The Admissions (11 page)

“Wow,” said Nora sincerely. “I never would have guessed that.” It was true. The bump was scarcely visible. This woman was probably the type to put on just the weight of the baby, nothing more, and to walk out of the hospital two days later wearing her favorite pair of pre-pregnancy jeans. When Nora was five months along with Angela she was already indulging so exuberantly in her daily pint of Ben & Jerry’s that her obstetrician had given her a stern warning and a handout about
incrementally
increasing caloric intake over the course of a pregnancy. The word
incrementally
was outlined with a neon-yellow highlighter.

Courtney said, “Thanks,” and then sighed again. She sighed very prettily, like a high-society lady in an Edith Wharton novel. “Honestly, I’m not that interested in the inspection. I love the house, but I don’t care about the behind-the-scenes stuff. The heating, the air-conditioning, blah blah blah. It’s all Greek to me.”

“It’s a great house,” said Nora, as neutrally as she could manage. “Really perfect as it is.” (
Don’t sell it,
sounded a note of caution from Arthur Sutton, coming to Nora as clearly as if Arthur were standing right there in the kitchen with them.
Don’t sell the house when it’s already sold.
) Courtney looked at Nora and cocked her head and said, “Do you have kids?”

Nora closed her laptop: it seemed it was chatting time. That was fine. She was here to serve. A good real estate agent had to be part therapist, part cocktail party hostess, part badass. Fearless and patient at the same time. She channeled Arthur Sutton, who had taught her never, ever to show anything to a buyer other than the utmost tranquillity, and said, “Three girls. Seven, ten, and seventeen.” What was that advertisement from the 1980s?
Never let them see you sweat.
In some ways real estate was just as much theater as theater itself was. More! Because one person was actor and director both. Stagehand too, besides the therapist, the cocktail party hostess, the badass. Very few people understood how many hats this job required.

“Oh, hey,
wow,
” said Courtney. She could have meant anything by that, or nothing. But Nora took it to mean, Man, lady, you are
old.
Courtney had no additional follow-up questions. If you had children yourself you asked things like what grade they were in or what sports they played or if they liked their teachers or where they were applying to college, but if you were newly pregnant you didn’t know enough to ask all of those questions. You still, hilariously, thought it was all about you, and your checkups, and what stroller you were going to choose and which of your friends was also pregnant and how much weight you’d gained or hadn’t gained, maybe as compared to the aforementioned friends who were also pregnant. Nora had been the same way when she was pregnant with Angela, four hundred years ago. As obvious as it seemed later, you didn’t really, truly understand that you were growing a little person in there until that little person emerged, blinking and crying, and looked at you with squinty watery eyes and an expression that very clearly said,
Well. Here I am. What are you going to do with me now?
Although, truth be told, Angela had emerged with a preternatural calm, and her eyes were wide and alert. Cecily had been blinking and crying. Maya had been breech. (Could that somehow explain the reading difficulties?)

Anyway! You didn’t know that the complicated lives of children were going to unroll themselves in front of you like a carpet whether you wanted them to or not, and that you would be expected to walk along that carpet for many, many years, always wondering if you were walking the right way.

“Do you know what you’re having?” asked Nora politely—she didn’t run in many circles with young pregnant women these days, but she remembered that this was a proper question to put forth. That, and Where are you registered? Hilarious! Imagine women in Somalia or Kenya or India talking like this among their friends. No, sir, those women (not to stereotype) just popped them out, strapped them to their bellies or their backs or wherever there was room, and then got pregnant again.

People had asked Nora all the time if she knew what she was having. She hadn’t found out, not with any of her children. The prospect made her feel too anxious. She couldn’t stop thinking that if she assigned a gender to them then she would have to assign a name, and if a name then they became real people, and if they were real people then they were subject to the whims of nature and biology, where anything could happen, including but not limited to death or birth defects. (“A bit of a downer of a worldview, Nora-Bora,” Gabe had said. But Nora, in the throes of pregnancy hormones, weeping once over a mistake in one of her open house listings in the
Chronicle,
couldn’t help it.)

“No,” said Courtney. “I haven’t found out. I want to be surprised!”

Surprise!
thought Nora.
Here’s a little person who will one day need to get into college! Here’s a person who will need three meals a day for the next eighteen years, but who will eschew more than half of the ones you prepare for reasons of taste or general stubbornness! Here is a person who will have nightly homework, yearly science fair projects; here’s a person who will one day go through puberty, and you will have a front-row seat to the show.

“You’re going to love parenting,” said Nora. “There’s nothing better. Except—”

“Except what?”

