“Ha, ha,” I said.
“Well, let’s get down to business. From your application, you seem to be very creative. I enjoyed your creative application essay. My only concern is that you realize this seminar is an academic class, not a creative class.”
“Right,” I said, nodding energetically and trying to determine whether any of the rectangles in my peripheral vision was a box of tissues. Unfortunately, they were all books. The professor was talking about the differences between creative and academic writing. I kept nodding. I was thinking about the structural equivalences between a tissue box and a book: both consisted of slips of white paper in a cardboard case; yet—and this was ironic—there was very little functional equivalence, especially if the book wasn’t yours. These were the kinds of things I thought about all the time, even though they were neither pleasant nor useful. I had no idea what you were supposed to be thinking about.
“Do you think,” the professor was saying, “that you could spend two hours reading the same passage, the same sentence, even the same word? Do you think you might find it tedious, or boring?”
Because my ability to spend hours staring at a single word had rarely been encouraged in the past, I pretended to have to think it over. “No,” I said finally.
The professor nodded, frowning thoughtfully and narrowing his eyes. I understood with a sinking feeling that I was supposed to keep talking. “I like words,” I elaborated. “They don’t bore me at all.” Then I sneezed five times.
I didn’t get in. I got called to only one other interview, for Form in the Nonfiction Film: a seminar I had applied to because my mother, who had always wanted to be an actress, had lately joined a screenwriting class and now wanted to make a documentary about the lives of foreign medical graduates in America—about people who hadn’t passed the medical board exams and ended up driving taxis or working in drugstores, and about people like my mother who passed the boards and became research faculty at second-tier schools, where they kept getting scooped by people at Johns Hopkins and Harvard. My mother had often expressed the hope and belief that I would help her make this documentary.
The film professor had an even worse cold than I did. It felt magical, like a gift. We met in a basement room full of flickering blue screens. I told him about my mother, and we both sneezed continually. That was the only freshman seminar I got into.
? ? ?
I went to the snack counter in the student center to buy a Diet Coke. The guy in front of me in line was taking forever to order. First he wanted iced tea, but there wasn’t any.
“Do you have lemonade?” he asked.
“Lemonade, I have in the can and the bottle.”
“Is it the same brand in the can and the bottle?”
“The bottle is Snapple. The can is, uh, Country Time.”
“I’d like the bottle of lemonade, and an apple Danish.”
“I’m out of the apple. I got cheese and raspberry.”
“Oh. Do you have baked potato chips?”
“You mean the kind that’s baked?”
It was the world’s most boring conversation, but somehow I couldn’t stop listening. It went on like that until finally the guy had paid for his Snapple lemonade and blueberry muffin and turned to leave. “Sorry for taking so long,” he said. He was really good-looking.
“That’s okay,” I said.
He smiled, started to walk away, but hesitated. “Selin?”
“Ralph!” I exclaimed, realizing that he was this guy I knew, Ralph.
Ralph and I had met the previous summer at a program for high school juniors where you spent five weeks in a house in New Jersey studying the interdisciplinary history of the Northern European Renaissance. The thing that had brought us together was how the art history teacher mentioned the Doge of Venice, whom she called simply “the Doge,” in every lecture, regardless of subject. She could be talking about the daily lives of burghers in Delft and somehow the Doge would come into it. Nobody else seemed to notice this, or to think it was funny.
We sat together with our drinks and his muffin. There was something dreamlike about our conversation, because I found that I couldn’t quite remember how well we had known each other last summer. I remembered that I had admired him, because he was so good at imitating people. Also, I found that I now somehow knew a lot of information about his five aunts—more than one would know about someone who wasn’t a friend. At the same time, Ralph was somehow categorized in my mind as the kind of person I would never truly be friends with, because he was so handsome, and so good at relating to adults. He was what my mother called, in Turkish, a “family boy”: clean-cut, well-spoken, the type who didn’t mind wearing a suit or talking to his parents’ friends. My mother had really liked Ralph.
Ralph and I talked about our freshman seminar interviews. He had interviewed for a seminar with a Nobel Prize–winning physicist who hadn’t asked a single question and just made Ralph wash some lab equipment. The equipment might have been a gamma ray detector.
? ? ?
I applied for a class called Constructed Worlds, in the studio art department. I met the instructor, a visiting artist from New York, in a studio full of empty white tables, bringing my high school art portfolio. The visiting artist squinted at my face.
“So how old are you anyway?” he asked.
“Eighteen.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake. This isn’t a freshman class.”
“Oh. Should I leave?”
“No, don’t be ridiculous. Let’s take a look at your work.” He was still looking at me, not the portfolio. “Eighteen,” he repeated, shaking his head. “When I was your age I was dropping acid and cutting high school. I was working summers in a fish factory in Secaucus. Secaucus, New Jersey.” He looked at me disapprovingly, as though I were somehow behind schedule.
“Maybe that’s what I’ll be doing when I’m your age,” I suggested.
“Yeah, right.” He snorted and put on a pair of glasses. “Well, let’s see what we’ve got here.” He stared at the pictures in silence. I looked out the window at two squirrels running up a tree. One squirrel lost its grip and fell, crashing through the layers of foliage. This was something I had never seen before.
“Well, look,” said the visiting artist finally. “Your composition in the drawings is . . . okay. I can be honest with you, right? But these paintings seem to me . . . sort of little-girlish? Do you see what I’m saying?”
I looked at the pictures he had spread out on the table. It wasn’t that I couldn’t see what he meant. “The thing is,” I said, “it wasn’t so long ago that I was a little girl.”
He laughed. “True enough, true enough. Well, I’ll make my decision this weekend. You’ll be hearing from me. Or maybe you won’t.”
? ? ?