The Admissions (17 page)

She waited a beat. “Vice versa?”

“No. Trust me, that’s the furthest thing from her mind. And my mind.”

Nora stared at the moon glancing in through the skylight. You
always
recouped your investment when you added skylights to a home.

“Then why do you hate her?”

“It’s like I said at the restaurant. She’s very intense, work-wise. She always wants to talk about Bizzvara. Constantly asking for career advice. You know how that generation is,
me me me.
Makes me crazy. It really, truly, makes me crazy. Like they want to rule the world, but they don’t want to put the necessary work in to learn
how
to rule it. They just want things handed to them. She just—she represents something that I really despise.”

Nora settled her head against her pillow. “That’s it?” she asked. “Really and truly, that’s why you hate her?”

“That’s it. I swear. Scout’s honor.”

She thought of Gabe in a scouting uniform. “Were you really a scout? I can never remember.”

“I was.”

“There are still so many things I don’t know about you. Or that I forgot. How is that possible? We’ve been married for ten lifetimes.”

“Right. I know. At least ten, maybe more.”

“More.”

2:15 a.m.

Dear M—

I keep dreaming about Rhode Island. I dream about the beach, of course. That’s an obvious one. But I also dream about other things, like the lady who used to work at the drive-through at the bank. Remember her? Her two front teeth crossed over each other, you and I were fascinated by that. If she lived in Marin she would have gotten braces in kindergarten. She always gave us lollipops. I remember it like it was yesterday, sitting in the backseat of the station wagon. Summer, humid, no air-conditioning, the backs of our thighs sticking to the black vinyl car seat.

Such an ordinary memory, I wonder why I’m dreaming about it.

Isn’t it funny? All these years out here, and suddenly all I can think about is going home. Simpler times, I guess that’s what I’m longing for.

I peeled back the layers to reveal the truth that I haven’t been admitting to anyone. Do you care to hear it, Marianne, honorary therapist?

I want to go home. Not for a visit, but for good.

When Nora and Marianne were young they used to play a game called One Genie, Three Wishes. They played lots of games! How was it that they had so much time for games? They were smart girls, they were productive members of the childhood community in Narragansett. Nora had been an avid Girl Scout, from Daisies all the way to whatever they called it when you were so old there was something faintly humiliating about it. (There was an “adult” category at many of Cecily’s
feises,
and Nora felt a definite twang of embarrassment when she passed by the rooms where these women were competing. They looked like a bunch of librarians who had gotten drunk at the holiday party and had taken to the dance floor. No offense to librarians! But. Some things were better left to the young.)

For six years running Nora had sold more cookies than anyone in her troop, and one year she sold more than any scout in her region.

Marianne, for her part, had been a phenomenal soccer player, and this was back in the days before all girls played soccer as a rite of passage.

So. Three wishes, the genie says to you. Because despite the soccer, despite the scouting and the tooling around the neighborhood on their three-speeds, and the catching of lightning bugs during endless summer evenings, and the Monopoly that went on for hours or days during blizzards, and Boggle and Scrabble and Clue when they tired of Monopoly, Nora and Marianne still had time for this game.

Just one wish, Genie, thought Nora now. Just one. You can keep the other two, I don’t even need them. And my wish is this! I would like to take each of my children at a particular age (of my choosing, Genie) and I would like to put them in a glass jar, like a mason jar. (The logistics I’ll leave up to you.) And I would like to be able to take them out and play with them and listen to them and
enjoy
them the way they were before the world got its teeth into them. If their older selves, their current selves, could spend a minute talking to the smaller versions that would be really cool but it’s not totally mandatory.

What’s that, Genie? What ages? That’s easy. I hardly have to think about that. Angela, age three, because she had this adorable lisp and she called strawberries
strawbabies
and because she went through a phase where she said, “Goodbye! I love you!” to anyone,
anyone,
like the clerk at the gas station or patients waiting to be called in to see the dentist. For Cecily I would pick five, kindergarten, because she wore her hair in two braids with ribbons at the ends and she had this great big belly laugh that a lot of kids have outgrown by that age but that she hadn’t. People have turned around in the grocery store when they’ve heard that laugh, and I am not kidding, Genie, when I tell you that every single person who hears that laugh laughs too. You can’t
not
laugh back at it. It is quite literally not possible.

Maya: age four. She took gymnastics and she thought the balance beam was called a balance
bean.
I never corrected her because I didn’t want her to stop saying it. It killed me every time.

