Karen Stabiner - Getting In

Life, for Nora, had become an endless SAT exam. At seven forty-five on a Saturday morning she stood in her closet in her underwear, paralyzed by a series of multiple-choice questions.

Question 1: Its really sunny but I felt a cool breeze when I opened the bedroom window. Should I wear:

• a. A thin turtleneck
• b. A light sweater
• c. A scarf
• d. All of the above

Question 2: I wont be home until after one. Should I eat:

• a. Egg whites and turkey bacon
• b. Flaxseed raisin bran with nonfat milk
• c. A carton of yogurt while I drive
• d. A glazed donut

Question 3: Given Laurens stress level, should I say:

• a. You know I love you no matter what happens, honey.
• b. I just know this is going to go well.
• c. How six hours of sleep is enough is beyond me, but hey.
• d. None of the above

Seven forty-seven. She put on a clean T-shirt, a crewneck sweater, and a pair of loose khakis, slid her feet into her work clogs, and reached for the closet door just as Lauren pushed it open from the outside.

Hey, am I supposed to ace this on an empty stomach or what?

They pulled into the school parking lot the prescribed half hour before the test was supposed to begin, and Nora drove aimlessly up one row and down the next, marveling at how many juniors seemed to own their own Priuses, and to believe that getting to the parking lot first would somehow give them an advantage. She was about to begin a second loop when Lauren grabbed her purse with her left hand and gestured toward the curb with her right.

Mom. Just pull over, she said. Here. Right here. Nora obeyed, and Lauren hopped out before her mother could say any of the things she had rehearsed, which was probably a good thing, as Lauren undoubtedly would have misinterpreted every one of them. Nora settled for rolling down the window to yell, Call when youre done at Laurens back, and Lauren waved without breaking stride.

Nora sat with her hands clenched on the steering wheel.

Question 4: I have four hours to kill. Should I:

• a. Go shopping for something I dont need
• b. Drink too many cappuccinos
• c. See if there are movies this early
• d. Call Joel

She would have picked d , except that he was on an airplane. She had to find something to do, though, as it made no sense to drive a half hour home, and then back again, for no reason. Nora had seen that photograph of the polar bear perched, bewildered, on a melting platform of ice. She was not about to subsidize her own indecision with an hours worth of exhaust fumes; not going to ask the poor bear to pay for her lack of planning.

She should have been thrilled to be stranded without an agenda for four hours, as her usual schedule involved a puff pastry of layered responsibilities, but this did not feel like freedom. Nora had the nagging sense that there were right answers and wrong answers to almost everything these days, and that God kept a running tally of how smart she was about her daily life. Unstructured time seemed like a punishable offense for which she anticipated dire consequences down the line; the lucid ambition that had fueled her twenties and thirties had given way, on the down slope of her forties, to the kind of vague superstition she had once ridiculed in her mother and grandmother and aunt. Her attempts to stick with a rational approach to life met with diminishing success, and she tried not to worry about the possibility that she was genetically predisposed to utter the word portent with a straight face, someday.

The right answer, or the least wrong answer, was b , so Nora drove the short block to a Starbucks in the lobby of an office building in the nearby neighborhood business district, a Starbucks that this weekend would owe most of its profits to the parents of the juniors who were filing through the gates of Crestview School. She strolled toward it with her best approximation of a carefree air, and when her feet hit the sensor the automatic door swung toward her with a slight pneumatic sigh, not unlike the sound that would soon be generated in the Crestview auditorium, library, and four history classrooms as four hundred hands, on cue from the clock-watching proctors, simultaneously opened their SAT test booklets.

Nora got stuck in line behind a woman with a written list of twelve custom coffees and a sweaty middle-aged couple reaching loud consensus about the biomechanical advantages of their new sneakers. She stared at her reflection in the dessert case and found fault with everything. On most days her tousled brown hair shot this way and that in two-inch bursts of energy, but this morning it fell on itself in deflated little parentheses. Her eyes, large and gray like her daughters, looked as startled as they always did, a nice quality when she needed to feign attention, but not so much of a plus when she was striving for calm. Another customer might have admired her straight, sculpted nose, had plastic surgeons not eliminated all the excesses to which a nose with discretionary income could fall prey, making Noras seem less remarkable by comparison. As for her mouth, it was so tight that Nora instinctively let out three little breaths whoo, whoo, whoo to force it to relax.

Joel liked to say that his wife was too energetic to be merely pretty, and too sexy to be considered handsome. Nora appreciated the effort on his part; he was trying to protect her from the prevailing belief that pretty was the exclusive province of women under thirty, while handsome belonged to women with an income in the high six figures. She did not look the way her mother had in the shadow of fifty, resigned, designed, with the muscle tone of a baked potato, and under normal circumstances that was good enough for her. This morning it was not. The face in the dessert case looked manic in a way peculiar to postmillennial mothers about to launch their daughters into a world that was larger than it had been when the moms were in college, but smaller, and less yielding, than the girls imagined it to be.

She forced herself to change focus. She flirted with the idea of ordering an apple fritter, but as she looked at the tray of knobbly, glazed pastries she suddenly imagined other SAT moms considering other, identical apple fritters at Starbucks from coast to coast, an infinitely replicating population of apprehensive moms rationalizing a 400-plus-calorie sugar rush by concentrating on the amount of fresh apple they were about to consume. The knowledge that she was not alonethat she was far from alonefailed to comfort her. Nora was not normally a Starbucks person, any more than she was a McDonalds person; she had a natural distrust of chains. She liked the local, the mom-and-pop, the neighborhood business, just as she liked short hair, the clogs she wore more and more outside of work, the baggy khakis that sat closer to her waist than to her crotch but were nothing like the dread mom jeans, and the same brand of T-shirt she had worn since before Lauren was born.

All of her choices were of a piece, as she saw it, and she told herself that the common denominator, the theme of her inner life, was a search for authenticity. Her friends admired her for the thoughtfulness required to find an alternative to the chain coffee boutiques, and for the important ideas that must be rattling around in her head in the space they consigned to losing five pounds and getting a weekly blow-dry, though privately they felt she could do a bit more with her hair. They considered her to be a valued friend. They used the word genuine when they spoke of her, and believed that they acquired a little spiritual heft by association.

The warier, more competitive moms at school considered Noras stated preferences to be a quirk, if not an affectationan artificial means of singling herself out when there really was not much she could claim as unique. What she saw as nonconformity and her friends prized as originality, they saw as a lack of standards. In the thin air on the west side of Los Angeles, where appraisal was a contact sport, everyone had an opinion.