It was her greatest fear, and the anticipation of it her greatest pain. Still, it didn’t occur to her that there was anything to be done about it, anything she hadn’t already tried, and not even the one thing that would seem so obvious to all of us, in retrospect, and which might have been done at any point while we were growing up, not left to its absurdly latter-day implementation. That, not one of us would understand.
One spring morning in the triplets’ eleventh-grade year, our mother went to a parent meeting in the gym on the top floor of the school, where at least a hundred chairs had been set up. This was their introduction to Walden’s college counselors: two young people hired from their first admissions jobs at Harvard and Princeton and the department head, a woman named Fran. Fran had been at Walden so long she actually remembered a time before the arrival of the first helicopter parent, a time of “well-rounded” students each submitting five or six handwritten applications (one to a safety school that truly was a safety school). She was a tall and lean woman with a long gray braid, artfully arranged over her shoulder. She stood before the crowd with a beatific smile.
That didn’t last long.
The purpose of this meeting, Fran explained, was to make a preemptive plea for calm before the parents hurled themselves, lemming-like, over the cliff of madness.
Maybe it was supposed to get a laugh. It didn’t. Even at Walden, that lemming had bolted.
Colleges loved Walden students, said Fran to her palpably tense audience. They always had! Walden students were independent thinkers, intellectually robust and thrillingly creative. Walden students had been admitted to colleges and universities all over the world, some of them with famous names, others less well-known but perfectly suited to that individual applicant. Every Walden student would receive the focused guidance of one of the three college counselors, and individual meetings would commence at precisely the right time, which was now, in the spring of the students’ junior year, when a holistic approach to finding the right fit for each young person would be applied. Every Walden student would receive personal attention and custom support. Every Walden student would be treated as the unique and capable young adult he or she was. And when it was all over, every Walden student would be admitted to a college that would eminently fulfill his or her needs. That was a promise she felt very comfortable making!
Any questions?
In a flash, those laid-back parents who had chosen Walden over Brearley, Walden over Dalton, Walden over Riverdale, and Walden over Collegiate transformed into obsessive, ruthless, competitive despots.
Won’t it hurt our kids that Walden doesn’t grade?
What about class rank? How was an admissions officer supposed to tell if a student was at the top of his or her class or the bottom?
Would transcripts indicate the difference between, say, an advanced seminar and a tie-dye-for-credit course?
Were the college counselors going to persuade certain kids not to apply to certain colleges? And if so, how did they plan to justify that?
“If my wife and I went to Harvard, does our daughter have an advantage there?”
(Just pure nastiness, for its own sake, this particular father being a well-known asshole.)
Fran, of course, had been here before, and “here” was getting worse with every passing year. She reiterated her points, reissued her Zen, and recommended that parents read a recently published book that she herself had been learning a great deal from: Colleges That Change Lives. “If you look beyond the name-brand schools there is so much out there! Even I didn’t know some of these places! The educational landscape is so varied and fascinating! I really look forward to meeting you, and working with your children!”
Johanna left with the others, spilling out onto Joralemon Street in a scrum of frantic people. Many of these mothers and fathers had been together since their children started pre-K; now, suddenly, they were at the opening bell of a steeplechase, and everyone knew far too much about everyone else. Tommy Belkow was a piano prodigy. Lizzie Wynn had spent the previous summer in China doing a language immersion, and her older sister was at Princeton. Julia Wu was straight-up brilliant, and she had already taken the SAT. Twice. Both of Carla Leavitt’s parents—as her father had just reminded over a hundred truly disgusted people—had attended Harvard.
“Poor you,” Nancy Farrell said, behind her. “You’ve got three!”
She said this as if it was news to Johanna.
“Maybe that’ll keep me from getting too stressed out about any one of them.”
“I’d be out of my mind. I still haven’t recovered from Daisy.”
Daisy was a sophomore at Brown, where Nancy herself had gone to college.
“I suppose Harrison’s going to want to apply to Yale or Harvard.”
Johanna had no idea whether Harrison was going to want to apply to Yale or Harvard. Even if he was already thinking about college—and he was the only one of the three who conceivably was—he was hardly confiding in her.
“Wherever he wants to apply is fine.”
That felt like a pretty strong statement to Johanna, but obviously not strong enough.
“Where did Salo go? Remind me.”
“Cornell.”
“Oh! Well, I bet Cornell would take them all.”
Johanna looked at her.
“Sammy says he doesn’t want to go to Brown but I told him he needs to apply. At least have the option.”
“I have to go,” Johanna said. She didn’t, and she was surprised to hear herself say it.
“Oh. Okay. Where you off to?”
“Bookstore.” Another surprise. “I have to get some books.”
Nancy laughed. “Well, that would be the place for it. Hey.” She leaned close to Johanna’s ear. “Carla Leavitt’s dad. What a tool.”
Johanna nodded.
She took off down Clinton Street, leaving the scrum behind. It was a bright spring day, and she couldn’t quite believe that they were really here, all five of them. She’d been grateful for the parents’ meeting, the excuse it gave her to walk to school behind the kids this morning, but the day still stretched before her, a long straight line to sleep, itself a preamble to waking again with this same terrible feeling of not one wonderful thing to look forward to in the years ahead. Then, as she turned down Court Street, she found herself circling that thoughtless comment of Nancy’s, about all of her children going off to college together, at Cornell. Neither she nor any of the children had actually ever been to Cornell. Salo had never been able to love the place—how could he, after what had happened there?—so there had been no class reunions with the family in tow, no football weekends or visits to show the kids where he had spent four years of his life. Still, as Johanna walked, she found herself consumed by a powerful reverie about the three of them, together at Cornell, and somehow finding one another there, at last sitting together in class, meeting for dinners, even studying in one another’s rooms. Could that happen? Had it only, ever, been a question of their leaving home, leaving herself and Salo, to find what had been so not there among them all these years? If it were possible, even if it left her out, she would still rejoice at the thought of it: all three of her children, reconciled at last over whatever had driven them so relentlessly apart. Calling home to report that Harrison and Lewyn were joining the same fraternity, or Sally’s room was the place they gathered to study, or Lewyn had found a great restaurant in town and they were meeting there for dinner every Sunday night. When she and Salo went up for Parents’ Weekends they would find the children waiting, arms around one another and full of love, and at last, at last, the five of them would be that thing she had given herself over to making, and which was not a failure.
But then it struck her that Harrison would never, under any circumstances, even apply to a college his brother and sister were applying to. So that fantasy crashed to the pavement.