Getting In: A Novel (3 page)

Ted’s office door swung open.

“C’mon in,” he beckoned, with a calibrated enthusiasm. “How’s the master baker?”

“Oh God, I didn’t think,” said Nora. “I’m so sorry, and I had these little apple charlottes, how could I…”

“Hey, I could lose five pounds. Lauren will still get into college, I promise. Maybe not the college of your dreams…”

Joel saw an opening. “And if Nora delivers a chocolate cake by noon tomorrow?”

“Any school you want, early decision,” laughed Ted. Lauren was not an Ivy League candidate, but he had plucked her off another counselor’s list because he had a fairly good contact at Northwestern—she was going to need help—and because he was curious about Nora, or rather about Nora’s midlife career change. Ted’s current fantasy involved ditching his job someday for something better, though he had no good idea what that might be. He could write the insider novel to end all insider novels, but he worried that what he knew about college apps would only scare off potential readers. He worried that no one would make a movie out of his novel, so he would have to keep his job—except that parents would refuse to work with him out of fear of being ridiculed in the sequel. He could write an original screenplay instead, but one screenplay was not enough to subsidize his freedom, and he had no idea what the second screenplay would be about. Ted could not figure out how to turn desire into advantage, but Nora was proof that it could be done. She had switched over from magazines to baking. She knew something he did not know, which made her potentially as useful to him as he was to her.

“Tell me it doesn’t work like that,” laughed Nora, who had already decided on the dark chocolate cake with the espresso ganache.

“It doesn’t work like that,” said Ted. “You have to come up with much more than a cake. A wing of a building, maybe.”

At that exact moment, Lauren blew into the room, all apologies and flying shirttails.

“Here she is,” said Ted. “Now we can get to the important stuff. You have a list for me, young lady, I believe.”

Lauren pawed through her backpack and extracted a sheet of paper, which she handed to Ted, while Joel quietly opened his briefcase and pulled out a copy for himself and one for Nora. Nora reached for it without taking her eyes from Ted’s face.

Ted stared at the page for one of those long moments that seemed, to Nora, to define adulthood: the periodontist looking at the x-rays, the colorist looking at her roots, the associate publisher pretending to review her file before he followed his boss’s order and fired her. Getting older meant handing over far too many fateful decisions to people who had no vested interest in the outcome, and Nora was never comfortable waiting for the verdict.

“Northwestern is a very popular school this year,” said Ted. It was a very popular school every year, one of about twenty schools that sat high on the
U.S. News & World Report
rankings and were either near a major airport or ranked in the single digits, which compensated for the connecting flight or the rental car. It was one of the schools Crestview seniors thought about without thinking about it, which made for a crowded applicant field.

“Yeah,” said Lauren, who liked the school because the proportions felt right—far enough away to prevent spontaneous visits but closer than the East Coast, selective enough to feel special but not as daunting as the Ivy League, big but not too big, a modulated choice for a girl who had yet to be seized by an extreme desire. “It would be so fun if a bunch of us ended up there together.”

Nora watched Ted, who did not smile enough.

“Or are you saying it’s too popular to get into?” she asked.

“Mom, will you stop?”

“No, she’s right to ask. Their apps were up maybe, I don’t know, fifteen, twenty percent last year. It’s a big favorite.”

“She’s the news editor,” said Nora. “Doesn’t that help?”

“Mom. It’s not like I’m the editor in chief.”

“Well, if Mr. Nelson lived in this century…” Nora was convinced that the faculty sponsor had decidedly obsolete ideas about what women could and could not do.

“
Mom.
Could we not talk about this here?”

Ted smiled and waited. Lauren was right and Nora was right, but there was nothing to be gained from agreeing with either of them. He studied the list again and made a decisive mark with his pencil.

“I’d say it’s a stretch unless you apply early, and early might get you even odds, but they don’t defer, so if it’s over, it’s over.”

“Hold on.” Nora reached into her bag for a pen, despite the fact that Joel was already taking notes.

