The Admissions (27 page)

Midnight

M—

Do not go crazy on Christmas gifts this year. I still think it’s ridiculous what you spent on Angela’s birthday last year. I feel like I should pay you back…

Remember that genie we used to talk about when we were kids?

I really could use him right now.

Where the hell is he?

Xo.

Typically Nora loved going to Arthur and Linda’s house. She loved Arthur and Linda separately, and she loved them as a couple. She loved the food Linda served when she wasn’t on one of her restrictive diets and she loved the way they talked to her children, with interest and respect and the assumption that they could carry on an adult conversation without being talked down to. She loved the way Arthur and Linda still linked fingers when they were walking down the street, and the way Arthur stood if Linda entered a room he was in, and gave an odd little formal bow, like Carson on
Downton Abbey.
She loved the house itself: prime real estate right on Marina Boulevard, meticulously decorated and perfectly kept up and absolutely free from clutter in a way that a home with children could never be, not in its wildest dreams. No matter how much Nora tried to keep her home looking like that she simply couldn’t do it. Her children were too prodigious with the bobby pins and hair elastics, the glasses of lukewarm water left around, the Rorschach-test globs of toothpaste abandoned to dry in the sink. It was hopeless, it would be hopeless until they all went off on their own, and by then Nora would be too old and too sad and too lonely to care about tidiness.

Nora was hoping Linda would be there too, to break up the tension a little bit. But no, Arthur said, Linda was out at a yoga class. Hot yoga three times a week, and some other type of yoga whose name he could never remember three other days. Sundays off sometimes, but not always. Over the past few years Linda had become very serious about her yoga. You could practically see the tendons in Linda’s neck present themselves, a new tendon every time Nora saw her. It made Nora feel positively fleshy.

At the moment, though, rather than fleshy, Nora was feeling extremely tense. Her own neck muscles were tied up in such a knot that she could feel them bunched under her skin, like an actual knot in an actual rope. A bowline, or maybe a clove hitch. She had learned all sorts of knots in the Girl Scouts back in Rhode Island. Not that she’d ever had to use any of them in any real-life situation.
(The paperwork is due to the mortgage counselor! Quick, somebody tie a cow hitch!)

She’d been really good at the knots, which was sort of ironic, since these days she couldn’t
un
tie a knot to save her life: not a knot in a shoelace or a necklace or even the string that held up the ancient, hopelessly unfashionable pair of gray sweatpants that she’d donned regularly as maternity wear when she was pregnant with Cecily and which Gabe had politely asked her to burn after the fact. (She hadn’t. They were ridiculously comfortable.)

On the other hand, she was feeling oddly
un
-tense, sort of the way she imagined a prisoner on death row might feel when, after years and years of imagining the event, he was finally asked to choose his last meal. (Spaghetti carbonara, Nora would choose, with a green salad and a large glass of Chianti. Espresso crème brûlée for dessert. Because it wouldn’t really matter if it kept you up. Ba-da-dum. This question came up in their family a surprising amount. Gabe would have ribs and a bourbon—ever the ranch boy—and Cecily would have a Double-Double from In-N-Out, with fries and a chocolate shake. Pizza for Maya. Come to think of it, Nora couldn’t remember what Angela would have. She’d have to ask her later. It seemed suddenly like a very bad sign, that she couldn’t remember this important fact about Angela.)

After Arthur greeted Nora at the door he left her for a moment without apology or explanation (she hadn’t heard a phone ring, no summons from the hallowed offices of Sutton and Wainwright), so she stood at the front window and looked out onto Marina Boulevard. Maybe he just needed the bathroom. Although Arthur never seemed to need the bathroom—he seemed somehow above and separate from the basic operations of the human body. She’d seen him eat, of course, many times, but he never expressed hunger before the fact nor satiety after it.

Arthur and Linda’s home was detached, though the neighboring houses were so close that if you were upstairs and your neighbor was too and you cared to pass a cup of coffee from one house to the other you could both lean out of the window and accomplish this with little to no incident. Theirs was Spanish-style stucco, tan in color, though farther down the street some of the attached homes bore bright pinks and yellows.

