Admission

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  “He’s not an applicant yet,” she pointed out, knowing he was perfectly right.

  “No, but he will be if I have anything to do with it. Princeton would be a paradise for him. Not that you heard me say that,” he said, shaking a finger.

  “I didn’t hear a thing,” Portia said.

  He leaned over her and kissed her again, this time less chastely and not on her cheek. “You know,” he said, “I’m surprised to hear you say your work isn’t meaningful.”

  “I didn’t say that,” she objected.

  “Well, implied it. Or that you felt less qualified to send the acceptance than you did to receive it.”

  She heard this, somewhat dumbstruck at its accuracy. “It isn’t true,” she managed to say, though she felt, more than ever, and hearing it put so succinctly, that it was. And also she was getting distracted.

  “Good. Because I think your work must be incredibly fulfilling. You can change lives, can’t you? I mean, it must be wonderful to take some kid who’s fully capable of getting his teeth into a first-class education and then giving that to him. You must love doing that.”

  She nodded. It sounded good.

  “All that saying yes you talked about. Downstairs.”

  “Yes,” Portia said, but she wasn’t sure what exactly she was saying yes to. John’s hand was in the hollow of her belly, and nothing was holding still.

  “Besides,” she heard him say, “it’s not like it’s a simple thing. Admissions. Admission. Aren’t there two sides to the word? And two opposing sides.”

  “What?” she asked him indistinctly. She was feeling something, definitely. It was harder to focus.

  “Admission. It’s what we let in, but it’s also what we let out.”

  “Let out?” said Portia, trying to catch her breath.

  “Our secrets,” he whispered, enjoying himself. He had kissed her legs apart and was moving between them. “Of course. We admit a stranger to our homes. We admit a lover to our bodies, yes?”

  Well, yes, she thought, losing, for the next moment, the train of their conversation.

  “But when we admit something, we might also let it out,” he said. He seemed, rather maddeningly, not to have stopped thinking. “That’s true, isn’t it? That we admit our secrets?”

  Secrets, Portia thought. She was not inclined to speak. She had no breath to speak.

  “I have them. You have them. Well, I think you have them.”

  She closed her eyes. She had them.

  “Can I stay a little longer?” he asked. “I’d like to stay.”

  He was very close to her, close from chest to calf. It had come back, fast, the specific feel of his skin against her skin.

  “Where is your son?” she managed to ask.

  “He’s playing illicit video games at his friend’s house. He’s going to spend the night.”

  She nodded, but it wasn’t a nod, really. “Yes, you can stay,” she told him. They could both stay, a little longer, at least.

  I have always felt that it was my destiny to attend a first rate college or university like your institution, and with the help of your institution I can achieve all of my potential. I know that I will bring to your institution all of my intellectual and extracurricular gifts, and I will add to the life of the campus in a myriad of ways. My aim in life is to use my abilities to make the world a better place, and I am sure that your institution can help me accomplish that.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHICKEN MARBELLA

  Princeton’s Office of Admission had both a public and a private face. For the scores of visitors to the university, tremulous high school students with their families (sometimes in tow, sometimes firmly in the lead), there was the impressive Clio Hall, a white marble mausoleum complete with classical pillars and Groves of Academe steps, located directly behind Nassau Hall in the heart of the campus. Inside Clio, these visitors registered for their information sessions, picked up their Orange Key tours, helped themselves to gratis coffee, and nervously eyed the competition. Portia and her colleagues took turns manning the sessions, but this was an element of her job she had liked less and less as the years went by and the atmosphere grew ever more toxic. A decade earlier, when she’d first arrived at Princeton, she had enjoyed the challenge of responding to whatever might come up: a father’s question about the Ultimate Frisbee team, a kid from Mexico City wanting to know if he’d be able to study in China, tongue-in-cheek questions about This Side of Paradise, thoughtful queries about social issues on campus, including the eternal curiosity about the eating clubs and their influence. She had prided herself on not getting stumped, even during those first years when she was learning the material herself, and later, as her affection and respect for the university became genuine, it pleased her to communicate how extraordinary she thought it.

