CHAPTER FIFTEEN
A FEW DETAILS
In February, she came face-to-face with Jeremiah Balakian, twice in the same grim week.
First in the pile at ten on a Monday morning, three hours into her day. Her door was shut, her jeans stiff with wear, last night’s snow from her trudge through town drying into white rings on her boots. The folder began, as always, with the test sheet. It showed that the applicant had taken the SATs the previous spring. Verbal was an 800—common enough in this applicant pool. The math was lower—680—but respectable. There were no SATII test results, but there were plenty of APs. Eight in all, likewise taken the previous spring. They made an unbroken line of 5’s.
She turned to the second page of the application, where extracurricular, personal, and volunteer activities were listed and defined. More often than not, Princeton applicants overflowed the available seven lines with their debate teams and varsity sports, volunteer work and church activities. This applicant’s was entirely blank except for a two-word notation on the top line: “Independent study.” She wondered if she might be missing something.
Portia went back to the reader’s card, where Martha’s downstairs staff had pulled the relevant grades from the high school transcript, inserting them into a grid for each year: A’s, B’s, C’s, D’s, and F’s. It was a shocker. Mostly C’s and several D’s; nothing higher than a B. And no AP courses at all. But how, she wondered, given his scores on the AP exams, could that make sense? She had sometimes seen this kind of syncopation on the exams of homeschool applicants, but the applicant had clearly attended high school. She paged forward, past essays and signed forms, to the guidance counselor’s portion of the paperwork and found, as she’d expected to find, an official transcript and forms. They were from Keene Central High School and were accompanied by the customary brochure about the school and its demographics, lists of clubs and teams (“Go Lions!”), and roster of colleges attended by the last five years’ worth of graduates. Then, tucked behind these, she found letters related to the applicant’s senior year at the Quest School. A page of densely written course evaluations from various teachers. And letters. The first letter was from John R. Halsey, humanities teacher and student adviser.
So. Yes, she nodded, shivering in her layers of dirty clothing. Here was Jeremiah.
She returned again to the front of the reader’s card and looked at the Academic and Non-Academic rankings, finding herself entirely unprepared to choose one. Academic 1’s were kids who had 800 SATs and job lots of AP 5’s. Academic 5’s were kids who had barely scraped themselves through high school. Jeremiah, apparently, was both of these. She resisted the momentary impulse to average everything out and give him a 3. Clearly, whatever he was, he was not a 3. Not that these ratings were in any way binding. They were a signpost, not an evaluation, a little shorthand to the reader as he or she embarked on a thorough consideration of everything in the folder; but setting Jeremiah up with a rating of Ac 3/NonAc 5 would only make everything an uphill battle, at least for the readers who followed her. She decided to leave the ratings aside for the moment. Instead, she began to read the application itself, slowly and with judgment suspended to the best of her ability.
Balakian, Jeremiah Vartan. She hadn’t realized, when she’d met him, that he was Armenian. She didn’t recall having heard his last name at all.
Home address: Keene, New Hampshire.
Possible area of academic concentration: “Humanities: art, history, languages, literature.”
Possible career or professional plans. This he had left blank.
Place of birth: Lawrence, Massachusetts.
Ethnicity: Caucasian.
The address of the school she remembered all too well: One Inspiration Way, North Plain, New Hampshire.
His father was Aram Balakian, occupation retail sales, employer Stop & Shop, Keene, N.H. He had an associate’s degree, Keene Community College.
His mother was Nan Balakian. The space for education was left blank. Retail sales. Stop & Shop, Keene, N.H.
No siblings.
Portia turned over the reader’s card and wrote, “Mom and dad: grocery clerks. No sibs,” in the “Background Information” section. Then she wrote and circled the letters NC, meaning that the parents had not attended college. Jeremiah, if he managed it, would be the first.
She left the spaces for “Academic” and “Non-Academic” activities blank.
Under “Summers” he had written:
For the past two summers I have been employed full time at a supermarket in Keene, rotating among various positions, from stocker to warehouse to checkout, none of them particularly taxing. I wasn’t very optimistic about the job at the outset, but I came to discover that examining someone’s groceries is a strangely intimate and fascinating activity. When you know what people are putting in their mouths and on their bodies, you know a great deal about them: physically, emotionally, even politically. Sometimes I’d want to confront them about their choices: Don’t you know what this food is going to do to your blood pressure? Don’t you know this manufacturer has one of the worst environmental records in the world? Did you know that for the same price as this fake cheese you could get real cheese? But of course, a humble checker can’t say such things. We scan and pack and take their checks or food stamps or credit cards. I learned a great deal, and I hope I’ll never have to work there another day in my life.
She smiled. She flipped back in the application to check the “Work Experience” section for the name of the employer: Stop & Shop. He had worked for his parents’ employer. Under “Summer” she wrote, “Grocery Clerk, FT X 2,” meaning that he’d been employed for both of the past two summers, the ones Princeton cared most about. Then she turned back to the application and frowned at the “Few Details” section.
