Admission

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  But she didn’t call Susannah.

  And she didn’t call Caitlin.

  She woke before dawn every morning, sore with the cold, and then waited pointlessly to fall back to sleep. When that failed, she turned on the light and sat hunched under the coverlet to read the day’s first folders against her bent knees, breathing visible breath onto the printed pages: the Vietnamese girl from Methuen who wrote about the crack house across the street; the rock climber from Choate who described hanging by his fingertips from the wall of El Capitan so vividly, she felt her own fingers throb. When the sun came up Portia put on clothes, avoiding herself in the mirror, trying to look as if she were putting some thought into it. She went downstairs to make coffee, rinsing yesterday’s coffee cup, pushing aside yesterday’s unread paper to make room on the table for them: the children of professors at Brown and Harvard, a corrections officer from Somers, Connecticut, a Yale microbiologist, a fast-food worker from New Bedford, and hedge fund managers from Greenwich and Darien. She knew she needed to eat breakfast, but every morning she remembered that she had forgotten to get food again, which was something she never used to forget. So she loaded up the read files in one bag and the unread files in another, zipped the bags closed, and began the walk downtown, arms and legs and back screaming in pain, and unlocked the outer door to West College, and carried them up the stairs and down the corridor, where she read and read (as the watery light filled the room and the sounds of her colleagues came into the building and up the stairs and down the corridor to their own offices): the Fairfield County kids with summer jobs in Edgartown, the strivers from Woonsocket and Bridgeport. More and more of them ran before her eyes, new immigrants and old families, brawny, brilliant kids from the great prep schools, polished and shining, kids who struggled to express themselves in the new and thorny medium of English. She had asked Clarence for them, and now she had them. She couldn’t fail to see the right things, make the right decisions.

  That particular week, the week that began with Jeremiah’s baffling, difficult application, was the darkest, the coldest yet. She had a pair of those ugly boots everyone had worn the previous year, the soft ones that looked like overgrown bedroom slippers. Every morning they became saturated with water on her way downtown, so she took them off, and her drenched socks, and set them in the corner of the office beside the heater, where all day they dried with white lines of evaporated moisture, like tidewater marks, and the smell of damp wool filled the room. In direct contrast with her house, the office was nearly too warm, and as the day went on she would remove layers, dropping them into a pile beside her chair. Only when she got down to the clothing closest to her skin did she understand that she was not very clean and should really address that, though by the time she got home at night, it was too cold to think about being undressed, even briefly.

  On Tuesday, Rachel stopped by again and tried to get Portia to go have lunch, but she had too many files to read and sent her away. On Thursday, a message appeared on her office phone from a sober-sounding male attorney whose name she didn’t recognize, complaining that he had left several messages at her home and would she please call him back? She listened twice to this, if only to ascertain that he was not the lawyer who had handled their house. Had Mark, then, “given” her their lawyer? Was this a concession? Or perhaps Mark had not considered him a good enough attorney. Why were they bothering her now, at the height of reading season? Had Mark learned nothing from the sixteen years of admissions work he had at least been a close witness to? Did he not know how hard this was, how much care they needed, every single individual young person who had exactly one chance to apply to Princeton, who required her clarity, her compassion, her judgment? Why couldn’t they all just leave her alone?

  On Friday afternoon, she found herself, quite suddenly, without files to read. She stood for a strange, awkward moment amid the tumult of the downstairs office, looking first at the stack of files she had hoisted into Corinne’s holding area and then staring blankly at her own, which was empty. It was a weightless moment, not at all pleasant. The idleness, even momentary, felt so out of synch with the tension and focus all around her, as so many thousands of pieces of paper were tracked in their journey around the maze of admissions personnel. She was not sure what to do with herself. Should she go home and try to sleep? She was tired enough, she knew, but she also knew it would be a pointless endeavor. If she could barely sleep in the deep night, how would she be able to do it in daylight? Besides, how long was this odd lacuna of inactivity going to last? The second wave of reading—in which she’d review Corinne’s first pass on the applications from her former territory—had already begun, and there were still stragglers coming down the pipe, sometimes short a teacher recommendation or missing some test score.