Lauren gave her a pulverizing stare. “You know what that means. I can apply early decision and have a better chance of getting in, but Northwestern doesn’t defer you into the regular pool if you apply early. They accept or reject. No in between.”

“Good job,” said Ted. “You want to handle my ten thirty appointment?”

They made their way through the rest of the list that way. Ted alternated between tough love and humor, Nora asked questions she knew the answer to in case the response changed with repetition, Joel took more notes, and Lauren refused to hear anything but the optimism she needed to make it to the end of first semester. If Ted had polled each family member at the end of the half hour, Lauren would have said she was getting in everywhere but Stanford, Joel would have said she would get into more than half the schools on her list, and Nora would have wondered why her beloved and accomplished daughter was clinging by a hangnail to the bottom of the acceptance brackets at so many schools.

Still, they had a list, which Ted transferred to Crestview’s printed form and embellished with underlining and brackets, arrows and margin notes. The point of this meeting was to evaluate the schools and divide them into three categories—Stretches,
Even Odds, and the newly renamed Best Chances, which he had called Safety Schools until last year, when a very contentious father complained to the head of school that safety meant safety, and what was Crestview going to do about the fact that his child had been rejected?

Ted made three copies and handed them out:

STRETCHES

Stanford

Williams/Wesleyan

Columbia

Northwestern
, underlined, with an arrow pointing down toward the Even Odds category, with the notation, “Early?”

EVEN ODDS

University of Michigan (too big?)

Claremont (too small, too near?)

NYU
(no campus), also underlined, with a smaller arrow and “Early?” pointing toward the Best Chance category. Ted knew of eight other students who planned to apply early, a bit of information he would not reveal unless asked.

BEST CHANCES

UC Santa Barbara

Skidmore

“So all you need is another best-chance school and I’ll let you go,” said Ted.

“But there’s no place else I want to go,” said Lauren. “I mean, I don’t even want to go to some of these.”

“You know the rule. Everybody comes up with three likely candidates and I get to sleep at night. We’re just a bit top-heavy
here. A bit top-heavy. We need to add a little more weight at the bottom.”

Lauren’s voice got smaller. “I’ll think about it. Can’t I make NYU a best chance?”

She had opened the door.

“Bad-mouth it to the other seniors,” Ted said. “Your test scores are strong—”

“That’s nice to hear,” Nora interrupted. A score of 2200 in May might not beat Sam the barista, but with his help Lauren had improved on her April score, and she was going to try one more time in October.

“Mom.”

“Well, they are, sweetheart. It’s nice to hear Ted say so.”

“The scores are strong,” Ted continued, rowing for shore, “but I’d like the GPA up just a little, so no slacking this semester, no senioritis. It would be good if they didn’t have the biggest increase in apps of anybody last year, which makes them even hotter this year, but there’s not much you can do about that. Except convince your friends they’d hate it.”

“Wait a minute,” said Nora, trying for a light tone. “I’ve got it. Tell us a great school nobody wants to apply to and Lauren can go there.”

“Macalester,” said Ted, without hesitation.

“Where’s that?” said Joel.

“Minnesota,” said Ted. “St. Paul, either of you been there? Really a great city, great food…”

“I am not going to school in Minnesota,” said Lauren, a pinched note of fear in her voice.

That was Ted’s cue: logic and strategy were about to give way to emotion, and to preserve his sanity he had to get them out of his office, fast. “Anyhow, let me know by Friday and we’re good.” He stood up and shook hands all around, and before the Chaikens
quite knew what had happened they were standing outside the counseling offices. Lauren put on her best harried face. The bell was not going to ring for another ten minutes, but her parents did not know that.

“Listen, Chloe wants me to come by after school, so can you go home together and I’ll take Mom’s car?”

She waited while her parents got flustered, compared their schedules, and worked out a new plan. Other girls’ parents acted as though they had it down cold, whether they did or not. Lauren’s parents were in what her dad called a suspended state of constant revision, which was not as unnerving as it sounded. Lauren knew they were going to let her use the car because they missed Chloe, too, so there was nothing at stake. She could stand there, safe in the outcome, and appreciate the effort they made on her behalf.

