Admission. Part 15

This last was said softly, but with a hiss of pure vitriol. Portia was momentarily taken aback.

"I guess what you're telling me is that you don't want to do this."

Frieda sat back in her chair. She gave Portia a look of profound disgust. "I'm not doing it. And this is my house," she said, visibly enraged.

"Well, Frieda, you've been here together for... what is it?"

"My house. I found it. I bought it. Carla and I were here since 1979, for f.u.c.k's sake. When Susannah came, we did some financial maneuvering so we each owned a third. And then Carla left, so we did another transaction, and we changed the papers again. But she has no right to do this, even if it weren't completely insane. And I've raised my kids, Portia. I have no intention of starting over again."

"Have you told her?" Portia said, struggling to stay calm.

"Have I told her? Every day. Every f.u.c.king day. I'm not doing it. I'm not staying for this."

"Wait," Portia said, readjusting, "you mean... are you telling me you're going to kick her out?"

"I can't," she said unhappily. "I've looked into it, believe me. Legally, it would take years for one of us to oust the other. And a fortune-which, unlike your mother," she said nastily, "I do not have. Plus I have no desire to spend however many years I have left in litigation. I'm sixty-five. There are other things I need to do. I want to do."

"Of course," said Portia. "You have to do what's best for you. But..."

"What?" Frieda said combatively.

"Well, what are you going to do?"

"I'm moving to Boston. Carla's been living in Somerville for the past couple of years. There's an apartment in the house. Someone's in it, but she can get them out with three months' notice. Most of my drumming circle's in Boston now." She pushed up the sleeves of her blue sweater and laced her fingers together again. Then she sat for a long moment, clearly wrestling with how indelicate she ought to be. Portia, half-curious, half-afraid, waited for her to make up her mind.

"You know," said Frieda at last, "I think... well, I've felt this for a long time, that Susannah's just at loose ends."

Portia, who had thought the same thing for most of her life, merely nodded.

"It's a quiet place, Vermont. I mean, we've got things more or less in hand here, there aren't so many battles left to fight, do you understand? It's not like when we were all in Baltimore or Susannah was in Harlem, and women couldn't get abortions or health care or child care. Even in Northampton, she was always running around, setting things up or keeping people on their toes. That clinic in Holyoke, we never would have got that moving if it wasn't for her. And when Springfield tried to get rid of that lesbian teacher, do you remember that? That was Susannah in her element."

"It was my history teacher's girlfriend," Portia said, smiling. "Of course I remember."

"I never really thought she'd be happy here," Frieda said, studying her hands. "But here we are, all these years later, and I have to be honest, it does surprise me. Not that I don't love her, of course, but for her, I'm surprised. She's a warrior, okay? I always saw her on the ramparts. And here... no ramparts. Peace has been declared. Forever." She laughed shortly. "Even a couple of years ago, with the gay marriage stuff-'Take Vermont Back' and 'Move Vermont Forward'-all it amounted to was a war of lawn signs. It's done."

"Nirvana of the Green Mountains."

"Well, we like it," Frieda sniffed. "It suits us. It suits me. But I'll leave if she goes ahead." She shook her head. "I wouldn't if I didn't have to. I love my life here. I've built my life here," she said with a new infusion of umbrage. "I'd like you to talk to her while you're visiting. I think she might actually listen to you. I think there's a lot going on here. Mortality. Regrets about you. All the big stuff, you know?"

"Regrets about me?" Portia said, instantly on guard.

"Oh, nothing terrible. I'm sorry, Portia, you have to forgive me. I'm very upset. I think I must be coming at this with a sledgehammer, and I don't want to. Not, you know, about you. I mean, you're great. You've become a very strong woman. You've got a great career and a solid relationship with Mark, obviously. You're a force for good in the world. She knows that. But, you know, I think she wishes you were closer."

"Physically closer?" Portia said hopefully, but she knew the answer.

"No. I mean, it was the same when you were just up the road in Hanover. She expressed the same... sadness, really. Look, it's not uncommon for mothers to feel this way. I miss the relationship I had with my boys when they were small. Of course, they call me, and we visit, but you do lose something. Well, you lose your kids, really. You get them in another form, as adult children, but you lose what you had. It's part of life, so you have to accept it, and I mean, what's the alternative? That your children never grow up? That's unacceptable. But you know, you find other things. Your grandchildren. Or other interests unrelated to children, whatever. And I've been really lucky because I have my grandkids, and my music."