This had been a fairly recent innovation, part wink to the applicants (See? We have a sense of humor!), part palate cleanser between the nuts and bolts of the front-loaded information at the beginning of the application and the essays to come. The questions changed a little every year, but they generally asked the kids to name their favorite books, music, sources of inspiration, films, mementos, and words. (The words tended to be fairly grotesque. In the past month alone, she had come across “defenestrate” more times than she cared to remember.) This year’s tweak was “Your favorite line from a movie,” which had reaped hundreds of sentences Portia had never heard before and many, many citations of the classic Godfather line “Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.”
Jeremiah’s choices, to say the least, were unusual. His favorite book was Wiesenthal’s The Murderers Among Us. His favorite source of inspiration: “Whatever book I’m reading at the time.” Under favorite Web site he wrote, “I’m sorry, I don’t have a computer.” His favorite line from a movie? “Now tell me, do you feel anything at all?” from Sunday Bloody Sunday. She hadn’t seen the film in a decade, at least, and yet, reading the line here, so out of context, she was amazed at how quickly and fully this opening line came back, spoken over a black screen: just that male voice—Peter Finch’s voice—and then the image of a hand—Peter Finch’s hand—palpating the bloated abdomen of a middle-aged man. It was a ringing, terribly bleak line, sharply foreshadowing the ninety-odd minutes of interpersonal desolation to come. The adjectives he’d chosen to describe himself were “loner (but not the scary kind)” and “fervent.” Being a loner was not, she thought, something the modern teenager was often eager to admit to. “Fervent” she had never come across before.
Usually, there wasn’t much to take from the “Few Details” section. Occasionally, something unusual was worth writing down. In the section of the reader’s card marked “FD,” she wrote: “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” but mostly because she enjoyed thinking that Corinne would not know what it meant.
Now, and only now, it was time to read the essays.
For his longer essay, Jeremiah had chosen one of the most popular prompts, an Einstein quote: “The important thing is not to stop q
uestioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when one contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries to comprehend only a little of this mystery every day.” (Albert Einstein, Princeton resident 1933–1955)
She leaned over the page, awkwardly aware of how good she wanted it to be.
I became an autodidact at eight years old, when I realized that my teachers were not going to be able to teach me. It wasn’t that they were unequal to the task of teaching me—they weren’t. And it wasn’t that they didn’t wish to teach me. I think they wished to very much. But they were busy. They needed to keep order, muster the slower ones, persuade various second graders to stop biting, pulling hair, and doing disgusting things with their body fluids. I think I spent most of that year waiting to learn, but I finally figured out that I could be putting that time to better use. So I set off, without much direction. I read biographies, mainly, because I had no idea how other people had lived their lives. When biographies led me into different disciplines, I followed them until my interests shifted, but I always picked up the thread with a new life story. I never bothered to devise a master plan. I had no concept of a master plan. What I was doing was almost hedonistic. It certainly was not disciplined. It has continued now for ten years.
All this time, of course, I was in school, but just barely. I’m sure it does not reflect well on me when I say that my high school classes, in the main, did not interest me, so I mostly ignored them, sometimes scraping by with passing grades, sometimes not. My high school, Keene Central, tried various methods to bring me into the fold. I was threatened with detention, which was fine with me because it was a quiet place to read, and suspension, which was even better since my parents both worked during the day, which meant that I could read in comfort, at home. I was told that I would be held back to repeat tenth grade, then eleventh grade, but to me, additional years of school meant additional years when I would not have to support myself, when I could simply continue on as I had been. Still, I believed that my guidance counselor meant well, and I regularly promised to mend my ways, but it always had to be after I finished the next book, and then the book after that.
Then, last spring I had a chance meeting with a teacher from a new private school, not far from Keene. On his advice, I registered to take AP tests in some subjects that were interesting to me. I also took the SAT a few weeks later and did all right on the verbal part, but I should have reviewed the math before I took it. Most important, though, was that I persuaded my parents to let me leave Keene Central. (It was difficult to persuade them, but not at all difficult to persuade Keene Central!) In the past few months I have spent at Quest, I have at long last learned to bend my pursuits into some thematic shape, to make links between ideas, to consider opposing ideas in a critical way. I have also developed the long overdue discipline to complete assignments, prepare for tests, and meet deadlines. For the first time, I feel an immense exhilaration about where all of this may be going, and what it has been for. Of course, it is frustrating to think about how things might have been different if I had been exposed much earlier to this kind of guidance, but it should also be said that I never thought of going to college until I began studying at Quest, so now, perhaps, my education may be extended and deepened in this new direction.
The sum total of all I’ve learned is that I don’t know anything, really, only little pieces of things. I haven’t been anywhere except for a few trips to family in Watertown, mainly because my parents aren’t wealthy but also because they are settled people who don’t like to travel. I haven’t had any interesting jobs, but I do work during the summer at the supermarket where my parents are employed. Mostly, what I do is read. Right now, my interests are the architecture of early cities, the Ottoman Empire, George Sand, Sojourner Truth, and contemporary Japanese fiction (in translation, unfortunately; another shortcoming I would like to rectify). Earlier this fall I immersed myself in American Pop Art, with particular reference to Warhol and Lichtenstein. If I am accepted to college, I would like to delve deeper into art and architecture, European literature, Eastern religions, and the history of medicine. I would also like to continue with Latin, which was not offered at Keene Central, and which I was only able to begin this fall, and especially philosophy. I have left the question of possible future plans unanswered, because there are too many things I would need to find out first. Thank you very much for your time.
