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.