The Admissions (12 page)

“Hey!” said Kelsey, as Angela pulled open the heavy glass doors with the Elpis logo emblazoned on both sides. “What’s
up
?”

Kelsey hugged Angela and Angela absorbed her perfume, a complicated smell that made Angela think of pine trees and rosebushes and maybe the ocean and definitely something metallic.
Odiferous.
SAT word.

“Not much,” said Angela. “I had a thing in the city for Student Sharing, so I thought I’d come by and see my dad.”

“Sit
down,
” said Kelsey. “Tell me everything, oh my God, I can’t believe you’re
graduating
next year; when I first started working here you were a
freshman.
” Kelsey’s breasts were big and soft and so completely on display that Angela couldn’t look away from them. Her smile was wide enough to fall into. In the very back of Kelsey’s mouth, sitting atop a molar, were the remains of Kelsey’s lunch, or maybe her afternoon snack. Elpis was famous for its snack room. Angela had known approximately five Kelseys since she’d started visiting her father at work: Veronica. Mabel. Juliette. Janie. And now the actual Kelsey. Each one replaced by the next, a revolving door of office assistants who organized activities for Take Your Child to Work Day and kept her father and the other Elpis partners on schedule and in line and then eventually aged out of the position.

Kelsey pointed to a square chair, too modern to be comfortable, and said, “Your dad’s in a meeting, but as soon as he’s out I’ll let him know you’re here. Is he expecting you?”

Angela shook her head and got ready to explain her presence when a commotion from down the hall distracted her and Kelsey. Two of the senior partners, Doug Maverick and somebody Angela thought was named Stuart, were arguing over a paper one of them held.

“That’s
not
what the data tells us,” said Doug. “You know it’s not, Stu, you can’t keep—”

“Actually,” said a young female voice, “I’m with Stu on this one. I think that is
exactly
what the data tells us.”

“Oh, God,” whispered Kelsey. “Here we go.” She rolled her eyes dramatically, impressively.

“Here we go what?” Angela gave in and sat on the modern chair.

“You’ll see,” said Kelsey. “Just hang on.”

Angela hung on long enough for the voice to turn into a person, a young woman, not much older than Angela, though dressed (Angela thought) like a forty-year-old attorney, with a gray stretch wool jacket and matching gray pants. “The intern,” whispered Kelsey, “who thinks she’s a senior partner.”

The gray suit grew closer and closer and finally its owner said, “Angela? I recognize you from the pictures in your dad’s office. Oh, I’m so happy to meet you. Finally! I’m Abby.” She extended a hand.

“I’m happy to meet you too,” said Angela, dutifully shaking, but inside she was bewildered and maybe even a little bit alarmed and also she was thinking,
WTF?

“Your dad has told me
so much
about you,” said Abby. “I feel like I know you.” She claimed the chair opposite Angela’s, crossed her legs, and leaned in closely. “And I’m sure he’s mentioned what he and I have in common.”

“Um,” said Angela. Angela’s father had never mentioned this person to Angela at all (he wasn’t in the habit of talking about the
interns
at home), and while she was searching for a way not to say that—she had manners, after all!—Abby said, “Harvard, of course!” with a note of triumph, as though Angela had asked a question and Abby had produced the correct answer. “We both went to Harvard. And you’re headed there too.”

“I haven’t even—” said Angela, but before she could finish Abby fixed her with an odd, almost secretive look. (
Conspiratorial.
SAT.) And then she said, “Let’s get a snack.”

Angela was starving. They’d had an early practice that morning, a four-mile tempo run. Kelsey was at her desk, answering the phone, “Elpis Consulting!” and rolling her eyes at Angela, like somehow this was all a big joke. “Okay,” said Angela. She thought for a second that this Abby person was going to take her hand and lead her to the snack room as though she’d never been there before, but instead she walked in front of Angela and Angela followed along, like a serf.

