Chapter 12 A Challenge You Have Overcome #2
A student named Jonah came to her that afternoon and at one point he said, “I’m not gonna get in anywhere.”
Andrea whipped off her reading glasses. “Yes you will!” she declared. Because of course there was a school for everybody, even the worst student. There was absolutely a college out there. A lid for every pot, Jeanne whispered.
Too cynical. Too true. This is not who I am, Andrea told her mother-in-law. I never even liked you. Yes, I know, she heard Jeanne answer. Sometimes Andrea hummed to drown Jeanne out, but it was difficult. She felt haunted, although she did not believe in ghosts. Jeanne said, I don’t either.
—
November first, Andrea made a supreme effort.
When she saw Steve digging into the leftover Halloween candy, she did not say a thing.
When Nate skipped school to write his application, she did not say Oh, now you’re trying to do it all on the last day?
Her clients had already submitted. They had completed the process days ago.
Meanwhile, her son holed up in his room.
Andrea stood outside his door and begged to help—but he would not relent.
Hours passed, and she could hear Nate typing.
Half a day, and she worked down in her office.
Leave him alone, she told herself. No more pleading or berating.
All she did was slip her Essay Guidelines under Nate’s door.
This was a two-page handout which included TOPICS TO AVOID.
Death of pet
Divorce of parents
Sports injury
Drugs, alcohol, mental health, cancer
Challenge you have overcome if it’s one of the above…
Actually, Andrea steered her students away from writing about challenges of any kind.
Asian, Jewish, and just plain white, her kids had real troubles, but they were not homeless, stateless, or first-gen anything.
They had not walked across Sudan to freedom, or escaped the killing fields, or lived as refugees.
Some had parents or grandparents who had done these things.
Nate’s own grandfather had been a Holocaust survivor who had rebuilt his life, working his way through college and then law school—but, to state the obvious, Zeyde was not the one applying.
(Andrea’s sixth topic to avoid was Impressive relatives.) Demographically, a kid like Nate just couldn’t win.
All he could do was write with wit, humility, and self-knowledge, in hopes that someone would take a second look at him.
—
At dinnertime, Nate emerged to refuel in the kitchen. He toasted two bagels and smothered them with cream cheese which melted through the holes.
“How are you doing?” Andrea asked, as he licked his fingers. “Do you want me to look?”
“No.”
The garage door was rumbling open now that they had found the other clicker. Steve thumped up the stairs and said, “Hey, Nate. How’s it going?”
“Okay.”
“Taking a break?”
“Yeah.”
“We should at least proofread,” Andrea interjected.
“Shh,” said Steve.
What? Andrea demanded silently, because hadn’t she kept quiet almost the whole day?
And wasn’t her kid sending in his application that very night with no help, no oversight?
(Every essay will benefit from a second pair of eyes.) She told Nate, “Just let me look for typos,” but he was already running to his room with a one-pound bag of pretzels.
Steve turned on Andrea. “Can’t you see you’re triggering him?”
“I’m not triggering anyone!”
“You chased him right out of here.”
“I did not.”
“Now you’ll never see that application.”
“That’s not my fault!”
“Because you are always ordering him around.”
“I was making a suggestion.”
“You are incapable of suggesting anything. Every statement is an injunction.” Not for nothing had Steve edited The Hillier Handbook for College Writing, ninth edition.
“STOP!” That wasn’t Jeanne talking; it was Andrea, trapped there in the kitchen with her husband.
She, a college counselor, he, an editor, both banished by their son—and now what?
They were supposed to take it calmly? Applaud his budding independence?
Let go and watch him fail? The hell with that.
Andrea did this for a living! Her kid didn’t have to be the one to learn the hard way. “I know how to help him.”
“But you have no idea how to talk to him.”
“I talk to people all day.”
“That makes you even worse.”
“You stay home and coach five kids an afternoon.”
“I wish,” said Steve. “I wish I had your job.”
“You do not,” Andrea shot back, and this was true.
He didn’t wish it. He wouldn’t last five minutes; he would lose his mind.
At the same time, she had no idea what he was going through.
Andrea had been laid off two years before with lots of other people.
There had been esprit de corps, and goodbye coffees, common cause.
She’d left when business was merely bad.