Nora handed her the keys. “You’re going to pick her up at school?”

“Right.”

“And then?”

Lauren shrugged. “Probably Coffee Bean.”

“You have anything tomorrow?” Joel was double-teaming her.

“You guys. I’m not going to flunk the calc test.” She rolled her eyes. “If I get a B, Ted will make all my Best Chances into Even Odds. Oh no! My life will be over.” She pocketed the keys, kissed them both, and ran off down the hall.

“Home in time for dinner,” said Nora in a stage whisper.

She and Joel were huddled over their respective PDAs, arranging their new mutual commute after work, when Dan and Joy and Katie glided up for their meeting, all smiles and twelve-ply cashmere. They waved without breaking stride and headed for Ted’s office. Joel, wondering why Dan’s perfunctory greetings always felt slightly like a snub, turned with what he hoped would be interpreted as urgency and strode toward the parking lot. Nora skittered along
side, glancing over her shoulder, wishing that she could be a fly on the wall for the sake of comparison. It was so hard to evaluate Ted’s comments in a vacuum.

“Now that’s going to be a meeting,” said Joel.

Nora slumped onto the passenger seat, in a deep adrenaline deficit.

“Here’s what I don’t understand,” she said, hoping to keep the quaver out of her voice. “We weren’t going to force her to take AP biology, what was the point. Okay, maybe she pays for that at someplace like Wesleyan. But still, she’s got, you saw the list, APs and good grades and awfully good scores.”

“Yes, she does,” said Joel.

“But you know what Ted says,” Nora continued. “‘Take the AP and get the A.’ And she did, some. You can’t always…”

“You don’t have to defend her to me,” said Joel. “I’d take her in a minute if I ran an admissions department. Since I don’t, she took some APs but not all of them, and she got some As but not all of them, and that’s where we are.”

“Please, a B plus in AP English with that teacher?” Nora snorted. “She wouldn’t recognize imagination if it wore a name tag.”

Joel grinned. “I think you ought to send a letter in with Lauren’s transcript—you know, kind of an annotated explanation of what the grades really mean.”

“You think this is funny? The other teacher would’ve given her a better grade.”

“Nora, stop. If you get this worked up now you’re not going to make it to the end in one piece.”

“And besides, what use is a likely school if she has no desire to go there? We might as well put down, I don’t know, South Dakota University, if there is such a place.”

“She’s not going to South Dakota. Ted said he’s going to go to bat for her at all the schools she likes. Remember, he said, and I
quote, ‘I’m going to fill in all the blanks for the admissions people so they know how special Lauren is.’ I took that down verbatim. Don’t mess with me.”

“What blanks?” said Nora.

She had him there. Joel had tried very hard, and with success until this exact moment, to focus on the positive aspects of the meeting. Ted was ready to do battle, which was a good thing—except that it implied that Lauren needed to be fought for, which was not such a good thing.

“I thought she took AP bio,” he said, quietly. “Didn’t she take AP bio?”

“No. She took physics last year. She’s taking bio now.”

“There. AP physics, are you kidding? I couldn’t handle AP physics, I know that much.”

“Regular,” said Nora. “She took regular physics, too. Why don’t you know this?”

The silence in the car got very large.

“So how’re the orders going?” Joel asked. “For the charlottes.”

“I know what you meant.”

“You want to keep worrying, go ahead,” he said. “I thought I’d ask about the new star dessert. Shoot me.”

Nora sighed. “I could hire two more people just to cut crusts off bread and peel apples, except I’d have to fire them after Thanksgiving. Never thought about crusts and peels. I only thought, Charlottes, cool, nobody’s doing that. No follow-through.”

Joel thought for a moment.

“We can go look at some other schools,” he said.

“Top-heavy,” sniffed Nora.

