Early Decision

by Lacy Crawford

  Anne felt helpless and panicky, as though a bounding dog had just bolted into traffic.

  “Um,” she stalled.

  “You think that’s stupid,” said Sadie. She let her hands come apart and placed them in her lap.

  “No, it’s not stupid. I just don’t want my crazy neighbor to get any airtime in your essay. She’d put a copy of it on her fridge.”

  It was a punt, but it worked.

  “Oh.” Sadie nodded. “Got it.”

  “But certainly the month of April, and all that that portends for a high school senior—certainly that’s a terrific subject, I think.”

  As she spoke, Anne imagined the directions Sadie might take. She saw that this subject could be made to solve everything. The kids who applied early admission heard from their schools in December; there was no long winter wait for them, no April week of stiff spring winds and shivering by their in-box. In writing about April, Sadie could address her choice not to apply early, thereby putting to rest any uncertainty about her focus on Duke, and maybe even placate her parents about her shifting intentions. She could explain it all.

  Sadie wasn’t intending any of this, of course. But what harm was there in showing her the chance? The idea had been hers, after all. And it was much, much better than writing the damn thing for her.

  Sadie was still riffing on her inspiration. “So maybe I just write about, like, the process—the waiting, you know, for schools to tell you where you’re in. I wonder, can I talk about Duke? Probably not, if I’m writing for all of them, right?”

  “Well, you can personalize, if you wish—”

  “No, no,” said Sadie, waving her hands over her uneaten lunch. “I’ve got an idea now. I don’t have to be specific. I’m interested in, like, the difference between planning and being told? How you just find out where you’re going to be for four years, which, like, changes your life. You know?”

  “I do know, yes,” said Anne.

  “Cool! This is cool! I’m excited now!” Sadie pushed aside her salad, uncapped her pen, and began to take furious notes. Her handwriting was tiny and straight and perfectly rounded, like a stitch. Anne found herself imagining lost generations of women bent over tiny, delicate crafts, complicated things no one else appreciated and that fell apart.

  “Okay,” said Sadie. “I’ve got it. I’ll send it through to you soon.”

  For the first time in a while, the girl actually looked seventeen. Eager and clear, with a busy mind.

  “Can’t wait,” Anne told her.

  BY THIS TIME of year, Anne’s students were assembling piles of essays—at the core of each application the Personal Statement, a five-hundred-word massif around which were arrayed various shorter exercises, the usual paragraph about a “significant activity,” and any other “supplemental” essays a university wished to request. Though the topics varied from school to school and even from year to year, with a list of eight or twelve schools the average student ended up answering the same questions in one form or another: Tell us about a teacher, coach, or mentor who impacted you in a significant way. Tell us about a work of art that challenged, surprised, or upset you, and why. Tell us where you’ll be in ten years. Tell us what is special about our school/program/major. Tell us why you want us.

  It really did grow quite dull.

  The centrality of the Personal Statement was courtesy of the rise of the Common Application, and in Anne’s opinion this did not represent progress. When she had applied to colleges, each school had had its own elegantly printed form that posed specific questions for the applicant to answer. The feeling was of writing a letter to a school, which in turn genuinely wished to hear the answers. Now her students were given the convenience of completing essentially one application, and then, with the nuisance of a few extra questions here and there—and these mostly confined to the most elite schools—sending it to anyone and everyone they wished. It was no longer about making contact with a great institution and entertaining one’s dream of attending. There was no longer imagination in the drafting. You didn’t envision walking the quadrangles on a snowy day or scanning a packed cafeteria for somewhere familiar to sit. Didn’t loll over the phone-book-thick course catalog and wonder at seminars labeled “400.1.” Instead, it was an exercise in self-branding. The schools were secondary. Marketing the student came first.

  The intention was to introduce convenience, and as with all leaps of efficiency, the result was to depersonalize what had been a private process. Was it any wonder the professional college counselor cropped up now? Applying to college used to be like asking someone out. Long-considered, long-desired, heart-in-your-throat. Now it was like posting an ad.

