The Admissions (3 page)

“You are
so
lucky,” said Cecily. “I wish my dad worked for Apple.” She held Pinkie’s iPhone 5s reverently, the same way she held Pinkie’s dwarf hamster, Mouse, although she preferred holding the iPhone 5s because Mouse always pooped on Cecily’s shirt.

They were lounging on Pinkie’s queen bed, avoiding their homework. Pinkie’s room was enormous, with its own marble bathroom (
en suite,
Cecily’s mother would have said) and a shower with four separate shower heads that you could turn on at the same time if you wanted to. Pinkie was an only child. Cecily shared a room with Maya and a bathroom with both of her sisters, which was fine, but Maya always forgot to rinse the sink after she spit out her toothpaste, so every time Cecily went to take her turn she found herself staring at a dried riverbed of pink. Angela, though she represented only a third of the Hawthorne girls, took up way more than half the bathroom—she had even installed a
padlock
on her
cabinet
—and every time Cecily lodged a complaint her mother said something vague and unsatisfactory about Angela going through a hard time right now and couldn’t they all be a little bit patient.

First they tried a slow-motion video. Cecily did part of her Irish dance solo, and Pinkie did a handstand.

“I’m glad you got the gold phone,” said Cecily when they repaired to the bed to look over the video. “I totally would have gotten the gold too.”

They sat in respectful silence for a moment, admiring the 5s. Cecily’s father worked for a management consulting company, which meant that there was nothing he could bring home to Cecily. When she was younger Cecily had asked once what he made at work and he had said, “Ideas.” Yawn.

“We could invent our own Rainbow Loom bracelet,” said Pinkie. “And make a video, and put it up on YouTube.”

“Yeah,” said Cecily, thinking of the triple starburst girls, now YouTube famous for their bracelet. “But I didn’t bring my loom.”

Instead they did accents. Pinkie could do British, but Cecily was much better at Irish because she spent so much time with Seamus O’Malley. They could both do Australian from watching
Mako Mermaids
on Netflix, but Pinkie’s was a little more authentic. Probably because she’d actually been to Australia.

“Okay,” instructed Cecily. “Record me. Guess who I am.”

She took a deep breath and closed her eyes and said, “Time for dinner, everyone!”

“Oh my God,” said Pinkie. “You sound
exactly
like your mother. Exactly.”

“I know,” said Cecily, sort of modestly but sort of not, because there were not that many things she could do that Pinkie could not. “
Right?
I’ve been practicing. I can completely trick my father, if I call to him from another room.”

“That’s awesome,” said Pinkie. “That’s absolutely awesome. I wish I could do that.”

“You can,” said Cecily. “Just record your mom talking, then play it over and over again. You’ll get it.”

“Here, I’m going to record you,” said Pinkie. “It’s so awesome, you sound just like her. Okay? Ready? You sure? Ready, set.
Go.
”

12:13 a.m.

Dear M—

Since you’re my fake therapist, I feel I can tell you something I’ve never told anyone. Ready?

I don’t care if Angela gets into Harvard.

I can’t say that to Angela, and I certainly can’t say it to Gabe, my goodness. I mean, just imagine.

I can’t even say it to Cecily or Maya: it is just something, in our house, that is not allowed to be said.

In fact, sometimes I think I would
prefer
that she didn’t get in!

I’m sitting back now, and I’m waiting for the lightning to strike me down.

So far, nothing has happened.

Nora was so excited about the potential buyers for the Watkins home—they had requested a second showing—that she stopped at In-N-Out Burger in Mill Valley and picked up dinner for the family. Everyone she knew had recently gone gluten free; she felt like she was sinning just bringing bread into her household. And plain white bread! But: screw it. The potential buyers had loved the Watkins property. They had loved the wine room, the library, the many bathrooms. They had loved the view of the Golden Gate Bridge, the his-and-her walk-in closets in the master bedroom, the glimpse of Alcatraz, of Angel Island, where not so long ago Chinese immigrants waited for their chance to enter America. They had loved the staircase that curled up through the center of the house, and the lush landscaping, and the way you could stand in the master bedroom and feel like you might fall right into the water. She deserved some white bread. They all did.

