Early Decision (7 page)

From beneath her hair, Sadie said, “My mother thinks I should take out the stuff about her and Dad.”

“Why?”

“She thinks it shows I think I'm special because my parents both work, when really the norm in the world is that. And it's only because we go to private school that I think moms are there to pick up their kids and stuff.”

Man, there they were, at the most tender spot. With the boys, it took weeks of scraping at their dull sentences to find a beating heart. The girls drove straight to the center. “I think it's hard to have two parents with really big careers,” Anne told her. Her own mother had started graduate school when Anne was small, and she remembered clearly the years of being told to look for their car in the pickup line because it was unclear which of a number of ever-changing college girls would be there to fetch her. For a moment she felt cold fall air and remembered one precise afternoon, and the white turtleneck she was wearing, and not having a jacket. Why would she not have had a jacket? Maybe her memory had added that bit, to explain the chill.

“Really?” said Sadie. “I think it's just normal.”

“Well, ‘normal' doesn't mean not hard, does it?”

Sadie shrugged.

“What do you think of your mom's suggestion?”

“I don't know. I can't think of what I would put in for those two points, though, if I took them out.”

“I think we might be able to let the star metaphor go, eventually, as the essay evolves,” Anne said.

“Really? But I thought that was good? As structure?”

“It does give a firm structure, it's true. But you might find down the line that you don't need it. Anyway, let's not worry about that now.”

“I really like it, though.”

“Okay,” Anne stalled. God, who were the English teachers who taught these extended metaphors? Every year they replicated.

“You know,” Anne continued, “when I was a little girl, my mom went back to school. To become a social worker.” Anne's students had been raised in the age of oversharing. Confession was like a key in a lock with them, particularly the girls.

“Really?” asked Sadie. “Who'd she work with?”

“Well, she has an interest in families with small children. Single moms. People who are struggling.”

“How old were you?”

“When she started school? Four.”

“So not really little.”

“Um, I think that's kinda little.”

Sadie was puzzled. Her fingers worked the dog's ruff.

“You must be proud of her,” she said.

“Absolutely. Of course.”

“I can kind of understand that. My mom's job is to help people, too.”

“Doesn't mean it's not a drag when you feel you're the one who needs help. Does it?”

“I guess it's, like, I don't know. When it's really bad, the kids we see, I just, you know, I think about this”—she waved her hand vaguely toward the room's double-high windows, the late city light falling behind the silk—“and I just wonder, like, why them and not me?”

Which was exactly what her parents intended, thought Anne coldly; trying to prove to their children how good they had it. Or trying to prove to themselves how good
they
were, and how deserving of fortune. A tidy transfer of guilt from parent to child.

“Of course,” said Anne quietly.

“Anyway, I just think it's great that my parents give us all these opportunities to remember how privileged we are. But can you hold on a sec? I want to make sure Inez isn't putting meat in the dinner. I'm totally into the vegetarian thing right now and she keeps forgetting. Be right back.”

Sadie upended Tassel onto the cushion and trotted out. Instantly Charles appeared and scooped up the dog, which looked aggrieved. He paused on his way out. “Meat is dead animals,” he informed Anne. “Like, dogs.”

“I know it,” Anne replied. Cradling Tassel, Charles left.

“Inez is great but totally flaky,” said Sadie, taking up her place. “Where's Tassie?”

“Charles,” said Anne.

“Oh. Poor thing.”

“I know,” Anne agreed.

“He drags her into all his little forts.”

“Bummer.”

“Anyway,” said Sadie, “do you think my essay is good for Duke? I'm applying there early decision. You know, it's kind of a big deal, because my dad is head of the board. So, like, it's all his friends who will read it. And he really wants it to be good.”

“I'm pretty sure the board of trustees won't be reading applications,” Anne reassured her.

“Okay, but Dad's, like, in tight with the head of admissions,” Sadie told her, clutching her hands together. She gave Anne a wide grin. “They went to Choate together, isn't that wild? And I know he's just really proud of me, and he'll want to send the essay to lots of people when I get in.”

“Then we'd better get started,” said Anne.

