Small Admissions

by Amy Poeppel

Biggest problem our country faces—greed

  Allergies—none

  Vision—nearsighted

  Etc.

  I’m not saying we’ve never had an argument, but when you start out with so many of the big topics as nonissues, you’ve got a pretty heavy advantage going in.

  There was a bar in our neighborhood that George and I had decided was our “local.” It suited us. It was a bit of a dive, but the drinks were cheap, and it was dark and homey, with pretty votive candles on the windowsills. We were meeting Kate and Jonathan there, and we arrived first to get our usual table. I hadn’t seen Kate in so long, I felt almost giddy waiting for her; I couldn’t wait to talk to her, to have her meet George, and to see the chemistry between her and Jonathan.

  She walked in with a massive bunch of white tulips for me, a thank-you for all the presents I had given her throughout the year. I introduced her to George, and Kate hugged him. As she sat down, she took my hands and said, “It’s okay, Vicki can have him.”

  George looked at me and said, “Uh-oh,”

  “Maybe it wasn’t my place,” Jonathan said, “but I told her.”

  “He didn’t have a choice,” Kate told me. “I was about to call Vicki to ask her to come out with us tonight, so she wouldn’t feel left out. Jonathan practically knocked my phone out of my hand.”

  I could barely find my words and felt the familiar stab of guilt, just when it had begun to dull a bit. “I’m so sorry, Kate,” I started, “so sorry . . .”

  “No,” Kate said. “Don’t apologize.”

  “I should have told you.”

  “Why would you want to do that?” Kate asked. “I wouldn’t want to break that news.”

  “What a mess,” I said. “And after what happened before? Talk about adding insult to injury. It’s unconscionable. And indefensible.”

  “Stop, I don’t want you to be upset about this.”

  “Obviously I’m upset. I tried to get her to end it,” I said, “but she wouldn’t listen to reason.”

  “No, Chloe,” Kate said, “you can’t tell them what to do.”

  “Aren’t you mad?” I asked her, still unable to discern what she was thinking, how she was taking the news. “Aren’t you freaking out?”

  “It’s surprising, obviously,” she acknowledged, “and weird, but it’s not going to send me back to my couch, if that’s what you’re worried about. I took a whole year of my life to binge-mourn the end of that relationship, so I’m pretty sure I got it all out of my system.”

  The mention of Kate’s depressing period on the sofa made me start crying, and George leaned over to hug me. “Who wants a beer?” he asked, getting up from the table. “Everyone? A round?”

  “Good idea,” Jonathan said. “I’ll go with you.”

  “And fries? Yes?” George asked, as he and Jonathan went off to the bar together. It was very staged, but I appreciated being given a chance to talk to Kate alone.

  “Why are you crying?” she asked. “You have no reason to cry about this.”

  “I messed up your life,” I said. “I think about where you might be right now if you’d never met me, and I know you’d be better off.”

  “None of my problems were your fault,” she insisted. “And I’m fine. Look at me: I’m happy. I love my job. And I’ve met this great guy. Oh, and speaking of which,” she said smiling and nudging me, “Jonathan told me something else before we came here tonight. He says you did a little online dating on my behalf.”

  “Jonathan has a big mouth,” I said, but I admit I was pleased with myself.

  “I mean, who does that? You’re an embarrassingly good friend to me, and I’ll never be able to keep up with you on that score. I’ve just given up. I want you to stop worrying about me.”

  I had imagined and dreaded this moment so many times and had always pictured rage and tears. “You seem so okay with this,” I said. “I thought you’d be the one crying.”

  “Well, I’m not Nelson Mandela,” Kate admitted, handing me a napkin. “I don’t particularly want to triple-date with them. I’d prefer to see you without Vicki from now on.”

  I understood her completely; I was angry with Vicki, too. But my instinct, as always with them, was to hold the trio together.

  “What about when it’s over?” I asked. “This relationship isn’t going to last long. They’ve probably broken up already.”

