Admission. Part 9

"Many come from college advising. In other words, they've counseled high school students on applying to college. Some are teachers. Some people just begin working in an admissions office-for example, in some clerical capacity. Then they move into the actual admissions work."

"So you're not qualified, exactly. It's more of a seniority track."

There was now official discomfort at the table. Rachel seemed to be looking past Portia entirely, her gaze vaguely on the wall of bookshelves at the far end of the room. Even David, not the most sensitive follower of human interchange, was looking at Helen in an openly perplexed way. When Mark came to the table, he sat down quickly and looked worried.

"I suppose." Portia nodded carefully. "We don't have formal preparation. Admissions work is something people just find they're good at. Or they don't. Or they may be good at it, but they discover it's very difficult for them emotionally. It does affect you. You're very aware of what's out there, and the stress these kids are under. And they're very deserving. You want to say yes to them all, but you can't. People either make their peace with that or they need to do something else."

"And you've made your peace with it, then." It wasn't a question. It was a judgment. Helen sat back in her chair, looking diverted. Portia let the wisp of earlier distaste come flooding through her. This, after diligent good manners, was actually a relief. She said nothing but allowed herself to feel the pleasure of pure, almost gleeful loathing. It had been a long time since she had hated anyone so fully and with such little cost to herself. She was even able to laugh as she answered the question that was not a question.

"It's a process." She forced a smile and wrenched the subject away. "Mark," she said, "that looks so good."

He served the rather ordinary fruit tart, and the evening limped along to its end. She heard about Helen's first American Halloween, at the Friedmans' on Wilton Street, and her perambulation through the neighborhood with ten-year-old Julia Friedman, who was dressed as a white-faced ghoul in a mask that somehow pumped fake blood over its own cheeks. The parents they met in the darkened streets had been horrified, Helen reported, and covered their young children's eyes. One had even scolded Helen, mistaking her, Portia supposed, for Julia's mother, complaining that the dreadful b.l.o.o.d.y mask was too frightening for the children.

"Which is absurd," Helen announced. "Of course, we invented Halloween. In England, it's meant to be b.l.o.o.d.y. The fear is the point. This costume parade of cartoon characters and superheroes, I can't fathom it."

Portia practiced her weary smile and feigned interest. She suppressed her dismay when Mark offered, and then made, a second pot of coffee. She was close to Rachel. Sometimes they went for walks along the ca.n.a.l, accompanied by the Friedmans' portly chocolate Lab, or met at Small World Coffee on Witherspoon Street. She found David adorable in a profoundly glad-I'm-not-married-to-him way. But tonight, after two such wearying, emotionally exhausting days, she could bear little more of them. She wanted them-please, please-to exhale, push back from the table, arise, withdraw, depart. And this woman. Who was this terrible woman?

"Who was that terrible woman?" she asked Mark, following him into the kitchen with the gla.s.ses in her hands. David and Rachel had finally gone, taking Helen away with them. "Apart from a colossal b.i.t.c.h, I mean."

"That terrible woman," Mark said testily, "is one of the most eminent Virginia Woolf scholars in the world."

"Don't you mean Bloomsbury as a whole?" said Portia, setting down the gla.s.ses beside the sink.

"I mean," said Mark, "that we're lucky to have her. She brings a good deal of prestige to the department. And the university."

"Well, she brought a good deal of bad temper to our house tonight. I didn't hear her say one pleasant thing all evening. She didn't even compliment you on your dinner. Which was excellent, by the way."

Mark ignored this. He had his back to her. He stood at the sink, running plates under the tap and setting them down into the dishwasher.

"Mark?"

His shoulder flinched. This actually made her furious.

"Mark. Is she... was tonight typical for her, or do I need to give her the benefit of the doubt?"

He whirled around, his hands almost comically flicking soap onto the floor, but there was nothing comical in his face. It made her want to step back.

"I thought that was inexcusable, if you want my honest opinion. Going on like that about the university. Like a saleswoman."

"I don't-"

"You don't need to peddle to us, Portia. We live here, too. Our paychecks say Princeton, too."