  She heard herself tapping an impatient fingertip on the countertop. In the busy room, her stillness felt unavoidably comical. Embarrassing.

  “Need something?” said Martha, passing with a stack for Dylan’s shelf. Portia looked at them almost enviously.

  “Folders,” she said.

  “Are you missing some?” Martha said with alarm. Lost applications were her nightmare scenario, and rightly so.

  “Oh! No. All present and accounted for. Except I have nothing to read at the moment. I don’t think Corinne’s ready for me yet.”

  “Corinne? Wouldn’t think so. California had a big jump this year. You should go home!” Martha said. “I have to tell you, you’re not looking very hale at the moment.”

  “It’s the sinus,” said Portia. “I get it every year.”

  Martha did not respond, but Portia could see that she wasn’t jumping to agree with this.

  “I’m going out for coffee,” Portia said brightly. “I haven’t been to Small World in weeks. I can’t go in there with folders, and I always have folders. But look! No folders. I’m going to Small World.”

  “Well,” Martha said dryly, “I suppose it’s closer than Disney World.”

  “And when I come back”—she nodded at her empty shelf—“there will be folders here, waiting for me.”

  “It’s entirely possible,” Martha said merrily.

  Portia looked around one last time, in case someone might be approaching with reading material bound for her holding area; but when this proved not to be the case, she returned to her office and put on her outer sweater and her coat. It felt so peculiar not to be walking with great weighty bags at the end of each arm. It felt light and unsteady, as if she had become unrooted somehow. She went outside, grateful for once for the hit of cold, which at least helped to cut through her haze. Coffee was good, she thought. It was a giver of energy without requiring digestion or even the effort of chewing. She had not done much chewing lately. She wanted to feel the heat run down her throat and settle into that hole at the core of her and take up space for a time. And she missed Small World, which was a buoyant place, full of conversation and greetings among friends, but also a place Mark frequented, which was another reason she had been avoiding it.

  She was rounding the corner of Nassau Hall when she found herself shuffling past a tour group making its frigid way back to Clio and the Office of Admission welcome center. Her arms were crossed over her chest and her head was down, which was why she hadn’t seen them coming, but the backward-stepping undergraduate at the head of the group caught her eye as he passed, for the unusual rhythm of his gait and the bright white of his Princeton Marching Band boater. He was telling the storied history of Nassau Hall. He was good at walking backward, she thought, shuffling forward. Was that a marching band skill? Did he really love Princeton as much as he seemed, when his mittened hand pointed out the missing blocks of sandstone, replaced by class plaques since the nineteenth century? She followed his gaze, slowing as the group stopped around her, and found herself beside a boy in an old black coat, who looked so oddly familiar that she wondered first if he might be an actor, someone whose face had flitted past on a cereal commercial or an ad for a wireless provider. His bla
ck curly hair was whipping in the wind, but he did not seem very bothered even so. Possibly he was used to the cold.

  “Portia?” the boy suddenly said.

  Portia thought: How strange, that there is another Portia. And apparently standing just where I am standing.

  “Isn’t it?”

  “Portia.”

  This other voice was behind her. She had been swallowed up by the little crowd, nearly all of whom were paying her not the slightest attention. But this particular voice was creating a real disturbance in the field. It had spoken only one word, and she wanted it to go away.

  “Hey,” said the boy, “do you remember us? You came to our school. You’re an admissions officer, right?”

  She stared at him. The effect in the little group was seismic. Even the backward-walking guide stopped talking. The mothers and fathers were instantly alert, but no one said a word. Perhaps they couldn’t believe it was true, Portia thought sourly. The way she looked, with her wet slouchy boots and multiple sweaters, the same thick braid she’d been wearing for four days or five, she couldn’t remember. “It’s Jeremiah,” she told him, as if he had asked for clarification.

