time, worrying about… I don’t know, a French test or something.
And I’m having a baby. It’s so… wild. You know?”

Portia was pretty sure she did know, but she didn’t say anything.

“Not… I don’t want to sound like I’m not grateful. To your mom. I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t met her friend.
Barbara?”

“Yes. Barb. She used to live near us when we lived in Massachusetts.”

“And she had this crazy idea, to come here. But I needed a crazy idea. I needed any idea.”

Portia sipped her coffee. “I think… ,” she said, remembering, “my mother said you wanted to go to college yourself.”

To her surprise, Caitlin responded to this by laughing. She shook her head over the mug of tea, which she held between her
palms. Portia looked around the room. They were indeed alone, except for the dull-looking girl who had made her coffee and
a man in one of the armchairs, reading
The New Yorker
.

“Here’s what’s funny,” Caitlin said. “Well, I think this is pretty funny. Yeah, I do want to go to college.”

“There’s nothing funny about that,” said Portia.

“No, that’s not what I mean. I realized I wanted to go to college the same day I figured out I was pregnant. It was a pretty
intense day. Well,” she said, eyeing Portia, “I don’t know if you want to hear this.”

“Of course,” said Portia, surprised to discover that she did.

“I took the test in the morning. It was Labor Day weekend. I went to the drugstore and got it, then I went to the library
and took the test there. I didn’t want to take it home and have my mom find it.”

“Okay,” said Portia.

“So I’m not… I mean, it was awful. I didn’t believe it at first. I couldn’t believe I was pregnant.”

“Were you using anything?” Portia asked, trying not to sound preemptively judgmental. Obviously she hadn’t used anything.

“Anything? Like birth control?”

Portia nodded.

“My boyfriend… my
boyfriend,
” she said with refreshing hostility, “told me we didn’t need it. He said he wouldn’t”—she took her own furtive glance around
the room—“go in all the way. He said I could only get pregnant if he went in all the way. And he didn’t,” she finished unnecessarily.

Portia sighed. She was glad her mother wasn’t here. The inevitable diatribe would not have been helpful. “If it’s any comfort,”
she said, “you’re not the first woman to get misinformation on this subject. You won’t be the last, I’m sorry to say.”

“Not much comfort. But thanks.” She rolled her eyes.

“But what about at school? Didn’t they teach you about birth control in school?”

“Oh, you’re kidding.” She summoned a smile. “My school? Maybe here, but not where I’m from. My school is, like, one-third
LDS, one-third born again, one-third meth addicts. They taught us what your period is, and all those other fun changes that
mean you’re a woman now. But birth control, no way. Why would we need birth control? We’re not supposed to be, you know, having
sex. We were supposed to stay pure till we got married. That part of it was really clear. But, I mean, they never told us
what that meant, exactly. I know girls who thought if they ever kissed someone, they weren’t pure anymore. I used to think
that, actually. I thought sex was kissing.” She smiled and actually blushed. She looked, oddly, thoroughly innocent, circumstances
notwithstanding.

“In other words, you were supposed to be the first teenagers in history not to have sex. Is that it?”

Caitlin looked suddenly delighted. “That’s about it.”

“Did you tell your boyfriend?”

She shook her head. “By the time I found out, he wasn’t my boyfriend anymore. If I told anyone, it should have been the girl
he was going out with after me. I mean, isn’t he going to tell her exactly the same thing?”

“Oh, probably,” Portia said. “So back to taking the test.”

“Yeah. I’m in the bathroom at the library, trying not to lose it. And it was Labor Day weekend. Did I say that?”

“Yes,” said Portia, sipping.

“On Labor Day weekend we always have lunch at my aunt Jane’s house. All the sisters. My mom is one of six sisters and two
brothers. All the sisters are married, and one of the brothers. Almost all of them have kids, so it’s a ton of people. Plus
my grandmother. My grandfather died a long time ago.”

“Okay,” Portia said, trying to follow.

“And usually I’m running around with the kids, but this time I don’t feel like running around, so I’m sitting at the table
with my mom and all my aunts, just, you know, trying to follow the conversation and pretend the bottom hasn’t just fallen
out of my life. And my aunt Susie was talking about the school her kids went to, or something about the parents at the school,
and I just started looking around the table at all of them, you know?”

Of course Portia didn’t know. But she nodded anyway.