Portia nodded dumbly.

"I remember, when she moved up from Northampton, you were still an undergraduate and it seemed sort of obvious that she wanted to be nearer to you. She used to talk about what it was like when you were little, how close the two of you were, but then whenever you came to visit, it was obvious to me that you needed more distance. And she just couldn't make that adjustment. I kept telling her, 'Portia can't come back until she leaves. You have to let her leave.' But she felt that something had actually happened between the two of you. There was a thing, like a rift. It was too hard for her, do you know what I'm saying?"

Portia did but couldn't respond. This was not precisely news, but it was a topic of molten heat. She looked away. They sat in silence. It was nearly six-thirty, and outside, a light snow had begun.

"Will you talk to her?" Frieda asked. "While you're here? I've never been able to change her mind about a single thing, but you might have a chance. Besides, it's your business, Portia. This concerns you, you know."

"I don't see that," Portia said, surprised. "She's of age, obviously. And generally sound mind."

"Yes, and good health. But what if that changes? What if she dies? Who gets to raise this child if she dies?"

Portia felt as if the breath were being extracted from her, slowly and carefully, almost clinically. It was suddenly plain to her that she had failed-utterly failed-to really engage with this notion of her mother's. Of course she would be responsible for the child if Caitlin did not fall in love with her baby and take it away with her, and if Susannah did indeed end up fostering or, G.o.d, even adopting this child, and then if something happened to Susannah. Of course she would have to... what? Inherit? School conferences. Roald Dahl. Legos. Swimming lessons. Driving lessons. College applications. The commandments to love and nurture and discipline and safeguard. Who else could there be? How long would she have before the torch pa.s.sed? How much more of her life could she expect to live, on her own terms, before it happened? And did Susannah truly understand what she was asking of her? Or... and the new idea came to her in a powerful wave. Was this what it was ultimately about, actually for? Some disjointed, backhanded, unacknowledged effort to ensure that Portia have a child, some child, any child?

She was so full of rage that she could barely form thoughts, let alone words, but speech also required breath, and breath was still impossible to come by. She felt heat pound in her cheeks. She simply stared at Frieda, openmouthed and gasping.

"Talk to her," said Frieda. "I'm not very hopeful, but I haven't given up. You're the only person she might listen to."

Long after I have forgotten what's in the Magna Carta or the Krebs's Cycle, I will remember the lesson learned from my former best friend, Lisa, who betrayed my trust and unilaterally ended our friendship one day when we were in tenth grade.

CHAPTER TWELVE.

THE DREADED THING, THE AVERAGE MAN.

Susannah, however, was not interested in listening. She lasted barely five minutes the first time Portia tried to raise the matter, late that very night as Caitlin slept upstairs and Frieda, whose dinner out did not end until nearly ten, lurked in her room, undoubtedly straining herself to listen. Then she bolted from the living room, with Portia gaping after her in serious annoyance and disbelief. There was, she would later think, a definite smack of adolescence to the scene, albeit with this comical reversal of roles, though she could not remember ever partic.i.p.ating in such a cla.s.sically juvenile exit. Susannah would not be coaxed back, neither that night nor in the days that followed. She did not care to hear the myriad reasons why she should, at the very least, think again, think carefully about what she was doing. She did not want to hear Portia's areas of concern. She did not wish to consider whether the interests of a newborn baby might not, in fact, be best served by a single mother in her (almost) seventies or whether caring for an infant might not, indeed, be the best focus for her own life. Portia approached these conversations with great care, but care did not save her. Although she managed several times to lure her mother with innocuous queries and tender concerns (about Frieda's health, the state of fund-raising for the battered women's shelter in Rutland, the always damp corner of the bas.e.m.e.nt), the drift of her true interests would be altogether too clear, altogether too quickly, and Susannah, aggrieved, would rise and depart. So the first days pa.s.sed in anger and shared but silent meals.

Portia, who now had two very distressing things to avoid thinking about, was grateful she had brought so much work with her. She spent her days on the living room couch (her mother having laid claim to the kitchen as her own territory, and the dusty office upstairs too uncomfortable to spend any more time in than necessary), making her way through folders as Susannah prepared food for their holiday meal and Caitlin lurked in her room and Frieda made herself absent whenever she could. The atmosphere, Portia couldn't help thinking, was like that of a commune in its final days, the sum of its parts deconstructing, inexorably, into shards of individual lives, individual agendas. She had heard enough of these stories, or read them in memoirs, to imagine that this was what it must have felt like: not the impacted bitterness of an angry family, but a simple heading for the exits. Except for herself, of course, because she was more afraid to be home than she was to be here, as dispiriting as here was.