Is that a strange wish, Genie? Keeping my kids in mason jars? You would know, I guess, you live in a bottle. But don’t judge me for it. Don’t judge me for wanting to take the very best of them and keep it locked up where nobody else can get to it. You’re not a mother, are you, Genie? Your sexuality seems kind of amorphous to me, so I’m guessing not. And if you’re not a mother, you don’t know. So don’t judge.

Nora had many productive, useful things she could be doing with her morning—she wasn’t due into the office until noon, because she had to work into the evening. She had one showing for the Watkins house (she could tell already that the buyers weren’t solid, but at this point she had to chase every possible lead) plus a pile of paperwork that wouldn’t be ready until later that afternoon. She’d planned to take the morning to catch up on a bunch of things around the house and maybe even exercise; optimistically, she’d put on yoga pants and an embarrassingly underused lululemon top the girls had given her for Christmas the previous year. There was a pile of Maya’s clothes she wanted to go through for donation pickup, and three calls she was supposed to make about Spring Fling donations. Dry cleaning to drop off for Gabe. And for once in her life she wanted to get the family Christmas card made up in November so she could put it in the mail in early December. So far she had accomplished none of these things.

One problem: her laptop was at work, and that’s where she stored her pictures. Then she remembered that they’d taken some gorgeous photos on their summer vacation in Alaska with Angela’s iPhone; those might be on Angela’s computer right now, having been uploaded through the mysterious “cloud,” whose workings Nora still did not quite understand. (“It’s in the cloud!” people said so happily, so casually, like that just explained everything. It put Nora’s teeth on edge.) Anyway, it was worth a shot. She tiptoed into Angela’s room, as if she were trespassing. But she wasn’t
trespassing,
she was very innocently looking for family vacation photographs for the family Christmas card. In a house on which she paid a good part of the mortgage. (Depending on the real estate market in a given year.) She was allowed. And besides being allowed, she was, parentally speaking, entitled. They had a rule that Nora and Gabe were allowed to look at any messages or social media posts that Angela put out or received. Truly, Nora forgot to do that most of the time, and anytime she did remember she discovered such inane chatter that she didn’t have the stomach for it, all the silly abbreviations and emoticons, all the nonsense.

Of course, everybody was silly as a teenager, everybody did things that would make their parents blush if they knew about them. Nora certainly had! The difference was that now it was so terrifyingly
public
—anybody could witness your shame or humiliation or insecurities. It was there for anyone with a data plan to see.

Nora had mostly instituted the rule because she’d learned about it a few years before at a “parents and technology” seminar when Angela was in middle school. Because, really, it was
Angela
! She didn’t even have time to be up to no good. She barely had time to be up to good.

Nora tapped a button on the keyboard to bring the screen to life and thought about how nice it would be to cross the Christmas card off her to-do list. Wouldn’t that be a coup! She’d shock everyone who’d ever known her. She imagined Marianne’s face when she reached into her mailbox.

Angela had her iMessages open on her computer. Could Nora have closed the iMessage screen? Sure, she could have. But she didn’t. As she watched, a group message popped up, four unfamiliar numbers with local area codes.

Anyone know where Addy is?

And then a reply from another number,
nope.

Nora stared at the screen and wondered who Addy was. Maybe it was a nickname, short for Adeline or Addison or Adelaide, a nice, solid, old-fashioned name for a nice, solid, old-fashioned girl, someone who might wear a maxi skirt to school. But Nora had never heard of Addy.

Well, of course she hadn’t heard of everyone! There were scores of students at the high school, and really Nora knew only a fraction of them, whereas she knew all the kids in Maya’s and Cecily’s classes.

So that was that.

She was moving the cursor toward Angela’s iPhoto library when another message popped up, this one from Angela herself, texting from her phone:
no I wish,
and then the original questioner texted,
2 bad
and then Angela texted,
IKR?

Nora wanted to reach through the computer and tell Angela,
Stop texting at school.
She wanted to tell her,
You’re too smart to say
“yeah”
and
“I know, right?” She wanted to hit reply and ask who Addy was. She wanted to scroll through every other message on Angela’s account and see what she was missing out on. She had the right, of course. It was part of the agreement as long as Gabe and Nora paid the cell phone bills. But she didn’t
really
want to. Because she was getting a funny sensation in her belly, a Viper-roller-coaster-at-Six-Flags feeling. (The last time Cecily had coaxed her on the Viper Nora had thrown up semi-discreetly in a garbage can just past the exit.) She felt sort of like a voyeur, sure, but, a thousand times worse, she also felt like a stranger. Someone who didn’t know her own child.

Of course, she
knew
her daughter.