  Eventually, though, the sessions became stressful, then oppressive. There was something about how the mothers sat, knees tightly together, mouths painfully tense. The anxiety in the room was free-flowing. And the hostility. The visitors had a way of checking out their designated tour guides, as if trying to guess the pertinent statistics, the hooks or—worse—tricks that had brought him or her to Princeton, as if this unsuspecting student had directly usurped their own son’s or daughter’s future spot.

  Still, no matter how severely the applicants and their families inspected the student guides, it was nothing to the way they sometimes looked at Portia. Who was she, their sharp eyes seemed to ask, to sit in judgment on them or their brilliant children? And when they asked, as they often did, whether she herself had graduated from Princeton, and when they learned that she had not, there was palpable disdain. She couldn’t even get in herself! (This sentiment had reached its apotheosis the previous year, when the director of admissions for MIT had been exposed as lacking any college degree at all.) For Portia, the last straw had been a visiting boy from the South with a lock of nutmeg-colored hair dipping over one eye, who had asked with great false solemnity what advantage he might expect from the fact that both parents and both grandfathers had attended Princeton. There was a shudder of distress throughout the crowd. Portia, repelled, made sure that she took down his name, though not for the purpose the student so clearly hoped. After that, she had asked Clarence to give her a little hiatus from the information sessions, and he’d agreed, but only for a while and only because he had two new hires, both newly minted Princeton grads who were still, in some small way, celebrating their own letters of acceptance and too brimming in goodwill to take anything personally.

  Catty-corner from Clio stood West College, the more modest but far more crucial private face of the university’s admissions apparatus, where the heavy lifting was actually done. In the fall and winter, hundreds of thousands of pieces of mail arrived here in trucks from the post office, FedEx, and UPS and were hauled into the building, crate by crate. They went first to the sorting stations in the back of the ground floor, where they joined the paper output of a dozen purring fax machines and as many printers, churning out hard copies of e-mail correspondence and the ubiquitous common application. Everything was sifted, inspected, shifted, and dealt, sorted and sorted again by the permanent staff and student employees until they landed—ideally, at least—in appropriate individual folders and there merged to form a cohesive whole in theory greater than the sum of its parts: The Ballad of Johnny Schwartz from Shaker Heights; The Saga of Robert “Bo” Wilson-Santiago from L.A.; The Tale of Betsy Curtis, Manhattan via Exeter; The Broken Narrative of Xiao-Gang “Kyle” Woo, Shanghai by Way of San Diego. And on.

  There was concentrated, detail-obsessed attention in this office. When Portia came down, as she often did, to pick up files or avail herself of the confectionery smorgasbord (by tradition, baked goods and other delicacies submitted in misguided support of applications were promptly parted from their senders’ identification and set out on a table in the corner, beside the coffee machine), she was quite often reminded of a fairy tale that had fascinated her as a child,
in which scores of devoted ants worked without respite on an intermixed mountain of black and white sands, separating them into perfect, segregated hills. There were, of course, occasional errors—Cindy Lin’s effusive teacher recommendation landing in Cynthia Liu’s application folder, that sort of thing—but nothing irreparable. With so many filaments of information flying around and so many hands stirring the soup, it was surprising how few applications turned up incomplete. (When they did, when a folder lacked its letter of recommendation or a transcript, the student was given an opportunity to resend whatever was missing. In general, applicants to Princeton tended to be as highly detail oriented as the officers evaluating them; if their folders lacked some critical element, they wanted to know about it. They wanted, most fervently, to redress the flaw.)