On Wednesday night, when her mother reminded her of Caitlin's appointment in Hanover the following day, she tried once again to turn the conversation-which was not, actually, a proper conversation at all-to the girl, her pregnancy, and the baby.

"Look," Susannah snapped, "can you take her? Because if you can't, I need to make arrangements."

"I can take her, of course," Portia said, straining for a conciliatory tone. "But Mom, at some point we're going to have to talk about this."

"Sure," Susannah said unkindly. "Right after we get to all the things you're never willing to talk about."

And thus ended this particular round.

The following morning, Susannah left with Frieda for Burlington, the two of them stiff and cold in each other's company. Portia waited in the kitchen for Caitlin to come downstairs. She had read the paper and did not want to start a folder, since there might not be enough time to complete it. There were no other obvious distractions. So when her eye settled on the kitchen telephone, she decided to dial her own number in Princeton, to see if she had messages. Their outgoing greeting had not been changed in years, not since the previous phone had packed it in. She had recorded it then without much care, reciting her office number and Mark's, her cell phone number and Mark's, and inviting the caller to leave a message in a tone that, she sometimes thought, sounded a bit offhand, as if she didn't much care whether they did or not. Once or twice, listening to herself as she waited on the other end of the line, impatient to retrieve the recordings, it occurred to her that she ought to do it again, to record it again, to change it in substance or at least make it a bit peppier in tone; but she had never quite gotten to it. And now, as with so many other aspects of her old life, it was too late.

She waited through the rings, three, four, five, craving, oddly, the sound of this blase former self who had a partner and a job and a cell phone, a partner with a job and a cell phone, a life somewhere else, and a house in which a phone might ring long and loud through untenanted rooms, and when the phone gave its distinctive click-Enough already! No one is here!-she tensed, eager for her own voice. But it didn't come. Instead, a breathless Mark recited their number and thanked her for calling. "You may leave a message for Portia after the tone," Mark said. "If you are trying to reach me, please try my office or my new number." And this he gave. Local area code. Princeton prefix. The beep came, loud and sharp. Portia stared straight ahead at the kitchen phone, mounted to the wall with a long coiled cord swinging below like a lazy jump rope. It was dingy with handling, unfashionable avocado in color, and altogether unaltered since the year 1978, when it had been installed, because it would not have occurred to Susannah to fix what was not broken. Obviously, such a thought had not occurred to her, either.

Caitlin materialized, wearing layers of sweatshirts. Portia drove them both down the icy drive and onto the road, which was better, gritty with sand. The road twisted down the hill and out of the woods, into fields of snow, the highway, and the ice-packed river. Caitlin rode in silence, arms folded across her belly.

"You warm enough?" asked Portia.

"Too warm," she said. "Hot."

Portia nodded. This was the entirety of their conversation.

The midwife her mother had chosen was part of a hybrid OB-GYN practice at the south end of town: MDs and midwives, childbirth educators, even a prenatal yoga teacher. In the homey waiting room, there were framed prints of ma.s.sive Native American women with their arms full of corn (they looked ready to squat and produce their offspring on the spot), fat kilim-covered pillows on the floor, and long, deep sofas. In the corner, a little fountain gurgled, the water running over polished black stones. Portia took a seat as Caitlin checked in with the receptionist, noting the range of reading material on the low table (the full ideological spectrum from Parents to Mothering, Prevention to Holistic Parenting) and the women doing the reading: an appallingly young girl in black, clutching the bony hand of her black-clad boyfriend, a woman in denim overalls and a buzz cut, a woman her own age, heavily pregnant, unwrapping a roll of Tums as she turned the pages of the Valley Advocate. Faculty? Faculty spouse? She wore a man's roll-necked sweater and sweatpants in the ubiquitous Dartmouth green. Caitlin sat on the opposite couch with a clipboard.

"My midwife's at the hospital," she told Portia. "I have to wait for the other midwife."

"Did they say how long?" said Portia, paying attention to a small pulse of nausea just beginning to announce itself.

"No. I'm sorry."

"It's fine," Portia told her. "I don't have any plans."