"It's a very nice paycheck," she reminded him, wondering that she had to remind him.

"I know it's a nice paycheck!" he said.

His voice was quiet, but suffused with anger. She stared numbly at him. She had heard this voice before, but only when he spoke to Marcie, or about Marcie, or to the lawyer on the subject of Marcie. Never to her. She remembered the day they had driven to Newark Airport to pick up Cressida, only to find that she was not on the plane, was not even booked on the plane. He had gone to a corner and called Marcie, swaying in rage like a davening Hasid. And the time, just this past July, when he had gone to London for his visit, only to find that Marcie had decamped to a friend's house and refused to release Cressida until Mark signed some doc.u.ment promising he would drive only on secondary roads, because she had reason to distrust his ability behind the wheel. For years, forever, Portia had taken the attendance of Mark's rage. She knew it was there, but what had it to do with her? She had always been the one standing slightly off to one side, watching the white beam of that anger find its target-like the supportive teammate or faithfully recording secretary. This wasn't right. She stared at him: green eyes, graying hair, poorly shaved jaw. And then the idea came surging up into the s.p.a.ce between them, erupting from the blue-painted floorboards, exploding through their kitchen and their house and their conjoined lives: He knew. Somehow, she had no idea how. He'd known all evening. He'd known since before she arrived home. He'd known the instant John Halsey had left her body.

"Mark?"

"I bring home a new colleague. A valued colleague. And incidentally, someone I've known for a long time. And you treat her like she's applying to Princeton but hasn't bothered to read the catalog."

Despite herself, Portia nearly laughed. This was, in fact, a fairly succinct description of Helen.

"I do wonder why she came here, if she's so down on the place. I mean, if Oxford is so perfect and the students so superior, why on earth did she leave?"

"Why, I don't know," Mark said caustically. "Maybe it has something to do with a higher paycheck and a lighter teaching load. She's a scholar, Portia. She has work to do."

Portia noted the dig-her own work being more toil than vocation, in other words-but chose not to react.

"Yes, but Mark, she just came in here and started criticizing everything. You have to admit she was far from gracious tonight. And she was thoroughly unpleasant to me."

"You were thoroughly unpleasant to her," he corrected. "I was ashamed of you."

Portia looked at him in disbelief. For a long moment, neither of them spoke. Then, seemingly with great effort, Mark broke away and turned back to the sink. Painfully, he took up a plate and painfully, deliberately, ran it beneath the water.

"Mark," Portia said quietly. "What is this?"

His shoulders tensed. He gripped the edge of the sink with one hand and leaned slightly forward. The water ran on, bouncing up off the surface of the plate.

"I think," he said finally, "I need to go back to the office for a bit."

Automatically, she looked up at the kitchen clock. It was half-past ten.

"Now?" she asked.

"I just need some time. Everything's all right."

Strangely, she did not feel at all rea.s.sured.

"Could you bear to clean up? I know I said I'd do it."

He wasn't looking at her, though he had turned off the water and stepped back from the sink.

"All right," she told him. "I don't mind. But we'll have to come back to this at some point."

"Yes." He nodded. He looked horrendously depleted. "I know. But tonight, I can't. I'll just be a couple of hours."

"Okay," she said.

He walked past her, moving the air. He went straight to the hallway, picked up his keys from the table, and left. The door behind him failed to click shut. Portia looked after him. She stood for some time, rooted and amazed. There was a subject between them now, as yet unidentified but quite real, and likely not evadable, or at least not without cost. She had grown comfortable here, with Mark, or if not comfortable, then stable, safe from the barbed thing she had done a very long time ago. Now, suddenly, that thing was utterly present, sharp, and terribly sad, demanding attention and redress, and she was as ill prepared now to face it as she had been then, in spite of being so much older and theoretically more capable. Theoretically, Portia thought, astonished. Alone in the house, alone in her life, alone with the aftermath of a bad dinner party and an old, old transgression. What was there to do but follow him to the front door and shut it the rest of the way?

I have experienced a myriad of challenges in my young life, but I am not sorry for myself, because they have had an important affect on me. I know that I am a better person because of the things I have faced. I try to remember that everyday.

