Getting In: A Novel

by Karen Stabiner

  “No, butterfingers, I meant the nurse. Not you.”

  Yoonie took longer than usual cleaning up after Jim left, but when she came out of the examination room Dr. Joy was waiting in the hallway.

  “You’re humming,” said Joy.

  “Oh,” said Yoonie. “I disturbed you, again, I am sorry, I will not do it again.”

  “Yoonie.”

  “Yes, Dr. Joy.”

  “Come in my office for a moment.”

  Yoonie followed her but did not sit down.

  “You never hum.”

  “No.”

  “But now you hum. Why is that?”

  Yoonie mistook irritation for interest.

  “Liz is going to the prom and I am very happy for her, so today after school and after work there is a dress she found that she wants me to see.”

  “Prom? Well, someone must be crazy about her to invite her so early, perhaps you’ll want to keep an eye on this. Prom. When is the Ocean Heights prom? And where? In the gym?”

  “I do not know. Liz has been invited to the Crestview prom. To your prom. In fact you must know, do most of the girls wear long dresses or short? The one to see today I think is short, but I say she ought to look at long ones. What will Katie wear?”

  Joy was instantly disgruntled, doubly so, at Yoonie for having a reason to be happy that Joy did not yet have, and at herself for caring that Yoonie had a reason.

  “Katie hasn’t decided who she’s going with yet,” said Joy. “And of course once she sees what group she’s going with, she and the other girls will probably decide what they’re wearing. I expect she’ll want a long gown, but some of the girls do wear short.”

  “Ah, groups,” said Yoonie. “I do not know if the boy who asked Liz mentioned a group.”

  “How did she meet him? What’s his name? I bet I know him.”

  “His name is Brad. Like Liz he hopes to go to Harvard.”

  “Good grief, he’s one of Katie’s best friends,” said Joy. “He’s a very popular boy. Plenty of girls at the prom are going to hate your daughter, let me tell you.”

  “She cannot help it if they are jealous. He asked her. He did not ask them.” Yoonie had no patience for, no understanding of, the envy that drove some girls into a cruel frenzy. To her, worrying about beating another girl at anything—better grades, a more popular boyfriend, being the first to acquire whatever the magazines said a girl had to acquire this season—seemed a tremendous waste of energy. She and Steve always told Liz to challenge herself and to ignore everyone else, because the victory was excellence, not comparative excellence. She was surprised at Dr. Joy, who in turn was a bit surprised at the flinty tone in Yoonie’s voice.

  “True enough, he did not ask them,” said Joy, sitting up a bit straighter and pretending to consult a patient’s file. When she spoke again, she did not look up. “I’ll be ready for Joan in a minute.” Yoonie was dismissed.

  $11,565.

  Steve wrote the number at the top of a blank sheet of paper and let it sit. He had driven to work as usual but circled back an hour later, once Yoonie was at work and Liz was at school, to finish the single aspect of the college application process that he refused to share with his wife and daughter—the financial aid forms, which he had completed a month before the government deadline, because he wanted plenty of time to prepare for whatever the computer said to him. He reviewed the online application one last time, clicked on SUBMIT, and within seconds the computer spit back the Changs’ Expected Family Contribution. Steve needed to find a minimum of $11,565 toward Liz’s $49,000 freshman year, and Harvard was supposed to provide the rest: $37,435. He would not allow himself to think about what he would do if Harvard gave her any less.

  He had seen the headlines about Ivy League schools starting to offer even more financial aid, but he worried that it was aimed at more comfortable families than his, at people who had cars and a mortgage and still could not absorb the cost of a college education. He worried about shrinking school endowments and the dwindling supply of loans. He had pored over the list of websites that Liz brought home from school, including one that promised to search for appropriate private scholarships if the applicant filled out a basic questionnaire. Steve completed it without telling her, but the results were meager. Liz was not related to Emily Dickinson or the Plains Indians, nor was she of Slavic descent and a serious bowler. She did not have the time to write a three-thousand-word essay on freedom for the chance to compete with ten thousand other students for $1,500. The members of her immediate family did not work at a Coca-Cola bottling plant or belong to the Elks. She had just found out that she was a finalist for a National Merit scholarship, but to Steve’s dismay, not all of the finalists got money, the ones who did received only $2,500, and there was nothing Liz could do to affect her chances. It was up to Steve to find $11,565, and more to bring her home on the holidays and buy her books and give her spending money.

