“I guess so,” he said.
“It happened,” I said. We sat side by side on the edge of my bed. “The final base.” I was seventeen, a senior.
“Was it all right?” he asked.
“It was.” I did not tell my father that at first the angle was wrong, and so for a little while we thought sex would not be possible for us, that we were built incompatibly, that the parts did not fit the way they should.
Sometimes, in the late afternoon after school during the weeks when we were not producing the newspaper, Josh and I went to Windy Hill preserve, up above Skyline, hills wide and yellow and soft like the humps of camels, on one side more hills like a blanket thrown out into the wind all the way to the Pacific Ocean. The town was a miniature below us, silent and still except for the singing, rasping wind that flattened the tall grasses. A clear day, too much to take in, the glassy air, and the feeling of great freedom and grace, the world opening. I looked north and I could see San Francisco sparkling in the distance, but clear like it was close. It was like the way I’d seen it in the hovering dream, both close and far away, something to do with the angle from this hill to those hills, the refraction of the light.
That’s how I felt about my parents now that Josh was around, not that I didn’t worry about how my mom would earn money, or about my father mocking me, or even what would happen when he realized that I was really leaving for college. I was simply hovering above it all, so it didn’t pinch or press. Now Josh was the one who drove me to doctors’ appointments or between houses. He did not keep a calendar, forgot about homework assignments, and missed dentist appointments and other appointments, but never the ones with me. I was protected inside his teal Supra.
After the spring rains, when the grasses came up out of the clods of dirt under the oak and eucalyptus trees around Stanford—viridian fuzz like whiskers, stripes of gold light in long bright ribbons—I thought, This is my town. I walked home after school, and noticed the seasons change. Before this it was my father’s town, or my mother’s town, or the town where I’d been placed by accident and shifted around. Now I was in love, and the land was dimensional and heavy and particulate; it belonged to me.
During lunchtime, I visited Paly’s college admissions office, presided over by a woman with short, gray hair named Mrs. Daas. I flipped through a binder to find the names and addresses of students who’d been accepted to Harvard. Harvard, monstrous, distant, and separate from me, pulling away. It was the most legitimate organization I could think of. Also, it was one decision that seemed to eradicate uncertainty. Once I’d chosen it, I didn’t have to make other decisions or discoveries. It seemed right—not for me, necessarily, as I didn’t know what would be right for me at all, and hadn’t bothered to think that far, but right in a general sense. There were usually a few acceptances per year. There was a space for the students to list where their parents had gone to college, and I read through all of them, trying to find an instance in which a parent had not been to college.
I paid for an SAT class, biking there on Saturday mornings. I didn’t tell my parents about the process, although they knew I was applying to college. They didn’t seem to understand the steps involved, or ask me questions about it.
I applied for early admission. Along with the application, we were asked to enclose a self-addressed, stamped postcard. I snuck into Laurene’s office and took a fetching postcard from her book of Cartier-Bresson’s black-and-white photographs. I liked these postcards; I wanted Harvard to find my application tasteful. The postcard I’d stolen would arrive back at the house—making my theft obvious. But I cared more about making an impression than I did about getting caught.
My father was away on a business trip, so I faked his signature on the application.
Over a long weekend I flew to New York to stay with Mona and look at colleges. My mother couldn’t afford to take me; my father didn’t have time. Mona knew more about colleges anyway.
She lived on the Upper West Side in an apartment with a line of round windows surrounded by stripped wood that looked out over Riverside Park. The radiators clanked.
Mona took me to walk around Columbia University, where she’d gone to graduate school. She took me to see Princeton, which she favored, for me, and then Harvard, where I’d arranged to have an interview at the admissions office instead of with an alumnus in California because I thought it would increase my chances of admission to be close to the source.
