The Admissions (6 page)

12:15 a.m.

Dear Marianne,

I had seventy-eight different things to do today. I was supposed to buy supplies for Cecily’s around-the-world project, and make an appointment with Maya for the reading tutor, and check in with Lawrence Watkins. But instead I went into Cecily’s bookcase and I found an old copy of
Betsy-Tacy,
the third book in the series. It had both of our names in it. Remember when we used to put our names in our books? After my name it said, the Great. Nora the Great, I used to call myself. How narcissistic is that?

Deep Valley, Minnesota, the early nineteen hundreds. Snow fell in November (no global warming), baked goods were plentiful and not frowned upon (no gluten sensitivity), and friendships were thorough and everlasting (maybe there were class ranks, but it didn’t seem like people battled for them in quite the same way).

I turned to my favorite chapter in book three: A December snowfall, the kids sledding down the hill by the light of the moon (no streetlights. Okay, maybe there were streetlights. I’m not sure. Probably gaslights). Betsy fell off a sled and sprained her ankle. And she was out of school for weeks. Weeks! Just healing her ankle, limping around her house, writing her little stories on the old trunk. Nobody said, “Betsy, you’re going to miss so much.” Nobody said, “Betsy, you’ll never get into college now.” Nobody said, “Betsy! Your after-school activities! Your reading tutor! Your dance class!” They left her alone, and she rested her ankle, and she got better, and life went on. And they all ate more cake.

The offer came in lower than asking, but truthfully Nora thought it was reasonable, even generous. Lawrence and Bee begged to differ. Well, they didn’t really beg. Mostly they just differed; more specifically, they refused at first to entertain what they considered an abysmally low number.
Marianne,
wrote Nora in an email in her mind.
Can you imagine a world where a number that begins with a seven, as in seven
million
dollars, is considered abysmally low?

“Counter, then,” said Nora, as gently as she could when she presented the offer to them—
in person,
as Lawrence had requested. Lawrence and Bee did not like to have important conversations over the phone. They were like a couple of shady Russian diplomats who preferred to meet in smoky bars or corner cafés where nobody went. Or, in this case, on the leather stools in front of their massive kitchen island. Nora sat between Lawrence and Bee, like an only child out to dinner with her parents. “These are solid buyers,” she continued. “You don’t want them to walk away. You
really
don’t want them to walk away. If they walk away, they’re not coming back.” The buyers had made that very clear to their agent, who in turn had made it very clear to Nora.

She brought the offer to Lawrence and Bee at six thirty in the evening, which was a terrible time both traffic-wise and family-dinner-wise. Nora had just released Maddie from her duties, and Gabe wasn’t home. Angela was ensconced in her room with post-practice homework. (Was she crying?) Who was supposed to make dinner? Cecily? Unlikely. Nora had never found time to teach her to cook anything. She hadn’t taught Angela to cook either. She cut up a bunch of raw vegetables, on which Cecily and Maya began to nibble while they watched the Disney Channel in the living room and Cecily did her heel raises.

“Homework?” Nora asked, laying the plate on the coffee table like Communion gifts at Mass.

Maya said, “Don’t have any.”

“None?”

“Nope.”

Well, that didn’t seem right. She’d tackle that one when she got home.

Cecily waved a thin arm toward Nora and said, “Later.” They were watching the show with the talking dog who wrote a blog. Nora didn’t think Angela had ever expressed even a teaspoon of interest in the Disney Channel. Nora stood for half a second and found herself laughing at the dog, who was observant and sardonic, just the right balance for the busy, wacky, blended family. To boot, he looked like some kind of border collie mix, Nora’s favorite breed after Newfoundlands. A little-known fact about Nora Hawthorne was that she had always been a sucker for talking animals. In this show, only the kids in the family knew the dog could talk. Brilliant.

They had a no-TV-before-homework rule, like any respectable modern family, but Nora was in no position to play cop.

When Nora brought the offer over she focused at first on Lawrence, because she thought he was the holdout, had always been the holdout. He was the one who had refused to lower the price back in the summer, when Nora had sat on this very same stool, sipping at a white sangria that Bee had pressed into her hands, and explained to them that the market was seasonal and finicky and that the time for a change was now. But when she looked directly at Lawrence she saw that she’d been wrong; his gaze was open and guileless, while Bee’s was shrouded.
Bee
was the holdout. Bee, with her copper-colored hair, her matching copper-colored lipstick, was the Oz who moved the machinery of this marriage.
A-ha.
Nora should have known it.

Forty-six minutes later, Bee bent. An hour in, she broke. The Watkins submitted a counteroffer. The buyers countered the counter.