  “Yes! And you’re Portia. The symbol of wisdom.”

  “Only on my good days,” she said weakly. She looked around at them all. She was tempted to reassure them: You are not to infer, from my slovenly appearance, that your child will not be given thorough, professional evaluation by myself and my co-workers. Bye now!

  “I decided to apply to Princeton!” he said delightedly.

  “That’s good news,” she said, careful, very careful. She could not, of course, confirm that she knew this, let alone that she had very recently read his application.

  “Portia,” said that voice again, and this time she really had to turn. With so many watching, and they were absolutely watching, there was really no dignified—no, sane—way not to. And there he was, right behind her with his dark and lanky son at his side, and a tall woman, taller than him, with long ringlets of red and gray hair. The infamous Deborah Rosengarten, no doubt.

  “Hello, John,” she said, her voice sounding bizarrely perky. “What a nice surprise.”

  “We were hoping to see you,” he said. “I wrote to say we were coming.”

  “Wrote… ,” she considered.

  “I got your address. Through the alumni directory.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry. I’m a little behind on my mail.” She glanced at the tour guide, trying not to make eye contact with anyone else. “Please don’t let me hold you up. It’s too cold to stand outside.”

  “Actually,” he said affably, “I was just about to finish up. ’Course, you’re all welcome to come back to Clio for a cup of coffee, and to pick up an application and one of our brochures if you like. Or it’s all online, of course. I have a rehearsal I need to get to now, but if anyone has any more questions and you don’t mind walking over to 185 Nassau, feel free to come along. Take care, folks, and I apologize for the weather.”

  He moved off, and several families instantly fell in behind him, one mother with a regretful glance back at Portia, who she plainly felt was a much better mark. The rest dispersed: to Nassau Street or back to Clio, presumably for the promised coffee and applications or to take the classic tourist photo beside the enormous bronze tigers next door. Portia was left standing with a new, much smaller group: John and Deborah and the children, Nelson, Jeremiah, and—now she saw, sulking off to the side—that very disagreeable girl who had been all over her about why one should even bother going to college. Simone. She hadn’t seen an application from Simone, she was fairly sure. They all, with the exception of Nelson (who gazed longingly off in the direction of the Nassau Street Foot Locker), stood looking awkwardly at one another, waiting for someone to say something, to address the many permutations of discomfort among them, but the only emissions were frosty breath. Portia was painfully aware of how terrible she looked—ill rested, ill dressed, fundamentally out of sorts—while the likely Deborah Rosengarten stood tall and composed, well appointed in a hat that covered her ears, a serious parka, and warm scarves wound around her neck, willfully oblivious to the fact that she was supposed to be the stranger here. John, she could not look at. Jeremiah, too, she was having difficulty looking at. A blast of still more frigid air blew through their little congregation.

  “Welcome to Princeton,” she said feebly.

  Hello admissions officer! I’m sure you are tired from reading all these essays! Take a break, have some coffee. I’ll be right here when you get back.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  SMALL WORLD

  She brought them to Small World. She couldn’t think of anything else to do, and in the awkwardness, not to speak of the cold, what persisted was a systemic craving for caffeine.

  Portia led them off toward Nassau Street, and they fell in around her, as if she had only replaced the tour guide, with Jeremiah at her side and Nelson a half step behind, his teeth chattering audibly. The girl hung back, and the parents behind her. Portia had no idea what she could say to any of them.