Two men I knew who’d been to Harvard warned me off. Dr. Botstein at the Stanford Genetics Lab, where I’d worked for two summers, said he’d been unable to join the finals clubs because he was Jewish. “I’m not going to tell you not to go,” he said, “but I would give it a lot of thought.” I wasn’t able to believe in the possibility of my own acceptance then, let alone turning it down. The other man, Dr. Lake, said that he had been lonely there and it felt institutional, and that it wasn’t until he got to medical school at the University of Chicago that he’d felt happy. I didn’t believe either of them. They’d gone a long time ago. I knew what was best for me, I thought, even though I knew almost nothing about Harvard. It wasn’t happiness I was after, but something they might not understand: a seal of approval, and escape. Harvard, I thought, would make me worthy of something. Of existence. I didn’t think anyone could comprehend how much I wanted to go to this place I knew so little about.
It was autumn, clear and stinging cold outside, when Mona and I visited, no more beautiful or cold than Princeton or Columbia had been. The idea of it, the glamour and luck I associated with it, the brand, hovered beside the fact of it, gave it luster and dignity, the buildings, lawns, and trees.
The waiting room of the admissions office was overheated and smelled of paint, with cream-colored walls and blue carpet. Other prospective students sat in chairs nearby. I wore a black skirt with black tights.
I was nervous. It was true that I had not received a single B during high school, but I’d had to work hard for the grades. My SAT scores were good, but not stratospheric. This interview could make a difference.
“Lisa?”
I stood when I heard my name.
A tall woman with dark hair, wearing a skirt and a white sweater, said, “Follow me,” and led me down a hallway and into a small, dim room. She seemed bored. She did not seem charmed by me but almost annoyed by my presence.
“Why don’t you tell me a bit about your interests outside of school,” the woman said. She made no reference to my application, as if she hadn’t read it.
“Let’s see,” I said. “I suppose I do many things, like most of your candidates.” I wanted her to understand that I knew I was human despite my great accomplishments, and humble, aware of, and even embarrassed by the excess of extracurricular activities I had collected for the purpose of saying them at this very moment. “I’m an attorney on our mock trial team, and I’m editor in chief of the school newspaper, with a staff of eighty,” I said, glossing over the fact of the other three editors in chief. “I also take advanced Japanese, after having gone to Japan with my school, and later with my father on a business trip. He also helped me get a job at a lab at Stanford, where I developed photographs of yeast cells under the electron microscope and conducted large-scale experiments on yeast, inserting vectors of DNA into the cells.” As if I were in charge of these experiments, when I only followed instructions; as if I were passionate about any of these activities besides the newspaper, or cared about Japanese or yeast as anything but a way to get into this place—if admitted, I would drop them.
I sat straight in my chair, my legs crossed. I slipped my father into the conversation like an accident.
I would use him. He was my only advantage after the grades and the activities.
“And what does your father do?” she asked politely.
I hesitated, lifting my eyebrows as if to say, “Oh, him?” I took a breath to indicate I hadn’t expected the conversation to go here.
“He started a computer company,” I said. “
He invented a computer called the Macintosh.” I said it as if she might not have heard of it.
At that, the woman stood; she looked alarmed. “Excuse me,” she said. “I’ll be right back.” She grasped the doorknob and left the room abruptly, closing the door behind her, as if she’d realized all at once she had to attend to something urgent outside the room.
It was too obvious; I wondered if it could possibly be happening like this. Would she rush out and stop them from turning down my application? Were there other admissions officers shifting through the files of those being interviewed at that very moment?
A few minutes later, she returned. She didn’t explain where she’d been, or why she’d dashed out, but seemed kinder and more attentive. She asked me a few more questions I don’t remember, and the interview concluded.
When I left, my cheeks burned.
Back home, as I waited to find out if I got in, I wore corduroy for luck. I wore it top to bottom, corduroy pants with a corduroy shirt. The pants were wide wale, moss green; the shirt was a finer wale button-down with pockets, indigo blue. It felt like velvet. Usually, I wore these items singly, when I was taking or receiving the grade for an important test.