CHAPTER SEVEN.

TEAMMATES.

At the age of sixty-eight, Susannah Nathan was still, somehow, a firebrand in the making. Despite committed attachment to a long series of social, political, and creative endeavors, Portia's mother had never found the vector capable of transforming her into a Gloria Steinem, Alice Waters, Wilma Mankiller, or Twyla Tharp. She could last only a brief time in any setting before becoming convinced that she was needed elsewhere. She had campaigned for women and immigrants, early s.e.x education, and subsidized housing, sanctuary for victims of male violence and of mandatory drug sentencing. She had toiled against consuming the flesh of animals and the slaughter of virgin forests. She had marched and rallied and fundraised and lent her considerable energies to any number of efforts both local and global, but always as a foot soldier, never a general-forever the woman holding the sign in the background, as some astonishing beacon of energy and inspiration stepped up to the microphone. Outwardly, over the years, very few things had remained constant in Susannah's life. In fact, there was only one thing that had traveled with her wherever she went. That thing was money, and lots of it.

Regrettably, for an aspiring revolutionary, she had been born into a family of materialism and privilege, and unlike some of the others, she had never quite had the wherewithal to let it go. Initially, she had stuck to the proven path, commuting to Barnard from her parents' home in Great Neck and making a real effort to do the great work expected of her, which was to secure a Columbia-educated future physician or attorney and marry him. Even as graduation neared without her having accomplished this basic goal, no one in her family admitted to any apprehension about her. Susie was an excellent student, and her parents were modern people: Didn't Judaism celebrate the intelligence of women? Why shouldn't she get another degree? A master's, or a... teaching thing? (It was good to work with children before you had your own. It showed you what to expect.) The alarm bells failed to ring as Susannah made her application to a university far, far away in California, an about-to-be-roiling university, a university already uncomfortably odd. Ostensibly, she had gone west to study psychology, but her interest, already tenuous, did not survive the realization that graduate work in the field focused less on feelings than on dry a.s.sertions tested with live mice. Also, she was not personally courageous. During her first year on that soon-to-be-tumultuous campus, she joined a sorority, the only graduate student in the university to do so. At best, she was fixed in place. At worst, moving backward.

Then, finally, she got the jolt she was waiting for. That spring, only months before Mario Savio would seize a microphone on Sproul Plaza and declare Berkeley, California, the center of the new universe, Susannah, who was manning a fund-raising stand on Shattuck with some sorority sisters, was noticed by an artist (also dope dealer) from St. Louis, whose street sculptures were arrayed for sale on the pavement. The artist (and dope dealer) had cast aside his own familial trappings and invested his tuition money (originally intended-O irony-for Princeton) in a particularly fecund patch of Northern California, where a hale and potent strain of cannabis grew as cheerfully as the kudzu back home. He beckoned Susannah to his makeshift stall on the pavement. So much for that elusive Jewish physician. So much for psychology.

He, at least, was entrepreneurial. Many years (and two prison terms) later, he would still be living on the proceeds of that thwarted Princeton tuition and that very prosperous hectare of soil. With him, the following year, Susannah would leave Berkeley and move north to live at peace with nature. With him, a couple of years after that, she would try urban homesteading in Harlem. Without him, when that went south, she herself would head south to attempt life as an emanc.i.p.ated human in a womyn's collective, in Baltimore. Then north again, first to tidy up odds and ends (and collect the lion's share of her fortune) in the house her parents had left her in Great Neck, and so to Northampton. Ah, Northampton. Home of the listing Victorian painted some unusual color. Home of the rigorously divided household responsibilities and rotating cooking duties. Home of the Bluestocking, the deconstructing genius scholarship girl, the earth mother therapist who moonlighted with her guitar at the Iron Horse Music Hall, singing, "There's something about the women in my life..." In Northampton, Susannah picked up a legal mate and produced a daughter, not that those two acts were at all connected, and continued to pa.s.s from stand to stand, from purpose to purpose, from partner to decreasingly viable partner, before, at last, migrating north to the eventual destination of not a few of her friends: Vermont. But through every outward change, she held on to her money. And despite the chorus of disapproval, the dressings-down at consciousness raising, the patient counseling of gurus and sisters, not to mention the pointed and powerfully articulated views of the men she sometimes cohabited with, Susannah declined to consider that a problem.