She knew lots about Angela. She knew that when she was a child she liked applesauce with cinnamon in it and toast with a great deal of butter on it. She knew that the only subject at which she did not naturally excel was science. She knew that she liked light blue but not navy, red jelly beans but not black, spinach but not kale, Katy Perry but not Pink. She knew that until she was seven she liked to sleep with her door open and her closet light on. She knew that she was a cautious driver and a prolific texter and better at the butterfly than the backstroke. She knew that she sometimes forgot to put her running clothes in the hamper but never forgot a friend’s birthday.

See?

There was a time when Nora knew
everything
about her daughter. Everything. But now she knew so little.

And here it was, nearly eleven, her exercise clothes were still pristine, she hadn’t done a damn thing about the Christmas card.

It was called the Common Application, but to Gabe there was nothing common about it. Of course he’d known forever that this day was coming, but he couldn’t quite believe that it had actually arrived.

His progeny. His eyes felt moist and he had to blink and look away before another family member noticed and perhaps made fun.

It was all just very, very remarkable, that was all. That they had arrived at this point.

Angela’s laptop was open on the kitchen desk and Angela sat in front of it, squinting at the screen. Her posture was perfect. Deadly, even. Her posture said,
Let’s do this thing.
Gabe couldn’t believe nobody else in the family was similarly in awe of the moment. Cecily and Maya were already in their pajamas and in fact Maya’s bedtime had come and gone, unnoticed. They were all hyped up because Halloween was only two days away.

Gabe thought about pouring himself a bourbon, to celebrate this moment, this night, the submitting of Angela’s Harvard application.

Also, there was one other thing. He was nervous.

Well, why not? He poured two fingers, then three. Why the hell not. Big day.

Abby Freeman’s face appeared briefly in his mind’s eye and he made every effort to ablate it.
Pop.
There it went, into oblivion.

“I can’t believe this is happening,” he said, to nobody in particular. Cecily and Maya had repaired to the living room to sneak in a show on the Disney Channel, and Nora was loading the dishwasher with the dinner dishes.

Angela took a deep breath and let it out slowly, the way she did before the start of a cross-country race. Her hands, poised over the keyboard, were shaking. (Maybe
she
needed the bourbon?)

“Can you just check it all over for me one time?” asked Angela.

“Absolutely!” said Nora, but Angela twisted her shoulders and whispered, “Sorry, Mom, I meant Dad.”

“Right,” said Nora. “Of course you did. I knew that.” She clattered some dishes in the sink to indicate that she wasn’t offended.

“Dad?” said Angela. She turned her face toward him and all he could think about was the way she’d first looked at him from the confines of the hospital blanket on the night she was born, after her first feeding, when the world was calm and her belly was full and she was just getting used to this thing called life.

“I thought you’d never ask,” he said. (In fact, he had been terrified that she wouldn’t.) “I’m just going to— Do you mind if I take it into my office, so I can concentrate?”

“Nope,” said Angela, and she handed over the computer carefully, the way you’d pass off an infant.

Gabe had cruised the College Confidential message boards, and he knew how very, very many people were out there, about to press
Submit
on this same application. He hoped Angela never cruised the College Confidential message boards; they were a minefield of ultracompetitive students, with a bunch of low-grade procrastinators mixed in. These poor kids wondered if they should disclose their mental illnesses in their essays (definitely not, was the consensus); they wondered how to get by on four hours of sleep while playing high school football; they wondered how competitive the White House internship program was and what would happen if they decided to drop an AP class senior year. They gave Gabe a serious case of agita.

When Gabe returned from the office he handed the computer back to Angela. He half expected that things would be different, that the universe would have somehow reordered itself in his absence. But all was just as he’d left it: the canned laughter from the television, Angela sitting at the kitchen desk. The only change was that the dishwasher was now beginning its cycle, issuing semicontented noises.

“Go ahead,” he said. “Submit it. Knock ’em dead.”

Angela took another deep breath and pressed some things on the computer. Then she said, “Okay. That’s it. It’s done. It’s in.”

“It’s in!” cried Nora. “What should we do, to celebrate? Champagne?”

“We can’t drink champagne,” said Cecily, from the living room. “We’re kids.”

“A sip isn’t going to kill anyone,” said Nora. “And I meant Angela, actually, not you and Maya.”

“No—no,” said Angela. “I don’t want champagne. I just want—”

“What?” said Gabe, way, way too eagerly. “Anything you say.”

“I just want to go to bed,” said Angela. Her shoulders slumped forward, and Gabe drank the rest of the bourbon down straight.