“We’re getting somewhere!” said Nora. She patted Bee on the hand, tapped Lawrence lightly on the shoulder as she passed him on her way to one of the six and a half bathrooms. Nora called home—Gabe had arrived in the interim and opened a box of Annie’s Mac and Cheese—and stayed put. She knew Gabe could do better than Annie’s; he’d been raised on ranch food, good beef and venison, hearty chili and stews, and his mother had made sure that all of her sons knew their way around a kitchen. But now was not the time to quibble.

Nora left the room to call the buyer’s agent and to verbally present the counter-counter. She walked around the living room and peered at some of the artwork on Lawrence and Bee’s walls, which Nora was sure meant something to people who knew more about art than she did. She opened the door to the ridiculously stocked wine room and wondered how on earth Lawrence and Bee were going to get all of those bottles out when it was time to move, and where they were going to put them. It wasn’t her problem, but she couldn’t help thinking about it.

While she inspected the Watkins home, she talked. She used the ultra-reasonable voice she had trotted out time and time again during Angela’s transition through puberty and into young adulthood, when every conversation was a minefield waiting to explode. She explained about the merits of the home and how they justified the price tag. She reminded the buyer’s agent that Cooper Sudecki was no longer designing homes in the Bay Area, nor anywhere else for that matter, and that of the dozen homes that bore his name very few were likely to hit the market in the next five years.

She knew the other agent well enough to tell it to him straight—the sellers were not bending any further. Their counter-counter was firm, this was it, take it or leave it. Etc.

The buyers took it. Hooray! Nora called Gabe to check in. All three girls had eaten. Maya was plugged into her Hooked on Phonics CDs. Angela was doing homework and Cecily was practicing her Irish dance solo. Gabe had the fuzzy voice that signaled to Nora that he was into the Bulleit.

Champagne all around. Lawrence, in an unguarded moment, hugged Nora. Even Bee hugged Nora. They had reached an agreement! The long local nightmare was over.

Angela was at her desk. She was having trouble concentrating. There was still a month to go until Halloween. Even so, Cecily and Pinkie had spent much of the afternoon—Cecily’s sole afternoon free from Irish dance practice—working on their costume, which was some sort of Siamese two-headed zombie situation:
Guinness World Records
meets
The Walking Dead,
while Angela went to French club and cross-country practice and showered and snuck into her room past Cecily, Pinkie, Maya, and the babysitter Maddie. Maddie and Maya had been looking together through a picture book—
The Day the Crayons Quit
—and Maddie had been scrolling through her texts at the same time. It was a
prodigious
(SAT word) display of multitasking.

Sometimes Angela felt really weird in front of Maddie the babysitter. She was only, what, three years older than Angela? But she had a boyfriend and her own cherry-red CR-V and she was practically done with college. Angela was never sure if she should treat her like a peer or a grown-up. (“Oh my
God
you’re going to
totally love
college,” Maddie had said to her recently. “Just be careful with the beer, you can’t believe how many carbs are in there, I blew up like a
balloon
first semester freshman year.”)

Now it was after dinner. Angela was making her way slowly through
Angela’s Ashes.
“Not a prescient choice, I hope,” her father had joked when he saw it on her desk.
Prescient.
Having or showing knowledge of events before they take place.

Angela was wearing an old pair of flannel pajamas and a Harvard sweatshirt her father had given her two years ago. It was too big then but now it almost fit. With the exception of the absolutely gigantic bulletin board, the centerpiece of which was still the calendar with November first circled, Angela’s walls were bare. Over the summer, before her senior year kicked into full swing, she had stripped them of all the childhood memorabilia that she deemed juvenile or distracting. The family photo from a trip to Disneyland five years ago, when Angela and her father rode Space Mountain six times in a row: gone. The poster of Mumford & Sons sitting on an old-fashioned sofa in front of a backdrop of fake trees: also gone. The ribbons from elementary school swim meets. Gone gone gone.

Crappy day, all things considered. Earlier, at practice, Henrietta Faulkner beat Angela on the last two of six hill repeats. Even Angela’s usual mantra—
the only way to win on this hill is to train on this hill
—repeated to herself over and over had failed to produce. She had thought about it while she took a shower and had decided that she’d taken the first three hills harder than she needed to. Way harder. Showing off, for no reason. Probably trying to show Henrietta which one of them deserved to get into Harvard. She’d hung on for the fourth hill but she had nothing left for five and six. She had been absolutely
depleted.
So after much
deliberation
Angela had determined that perhaps her
hubris
had led to the failure to engage in proper
husbandry
of her resources. To
deleterious
effect. And now she was bathing in her own
ignominy.

Henrietta never beat Angela on hills. Nobody ever beat Angela on hills. Hills were her thing. Because she was light, and because she was agile, and because she could scamper over the rocks like a mountain goat, she’d won many a race on the uphills alone.
The only way to win on this hill is to train on this hill.
Truer words were never whispered to oneself.