The money, which had been tied up in trust until Susannah was twenty-five and was hers outright thereafter, came from two sources: first, a maternal grandparent who had been consumed by anxiety all through the summer of 1929 and finally given way to it in early October of that year, fleeing the stock market to the derision of his friends; second, her own father, who had a (not quite aboveboard) knack for knowing where most of the postwar Levittowns on Long Island were going to get built. The fortune these visionary men would leave to Portia's mother was not of immense proportions, but it was unignorable money. Safety-net money. Property-in-the-community-of-one's-choice money. It was don't-have-to-work money, f.u.c.k-you-I'm-out-of-here money, and at-least-I-know-my-kid-can-go-to-college money, just the thing for a responsible citizen who needed to make art or wanted to give everything to the poor. But Susannah was not an artist, and though she dutifully raised funds for the poor in their many guises, she never gave away any of her own money. Instead, she put it into quite a sophisticated portfolio, had it managed by a series of extremely smart young men at a white-shoe firm on Water Street, and directed a laudably modest percentage of the interest to be deposited regularly into her checking account, where it mimicked a subsistence wage or welfare stipend.

She refrained from telling any of this to her daughter, who was accordingly stunned, years later, to happen upon a $20,000 check for her college tuition, printed in an old-world typeface on a pale beige check and from an extremely WASPy-sounding bank in New York Portia had never heard of. It would shame her, later, that she had just a.s.sumed she was on financial aid at Dartmouth, like everyone else up there who didn't come from obvious wealth. When she confronted her mother it all came out, and without shame. So she had some money saved. So what? Was Portia implying that she had led a life of deprivation? Was there some terribly important thing she had been denied? Some crucial possession she had been forced to forgo? Had she suffered terribly?

Of course, she had not. In fact, Portia had some difficulty articulating the sense of dismay, of... well, almost betrayal, she was feeling. It went without saying that their life, the life of her childhood, had not been one of suffering and deprivation. It hadn't been luxurious, of course. Their bookshelves were salvaged boards and cinder blocks, like the bookshelves of everyone else they knew (and, for that matter, laden with most of the same books). They ate their own tomatoes, and Susannah bartered baby-sitting for the services of a handyman when the ceiling started to bow. Her mother hit the yard sales and rummage sales for every thread Portia wore, every toy she played with and book she read. Food came in bulk from the Co-Op. Gifts were handwritten cookbooks containing Susannah's recipe for wheaten bread, her brown rice stir-fry. She also knitted a lot. But while there were utilitarian things around them, things they needed, things to make life simpler or better organized, Susannah seemed thoroughly averse to the idea of acquisition for its own sake and terribly proud of her abstemious character. (Portia had sometimes heard her mother proclaim, with glee, that an entire society of consumers like herself would bring the economy crashing down within days.) She and her mother did not take the kinds of vacations her future cla.s.smates at Dartmouth were taking, to winter sport meccas, capitals of culture, white beaches. On holidays, mother and daughter visited friends and Susannah's former lovers in their mindful communities or off-the-grid last stands. It helped that Portia was not covetous herself. But the oddity of it, the irony of it, was something she had never been able to stop chewing over. After all, it was one thing to have money and something else not to have it. But to have it and, as far as she could tell, ignore it? For all that time? This paradox would preoccupy her for years. If you had money and didn't want to spend it, why not give some of it away? On the other hand, if you had it and didn't want to give it away, why not, you know, buy yourself something nice every now and then?

The year after her daughter started college, Susannah sold the Northampton house-at a loss, of course. (That plumber? Whose services she had bartered for babysitting? He was neither gifted nor licensed, let alone bonded. The resulting mess would require a ma.s.sive reduction in the sale price.) Then she resigned her chairmanship of the Pioneer Valley Food Co-Op and her membership in the Northampton Fellowship of Reconciliation, found a successor to lead the Pioneer Valley chapters of NARAL and Amnesty, and moved north.