But she also had no work with her, which meant that she had no focus, no distraction from her now evident and growing discomfort. Those files that might have consumed her-and she had many, many still to read-were back at her mother's house, back in the dusty office room she'd slept in now for three fitful nights. It wasn't good practice to take files out in public. Especially in a college town. Even in an obstetrician's office. Who knew? Maybe these moms-to-be were already obsessing about college admissions.

She picked up the nearest magazine and started to read an article about a woman in Connecticut arrested for breast-feeding at a Denny's restaurant. But she didn't like the woman, who was a La Leche instructor and, Portia quickly suspected, had planned her arrest, and the civil suit that followed, well in advance. Lactation n.a.z.is, Rachel had once called them (this after a woman in her mothers group had condemned her decision to stop nursing after six months). Portia flipped past articles on aromatherapy as a means of avoiding gestational diabetes, water birth, the dreaded cesarean, and how to outmaneuver a scalpel-happy (and, it was implicit, male) doctor. She realized that she was becoming more and more irritated with every page.

"May I see that one?" said the woman in the green sweatpants when Portia tossed the magazine back on the table.

"Oh, sure." She picked it up again and pa.s.sed it down the couch. "I should warn you, it's pretty hard-core. If you're planning on taking an aspirin during labor, I wouldn't read that."

"Really?" The woman frowned. "You'd have thought the pregnancy wars would be over by now."

Caitlin, who had finished filling in her forms, was listening.

"You'd have thought." Portia halfheartedly rummaged through the other magazines. There wasn't anything she wanted to read. After a steady diet of Princeton applications for weeks, nothing felt as urgent, as vital. Nothing, she reflected, equaled the adrenaline jolt of opening the folder and meeting the person inside.

"I haven't read anything, really," the woman said. Then she sighed. "You know, I've sort of been ignoring this whole thing."

Portia heard herself laugh. But that was terrible, she thought suddenly. So she apologized. "I suppose you've had an easy pregnancy," she added. "I mean, if you've been able to ignore it."

"No, no. I mean, yes, I suppose it's been easy. I just... well, I've had a lot of miscarriages. A lot." The woman shrugged. She seemed embarra.s.sed, a little out of it. "It got to the point that whenever I got pregnant I'd just start waiting for the miscarriage, because my doctor told me not to get my hopes up. So when I got pregnant, I more or less tried not to think about it. And then, last month, my husband and I kind of looked at each other one day and went, you know, 'Oh, my G.o.d, I think we're really having a baby.' "

Caitlin, beside her, said, "Oh, wow."

"I know. I mean, it's not that we're not happy, we're just in shock. And of course they're mad at me that I haven't been coming in all summer and fall, but I just couldn't put myself through all that again. So now I have to come every week, to get scans and everything. I haven't had time to think about the pregnancy wars, or the birth wars, or anything."

Portia looked at her. The woman was her own age, certainly no younger. The skin around her eyes was loose and dark. Her hair, halfhearted blond, was dark at the roots. How many miscarriages did "a lot" mean? How many years had her body been conjuring and expelling unrealized children? She felt, as she thought about this, a wave of powerful aversion-to the woman, so heavily pregnant, and then to the girl, who would soon be just as heavily pregnant.

"You okay?" said Caitlin.

"Me?" Portia asked stupidly.

"Should I go get someone?"

This was the woman, the older woman. Portia wondered what they were talking about. Then, quite suddenly, she understood that she was looking at the floor, at her two feet in the warm boots she always wore when she was in Vermont: Abominable Snowman boots, Mark called them, since they looked like the feet of the mythical Sasquatch. They had bought them one summer in the sale at the Princeton Ski Haus, though she couldn't now remember why they had gone in there, since they didn't ski. The white furry feet were planted squarely on the carpeted floor of the waiting room, and Portia, who had an excellent vantage point from between her knees, could see the tufts of synthetic hair curling around the rubber soles.

"Are you going to be sick?" she heard the woman say, but from very far away, like across the room, except that she also felt the woman's hand on her forehead, holding her forehead, just as Susannah had done years before, when she was a child and needed to throw up. It was something a mother did: holding a forehead like that. This woman, Portia thought, already knew how to do it. She was already a mother.

"You're going to be fine," the woman said in her soothing, mother voice. "They say nausea means it's a healthy pregnancy."

"Oh no," Caitlin said loudly. "She's not pregnant. I'm pregnant."