  “I don’t think so. I was telling Jonathan earlier that they’re a lot alike.”

  “You mean thoughtless? Selfish? Cruel?”

  “No, I mean I think they make sense together. They have the same priorities. They care about designer labels and cocktail dens. They fill up their posh apartments to the brim with expensive shoes.”

  “They’re judgmental and condescending,” I said. “They’re smug.”

  “They’re charismatic,” she continued, “and, let’s be honest, gorgeous. Great hair, both of them.”

  “But they’re so narcissistic and totally insensitive,” I said.

  “Oh, come on, Chloe,” Kate told me, sounding almost parental. “They’re not bad people, and you know it. I want you to call them up when you get home tonight and make a plan to go out with them to a fancy bar for twenty-dollar martinis. They’ll be scintillating company and entertaining as always. It certainly won’t be boring.”

  “I’m too angry to call. Just when I thought Robert couldn’t possibly do any more damage, he pulls this shit,” I said. “Why can’t he just leave my friends alone? I really don’t understand why you’re being so nice.”

  “Because I feel guilty,” she said.

  “You?” I asked. “What do you have to feel guilty about?”

  “I haven’t been honest. It wasn’t fair that I demonized Robert so completely. It’s not like I did everything right; I made mistakes. And I totally used him. Not on purpose, but still, it was very self-serving.”

  “Used him how?”

  “To get myself out of a dead end. It’s hard to admit this,” she said, “but I pretty much flunked out of anthropology.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I was a flop at my job at NYU.”

  “Oh, please.”

  “No, it’s true, Chloe. I didn’t opt out of grad school because of Robert. I couldn’t do the work. From day one, I struggled with every project my professor gave me. Everything, whether it was calibrating the laser scanner or recognizing the lesser trochanter of the femur, forget it.”

  “I don’t know what any of that means.”

  “It was all so frustrating for me, and I couldn’t identify any part of it that I actually enjoyed,” she said. “I found out quickly that my brain just doesn’t work that way. I don’t have good intuitions about anything useful to that particular field, not anatomy, morphology, osteology, paleontology, nothing.”

  “Maybe you just needed time to learn all that stuff. So much of it was new to you.”

  “No, that wasn’t it. Everyone in the lab started picking up on my incompetence, and they were nice about it at first. My friend Sherman always tried to help me. He’d stay late with me and review my work, correct all my errors, but it didn’t matter because I could never do it on my own. He kept telling me, so patiently, to try to get a feel for the topography of a bone fragment, to try to imagine the way it fit into what I couldn’t see by examining the proportions and features of the part I could see, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t conjure the part that wasn’t there. I don’t have good spatial or visual memory, and so it would take me an eternity to identify the fragments I was analyzing. It was the first time I’d ever been bad at something academic. Sherman kept reminding me, ‘Dr. Greene’s hard on me, too,’ which was true, absolutely, but I also could see that in my case it was warranted; something really was wrong. To top it off, I was reformatting a hard drive one day, and I accidentally deleted an entire data set. I wasn’t very popular there after that.”

  “But you were probably having a tough time because the work didn’t interest you,” I said.
“I remember how boring you thought it was.”

  “It was tedious for me, and at some point I couldn’t tell: Was I bad at it, and that made me not like it? Or did I not like it, and that made me bad at it? In either case, when I told you I was blowing off deadlines, the truth was that no matter how many hours I put in, I couldn’t finish my projects on time, and I couldn’t get myself excited about them.”

  We heard laughing from over by the bar and saw that Jonathan and George had settled in and taken seats. “I’m sure you’re just being hard on yourself,” I said.

  “No, this isn’t just my perception that I was a misfit. That February my professor, Dr. Greene, who mostly acted like I didn’t exist, called me into his office to tell me that NYU wouldn’t be offering me a spot in the graduate program. He said I lacked the requisite skills. I was mortified. And then, it gets worse: he said that if I got into CUNY, he would strongly recommend that I turn it down because, as my advisor, he really didn’t think I was cut out for a PhD in the field. I started crying right in front of him; it was humiliating. He handed me a tissue and said, ‘I know it’s been hard to be out of your depth for so long.’ A few weeks later when word got out that CUNY had accepted me, I thought about what he’d said, and I turned it down.”