Vermont, it seemed clear to Portia, was destined to become one great retirement complex for lefty seniors, not to mention an outstanding investment opportunity for the right kind of entrepreneur. (Organic all-you-can-eat buffets? Collectively run and Hemlock Societyendorsed continuing care facilities? Health clubs pulsating to a Jefferson Airplane sound track?) Specifically, Susannah was bound for Hartland, where two of her friends had decamped some years before, pooling their funds to buy, renovate, and generally civilize a hundred-year-old farmhouse on twenty hilltop acres. The friends, both women, were cohabitants but not lovers. One was a weaver, one a schoolteacher-turned-folksinger, both committed vegans and technophobes. Their domestic arrangement, in its eighth year at the time of Susannah's arrival, had lasted longer than both women's marriages and was, by any account, a success. Then Susannah moved in.

"Call your mother," Portia thought, jolting awake the morning after the dinner party, the cold air hitting her exposed shoulder as it came uncovered. She was alone in the bed but hadn't been for long. At three she'd been wakened by the suck, slap, of the refrigerator downstairs and noted then that Mark had only just gotten up. Which meant that he had previously come home, undressed, and entered the bed-all without waking her. Now he might be anywhere: in the bathroom, the kitchen, his office. He might be at Small World, drinking his habitual wake-up espresso and plowing through the Times. He might be at his desk in McCosh Hall. How much time would pa.s.s before they came back to it? And would they come back to it at all? This sort of thing had happened before, she freely admitted: little jolts of the needle, measuring the years they had lived together, little dots that had never connected to form any sort of linked narrative but remained in situational isolation, though Portia could remember each and every one of them, pain-filled nights of no sleep, bleary, acrid mornings. Somehow they had always pa.s.sed. And this one, she supposed, would as well.

After all, it came to her, making her way downstairs and pouring herself what remained of the coffee Mark had made earlier that morning, they had both been tired. Mark had cooked single-handedly to give dinner to his friends and colleagues, and the evening had mired in... well, not strife. Not acrimony. But there was perhaps an absence of good feeling. It hadn't been a disaster, just not a success. Not the warm welcome he must have wanted to extend to his new colleague from the old country. She ought to have tried harder, Portia thought. Stuck to local real estate (that staple of Princeton conversation) and supermarkets, the new plan for downtown, the ongoing restaurant black hole in which they dwelt. She ought to have sold the town the way she sold the university, and she had not done that, and for the worst of reasons: because she was tired and cranky and racked with... well, something, about the fact that she had gone to bed with a man who wasn't Mark, and she had forgotten about the dinner and was predisposed to dislike anyone who walked in her door and required more than the most modest of effort on her part. She would apologize to him. Then she would call Helen and offer to take her to lunch, or out to the flea market in Lambertville, or something she might enjoy, and through this penance she would restore herself and her home.

Reaching into the refrigerator, she looked past the plastic wrapcovered bowl of goopy leftover chicken Marbella, not because it seemed unappetizing (the dish was, annoyingly, often better the next day), but because it now felt entwined with what had happened last night and bore a kind of taint. She put milk in her cup and placed the carton back on the shelf.

Portia resisted the unfurled New York Times on the kitchen table and took her coffee back upstairs, intent on working through four or five of the weekend folders before she got up properly. The Wild Oats receipt and its note were on her nightstand, left atop the unfurled paperback novel she had given up on the previous month. Portia's heart sank anew. Her mother's tone of command had an uncanny way of working itself through all media, no matter the filter or the remove. Even here, on this pink-striped slip of paper, there was a sense of imperative and imminent offense. How much time had pa.s.sed since her call? The clock was ticking.

Mother and daughter had once been teammates, but never quite friends. Teammates, as Portia would discover in high school when she had actual teammates, were fine things. Piling onto the bus before the game, edgy with shared nerves, egging one another on with the genial, meaningless phrase C'mon, you guys!, collapsing back into the same seats for the ride home-that sense of striving in accord had been a sweet part of high school. Possibly the sweetest. But the camaraderie had not survived graduation, or even the off-seasons. Her teammates, pa.s.sing in the school corridors in winter or spring, were downshifted to nodding acquaintances who had once been close, that past connection floating off like cotton candy on the tongue. They were not friends like the friends her mother instructed her to find, the kind her mother had in, it seemed to Portia, embarra.s.sing excess.

