Admission (20 page)

Mother and daughter had once been teammates, but never quite friends. Teammates, as Portia would discover in high school when
she had actual teammates, were fine things. Piling onto the bus before the game, edgy with shared nerves, egging one another
on with the genial, meaningless phrase
C’mon, you guys!,
collapsing back into the same seats for the ride home—that sense of striving in accord had been a sweet part of high school.
Possibly the sweetest. But the camaraderie had not survived graduation, or even the off-seasons. Her teammates, passing in
the school corridors in winter or spring, were downshifted to nodding acquaintances who had once been close, that past connection
floating off like cotton candy on the tongue. They were not friends like the friends her mother instructed her to find, the
kind her mother had in, it seemed to Portia, embarrassing excess.

Women friends, to be specific. Susannah was passionately clear about the necessity of women in a woman’s life. And not too
many of them, but only the right ones. “You don’t need fifty best friends,” Susannah had told her after one especially gruesome
day in seventh grade, when Portia had been roundly shunned by the rigidly patrolled popular crowd at Northampton Middle School.
These girls, uniformly lithe and light of hair, held unchallenged sway over the choicest lunchroom tables (best visibility,
best vantage, just… best). When Portia, employing a very deliberate air of cluelessness about the hierarchy of seating, had
attempted to sit at the most rarefied table of all (she had rushed to the cafeteria to be first in line, for this very purpose),
two extremely strident and highly amused blond girls had sent her very publicly packing.

“Why are you running after a crowd?” Susannah had said that night, over vegetarian chili and green salad from Bread & Circus.
Her lack of sympathy, though hardly unexpected, was salt in her daughter’s wound. “Even if you succeed, what have you got?
You’re just another face in the crowd. And
that
crowd,” said disapprovingly.

“But they’re
nice,
” Portia had said in pointless disregard of recent history.

“That I doubt. And even if it were true,
nice
is very much overrated. I’d like to see you go for more than
nice
.”

In any case, Susannah had gone on to explain, women do not bond in packs, or if they do, they do falsely, in the manner of
clubs or sororities, with their artificial enclosures of dues-paying “sisterhood.” Portia should have real friends, soul friends,
not birds-flocking-together-in-their-common-plumage friends. Not, Susannah would undoubtedly have said,
teammates
. Portia was going to require companionship through life. Confidantes. Counselors. Comedians with perfect timing.
There’s something about the women in my life
. Like the women who loved and valued Susannah herself.

Right, Portia had thought, despondent and irritated. The irritation was for her mother, for making such a thoroughly unrealistic
injunction. (In seventh grade, who has friends like that?) The despondency was for herself, because she suspected even then
that she would never have friends like that.

And in fact, she had never had friends like that.

A quarter century after her exile from the coolest of tables in the middle school lunchroom, Portia had found neither those
intimate traveling companions her mother had prescribed nor even the superficial reassurance of a group of women friends.
She enjoyed her colleagues—or some of them—here at home and generally looked forward to the annual NACAC meetings, where she
often joined a group of long-acquainted comrades to indulge in soul-cleansing portions of alcohol. Were these the friends
her mother had alluded to? They were not. She never spoke to any of them between conferences, unless some professional necessity
arose. Their interactions were limited to e-mail health alerts and holiday cards containing snapshots of their families. But
she was not isolated. Who could feel isolated when bombarded daily by hundreds of teenagers? And she lived with Mark, after
all! She went for walks on the canal with Rachel and Rachel’s dog. She was in a book group, though she tended to duck out
at the height of the admissions season. (And whenever she didn’t like the book. Which actually happened quite a lot.) But
it wasn’t the same.

