I can feel Etta’s eyes drilling a hole into the back of my head from four rows behind. Krista, you are dead to me, I decide on the spot. I will have to text her and let her know I’m canceling our walk on Thursday. Oh wait . . . On the walk she’s telling me all the juicy info she knows about the athletic director at Three Winds Academy being fired effective immediately, vital gossip given the competitiveness of admissions among San Francisco private schools. Okay we’ll go for our walk, but after that she’s officially dead to me.
MID-SEASON
ELEVEN
FROM: Nan Gooding
DATE: November 6, 2018
SUBJECT: Admissions Check-in
TO: Josephine Bordelon
Dear Josie,
I can’t believe it’s that time of year again to dig our heels in and get to work on admissions. Let’s meet on Thursday from 1:00–1:30 p.m. so you can tell me how things are looking for this year and I can tell you what I need you to do to ensure that we have our best admissions season yet. Check in with Elsa, my assistant, first and don’t be late, I’m booked solid with meetings in my office so there will be a line at my door of people waiting to meet with me.
I will see you at our scheduled time, 1:00 p.m. sharp.
Your Head of School,
Nan Gooding
HEAD OF SCHOOL
FAIRCHILD COUNTRY DAY SCHOOL
About mid-admissions season Nan sticks her head out of her oak-paneled office decorated with portraits of past school heads to meet with me for an admissions status update. The moment always reminds me of a gopher sticking its head out of a ground hole checking for predators to make sure it’s safe to come out and scurry about. I wish I could say after a few years her directive e-mails wash right off my back, but I’d be lying. Every single e-mail that comes my way I want to clap back with:
Nan, I know you ain’t talkin’ to me like that, did you mean to send this to someone else?
But I do like my job, and after checking my bank account balance last night I know I need this job. So I reply politely that I look forward to meeting with her.
And then show up at 1:04 p.m.
Our brief biyearly admissions updates have, without fail, gone something like this the past six years:
NAN (CLEANING HER GLASSES): How are the numbers looking this year, Josie?
ME (STICKING TO SCRIPT): As strong as last year.
NAN (NEEDING MORE): Stronger than when Dr. Pearson was here?
ME (RECOGNIZING WHEN AN EGO NEEDS TO BE STROKED): Absolutely, Nan, I never saw numbers like this under Dr. Pearson.
NAN (PLAYING WITH HER SILK NECK SCARF): Good, good. Admissions has always been one of my strong suits as head of school.
ME (NOTHING)
NAN (A BIT LOST IN SELF-CONGRATULATIONS): Not that I care, but the board of trustees will want to know the admissions numbers.
ME (IN MOCK AGREEMENT): Yes, yes, for the board of trustees.
NAN (RETURNING TO HER ALL-BUSINESS TONE): Here is my list of three “must accept” families. They will need to go through the full admissions process like all families, of course, but will be accepted to Fairchild no matter what. And I may have a fourth.
For thirteen years as a student and for my first six years as an employee in admissions, I had never known any head of school other than Dr. Pearson. For generations of students and their families, there hadn’t been a Fairchild without Dr. Pearson. For thirty-eight years the school was his life aside from his wife, Della, who was as loved as Dr. Pearson by the student body, with her warm, reassuring presence and the sacks of tulip bulbs she planted with each incoming kindergarten class in the fall.
As far as anyone knew, Dr. Pearson had no children, no friends, no hobbies, and no interest in travel. He had Della and he had Fairchild. That is probably why, under Dr. Pearson’s leadership, the school endowment grew to sixty million dollars. Even through two dot-com busts, the campus gained four new state-of-the-art buildings, a couple of playing fields, and a parking garage. And, along the way, Fairchild became the most competitive private school in the Bay Area. From tech billionaires living in Presidio Heights to moody, persnickety chefs planted firmly in Mission Dolores, the one thing they had in common, aside from their Range Rovers, was the desire to have their kids attend Fairchild.
In the fall of my fifth year working as an admissions assistant, Della passed away suddenly. The whole community was sure Dr. Pearson, who was healthy as a horse, would follow shortly thereafter from a broken heart. A secret head of school search committee was formed to make sure the school was fully prepared to find an exceptional new head for when that fateful and devastating day came.
Dr. Pearson took off the month of November. The board offered him more paid leave through the winter holidays even though he probably could have taken off two full paid years given the amount of unused sick time the man had accumulated during his tenure. But Dr. Pearson kindly declined the offer and returned to school the Monday after Thanksgiving vacation looking tanned and fit. Still, the community stayed braced for him to drop dead any minute.
But then the one-year anniversary of Della’s passing came and went and Dr. Pearson showed no signs of slowing down. The school thrived and, oddly, Dr. Pearson began to show up at school looking younger and appearing more vital than ever, mentioning dinners at San Francisco’s trendiest restaurants. It seemed Dr. Pearson was going to go on forever as head of Fairchild Country Day and that was just fine by me because in that time of personal renaissance he promoted me to director of admissions. For the first time, I felt like I had some financial wiggle room. By no means rolling in cash, I could at least start to pay down my NYU loans and not have to choose between rent, groceries, and new ballet shoes for Etta. I had finally been given a break in life, and I was ready to coast a little bit.
The spring of my second year as director of admissions, Dr. Pearson was discovered by Fairchild’s upper school’s dean of students, pants down around his ankles in the art supply closet with Señorita Flores, the Spanish teacher. This in and of itself may not have been that big of a deal. In fact, most of us would probably have been rooting for him, knowing he was getting a second chance at love. That was until Bea Cornwall, Dr. Pearson’s long, long, longtime executive assistant went batshit crazy and destroyed his office with the new nine iron he had her pick up for him since his late-in-life interest in golfing developed. She put that nine iron right through his head of school portrait. It turned out all these years Dr. Pearson had had a hobby: Bea Cornwall. It also turned out that Bea Cornwall had simply been biding the appropriate amount of time (whatever that is) after the Della era for Dr. Pearson to pick up the pieces and ask for her hand in marriage. By the end of the Week of Love all three were gone from Fairchild and the middle school art supply closet had been emptied, disinfected, and restocked. What remained of Dr. Pearson’s thirty-eight-year legacy was a Greek tragedy that would haunt the next head of school, Nan Gooding, and Fairchild’s reputation for the first couple of years of her headship.