Getting In: A Novel (39 page)

“Drinking, not drinking, it is what it is what it is,” she said, waving at Brad’s mom and striding off in her direction. “I’ve got my college degree already, thank you. She can do what she wants.”

Alexandra waved back at Joy from the edge of a phalanx of Bradley men—her father-in-law, who had driven down from San Francisco, two of Trey’s brothers and their two sons apiece, three of the boys in law or medical school and the fourth getting both degrees sequentially, and Trey. The Bradleys turned out in force for family events, in case anyone had failed to make the connection between a boy with a roman numeral after his name and the existence of a dynasty. They assembled to impress, which was why Trey’s youngest brother, the one who had spawned a lobster fisherman and a party girl, was kind enough always to construct
an excuse and stay home. Trey’s mother and Alexandra’s two sisters-in-law flitted at the periphery of the family circle in watercolor prints as vague as their auras, while the menfolk—a term frequently hauled out of mothballs to describe the Bradley men—moved toward the refreshment table like a rugby scrum. Alexandra, suddenly alone, straightened the silver silk lapels on the jacket of her knit suit and stared enviously at Joy’s outfit, a champagne silk dress with a deep neckline and a fitted coat that was one, and only one, shade deeper. To Alexandra, Joy seemed like a woman who was capable of having an affair—not that she would, but that she could. Late at night, when Alexandra could not get back to sleep, she sometimes wondered if she could possibly be any lonelier living alone. She was somehow not surprised when Joy veered off to talk to someone else, and she stood there for a long moment, wondering what she ought to do next.

“Hey, Alex,” said Trey’s eldest brother, waving a skewer of fresh fruit up and down in front of her nose. “Where are you, daydreamer?”

“Right here,” she said, on cue. “But my goodness, don’t they all look so grown-up.”

“As they should.” Trey’s voice startled her, for she had not sensed him coming up behind her. What was it about the Bradley men that made them instinctively surround their prey, even when the prize was as insignificant as having the last word? He clapped his brother on the back and addressed him as though Alexandra were not there.

“I don’t know what it is with the girls,” by which he meant the wives. “Was Ginny like this when Bud and Jack left home? It’s as though they don’t see it coming. Brad’s nineteen in July. I figure if we get him home winter break next year we’re ahead of the game. After that, I think it’s calls on our birthdays.”

His brother managed a tight smile, for the secret question in his household was whether Bud would get it together for the final
year of medical school or make good on his threat to move back into his old bedroom to think things over. “You never know,” he said, with a false heartiness. “It may not turn out to be that extreme. Bud shows up more than—”

“There he is,” Alexandra squealed, in a tone Trey rarely heard and always disliked. “Brad, Brad, we’re over here.”

“Like I could miss them,” said Brad to another boy, as he considered the imperative that was his family. He raised his arm and waved back so that his mother would stop yelping, and made his way across the lawn. Preston Bradley IV was the only member of the Crestview senior class to be going to Harvard, thanks to the girl who had chosen Stanford instead, and as he walked he was aware of attention he did not want, of heads turning and the occasional admiring, envious murmur. He tried to limit his focus to his family, which was why he did not see Katie’s dad until he stepped right in front of Brad.

“So,” said Dan, that single syllable dripping with a familiarity Brad had never felt for either of Katie’s parents. “Some speech. Where were you and Katie when we needed you?”

Brad smiled. Lauren always cut Katie slack because her parents were so impossible, but a good lawyer would say that her parents’ behavior was immaterial.

“Oh, I tanked a math test,” Brad said, which was almost true. “That’s why I wasn’t up there. It wasn’t the prom with Katie, was it? I told everybody, I bet she didn’t even know what was in that bottle. Hey, there’s my folks. See you, Mr. Dodson.”

He strode off, feeling as better as a boy can feel when he is about to embark on someone else’s version of his future. Brad had settled some accounts in the last days of his senior year. He had refused the valedictory on principle and told his father the truth about why they would not see him at the podium. He had confessed the business about the Harvard wait list to Lauren, which made him feel better and helped her decide to take a chance with
Northwestern. He had failed to stand up to Katie at prom, but he had finished the model and given it to Liz, which was as close to apology as he knew how to get and made him happy despite her guarded text—“It’s lovely. Mom’s crazy for it. Thanks. Luck at Harvard.” And he had planted a seed of doubt in Mr. Dodson’s brain, which held real promise in terms of the erosion of trust over time.