It wasn’t what her mother had, had always had. In the Northampton kitchen the phone rang incessantly, not only with organizational
updates for the myriad collectives, task forces, and Amnesty groups, but with glad women, distraught women, women in need
of Susannah’s counsel and support. When Portia came home from school, they would be there before her, as often as not, cups
of rapidly chilling herbal tea on the kitchen table and little soggy teabags oozing into the tabletop. The women would look
up when she came in, their faces full of residual pain. (Her mother excelled at residual pain, Portia sometimes thought. She
had a calling for it.) They seldom broke away from Susannah, and if for some reason they had to leave Northampton, they became
the very women Portia and her mother would visit during school breaks: days of local culture and activity punctuated by more
of those long, long evenings over the kitchen table (nicer kitchen tables, generally, in much nicer kitchens). Her life with
her mother had been a travelogue of these dearest friends, like the one who committed to her lover and followed her to Tennessee,
and the one who left her husband and was suddenly a Harvard Law student. (She must have been planning
that
for a while, Portia would later understand.) Embarrasingly, even at the height of her high school career, the ringing phone
was always for her mother. Even more oddly, this would not strike Portia as odd until years later.

Still, as the only fruit of Susannah’s loins, Portia had not exactly faded into the crowd of her mother’s women. She was special.
She was perennially important, like the permanent number one slot on the to-do list. She was, she saw very early on, Susannah’s
purpose and justification: her life project. And it would be wrong to suggest that this had not been heady stuff for a very
long while. Portia had been introduced to her mother’s circle as a heroine taking shape before their eyes, Susannah’s own
little light of mine
. She had been the future something amazing, the proof in the pudding of what could happen when women did not allow themselves
to be thwarted, limited, disrespected. She turned cartwheels at the potluck in somebody’s Northampton backyard, the joyful
girl at whom everyone else smiled and nodded, the powerful example of what a free and strong female was supposed to look like.

Sadly, by adolescence, Portia was finding it harder and harder to keep that up.

Shining examples were not supposed to get sent packing from the cool tables, were they? Joyful girls were supposed to have
friends, or at least scads of people who wanted to be friends. And free and strong women? Surely they never felt about themselves
the way Portia felt about herself: addled by insecurities, endlessly halted by doubt. And also sure—quite sure—that she was
losing, filament by filament, the respect of Susannah, her creator, who was going to be very disappointed when she discovered
that her daughter, in whom she had invested so much effort, was turning out to be deflatingly normal, a garden-variety self-sabotaging
female after all. This normal Portia would turn out to be a woman of unobjectionable looks (trim enough, tall enough, with
brown hair like her mother’s and brown eyes like her mother’s and pale, freckled skin. Like her mother’s). Normal Portia would
be obviously intelligent, but not what you’d call scary smart. Normal Portia was one of those people you could count on to
listen to what you were saying and say, more or less, the right thing in return, but she wasn’t exactly a font of wisdom or
comfort. Like Susannah. In her serene and knowing way. To her many dearly loved and loving friends.

Later, she would try to convince herself that the renegotiation of power in a mother-daughter relationship was an essential
part of growing up, and perhaps that was a little bit true. She would also tell herself that she and her mother had grown
apart at the normal time, when she was in high school, when daughters were simply supposed to leave their mothers in the dust.
But that wasn’t quite true. She would try hardest of all to believe that there had been no incident, no great traumatic event
parting daughter from mother, severing the unspoken bond, et cetera, et cetera, but that the coming apart had happened in
increments so slight, she had not even noticed: glacial disentanglement, continental drift. And that, Portia knew perfectly
well, was an outright untruth.

An incident. An accident. A rift.

All of the above, she thought grimly, which made her mother’s increasingly desperate, then increasingly hopeless, overtures
ever more poignant. They went on for a long time: the last year of college, the first years of Portia’s new career (which
baffled her mother), and all through the past decade at Princeton, when Susannah seemed at last to have begun to give up.
Now their phone calls and visits were acrid, hollow ordeals of proximity and pretending, painful to all concerned but hardening,
at least, into routine. They did not begin without anxiety on both sides, Portia knew, and they did not end without relief,
also on both sides. And it might all have been avoided. And it might still be somehow salved, if Portia one day decided to
take her mother back into their long-ago confidence. But that would never happen.