The Dodson family rolled up to Crestview in a perfect
caravan of blended want and need. Dan refused to surrender his Mercedes to the possibility that generations he would never meet might find their beachfront properties eroded by a bloated ocean, but he encouraged Joy to trade the Navigator for a hybrid SUV, and Joy, in turn, had jumped the waiting list on Katie’s new Prius because every three months she dispatched the jowls of a grateful Toyota dealer with a jolt of Botox. There was no carpooling in a family like this, not with everything they had to do, but they did their part to emulsify personal preference and global responsibility.

Katie drove around back to the student parking lot while her parents waited for her in front of the two-story wrought-iron security gates that Dan called the pearly gates, even though Katie no longer laughed when he did so. What a life he and Joy had made: two kids from Chicago public schools, the first in their respective families to attend college, to say nothing of law school and medical school, about to send their second child to the best small liberal arts college in the country. Dan was not being cocky about Katie’s chances—merely reasonable. Early in Katie’s junior year, he had drawn up a comparative tally of his two children’s accomplishments: Ron had better reading scores, but Katie had him beat in math, which was nice for a girl; neither of them had ever gotten a B; Ron had compensated for a profound lack of coordination
by getting up at five every morning to be the rowing team’s coxswain, while Katie got up almost as early for the swim team; he was class treasurer and she was vice president of school council; they dabbled in community service enough to get credit for being humanitarians. No matter that Ron seemed to be majoring in disdain at Williams, or that Katie sometimes treated Dan like her personal ATM machine. He doubted that community college students were any nicer to their parents.

During the spring of Katie’s junior year, after a short and efficient family tour of the Ivy League and a handful of small East Coast schools, each one of them read through their own copy of the Fiske—to avoid influencing each other—and flagged any school that appealed to them. Dan handed over all three annotated copies to the most sycophantic of the paralegals in his firm, with instructions to turn the flags into an Excel spreadsheet arranged in order of the schools’ decreasing popularity, with columns for contact information, mailing and web addresses, and application deadlines. When he first saw the list, he reminded the young woman that he had asked for the schools to be listed by combined preference, not solely his own, but that was the beauty of the exercise. Without once consulting each other, he and Joy and Katie had all agreed on their top ten choices: Williams, the Ivy League eight, and, to avoid accusations of hubris, one of the University of California campuses. It hardly mattered which one, as Katie would not be going there, but as it turned out, they all chose Berkeley.

There was no point in coming up with the twenty schools Crestview requested for the junior-year list, because these ten were the only ones they wanted to consider. They returned for their first senior-year appointment without having added or subtracted a single name.

Dan smiled at his wife as Katie walked toward them.

“I’m actually looking forward to this meeting,” he said.

Joy smiled back, big, confirming that the new cosmetic dentist really had a way with veneers. “Not a whole lot of people who can say that,” she replied.

When Katie caught up with them, they strode across the courtyard together, floated past Nora and Joel, and walked into the college counseling lobby, where Ted was already waiting. Ted enjoyed a Dodson family entrance. He thought they wore success better than almost any other family at school, even more so now that Ron had graduated. Not that they were humble about their accomplishments. In fact, just the opposite: they lived in every inch of their lives; they were bursting at the seams of their existence. It did not matter that Ted had known them for almost six years. The impression they made did not dull with time.

Privately, he assumed that Dan and Joy must have been drawn to each other by vanity. They looked far too much alike for a husband and wife—both of them tall and big-boned, with thick, wavy hair in a tawny shade that was striking enough to make people wonder if they shared a colorist, a hue they showed off by never wearing any color brighter than navy blue. They had shoulders that made shoulder pads redundant, and, best of all, they shared the one attribute that no one in Los Angeles had yet figured out how to duplicate surgically—long legs. Anyone with the price of admission could have new hair, new skin, a new nose or eyelids or lips or ears, new teeth, and new breasts; people could alter their tummies, their thighs, their hips, their rear ends. No one could have long legs unless they were born with them. A self-made couple with new money and two sets of long legs—three, if you counted Katie’s, in whom their combined DNA had found a perfect vessel, and dismissed Ron, who at a fidgety five-foot-ten was a throwback to his paternal grandfather’s double helix. The Dodsons were confidence incarnate, as long as Ron was out of town.

