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.
All New Yorkers walk quickly, even as they daydream, and it took only a few minutes for Johanna to reach BookCourt. Inside, the usual Brooklyn literati, actual and wannabe, davened among the volumes. For a moment she forgot the specific books she had come here to buy; then, as another Walden parent from the eleventh-grade meeting came into the store and made for the SAT prep volumes, she remembered, and followed.
She didn’t know this guy, though they nodded to each other. His child—daughter, Johanna thought—had been a ninth-grade arrival at Walden, and by ninth grade even the most socially active among the parents were tired of meeting new moms and dads. He was holding two thick workbooks and seemed to be evaluating them on the basis of weight. She stepped beside him and began to pick her way down the shelf. The Yale Daily News Guide to the Colleges. Getting In. 100 Winning College Essays. Then she noticed a small paperback at eye level. Colleges That Change Lives: 40 Schools You Should Know About Even if You’re Not a Straight-A Student.
“Oh, that’s the book she mentioned,” said the Walden dad.
Johanna looked up. “Yes, I guess so. Do you want it?”
He smirked. “No. My daughter’s Stanford or bust.”
Well, I hope for her sake it isn’t bust, Johanna nearly said.
She opened the book and read her way down the table of contents. Forty schools, as promised, and, as Fran had mentioned, far from “name brand.” In fact, Johanna hadn’t heard of any of them: Whitman, Grinnell, Roarke, Reed, Hendrix.
“Happy reading,” said her fellow Walden parent. He took his prep books over to the counter. Johanna looked around for a chair.
The college section was adjacent to the children’s area, an open space with a bright, multicolored rug and a number of fabric-covered cubes for small people to sit on. There were toys underfoot, and a couple of moms were down there with toddlers on their laps, turning the pages of board books and talking over their children’s heads, a maneuver that Johanna remembered as having been all but impossible for her with three kids. These two tow-headed children—one with a haircut straight out of To Kill a Mockingbird and a pair of Boo Radley overalls to match—were perfect exemplars of the new Brooklyn, prematurely literate kids with names like Otis and Mabel and parents who made jewelry or kombucha, and still somehow lived in gleaming brownstones on the side streets of Cobble Hill and the Heights. She wondered what it would be like to be starting now, in an obvious renaissance of this sturdy borough, with its new rules and rituals and so much more of everything to fight over. Then a new child walked over to the rug and got down on the floor and began, on his own, to read.