In the snack room Angela surveyed the offerings. SunChips. Clif Bars. Gluten-free scones baked by somebody named Sunny in Half Moon Bay. A stash of Vitaminwaters and regular bottled water in the fridge with the clear doors. Abby plucked a bag of M&M’s out of the candy bowl and said, “My favorite.” Angela chose Twizzlers, as she did every time she came to the Elpis snack room, as she’d been doing for a dozen years, because there was nobody here who was going to remind her how badly chewy candy stuck to the teeth. Anyway, Cecily was the one who was getting braces. Angela was all done with the orthodontist.

“So,” said Abby, tearing into her M&M’s bag with her teeth (with her
teeth
!) and speaking as though she was continuing a conversation they’d begun earlier, “the next thing you need to know about Harvard is that everybody there is terrified. That’s your secret weapon, but it took me two years to figure it out.” She leaned against the counter and rooted through the M&M’s bag. Angela bit into a Twizzler. “Once you know that,” Abby said, “you’ll be amazed how well you can get along. I wish someone had told me early on, like I’m telling you.”

“But I don’t even—” Angela had been about to say that she didn’t even know if she’d get in, but Abby stomped on her words and said, “In other news, that rule applies everywhere. Now that I’m half a year out, I can see it.
Everywhere.
But especially where there are super-smart people trying to do a good job. People are scared everywhere.”

Angela was starting to feel a little scared herself. This Abby person was very intense. The way she stared at you when she talked. The way all that fire came out of eyes that were small and close together. There was something desperate there, something striving. Maybe even something
indefatigable.

“When do the notices go out?” asked Abby.

“Not sure, exactly,” said Angela. “Middle of December.”

Abby laughed. “Yeah, isn’t that maddening? You don’t know exactly when it’s coming, and then—
poof!
—you get an email, and your whole world changes, one way or the other.” When she said
poof
she flicked her fingers like a magician.
God,
thought Angela.
What a nut.
But she was also sort of mesmerized.

It could have been the Twizzlers, but Angela felt something knot up and flip in her stomach. She took a Vitaminwater and studied the sensation for a moment. Okay, it was something like this.

Abby was six months out of Harvard.

Which meant that if she was
out
of college and
this
was how she acted, well, then, it didn’t end with college. The competing, the posturing. It didn’t even end with the end of college. The bullshit that Angela thought she was nearly done with—did it have a finish line? If it did, where the hell was it?

The snack room door swung open and Kelsey popped her head around the corner and said, “You guys cool here?” There was a purple streak in her hair Angela hadn’t noticed before. Kelsey was so badass. Angela bet she slept with all kinds of guys, and did it the right way, too (whatever that was, not that Angela would know). Kelsey looked like sex. Whatever sex looked like.

“We’re great,” said Abby, with a considerable amount of authority. Angela nodded along. “Just getting to know each other.”

Angela thought,
We
are
?

On the other hand. There was something about this conversation (could she call it a conversation when she hadn’t actually gotten a full sentence out? Or was it more like a lecture…) that was the opposite of scary, that thrilled Angela for a reason she couldn’t quite put her finger on. An
unfathomable
reason.

“Soooooo,” said Abby, crumpling the M&M’s bag and tossing it toward the garbage. She missed, and got up with a little embarrassed smile to retrieve it. “What else do you want to know about Harvard?”

Then it hit Angela, why she’d felt a little
frisson
of excitement. Pretty simple, really. Her entire life people had been telling her how to get into Harvard: what to do, what not to do, how to think and write and run and be. Now here was someone who took her ability to be admitted for granted, and who was telling her what to do once she got there. The sensation was refreshing, like diving into a cold wave. A cold Atlantic wave, in Rhode Island.

“I heard I have a surprise visitor,” said a familiar voice. The door to the snack room swung open for a second time, and Angela said, “Dad!” Her father looked the same as he always did, a little tired, a little stressed, but with an underlying
countenance
that said that if you told a funny enough story about your day he’d give you his full attention and laugh and be sincere about it.

At almost the same time Angela said, “Dad!” Abby said, “Gabe!” and Angela’s father’s face took on a startled expression. He rarely flushed (that was her mother’s department), but now there was a spot of color high on each cheek. Weird.

