Early Decision (3 page)

“For two years I taught at a very selective prep school, English composition and Shakespeare,” Anne told Mr. Blanchard. He nodded gamely. “My seniors were always asking for nights off from their homework so they could work on college applications. So I assigned those essays as homework, and made them bring them into class, and they were terrible. We worked on them for weeks. I created a course on the personal essay, and both years, for whatever reason, all my kids got into their top choices. Then their mothers started calling about siblings, and word got out, and now here I am.”

Anne had come to her work at a fortuitous time. A combination of social and economic factors had sent application rates soaring. The sixties had opened the college gates to nonwhites and women, and all of those kids—the baby boomers—had grown up and created more college-bound seventeen-year-olds than the country had ever seen. Growing wage disparity between blue- and white-collar jobs made a degree necessary for a middle-class existence; shifting industries made it impossible to land even some blue-collar gigs without the advanced diploma. Add to that the fetishization of certain schools and the institution of the Common Application, the online form that students could submit to a hundred colleges simply by giving each a credit-card number, and you had a mad scramble for a handful of trophy campuses, a blood race buffeted by corporate hangers-on, some of them standardized testing toughs and some of them media companies producing annual publications ranking schools from one to fifty on dubious metrics pulled together from SAT scores, graduates' tax returns, and the occasional interview with a hungover senior. And to hear of it, there seemed nothing but the darkness of outer space for everyone who fell short of the bar. In graduate school, Anne had been appalled by the teaching jobs awaiting the brightest doctorates she knew, who left Chicago for dusty towns where the state university campus had a tenure-track spot open up, and who hoped to publish enough in six years to transfer back to a city with a Starbucks. All of these brilliant young adults were installed in everyday colleges. If you just knew where to look, she thought, if a student knew what to ask for, she could have an extraordinary experience at any college in the country. But these schools Anne might have mentioned—as one father said, “Please, nothing I've never heard of, okay?”

The fathers often had very little idea how things had changed. Often the mothers hired her in part to impress upon them the dire nature of the college circumstance. But fathers were uneasy about Anne. She did not blame them. They made money, and she wanted some of their money, to do what? Nothing they hadn't already paid a zillion dollars for their fancy private school to do. Hiring Anne smacked of excess, of mommy zealotry, of spit-shining and list making and competing with all the other assholes out there on the freezing sidelines of the homecoming game. She had to work to disarm them. It was on occasion even harder than disarming their teenage children.

“You went to Princeton, is that right?” asked Gideon Blanchard.

“Yes, that's right.”

“And then?”

“And then graduate school at the University of Chicago.”

Here he sidestepped the obvious question. He seemed, in fact, not to see it at all, so instead of asking what the hell went wrong, he inquired, “So, tell me: why is it acceptable for me to hire a professional to write my daughter's college essays?”

Anne got the “hire a professional” question fairly regularly—a last gasp of liberal guilt as they pulled out the checkbook: “Why is it fair for me to hire you to help my child?” Once Anne had given a long and gentle explanation that she was the logical extension of an education that began with private preschool and intended to position the child for the greatest success. Now she just smiled a little and said, “It's
not
fair.”

But
write the essays
? “I don't write the essays,” she told him.

He raised his eyebrows and shifted his jaw from one side to the other. “No?”

The first response that came into Anne's mind—
Would it be okay with you if I did?
—seemed rude. She was quiet for a moment, trying to think how to help him save face, although the man hadn't blanched a bit. She tried reason. “Do you think admissions officers can't tell the difference between my writing and that of someone a decade younger than I am?” she asked. “It wouldn't help if I wrote the essays. In fact, it would probably ensure the student's rejection.”

Now he was with her. The ethical question had been a feint; Gideon Blanchard was a pragmatist.

“No. I just help with the process.”

“And how do you do that?”

Anne leaned forward over her clasped hands. Feeling him clock her ringless fingers, she counted on them to make her case. “I provide three things to your family,” she began.

“First, I serve as a buffer between you and your daughter during this difficult time. I will monitor the deadlines, the forms, the teacher recommendations, the submissions. I'll make sure nothing gets missed. That will spare you the nagging and the asking and the keeping piles on your dining room table from now till Christmas.