  “ ‘Out of your depth’? That’s so insulting. Why’d you listen to him?”

  “Because on some level he was right, and I knew he was. But I had no clue what to do with my life instead. My confidence was shot, and I wasn’t in a frame of mind to brush myself off and start over in a whole new field.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me any of this?”

  “My parents were the only ones I talked to about it. And they said to ignore everything Dr. Greene said, stand up tall, and seize this wonderful, exciting opportunity to make a fresh start, but I was too demoralized to see it that way.”

  “And Robert?”

  “I didn’t tell him anything. Have you ever read Madame Bovary?” she asked suddenly, “because I finally finished it, and it was just like in the book: my current situation made me want to die, and I wanted to live in Paris. I wasn’t up to the task of reinventing my life, so instead I latched on to Robert’s life, poor guy. I tried to usurp it.”

  “Did you say ‘poor guy’?” I asked.

  “He must have felt I was commandeering his entire existence. I needed a way out, and I put it all on him.”

  “But the airport . . .”

  “Forget the airport, I never should have been on the plane to begin with. Angela told me I was being rash, but I couldn’t slow down because I desperately needed to be somewhere else in September when the school year started. But moving to Paris wasn’t going to solve the real problem, and, come on, Robert and me? We were not a good fit,” she said.

  “He can be such an asshole.”

  “Yes, sure, but so can I. And so can everyone else at one time or another.” She caught Jonathan’s eye and waved him over. “I want you to promise me you’ll make up with Vicki and Robert, okay? At least try, at least see them.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll think about it.”

  “Here we go,” George said, coming to the table and handing Kate a beer. “Everyone okay? Should we toast?”

  “But how can I be friends with Vicki if you aren’t?” I asked. “That doesn’t seem right.”

  “Just because Kate’s thinning her herd,” Jonathan said, “doesn’t mean you have to thin yours.”

  “And I need to thin mine,” Kate added, “because I want to make an opening for George.”

  “All right!” he said, looking like he’d won a prize. “Thanks.”

  “What about me?” Jonathan asked.

  “I already made room for you,” she said. “You’re not getting two spots.”

  Kate and Jonathan had plans to spend their first weekend away together. Springtime in Vermont at an inn by a lake. It sounded very romantic to me. I sent her a sexy little satin chemise to take along on the trip. Who doesn’t love lingerie?

  To: Angela

  From: Nancy

  Subject: Thanks to you and Kate

  * * *

  Angela—

  A million thanks to your sister—would you believe?—Gus actually got IN to Hudson! I can’t imagine how, but he was accepted! Kate clearly went to bat for us because between Gus getting suspended from school and Sam and me ruining the interview, there was NO WAY. Even our placement specialist told us to forget about it. So thank you for putting in a good word, and please thank Kate for doing the impossible. She is one powerful lady!

  Gus decided on Graylon Academy in the end. Something about he wanted “experiential learning,” “creative expression,” and “collaborative circles,” whatever the hell that all means. But it was great to be able to tell everyone he picked it over Hudson. Ha!

  I’m sorry I didn’t share the news sooner, but things have been really busy. Sam and I are taking a big summer trip together, a private cruise in the Mediterranean. I’ve got gobs of shopping to do.

  Thank God for nannies, right? :)

  Nancy

  Ms. Pearson,

  Silvia is distraught at your refusal to do the humane thing and talk to us. All we want is to know what happened. We have to apply all over again next year, so it would be helpful to know what went wrong so that we can receive a better outcome next time. Even as I write this, it does not sound like a lot to ask. It is astonishing to me that you remain unwilling to help.