  He divided the sheet of paper into columns labeled Income and Expenses and filled them speedily, because he knew his family’s finances as well as he knew his ever-expanding inventory of addresses and alternate routes. The government might look at his finances and determine that he had almost $12,000 available to spend on a single year of college, but Steve worked and reworked the numbers in both columns and came up with less than $7,000.

  Beyond that, he was left with the kinds of strategies that appeared in advice columns aimed at recent college graduates, for whom forty years without gourmet coffee might actually amount to something. He could never again stop at a fast-food restaurant, Yoonie could eliminate Liz’s latte allowance, they could spend more on gas to get over to the big-box store to buy bulk paper goods that they had no room to store. He could cancel Netflix, although he hated to do so before Liz left for Boston. They could sell the car and he could drive Yoonie back and forth to work in his cab, but what was a 2001 Sentra worth?

  Everything that might be considered an extra, in his family’s circumscribed life, and not enough trade-in value to close the gap for one year, let alone four. Steve tore his worksheet into vertical strips and tore the strips into bite-sized pieces, which he wrapped in a paper napkin and buried under a layer of carrot peelings in the kitchen garbage can.

  A merit scholarship was the key, one of those tantalizing stipends dangled in front of the most deserving applicants to lure them to School A instead of School B, thousands of dollars that never had to be repaid, a tool used more and more frequently to snare the best kids. A gift. There was no way to apply for a merit scholarship, though, so Steve could not depend on it. He decided that he would borrow the limit on his two credit cards if need be, as distasteful a high-interest solution as that was. This was a puzzle. Not figuring it out was not an option.

  Dan wandered down the hall toward the kitchen, drawn by habit more than anything else. Sunday night was Joy’s version of his childhood chicken dinner, the same roasted trinity of chicken, potatoes, and carrots, the components acquired at a little French bistro every Sunday morning on her way home from the gym and extracted from the refrigerator an hour before dinner. She called it cucina al fresco to make disregard feel like preference.

  Not that he had loved having dinner with his parents, but he had enjoyed the anticipatory smells.

  He instinctively stepped to the left at the sound of Katie barreling down the stairs.

  “It’s dinnertime. Where are you off to?”

  Katie waggled her towel in his face.

  “I don’t know, Dad,” she said. “What’s your guess?”

  She turned away without waiting for an answer, left the sliding glass door open behind her, and switched on the pool lights. A moment later he heard the very specific sound of Katie entering the water—not a splash, not a plop, but a more precise sound that reminded him of a piece of stationery being torn in two.

  He headed to the back of the house to close the door. Dan did not enjoy swimming. His parents could have lived downstate, landlocked, for all their interest
in Lake Michigan; they only visited the lake in street clothes for the occasional picnic, and by the time they thought to sign twelve-year-old Dan up for summer swim camp he had outgrown a little boy’s oblivious courage. He knew the camp counselor was lying when he said that everyone floats, because his arms and legs started to sink every time he tried.

  He quit camp after a week. “They call it dead-man’s float, don’t they?” he told his dad. “Don’t you think there’s a reason for that?”

  When he met Joy, who swam with a baffling and offhanded ease, he bartered coherent poli sci essays for swim lessons from his roommate, and by the end of the semester Dan could impersonate a recreational swimmer. Now he did weekly laps with his wife in the pool that had made buying the tear-down on the adjacent lot such a smart move. No one would have guessed that his internal metronome beat to the four-four rhythm of “do not drown now, do not drown now.”

  He stood in the doorway and watched Katie, although there was little of her to see. She moved through the water like a torpedo, silent and unwavering, and when she came out of the water for the breaststroke or the butterfly she did so with little of the fuss that hobbled the slower swimmers. Freestyle, she sat right below the water, the only signs of life a bouquet of exhaled bubbles on every fourth stroke and her bent elbow surfacing and disappearing along the length of the pool.