Brad was at his mother’s side before it hit him that such glancing pleasures might be the most that a reluctant legacy could hope for. As she wrapped her slender arms around him, and he wondered why a hug from her felt more like a brush than an embrace, he imagined his father telling the story of the valedictory address and the obvious GPA glitch that had robbed his son of the honor—telling it even though it was a lie, as though it would become true by repetition—to a handful of admiring associates, young lawyers not so far removed from their own grade-grubbing days, who were struck by the level of privilege, of presumed success, that enabled Trey to tolerate such an injustice with a bemused grin. Worse, for a moment Brad could imagine telling the story himself. He might tell it forever, rewriting it over time until its edges were as clean and hard as the facets of a diamond, as he settled into the life he had sworn he would never live. The fact that he saw the possibility made him nervous. He sank against his mother for a moment, until she raised her fluttery hands to his chest and Trey grabbed his shoulders from behind.

“Enough!” he said, with what passed among the Bradley men as a playful tone. He pulled Brad backward. “Come on. You’re going to wrinkle your mother’s suit.”

Nora was capable of bad behavior when overcome by motherhood, and she threw a discreet elbow or two, and used her shoulder as a driving wedge, in an attempt to part the sea of people
that blocked her access to Lauren. Her daughter was not standing near the pile of discarded graduation gowns, so Nora hurried out to the lawn, where the crowd fanned out in all directions. It was hard to pick out a specific senior—no, a graduate—in a sea of white dresses, and at first she did not see Lauren or any of Lauren’s friends.

For a moment, Nora felt an odd sensation that she had felt only twice before in her life, once on the day Lauren was born and once on the day she got fired: faces she knew she ought to recognize were suddenly unfamiliar, not completely so, but skewed just enough to unsettle her. She stared at people and waited for their features to resolve themselves into a familiar layout, even as some of them smiled and reached over for a quick kiss. Her brain was not cooperating. Her brain was on a quest to find Lauren, and until she did so, the rest of the world was reduced to a quivering mass of unprocessed information.

The dance band started up a lounge version of a Bruce Springsteen song, which helped somewhat, because the crowd thinned as hyperactive graduates and parents who had remembered to take a prophylactic Aleve hit the dance floor. Nora scanned the horizon. No Lauren. She pointed Joel toward the far side of the lawn and set off past the photographer’s setup, a drop cloth behind a white chair next to a little table and a vase of white roses, for parents who wanted yet one more staged and awkward portrait of their children, looking not like themselves but like generic, hopeful young adults. No Lauren there, either.

Nora circled around toward the refreshments. Lauren was not at either of the long buffet tables, but one of the girls had seen her near the dance floor. A boy near the dance floor had seen her heading toward the bathroom. Alexandra, who monitored her unchanging hair and lipstick on an hourly basis, came out of the bathroom and said she had seen Lauren near the food table, so Nora began again. Joel caught up with her, and together they completed
another unsuccessful lap.

“If we keep moving and she keeps moving, we will never find her,” said Nora. “I really want to find her.”

A simple expression of desire was like a magnet. A moment later, Lauren tapped her mother on the shoulder and kissed Nora, and Joel, and Nora again. On the second embrace, Nora noticed that Lauren was trembling, slightly. She tightened her grasp, and nodded when Joel pantomimed the acquisition of cold drinks.

“You okay?”

“I couldn’t find you,” said Lauren.

“That’s because we were chasing each other,” said Nora. “We couldn’t find you, either.”

“I am so tired of people I barely know asking me what the deal is at Northwestern,” Lauren whispered. Rita, who intended to inject into the college counseling department an enthusiasm she felt it sorely lacked, had seen Lauren in the hallway and called out “Go January Wolverine!” which put an end to the family secret. “It’s like people who never cared about me for one minute for six years only want to hear the entire story of my life.”