“Gabe,” said Abby again, like nobody had heard her the first time. Angela chewed the inside of her lip. It was odd to hear her father addressed so familiarly by someone so close to Angela’s own age. Not just familiarly, but sort of, well…for lack of a better word (
There’s always a better word,
Ms. Simmons would say),
intimately.

Intimately! She looked more carefully at Abby, at her father. Her father had a strange look on his face.
Sphinxlike.
He glanced at Abby, then back at Angela, and if Angela didn’t know much, much better, she’d think that he looked like a man who’d been caught doing something he shouldn’t have done.

Your dad’s office.

I recognize you from the pictures.

Your dad has told me so much about you.

What he and I have in common.

“Angela,” he said. “What a surprise—”

Her
father
and the
intern.
Oh. My. Freaking. God. Gross. Grosser than gross. Whatever was in her stomach triple-flipped.

“I have to go,” she said to both of them. Finally! A complete sentence. She looked at her wrist for a watch that wasn’t there. “I forgot, I have—I have a thing. I have to go.” She turned out of the snack room, past a bewildered Kelsey, who half stood when Angela passed, and out toward the elevator.

Her
father
and the
intern.
It was such a cliché, they may as well slip on a couple of banana peels while they were at it. It was the plot of every bad movie and a bunch of books, both mediocre and not, and it was happening right now, right here, right in her very own life.

So what? she thought, turning out of the office building and melting away into the early-evening crowds. So
what
? She’d be out of the house by this time next year, so, really, so what.

But that wasn’t true; that wasn’t how she really felt. She would never let something crappy like that go on behind her mother’s back without telling her about it. After the Harvard application was in, she’d find time to investigate.

It wasn’t
so what
after all, not with this. It was
so everything.

“All right, then,” said Arthur Sutton. It was the weekly catch-up meeting. He was sitting at the conference table with Grace, Nora, and the new realtor who had joined the firm the past spring, Seth. Things had been looking altogether better when Arthur hired Seth. If sales didn’t pick up soon, Arthur would have to let him go, which would be a shame, because Seth and his young wife had just bought a starter home in San Mateo. A heck of a commute, though, San Mateo to Marin, so maybe it would be for the best.

Arthur cleared his throat and waited until all eyes were on him. In general Arthur loved the weekly check-in meeting; it comforted him to know that things at Sutton and Wainwright were ticking along the way they were supposed to. But today the mood felt somber and gray. It felt like they were at a funeral meal.

“Nora,” he said, “you had the second-highest sales in the region the quarter before last, right behind Sally Bentley at Bentley and Associates.”

There were few people in the business—really, few people in the world—Arthur truly disliked, but Sally Bentley was one of them. She spent more on advertising than any other agent in the Bay Area. She plastered her photo—coiffed hair, Nancy Reagan lollipop head on a skinny body—all over the city, on buses and billboards, in coffee shops, on grocery carts. She used the slogan “When you think
Sell
think
Sally.
” She bragged about her sales (which, admittedly, were astronomical) to anyone who would listen and to many who wouldn’t.

“That’s great,” said Nora. Her tone was flat.

“But last quarter…well, nobody in the office had stellar sales. Madrone Canyon was the last big one.” Arthur took a deep breath. “The Watkins home,” he said. “Nora? Any nibbles out there?”

Nora shook her head and winced. “Not yet,” she said. “I tried to get Lawrence to compromise. I think Bee was open to it, I really do, but Lawrence wouldn’t hear of any solutions. I mean, the buyers wanted to knock forty thousand off the price to replace the doors.”

Seth said, “That’s insane.”

Nora said, “Lawrence wants it back on the market, full price.”

Arthur didn’t like Nora this way, tense and sad. He wanted to put his arms around her (in an avuncular way) and tell her that everything was going to be okay.

“He held it against me, that
I
didn’t point out the flaws in the glass.” Her voice was strained; she sounded like she might cry. Arthur really didn’t want Nora to cry. He didn’t think he could take it.

“You’ll find another buyer,” he said now, glancing at Seth, glancing at Grace. “No home goes unsold forever.”

Actually, that wasn’t true. Some of them did.

Nora looked tired. Nora always looked a little bit tired, but now she looked about as tired as Arthur had ever seen her. Was there something else bothering her besides the Watkins sale? Something with one of the girls, or with Gabe?