“Five Double-Doubles,” she said. “And five fries. And five chocolate shakes.” Cecily was going to freak right out: her favorite food in the whole entire world was a Double-Double from In-N-Out. Maya would probably just drink the shake. (Was Maya eating enough? She had sturdy little legs, but maybe there was some deficit in her nutrition…should Nora try to get in with another reading tutor, if the one everyone had recommended wasn’t available?) In the olden days, when Frankie was alive, Maya would have fed Frankie the burger under the table, and in the middle of the night Frankie would have thrown up all over the living room—the next day, Maya would have feigned ignorance.

They had eaten at In-N-Out the night two years ago when Arthur Sutton called her out of the blue, six years after she’d left Sutton and Wainwright, the premier real estate agency in Marin. “Arthur says there’s an opening. He says he wants
me.
Only me.”

Gabe hesitated.

It wasn’t just a phone call from Arthur Sutton—it was a phone call that led to lunch at Perbacco in the city, in whose red-boothed extravagance Nora indulged in
salumi misti
and a pan-seared hanger steak and, at Arthur Sutton’s urging, one glass, then two, of a gorgeous Valpolicella that was such a dark red it was almost black.

Arthur Sutton was that rare creature in California, a true East Coast West Coaster, born and bred near the stone walls and rolling acreage of Greenwich, Connecticut, but educated on the cheerily sun-splashed Stanford campus. This pedigree, to be sure, was not so unusual; what was different about Arthur was the way he fully inhabited both coasts, rather than constantly documenting and enumerating the differences between the two or the failures of one as compared to the other. (Nora, herself a product of Rhode Island, could not, even after nearly two decades in California, stop herself from using the phrase “back home” to describe her beloved Ocean State.)

Arthur Sutton was fifteen years Nora’s senior, and his graying temples, his pressed suits and shined loafers, even the cologne he wore—a subtle and tweedy scent to which Nora could not put a name, for Gabe was not a cologne fan—suggested a gravity and a clarity of purpose that she had always found alluring. In a
fatherly
way, of course. Or at least avuncular. Back when Nora first started with Sutton and Wainwright, she had had offers from six of the seven agencies she’d applied to, but only Arthur had taken her by the hand (figuratively) and shown her how the real estate market worked and how she could make a name for herself in it.

“He wants you back?” said Gabe, two years ago. And he hesitated before saying more, instead taking a giant bite of his Double-Double. Nora, still buzzing from the Valpolicella, had been too wound up to make a real dinner.

“Yes! He wants me back. He says I still hold records in the office. He says they need someone with my…how’d he say it?” Here she feigned a brief memory loss, for she knew exactly how Arthur Sutton had said it. “Ah, yes. Someone with my particular combination of
spunk
and
knowledge.
”

Maya was five then; Cecily almost eight, Angela fifteen. “We always thought I’d go back,” said Nora. “When the kids were older, more self-sufficient.” (Were they, though? They were older, anyway. She wasn’t sure they would ever become more self-sufficient. When she was Angela’s age she was cooking dinner for her entire family twice a week, holding down a part-time job at a now-defunct Newport Creamery, and still finding time to get buzzed on cans of Busch on the weekends down at the beach.)

“We did.”

“You’re hesitating, though,” she told Gabe.