“Tell them anything. Don’t tell them anything. You don’t owe them an explanation. Tell them you’re going to be a master baker.”

Lauren continued to cling.

“Will you teach me how to make chocolate ganache?”

“Yes.”

“And that little cheesecake thing.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t want to make anything with bananas.”

“Oh, good. Are you going to be a diva? I’ll fire you.”

“Buttercream would be fun, I bet.”

“Buttercream is fun,” said Nora. “You get into a groove.”

They worked through red velvet cake and panna cotta and the little apple charlottes, and still Lauren seemed unwilling to let go and not quite able to relax. It was a nice change from the bolt-out-
the-door behavior, but it made Nora feel that she had a job to do here, that she ought to say something maternal. Gently, she held Lauren at arm’s length.

“Honey,” she began, “it’s going to be fine.”

“Great! Chloe!” shrieked Lauren. She yanked herself free and ran over to Chloe, who had skipped the ceremony but snuck into the reception to see her friends. This, thought Nora, was transitional parenthood: a mom was as essential as ever until something more interesting came along, at which point she was instantly less than peripheral.

Joel returned a moment later with three cups of lemonade, only to find Nora standing alone, staring blankly at the dance floor. He handed her a cup.

“Now what?” she asked. She wandered off without waiting for his reply.

Less than an hour later, the graduates had changed into their street clothes and were on their way to a club at Universal City Walk that Crestview had taken over for the evening. Most of the parents left as soon as their children drove away, but some of them lingered, confused, trying to make sense of the fact that they would never again need to set foot on the Crestview campus. On one side of the main gate, a woman Nora and Joel did not know tried to guide her sobbing husband toward the parking lot. Another couple walked past, the wife whispering much too loudly to her husband about what she intended to do to him once they got back to their blissfully empty house. Everyone except the sobbing husband seemed to be aggressively, emphatically happy to be footloose, and everyone except the sobbing husband was working overtime to convince onlookers that their delight was genuine.

Nora sank onto one of the teak benches that ringed the front lawn, and Joel reluctantly sat down next to her.

“Here’s what I hate about graduation,” she said.

“Besides the endless speeches.”

“Yeah.”

“The uncomfortable chairs.”

“Yeah.”

“The numbskull valedictorian, the slightly off-key choir. Except for Lauren, of course.”

“Stop it,” she said, smiling. She leaned against him. “What I hate about graduation is that it’s so short.”

“Nora. It went on forever.”

“You know what I mean. You finally get to the great day and it’s, I don’t know, what do you think? Thirty seconds to walk up and get your diploma? I expected it to feel different. I expected it to feel big. Memorable. In proportion to everything that led up to it. I mean, it was touching, she looked so happy, but maybe it’s us, maybe somebody else would have been happier than us.”

“Let’s go,” said Joel, putting his arm around Nora and pulling her to her feet. She got up willingly enough, so he kept his arm around her shoulder and guided her toward the parking lot, past the security guard, who only wished that the other stragglers would leave so that he could close up and go home.

“It’s so fast,” she said. “I have to think about what to make her special for breakfast tomorrow. Lunch, probably, by the time she wakes up.”

Joel opened the passenger-side door for Nora, which he never did, but he had the sense that she would not budge without prodding. He waited until she was settled, muttered, “Seat belt” as though she were a child, and walked around to the driver’s side, in a bit of a haze himself.

He turned the key in the ignition, put the car into gear, edged toward the exit, and headed by rote toward the freeway and home. As he approached the on-ramp, Nora reached over and touched his arm.

“Let’s not go home yet,” she said.

“Okay,” he said, no more eager than she was to walk into an empty house that he knew would feel different from the pre-graduation empty house. “Where should we go?”

Nora did not reply.

“We haven’t had dinner,” he said.

“I’m really hungry,” she said, slowly coming to her senses. “I didn’t eat at the reception.”

“Let’s go get sushi,” said Joel.

“Lauren loves sushi,” said Nora, as though it would be a betrayal to enjoy it without her.

“I know,” said Joel. “Let’s go get some.”

He felt as loyal to memory as Nora did, but he thought that the right move might be to resist it, given how much they both liked yellowtail.