The Admissions (24 page)

“Ah,” Gabe said to Abby. They were standing on the Golden Gate Bridge. “
This
is what it’s all about, isn’t it? This is what makes living here worth it, what makes up for the traffic, the expense. Look at that view.” Mount Tam to the north, the city to the south. Alcatraz in view. A sailboat with pristine white sails passing underneath. Beautiful.

A gaggle of Japanese tourists passed them, chattering and pointing. Then came a woman in a sari. On the west sidewalk (they were on the east) he could see a couple riding bicycles. It was warm for late November, must be mid-sixties. Abby peered at him with those odd, close-together eyes. It was strange, standing here with a woman almost his same height. She moved in closer. She parted her lips just a little bit, like she was going to kiss him.

“Oh, no, Abby,” he said. “You’re facing the wrong way. You’ve got to look out, to appreciate it.” He put his hands on her slender shoulders and turned her. Gently! So gently, so she could see the twilight purpling of the sky. He could feel the vibrations from the traffic underneath his feet.

She turned.

“Look at that,” he said, in his most tender and accommodating voice. “It’s like nothing else in the world, this bridge. It means so much to so many people.”

It would be so easy, from there. A push, a fall, a tragic accident, a young and promising life snuffed out.

So easy.

“Gabe?
Gabe? Earth to Gabe…
”

Gabe jerked back to reality. He and Nora were making homemade spaghetti sauce. This was a highly unusual occurrence, the two of them cooking together on a Friday night. They used to do it quite often, before kids. In his dismal little apartment in the Mission they’d once attempted Lobster Thermidor. It had been a certified failure, and they’d paid through the nose for the lobsters. But there was lots of wine involved, so it was fun. Like most things with Nora were fun.

He pulled himself back into the present.

“You have to skin the tomatoes before you chop them, you nitwit. That’s why I have the water boiling. Remember? You make the little X at one end and drop them into the water for exactly sixty seconds, no more, no less.”

“You’re talking to me like I’m someone who never watches
Chopped,
” Gabe said, channeling his normal voice.

If he pushed Abby off a bridge, Nora would never lovingly call him a nitwit again. He’d never make homemade spaghetti sauce again; he might never eat it again. Plus, wouldn’t it be difficult to push someone tall off a bridge? Much easier to push a petite person, you’d have physics on your side. Though the rails on the Golden Gate were pretty high, no matter the size of your victim.

You’re a sick bastard, he told himself. You know that? A sick, sick bastard.

Tomorrow, he would tell them at Elpis. Tomorrow, he would make it right.

Or if not tomorrow, then definitely the next day.

Melvin Strickland sat in the teachers’ lounge with a Starbucks coffee and a croissant. He was supposed to be watching his cholesterol and his blood pressure and everything else a man of his age (fifty-six next week) should be watching; his wife, who worked as a hospital administrator at Kaiser San Francisco, had sent him off for the day with a container of fruit salad and another container of hummus. To go with the hummus was a snack bag filled with baby carrots. He felt like a preschooler, unpacking this food from his satchel. So he supplemented.

Melvin Strickland had been teaching at the same school for two and a half decades. He’d seen his own children, three of them, two boys (easy) and a girl (more difficult than the two boys put together), through their own high school years. There had been some bad moments, and many good.

Melvin Strickland had seen thirty-one of his students accepted at Ivy League colleges. He remembered the best students he’d ever had—he could, when called upon, also remember the best work of the best students: his mental filing cabinet was extremely well organized. He figured in two and a half decades he’d graded north of 28,000 essays. He’d written hundreds of recommendation letters. He was, to put it gently, exhausted.

So when Leslie Simmons approached and sat down across from him the day before Thanksgiving (without asking), Melvin found himself decidedly this side of happy. Leslie unpacked, in short order, a Greek yogurt, a whole-wheat wrap with (she told him) almond butter, and some sort of salad, heavy (naturally) on the kale. Leslie was in her late thirties. Smart but scattered. Still had young children at home, preschool and younger, which explained the scattered. Degrees from Johns Hopkins and Stanford, which explained the smart.

“It’s such a treat,” Leslie said now. “To come in here every day and worry only about my own food, not what anyone else is eating, not cleaning up anyone else’s messes.”

“Ah,” said Melvin charitably. He remembered those days, but only barely. Mostly he remembered them fondly, but his wife was always reminding him that the sheen of nostalgia did a lot to conceal the reality. She was pragmatic nearly to a fault, which was why she was so highly valued at Kaiser.

Leslie was going at the salad with what could only be called gusto. “I think these five lunches are the best part of my week.” She smiled at him. She had a pretty smile. “I love Mondays. Sometimes the end of the weekend can’t come fast enough for me.”