“Second, I'll be an advocate for your daughter through an immensely stressful process. She will have my e-mail and my cell-phone number, and she can contact me at any time, about anything. So can you, or her mother, incidentally. So if your wife is freaking out on a Friday night, she calls me.”

Mr. Blanchard huffed a laugh. Anne was winning him.

“Finally, the essays. Here's the thing. Your daughter has had an excellent education, probably the best in the city.” She paused so he could agree with this. “Right? She has been taught to write book reports, lab reports, history papers . . . I bet even sonnets. But now she has to write a five-hundred-word essay that will be the most important piece of writing in her life to date. It has to be concise but inviting, bold but modest, confident but not arrogant. It has to be clever and original and authentic. Now, has she ever been taught to write a personal essay? I bet not. Why should she know how to do that? It's a skill that will serve her well for the rest of her life, but she hasn't learned it. And that's what I do. I'll put her through draft after draft until she's got a set of essays that represent her best foot forward. Then we'll send in the applications and see what happens. I don't have any truck with admissions offices. I don't call them, I don't know them. I don't care where your daughter ends up, as long as she is happy there. But I do guarantee that no matter what, your daughter will feel that she has given it her very best shot.”

Mr. Blanchard pursed his lips. His mouth's strawberry fullness embarrassed her and made her wonder how long he'd been married, what he'd been like at her age. He sat back and propped both hands behind his head, spreading his elbows wide. “Very compelling,” he finally declared. “Quite a racket you've got going there.”

Anne waited.

“I assume my wife has worked out the details of your fee?”

She had not. “I charge five thousand dollars a student, all-inclusive. No limit to the number of applications. Half payable before we begin working and the balance upon submission of the final application. That's it.”

“Oh,” he said, seemingly relieved. “What does that work out to by the hour, I wonder?”

“Counting or not counting the hours on the phone with moms?”

He let his head hang back in an openmouthed laugh. “You're a pro, I can tell. Where do you live?”

“Lincoln Park. Not far from the zoo.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, but I don't work out of my apartment. I prefer to meet students at home or elsewhere.”

“Fine. We're Gold Coast—Delaware. Margaret will work all of that out with you. And, Anne, listen.”

“Yes?”

“Did my wife talk with you about Duke?”

“No. She did mention that—”

“Sadie's got quite a boost there.” He seemed to almost blush. He pulled his arms back down before him on the desk and folded in to demonstrate his humility. “Yes. I've been fortunate to serve as a trustee for, oh, going on about five years now. We're strong supporters of the university's current capital campaign. So all these applications—well, I don't really see the point in making too many. Let's just do what we have to do. Sadie will go to Duke. But I want her to have the experience of gaining admission on her own.”

Which was impossible, thought Anne, unless Sadie applied anonymously; and more to the point, how was her independence to be assured by hiring a private coach? Christ.

Still Blanchard had again avoided an easy provocation, and it surprised her. Anne's own father, a head of pathology at a large city hospital whose tower was visible from this very law office, had gone to Princeton before her. It was a fact easily uncovered online and that she often anticipated would lessen her credentials in the eyes of parents, as in,
Of course you got in
. Oddly, it seemed to have the opposite effect: as though they imagined her the right sort of person to work with their children, to the manor born. Sometimes they alluded to it, which Mr. Blanchard did now, though kindly: “That's a concern I trust you can relate to,” he said.

“I was lucky to be a legacy,” Anne replied, as she always did. “But I believe my college record speaks for itself.”

“Indeed,” he said, raising a liturgical hand over her CV.