Nora drummed her fingers on top of the laptop. The inspector and Mr. Buyer were nowhere to be found. The tapping in the garage had ceased. Perhaps they were outside, inspecting the grounds, though most likely the buyers would bring in a separate inspector for that. Most did, at this level. These people, for sure. They had enough money to be crazy with it if they wanted but also enough brains to be smart. She looked Courtney square in her pretty face and said, “Can I give you a piece of advice?”

Courtney said, “Sure?” She smoothed her already-smooth hair with one hand.

Nora took a deep breath. Yes, it was true. She had become
that
woman, the woman dispensing matronly advice. No matter, what she had to say was as true as anything. Courtney was chewing on a cuticle; it was, thus far, the only sign of physical imperfection Nora had noticed, and she’d been looking pretty hard. Nora said, “I know, everybody will say this to you!”

Courtney said, “You’re making me nervous.”

“Well,” said Nora. “I don’t mean to. But I wanted to say: enjoy the heck out of that baby.”

“Okay,” said Courtney automatically, like a child being given instructions for a test.

“Because it will seem so hard, I know it will. But later on, when they’re older, my God, when they’re applying to college and crying over a test score and they still need you but they don’t
need you
need you the way they did before, you’re going to wish you had that time back, when they were snuggled up next to you and they needed you, only you. Nobody else, not even their fathers, the way they need you.”

“My mother-in-law says stuff like that to me all the time,” said Courtney levelly. She shook her head and her hair lifted and settled; it was Disney princess hair, Mulan or Jasmine. (Was she part Asian, Mrs. Buyer? It was hard to say—but there was something exotic about her, something not-quite-U.S.-born-and-bred. Eastern European? Russian? Boarding school, definitely, somewhere far away and astronomically priced. This was going to be one beautiful baby, whatever gender it decided to be, beautiful and rich.) “But I guess I don’t really get it. Yet.”

Mrs. Buyer stood—gracefully, giving, in her stance, no indication of any physical discomfort. The sun was now shining with a vengeance. Mrs. Buyer walked toward the French doors leading to the deck and Nora imagined her, baby in her arms, striding across the kitchen, a burp cloth over her shoulder, a decaf espresso brewing at the coffee bar. Wearing some sort of luxury robe that Nora could not clearly imagine since she herself did not actually own one; she was a battered terry-cloth girl herself. Perhaps silk? Although that seemed impractical, with the baby. Slippery, and likely dry-clean only. Nora sighed. She knew her business. She knew the perfect buyer when she saw the perfect buyer. Once Nora Hawthorne, Marin realtor extraordinaire, could envision somebody inside a home, making a coffee, holding a baby, it was pretty close to a sure thing.

And then.

“What’s this?”

Nora said, “What’s what?”

“On the doors, there’s…” Courtney Buyer was crouching down, inspecting the doors. “There’s something in the glass.”

“Probably just a smudge,” said Nora. That was unlikely, because Bee Watkins was extremely particular about her housekeeping, which she didn’t do herself but which she outsourced to a lovely Mexican woman who spoke almost no English but who came in from Vallejo
every single day
to vacuum and dust and Windex the French doors and wash the dinner dishes from the night before. Imagine.

Nora’s heartbeat picked up speed. She didn’t like the way Courtney was crouching; she didn’t like the way she was frowning—it was enough of a frown that it caused a tiny divot to appear in Courtney’s
Asian/Russian/European/boarding
school brow.

“My goodness, don’t crouch like that,” said Nora. “That can’t be comfortable.” In fact Courtney looked perfectly at ease; she straightened her legs with barely a flicker of effort, not even pushing herself with her hands—she looked like a long-legged feline. She must be a yoga aficionado.

Standing now, Courtney was still peering at the glass in the doors. “No, it’s not a smudge,” she said. “My father owned a glass manufacturer for twenty years in Brooklyn.” (Brooklyn! Nora never, absolutely never, would have guessed Brooklyn.) “There are pits all throughout this glass. It’s a defect. They’ll have to be replaced.”

“A defect?” Nora crossed the living room to the French doors. The living room was so big it felt like it took years to cross it. Lawrence and Bee entertained frequently, dozens and dozens of people at a time. Four of Nora’s childhood living rooms, maybe five, would have fit inside the living room in the Watkins home. “I can’t imagine that. The current owners are very particular.”
(Also,
she wanted to add,
I thought you didn’t care about inspections.)

Just then Mr. Buyer and the inspector appeared. The inspector smiled and said, “We’re looking good! Just a couple of rooms to go. Great house.”