  When Portia returned to Princeton late that Friday afternoon, she drove directly to the middle of town, lucked into a space on Witherspoon, and hauled her laden bag to this warren of activity in West College. She greeted the women in their cubicles, but the truth was that she didn’t know half of them by name. There seemed to be a fairly high outflow from this office to administrative posts in every corner of university, the theory being, she supposed, that if one could handle being on the receiving end of an entire country’s application panic, one might easily parry a few philosophers or chemists. And after a year or two down here, people were usually quite content to move on to more sedate work environments.

  Only Martha Prestcott was eternal. A woman whose figure seemed to spring from a Helen E. Hokinson cartoon—all thrusting bust and linebacker shoulders—she ran this nerve center as a benevolent dictatorship. “Hey there,” she hailed Portia. “How’s my gorgeous niece?”

  “She’s terrific,” Portia said. Martha’s niece, Princeton graduate and math teacher at Northfield, had attended her session that morning. “She said to give you a big hug and remind you that you promised her Pillsbury crescents on Thanksgiving. I assume this is some kind of secret code, because I know you wouldn’t be caught dead serving Pillsbury crescents.”

  “Oh dear. I forgot about that. I promised her,” Martha said with evident regret.

  “Are you expecting a big crowd?”

  “Well, I’m up to fourteen and it’s still three weeks off, so I’m thinking twenty. George usually brings home a few strays.”

  George Prestcott taught in the Engineering School, where a concentration of international students tended to linger over holidays.

  “That’s nice.”

  “Well, it makes a challenge. This one won’t eat meat. This one won’t eat pork. They’ve never seen yams and cranberries before.”

  “Or Pillsbury crescents.”

  “Oh, they’ve probably seen those.” She laughed. “We know the college diet is largely composed of refined sugars and bread from a cardboard tube.”

  Portia smiled. She went to the corner and surveyed the offerings. Brownies with orange icing, two tins of cookies, some squares of indeterminate nature. She helped herself to a cleverly decorated cookie in the shape of a P.

  “I wouldn’t,” said Martha. Martha’s tenure in Princeton admissions was easily double Portia’s own. She had seen—and, given her girth, more than likely tasted—everything. “Hard as diamonds.”

  “Oh. They look so pretty. And I’m so hungry.”

  “Try those.” Martha pointed. “They came with a note about a vegan cookbook.”

  “Vegan?” Portia frowned. She looked into the box on the table. It was a shoebox lined with waxed paper. The squares inside looked dark, moist, and dense.

  “Her own recipe. For her vegan cookbook in progress. They’re called ‘Health Bars.’ Don’t worry,” she told Portia, “they arrived this morning. By overnight express.”

  “I thought you threw the written stuff out,” Portia said, lifting a health bar from the box. Fulfilling her expectations, it was weightier than it looked.

  “Oh, we do, but I always read them first. There might be some information to transfer to the file. Besides, I feel bad for them. I mean, these kids have gone to the trouble. Somebody should read what they have to say. You know,” she said, eyeing Portia, “they’re actually better than they look.”

  Portia inspected the square, supporting it with two hands. She took a cautious bite, filling her mouth with molasses, honey, and packed dried fruit. She folded the rest into a paper towel. For later, she explained. “Corinne been in today?”

  “Sure.” Martha nodded. “She was here. Loading up for her trip. What do you need?”

  “Oh… whatever you have ready.”

  Martha nodded. She got up and went to the files, where she pulled about fifty orange dockets identical to the ones Portia was turning in.

  “Where’s Corinne again?”

  Martha considered. “Castilleja, I think. Is that just girls?”

  “Uh-huh. Silicon Valley.”

  “That’s the one, then. And a couple of schools in the East Bay. It was rescheduled from that time in May she hurt her back.”