  Not to mention the monotony. Hunter Pfaff was industriously sending through supplement after supplement: “I believe Bates College is the perfect place for me because of its northern, rural setting, its emphasis on the liberal arts and academic exploration, and its opportunities for close contact with professors”—which, of course, distinguished poor Bates not at all from its dozens of small, rural, liberal-arts competitors in the American Northeast. The truth would have read something more like this: “I believe Bates College is the perfect place for me because my college counselor put it on my list as a yellow-light school, my parents are okay with it, and it doesn’t make me write another long supplement except for this one.” Anne and Hunter were complicit in crafting these friendly lies; everyone was.

  William Kantor, meanwhile, was just moving commas around in drafts: “The most significant activity in my life, outside of school, is the time I spend performing tzedakah, whether it’s by sitting with patients in the elder home, preparing meals for the house-bound, or donating from my allowance to our synagogue’s ministries in Chicago and beyond”—intuiting, perhaps, that religious and ethnic minority interests, particularly when expressed in their native tongue, were unimpeachable. Sadie Blanchard had yet to send through her new essay, but she was dithering with a question regarding a character in literature with whom she’d like to have lunch (“I’m thinking Scout Finch or Ophelia? Does it matter that Ophelia’s dead?”). Only Alexis Grant was seeking to set the world on fire. She overlooked no opportunity to address a desperately complex or traumatic topic: genocide, the failure of public education, the inability to take all the courses Yale had to offer in the four short years she’d be there. Anne read her essays with pleasure, suggested curlicue phrases to cut, and sent them back. From their pruned forms, three more essays would sprout, like old roses in spring.

  So she was hardly surprised to find Alexis almost bobble-headed with excitement when she met her at the University of Chicago following her debate.

  “Oh my God, so they argued,” Alexis explained fitfully, “that you can freeze a person. Never mind the ethics of this, the legality is clear! It’s absurd!”

  For a moment Anne said nothing. She was suffering from a sort of emotional vertigo to find herself back on the Hyde Park campus, having parked along the Midway, where the long, low light was streaking east to the lake. She’d allowed it to blind her momentarily to the fact that she was about to come through the archway into the same quadrangle where she’d spent several years in graduate school, and which she’d finally walked out of a few years prior. Not that she regretted the decision to leave. But being grateful to be out of there didn’t mean that going back didn’t stir up her heart. She tried to fast-forward through the afternoon, picturing the long drive ahead, picking up Mitchell in Lincoln Park, and heading north to the suburbs for the holiday. And in the morning, Martin arriving, having booked the red-eye to save money.

  The debate had been held at Cobb Lecture Hall. Now clusters of high school kids stood shivering in the frosty air all around the quad, where occasionally an unshaven philosophy or classics scholar would stumble down the stairs of an entry onto the walkway, study the groups of young minds, and look up at the fading sky before zipping up and hunching away. Alexis was radiant, standing there, bundled in a pink parka with her hair in a high
ponytail. Behind her the long expanse of Gates-Blake Hall was like a quiet ship at mooring. The English department was there, and inside, Anne’s old mailbox, with a new doctoral candidate’s name assigned it.

  “Sorry,” Alexis was saying, giggling. “I should have explained! Okay, so it was, ‘Resolved: Life begins at conception, so reproductive technology constitutes murder.’ I was Negative. First speaker. And you can’t talk about God, of course, though there was this one Catholic kid on the Affirmative who shouldn’t have been there, I can’t believe his coach didn’t switch him, it’s just stupid to be all passionate like that. You can’t think. So it came down to policy which is already in place, all these practices and procedures, did you know about IVF, what they’re really doing? Did you know that there are pregnancies that, if they are left to continue, will absolutely kill the mother, no matter what? And the baby?”

  She was speaking faster than Anne could track. And doing so with a small wad of pink gum in her mouth, which Anne spotted periodically behind her teeth, and which made a kind of syncopated cracking sound as Alexis spoke, as though her tongue were wearing tap shoes. A faint strawberry cloud hung in the air between them. Alexis reached up, undid her ponytail, rebound it, and kept talking.

