Early Decision (10 page)

 

A
LEXIS
G
RANT, THOUGH
she had spent every one of her seventeen years in Minnesota, had recently gained conversational Somali, the mother tongue of a small group of refugees whose children she tutored on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. Her gift for languages had emerged early, when she demonstrated familiarity with the Latin mass her mother dragged the family to. At twenty-two months she'd sat in her car seat and called out bits of the psalms. Recalling it for Anne, her mother shuddered: the car seat had been facing forward! They just didn't know then. The danger!

Anne looked across the table at Alexis's father, who was shaking his head gravely. Alexis wore the same smile she'd had since she'd arrived at the café, fresh from her tour of Northwestern, ponytailed and clutching a tiny notebook with a pen through its spiral coils. A little sister sat quietly, diligently shaping her paper napkin into a pulpy ring.

Their mom went on.

By the fifth grade Alexis had French and Spanish. The gift lent itself to music, too, as such facilities often do, you know; she had to choose between the cello and the French horn when it came time to sit for the high school orchestra, because even Alexis couldn't play both at once! (Her friendship with Michael Schleinstock was born of her choosing the cello, leaving them both first seat in their respective instruments; this information Anne had alone, having read it in the peer recommendation Mr. Schleinstock had written for Alexis, part of the Williams application since time immemorial.) And there was math, of course. High school had scrambled to think of something to teach Alexis once she finished calc two honors. She found an advanced logic course at U Minn with a sympathetic professor who agreed to argue on her sixteen-year-old behalf to the registrar. Michael had kept up in calculus, but he couldn't follow her to logic. Wednesday evenings, after class, she called him to describe the lecture. He answered with pen and paper to hand. She seemed to slip through complex analyses like a hot knife, leaving them laid open for even an idiot to see. Once he told her this.

“Sharpness is only a function of thinness, isn't that something?” Alexis had said.

Michael had thoughtfully written that Alexis was thin. Indeed she was narrow as a bird, with pointed elbows that flaked in the wintertime, which in Minnesota was most of the time. Alexis had explained this part in one of the essay drafts her parents had forwarded along in preparation for their visit. She was careful to keep her sleeves pulled down, even in the overheated common room of the residential facility where she volunteered. The Somali children, she noticed, suffered even worse, their dark skin blue with winter scales. So Alexis brought a tube of organic shea butter in her bag and later learned it ended up eaten on toast. The resourcefulness of this thrilled her, she wrote. Not that they were hungry; that they were willing. To recognize food where she had been taught to see a cosmetic! It was like seeing nature in a highway median, a hill of trees instead of a berm. Everything about her volunteering position was illuminating. To learn Somali, which was not represented in her high school's language library, she'd had to send away to Great Britain for actual discs. They arrived wrapped in craft paper with a feathery customs form in triplicate. It might have been posted straight from Victorian England. She imagined Darwin. She felt touched by Empire. These people knew how to take care of things. Alexis thought her young charges had much to teach her about how to live.

Alexis Grant had given college as much thought as she'd given everything else, which is to say quite a lot. Night after night, she read through course syllabi on the Internet and fell in love. Professors had Web sites! And links to their work! She wished she could cobble together a school composed of the faculty she most coveted. She had written a dozen college essays already, because the prompts, if you thought about them for a moment, were really quite good; Princeton had this fun one about the most important discovery in all of human history (fire was the gimme, of course; and from there the atom; Euclidean geometry; perhaps language. She considered writing about Lascaux or Chauvet, whose images haunted her, but settled for justice, believing it not an instinct but an adaptive, if evolutionary, behavior). And Alexis's parents had read her many drafts. Many, many drafts, as they explained to Anne. Hence their concern. She had too many ideas; she was all over the map. And there were grammatical problems, some fragments, areas where Alexis went too fast. Plus it was unclear whether the colleges were looking for her to give full rein to her imagination. Mrs. Grant's Wellesley roommate lived in Chicago, and had a daughter who went to school with a boy whose older sister had worked with Anne three years before. (Ellie Wishman, Georgetown early.) They'd heard such good things; was she free?