But today, Henrietta Faulkner had beaten Angela so soundly on the last two repeats that when she’d said “Good workout” and held her hand up for Angela to tap at the end, Angela, panting angrily, hadn’t even had the good grace to tap it back. She’d pretended she hadn’t seen it, and then she’d concentrated on stretching her calf. What a jerk she could be when she didn’t win. Major character flaw. Usually she was able to hide it. But not always!

Could it be the pills?

No. Perish the thought. Angela didn’t need the pills. Angela didn’t even have any more pills, she’d had only a handful, and she’d used them all.

Except there was one problem. She could really use a pill, just to get through tonight’s homework.
Angela’s Ashes,
a statistics quiz, flute practice…

She couldn’t ask Henrietta for any more
now,
not after that workout. First of all, who knew if Henrietta even had any pills. If she did, Angela didn’t want to show any cracks in her armor by asking for them. Now that Henrietta was applying early too.

The senior class had entered a new level of intensity; they eyed one another warily, like animals circling before the kill. Angela’s class rank was
precarious
as opposed to
immutable
and Angela didn’t want to do anything
impetuous
that would
substantiate
any rumors of her weakness.

Her mother knocked and opened the door simultaneously. Angela tried to be annoyed but in fact she was grateful for the interruption. She liked when her mother visited her: it made her feel warm and cozy and taken care of, like a bear in a children’s book. Bears in children’s books usually had very caring mothers. They baked a lot and wore aprons. Angela’s mother did not wear aprons, and she didn’t have much time for baking. But still.

Seriously, Angela really was lame. Maria Ortiz probably never hung out voluntarily with her mother. (Maria Ortiz’s mother had been a famous model in Mexico, BTW. Which explained a lot.)

“Hey there, sweetie.”

“Hey. Hi.”

When Cecily was really small, maybe two, she used to stand outside Angela’s room calling, “I come in? I come in?” Angela always let her in—Cecily was too freaking cute not to. Almost eight years was a big difference; when Cecily was born Angela had been old enough to help out for real, baths, spooning baby food into Cecily’s toothless little mouth. Even diapers! Angela and Cecily were too far apart in age to be competitive with each other, the way Henrietta and her younger sister were and the way that sometimes even Cecily and Maya were. Angela and Cecily simply coexisted. Cecily’s first word had been “Anla,” because she couldn’t pronounce the
g.
(Angela’s first word had been
libro,
owing to frequent viewings of a Spanish Baby Einstein video; her father had run with it as
substantiated
evidence of her bilingual capabilities, which were then nurtured in a series of early-childhood foreign language programs.)

“I didn’t see you much today.”

“Yeah,” said Angela. She twisted a piece of hair around her finger. “I know.”

A crappy day, the crappiest of the crappy. Angela was having trouble concentrating on
Angela’s Ashes.
It all seemed very far away and irrelevant and
Irish.
She was on chapter four, the First Communion chapter.

They dried me. They dressed me in my black velvet First Communion suit with the white frilly shirt, the short pants, the white stockings, the black patent leather shoes. Around my arm they tied a white satin bow and on my lapel they pinned the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a picture with blood dripping from it, flames erupting all around it and on top a nasty-looking crown of thorns.

What a scene. Man oh man. First of all, white stockings on a boy? Poor thing. The Hawthorne family as a whole had zero religion. Well, that wasn’t exactly true. Angela’s mother had grown up attending St. Thomas More parish in Narragansett, a brown-shingled, high-steepled New England church with a low dark wood altar to which Nora dragged the entire Hawthorne family anytime they visited what Angela’s father always (ironically?) referred to as “the homestead.” Angela was
perennially
surprised to learn that her mother knew all the responses and spoke them along with the rest of the congregation, and that she even sang along with some of the hymns in a lilting, mostly in-tune voice. Except for those times Angela never heard her mother sing.

In California: no church. Which was fine with Angela. Angela’s father had grown up “with the ranch as my chapel.” And Sundays, of course, belonged to open houses: real estate as religion.

“Just wanted to check in, see how your day was.”

“Checking in” was Angela’s mom’s
euphemism
for being extremely worried about her state of mind. Angela’s mother thought Angela worked too hard. She thought Angela pushed herself to extremes. She thought Angela didn’t laugh enough, didn’t hang out with her friends enough, didn’t eat enough or drink enough water or get enough sleep. Didn’t plan to apply to enough colleges…

When Angela’s mother was young she had so much free time that she and Angela’s aunt Marianne were
bored
half the time. Blah blah blah, and etc. Angela loved her mother to the ends of the earth, but sometimes her mother just didn’t get it.

“Fine,” she said. “Not bad.”