Women friends, to be specific. Susannah was pa.s.sionately clear about the necessity of women in a woman's life. And not too many of them, but only the right ones. "You don't need fifty best friends," Susannah had told her after one especially gruesome day in seventh grade, when Portia had been roundly shunned by the rigidly patrolled popular crowd at Northampton Middle School. These girls, uniformly lithe and light of hair, held unchallenged sway over the choicest lunchroom tables (best visibility, best vantage, just... best). When Portia, employing a very deliberate air of cluelessness about the hierarchy of seating, had attempted to sit at the most rarefied table of all (she had rushed to the cafeteria to be first in line, for this very purpose), two extremely strident and highly amused blond girls had sent her very publicly packing.

"Why are you running after a crowd?" Susannah had said that night, over vegetarian chili and green salad from Bread & Circus. Her lack of sympathy, though hardly unexpected, was salt in her daughter's wound. "Even if you succeed, what have you got? You're just another face in the crowd. And that crowd," said disapprovingly.

"But they're nice," Portia had said in pointless disregard of recent history.

"That I doubt. And even if it were true, nice is very much overrated. I'd like to see you go for more than nice."

In any case, Susannah had gone on to explain, women do not bond in packs, or if they do, they do falsely, in the manner of clubs or sororities, with their artificial enclosures of dues-paying "sisterhood." Portia should have real friends, soul friends, not birds-flocking-together-in-their-common-plumage friends. Not, Susannah would undoubtedly have said, teammates. Portia was going to require companionship through life. Confidantes. Counselors. Comedians with perfect timing. There's something about the women in my life. Like the women who loved and valued Susannah herself.

Right, Portia had thought, despondent and irritated. The irritation was for her mother, for making such a thoroughly unrealistic injunction. (In seventh grade, who has friends like that?) The despondency was for herself, because she suspected even then that she would never have friends like that.

And in fact, she had never had friends like that.

A quarter century after her exile from the coolest of tables in the middle school lunchroom, Portia had found neither those intimate traveling companions her mother had prescribed nor even the superficial rea.s.surance of a group of women friends. She enjoyed her colleagues-or some of them-here at home and generally looked forward to the annual NACAC meetings, where she often joined a group of long-acquainted comrades to indulge in soul-cleansing portions of alcohol. Were these the friends her mother had alluded to? They were not. She never spoke to any of them between conferences, unless some professional necessity arose. Their interactions were limited to e-mail health alerts and holiday cards containing snapshots of their families. But she was not isolated. Who could feel isolated when bombarded daily by hundreds of teenagers? And she lived with Mark, after all! She went for walks on the ca.n.a.l with Rachel and Rachel's dog. She was in a book group, though she tended to duck out at the height of the admissions season. (And whenever she didn't like the book. Which actually happened quite a lot.) But it wasn't the same.

It wasn't what her mother had, had always had. In the Northampton kitchen the phone rang incessantly, not only with organizational updates for the myriad collectives, task forces, and Amnesty groups, but with glad women, distraught women, women in need of Susannah's counsel and support. When Portia came home from school, they would be there before her, as often as not, cups of rapidly chilling herbal tea on the kitchen table and little soggy teabags oozing into the tabletop. The women would look up when she came in, their faces full of residual pain. (Her mother excelled at residual pain, Portia sometimes thought. She had a calling for it.) They seldom broke away from Susannah, and if for some reason they had to leave Northampton, they became the very women Portia and her mother would visit during school breaks: days of local culture and activity punctuated by more of those long, long evenings over the kitchen table (nicer kitchen tables, generally, in much nicer kitchens). Her life with her mother had been a travelogue of these dearest friends, like the one who committed to her lover and followed her to Tennessee, and the one who left her husband and was suddenly a Harvard Law student. (She must have been planning that for a while, Portia would later understand.) Embarrasingly, even at the height of her high school career, the ringing phone was always for her mother. Even more oddly, this would not strike Portia as odd until years later.