  “Right.” Portia nodded. It gave her some not very laudable satisfaction to think of Corinne Schreiber on a westbound flight on this clear blue autumn Friday. Corinne, who had taken over the Pacific region with a certain poorly suppressed antipathy toward her new assignment—indeed, the entire office had been treated to her ongoing and all too vocal resentment—had coasted for years on the excuse of her young children at home, clinging zealously to her prior geographic area, the Mid-Atlantic. She’d come to Princeton, her alma mater, from a college-counseling job at a private school in D.C., preceded by a decade in the English Department at the same school. The Mid-Atlantic, she’d argued, allowed her to travel to schools and still be home for her kids, a need few of her colleagues (recent college grads, the unmarried, and, like Portia, the childless) could claim. Portia, naturally, had declined to be persuaded by this rationalization after the first couple of years. She felt penalized for her childlessness, for her asserted independence, while she was every bit as old as Corinne and every bit—she was certain—as tired. When Clarence had given her New England, she’d made free to suggest Corinne as her successor.

  “Corinne doesn’t like to travel,” Clarence had remarked. “Because of her kids.”

  Portia had frowned. But… weren’t Corinne’s kids both at Andover now? Her oldest was in his third year. Her youngest was starting in September. Or perhaps she was mistaken.

  She was not mistaken. The following week, after a high-decibel exchange in Clarence’s office, Corinne had become the admissions officer in charge of the Pacific: California, Alaska, Hawaii, Washington, Oregon. There would be many long flights in her future and many school visits, from sunny San Diego to snowy Nome and all points in between. Portia had offered to share her list of great San Francisco restaurants. The offer was declined.

  The Office of Admission, two flights up, was a corridor of small offices with pretty, leafy views. A few of Portia’s co-workers preferred to take files home during the most intense reading periods, but most spent their autumn and winter months in these rooms, crawling through their allotted folders and fielding calls from contacts in their regions. At the end of the corridor was Clarence’s office, notably a far grander establishment than the smaller rooms Portia and her fellow officers occupied. It had, for example, windows on three sides, a couch, and a small round table, and it came with a nonfunctioning but very dignified fireplace. It also came with an assistant called Abby, who sat in an alcove just outside Clarence’s door, in a cubicle plastered with photos of her Russian grandson. Abby, who had also worked for Martin Quilty, possessed an easygoing nature in combination with organizational skills of military caliber. She had—and this was equally important—a range of phone voices extending from sweet simulated ignorance to cunning brick wall and an uncanny knack of choosing the correct one for whoever was on the line.

  Portia carried Martha’s fifty files into her office and set them down on top of another stack, this one bound in a rubber band and bearing a not
e from Corinne. Each application was reviewed by two officers before going to Clarence, committee, or both, and Clarence had requested she serve as second reader on Corinne’s folders for this, her first year in the Pacific schools. With the admissions season only just under way, Portia was already irritated by her colleague’s idiosyncratic spelling and elusive script, not to mention her evident paranoia about coached applications.

  Of course, Corinne was not alone in her antipathy toward paid college consultants and their influence. They all knew perfectly well what was out there, primarily in the cities and wealthier suburbs, but now also, democratically, on the Internet, where consultants of every stripe had hung out their virtual shingles, offering some artificial Rosetta stone for top-tier college admissions. All of them shared her opinion of applicants “reverse engineered” by some self-proclaimed expert. How could any admissions officer know—truly know—whether an applicant had honestly fulfilled the declaration he or she had signed on the application itself—the one that read, “I certify that the essays are entirely my own work”—or whether some other person or persons had advised, revised, or even written their essays for them? It was a laudable but doomed crusade. Yes, it went without saying that students capable of paying up to $30,000 for a consultant to “work with them” on their essays and design their applicant profiles had an unfair advantage, but it was also shortsighted to assume that any applicant to Princeton had not had his or her essays at least vetted by somebody. The least savvy among them most likely had a parent check the spelling or an English teacher look over the syntax. Even overworked college counselors with hundreds of college-bound seniors might take a moment to skim the essays of an applicant to Princeton, especially if she or he intended to write a recommendation for that student. Trying to detect the sticky fingers of a paid consultant seemed a poor use of time. And time was short enough.