SEPTEMBER

S
ATURDAY MORNINGS
, A
NNE
volunteered at an enormous public high school on the city's far north side. Autumn marked three years since she'd been recruited by the Princeton alumna who oversaw the program, and who might have recognized in Anne the desire to serve true need. Anne had jumped at the chance. “ACT prep, basic literacy skills, that sort of thing,” the woman explained. She was several years older, small and plump, with a bobbed haircut that Anne guessed had gone unchanged since she was a toddler. Anne considered her brusqueness to be compensatory, and imagined it was necessary in the classroom. She didn't seem to be married.

Anne had replied, “I don't have any training for the ACT, and I haven't ever actually done teacher prep. I'm probably best with essays.”

“Oh, honey,” said the woman, “these kids don't go to colleges that ask for essays.”

Ever since, Anne had been, by mutual agreement, openly submissive to Michelle.

Which is why it was surprising, and a bit flattering, that Michelle had called over the Labor Day holiday to discuss a student. The telephone had set Anne's heart jumping: her apartment was silent, save for the whirring air conditioner and the occasional clink of Mitchell's tags. Martin had deemed it too costly to travel to Chicago for the long weekend, and she had begged off moldering with her parents in the dog-day burbs using the excuse of her students, even though they were all taking the weekend off.

“I think we have a ringer this year,” Michelle said. “Am I disturbing you?”

“No,” Anne replied. “Tell me.”

“I don't know, but I think she can reach really high. She's easily the strongest student in the grade and has been since she arrived as a sophomore. Guatemalan. Pretty sure her family's illegal—I think only Mom is here. Dad may be back there, or maybe no dad. She's very shy. Doesn't get into trouble, so no one ever really asks. She's below the radar, is the thing, and I just think we're going to have to figure out how to thread this needle for her.”

“Does she have the ACTs yet?”

“Yes, took them this spring. No prep at all. Composite 34.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah, I know, right? But the family thing's going to be a hurdle. Just getting the ACT fee waiver was hell. And talking the school into pulling together all the documentation—well, I'll deal with all of that, but we're going to have to find a way to get the FAFSA forms done, and I don't know how the family will feel about any of this. Especially if I'm right about her status.”

“What does financial aid look like for her?” asked Anne. She'd only encountered the FAFSA forms twice, both times in cases of incendiary divorces. Her students were the full-tuition-paying sort, the pack mules of university budgeting.

“There won't be any contribution at all on her part, I don't think. Can't be. It would be too much for the family—they'd say no right off the bat. She'll have to work her tail off wherever she goes, in the dining hall or something, but we need scholarships, really big ones.”

“I guess we need to research those?”

“Actually, at this point, I think we need to go to the top. We need a trustee. Someone who'll advocate and speed things up. I was thinking Princeton, naturally, but Cristina's got this thing for Duke.”

Anne's breath caught in her throat. “Why?”

“I think because of the basketball team, oddly enough. She's got a brother, and uncles, or cousins or something, and they're all way into college hoops. So they're huge Duke fans, and I think she thinks that's the way she'll convince them she can go.”

“Doubt the Tigers have the same effect.”

“No. Anyway, I just wanted to give you the heads-up. She'll be there on Saturday. Cristina Castello. Have a look and see what you see. And then let's confer on this. I don't know anyone. I was thinking I could throw it open, post to the list serves—”

“Let me think about it,” Anne interrupted. “I might know someone.”

“Really? Seriously?”

“Might. Maybe. Let me look into it.”

“Oh, Anne, that would be amazing. I knew I should call you, with all your rich-folks connections. Okay. So let me know.”

By Saturday morning, however, Anne was feeling she'd been reckless mentioning her possible lead. Gideon Blanchard was hardly a friend, and, the more she reflected on it, the more it seemed wrong to ask him to advocate on behalf of a student who would be applying for his daughter's class. Maybe if Sadie were a year above or behind, but the same admissions cycle? Not that the girls would be direct competitors in the process itself. Still something seemed unfair to Sadie, though Anne couldn't put her finger on what. Sadie had so much. And she'd probably leap at the chance to help another girl. This weekend she was serving as a volunteer camp counselor at a Head Start program in south Detroit. From her e-mails it seemed that neither of her parents had been able to join her. Her father was in trial. Her mother was leading a workshop on positive empowerment at Canyon Ranch.