It was production week at the paper, and three of the four editors in chief had applied early to Harvard; we promised each other we wouldn’t call and find out until the current issue of the paper was finished with production. Harvard had a hotline you could call to find out if you got in or not, Rebecca said, and later in the week she broke the deal, called, discovered she was in, told Nicole, and after that I started calling too, using the phone in the classroom, the line perpetually busy.
It was also possible that an acceptance or rejection letter would arrive in the mail one day that week, and so I wore the corduroy not only for the possibility of getting through on the phone, but also as a prophylactic against the chance I’d arrive home to find the letter on the counter when I was not wearing the lucky outfit. As a result, I’d been wearing the same clothes for four days straight.
On Thursday I decided I’d call the minute the phone lines opened. I set an alarm for 4:30 a.m. The admissions office call center opened at 7:30 a.m. in Boston.
The woman on the other end of the line was distant and professional. She took my last name and put me on hold.
“Congratulations,” she said when she returned, her voice warm, relieved maybe—as if she, too, had been frightened of having to say no.
It took me a moment to understand what she meant. “Wait,” I said.
She laughed. “You’ve been admitted to the Harvard Class of 2000.” The words were scripted, but they might have been her own words, said with such joy.
“Thank you,” I said. “Oh, thank you.”
I got out of bed, put on my shoes with my pajamas, grabbed a sweater, and walked out the door into the dawn light, a blue veil over the street. The houses and lawns and cars were lit up but motionless like a stage set. Nothing stirring but me. Celebration was absorbed like the sound of a footstep on a damp lawn. The neighborhood was quiet, and I would be leaving it; that changed it, made it seem flat like a drawing. I walked past Kevin and Dorothy’s house. Everyone was sleeping. As I walked, a few porch lights went off—they must have been on timers—and sprinklers began to hish hish hish.
I stepped back into the house and ran to my room and ripped sheets of lined paper out of a notebook. I GOT IN I GOT IN I GOT IN I GOT IN, I wrote. I taped them up on the windows that lined the hallway.
After a while I heard my father and Laurene stirring upstairs. I waited in the hallway, pacing, still in my pajamas. They walked down, first my father, then Laurene. I held my breath.
“Oh!” Laurene said.
“What is this?” my father said. “Got in where?”
“Ding dong,” Laurene said. “She’s into Harvard.”
“Oh,” he said. “Right.”
Soon after, I would be moving to my mother’s house.
I called out to my brother from the bottom of the stairs. For his fourth birthday I bought him a royal blue satin cape with silver stars and a ruffle around his neck. It came with a magician’s conical hat and a wooden wand.
“Reed?” I called out. No response. I thought I heard a light shuffle upstairs.
“Glinda?” I called instead. This was one of the names he went by in costume.
“Esmeralda? Valencia?”
“Yes?” From a room upstairs came a thin, watery reply. “I’m Valencia.”
I found him playing make-believe.
“I want to talk to you,” I said, and sat him down beside me on the floor. “From now on, I’m going to live mostly with my mother.” When I spoke, he was distracted, facing me but looking away.
My mother had suggested I tell him in the form of a story. “There was once a prince and a frog,” I began. I wasn’t sure why I’d made myself into the frog. “The prince loved the frog, and frog loved the prince more than any other prince. They were dear friends. But then, one day, the frog had to go back to his own kingdom.” He listened now, rapt.
“Why did he have to go away?” Reed asked.
“There were other frogs. A land of frogs. He’d been away for a long time. But, you see, the frog still loved the prince. He wasn’t leaving because he didn’t—he just had to leave for his own reasons.” The story was undeveloped, no real plot, leaden, but he didn’t seem to mind, and wanted more.
“But he had to leave?”
“Yes,” I said. “Because he needed to go home to the other frogs.”