“Not so fast,” said Courtney. She crooked a finger at her husband and motioned him closer. “There’s something you have to see here.”

“What’s that?” said the inspector, and Nora, in her brightest, don’t-you-worry-about-a-thing voice, said, “Nothing,” at the same time that Courtney said, “Something.”

Now Mr. Buyer crossed the room too, and he and his wife both leaned in toward the glass. Outside, birds were chirping like crazy, as if they were tuning up for the Philharmonic. Across the street, a leaf blower roared to life, and a lawn mower started up too. The buzzing and sawing of a contractor’s mysterious machinery joined the melody. It was all very elite Northern California, privileged people keeping up their beautiful homes, and the sound was usually music to Nora’s ears. But all Nora really heard now was Courtney saying to her husband, in a low, urgent, confident voice used by wives the world over when they knew it was important that they have the upper hand, that they be listened to, that this was A Very Big Deal. All Nora could hear—she’d heard the sound before, in many different guises, though all recognizable to her practiced ear—were the sounds of a deal that was about to fall through.

Cecily knocked on Angela’s door. She knew Angela was in there, but at first there was no answer. So Cecily kept up the knocking.

Finally she heard a loud sigh, then footsteps on the hardwood, then the door opened just a smidge, and one of Angela’s big blue eyes appeared in the crack.

“Oh,” said Angela. “I thought it was Mom or Dad, coming to check on me.” She opened the door wider.

Cecily was wearing the black shorts she wore to Irish dance, the white socks, and her ghillies.

“Why are you wearing those in the house?” Angela nodded toward the ghillies.

“They’re new,” reported Cecily. “I’m stretching them out.” She extended a foot toward Angela.

“Why didn’t you just get them in a bigger size?”

“Ha!” said Cecily, then realized Angela hadn’t been joking. “They’re supposed to fit super-tight. So you have to get them really fitted, and then stretch them.”

Experimentally, she did a few steps of her hornpipe. The hornpipe was meant to be done in hard shoes, not ghillies, but Cecily wasn’t allowed to wear her hard shoes on the wood. They left black marks and scuffs everywhere.

“I’m going to sleep in them all week. So that they’re ready for the
feis
in November. It’s a big one, the regional.” You spelled
feis
one way, but you said it another:
fesh.
Weird, in Angela’s opinion. It meant competition.

“Oh,” said Angela irritably. “You can sleep like that? That looks really uncomfortable.”

“It’s not so bad,” said Cecily. “Anyway, Seamus says I have an incredibly high pain tolerance. Do you have an incredibly high pain tolerance?”

Angela was looking back at the work on her desk. “I guess so,” she said. “Yeah. What I have is an incredible amount of homework. So do you think you could go now, Cecily?” She chewed at her fingernails.

“You’re so
grouchy
lately, geez.”

Cecily looked around Angela’s room. It was smaller than the room that Maya and Cecily shared, but Cecily was still envious that she had it all to herself. Maya talked in her sleep and sometimes even sleepwalked; Cecily had recently woken to find her sitting at her little white desk, completely asleep but with her eyes wide open, trying to open a container of markers. That had freaked Cecily right out.

Her mother said it was stress that made Maya do that.
(How can second grade be stressful?
Cecily asked, and her mother had said,
It can be if you’re a struggling reader.)
Her mother got
ridiculously
stressed about Maya’s reading, even though she tried not to show it.

“So…,” said Cecily. She lay down on Angela’s bed and flexed her feet. Angela tapped her foot and looked again at her desk. “When you go away to college can I move into your room?”

“Cecily, I told you—”

“Just answer that one question. One.”

Angela smiled her new, weird smile.
Look at me!
the smile seemed to say.
I am all mouth, no eyes!
“I doubt it.”

“I’m tired of sharing a room with Maya, though. Don’t you think it’s stupid that Maya and I have to share just so we keep a guest room free? We don’t even have that many guests.”

“Sure we do. Aunt Marianne comes at least once a year. And Grandma comes from Rhode Island.”

“Not that much.”

“No, not that much. But still.”

“Pinkie has a room all to herself. And a bathroom.”

“Pinkie,” said Angela, “has a whole house to herself, and a whole set of parents, because Pinkie is an only child. Pinkie is probably incredibly lonely. Why do you think she wants to come over here all the time?”

“True.” Cecily examined Angela’s bulletin board. “Who’s Timothy Valentine? Why do you have his picture there?”

“That’s nothing.”

“Is he your
boyfriend
?”