The battered high school building where Anne did her own good deeds was surrounded by hurricane fencing topped with razor wire. Its two-story gate was unlocked at eight by a security guard who then returned to his van in the parking lot and spent his time until noon sipping from a set of coffees on his dash. It had been explained to Anne that Cicero North straddled a gangland boundary: half of the building was in one territory, and half in the other. Three magnetometers guarded the low steps. When the school's big metal doors slammed, the entire building shook.

Still, just after 8
A.M.
students came trudging in for the Excel program, a voluntary Saturday school meant to guide them to tertiary education in the absence of a true college counselor, since the school had eliminated that office for budgetary reasons some years back. Twenty or so routinely showed up. Their diligence was offset by their reticence, a learned shyness that led them to sit quietly even when they did not understand. They never failed to turn in their work, but if they hadn't understood the assignment, their pages would be blank. For some, particularly the girls, Anne suspected the hesitation was cultural, but for others it was the result of years of being ignored. They were accustomed to not understanding. They did not feel they deserved to know. Even more than the gaps in their knowledge, it was this passivity that drove Anne crazy: a more virulent form of the lassitude that infected her rich students, whose feelings of entitlement at least caused them to get their backs up on occasion. Her Cicero North kids sat in their plastic chairs quiet as cows. Their slaughter was nearing completion. They'd graduate with few options, or none, and their entrée into the world was through a gate topped with razor wire.

She started the year as she always did: by asking them to say good morning in their native languages. One year they'd gotten to thirty. She might have tracked geopolitical upheaval by the languages that cropped up in her ammonia-scrubbed classroom: English, French, Spanish, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Arabic (Egyptian), Arabic (Syrian), Arabic (Pakistani), Bosnian, Russian, Urdu, Punjabi, Hindi, Mandarin, Korean, Xhosa, Angolan Portuguese. One of two girls wearing abayas, both sitting in the far back corner, had four languages with English a recent fifth, but her voice was so soft Anne had to walk back to her desk to hear her speak. The girl sat huddled beneath her draping. Anne realized that her fantasy of lifting it off and squaring the girl's shoulders was inappropriate, though it was not unkind.

Following their Pentecostal greeting Anne unrolled the morning's
Times
for her usual opening exercise. She handed it to the closest student. “Pick any article and start reading,” she asked him.

“Big one or little one?” he asked her.

“You choose. The bigger headlines are the more important stories, but they might not be the most interesting. See what looks good.”

The boy hung his head low to the paper. He droned: “Senate Republicans met yesterday to consider changes to the passage of—”

“Okay, good,” Anne cut him off. “So who are they?”

“They work with the president,” said another boy.

“Do they?” Anne asked.

“One of two houses in Congress,” said a third boy.

“Who is?”

“Republicans.”

“Well, yes, you're right, but that's unfortunate and it's not by design,” Anne said. “In truth, what are the two houses of Congress?”

“The Senate and the . . .” began a girl. Then silence. As in all classrooms throughout time, the second hand on the clock gave an excruciating
tick-tick-tick
.

“The House of Representatives,” finished Anne. “Good. Now, what is meant by ‘Republicans'?”

She scanned the Spanish speakers to see if anyone seemed confident. One moon-faced girl wore a slight smile. Her cheeks were grazed with stubbly pimples, but her wide features were graceful, and there was something sophisticated in her loose ponytail. “How about you?” Anne asked, nodding at the girl.

“G-O-P,”
she answered cleanly. “Grand Old Party. One of the two dominant political parties. They're the elephants, I'm not sure why. Red states. Party of Bush. They control the House—that's the other part of Congress.”

Bingo, thought Anne. This was their girl. An autodidact. And she watched the news.

“Cristina, is that right?” Anne asked.

Cristina withered at the sound of her name. She nodded.