“Well. It’s just that I remember how hard you had to work, back then. And how much it took out of you. The nights, the Sunday open houses…”

Nora decided that the only way to make this conversation go how she wanted it to go was to play midcentury housewife; therefore, like someone straight out of
Mad Men
(the early seasons, before everybody’s lives went to hell), she found a rocks glass and poured into it three fingers of Gabe’s favorite, the amber-colored Bulleit. Frontier whiskey, said the bottle. Though truly it was California that was the new frontier, right? Years before, Nora had been with Angela’s fourth-grade class on a field trip to Columbia, where they’d drunk sarsaparilla straight from the bottle and waded in shin-deep water in search of tiny gold nuggets; she’d experienced a little bit of what it must have been like back then, to be new, in a foreign world, placing one’s hopes on a glimmer in the dirt.

Nora considered all of these facts and studied Gabe’s Bulleit, which was truly beautiful, like something Cleopatra might have planned an outfit around. “It didn’t take that much out of me,” said Nora.

That statement was patently untrue. Her job had taken everything out of her, that’s why she was so good at it. She was unfailingly on call to soothe the nerves of uneasy buyers and to simultaneously stoke and tamp down sellers’ egos.

When Cecily was a baby Nora sold what was then the second-highest-priced property in Marin, a $4.85 million five-bedroom in Tiburon with sweeping views of the bay from every window. The sale had nearly fallen apart at the last minute—buyer’s remorse, seller’s remorse, every other kind of remorse you could usher into a real estate deal—but Nora had outdone herself. She arranged for the sellers to vacate on the day the P&S was due to be signed, and she brought the buyers—a young couple who had thrived during the dot.com boom and somehow survived its bust—onto the exquisitely tiled patio, where she opened a bottle of Cabernet from her favorite winery, which she coyly called Napa’s best-kept secret but which was actually readily available to any tourist with a mid-grade concierge. In the gourmet kitchen she arranged a circle of Cremont, a Rogue River blue, and half a loaf of crusty bread from Boulettes Larder in the Ferry Building on the J. K. Adams plank that she and Gabe had gotten as a wedding gift, and she brought it out to the couple.

“Take your time,” Nora had said, sipping the wine, watching the sun slide into the water. She had slept a total of three hours the night before; this was the most relaxed she’d felt in weeks. “Truly, there’s no rush. And if this isn’t the right house for you, I promise we will find you the one that is. I want you to be happy.” She put the P&S and her favorite Uni-ball Vision pen (fine point, waterproof) alongside the cheese, far enough away that it seemed unobtrusive but close enough to be welcoming, within reach.

“How’d you
do
it?” Arthur Sutton asked her later. “I thought those buyers were gone. I swear I could feel them slip away.” Nora shrugged. Cecily was a three-month-old who still woke up at least twice a night to nurse, sometimes four or five times. Cecily’s infanthood at that point had left Nora exhausted, sapped, enervated. Cecily was colicky, rheumy-eyed, and dissatisfied, hungry all the time yet never taking a full feeding, giving no indication then of the quirky, bewilderingly lovable kid she’d since become, admired by teachers and students alike, a guest at every birthday party, a magnet, a socialite without the wardrobe. (Now Cecily was easy.
Easy peasy lemon squeezie,
like the rhyme one of them had picked up at a playground long ago and trotted home, where it had attached itself to their family vocabulary like a leech.)

“No,” Nora told Arthur. “They were never gone. They just needed a little extra massaging.”

And two years ago Gabe sipped his Bulleit and closed his eyes for a fraction longer than a blink and said, “If you’re sure it’s the right thing.”

“I’m sure,” Nora said. “I’m absolutely, positively sure.”

Now, while she waited for her order, Nora called Arthur Sutton on his cell. Arthur’s home phone number was a closely guarded secret. He’d given it to Nora once, but he’d asked her to use it only in the case of an extreme emergency. “Like a near-death emergency,” he’s said, as though the word
extreme
weren’t descriptive enough. But he was perennially available on his cell. Like, always. She was pretty sure Arthur Sutton didn’t sleep. His wife, Linda, had confided as much to Nora during a fit of prosecco-fueled oversharing that took place at the Sutton and Wainwright holiday party years ago.