“Come on, Cecily, don’t be an idiot.”

That one stung. Cecily tried not to let it show. Angela frowned and looked a little embarrassed. “I’m sorry. He’s an admissions guy at Harvard, the guy for this region. The
Chronicle
did an interview with him once and Mom saved it for me. So I cut out his picture. So I can bow to him five times a day. Like he’s Mecca.”

“Really?”

“No. Of course not. It’s just so I have a mental image of the guy who might be looking at my application. Personal connection, you know. But seriously Cecily—”

“Do you talk to him?”

Angela looked even more embarrassed. “Sometimes,” she said. Then, in a hurry, “Not very much.”

“He looks nice,” said Cecily. “Friendly. He looks like he’d like you.”

“Thanks.” Angela opened the door and stood near it.

Cecily looked at Angela’s bare walls. “What’d you do with your stuff? Your posters and all that?”

Angela took her chin in her hands and twisted her neck and Cecily heard a popping sound. Then she sighed and said, “I took them down.”

“Why?”

“I didn’t want them anymore. Cecily, I mean it, I have to do my homework now.” She gave Cecily a little push.

Cecily said,
“Ow,”
and stayed where she was. “What are you working on?”

Angela huffed and sighed and sat down at her desk and put her back to Cecily. “Statistics. But after that I have to work on English.”

“What do you have to do for English?”

“Do you really want to know? You do? Okay, we have to choose a British author and read two works and some criticism and create an original thesis. It’s called an extended essay. Okay? Now get
out.
”

Cecily didn’t know what most of that meant, but she was trying to find a way to stay in Angela’s room so she said, “Who are you going to choose?”

Angela leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. When she opened them she turned toward Cecily and said, “Probably Virginia Woolf.”

“I don’t know who that is.”

“That’s okay. You don’t need to, yet. She went mad.”

“Crazy mad or angry mad?”

“Crazy mad. She ended her life by walking into the water with stones in her pockets.”

“Huh? I don’t get it.”

“So she drowned. The stones weighed her down until she drowned.”

“But.” Cecily was perplexed. “Why didn’t she just take the stones out of her pockets?”

Angela sighed. “Because. She didn’t want to. She wanted to die. Okay? She wanted to die.”

This was horrifying news. Cecily felt a little bit sick to her stomach, and she watched a complicated expression cross Angela’s face. “I shouldn’t have told you that, Cecily. I don’t want you to get nightmares. Forget I said that, okay?”

“I don’t get nightmares. I never even remember my dreams.” Cecily tried not to think about the stones in the pockets. (Logistically, she wasn’t even sure how that was possible, like how many stones you would need and how big your pockets would have to be.)

Cecily lay back down on the bed and covered her face with one of Angela’s decorative pillows and mumbled, “Are you coming to my
feis
?”

Angela said, “Cec, I can’t hear a word you’re saying.”

Cecily removed the pillow, sighed theatrically, and said, “Are you coming to my
feis
? My dance competition.”

“I know what a
feis
is, Cecily. Geez.”

“Well, are you?”

“I don’t know. When is it?”

“The ninth. November ninth. My ceili team is trying to qualify for Worlds. We’re really good this year. So…you should come.”

“I have a meet.”

Cecily could sense that she was going to get tossed out of the room, so she kept talking. “Do you remember fourth grade?”

“Sort of,” said Angela. “Not really.”

“The California history year.”

“Oh,”
said Angela. “Oh, sure. The gold rush, et cetera. Yeah, I remember. All those field trips. It was fun. You’ll like it.” She smiled at Cecily again, the real thing this time, the eyes joining in. But it was still not enough for Cecily. She was drinking up her sister’s attention; she wanted more and more and more. She remembered when Angela had helped her learn to ride a bike, running behind her, balancing the bike, letting go and yelling,
You can do it!

“Did you have to do a paper on a state landmark?”

Angela had taken up her pencil and was writing something on graph paper. She looked up and said, “Probably. I don’t remember.”

“I’m going to do Coit Tower. Or the Golden Gate. I’m not sure. Hey, Angela?”

“Yes?”

“Are you going to miss us? When you go off to Harvard?”

Angela turned around and studied Cecily. Her mouth twisted in a funny way and she got up without saying anything and opened the door. Finally she said, “Of course I’m going to miss you.”

“For real?”

“Yes. For real.” Firmly. “I’m sorry I was grouchy. I’m just—” She looked at the ceiling and blinked rapidly. “Never mind. Now get out of here. Go stretch your shoes or whatever. I have to study.”