“And I just… suddenly, I just looked at them, and I realized. Every one of them, my mom and all her sisters, they went to junior
college for one or two years, and then they got married. And that was it. And then it just dawned on me, you know? That I
never thought about my future, and
they
never thought about my future. They never asked me, you know, what do you want to do when you grow up? Or if I wanted to
go to college. And I never asked myself. Because that part of my life was just kind of supposed to end after a year or two,
and then I was supposed to get married and do what they’d done, which was have babies. And it was totally bizarre, because
here I’d come to find out I was going to have a baby, and suddenly the one thing I knew was that wasn’t what I wanted. Do
you understand?”

Portia, dumbfounded, nodded. “That must have been very hard.”

“But I love them, you know? I love all of them. I love my mom and my aunt Jane. They only want the best for me.”

“Of course.”

“But I couldn’t tell them this. There wasn’t any part of it they’d understand. My mom would have just been, you know, destroyed.
And I think my dad and my brothers… I don’t know. And that part about wanting to go to college. I mean, real college.”

“Four-year college.”

“Yeah. They just wouldn’t have had any idea what to do with that. You know, four-year college, that means away, somewhere
else. Not at home.”

“Most parents,” said Portia, carefully, “like to send their kids to college. Of course, they miss them, but it’s an important
part of their growing up and becoming independent.”

Caitlin shook her head so vigorously, the thin locks of hair came out from behind her ears. “No. Not my parents. You know,
all these aunts? The farthest any of them lives from each other is, like, ten miles. And it isn’t just my family. It’s every
single person I know. Nobody ever goes away, except the boys, of course.”

“Why the boys?” Portia asked suspiciously.

“Oh, they go to Brigham Young if they go to college. And they go on mission, of course. But then they come back after. But
to get back to Labor Day, I was sitting there thinking about all this and I was just, like, paralyzed, you know? And then
that went on for a couple of weeks, and it was awful because I couldn’t tell anybody what was happening. But finally I made
myself make some kind of decision, because I wanted to be the one deciding what was going to happen. So I went to the nearest
clinic, which was all the way in Casper. I mean, four hours in the car to get there. I thought I was going for an abortion,
but I didn’t know you couldn’t just walk in and get one. They need to talk to you first and make sure you know what you’re
doing. I didn’t expect that.”

Portia nodded, waiting.

“The thing is, I wasn’t really in favor of abortion. I’m pro-life. I’ve always been pro-life. I mean, everyone I know is pro-life.
I guess I was expecting the people in the clinic would be, like, ‘Step this way, lie down on the table,’ you know, ‘we’ll
get rid of it for you.’ But they wanted to talk to me about how I really felt and what I really wanted to do with my life,
and how I thought about the baby. Barbara was my counselor. And I kept saying, yes, I want to end it, yes, I want the abortion,
but you know, she knew I couldn’t do it. She made the appointment to come back and do it the next week, but when I came back
I was just a wreck. I couldn’t make myself do it. It just felt really wrong.”

Portia drank the end of her coffee, lukewarm and grainy going down her throat. “It sounds like you were really struggling.”

“Well, Barbara asked me if I’d thought about giving the baby away for adoption, and of course I thought that was a fantastic
idea. I mean, right away I thought: That’s it. That’s my way out. But I still couldn’t go home to my family and have a baby.
I already looked different. I couldn’t wear most of my clothes. I don’t think anybody noticed yet, but I noticed.”

“Then Barb mentioned my mom?”

She nodded. “Not her in particular, but she said she had some friends back east who might be able to let me live with them
and I could go to school. The adoption part I could work out later, but the main thing was to get me out of the house as soon
as possible. I still can’t believe how fast she did it. I mean, less than a week later I was getting off the plane in Burlington.”
She gave a ragged sigh that spoke of barely averted tears. “I know how this sounds. I know you think I’m an idiot for getting
pregnant in the first place, and then not going through with the abortion.”

“I don’t think that at all,” Portia said, surprised.

“It’s just,” Caitlin continued, ignoring this, “when something like this happens, it’s like, you’re just knocked off your
feet. I couldn’t think about anything. I couldn’t make any decisions, like even what to put on in the morning or which way
to drive to school, let alone what to do about my life and going to college and having a baby. I think I must have gone crazy
or something. I’m sure you can’t imagine what I’m talking about.”

“I can imagine,” Portia said quietly. “I got pregnant once, a long time ago.”

Caitlin snapped to attention. She looked sharply at Portia, as if Portia had just become the most fascinating thing in the
universe. Portia, on the other hand, went numb. She found herself taking inventory of the palms of her hands. She had not
planned to say this. She was a little bit stunned herself.