“No, it's good. You're right, on all counts.”

It took half an hour to get through the six paragraphs on the front page, at which point the exercise had run its course. It overwhelmed Anne, every week, the number of definitions and references she'd have to teach to give context to a single news story. How helpful was it to talk about elephants and donkeys? Should she say,
Immigration reform will die, and here's why
? Discuss the impact of No Child Left Behind? Clearly not. Inappropriate, probably unethical. But what would be helpful, truly? In three years she'd seen a handful of kids go on to city colleges and a few state campuses. Thereafter she lost touch with them and could only imagine their lives.

But a student like Cristina reassured Anne that she might do more in that classroom than shore up her own self-respect. For ninety minutes they drilled math questions for the ACT. These kids were the only ones in their class of twelve hundred to sit the exam. Math was easier than history or politics, certainly easier than language. In her mind, Anne was working out what to say to Gideon Blanchard about this girl Cristina. She paced with an open practice-test booklet in her hand and tried to make things as simple as she could. She chalked names and numbers on the board as she dictated: “Peter and William each have twenty dollars. Elizabeth and Margo each have multiples of twenty dollars. Elizabeth has four times the amount William has. Margo has twice the amount Peter has. How much more money do the girls have than the boys?”

She looked up and waited for the students to scribble their figures. Some of the boys set to it. Cristina narrowed her eyes, worked it out, and then resumed her slight smile. The polyglot in the abaya stared straight ahead and did no work. For a moment Anne was irritated; this question was easy, and she needed them all to get it so they'd have shared purchase on the material. It would build their confidence, and hers.

“How much more money do the boys have than the girls?” Anne repeated slowly, as she remembered her own teachers doing. “How much more?”

A few voices answered, “Eighty.”

Still the girl stared. “Abir?” Anne asked. “Do you have a question?”

Abir's mouth turned down. She was embarrassed to have been called out. You'll need to get used to this, Anne thought; in college, in life,
somewhere,
you'll need to be able to speak up. “Go ahead,” she urged.

Finally Abir said, “Who is the girls and who is the boys?”

To:
[email protected]

From:
[email protected]

Dear Anne,

Here's my revised draft. I tried to make the changes we talked about, giving examples instead of just telling, showing the reader what the experience is like and so on. I really like the idea of independence vs direction and I tried to talk about that. I took out the stuff about God and church because IMO it's probably weird to talk about that in a college essay LOL! Also I cut the star part but now I'm really not sure how to organize things. I hope it's okay that I talked about my Mom and Dad working alot, I know that's probably not good but we can change it later, LOL! Thanks xxx

Sadie

Every holiday and school vacation, my family gives back to the world by performing acts of community service. We travel or we stay at home in Chicago and work in different neighborhoods. We always have a new project on the horizon. As a result, I am extremely dedicated and passionate about volunteering. Since I was little, I have volunteered in places as far apart as Kansas, India, Sri Lanka, and Turkey.

I learned my passion from my mother, who's committment to everything is amazing and a real example for me. My mother is a Life Coach for a wide body of people, which means she works more than any other mom I know. When my mom and dad take me on trips to serve overseas, or when I volunteer with my mom on a project in Chicago, I see that her dedication extends to people outside of her office. She is willing to take time from her weekends and vacations to give back to the less fortunate than ourselves.

My Dad is a lawyer who spends his life defending the law and upholding the constitution. It is a natural extention of his work that he also volunteers almost as much as mom. He is willing to defend the needy whether they can pay expensive legal fees or not!

As a child, I used to feel sad that my mom wasn't there after school, but as I became older I realized that it was better that my mom was pursuing her own dreams. It was hard not having them at my field hockey games or Parents' Nights for the choir concert. But a lot of my friend's parents are with them all the time, and their always giving advice about what my friends should do, who they should hang out with, etc. I can't imagine what it would be like to have my mother looking over my homework every day. In fact, when I was little and struggling with things, especially math, I had to learn by myself because there was no one home to help me. At first this made me angry, but I realize now that I learned so much more by having to google everything myself.