Later that year, my sister Erin was born, after I’d moved to my mother’s house. She had dark hair and a widow’s peak and large, soulful eyes. If she was still awake when I visited, I would hold her and stroke her forehead up toward her hairline. At just one stroke she would fall, miraculously, fast asleep. In the months leading to her birth, my father traveled in Europe for work, his company Pixar, which was on the verge of going public, and he returned from these trips with baby dresses from expensive shops, so that by the time she was born she already had many in plum and jute and white, hanging on a rail.
Harvard sent a form we were supposed to fill out to determine who our roommates would be. I wanted to sound cool and easygoing in order to attract cool, easygoing roommates. I concluded an autobiographical paragraph with the line “And, occasionally, I like to pick up a guitar and play a song.” This did not capture me at all, as uptight as I was. I’d once been able to play a couple of songs but had since forgotten, and even when I could play, I had been mortified to play in front of other people.
The summer before I left for college, when I was living at my mother’s house, my father took me to San Francisco to get a coat. It was his idea, and if I’d known he’d get me a coat, I might not have collected the others. We went to Emporio Armani, located in a converted bank with a towering ceiling and a café inside an internal balcony. We stopped at a rack of ties my father inspected and held with his thumb and index finger. I liked the way he held things. He looked at them with such intensity, but then he didn’t bother to buy any. I worried, as I always did when shopping, that my size would be sold out.
On the far wall below the balcony of the café were the coats. These were not coats for California but for another kind of life. “How about this one,” he said. Black wool with a collar and a double row of buttons that ran down the front. It swung out at the bottom, like a dress. We would have to get it adjusted, the sleeves, the length. “It’s nice,” he said. “Quite nice.” I agreed, but I wondered if it was too unusual. And what others would be wearing when I arrived. It looked like a dress for a French mime. He bought it for me.
On the day my father bought me the coat, on the way back to Palo Alto along Highway 101, the coat left with the tailor for alterations, he and I hardly spoke. He didn’t joke about Ruby’s when we passed it. It didn’t occur to me that he was silent because he was considering the fact that I was leaving—that he might miss me after I’d gone. Or he might have been thinking about
work, about NeXT and Pixar. The silence between us would grow over the next years. Soon he would no longer write or call back; I wasn’t sure how it started or why. That day he looked ahead, both hands on the wheel, moving his shoulder in its socket, brushing his thumbs back and forth, and clenching his jaw, the rhythms continuous but not exactly the same, like a mechanical man.
“I’m going to teach you to clean a toilet,” my mother said at her house a few weeks later. I’d shown her the coat, back from the tailor, and this was her answer to it: what she would give me in preparation for Harvard.
“I won’t be cleaning toilets where I’m going,” I said.
“Maybe not,” she said. “But you will someday.” She was right.
Coda
If you still desire a thing, its time has not yet come. And when you have what you desired, you will have no more desire, instead you will have time. Weak desires protect you from disappointment. But nothing keeps you safer than being a visible ruin.
—Fanny Howe, Indivisible
I arrived at Harvard alone the week before school started to join the First-Year Outdoor Program. It was hot and humid. I waited in the registration line under a white tent, but when I got to the front and said my name, a woman pulled me aside to say my tuition had not been paid. She seemed skeptical of my right to be there. I told her there must be a mistake, but I was embarrassed, and felt exceptionally alone. My dorm assignment and registration packet were delayed. I found a pay phone and called Jeff Howson, my father’s accountant, who said he would do his best to set it right. The following week, when I returned from camping, my tuition had been paid, and I was given a dorm assignment.
In the first three months of my freshman year, before my father stopped responding to my calls and emails, I complained to him on the phone about how I couldn’t see since I’d arrived in Boston. Everything was flat and close; there were no vistas; my eyes ached; the buildings were smashed up against the sightlines. “All I see is the building in front of me, everywhere I go.”
“It’s a metaphor for the East Coast mind,” he’d said.
Small Fry Page 30