Ted allowed himself to relax a bit. The Dodsons and Brad’s parents were this year’s anchor parents, another secret category
Ted had devised for himself, this one designed to compensate for the more high-maintenance families. He made sure always to include on his list a couple of families who knew what they wanted and looked good enough on paper to have better-than-average odds. As much fun as Nora and Joel might be, he needed a few families who never even joked about a causal link between cake and outcome.

Fifteen minutes after the Dodsons sat down in Ted’s office, each one of them had a photocopy of the family’s list transposed onto Crestview’s template, which Ted had already prepared with Katie’s near-perfect GPA, a list of the awards she had won, her extracurricular activities, and the names of five teachers who had offered to write one of her two letters of recommendation.

Ted quickly reviewed the list in his head, taking into consideration the eight business cards in his desk drawer: Columbia wanted the speech-and-debate kid who interned for the congresswoman. Cornell would not be Katie’s favorite because people out here forgot it was in the Ivy League, so much for bragging rights, and Brad stood between everyone else and Harvard. Yale was the flavor of the month for some reason, and Ted could think of at least four other seniors who swore it was their first choice. The Dodsons were not serious about Berkeley. But one of his eight business cards had the Williams seal on the front and Katie’s name scrawled on the back. The solution was obvious. Katie was a legacy at Williams, and he knew of only one other girl who planned to apply there. If Katie applied early decision, she would get good news in December, and he could take her off his to-do list. Better still, getting her out of the way improved the odds for the other Yale applicants. It made all the sense in the world.

“Okay, we’ll pretty much ignore the UCs. On the others, I think you’ve got a really good shot with at least one of these schools.” The first rule of influence, Ted knew, was to nudge, not shove.

“Her brother’s at Williams,” Joy said firmly, discomfited by “really good shot,” and “at least one.” She felt that Katie was a stronger candidate than Ron had been, and she had told her daughter as much, as had Dan. It was hard for both of them not to feel that their son was a rehearsal for their daughter.

“And her math scores are higher than his,” said Dan, studying the page he held in his hand. “It’s the A in art, isn’t it. Shouldn’t have taken ceramics. Not a weighted grade.”

“I liked ceramics,” said Katie wistfully, the way a vegan might confess to having once enjoyed a quarter-pounder.

“Dan, the other seniors would kill for this GPA,” said Ted.

“Ceramics shows she’s well-rounded,” said Joy, who almost believed it. “And I hope someone’s going to point out that Katie should have been captain of the swim team. I mean, any other year there wouldn’t have been a girl on the team who was training for the Olympics. Who saw that coming?”

“I really want to go to Yale,” said Katie. “I thought about it, and I don’t want to go to Williams after all. I’m going to apply early.”

Ted took too long underlining Yale in red on his chart. He glanced up to see if Katie’s parents were going to say anything, but they looked as startled as he felt. Kids sprang surprises like this all the time in his office—they saved up news they thought their parents would not want to hear, relying on Ted’s shielding presence to blunt Mom and Dad’s response. It was not his favorite maneuver, not by a long shot—there would be emails or phone calls from the parents later this afternoon, he knew it—but Ted was not about to be thrown off his game by Katie’s experiment in independence. He had his moves, too.

“No family dynasty? How come?”

Katie thought and did not say: Because I am not going to be Ron’s little sister ever again if I can help it. Because I would like to do one thing that isn’t because it works so well for my folks and just think how much easier it will be to visit if both of you are in
the same place. Because I don’t need a reason. Because I’m tired of coming up with them.

“I like the courses at Yale,” she said, though she had yet to open the course catalog the school had sent her.

“Ron’s been very happy at Williams,” said Dan. He addressed Ted directly. “We’re going to talk about this some more, of course. It’s early in the game to be…”

At that, Katie stood up and slung her backpack over one shoulder.

“I have a test,” she said. “I have to go. Sorry. I’ve got a draft essay and I think I’ll ask Madame Marie and Dr. Wright for letters. I want to file by the end of the month. Don’t you think that’s good, to get it in really early?”