“I do have some availability,” Anne replied. Before her was a faxed document listing Alexis's grades, coursework, APs, and extracurriculars, all neatly recorded in a nonadolescent hand. “But I'm not sure your daughter needs any help from me.”

Alexis blushed. The little sister's brows shot up, but her gaze stayed low.

Mr. Grant chuckled. “Oho, she's like all of us, needs a little boost here and there.” All four mugs of herbal tea drained, Mr. Grant started passing round a ChapStick.

“Truly,” Anne told him, “I'm not sure what I can do, beyond reading over drafts for basic corrections—which I'm sure you can do just as easily. And for free.”

“We're comfortable with your fee,” he said.

“That's not my point.”

“We understand. But Alexis is coming out of a high school with a lousy track record with the Ivies. It's a big public, they all go to U Minn, the top students go on these state fellowships. Or to Carleton, if they're really tops. I think one boy went to Cornell, like, four years ago. I doubt the college counselor even knows her name. We had to sign her up for APs on our own.”

“They don't offer AP courses?”

“They call them honors. But Alexis has taken six of the exams. All 5s.”

“Again, I'm not sure what—”

“Could we just run essays by you? We can fax, e-mail, even just read them to you. You've seen those few we mailed . . .”

“I'll be happy to read and respond, of course. But we'll arrange something by the hour, because, yes, I have seen those few, and really, you don't need much help here.”

Alexis spoke for the first time. “I have
a lot
of essays,” she said apologetically.

“A lot,”
chirped the sister.

“Well, we know you won't be the same way, don't we, Marlo?” said the father.

Marlo did not look up.

“My sister's an athlete,” Alexis explained.

“Soccer!” added her mother.

“All-state already,” completed the dad.

“Well, congratulations to all of you,” Anne said. “I don't mind lots of essays—that's what I do.”

“And of course we're thinking Harvard early action,” said Mr. Grant. Alexis smiled and rolled back her eyes as though in ecstasy.

Many of the most competitive colleges preferred the early decision application, which bound a candidate to the school if accepted—it boosted their matriculation rates and took some of the guesswork out of the larger spring pool of decisions. But Harvard, almost alone at the top, had a swashbuckling play called “early action,” which required an early application but did not bind the student to the school if admitted. It was like a suitor offering a girl a diamond ring on the first date but letting her know to take her time playing the field. It was an astonishing feat of confidence. Or of ego, depending on how you felt about Harvard.

“I think that's a fine idea,” Anne confirmed.

“Alexis looks marvelous in crimson,” said the mother. For Williams's sake, in his recommendation, Michael had made just this point about purple.

“If you think she has a chance,” added the father.

“Harvard's Harvard,” Anne told them. “But I think Alexis seems like the sort of student who would do very well there.”

“Or would it be better for graduate school?” Mr. Grant asked. “I know there isn't that much attention paid to undergraduates, and it's a little bigger than Princeton and Yale—”

“You know,” said Anne, “why don't we just see how we go for the next few weeks, and we can talk about that down the line, okay?”

“Yes, sweetie,” said Mrs. Grant. “Alexis may not even want to go to graduate school.”

“Of
course
she'll go to graduate school,” deadpanned Marlo.

“Alexis?” prompted Anne.

“I don't know! There are so many things I want to study, I don't think I could ever choose!”

“Well, then, let's get you on your way,” said Anne, bundling her things. “Harvard it is, then, November first.”

“We'll call you as soon as we get back to the north country,” said Mr. Grant. “Thank you!”

“Yes,” said Alexis. “Thank you so much! Thank you so, so much!”

The four Grants grinned: smooth-cheeked, perfect tile teeth. Only Marlo wore a touch of irony in her eyes. It was rare, but occasionally Anne worked with students who could write their own tickets. First Cristina, and now Alexis, with her border-collie brain, running down ideas like wayward lambs. Sometimes Anne wished, a bit sadistically, that she could show their files to the other mothers—the Pfaffs, the Blanchards—to demonstrate just what it looked like when a student was exceptional. A necessary corrective. Would disillusionment help them to admire their own children for who they really were?