In fact Anne's father had graduated smack into a terrible draft number, and four years in the navy had left him among the oldest in his med school class and late getting through residency; she remembered the long nights without him, her parents' squabbles over money. Her grandfather had gone to Princeton, too, finishing in three years to join up during the Second World War; to his mind college did nothing but keep him from his manhood, and she couldn't recall his mentioning the place once before he'd died. Family legend had it that
his
father had attended Princeton for his freshman year, but had withdrawn after his own father died of the Spanish flu. Anne didn't actually know if this was true. But as a family creation myth, it was accurate: all the men had left college and returned to the deep Midwest, where, in those days at least, one didn't gas on about East Coast educations. Now, in Anne's era, there was no boy. Only Anne. And there she was, back in Chicago. Nevertheless she was—probably—fourth-generation Princeton. Did that make her the sort you wanted to have working with your child, or the sort you found it easy to scapegoat?

Sometimes, of course, parents paid her for the former but retained the option of the latter. This was part of the job, too.

“And I'm sure Sadie's accomplishments will speak for themselves,” she said. “I'll do my best to help her put them forward.”

“I greatly appreciate that.” Gideon Blanchard rose from his chair. “Listen. Great time chatting with you, young lady.” He rested his palm on Anne's shoulder, long fingers spread like a squid, and steered her toward the door. “Thanks for coming in. Best of luck to you.”

Was that luck intended for use with his daughter, or in her own life? Was it that obvious that Anne was a mess? “Thank you,” she said.

At the door he paused. “Oh, and did I see you chatting with Ewan Monroe out there? He a friend?” His pony grin was wide. He seemed to have too many teeth.

“We were at high school together,” she told him. “Haven't seen him since I was sixteen.”

“Ah. Well, that can't have been that long ago. Lucky girl. Off you go. Many thanks, then. Have a great Labor Day.” And the door was closed.

 

T
HE SUPPLICATION ALWAYS
stung. Anne told herself she did it because she felt sorry for the kids, which was true, and she believed she could help them. She thought a good deal about their odd paralysis. She'd read somewhere the description of a horrifying lab experiment in which dogs were locked into cages and made to suffer shocks whether they tried to move or not, and before long the dogs learned to just lie there and take it—they stopped even trying to escape. Similarly, she imagined her kids trying to take their steps into the world, and being told at every turn that they needed to do it bigger, better, or more publicly, their parents not knowing the difference between encouragement and domination. Worse, the parents hired specialists to address every aspect of these kids' lives—SATs and calculus and French verbs and baseball throws and volleyball serves, which was a way of saying,
Whatever you can do, it's not good enough
. The trick was that the kids were
trained
to ask for extra help. They saw their peers gaining through private arrangements, and they understood that they needed to keep up. So the kids themselves often requested the extra credit, more tutoring, special mentoring. What parent would say no? Finally, there was the harrowing new ritual of having one's child diagnosed with a delay of some sort—reading/processing/seeing/thinking—or the basic inability to sit still, and then petitioning the College Board for untimed tests. And there it was, in black-and-white ovals: You can't do what thousands upon thousands of other students can do. Can't show up in a gymnasium on a miserable Saturday morning, take your test, and go home. Can't suffer the nausea and the exhaustion and the overwhelming boredom, fret over the last fifteen questions, mix up your lines and have to go back and erase your bubbles. Leave trashed and with a lead-shined fist. All of these most basic indignities of secondary education had been supplanted by the graver insult of relieving students of the notion of independent challenge in the first place. By the time the children got to her, they sat warily in their chairs with hunched shoulders and waited to be told what to do. College was just the next thing—that was all. It was Anne's goal to shake them awake and alert them to the fact that real life was just around the corner. That they had four years to transition from being told what to do to choosing what to do, and that the world after college was unforgiving of indecision. When she finally did manage to get through to her kids, then it was as though a person who had been absent decided to show up—a voice appeared on the page in their essays, and a new energy drove their search. They started keeping their own deadlines and doing their own dreaming. And almost without fail, this new sense of self-possession, coupled with some insight and reasonable scholarly ambition, was rewarded by the admissions committees. In five years and seventy students, all but two of Anne's kids had matriculated at their top-choice schools. Anne was passed down from year to year by parents who refused to breathe her name until their own children had finished the process. They flew their kids in from all over the country to see her, and they flew Anne everywhere to be with them—Manhattan, Marin, Snowmass, Siena. She was sure she could help. In fact, she sometimes believed she was the only person left who could.