  Kenneth Blake

  “So Maureen comes into my office,” Kate was saying, “and looks in the Victoria’s Secret bag and says, ‘Ha! Lingerie! I told you! I told you that girl is hot for you.’ ”

  Angela was struggling to focus on Kate’s litany of work stories, but she somehow couldn’t keep up. “That who’s hot?” she asked.

  “No, she’s . . . It was just funny.”

  “And Maureen knew that?”

  “Never mind,” Kate said cheerfully. “You probably had to be there.”

  Angela had come uptown to a restaurant near Hudson to meet Kate for lunch. She had arrived ten minutes late, and Kate was already there, waiting for her, engrossed in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. “I’m rereading every Brontë novel by the end of the summer,” she had said, putting the book away in her bag.

  They were sitting outside at a table on the sidewalk, pretending spring had arrived, taking off their coats but keeping their scarves on as they waited for the food to arrive. The place they’d chosen was packed with people in oversize sunglasses who were drinking iced tea and shivering.

  “I might get a coffee,” Angela said suddenly. “Pep me up a bit.”

  “Does Grace sleep through the night yet?”

  “Ha. No.”

  “I’ll start coming over more now,” Kate said. “I promise. I have four weeks off, and I can help out anytime you want.”

  I’ll believe it when I see it, Angela started to say, but instead she smiled. “That would be great.”

  Doug had suggested a form of behavioral therapy: suppress the urge to make a disparaging remark by saying something positive in its place. Angela was doing her best, but it was a challenge. She found it so hard not to find fault, not to foresee disaster. She had come to lunch with the goal of putting a stop to her habit of criticizing, giving her sister credit instead, trusting Kate the way Chloe did, the way her parents did.

  Angela had a list of apologies, and she was prepared to talk through each one, starting with “I have this tendency to underestimate you.” Her little sister was—what had Nancy said?—powerful? She could do the impossible. Her boss liked her because she worked hard, not because he wanted to sleep with her. Angela felt like a huge ass.

  “It seems like you’re a pretty big deal at Hudson. Getting Nancy’s kid in?”

  “No, don’t get carried away,” Kate said. “I had nothing to do with Gus getting accepted, so don’t give me too much credit.”

  “She said you pulled strings, got your boss to interview him.” />
  “I just thought it would be awkward to interview him myself. She’s your friend, and what if we didn’t take him?”

  “We’re not really friends, and I think I was just trying to impress her—having an ‘in’ at one of the best schools in New York? I was trying to be cool.”

  “Cool? You?”

  “Right, hilarious,” Angela answered. Having her hair chopped off and getting told off by Chloe had made the past few weeks hard but enlightening.

  “Have you considered hair extensions?” Kate teased.

  “Yes, and I’ve been buying up hats all over town.” Angela tried to tuck her hair behind her ear, another old habit. In spite of the incontrovertible evidence—her head—Doug was still insisting that she looked pretty, always trying to compliment her, telling her sweetly that she looked just like his handsome hero, Stephen Colbert.

  The waiter came with a bread basket, and Kate checked the time on her phone.

  “Are you going to be late?” Angela asked.

  “It’s fine, as long as the food comes soon. Hey,” she said suddenly, “in another month we’ll have parents again. Finally, right?”

  “It’s about time.”

  “Willkommen! Tervetuloa!”

  “God help me,” Angela sighed.

  “It’ll be good, though, right?” Kate said. “Grandparents would probably come in handy.”

  “I’m trying hard to put aside my resentment toward them for their neglect and abandonment.”

  “They’ll make up for it: prepare to be subjected to a thirty-part PowerPoint lecture series, full of anecdotes and fun factoids. I’m not sure if I’m ready for all of that.”

  “I’ve always been the odd man out in the family,” Angela confessed, “but it looks like I’ve finally won you over to my team.”

  “What if I want to be on both teams?”

  “Meaning?”

  “Turns out my job is a little like applied sociology. I was thinking, maybe someday I’ll get a degree in social psychology. Or pedagogy. Or maybe even educational policy. Or maybe not. I don’t know. No need to decide now.” She shrugged.