Angela’s mother sat carefully on the edge of the bed. She folded a T-shirt that Angela had left crumpled on the floor and said, “Yeah? Good day?”

Sometimes Angela wished she were still small enough to curl up on her mother’s lap, like Maya was.

Did she have to say it again? “Fine,” she repeated, trying not to sound testy. But feeling it. Her mother was no longer acting like a bear in a children’s book.

What a smart girl. Look, Gabe, it’s a chapter book, she read it all by herself!

“Everything okay at school?”

Unbelievable. “Sure. Same as ever.”

“Lots of homework?”

Angela yawned. “Always.”

“Everything
really
okay?”

Angela eyed her mother. “Yes, Mom, sure. Why?”

Angela, did you do your homework? Did you did you did you.

“Oh, it’s nothing. Just that Maya said something about she heard you crying sometimes in the afternoons—” Her mother stole a
surreptitious
glance at the calendar.

“
Crying?
Me? Why would I be crying in the afternoons?”

“I don’t know. That’s what I’m asking you.”

Angela put on her best exasperated face. In fact she had been crying in the afternoons. She couldn’t explain it to her mother any better than she could explain it to herself. She was not, in general, a crying sort of person. She tried to make her expression
impassive.

“So you haven’t been crying? Angela?”

“No, Mom, I haven’t been crying.” Angela bit down on her lower lip, hard. God.

Angela, did you practice?

Angela, kick the ball! Angela, reach for the wall!

Her mother exhaled audibly and rubbed her hands together like that was that and said, “Good.” Then she said, “Mrs. Fletcher called earlier.”

Instinctively, Angela checked her phone, which she kept on the desk but which she turned facedown and muted while she was doing homework. “I didn’t get any calls.”

“The home phone.” Angela’s mother looked around the room, seeking, no doubt, another pile of clutter to which she could bring order. But with the exception of the recently folded shirt Angela did not allow clutter; her room was as neat as a pin (seriously, what did that mean?). All the clutter in this room was smack-dab in the middle of Angela’s mind. Which was a crowded and bewildering place.

“She did? She called the home phone? Nobody calls the home phone.” Angela chewed at a fingernail. She thought painting them black might have helped her kick the habit, but so far it hadn’t.

“Just telemarketers,” agreed her mother. Then gently moving Angela’s hand away from her mouth, “No nibbles, honey.” (That’s what she used to say to Angela when she was young, Cecily’s age, and had first begun biting the nails.) Angela thought about protesting the choice of phrase, but she was too tired. She let her hand fall to her lap. “But anyway. She wanted to know if you could babysit, on Friday night.”

“Babysit?” Angela had stopped babysitting regularly for the Fletchers. Too busy, for one thing. And for another, Joshua Fletcher was a sweet kid (sort of, sweet
ish,
anyway), but he had so much untamed energy that Angela spent half the time running around just making sure he didn’t hurt himself. When the younger Fletcher, Colton, was eleven months old—Angela was thirteen—Angela had been there when he’d taken his first steps; she’d thought to capture it with a video taken with her newly acquired phone, and Mrs. Fletcher had been forever grateful. Recently Joshua had been diagnosed with ADHD and the Fletchers had gotten divorced.

“Do you think you might do it, Angela? She’s really in a bind, she sounded desperate. Things have been tough for them, and she never even asks anymore, she knows you’re so busy. It’s the night before the auction and I realize I asked you to stay here with the girls and I hate to take up your whole weekend. But.” Angela’s mother put the heels of her palms to her forehead and massaged the skin outward. Angela had asked her once why she did that and Nora had said, regretfully, “Trying to smooth away the wrinkles.”

Angela said, “I don’t know…there’s a meet on Saturday.” She flipped through
Angela’s Ashes.
So many more pages to go. Her flute, still in its case, seemed to be reprimanding her.

“Oh!” said her mother. “You’re reading
Angela’s Ashes
! I loved that book.” Then, channeling Cecily’s dance teacher, the eminent Seamus O’Malley, Nora said, “Bit of a downer though, yeah?”

Angela allowed herself a small smile: her mother was trying.
Assiduously.
“That sounded British,” she said. “Or South African.”

“Listen, honey, you know I don’t try to dictate your schedule to you but this time I would really, really appreciate it. If you would help out Anna. She’s had a hard time since the divorce and I have a feeling”—here she lowered her voice, as though the walls were listening—“I have a feeling that she might be going on
a date.
”

Henrietta Faulkner had beaten her on two out of six hills. There was so much more to go in
Angela’s Ashes.
Five fifteen a.m. practice every Friday. Volunteer tutoring for National Honor Society: twenty-five hours required over the course of the year. She hadn’t even started thinking about that. The term paper for AP English. (Virginia Woolf?) The Harvard application…