  Like a baby shark’s fin, he too often thought, both delighted and mildly disturbed by her discipline in the water. He closed the door behind him and went into the dining room to set the table, vowing to start a list of things he and Joy could do once both kids were at Williams. He had considered and dismissed learning Spanish and taking a wine appreciation class, and was debating whether they could retain a private yoga instructor without feeling like fools, when Katie appeared at his side and leaned over to correct the alignment of a water glass.

  “I am going to miss that pool,” said Katie, who in fact had decided not to swim for the team second semester simply because she no longer had anything to prove. “What a waste, I mean, you guys almost never use it. Hey. You could pave it over, put in a tennis court.” She giggled. “Ooh, no. A putting green.”

  “You’re dripping,” he said.

  She stood there for an extra count of five to irritate him before she turned for the stairs. Dan took it all in: the squishy wet footprints on the dining-room rug, the trail of water along the hardwood floor in the hall, the threadbare tank suit Katie so proudly wore at home. Her drag suit, she called it, and the first time she did he had Googled the phrase rather than confess his ignorance. Her drag suit: the old, worn suit she wore to practice because it created more resistance in the water than a sleek, skintight new competition suit would. If she was fast in the old suit, she would be faster in a new one without making any additional effort.

  He understood the rationale, but he hated the drag suit. It was like the clothes the kids wore when they drove down to his dad’s liquor store, the beat-up khakis and the battered loafers, the dress shirts with frayed collars and cuffs, the clothes that said, I’m so rich I don’t have to bother to impress anyone. Dan and Joy had managed to spawn an Evanstonian, a second-generation snob, and he had to work hard not to take his daughter and her little jokes as seriously as he had the boys who had tormented him. As though he would ever install a putting green, as though his lessons with the club pro had not made him proficient enough to survive the requisite rounds with clients.

  chapter 11

  Lauren was sprawled on the couch with the television on when Nora got home, a flagrant infraction of the rule about no television until your homework is done, which could not possibly be true at six o’clock at night. Nora swallowed the sanctimonious comment forming at the back of her throat. Lauren was not the kind to flaunt. If she was breaking the rule, there had to be a reason.

  Or perhaps Lauren had snapped altogether. She was watching Threesome, a nighttime soap that she had never bothered to watch before.

  “Honey,” Nora began, tentatively, “what’re you doing?”

  “Ssshhh,” said Lauren. She hit the PAUSE button and shot her mother a long-suffering look. “That’s Madison Ames. Chloe had last season on DVD.”

  There was a trio of women on the screen, a blonde, a redhead, and a brunette, each one in her forties and desperate to prove otherwise. Three face-lifts, three bust lifts, three sets of false eyelashes, three shiny, low-cut, strapless dresses held in place by a combination of corset boning, double-sided tape, and sheer will.

  “Which one?”

  “The redhead,” said Lauren. “Can we be quiet please so I can watch this?”

  “But…” Nora was drawing a blank.

  “The Northwestern interview. Madison Ames. She’s the one I’m talking to.”

  Nora peered at the screen. “She went to Northwestern?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Nora sat down on the couch next to her daughter. “Nothing. Can I watch her with you?”

  Lauren shrugged and hit PLAY, and Madison Ames’s character continued her conversation with the other two women about whether her second husband was abusing alcohol, cocaine, the new single neighbor, or, in a trifecta of prime-time cliffhanger narrative, all three. The blonde’s housekeeper was threatening to destroy her candidacy for mayor by disclosing that she had never taken out withholding taxes or paid Social Security, and the brunette’s son had run away from home with an ATM card, a jar of peanut butter, a loaf of bread, and his father’s gun, but Madison Ames was the most famous of the three stars, so her fidelity and substance abuse issues took priority. She launched into a long speech about the dreams her character had dreamt, back when she was waitressing to support her first husband, a medical student who had died in a terrible accident but still appeared from time to time in a flashback sequence. Lauren and Nora sat, transfixed, waiting to hear what she was going to do about her current spouse.

