Privilege and tragedy. A perfect storm for any adolescent.
I was carrying my backpack, and it was even heavier than usual. One of the straps slipped as I reached into the mailbox, and somehow it trapped a bit of my hair. I kept crooking my neck so it wouldn’t pull, and trying to keep the catalogs and magazines and windowed envelopes and brochures from slipping to the ground as I also looked for my key, but a few of them fell anyway, and when I bent to pick those up off the back steps, everything else fell, too: New York magazine, ConEd, the College Board. After I unlocked the door, I had to gather it all up again.
“Phoebe?” I could hear my mother croak. She’d had a root canal earlier in the week and was perhaps making a bit too much of her discomfort, but it was impossible to know.
“Yeah.” The brochure on the top of my pile was from Webster College: iconic New England clapboard, statue of stern founder rendered verdigris by time.
“Aunt Debbie’s visiting,” said my mother, from the living room. I went in to them. Aunt Debbie didn’t get up.
“Hi.” I put the mail on the coffee table and gave my aunt a squeeze around the shoulders. Aunt Debbie wore an awful floral perfume, and way too much of it. She always had.
“Hi, doll,” Debbie said. “Your mom’s a trouper.”
“Mm-hm.”
Mom, I noticed, was holding a bag of frozen peas against her jaw.
“Is it bad?” I asked her.
“How was your day?” she said, instead of answering.
“Bio quiz. We did sprints in track.”
“The only one of my kids who runs intentionally,” Johanna said, slurring a little.
“I like to run.”
I did. I ran at school, because it made more sense to me than any other sport I’d attempted. I ran in the summers, on the beach at the Vineyard. I ran on the weekends, across the bridge and over to the West Side Highway, and then back. I’d always found, when I ran, that my thoughts got really still, which is a highly desirable state for me, and which desisted the moment I stopped running. Unfortunately, I wasn’t especially fast, and there seemed to be nothing my coach could demand or suggest that made me any faster. It was telling, for example, that neither he nor my college counselor, Shura, had suggested I write to track coaches at any of the colleges I was supposedly already at work applying to.
“Webster College,” said Debbie, looking over the scattered haul on the coffee table. “The one in Massachusetts?”
I shrugged. “They just send me stuff. I don’t know why.”
“I know why,” mom said to her sister. “Her PSATs were almost as good as Harrison’s.”
Harrison’s, naturally, had been perfect. Harrison’s entire academic career, from PSAT to Roarke to Harvard to the largesse of the late Cecil B. Rhodes, had been paved with gold.
“More likely I’m just on a big long list somebody sold to somebody else.”
“You know where you’re applying yet, hon?” said Debbie. Her own sons had gone to Wharton and were doing various sketchy things on Wall Street.
I made a face. I knew how bad it was. To be a senior at a place like Walden and not know where you were applying to college? Luckily, my mother answered for me.
“Cornell, probably. I mean, that just makes sense. And anywhere else she wants.”
“I’m going to make some tea,” I said. I gathered up all the mail and brought it with me into the kitchen, where I filled up the kettle and set it on one of the burners. （The range was a Viking no member of our family had ever deserved, at least in terms of our culinary skills.） While I was waiting I opened a letter from a college in Wisconsin I’d never heard of （Dear Miss Oppenheimer … it began. The “Miss” itself was disqualifying） and another from NYU, extolling the value of its international campuses. The Webster booklet I put aside for later. The last one was a standard envelope in standard fawn, and I was halfway through the first paragraph before I realized that it wasn’t from a college at all. Also, it wasn’t for me.