Portia shot to her feet, bashing her shins against the low table. This hurt terribly, but the pain also cleared her head. She climbed past Caitlin's knees and away from the woman, the mother. "I'm sorry," she said, not looking at either of them. "I think I need to go outside. I need some fresh air."

"Okay," Caitlin said amiably. "You don't need to wait with me."

"Can I meet you?" she asked. Her voice sounded absurdly cheery. "Do you know that cafe up at the top of Main Street? It's called the Dirt Cowboy?"

"Sure," said Caitlin. "I'll just walk over there when I'm done."

"Great." She took her coat from a hook near the door. "Hey, good luck with your baby," she told the woman. "I'll see you!"

And she went outside.

The day was cold and bright, a cla.s.sic Hanover day. Portia walked slowly up Main Street, taking deep breaths of the hard air. She did not understand what had happened, how she had lost that time between sitting politely on the couch and eyeing the carpet between her Bigfooted feet. She had a terrible idea that there was some element to the story that eluded her, like an ident.i.ty-the woman's ident.i.ty-known but beyond reach, which had somehow upended her. Faculty? she thought again. Faculty spouse?

She began, without any real attentiveness, to skim her own remembered directory of Dartmouth personnel, department by department, building by building, across the campus, but it was a pointless exercise. She had been gone for years, ten years, an eternity in college time. And even when she'd been a part of this college community, she'd hardly known every face or every name. It wasn't a big school, of course, but Dartmouth's faculty were scattered far afield around the Upper Valley. They lived on winding wooded roads, out of sight of other homes, in old farmhouses in Etna or gla.s.s-and-steel boxes up in the hills with views of the Connecticut, and somehow you didn't run into them at the supermarket or the movies. She abandoned the project as she walked, giving herself over to the diversion of shopwindows. Two days before Christmas the town was empty, and this was a town unused to being empty. Dartmouth functioned year-round as a college, and the students were eternally present, trawling the few streets, queuing up at the same restaurants, trying on the same green T-shirts at the Coop. In any season they dominated the sidewalks, outnumbering the grown-ups, outmaneuvering the Appalachian Trail through-hikers who stumbled out of the woods, stunned to find so many human beings in one place. Looking ahead up the hill, Portia saw no one at all, just a short man in khakis and a down jacket washing the window of Campion's.

Without really planning to, she turned down Lebanon Street, which ran behind the ma.s.sive Hopkins Center, the art and performance building that doubled as Dartmouth's post office. The street, indifferently plowed, was pocked with holes and ruts and packed with dirty snow. Portia walked, her hands in the pockets of her parka, stepping with care to evade the ice, feeling the cold in her face. She supposed she was headed for the place she had once lived, her first off-campus apartment in the year after her graduation, though she knew the building was no longer there. It had risen three unlovely stories behind an excellent ice cream parlor called the Ice Cream Machine, fondly dubbed the S'Cream Machine, now similarly departed. The S'Cream Machine had been the site of many an evening run while Portia was a student, and after, ostensibly for defensible items like coffee but, inevitably, for double cones of coffee fudge. She was not yet a cook. The first few years of her so-called adult life, she ate pretty much the way she had as an undergraduate: lunches at Collis (the student center), takeout, toasted sandwiches in a grill contraption that looked like a waffle maker.

She wasn't sure when it had closed. After they'd moved to Princeton, she hadn't come back for a year or two, not until Dartmouth hosted one of the annual Ivy League conferences: minority recruitment or debates on the common application, forty or so admissions officers, newly out from under the cloud of April 15, crowded into the Hanover Inn. That first night, she had waited until after the dinner in one of the private dining rooms, then stolen out back for her fix of ice cream (the memory of which, swelled with nostalgia, had a.s.sumed ambrosial proportions), only to find a hemp and incense emporium where the S'Cream Machine had once been. Gone, very long gone, she had thought, standing in front of the Hempest, eyeing the coa.r.s.e purses and dubious toiletries through the window and conjuring for some reason a t.i.tle from Mark's library, of a book she had never actually taken down, let alone read. She wasn't really sure which she was thinking of: the ice cream parlor or herself. Gone from here. Long gone. And not coming back.

The Hempest, too, had moved on. The storefront now belonged to a hoagie and pizza shop, with loudly advertised free delivery on campus. The building behind it, where she had lived alone and then with Mark, was now a parking garage. Portia, idly reading the ingredients for the Big Green Special (cukes and sprouts), shivered in her parka.