This was a depressing confession, but Melvin didn’t let on. Instead he inquired politely after the AP English Lit class—the crown jewel in the school’s English department, and one that had been bequeathed to Leslie this year. By all accounts she was doing well.

“Oh, it’s wonderful,” said Leslie. She had come to them via a school in Antioch, where parental oversight was zero and student fervor a negative five. They were lucky they had nabbed her when they did, before she burned out. “Sometimes I can’t believe how smart these kids are,” Leslie said, “and how hard they work. How much they
care.
My word. I mean, some of this work—they really blow me away, these kids. I didn’t learn that kind of critical thinking until college.”

Melvin had been born with critical thinking skills. He thought of his years-old novel, rewritten so many times that it no longer bore much resemblance to what it had originally started out to be, which was a satire of a high school writing workshop.

“For example,” said Leslie, “you should see some of these extended essays…”

Melvin felt his mind beginning to drift. His children would be home for Thanksgiving, and he couldn’t wait.

Leslie was saying, “…far and away the best in the class. Might be the best I’ve seen, for high school.”

Melvin was listening, but not really. In fact he was thinking about his novel, and whether or not he was ready to pull it out again, tackle some revisions. Maybe over the Christmas break.
Winter
break! They weren’t allowed to say Christmas, not in this day and age. Since when was he old enough to use a term like “this day and age”? He felt like he was nineteen a lot of the time, until he looked in the mirror and saw an old man staring back at him. But the novel. He could strip it down to its barest bones, set right everything that had gone wrong. And if the details seemed dated (the setting was the late nineties), well, he could fix that. He could move it up a decade, add a few iPhones, a Twitter reference.

“Are you okay, Melvin?”

“What? Yes, of course.” In fact, he had felt short of breath for a moment, but the sensation passed. Must have been the thought of unearthing his novel.

“Good. You looked a bit off there for a sec.” Leslie was still talking, enthusiastically spooning yogurt into her mouth at the same time. “Virginia Woolf,” she said.

Melvin perked up a little. He loved Virginia Woolf. Then his mind trotted off again. He wondered if the satire in his novel still held up. Perhaps he should change the setting from a high school to a college—a fictional version of a small liberal arts college, maybe in the East, or the Midwest. The Midwest could be funny, though Melvin wasn’t that familiar with it. Maybe a road trip was in order, over the summer. His wife got two weeks off from Kaiser. They could rent a Winnebago, stop at the Grand Canyon on the way out. He’d never seen the Grand Canyon. A change in setting might solve some of the novel’s more cantankerous problems. California as a setting for fiction was sort of overdone, in his opinion. Apologies to Steinbeck.

“The use of indirect discourse in, let’s see, it was in
Mrs. Dalloway
and
To the Lighthouse.
Just spot-on. I mean, I did
graduate
work on Virginia Woolf, and I don’t remember writing anything like this. Melvin? Melvin? You okay?”

Somewhere deep inside Melvin Strickland’s formidable memory, a bell rang. “Hold on,” he said. “Do you have that paper?”

“Not on me,” said Leslie, holding up her hands to show that they were empty, save a fork on which reclined a forgotten piece of kale. “But I’ll remember to show it to you, at some point. Plans for Thanksgiving, Melvin?”

“Please, Linda,” said Nora. “Come fill your plate.” The Hawthornes had the Suttons over for Thanksgiving dinner any year they didn’t go back east. Nora set up the dishes on the sideboard. She had thought about canceling the dinner this year, because she had trouble looking Arthur in the eye after what had happened in the Millers’ yard. It would have been terrible if he’d known about it, of course, but it was nearly as awful that he didn’t. Nora didn’t like keeping secrets, even if they were of the self-preservation variety.

But instead of canceling she’d gone full steam ahead: a new set of holiday place mats from Crate and Barrel, three complicated side dishes she’d never made before, a piecrust she’d had to wrestle into the pie plate because the timing of it had to be perfect. Two lovely red wines she’d researched carefully, plus a bottle of champagne to serve with the appetizers.

“Don’t bother with Linda, Nora,” said Arthur. “She’s on day thirteen of a twenty-one-day cleanse. I said to her, ‘Who starts a cleanse during the holidays?’ but she just smiled and handed me a hemp seed smoothie.” He raised a hand to the side of his mouth like he was telling a secret and stage-whispered, “I dumped it.” He was extra-jovial because he and Gabe had started in on the cocktails early.