Still, as the only fruit of Susannah's loins, Portia had not exactly faded into the crowd of her mother's women. She was special. She was perennially important, like the permanent number one slot on the to-do list. She was, she saw very early on, Susannah's purpose and justification: her life project. And it would be wrong to suggest that this had not been heady stuff for a very long while. Portia had been introduced to her mother's circle as a heroine taking shape before their eyes, Susannah's own little light of mine. She had been the future something amazing, the proof in the pudding of what could happen when women did not allow themselves to be thwarted, limited, disrespected. She turned cartwheels at the potluck in somebody's Northampton backyard, the joyful girl at whom everyone else smiled and nodded, the powerful example of what a free and strong female was supposed to look like.

Sadly, by adolescence, Portia was finding it harder and harder to keep that up.

Shining examples were not supposed to get sent packing from the cool tables, were they? Joyful girls were supposed to have friends, or at least scads of people who wanted to be friends. And free and strong women? Surely they never felt about themselves the way Portia felt about herself: addled by insecurities, endlessly halted by doubt. And also sure-quite sure-that she was losing, filament by filament, the respect of Susannah, her creator, who was going to be very disappointed when she discovered that her daughter, in whom she had invested so much effort, was turning out to be deflatingly normal, a garden-variety self-sabotaging female after all. This normal Portia would turn out to be a woman of un.o.bjectionable looks (trim enough, tall enough, with brown hair like her mother's and brown eyes like her mother's and pale, freckled skin. Like her mother's). Normal Portia would be obviously intelligent, but not what you'd call scary smart. Normal Portia was one of those people you could count on to listen to what you were saying and say, more or less, the right thing in return, but she wasn't exactly a font of wisdom or comfort. Like Susannah. In her serene and knowing way. To her many dearly loved and loving friends.

Later, she would try to convince herself that the renegotiation of power in a mother-daughter relationship was an essential part of growing up, and perhaps that was a little bit true. She would also tell herself that she and her mother had grown apart at the normal time, when she was in high school, when daughters were simply supposed to leave their mothers in the dust. But that wasn't quite true. She would try hardest of all to believe that there had been no incident, no great traumatic event parting daughter from mother, severing the unspoken bond, et cetera, et cetera, but that the coming apart had happened in increments so slight, she had not even noticed: glacial disentanglement, continental drift. And that, Portia knew perfectly well, was an outright untruth.

An incident. An accident. A rift.

All of the above, she thought grimly, which made her mother's increasingly desperate, then increasingly hopeless, overtures ever more poignant. They went on for a long time: the last year of college, the first years of Portia's new career (which baffled her mother), and all through the past decade at Princeton, when Susannah seemed at last to have begun to give up. Now their phone calls and visits were acrid, hollow ordeals of proximity and pretending, painful to all concerned but hardening, at least, into routine. They did not begin without anxiety on both sides, Portia knew, and they did not end without relief, also on both sides. And it might all have been avoided. And it might still be somehow salved, if Portia one day decided to take her mother back into their long-ago confidence. But that would never happen.

She took the first four folders from the pile and set them down on the bed, then climbed in with her coffee. The bed was simply made but warm, Mark having introduced her to certain European necessities like the divine duvet. She plumped the pillows behind her back, sipped her coffee, took up her pen, and read.

Stressed-out girl from Belmont, math team, tennis team, violinist in the local youth orchestra, fund-raiser for the women's shelter. Mom an engineer. Dad an engineer. Older brother at Yale. She wrote about her grandmother, who'd left Ireland in the 1950s because no one seemed willing to educate her and came to Boston, where she remained uneducated. "Going to college has been my goal since childhood," the girl concluded her essay rather portentously. "I've seen what happens to people who are not granted this opportunity."