She took the first four folders from the pile and set them down on the bed, then climbed in with her coffee. The bed was simply
made but warm, Mark having introduced her to certain European necessities like the divine duvet. She plumped the pillows behind
her back, sipped her coffee, took up her pen, and read.

Stressed-out girl from Belmont, math team, tennis team, violinist in the local youth orchestra, fund-raiser for the women’s
shelter. Mom an engineer. Dad an engineer. Older brother at Yale. She wrote about her grandmother, who’d left Ireland in the
1950s because no one seemed willing to educate her and came to Boston, where she remained uneducated. “Going to college has
been my goal since childhood,” the girl concluded her essay rather portentously. “I’ve seen what happens to people who are
not granted this opportunity.”

Maybe Yale would take her, Portia thought, marking the reader’s card with comments from the two enclosed references (“One
of those faces I look forward to seeing in my classroom.” “Hardworking and sensitive student.” Sensitive? Portia thought).
Colleges, Princeton included, did try not to create dire family stress by admitting one sibling and rejecting another, unless
there were overwhelming differences in the quality of the applications. No undeserving applicant ever rode in on the coattails
of a brilliant older sibling, of course, but no admissions officer relished being the cause of some drunken outburst at Thanksgiving
twenty years hence, along the lines of: “You know you’re not as smart as Johnny.
You
couldn’t get into Princeton.”
Good luck at Yale,
she silently told the girl, shutting the folder and putting it aside.

The next folder belonged to a classic campaigner. In addition to the common application with its Princeton supplement material,
transcript, test scores, and recs, he had accumulated a two-page CV that memorialized every move he had made since entering
the ninth grade, an eight-by-ten glossy photo in full baseball regalia, and a page of game-related statistics. There was a
packet of newspaper clippings, and three unrequested testimonials illuminated the applicant’s team spirit, competitive rigor,
and moral caliber. Portia, alerted to the presence of this extra stuff by the thickness of the folder, rigidly avoided looking
at it until she had made her way through the application proper, in the same order and at the same pace she read every other.
That way, when she finally arrived at this figurative and literal padding, she was reassured by the fact that her impressions
had already been formed not by the egoism of the publicity blitz, but by the lack of academic intensity already inherent in
the transcript, the serviceable writing of the essays, the hearty but nonspecific recs. Then, having ascertained the gist
of the unsolicited material, she put aside these later impressions and tried earnestly to forget them, forcing herself to
think her way through the application one more time, making sure that her resistance to his personality had not overly directed
the box she checked.

Go for It!
was his mantra, she supposed. Or,
Sell Yourself! The Squeaky Wheel Gets the Grease! Don’t Hide Your Light Under a Bushel! Ask for What You Want! Never Ventured,
Never Gained!
The impulse to hawk one’s virtues, to demand affirmation, to politely but firmly request the prize, was so American, she
thought, sighing. Being unmoved by it seemed unfair, like an unannounced reversal of the rules. In this dossier, after all,
was the spirit that had crossed the prairies, the go-getting attitude that had built empires of business and culture. The
fact that it so turned her off was downright unpatriotic, she thought regretfully, setting aside the folder and taking a long
drink of her now tepid coffee. Two down. Two more and she would get dressed and go into the office: a decent overture to a
decent day’s work.

She hadn’t made it past the data pages when the phone rang. Portia looked at it, considering. The bedside phone had no caller
ID, but far away downstairs a stilted, computerized female voice made an accompanying declaration to the empty kitchen:

“
Call from… a… nony… mus… . Call from… a… nony… mus.”

This little feature was supposed to make life easier. It was supposed to give you a heads-up that a pollster or telemarketer
or simply the person you least wanted to talk to was on the line, but in practice there were far too many calls that seemed
to carry the designation “a… nony… mus.” The antiquated phone in her mother’s house, and the undoubtedly antiquated Vermont
network it was attached to, quite often announced itself as “a… nony… mus” but sometimes, maddeningly, as “Out of… area” or even
“Hart… land… Ver… mont.”