“Let me think it over,” said Ted feebly.

“Okay, then.” She walked out the door.

Ted pretended to jot down some more notes on his copy of the master plan, which he ceremoniously placed inside Katie’s folder. He inserted the folder in the very first segment of the stand-up metal file on the cabinet behind his desk, which was his way of saying that Katie’s future was extremely important to him. Only then did he make eye contact with her parents.

“Sometimes it can be good for them to strike out on their own,” he began. “Katie and Ron, two different people, two different sets of needs. She needs to feel this is all about her. If she sticks to it, at least they’re on the same coast. Be grateful she didn’t fall in love with Stanford.” He got a wan smile from Joy and the smallest belligerent grunt from Dan, but anything was better than silence.

A seductive, conspiratorial tone crept into his voice. “Besides, a month of feeling like it’s her decision and she might be willing to reconsider. Let me get her in here again and we’ll talk about Williams for her, not for her brother, not for anything but what’s best for her. And trust me: she’ll start talking to the other kids and the legacy advantage’ll start to sound very appealing.”

“I can’t see why she’d think of anyplace else,” said Dan.

“Well, she’s a terrific student,” said Ted, with an eye on the clock on the wall behind Katie’s parents. “And you have to expect this a little bit. I mean, she’s got parents who really struck out on their own in a big way, am I right? So it’s in her makeup. And for six years we’ve been telling her the sky’s the limit as long as she excels, so she excels and maybe she wants to fly just a bit too close to the sun. We’ll talk about it. If she sticks with Yale, I’ll have to get them to fall in love with her.”

He shook Dan’s hand and gave Joy the thin sort of hug that two people not prone to embracing settle for, and after they left he moved Katie’s folder to the back, to leave the first slot vacant for the next student’s folder. If Ted had been greedier he might have become an agent; if he had been more self-effacing, he could have been a personal assistant. He would sell Katie on Williams without ever divulging all the variables that informed his recommendation. Katie would come around. Ted was very good at getting people to think they wanted what they got.

Joy pulled into the medical building’s underground parking garage without quite remembering how she got there, threw the keys at the valet, and kept jamming the elevator call button until it arrived. She had ten minutes before her first peel, but it was going to take her at least that long to collect herself. She held up five fingers twice as she passed her nurse in the hall, shut her office door behind her, and fell into her posturally correct but unsympathetic Aeron chair.

She did not like surprises. Joy picked medicine because new customers were born every day, and dermatology because the likelihood of an off-hours emergency call was low. It was a clean, finite specialty, which appealed to a woman who equated creativity with disorder and disorder with stress, a specialty that spared
her having to see anything more gruesome than a suspicious mole or a fungus. She improved her odds even further by opening an office in Beverly Hills, where she could fill a practice to the brim with people who had nothing wrong with them beyond the perceived ravages of time. Word of her finesse quickly got around, and over the summer she had informed her staff that from now on she would see noncosmetic patients only on Thursday afternoons. If a patient slipped in with a problem she did not want to treat, all she had to do was feign concern, say that she was worried about scarring, and recommend a plastic surgeon. She intended to retire in two years, when she was fifty, whether or not her television-producer client was right about the demand for a skin-care reality show for Lifetime, if not Bravo. Having expended a great deal of energy getting from Wheaton, Illinois, to here, she was slightly more willing than Dan to take what they had as more than enough. She was satisfied a moment before he was in all things except sex, where she was the appreciative recipient of the same attention to detail that he lavished on his work.

In a life where nothing was left to chance, the business about Katie wanting to go to Yale threw Joy more than it should have. She dug the Fiske out of her briefcase, found the pages for Yale and for Williams, and ripped them out so that she could study them side by side. What was Katie’s problem? Williams was smaller and lovelier and equally rigorous; Dan had taken to saying that it out-Ivied the Ivies. Joy was mystified and irritated by Katie’s behavior, and she was out of time. The light above her office door blinked on, signaling that the divorcée who thought that fewer facial lines would compensate for her sniping personality was waiting in exam room 3.