“Right, I know.” Nora rubbed her eyes and twisted her pencil in her hands. “I’m sure I’ll find another buyer.” It must be difficult to be wife and mother and realtor all rolled in together, with one of her birds preparing to flee the nest. Perhaps that was what was bothering her, the oldest, Angela, almost out of the house. Maybe she needed to talk to someone about that. Nora would never see a therapist. Arthur felt confident in saying that. She was too practical and of-the-moment for therapy. Too busy.

Arthur felt a tug of sympathy for Nora, he did, but still he envied her, too, the unruliness and mess of family life. She was always, during her non-Sutton-and-Wainwright hours, consumed with her volunteer obligations at the girls’ schools and field trips and overseeing homework and shuttling them around to the various activities because it seemed that in the modern age you were not allowed to be a child who simply came home from school and
existed:
you had to be well rounded and accomplished and coddled and fed lots of flax and wild salmon and carefully monitored for signs of potential failure.

His non-Sutton-and-Wainwright hours with Linda were lovely, in their home on Marina Boulevard, looking out at the boats. But so very quiet.

“You will,” said Arthur. “You’re a wonderful realtor. And it’s a beautiful home.”

“It’s overpriced,” murmured Nora.

“It’s beautiful,” said Arthur firmly.

For Arthur and Linda there had been just the one baby. Just the one, a little girl, living only one day, like a mayfly. They had named her Dawn. That’s when she entered the world, that’s when she left it, that’s why Arthur was up before the sun every day of his life since then—he said a little prayer, paid a little homage, as the first threads of sunlight made their way across the sky. Often in the early morning he walked from his and Linda’s home down to Crissy Field, where he let the wind whip his thinning hair, and he watched the lucky dogs running along the beach. They had been so young then, Arthur twenty-nine and Linda twenty-six. Still nearly children themselves, it seemed to Arthur now, though at the time, when it happened, he felt older than the hills. A heart defect, not repairable. Dawn had no chance.

Come to think of it, they were
all
very quiet and subdued at the conference table today, not just Nora.

“Grace?” said Arthur. “What’s next?”

“I’m sorry,” said Grace. “I’m not myself today.”

Nora was on that immediately, shifting from tired mode to caretaking mode, stretching her hand toward Grace. “Oh, sweetie. Is it the cat again?”

Grace’s cat! How did Nora know what was wrong with Grace’s cat? In fact it seemed downright exhausting to be Nora—on top of everything else she was tracking a sick cat.

Grace nodded and took Nora’s outstretched hand. Seth looked uncomfortably at Arthur.

If Dawn had lived she’d be thirty-one years old; sometimes Arthur wondered if she’d have been a mother by now, and what kind of mother she would have been. Linda would have made a phenomenal grandmother, with just the right amount of doting, and she’d have been able to counsel Dawn to take it easy, not to worry so much about every little thing. Nora could probably use some of that. Her own mother lived too far away to do much of that for her.

Not all single women over the age of thirty-five lived alone in apartments with felines, Arthur knew that, but Grace did. It was hard to look at her and not think she had come straight from a casting call: the conscientious, slightly grumpy, loyal-to-a-fault secretary.
Office assistant,
Grace corrected him if he slipped.
Don’t you dare call me a secretary.
She was Sutton and Wainwright’s secret backbone.

“It’s just…well, she’s on a steroid, prednisone, and it’s supposed to work immediately but I’m not sure if it’s doing anything. I hate to think of her alone, in my apartment. If something happens.”

“Do you need to leave, Grace?” said Arthur. There was an impatient note in his voice that he tried to snuff out but that he didn’t quite get to in time.

Nora whispered, “I think she should.” She rubbed Grace’s back.

Arthur and Linda were not cat people—they were not
pet
people, their house was uncluttered and clean as a museum—but even so, Arthur tried his hardest to work up sympathy for Grace. And for the cat, he supposed.

“Okay,” said Arthur. “Well, in that case, if we’ve nothing else to discuss: meeting adjourned.”

Grace leapt up.

Oh, for Heaven’s sake.