“Hey,” she said now. “It’s me, Nora. Listen, these people loved the Watkins house. They
loved
it. I think they may be The Ones.” Perhaps it was a bit premature to say that, and if there was one golden rule in the real estate industry it was Don’t Count Your Chickens, but Nora felt like she owed Arthur a serving of optimism. The Watkins home had been on the market for a very long time; in real estate parlance, it was
growing stale.
Soon it would move out of the
stale
category and into the
retro
category, whose name Nora had coined herself. (It hadn’t caught on yet, but give it time.)

“Wonderful,” said Arthur. His voice was as smooth as Dutch gold honey. Though Arthur never slept, he never seemed to be tired, never seemed to be weak. His skin always looked as fresh as that of a young child. Six months ago Arthur had closed escrow on a $4.95 million property in Madrone Canyon that almost fell through at the last minute, and Arthur had never even looked harried. Nora knew he’d worked for it—they all worked for it, they killed themselves (in private, offstage) for every sale they got—but he never broke a sweat. Never second-guessed. Just moved deliberately forward, like a yacht in fine weather. “I knew you’d find the right buyers,” said Arthur now. “I didn’t doubt you for a second, Nora. That’s why I brought you back!” The Madrone Canyon sale had been a long time ago, and they needed something big, something legit, to take its place.

At home, Nora, lost in thoughts about the Watkins property, was halfway through her Double-Double (was this the same as all the way through a Single?) when she remembered to ask about the appointment with Ms. Vogel.

“Oh!” said Gabe. He had scarfed down his burger and was making serious progress on his shake. Angela was all over the burger and had put her shake into the freezer to drink while she studied. Maya was eating the bun but not the meat. Cecily, still wearing her ghillies and a tank top that read IRISH DANCERS KICK BUTT, looked about as happy as it was possible for a kid to look.
Family dinner,
thought Nora.
Maybe not home-cooked, but we’re all here. We’re all accounted for.
“It went fine,” said Gabe. “Just fine. She knows her stuff, that’s for sure. I can see why it’s so hard to get an appointment with her.”

Nora’s phone buzzed, but she ignored it. Family dinner! The time was precious.

“Good,” she said approvingly. She watched Gabe and Angela exchange a look. What was behind that look? She swiped one of her last fries through a field of salt. She could feel her blood vessels constricting, but, damn, this was a good dinner. “What’d you come up with?”

“What do you mean?”

“For a list. For the final list of schools.”

“We have the list,” volunteered Angela. “The list is Harvard.”

“That’s one school! One word! That’s not a list!”

“We don’t need a list. Angela’s already decided.”

Nora glanced at Cecily. She appeared to be listening to the conversation, but when Nora looked more closely she could see Cecily’s lips moving in time to an imaginary piece of music playing in her head:
one
two three four
five
six seven eight. Under the table, though she didn’t look, Nora knew Cecily’s feet were moving too.

“We know she’s decided what her
first
choice is. But what about the backup list? What about Williams? What about Amherst, Middlebury? What about
BC
? Plus all the schools out here: Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz. Wasn’t that the point of the appointment, to come up with that list?”

“Okay,” said Gabe. He drank the last of his shake and his straw made a sucking sound that, had it been one of her girls making it, Nora would have commented on. Not restaurant manners, she used to tell them. “Here’s the thing. She wasn’t great. She was like an evil witch in a fairy tale. She scared us.”

Angela nodded. “She scared us. She kept talking about all the statistics, about the percentage of admitted students at the Ivies versus the number of applications…”

Gabe picked up Angela’s sentence and ran with it. “She told us that—Who was it, Angela?”

“Henrietta Faulkner.”

“Right. That Henrietta Faulkner was applying to Harvard too.”

“I miss Henrietta,” said Nora. “Where has she been?”

“She’s around,” said Angela. “The thing is, I thought she was applying regular admission. Now it turns out she’s applying early, just like me. And too many applications from one school can— What’d Ms. Vogel call it?”