All right, she thought, relieved. So it was good. But the problems were glaring. By his own admission, he had ignored his classes, declined to follow the curriculum, and resisted guidance from teachers and administrators. Clearly, failure did not perturb him. What did? She considered for a long moment before writing, in the space allotted for Essay #1: “Autodidact since age 8. Has not done well in school but has read incessantly, esp. biographies. Clearly values education over academic ‘success.’ Complex picture here. Fine writer.”
His second essay:
I discovered early on that I was not at all interested in the practical side of mathematics (for example, in the problem solving that anyone who wants to use math for science or engineering needs to know). What I did care about were questions like: How we can know that 2+2=4? And that’s not so much a mathematical question as a philosophical question. Actually, it’s no different from other questions about the basic sources of our knowledge: How do we know that it’s wrong to cause pain? How do I know that something I’m observing is actually happening? In all of these cases, we have knowledge of a fact that doesn’t derive from ordinary sense perception. So how is that possible?
For a while, I did make an effort to follow the math curriculum in school, but I knew that I was always gravitating toward things that weren’t really central to the class material. When we studied geometry, for instance, we were taught Euclid’s axioms and postulates. The textbook mentioned that one of the postulates was controversial—given a line, exactly one line parallel to the original can be drawn through any given point—and that it might even be false “for our world.” This was baffling to me: mathematics is supposed to be certain! If this axiom is wrong, how do we know that others aren’t wrong? And if the others might be wrong, how can we claim to know anything in geometry, or in any other part of mathematics? I actually departed the curriculum completely at this point, and started reading philosophy on my own, which is exactly what I was doing when I was busy getting that D in eleventh grade math.
Since then, I’ve noticed that, in other classes, I tend to get stuck on questions that are raised in the very first chapter of the textbook: What is life? (in biology). What is a poem? (in English). What is the past? (in history). To be honest, I’ve never understood how people get beyond those questions to what comes later. It’s not that I’m not interested in what comes later: I’m very interested! But I just haven’t been able to get there on my own. Of course, I realize now that my unwillingness to play by the rules in my classes is going to end up hurting me, probably in ways I never considered when I was blowing off my homework. I wish I could go back and make a different decision, but if I could do that, I’d probably know so much math and physics that college would be a little redundant. So instead, I’m just going to hope it all works out for the best.
If she were in a different frame of mind, Portia thought, she might note the fact that the two essays were not very dissimilar. She liked, in general, for an applicant to take these two opportunities to show distinct facets of themselves: scholarly and personal, scholarly and musical, scholarly and socially conscious. But Jeremiah, she was getting the impression, was not particularly multifaceted. This—this avid, self-directed scholarship—was what he was, and all he was. There had been little development of a self, which was of course not all that unusual for the age group. But Jeremiah was a consumer of information and ideas. It was the most real, possibly the only real, focus in his life. This would hardly make him a hit in the eating clubs, but on the other hand, Prince
ton was one of the few universities where the Jeremiahs of the world could fruitfully congregate. He should be here, probably, where he could meet his peers and be properly nurtured.
In the comment space for the second essay, she wrote: “Following his own curriculum in math/philosophy. Not interested in applied math but ‘gets stuck’ on big questions. Reading far ahead even as he acknowledges underperforming in class. Again, strong writer.”
She read what she had written and frowned. Lemonade from lemons, certainly. But lemons in abundance.
The secondary school report from Keene Central, which came next in the file, was a definite cold shower. She’d known what was coming because of the tally on the reader’s card, but the transcript itself was still a blow, the very picture of a checked-out student. His highest grades, B’s, had been earned in history and English; his lowest, mainly D’s, in math and science. The cumulative picture of these two extremely important years of high school implied that Jeremiah didn’t even belong in the pool, let alone in the class. With a sinking feeling, she turned to the brief letter by his former guidance counselor, a Burton McNulty:
I was surprised to learn that Jeremiah had decided to go to college, because even though I tried to motivate him to do just that while he was at Keene Central, the fact is he never seemed to care about what he was going to do after high school. Jeremiah’s main goal in life, in my view, was to be left alone. He hated to be reminded that he wouldn’t pass English if he didn’t turn in his paper, or he wouldn’t pass math if he didn’t sit for the final. Of course, we have had many, many students over the years who fit that description, but what was so frustrating about Jeremiah was how smart he clearly was. If only he’d applied himself, he could have been at the very top of our class, not languishing in the bottom with kids who weren’t going anywhere in life. Time and again I sat him down and told him he needed to get himself together, that it would be an awful shame to waste what he had, and I thought I’d gotten through to him more than once, but then I’d get the final reports from his teachers and see he’d failed to complete assignments and skipped tests. Sometimes they really didn’t want to fail him because they recognized his potential, but they were obligated to because of the missing papers and test scores. I can tell you that a couple of those D’s and low C’s actually should have been failing grades, but the teachers just couldn’t bring themselves to do it.
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