  “So anyway we won, it was fine, but it was, like, I’ve never seen a team less prepared on pure policy. No takeouts, just this, like, they took offense. I think one girl cried. She was Chinese.”

  “Congratulations,” Anne said. “You must be tired. And thirsty.”

  “Thanks. But I’m totally revved. Do we have time to walk around? When do we have to leave? You’re so totally nice to do this!”

  They had half an hour or so. The weather was clear, but they’d hit traffic heading west toward the airport. “How about some tea?” Anne offered.

  They turned past the chapel toward a little café Anne remembered tucked up on the second floor, in a corner where two long corridors met. The holiday was descending, but maybe some straggler work-study kid was still closing up. “Why do they schedule debates the day before Thanksgiving?” she asked.

  “Oh, ’cause it’s the only time everyone’s not in school! And it’s not a religious holiday, so it’s okay to cut into it a little.”

  “Ah. Of course.”

  “Oh my God,” said Alexis, looking around. “I think I want to go here.”

  “To Chicago?”

  “Yes! Look up.” She was pointing along the cornices. “See those? Gargoyles, beside every other window! It’s like a cathedral!”

  Anne had loved the little guys when she was on campus, and this made her wish for a moment to put her arm around Alexis, as though she were her daughter.

  “They fascinate me,” Alexis continued. “They were an expression of Gothic fear. A way of manifesting all the nasty things the people couldn’t control. They didn’t have the science to understand famine, plague, you know, dying. So they envisioned these monsters. Expressions of their insecurity, but lovable, too. I like to wonder what we do now. Like, what gargoyles do we have?”

  “I don’t know,” Anne said. “Weird little lapdogs?”

  “You know what I think? I do this thing where, at night, I write down something I’m really worried about as though it has happened. Write it like a headline or something. Sometimes with a date and a place, like they do in the papers. And then I just look at it, and think, ‘Okay, so that happened.’ When of course it didn’t. Then I just tear it up into, like, a zillion pieces. That’s like my gargoyles. Only not as cute.”

  “Have you reported on not getting into Harvard?”

  Alexis stopped. They were at the café’s entryway. The other students had begun to clear out, and the last activity in the courtyard belonged to the frantically rummaging squirrels. Anne wondered if it was due to snow.

  “No,” she said. “Why? Should I?”

  “I wouldn’t think so. But I’m wondering why you’re interested in coming here, all of the sudden.”

  “Oh.” They climbed the stairs and came out onto a long, low hallway. Alexis lowered her voice, but they were alone. “Because in truth, maybe not getting in, it’s not the worst thing. I mean, maybe I don’t want to go to Harvard. Maybe it’s not the best place for me! And if I get in, like, how can I not go? But then I won’t be seeing all these other places. Like, really seeing them. You can’t see them when Harvard’s in your head. If you got in, I mean.”

  Anne was quiet.

  “I guess I’m foreclosing on my options, is what I’m saying,” Alexis finished. They came to the café, a paper-strewn set of laminated tables on uneven legs and a smattering of mismatched chairs. Behind the counter, a tired girl with magenta hair in a headband was shoveling sugar packets into a basket. “Oh my gosh, this is so cute and cozy!” said Alexis. “I can’t believe you knew this was here!”

  She seemed not to know, or to have forgotten, that Anne had been a student there, and Anne didn’t want to remind her; it would have meant explaining why she’d left, and she couldn’t yet talk about that decision and keep her confidence about her.

  “Can I have a coffee?” Alexis asked.

  Anne wasn’t sure what the prohibition was—caffeine? Spending cash? She raised her brow.

  “Oh, just because, you know, just asking,” Alexis said.

  Anne ordered two coffees. They sat.

  Anne had never formally withdrawn, actually, from the university. She was technically still on leave. She could, theoretically, still march downstairs to the dean’s office and reclaim her spot.