“Oh, you did
not,
” said Linda, punching him playfully on the shoulder. “You loved it.” Inwardly, Nora rolled her eyes. Normally she thought of Linda and Arthur as the world’s greatest love story, but just at the moment her nerves were slightly on edge and she didn’t quite have the stomach for anything that might make her feel inferior.

“Anyway, the cleanse is not so restrictive. I can eat most of what’s here.” Linda repaired to the sideboard and returned to the table with a tiny helping of squash. “Besides, this way I’ll be done before Christmas.” She smiled and Nora released an internal sigh. She loved Linda Sutton to death, but she did not approve of cleanses. Through gritted teeth she said, “Why don’t the rest of you go up.”

“I might skip the turkey. I’m thinking of becoming a vegetarian,” announced Cecily.

Nora sighed, outwardly this time. She had about as much patience for vegetarians as she had for cleanses. “No, you’re not a vegetarian, Cecily. We had a pepperoni pizza last night!”

“Pepperoni isn’t real meat.”

“Where do you think it comes from?” asked Angela. “The garden?”

“No, but,” said Cecily. “It doesn’t
seem
real.”

“Why vegetarianism?” asked Linda, with genuine interest. She leaned toward Cecily.

“My teacher says that cow flatulence is causing global warming.”

“That’s
ridiculous,
” said Nora. She looked helplessly at Gabe. He’d grown up on a ranch, he’d know! But Gabe was busy pouring wine for all the adults save Linda, who covered her glass with the flat of her hand and shook her head regretfully.

“Actually it’s true,” interjected Angela. “The methane the cows release is
way
more damaging to the climate than carbon dioxide. One cow can release, like, two hundred pounds of methane per year.”

“Aren’t you fortunate not to have a brilliant child?” Nora said to Linda and Arthur. She thought she saw Linda flinch, but that was probably because she’d noticed the melted butter in the squash.

“What’s flatulence?” asked Maya.

“Farts,” said Cecily. “Cow farts.”

Maya said, “Gross.”

Gabe said,
“Cecily!”

Cecily said, “Sorry.”

“Well, it’s just completely uncalled for,” said Gabe. “We have guests here, and I don’t know how the conversation got so—”

“You’re right, Daddy,” said Angela. “I’m sorry I started it.” She shot Gabe a look that Nora—if she had to put a name to it—would probably call guilty. That was odd. Nora made a mental note to look into that later.

“Please don’t start being a vegetarian until tomorrow,” Nora said. “Any of you. I was up at six with this turkey.”

“I’m not a vegetarian,” said Angela. “But I’m not that hungry.” Gabe was looking sharply at Angela. What on earth was going on around here? Nora said, “Gabe? Not you too, right? Please, not you too.”

“I’ll eat enough turkey for all of you put together,” said Gabe loyally. “I’m not scared of a little meat.”

“Thank you,” whispered Nora. She could always count on Gabe.

Gabe, bless his heart, piled his plate to the sky. So did Arthur. So did Nora, out of spite, and Maya, because Nora served her and she didn’t have a choice. She’d never eat it all, but Nora felt better that at least one of her children had a groaning plate.

“Well!” said Nora, once they were all seated. “Should we have a blessing?” Her children and husband looked surprised, the way they always did when Nora’s childhood religion snuck its way into the household.
Interloper!
they seemed to say to the prayer.
You don’t belong here, now get on back to where you came from.
But obediently, they all bowed their heads and folded their hands in their laps.

Now that she had the floor, Nora realized she couldn’t say any of the things she wanted to say. Which were, in no particular order: God, would you help Maya’s reading. God, would you help Angela’s Harvard application. God, would you help that snarky little intern have some misfortune befall her. God, would you help Cecily find something else she loves to replace the Irish dance hole. God, would you make sure people eat this turkey because it’s organic and grass-fed and free-range and all of the other good things a turkey can be and it cost eighty-three dollars before tax and besides that I have no idea what I’m going to do with the leftovers.

This was not what prayer was supposed to be, of course. You were supposed to pray for the poor and the hungry and the sick and the dying and all of the other unfortunate people roaming the earth. You were supposed to pray for people trapped in hospices or South American mines or prison camps in the Middle East. You were not supposed to use up all of your prayers trying to keep your little healthy and fortunate family in the cocoon of health and fortune into which they’d happily been born.
Bad girl, Nora,
she thought.
Selfish and bad. You deserve nothing.

So she went instead for brevity.
Lord, thank you for the lovely meal you have given us and the opportunity to be together with family and friends on this holiday, and Lord, help those less fortunate, amen.

“Amen,” said everyone together, and Nora was so happy about that that she said it again, louder, evangelist-style:
Amen.