Maybe Yale would take her, Portia thought, marking the reader's card with comments from the two enclosed references ("One of those faces I look forward to seeing in my cla.s.sroom." "Hardworking and sensitive student." Sensitive? Portia thought). Colleges, Princeton included, did try not to create dire family stress by admitting one sibling and rejecting another, unless there were overwhelming differences in the quality of the applications. No undeserving applicant ever rode in on the coattails of a brilliant older sibling, of course, but no admissions officer relished being the cause of some drunken outburst at Thanksgiving twenty years hence, along the lines of: "You know you're not as smart as Johnny. You couldn't get into Princeton." Good luck at Yale, she silently told the girl, shutting the folder and putting it aside.

The next folder belonged to a cla.s.sic campaigner. In addition to the common application with its Princeton supplement material, transcript, test scores, and recs, he had acc.u.mulated a two-page CV that memorialized every move he had made since entering the ninth grade, an eight-by-ten glossy photo in full baseball regalia, and a page of game-related statistics. There was a packet of newspaper clippings, and three unrequested testimonials illuminated the applicant's team spirit, compet.i.tive rigor, and moral caliber. Portia, alerted to the presence of this extra stuff by the thickness of the folder, rigidly avoided looking at it until she had made her way through the application proper, in the same order and at the same pace she read every other. That way, when she finally arrived at this figurative and literal padding, she was rea.s.sured by the fact that her impressions had already been formed not by the egoism of the publicity blitz, but by the lack of academic intensity already inherent in the transcript, the serviceable writing of the essays, the hearty but nonspecific recs. Then, having ascertained the gist of the unsolicited material, she put aside these later impressions and tried earnestly to forget them, forcing herself to think her way through the application one more time, making sure that her resistance to his personality had not overly directed the box she checked.

Go for It! was his mantra, she supposed. Or, Sell Yourself! The Squeaky Wheel Gets the Grease! Don't Hide Your Light Under a Bushel! Ask for What You Want! Never Ventured, Never Gained! The impulse to hawk one's virtues, to demand affirmation, to politely but firmly request the prize, was so American, she thought, sighing. Being unmoved by it seemed unfair, like an unannounced reversal of the rules. In this dossier, after all, was the spirit that had crossed the prairies, the go-getting att.i.tude that had built empires of business and culture. The fact that it so turned her off was downright unpatriotic, she thought regretfully, setting aside the folder and taking a long drink of her now tepid coffee. Two down. Two more and she would get dressed and go into the office: a decent overture to a decent day's work.

She hadn't made it past the data pages when the phone rang. Portia looked at it, considering. The bedside phone had no caller ID, but far away downstairs a stilted, computerized female voice made an accompanying declaration to the empty kitchen: "Call from... a... nony... mus.... Call from... a... nony... mus."

This little feature was supposed to make life easier. It was supposed to give you a heads-up that a pollster or telemarketer or simply the person you least wanted to talk to was on the line, but in practice there were far too many calls that seemed to carry the designation "a... nony... mus." The antiquated phone in her mother's house, and the undoubtedly antiquated Vermont network it was attached to, quite often announced itself as "a... nony... mus" but sometimes, maddeningly, as "Out of... area" or even "Hart... land... Ver... mont."

Sighing, she closed the folder.

"Portia?"

She still had her finger in the file, as if she had the option of declining contact. "Hey, Mom."

"Mark tell you I called?"

"I got in late, I'm sorry. I didn't have a chance. You know, you can always try my cell if it's important."

Instantly, she regretted this. What was she saying? That her mother shouldn't call unless it was important? That there had to be an "it," and it had to be "important"?

"So did he tell you?" her mother asked. Even from this distance, she sounded on the edge of some hysteria. Was it a disease? Was that it? And Mark had known and somehow forgotten to mention this? Because he was angry at her? Because she had supposedly been rude to a woman who was rude to her first? And in her own home!

"He didn't tell me!" she said, sounding a little hysterical herself. She was bracing herself for words with Greek roots: metastasis, diagnosis. Things ending in oma. Technical terms that everyone understood. Stage three. Stage four. Palliative. Hospice. But her mother was talking instead about a girl who had a baby. Or wanted a baby. Or-no, this was it-had a baby she didn't want. What did it have to do with anything? And she was laughing about this now: "It's been years since I changed a diaper! But I'm telling you, I can't wait."