  It was not pleasant to remember Princeton before Small World. There had been a Greek luncheonette in this storefront on Witherspoon, and the Annex, if you were really desperate, but the town, like the rest of pre-Starbucks America, hadn’t known from cappuccino. Small World, a homegrown enterprise, had been greeted by an instantaneous and devoted clientele and returned the favor by expanding its floor space (not too much), menu (not too much), and palette of coffee permutations (never enough). A decade on, the place was aptly named, a true crossroad for nearly every stratum of local society: moms fresh from school dropoff, students, faculty, the relaxed, dressed-down men who’d made so much money in their corporate lives that they could now run mysterious empires from downtown Princeton. The talk was a mixture of university dross, heady cerebral of every stripe, local fund-raising, and local boards, with scattered scribblers trying to write their novels and the town’s few social misfits, who sometimes took a berth and stayed for hours, nursing an herbal tea. Portia had been an early patron, but it was Mark—deprived, along with the rest of the British race, of any coffee that did not derive from dehydrated crystals—who was the true convert. For nearly a decade, he had begun his working day here with a steaming latte and a parade of colleagues, stopping briefly at his table in the window to sort some departmental difficulty or simply vent. Often he came back later in the day for another cup, or to meet with students, or simply to be in a place where he was sure to be disturbed. It was—it had been—after home and his office in McCosh, the next place she would always have looked for him.

  There was nothing to suggest he would not be at Small World at three in the afternoon, so she approached with her worrying ducklings behind, and somewhat breathless, though that might have come from any of several aspects of her predicament. Nelson informed her that he did not like coffee. There was hot chocolate, she told him. There were desserts. He seemed placated. Jeremiah was talking about a painting in the art museum, a Peaceable Kingdom. Had she seen it?

  “Peaceable…”

  “Yeah. You know, lion lies down with the lamb?”

  She didn’t know. She nodded.

  “And it’s right next to this great big blue Marilyn. It’s the wildest thing.”

  “Blue marlon?” she asked, picturing a great mounted fish, as in someone’s Florida room, circa 1955.

  “Blue Marilyn. Monroe. By Warhol. Warhol was demented, but a genius. He would have loved seeing his Marilyn hanging right next to this Quaker utopia, don’t you think? I mean, Marilyn Monroe was his utopia.”

  “Oh yes,” she told him. “I forgot you were interested in pop art.”

  He had stepped in front of her to take the door, an uncharacteristic move, even she recognized. He looked at her intently.

  “Last fall,” she told him. “You were reading about Edie Sedgwick.”

  “Yes!” he said. He seemed disproportionally happy. “You remember.”

  Unexp
ectedly charmed, she stepped past him into the café. With her peripheral vision, even as she went to the counter and took a place at the end of the line, she was sweeping the corners, the walls, the tables. He wasn’t here. He wasn’t in one of the window tables he liked to read at or one of the tables in the back, hunched forward in conference. He wasn’t with her. Portia was so relieved, she nearly forgot the myriad other reasons she had to be distressed.

  Nelson wanted hot chocolate. Simone wanted espresso. John, who insisted on paying for everyone, stood with her in line while Deborah took the kids to one of the big tables in the back. The tension between them built, it seemed, exponentially. She noted and tried to ignore a building urge to bolt. She wondered if it would be different without the others, if just the two of them had run into each other somehow, unobserved. She decided it would be different but still bad. This was so much worse.

  He opened his wallet and paid. The drinks began to land on the stone countertop in front of her. She couldn’t seem to look at him.

  “Hey,” said John, so quietly that she felt herself lean closer. “Is it my imagination? Or is this just miserably awkward?”

  Despite herself, she laughed. “Why, yes. Now that you mention it.”

  “I did write.”

  “I believe you.” And she supposed she did, given the state of the mail at her house. She wondered idly if his letter might be in the cardboard box she’d taken to throwing her letters in, or on the floor beside it, where the mail was spilling over.

  “I wanted to see you. I feel as if—”

  She made him stop just by glancing at him.

  Simone came. She took the tray. Portia was still waiting for her coffee and idly hoping it would never arrive.

  “Look, I want to make sure you understand this. I know I said it before, but… appearances to the contrary, we’re not—”