It was a beautiful neighborhood, unpretentious (yet still expensive), neither edgy nor progressive, but simply beautiful, with the gulls crying overhead and the boats rocking in the water and the Palace of Fine Arts rising in the distance. Standing here, Nora could allow herself to imagine the area thousands and thousands of years ago, when American Indians lived on the dunes where the homes now stood, and then, more recently, after the big quake in 1906, when real development first began in preparation for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in 1915. If Nora could travel back in time she’d like to see that. The Liberty Bell, all the way from Pennsylvania for a visit. The Tower of Jewels, covered with cut glass, but underneath, of course, just plaster and burlap, easily demolished after the fair. Then came the Loma Prieta quake in 1989—Nora was twenty then, happily partying at the University of Rhode Island, the quake didn’t register with her—and a lot of the neighborhood crumbled. Whole buildings, flattened. The marina even had its own personal firestorm. Now everything was rebuilt, earthquake-sturdy, reinforced and then doubly reinforced, with the price tags to prove it.

It was a glorious day, the sun was high in a sky that looked like gossamer, the light clear and almost springlike, although in less than a month it would be Christmas. The marina was plump with sailboats, and the bridge watched over the entire scene, like a benevolent parent, a good and wholesome nanny. Maybe even a god, if you believed in such things.

The genie grants you three wishes. First wish: Let me keep my job. Second wish: Let me keep my house. Third wish: Let me keep my sanity.

“Drink?” said Arthur. He appeared out of nowhere, like a ghost. The ghost, thought Nora, of employment past.

Nora said, “Um.” It was just before noon. While she was equivocating Arthur moved toward the bar. Ever graceful, he didn’t walk there so much as he floated, and Nora thought of the old dance studio in a shopping center not far from her childhood home, surrounded by an insurance company, a nail salon, a FedEx office. Sometimes her mother had to go there for various errands—though certainly not the nail salon; Nora’s mother had had exactly one manicure in her life, the day before Nora’s wedding—and Marianne and Nora would sit in the car and watch the ballroom dancers sail by the windows. Older couples, mostly, though sometimes they would see a bride and groom in training, or, once, hilariously, a pair of blushing teenage girls. Nora would bet real money that Arthur Sutton had grown up taking ballroom dancing lessons, and not in a grim little suburban shopping center, either.

Arthur turned his back to Nora while he was at the bar—not out of any lack of manners; his position was dictated by the setup of the living room—so Nora had no idea what he was pouring. It certainly wasn’t wine, which Nora might have preferred. When Arthur handed her the drink—something goldish brown, on the rocks—she felt like an executive from
Mad Men,
sipping away on a Wednesday morning in the office. (“No, Don, I really don’t think we should go for that account, and let me tell you exactly why…”)

Arthur Sutton, ever the gentleman, raised his own glass, gave a small chivalrous nod in Nora’s direction, and said, “How’s the family?”

“Oh,” said Nora. She shouldn’t have been surprised by this question—the little niceties were part of Arthur’s character, as much as ambition and drive were part of Angela’s and an ear for slip-jig music was part of Cecily’s—but nevertheless she was unprepared to enter the arena of small talk. Not now, not today. She could still call up the sensation of the dirt from the Millers’ lawn on her knees (her burglar suit had been inadequately thin; if she planned to take endangered-plant killing up as a career she would certainly have to budget for more appropriate clothing). She could feel, again, the sense of semi-detached excitement she’d experienced on the way there, the memory that had been called up of riding in Stuart Mobley’s old Buick toward the beach. Then the panic rising in her throat as she heard the Millers’ back door open, saw the silhouette of the career-destroying housesitter peering out into the lawn. She remembered thinking,
Well, that’s that, then. It’s all over now.
The new frontier, broken and burned. The California dream, gone.

No, she didn’t feel much like small talk. She just wanted to present herself for the chopping block and get on with her day, head in hand. (First wish, Genie. Get this conversation over with quickly.) But she took a deep breath and said, “They’re well, Arthur. Very well. Thank you.”

