I sat straight in my chair, my legs crossed. I slipped my father into the conversation like an accident.
I would use him. He was my only advantage after the grades and the activities.
“And what does your father do?” she asked politely.
I hesitated, lifting my eyebrows as if to say, “Oh, him?” I took a breath to indicate I hadn’t expected the conversation to go here.
“He started a computer company,” I said. “He invented a computer called the Macintosh.” I said it as if she might not have heard of it.
At that, the woman stood; she looked alarmed. “Excuse me,” she said. “I’ll be right back.” She grasped the doorknob and left the room abruptly, closing the door behind her, as if she’d realized all at once she had to attend to something urgent outside the room.
It was too obvious; I wondered if it could possibly be happening like this. Would she rush out and stop them from turning down my application? Were there other admissions officers shifting through the files of those being interviewed at that very moment?
A few minutes later, she returned. She didn’t explain where she’d been, or why she’d dashed out, but seemed kinder and more attentive. She asked me a few more questions I don’t remember, and the interview concluded.
When I left, my cheeks burned.
Back home, as I waited to find out if I got in, I wore corduroy for luck. I wore it top to bottom, corduroy pants with a corduroy shirt. The pants were wide wale, moss green; the shirt was a finer wale button-down with pockets, indigo blue. It felt like velvet. Usually, I wore these items singly, when I was taking or receiving the grade for an important test.
It was production week at the paper, and three of the four editors in chief had applied early to Harvard; we promised each other we wouldn’t call and find out until the current issue of the paper was finished with production. Harvard had a hotline you could call to find out if you got in or not, Rebecca said, and later in the week she broke the deal, called, discovered she was in, told Nicole, and after that I started calling too, using the phone in the classroom, the line perpetually busy.
It was also possible that an acceptance or rejection letter would arrive in the mail one day that week, and so I wore the corduroy not only for the possibility of getting through on the phone, but also as a prophylactic against the chance I’d arrive home to find the letter on the counter when I was not wearing the lucky outfit. As a result, I’d been wearing the same clothes for four days straight.
On Thursday I decided I’d call the minute the phone lines opened. I set an alarm for 4:30 a.m. The admissions office call center opened at 7:30 a.m. in Boston.
The woman on the other end of the line was distant and professional. She took my last name and put me on hold.
“Congratulations,” she said when she returned, her voice warm, relieved maybe—as if she, too, had been frightened of having to say no.
It took me a moment to understand what she meant. “Wait,” I said.
She laughed. “You’ve been admitted to the Harvard Class of 2000.” The words were scripted, but they might have been her own words, said with such joy.
“Thank you,” I said. “Oh, thank you.”
I got out of bed, put on my shoes with my pajamas, grabbed a sweater, and walked out the door into the dawn light, a blue veil over the street. The houses and lawns and cars were lit up but motionless like a stage set. Nothing stirring but me. Celebration was absorbed like the sound of a footstep on a damp lawn. The neighborhood was quiet, and I would be leaving it; that changed it, made it seem flat like a drawing. I walked past Kevin and Dorothy’s house. Everyone was sleeping. As I walked, a few porch lights went off—they must have been on timers—and sprinklers began to hish hish hish.
I stepped back into the house and ran to my room and ripped sheets of lined paper out of a notebook. I GOT IN I GOT IN I GOT IN I GOT IN, I wrote. I taped them up on the windows that lined the hallway.
After a while I heard my father and Laurene stirring upstairs. I waited in the hallway, pacing, still in my pajamas. They walked down, first my father, then Laurene. I held my breath.
“Oh!” Laurene said.
“What is this?” my father said. “Got in where?”
“Ding dong,” Laurene said. “She’s into Harvard.”
“Oh,” he said. “Right.”
Soon after, I would be moving to my mother’s house.
I called out to my brother from the bottom of the stairs. For his fourth birthday I bought him a royal blue satin cape with silver stars and a ruffle around his neck. It came with a magician’s conical hat and a wooden wand.
“Reed?” I called out. No response. I thought I heard a light shuffle upstairs.
“Glinda?” I called instead. This was one of the names he went by in costume.
“Esmeralda? Valencia?”
“Yes?” From a room upstairs came a thin, watery reply. “I’m Valencia.”
I found him playing make-believe.
“I want to talk to you,” I said, and sat him down beside me on the floor. “From now on, I’m going to live mostly with my mother.” When I spoke, he was distracted, facing me but looking away.
My mother had suggested I tell him in the form of a story. “There was once a prince and a frog,” I began. I wasn’t sure why I’d made myself into the frog. “The prince loved the frog, and frog loved the prince more than any other prince. They were dear friends. But then, one day, the frog had to go back to his own kingdom.” He listened now, rapt.
“Why did he have to go away?” Reed asked.
“There were other frogs. A land of frogs. He’d been away for a long time. But, you see, the frog still loved the prince. He wasn’t leaving because he didn’t—he just had to leave for his own reasons.” The story was undeveloped, no real plot, leaden, but he didn’t seem to mind, and wanted more.
“But he had to leave?”
“Yes,” I said. “Because he needed to go home to the other frogs.”
Later that year, my sister Erin was born, after I’d moved to my mother’s house. She had dark hair and a widow’s peak and large, soulful eyes. If she was still awake when I visited, I would hold her and stroke her forehead up toward her hairline. At just one stroke she would fall, miraculously, fast asleep. In the months leading to her birth, my father traveled in Europe for work, his company Pixar, which was on the verge of going public, and he returned from these trips with baby dresses from expensive shops, so that by the time she was born she already had many in plum and jute and white, hanging on a rail.
Harvard sent a form we were supposed to fill out to determine who our roommates would be. I wanted to sound cool and easygoing in order to attract cool, easygoing roommates. I concluded an autobiographical paragraph with the line “And, occasionally, I like to pick up a guitar and play a song.” This did not capture me at all, as uptight as I was. I’d once been able to play a couple of songs but had since forgotten, and even when I could play, I had been mortified to play in front of other people.
The summer before I left for college, when I was living at my mother’s house, my father took me to San Francisco to get a coat. It was his idea, and if I’d known he’d get me a coat, I might not have collected the others. We went to Emporio Armani, located in a converted bank with a towering ceiling and a café inside an internal balcony. We stopped at a rack of ties my father inspected and held with his thumb and index finger. I liked the way he held things. He looked at them with such intensity, but then he didn’t bother to buy any. I worried, as I always did when shopping, that my size would be sold out.