“Was it all right?” he asked.
“It was.” I did not tell my father that at first the angle was wrong, and so for a little while we thought sex would not be possible for us, that we were built incompatibly, that the parts did not fit the way they should.
Sometimes, in the late afternoon after school during the weeks when we were not producing the newspaper, Josh and I went to Windy Hill preserve, up above Skyline, hills wide and yellow and soft like the humps of camels, on one side more hills like a blanket thrown out into the wind all the way to the Pacific Ocean. The town was a miniature below us, silent and still except for the singing, rasping wind that flattened the tall grasses. A clear day, too much to take in, the glassy air, and the feeling of great freedom and grace, the world opening. I looked north and I could see San Francisco sparkling in the distance, but clear like it was close. It was like the way I’d seen it in the hovering dream, both close and far away, something to do with the angle from this hill to those hills, the refraction of the light.
That’s how I felt about my parents now that Josh was around, not that I didn’t worry about how my mom would earn money, or about my father mocking me, or even what would happen when he realized that I was really leaving for college. I was simply hovering above it all, so it didn’t pinch or press. Now Josh was the one who drove me to doctors’ appointments or between houses. He did not keep a calendar, forgot about homework assignments, and missed dentist appointments and other appointments, but never the ones with me. I was protected inside his teal Supra.
After the spring rains, when the grasses came up out of the clods of dirt under the oak and eucalyptus trees around Stanford—viridian fuzz like whiskers, stripes of gold light in long bright ribbons—I thought, This is my town. I walked home after school, and noticed the seasons change. Before this it was my father’s town, or my mother’s town, or the town where I’d been placed by accident and shifted around. Now I was in love, and the land was dimensional and heavy and particulate; it belonged to me.
During lunchtime, I visited Paly’s college admissions office, presided over by a woman with short, gray hair named Mrs. Daas. I flipped through a binder to find the names and addresses of students who’d been accepted to Harvard. Harvard, monstrous, distant, and separate from me, pulling away. It was the most legitimate organization I could think of. Also, it was one decision that seemed to eradicate uncertainty. Once I’d chosen it, I didn’t have to make other decisions or discoveries. It seemed right—not for me, necessarily, as I didn’t know what would be right for me at all, and hadn’t bothered to think that far, but right in a general sense. There were usually a few acceptances per year. There was a space for the students to list where their parents had gone to college, and I read through all of them, trying to find an instance in which a parent had not been to college.
I paid for an SAT class, biking there on Saturday mornings. I didn’t tell my parents about the process, although they knew I was applying to college. They didn’t seem to understand the steps involved, or ask me questions about it.
I applied for early admission. Along with the application, we were asked to enclose a self-addressed, stamped postcard. I snuck into Laurene’s office and took a fetching postcard from her book of Cartier-Bresson’s black-and-white photographs. I liked these postcards; I wanted Harvard to find my application tasteful. The postcard I’d stolen would arrive back at the house—making my theft obvious. But I cared more about making an impression than I did about getting caught.
My father was away on a business trip, so I faked his signature on the application.
Over a long weekend I flew to New York to stay with Mona and look at colleges. My mother couldn’t afford to take me; my father didn’t have time. Mona knew more about colleges anyway.
She lived on the Upper West Side in an apartment with a line of round windows surrounded by stripped wood that looked out over Riverside Park. The radiators clanked.
Mona took me to walk around Columbia University, where she’d gone to graduate school. She took me to see Princeton, which she favored, for me, and then Harvard, where I’d arranged to have an interview at the admissions office instead of with an alumnus in California because I thought it would increase my chances of admission to be close to the source.
Two men I knew who’d been to Harvard warned me off. Dr. Botstein at the Stanford Genetics Lab, where I’d worked for two summers, said he’d been unable to join the finals clubs because he was Jewish. “I’m not going to tell you not to go,” he said, “but I would give it a lot of thought.” I wasn’t able to believe in the possibility of my own acceptance then, let alone turning it down. The other man, Dr. Lake, said that he had been lonely there and it felt institutional, and that it wasn’t until he got to medical school at the University of Chicago that he’d felt happy. I didn’t believe either of them. They’d gone a long time ago. I knew what was best for me, I thought, even though I knew almost nothing about Harvard. It wasn’t happiness I was after, but something they might not understand: a seal of approval, and escape. Harvard, I thought, would make me worthy of something. Of existence. I didn’t think anyone could comprehend how much I wanted to go to this place I knew so little about.
It was autumn, clear and stinging cold outside, when Mona and I visited, no more beautiful or cold than Princeton or Columbia had been. The idea of it, the glamour and luck I associated with it, the brand, hovered beside the fact of it, gave it luster and dignity, the buildings, lawns, and trees.
The waiting room of the admissions office was overheated and smelled of paint, with cream-colored walls and blue carpet. Other prospective students sat in chairs nearby. I wore a black skirt with black tights.
I was nervous. It was true that I had not received a single B during high school, but I’d had to work hard for the grades. My SAT scores were good, but not stratospheric. This interview could make a difference.
“Lisa?”
I stood when I heard my name.
A tall woman with dark hair, wearing a skirt and a white sweater, said, “Follow me,” and led me down a hallway and into a small, dim room. She seemed bored. She did not seem charmed by me but almost annoyed by my presence.
“Why don’t you tell me a bit about your interests outside of school,” the woman said. She made no reference to my application, as if she hadn’t read it.
“Let’s see,” I said. “I suppose I do many things, like most of your candidates.” I wanted her to understand that I knew I was human despite my great accomplishments, and humble, aware of, and even embarrassed by the excess of extracurricular activities I had collected for the purpose of saying them at this very moment. “I’m an attorney on our mock trial team, and I’m editor in chief of the school newspaper, with a staff of eighty,” I said, glossing over the fact of the other three editors in chief. “I also take advanced Japanese, after having gone to Japan with my school, and later with my father on a business trip. He also helped me get a job at a lab at Stanford, where I developed photographs of yeast cells under the electron microscope and conducted large-scale experiments on yeast, inserting vectors of DNA into the cells.” As if I were in charge of these experiments, when I only followed instructions; as if I were passionate about any of these activities besides the newspaper, or cared about Japanese or yeast as anything but a way to get into this place—if admitted, I would drop them.