She had not seen worse. She had never known the loneliness, the dread, the poison in the air.
He was about to say all this when Nate flew down the stairs.
“Nate!” Steve called, but his son was opening the front door.
“Hey,” Nate said softly, and Steve thought, Oh great.
“Hi, Mackenzie,” Andrea called down to Nate’s first love, a junior with her whole life ahead of her, no applications for an entire year.
“Hi, Andrea,” Mackenzie answered, as Nate rushed her to his room.
Jeanne said, That’s what she calls you?
“Now Nate has his second pair of eyes,” Andrea told Steve.
“Wonderful.” Steve stalked to the living room couch and Andrea sat in the matching armchair. He opened a book. She wondered if Mackenzie could differentiate there and their. “What time is it?” Steve asked.
“Just eight.”
Steve opened The Hillier Anthology of Short Fiction because this is what he did now.
He salvaged old books from the office. These were the stories he had studied back in college.
High school. This was his youth. “Araby” and “A&P.” “Lady with a Lapdog.” “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter.
” He said, “I really thought they’d fire me today. ”
“Yeah, I know,” said Andrea. November first was a good crisp date for termination. Slowly, she said, “It’s been so long. They’re never gonna let you go.”
“Oh, they will.” Steve’s fate had been decided when his editorial director left, and her deputy left too, and the house restructured to bring in a new VP named Erin.
This Erin, who was thirty-one years old, had an even younger assistant named Cody, who had a PhD in composition from Wayne State, and answered the phone “ ’Lo?
” sounding remarkably like Nate. Who was upstairs in his room with his girlfriend and his application on his computer.
“What was that song we used to sing to the kids?” Steve asked Andrea.
“About the branch on the tree and the twig on the branch?”
“And the nest on the twig,” she said immediately. “And the egg in the nest, and the bird in the egg, and the feather on the bird, and the flea on the feather.”
“That’s what it’s like,” he said, because the older you got, the faster everything went.
Childhood, school, college, marriage, kids—egg, bird, feather—each nesting inside the other.
You tried to hold on. You tried to get your kid to listen.
You wanted to change the outcome somehow, but that wasn’t happening.
—
Strange how much better Steve felt in the morning.
Andrea was sipping coffee in the kitchen, and she looked better too.
One minute before midnight, Nate had sent his application in.
Relief! Of course, he would have many more to write.
Andrea’s students had a plan B and a plan C, their apps queued up like airplanes on a runway.
Nate had nothing. He would spend all of winter break writing new supplemental essays after he was rejected from Brown—but you couldn’t think about that now.
You just couldn’t get this crazy every time.
You could not let the darkness and the aggravation win.
And what if, by some chance, Nate had done it right?
Steve’s secret hope returned. What if his son’s essays sparkled with originality?
And what if Mackenzie had actually done some proofreading, and Nate got into Brown without adults?
What a triumph that would be—like navigating by the stars.
For weeks, Steve thought of this. All that autumn, through Thanksgiving, even to the first days of December.
Every day, on the train to work, Steve hoped for Nate.
The kid was funny. He was original. Brilliant, once you got to know him.
Wouldn’t Brown need a soccer-playing news junkie who was also good at math?
In the office, Steve prayed for miracles while Erin presented new initiatives to what she called the team and what Steve knew as the remnants of the company.
“We’re very excited about this project!” Erin declared.
“We’re taking our content off The Hillier Handbook and what we’re doing is creating a series of interactive trainings.
” As she played video clips, Steve imagined telling people, I never read my kid’s college essay.
No! they would cry, disbelieving. How could you let him send them in without even proofreading?
Modestly, Steve would say, He didn’t need my help.
He decided to go it alone, and I respected his decision.
“That’s what’s cool about this platform,” Erin was telling everybody, and Steve remembered that he had not respected his son’s decision. He still doubted Nate had done the right thing.
Nate hated personal essays. Although he was a whiz at math, and a political savant, he didn’t read a lot offscreen. He was the student Erin hoped to reach—although Steve could not imagine Nate undergoing video trainings—not for writing.
He told Andrea that night, “This interactive thing is the end.”
Andrea thought he was talking about the company. “Not necessarily.”
“No, I mean the end of me. I’m writing my resignation letter.”