  She poured milk in her coffee and watched Alexis do the same. Then followed with sugar. It occurred to her that Alexis had never had a cup of coffee before.

  “Like it?” she asked.

  Alexis removed her gum from her mouth and strapped it delicately to the side of her cup. She took a sip. “Delicious,” she lied.

  Anne waited.

  “But what if, like, I could get into Yale? Or Princeton?”

  “I think you probably can.” Anne had never told a student this before. She studied Alexis’s face, the pure enthusiasm sitting smooth across her cheeks, and waited for the shadow. Surely there must be something else the girl wished to talk about. What was it that drove her so hard? What specter stalked this cheerful achiever?

  “Oh my God,” moaned Alexis. “So what do I do? Like, in the debate, there are, like, a million ways to think about a thing. You know?”

  “All too well.”

  “Like, for example, if you consider the resolution—that life begins at conception—then a person exists before the mother’s body even knows it’s there. There are invisible people—we can’t see them, can’t detect them, but we are obligated to protect them. Or so this is what you’d have to argue, to be in the affirmative. And here we have all these in vitro clinics—you know about those?”

  “I do.”

  “So they create these people, literally make them, in the lab. Pipettes, plates, the whole thing. And then, if the mom and dad aren’t ready or something, they freeze them. Think about that. About half the time, they survive and can be put back into the mom and become a baby. It’s impossible. It’s like Frankenstein. If you’re in the affirmative, you have to believe all of this is wrong.”

  “Because you can’t freeze a person.”

  “Exactly! I mean, I couldn’t just take you and freeze you. At least, not without your consent. And they pointed out that the biology isn’t the same for adults, but that’s irrelevant to the ethics. A person’s rights, as we understand them, are sacrosanct, at least in this country. It’s not different with respect to age, not when it comes to having a fifty percent chance of surviving. And there’s no law against enforced freezing, but we may imagine there should be, or ought to be. I mean, you couldn’t freeze a baby that was, say, six months old. Or six weeks old. So why six days? Why is that okay? It’s okay because it’s not a person.”

  “Right . . .” Anne said carefully. For an instant she wondered if Alexis might be pregnant, but knew immed
iately that this was not so. Not even close.

  “So my question is, how late is too late to freeze a person? Just ’cause you’re not ready for them? ’Cause you have others to choose first? And it’s not directly relevant for the purposes of the debate, but it totally wrong-footed the pro-lifers, who as I said shouldn’t have had that side anyway, ’cause they were really upset. But here’s the thing.”

  She stopped to sip at her coffee, which she didn’t seem to care for much at all, then continued: “The thing is, I think of myself, now, as, like, having a thousand versions. There’s the me who could go to Harvard—I mean, if I get in. And the me who could go to Yale. And the me who goes to, I don’t know, Stanford. And the me who takes a year off and does something totally different. And the me who, like, decides college is an inappropriate use of my parents’ money and that I should work instead. Or—” She broke off, frustrated, and rustled through the discarded flyers on a table beside them. Flipping over one pink sheet, she read, “ ‘Graduate fellow opportunity in London, England! International comparative education study, tenure one year!’ ” She slid the page across to Anne. “Or I could do that! Why not that? You see?”

  “I do. I really do.”

  “All I have to do is just freeze all of the me’s except one. But then, I can’t ever go back. I don’t remember ever feeling this way before. High school was just, like, what they called the years after eighth grade. But now it’s like, I have to choose that one me, and that’s the only one I can have for the rest of my life. And the rest will die. And I just can’t face that.”

  Alexis blinked her clear blue eyes. She wore no makeup. Her cheeks were pink. A soft, pale mustache on her upper lip was almost shockingly candid, as though the girl had never looked in a mirror before. Anne raised her coffee and squinted a bit, to signify thought.

  There were, at that time, some four thousand two- and four-year institutions of higher learning in the United States. Anne had often thought of the graduating hordes every spring, jostling to find their places, pouring into the cities and onto the trains, writing reading calling knocking. It made her crazy to think of it. But Alexis was not speaking of competition. This was something different.