Between Excel spreadsheets of top-tier schools and professionally typeset résumés, I found a sheet labeled ESSAY PROMPTS: COMMON APPLICATION.
Isabel had circled #5: Describe a work of literature or art that has been particularly meaningful to you. If you wish, you may explain how this work has informed a particular life experience that you have had.
“That’s the most intellectual one,” Isabel explained, but I barely heard her; I was busy having the life experience of seeing, beneath this circled prompt, an “Academic Integrity Form”: Please affirm that you did not receive any outside assistance AT ALL in the writing of your college essay: no tutoring, no help from parents, no help from other students.
In green gel ink, Isabel’s splashy signature.
Isabel puffed out her cheeks. “Don’t look at that,” she instructed. “That’s not important.”
“You sure? It looks important.”
“It’s not. They make everyone sign those. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“Got it.” I turned back the page. “So what do you want to write about?”
“Wait.” From her bag she pulled out a glossy Dover Thrift Edition of The Souls of Black Folk. “Do you know this guy?” She consulted the cover. “Du Bois?”
I nodded. She seemed dismayed by this news, as if she had hoped her studies were more esoteric. “Well, so, he wrote this book, which was, like, really important, and he invented this phrase in it, consciousness.”
“You want to write about The Souls of Black Folk.” Neutral was the word for how I hoped I sounded.
“Well, just that particular phrase.” She consulted her notes. “Yeah, double consciousness. I like that. It speaks to me. And schools like it when you’re diverse.”
“Yeah, definitely. So what does double consciousness mean to you?”
A little gray cat nosed aside the door. She was small and light and drawn to high places. All business, she leapt to a perch beside the printer and surveyed us.
Isabel recited, “It’s when you see yourself from the inside, like a normal person, but also from the outside.”
“Right, great.” I bobbed my head. “The only thing I would add is that I think Du Bois was specifically talking about being black. Like, the way that white people see you not as a person, but as a black person. Like, that’s all they see. That’s all we see, I mean. We—us white people.”
While I oh-so-cogently explained the African American life experience to Isabel, she tilted the gray matte screen of her MacBook, examining her plucked brows.
“Isabel? Did you get that? Does that make sense?”
“Can you say it again? I missed it.”
“Well, I—”
“I’m just really stressed out,” she interrupted. “I have a big gala coming up.”
“That sucks.”
Isabel explained, “Yeah, my whole family is going to this gala for this organization that my sister works for. She goes to Columbia. Oh my God, do you want to see these shoes?”
She scurried off to her room, her little feet pattering along the carpeted hall, and then came hurrying back, clutching a pair of red heels, dagger-sharp, all leather and gloss.
“Aren’t they amazing? I love them so much.” She cradled them to her breast. “They cost twelve hundred dollars,” she announced, and gently slid them onto the desk beside her copy of The Souls of Black Folk.
“So what does this group do?” I couldn’t stop looking at the heels. Red and gleaming, they were sex weaponized.
“Oh.” Isabel straightened importantly. “It’s a nonprofit dedicated to—wait. You know that show Law & Order—SVU?”
“I do.”
“Yeah, well, one of the actresses from there, wait, do you know her?”
She said the name of a woman I knew I should know. I shrugged. “Nope.”
Isabel looked at me darkly. “She’s, like, really famous.”
“Yeah. I don’t really know anybody.”
Isabel seemed aggrieved. “Yeah, well, my sister was obsessed with this show, so my dad got in touch with the actress, ’cause he, like, had a connection to her through his work, and she agreed to let Aria intern at her nonprofit.”
Heartwarming, really. “Right, so what does the nonprofit do?”
“Special Victims Unit. Like, sexual assault.”
“Yeah, right. That’s the show.” She looked at me blankly. “And in real life,” I prompted.
“Oh! And in real life she runs a nonprofit dedicated to ending sexual assault.”
“That’s such a great idea.”
Mistrust blinked across Isabel’s face, but her sense of irony was too incipient to catch the mockery, and besides, why would I be mocking her when she owns those heels? Those fuck-me heels she was going to wear to a benefit to end sexual assault?
* * *
—
Later, as I walked down Lexington in the shortened twilight of an October evening—having done little more with Isabel than wrestle an essay topic out of her—I watched the women with their leather jackets, their delicate boots and gold-chained purses, and thought more about Isabel’s shoes. Her fuck-me heels. God, but how I longed for the days when the terms of the war had been absolute and unforgiving, when feminism hadn’t reclaimed sex and all its accessories: high heels, short skirts, lace. Who cared about femme? It bored me. I couldn’t do it.
Pop culture too. Hadn’t anyone noticed that pop culture was bad? I was tired of people being proud of their guilty pleasures, tired of these guilty pleasures founding nonprofits and ending up in the news. Everyone should go back to being ashamed. Everyone should go back to sneaking their TV on the sly, so that people like me, basic genetic abnormalities unfit to live in the modern age, people like me, whose preferred form of leisure involved reading a paragraph and then staring into space, people like me, who liked the opera and liked even more zoning out at the opera, could again be part of public discourse. For it was too much, I thought as I walked, to know about Damien Hirst and Honey Boo Boo. We were supposed to be conversant in Honey Boo Boo! The internet! Now, there was a thing that really ticked me off, along with fashion and anti-aging cream and the mainstreaming of BDSM. Just the other day Lacie had told me about a friend whose date had ejaculated on her face. What was with people? I was really whipping myself into a frenzy. I hated the world. I missed the ’90s, when everyone was wearing flannel and giant blue jeans. Now, that was a good time.