She went into the Hopkins Center by the back door and was surprised to find the cafeteria open, if deserted. She bought a cup of Green Mountain Coffee to warm her hands and continued on, through the arts center and out the front door onto the college Green.

The Green, of course, was one of Dartmouth's glories. Descended, like Harvard's Yard, from the town's once communal livestock grounds, it was Hanover's historical pedigree, its link to many other New England towns of its vintage. Once, the cows and sheep of local farmers had grazed here; now, the great open s.p.a.ce had been swallowed by the college and was ringed with its administration and cla.s.sroom buildings, its library and arts center, and the Hanover Inn. It was lovely in every season (except for mud season, in which nothing could be lovely) and was today especially brilliant, glittery with snow under this bluest sky. It was the one place on campus that had never grown shabby and lost its grandeur for Portia, the place she had always paused to appreciate, even in haste, even while rushing for a cla.s.s or, later, a meeting. There had been picnics here, rallies, her own graduation, outdoor cla.s.ses on days too sunny to stay inside, sunbathing under the anemic New Hampshire sun, endless hanging out. In the fall of her first year, she had gathered with her cla.s.smates to build their towering bonfire of railroad ties-one for each number of their cla.s.s year-just as the previous year's freshmen had gathered the October before, on the day she and Susannah arrived for an interview and a tour.

Sometimes Portia thought-and this was not an uncommon pastime for an admissions officer-of the seventeen-year-old applicant she'd been then, the shaky essays declaring an entirely artificial sense of self and an intellectual ident.i.ty she had no real claim to. She had perfect recall of her SAT scores (just fine before the upward ETS "recentering" in 1994, substandard today), the English and biology teachers who had written her recommendations, the (thinly fictionalized) short story she had sent along at the last minute, about attending a pro-choice rally in Boston. Portia remembered her interview in the small office upstairs in Mc.n.u.tt Hall (the same small office that would, amazingly, become her own small office only a few years later), in which she had been so shy, so terrified about not being good enough, not getting this thing, this chance, which she had only just discovered she wanted very badly. She remembered-oddly, for a woman who had begun paying attention to clothing only when it had become humiliating not to-precisely what she had worn the day of her visit: a blue velour turtleneck and a pair of Levi's jeans, tan Frye boots pa.s.sed down to her (about five years after they had left fashionable in their wake) by a friend of Susannah's. She remembered the simulated enthusiasm she had summoned when the interviewer asked what mattered to her.

What mattered to her? Nothing, at that time, mattered much to her, except getting into college and away from her mother. There was no pa.s.sion, no dream of what she might do in the world. Certainly there was no great purpose to her life or profound imperative writ upon her soul. The truth was that Portia thought of her seventeen-year-old self with deep humility, because she had too clearly been one of those late bloomers the current system was not primed to recognize. Or perhaps, she thought now, turning at the center of the Green to set a course for Mc.n.u.tt itself, she had not bloomed at all, only landed where she had landed, wherever that was, through a combination of chance and pa.s.sivity. It had to be said that, when she read applications for Princeton, she was not looking for students like the student she had been then, who had no clue what they might accomplish in time. Not, of course, that she would have revealed this basic truth about herself in her Dartmouth application-even then, the imperative of college admissions was to present oneself in the best possible light. She would not have actually announced that she had no particular talents, no extraordinary intelligence, no burning desire to excel in some academic field or profession, and that in the absence of a life plan or goal, her intention was to wait until something happened to her, or some opportunity presented itself, and hope that she was perceptive enough to grab it. Her deep fear of her own mediocrity was compounded, at first, by the students she would meet when she matriculated: happy, easy people, athletic and academically capable. But slowly, over the years that followed, cracks began to appear and widen. The lacrosse star who dropped out without warning. The pet.i.te girl from Georgia, last seen on a winter morning loading her family's car in front of the dorm. The plunging depressions. The pervasive smell of vomit in the women's bathroom on her floor. The alcohol-Christ, the alcohol!