Arthur nodded, and Nora took (or mistook) his pleasantly blank expression as a signal to keep talking. She helped herself to a giant sip of her drink. It scorched its way down her throat, but she made a point of not reacting, and soon enough her innards were filled with an overwhelming and not entirely unpleasant sensation of warmth, even well-being. So that was why people drank the stuff. She thought of Gabe’s amber-colored Bulleit, which made her think again of the gold rush settlers, wearing their hats and their suspenders, drying their socks over an open fire, sweeping out their tents with their corn-husk brooms. The card games, the whiskey, the eternal optimism of the new frontier, coming by land, coming by sea, whatever it took. She remembered, on Angela’s field trip to Columbia, learning about how fire had destroyed the newly built town in 1854. All but one building, gone. Did those miners give up and go home, tails between their proverbial legs, returning to the East Coast or the middle of the country or wherever it was they had come from? No, sir. They regrouped, they rebuilt, they used brick instead of wood. Then, three years later, another fire. The capacity this state had for rising from the flames was truly mind-boggling. Without the gold rush there’d be no California as they knew it today, no pricey Marin real estate, no rigorous public high schools. No blue jeans.

“And we’re just waiting to hear about Angela,” Nora said into the gap. “About, you know, Harvard. Early action.”

Arthur nodded and smiled. “Well, Harvard would be crazy not to want Angela.”

“That’s what I think. But of course I’m a bit biased.” Nora’s smile felt loose on her face. This stuff hit you faster than wine. No wonder the characters on
Mad Men
were always doing heedless things. Nothing seemed of much consequence when your ribs were on fire.

Arthur took a seat opposite Nora—the two couches in the room formed an L, with a small square table in between. He leaned in close enough that Nora could see a stray hair popping out from one of his eyebrows, which were usually well tamed. She looked deep into his eyes and saw there a bewilderment and a disappointment for which she knew she was responsible. She steeled herself: she was lying on the guillotine, waiting for the blade to fall.

“I think of you like a daughter, you know, Nora.”

Nora could no longer meet Arthur’s gaze—it was too dangerous, like looking directly at the sun. Instead she looked at her hands. She was still holding her glass. Arthur hadn’t offered her a coaster and this was not the sort of house where you put your glass down without a coaster. (The coffee table in Nora’s childhood home still proudly wore the rings from many a beverage set down in haste or ignorance. Can after can of Diet Pepsi consumed by Marianne and Nora, before the wars against artificial sweeteners commenced.)

She took a large sip and tried for a bit of levity. “For me to be your daughter you’d have to have been fifteen when you had me, Arthur.”

“True.” A false smile, only the mouth moving, nothing in the eyes. He tapped two fingers together, a gesture Nora knew from years of experience to indicate not that he was thinking about something but that he’d already decided.

While she was busy avoiding Arthur’s eyes she looked at the side table between the two couches. She saw there a photograph she had never noticed. It didn’t fit the décor at all, and Arthur and Linda were not people who left things out when they didn’t fit the décor. (This, of course, was a luxury afforded only the eternally childless.) It was as though somebody had just been looking at it and had forgotten to put it away.

Nora resisted the urge to pick it up, but, emboldened by the drink, she allowed her gaze to linger on it, and confirmed that it was what she thought: an ultrasound picture in a little gold frame.

Nora had one of those from when she was pregnant with Angela, and another one from when she was pregnant with Cecily. Her pregnancy with Maya had also necessitated (because of her
advanced maternal age
) an amniocentesis, with a terrifying large needle and lots of waiting to find out that everything was okay. She had never framed her ultrasound photos. Hers were in her nightstand drawer, along with a collection of Chapsticks that seemed to multiply like rabbits. She’d always intended to take them out and put them in the girls’ baby books. The photos, not the Chapsticks. Man, this drink was strong. It was difficult to put anything in her daughters’ baby books, since she’d never actually created the baby books in the first place. Someday she would.

Arthur followed her gaze and said, “Oh.” Carefully he reached for the photo and placed it facedown on the table. “Linda was looking at that earlier. She must have left it out.”

“Is that—”

“Nothing we need to talk about now,” said Arthur. “Just something from a very long time ago.”

But Nora persisted. She couldn’t help it. She loved Arthur so dearly, and respected him so formidably, that she had to know. She thought, she supposed later, that by asking she could possibly take on some of his pain as her own. Just in case he couldn’t carry it all by himself. Her voice seemed dwarfed by the large room, and dwarfed, too, by the information it was seeking. Out on the boulevard a siren screeched by. “Was that…was that your baby? Yours and Linda’s?”