  “This is really awful,” said Lauren.

  “Ssshhh,” said Nora. “Aren’t we supposed to be listening?”

  Lauren started to squirm. She turned to her mother, tossed her hair back the way Madison Ames did, and batted her eyelashes.

  “But, Mother,” she said, in a breathy voice. “I haven’t yet told you, Mother, about, oh, can I say it? About what Jonathan said to me. Yesterday. When we were strolling through the garden, and…” She flung herself on Nora, racked by phony sobs. “Mother, I didn’t want to tell you, I shouldn’t tell you, but how can I keep from saying it? Mother, I’m pregnant. With triplets. It was the drugs, he said the injections were vitamins, how could I know? Or wait! Do you think, is it possible”—and she broke into a beaming smile—“maybe I’m not pregnant. Maybe it was all that cake, you know I love your chocolate cake, Mother. Could the test be wrong? Could I just be, heavens, could I just be bloated? Oh, I’m so relieved—but wait. What’s that terrible pain in my head?”

  Nora wrapped her in a hug and they sat there laughing until they ran out of breath, at which point they watched a minute more and dissolved again, back and forth until the segment ended, Nora wondering to herself how long it had been since they had had anything that resembled fun.

  Madison Ames—renamed for her mother’s and her father’s midwestern hometowns, respectively, as Susan Miller did not sound like stardom—sprawled across the billboard at the entrance to the Fox studios in all her forty-foot-long, bathing-suited, airbrushed glory. She caught Lauren’s eye as Lauren edged into the left-turn lane, which caused her to overshoot the double yellow line and forced the driver of the oncoming Santa Monica city bus, who only a week earlier had taken off the open door of an old Volvo, to swerve into the next lane. The driver of the adjacent UPS truck slammed on his brakes, sending his Seven-11 Big Gulp all over the inside of his windshield. From behind a liquid curtain of Mountain Dew, he glared at Lauren and made her grateful that she could not read lips.

  Lauren corrected her trajectory and sat through a full cycle of traffic lights, waiting for her knees to stop tre
mbling, oblivious of the honking horns behind her. If she could have pulled out of the turn lane and driven a calming loop around Century City, she would have, but she had five minutes to get to Stage Nine, so she clamped her hands at ten and two, stared straight ahead, and made a left into the driveway that led to the security guard’s little hut.

  “Name?” he asked, without taking his eyes from the computer screen.

  “Lauren Chaiken,” she replied.

  He ran his finger down the list on the monitor.

  “And you’re here to see?”

  She cleared her throat and tried to sound authoritative. “I have a two o’clock appointment with Madison Ames. On Stage Nine.”

  “Well, Lauren who has a two o’clock appointment with Ms. Ames on Stage Nine, I do not have you on my list, so I cannot let you in.” Not a week went by without a kid pretending to have an appointment, in the hope of seeing someone famous once he got onto the lot. The guard had made his one mistake a year ago, with a USC freshman whose fraternity hazing required him to get a spec script for The Simpsons into Matt Groening’s hands. The people who worked on the show still gave him grief about it.

  Lauren leaned out the window for emphasis. “But I have to be there. In four minutes. I can’t be late.”

  The guard was already waving at the car behind her. He pointed toward the curb. “Pull over there for me, please,” he said.

  Madison Ames continued to pout rather than respond to the first knock on the door. She was tired of these kids and their attitude, and crankier still because she knew she would have to answer the second knock, and three more like it this week. A whole season of Northwestern alumni interviews, when all she had done was walk over to the twenty-four-hour Gelson’s at two in the morning, in her pajamas, to buy a steak. Everything would have been fine—women walked around in tank tops and penguin-patterned flannel pants in broad daylight in the Palisades and nobody blinked—if Gelson’s had not run out of New York strip steaks, bone in. If she had not crumpled to the floor and started to sob, if the night-shift butcher had not owned a cell phone with a video camera, if the middle-aged cashier with a motherly streak had not called 911. The next morning, Madison was on YouTube, YouTube was all over the entertainment news, and the show runner was in her trailer talking about damage control.