Inside every one of her fellow students, she understood now, was a person who didn't live up to his or her own expectations, a person too fat, too slow, whose hair wouldn't hold a curl, who had no gift for languages, who lacked the gene for math. They were convinced they were not all they'd been cracked up to be: the track star, cla.s.sicist, valedictorian, perennial leading lady, campus fixer, or teacher's favorite. The driven ones she'd known in college feared they weren't driven enough, and the slackers were sure they'd find out how deficient they were if they ever did apply themselves. Up and down the corridors of the dormitories, behind each closed door, and whether the person within was davening over organic chemistry or drinking himself into a stupor, the Dartmouth she'd attended was populated by young people who were terrified of exposure.

Twenty years later, it was worse.

By now, Portia had dwelt in the world of the college-aged, and the nearly college-aged, for a very long time. She knew these kids intimately, more intimately perhaps than when she'd been one of them. She knew that they were soft-centered, emotional beings wrapped in a terrified carapace, that even though they might appear rational and collected on paper, so focused that you wanted to marvel at their promise and maturity, they were lurching, turbulent muddles of conflict in their three-dimensional lives. She knew that they were dying to leave home and petrified to go, that they clung to their friends but knew absolutely that no one truly understood them. When she went out into their world, departing her ivory, literally ivy-clad tower to visit their schools-and it was oddly immaterial if their schools were sticky with wealth or held together by munic.i.p.al duct tape and valiant teachers-she knew precisely who they were and what they were going through. She knew that their arrogance was laced with self-laceration (sometimes, in the case of the girls, literal self-laceration) and that their stated pa.s.sions were, more often than not, arid things a.s.sembled in their guidance counselors' offices or at the family dinner table. She knew that the creative ones were desperately afraid they were talentless, and the intellectuals deeply suspected they weren't brilliant, and that every single one of them felt ugly and stupid and utterly fake.

This generation, raised with a mantra of self-esteem and extravagantly praised by their parents for every scribble, knew how to talk a good game. They knew how to acc.u.mulate accomplishments and present them in CV form (one infamous college counselor actually referred to such an item as a "brag sheet"), how to sell themselves to the teachers who would write their references and the alumni who would interview them. But inside they were crippled with doubt. And though there had been relatively few real scandals in recent Ivy League admissions, few cases in which applicants lied outright and gained admission as a result (any admissions officer could effortlessly cite the Harvard girl who failed to mention that she had killed her mother, the Stanford boy who'd plagiarized articles for his high school paper, and of course Princeton's own cowboy autodidact, really an ex-con in his thirties), Portia suspected that most applicants had a nagging fear that they were lying, too-or, if not actually lying, then exaggerating their interest in plant biology or modern dance, overestimating their natural apt.i.tude for math, overstating their pa.s.sion for public service. They feared that they were ordinary kids, in other words, and not the brilliant sparks they had unexpectedly persuaded the grown-ups they were. Ordinary and thoroughly average. Ordinary and undeserving.

One morning a couple of years earlier, Portia had spent a strange but fascinating hour on the filthy floor of a used-book store in Cambridge (another Ivy League admissions conference) with a pile of Harvard yearbooks, interwoven with dust, covered in flaking crimson leather. Turning the pages, she'd lost herself in the open, handsome faces of the Cla.s.s of '28 and their staid, abbreviated biographies: Charles Cortez Abbott (Lawrence, Kans., Browne & Nichols, Advocate, Hasty Pudding, Business). Alfred Reinhart (Lawrence, Ma.s.s., Lawrence High, Biology, Medicine). Joseph Parkhurst (St. Paul, Minn., Lawrenceville, Cla.s.sics, Delphic, Law). The cla.s.s poem that year had been written by a man not destined to enter the pantheon of American poets, but Portia found it beguiling and terribly current. It told the story of a Harvard student who felt deflated by his college experience, having failed to letter in a sport or graduate at the top of his cla.s.s, really to excel in any way at all. Determined to recapture this wasted opportunity, the student in the poem had graduated and changed his name, then re-sat the entrance exams (entrance exams! no art portfolios and viola recordings and "brag sheets" back in '28) to gain another place in the incoming Harvard freshman cla.s.s, where this time around he determined to make some mark on the university. His fate, however, proved inescapable. Four years on, he found himself precisely in the same position: competent student, athlete, orator, man about town, not a star of his cla.s.s, not a success in his own mind, merely the very ordinary man he ever was (though no longer quite so young). And this time he departed for good, presumably to become another nondescript alumnus in the sea of Harvard graduates. Because, the poem concluded, all of them-all of us, thought Portia, closing the yearbook in a final puff of dust-were that dreaded thing, the average man. 1928 or 2008-there was no escaping it.