How odd it was, she thought, that the kids who didn't really need college were the same ones who would make the best use of those four years. Bring on Cambridge: Alexis would be in a field of clover. She was what those schools were made for.

 

I
N HIS CAPACITY
as the incoming chairman of the board of trustees of Duke University, Gideon Blanchard thought it a
splendid,
and
worthy,
and
timely
project to help shepherd Cristina Castello through the financial aid and admissions processes.

In his capacity as Sadie's father, he thought it even cleverer: “How wonderful it will be for Cristina to have Sadie as a classmate,” he said into the phone. “Assuming it works out for the girl, of course.” Anne was drawing fierce cubes and spheres on a corner of her date book. Why should Gideon Blanchard make her nervous? He continued: “She'll begin with a peer who understands where she comes from and what she's facing. The learning curve will be quite steep, I imagine. You know, in terms of social interaction.”

The more odious his words, the more firmly Anne remembered that he was the esteemed civil litigator. Why must she always make everything so hard? It was her mother's refrain. “Things always seem so fraught for you,” she'd say. “I'm sure Sadie's public service has made her deeply empathic,” Anne said now, in soothing tones, taking a torch to her own ambivalence. “She'll be an excellent contact for Cristina.”

“Empathic,”
repeated Mr. Blanchard. “I like it. That's nice, Anne. You have a way, you know. Sadie's been reporting that her essays are coming along brilliantly.”

“She's been working very hard.”

“You know, I just can't get over it,” he said, musing. “What better indication is there of the promise represented by our nation's remarkable system of higher education than the promotion of a young woman from an undocumented family in gangland Chicago?”

“I'm not one hundred percent sure of her immigration status,” Anne began.

“Oh, of course. But let's just assume undocumented could mean visas, passports . . . hey, between you and me, a mortgage deed. Whatever it is, she hasn't got it. And now, thanks to us, she'll have a shot. It's really such a nice opportunity. This is what it's all about, Anne. It really is. Sadie will be just thrilled at the prospect, I know it.”

And to her credit, Sadie did in fact seem genuinely flushed with anticipation when she opened the door to find Anne, Cristina, and Michelle waiting on the stoop. Michelle might have chaperoned Cristina alone but asked Anne, as matchmaker, to come along. For her part, Anne suspected that Michelle's demeanor might put off Gideon Blanchard. A diplomat she was not. “Do I have to dress up for the robber baron?” she'd asked Anne. “Does he want me in a maid's uniform?”

Anne regretted the ill-fitting blue pantsuit Michelle had wedged herself into—she looked like she was selling insurance, when, as the educator, she was the one who should be commanding respect. Beads of sweat stood out at her hairline and on her upper lip. Cristina was shrouded in an enormous, borrowed shirtdress. For the first time, Anne felt her ragamuffin crew from Cicero North did in fact have something to be ashamed of.

But Sadie had just a moment to feast her eyes on the poor Latina girl; Mr. Blanchard loomed in the hall. “Miss Castello,” he sang, his broad shoulders darkening the stoop, trilling the
l
. Obviously he spoke no Spanish.

“Nice to meet you, sir,” said Cristina softly.

“Sir!” repeated Sadie, delighted.

“Pleasure,” he replied, reaching for Cristina. There was a quick handshake for each of them, accompanied by a fleeting but unmistakable expression across his eyes: an exaggerated roll of pleasure for Cristina; a slight flinching for Michelle; and, for Anne, a strobe of interest as his gaze swept down to her feet and back up again. She was ashamed to feel the tiniest bit excited about this. Cristina, meanwhile, sloped gently away from Blanchard's palm as he propelled her into the living room, where previously Charles had built his jungle refuge, and where now a pitcher of iced tea awaited on a silver trivet. Crystal highballs were distributed. Michelle considered it her job to make introductions, since Cristina was her discovery. She scooted herself up into a wing chair with both hands on the arms, like a child, and began.