“Okay. Never heard of her.”
“I have. Or at least, I saw her name once, on a letter. In a lawyer’s office. S. S. Western.”
“What lawyer?”
“Mom’s. You were there, too. Just a baby.”
“So Mom knows this woman?”
My brother shrugged and read aloud from the Wikipedia page. S. S. Western’s film about three generations of an Oakland family had been broadcast on PBS. Her film about a lesbian/separatist record company had been shown at Sundance. And her portrait of a Nebraska Klansman who converted to Judaism had won a human rights award.
“Is there a picture?” I asked, and he nodded. I got up and stood behind him. The photo was of a slender African American woman posing before a backdrop that read Visions du Réel. She had gray dreadlocks to her chin and a broad smile and a bright pink scar below her neck.
“Have you ever seen her before?” I asked, and he said he hadn’t. I hadn’t either, so that was everything we knew, which in this case was pretty much the same as nothing at all.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Existentially Defrauded
In which Sally Oppenheimer achieves one of her therapy goals
My first sit-down with one of Walden’s cadre of tenacious (yet principled!) college counselors had taken place the winter of my junior year, and it featured a glossary of admissions-speak that included the words “holistic,” “fit,” “range,” and that perennial favorite, “outside the box.” The gist of it all, and this was of primary importance to students and parents alike, was that you couldn’t just walk into the Ivy League today, no matter who you were, or where your parents went to college, or how many AP classes you’d taken (a moot issue at Walden, where AP classes weren’t offered because every class was considered AP-equivalent). It was different now.
Unlike many of my classmates, who continued to hope (despite the aforementioned reality check) that Legacy status would carry them over the line to Mom’s or Dad’s alma mater, I discovered early on that I was unable to “see myself” at either of the relevant institutions: Skidmore, where my mother had gone, and Cornell, attended by my late father (as well as my brother and sister, though it had taken Sally some extra years to graduate and Lewyn had transferred out). I’d been to Ithaca a couple of times over the years, but I couldn’t remember ever having set foot on the campus itself. And I’d never been to Skidmore. I wasn’t even sure where it was.
Did I “see myself” at a city school or a country school? my college counselor, Shura, wanted to know. She had a shaved head and a silver bar through her earlobe.
I couldn’t answer.
Did I “see myself” at a large school or a small school?
Same answer, or nonanswer. The truth was that I just didn’t particularly “see myself” anywhere at all.
What were my primary interests? the counselor asked, trying a different tack.
I didn’t think I had any primary interests. I wasn’t sure I had any interests at all, let alone enough to divide them into primary or secondary.
“Well, do you want to stay East? I went on a tour of small liberal arts colleges in the Midwest last summer. I am completely in love with Grinnell.”
“Oh?” I said. “I’ve never heard of it. Where is it?”
“Iowa.”
I just looked at her. I was lifelong New Yorker. I didn’t know from Iowa.
“Or what about the South? Vanderbilt’s very hard now, and Duke’s impossible. But I love Davidson, especially for creative people.”
Which is … me? I thought, with growing agitation. I hadn’t done one thing that could possibly be interpreted as “creative.”
“And where is Davidson?”
“North Carolina.”
“So what you’re saying is, I shouldn’t apply to Cornell?” I asked, finally getting with the program.
“No, no, I wouldn’t say that. On the contrary, if you’re interested in Cornell I think you should apply, and I think you should apply early. But I’m not getting that sense from you. Are you feeling family pressure to apply to Cornell?”
Family pressure? I was fighting an urge to roll my eyes. For a moment I imagined them—Lewyn and Sally and Harrison and Johanna—lined up on a long sofa and browbeating me: Apply to Cornell! Apply to Cornell! This would require the four of them to be in the same place at the same time. No, I was not experiencing family pressure.
That was pretty much the end of my first sit-down with the college counselor. I left with a long list of schools to investigate, and the name of a book I was supposed to read, called Colleges That Change Lives, but I did no investigation and I never got the book, and months went by without my ever once “seeing myself” anywhere.
A few days after I intercepted that letter from the American Folk Art Museum, I was scheduled for another sit-down with Shura, and this time my mother was present and very much accounted for. Johanna hadn’t forgotten the three-part assault of the triplets’ senior year, or the rounds of meetings with that earlier squadron of Walden counselors (who, back in the year 1999, had not yet been forced to contend with “holistic,” “range of options,” “fit,” or thinking “outside the box,” because back in 1999 over half of Walden’s graduating class had merely walked into the Ivy League, with the rest heading in droves to Wesleyan, Oberlin, and for extreme outliers, Hampshire). In the fall of 1999, Harrison’s academic star had been so bright that Walden, with its bizarre nongrading policies, had only served to dull its light. Sally and Lewyn had been middling students, utterly without distinction, but Cornell had welcomed them, nonetheless. The process, in the end, hadn’t exactly been pleasant, but it was generally straightforward.
“Did you have a think about the colleges on your list?” Shura asked me.
Of course I hadn’t. I’d spent the summer working at a Children’s Aid Society day camp, and coming home every night so blinded by exhaustion that my only off-time activity had been watching old movies with Lewyn, down in his apartment.
“Well, a bit,” I said. “But I still don’t see myself anywhere in particular.”
“I’d like Phoebe to apply to Cornell,” said my mother, stunned that she needed to point out the obvious. “You know, her father went there, and her older siblings. Also there was a very substantial donation of art, back in the early seventies.”
“Oh?” said Shura, trying to look interested. Her silver rod was gone today. Instead, a little coil wound in and out of three holes in her left lobe. “Have you been thinking about Cornell, Phoebe?”
“I’m … thinking about thinking about it,” I said, improvising. Then I said: “My sister lives in Ithaca. I’m planning to go up and visit.”
“Really,” Johanna said. “When is that happening?”
“We’re working it out,” I bluffed.
We left with another list of fourteen schools to investigate, and another suggestion that I read Colleges That Change Lives.