“Okay,” she said. “College. The process. My lack of direction.”
“That sounds like something someone told you.”
“Dad, my school counselor, my brother, everyone. I’m almost eighteen, nearly a senior, so I’m supposed to be into it—career aspirations, compiling lists of extracurricular activities, composing brag sheets. Ready to sell myself. It feels so … phony. I go to Pali Prep, freak-city when it comes to college. Everyone in my class is freaking out daily. I’m not, so I’m the space alien.” Her free hand flipped the edges of the green book’s pages.
“Can’t get into it?” I said.
“Don’t want to get into it. I honestly don’t care, Dr. Delaware. I mean, I know I’m going to end up somewhere. Does it really make a difference where?”
“Does it?”
“Not to me.”
“But everyone’s telling you you should care.”
“Either explicitly or, you know—it’s in the air. The atmosphere. At school everything’s been split down the middle—sociologically. Either you’re a goof and you know you’ll end up at a party school, or you’re a grind and expected to obsess on Stanford or the Ivy League. I should be a grind, because my grades are okay. I should have my nose glued to the SAT prep book, be filling out practice applications.”
“When do you take the SAT?”
“I already took it. In December. We all did, just for practice. But I did okay enough, don’t see why I should go through it again.”
“What’d you get?”
She blushed again. “Fifteen-twenty.”
“That’s a fantastic score,” I said.
“You’d be surprised. At PP, kids who get fifteen-eighty take it again. One kid had his parents write that he was American Indian so he’d get some kind of minority edge. I don’t see the point.”
“Neither do I.”
“I honestly think that if you offered most of the senior class a deal to murder someone in order to be guaranteed admission to Harvard, Stanford or Yale, they’d take it.”
“Pretty brutal,” I said, fascinated by her choice of example.
“It’s a brutal world out there,” she said. “At least that’s what my father keeps telling me.”
“Does he want you to take the SAT again?”
“He pretends he’s not pressuring me, but he lets me know he’ll pay for it if I want to.”
“Which is a kind of pressure.”
“I suppose. You met him … What was that like?”
“What do you mean?”
“Did you get along? He told me you were smart, but there was something in his voice—like he wasn’t sure about you.” She cracked up. “I’ve got a big mouth. . . . Dad’s super-active, always needs to keep moving, thinking, doing something. Mom’s illness drove him crazy. Before she got sick, they were totally active together— jogging, dancing, tennis, traveling. When she stopped living, he was left on his own. It’s made him cranky.”
That sounded detached, a clinical assessment. The family observer? Sometimes kids assume that role because it’s easier than participating.
“Tough adjustment for him,” I said.
“Yes, but he finally caught on.”
“About what?”
“About having to do things for himself. He always finds a way to adjust.”
That sounded accusatory. My raised eyebrow was my next question.
She said, “His main way of handling stress is by staying on the go. Business trips. You know what he does, right?”
“Real-estate development.”
She shook her head as if I’d gotten it wrong, but said, “Yes. Distressed properties. He makes money off other people’s failures.”
“I can see why he’d view the world as brutal.”
“Oh yes. The brutal world of distressed properties.” She laughed and sighed and her hands loosened. Placing the big green book on an end table, she pushed it away.
Her hands returned to her lap. Loose. Defenseless. Suddenly she was slumping like a teenager. Suddenly she seemed truly happy to be here.
“He calls himself a heartless capitalist,” she said. “Probably because he knows that’s what everyone else says. Actually, he’s quite proud of himself.”
Undertone of contempt, low and steady as a monk’s drone. Deriding her father to a virtual stranger but doing it charmingly. That kind of easy seepage often means the lid’s rising on a long-boiling pot.
I sat there, waiting for more. She crossed her legs, slumped lower, fluffed her hair, as if aiming for nonchalance.