When Mom and Father come home Sunday night, I show them my list of chosen colleges. Father raises an eyebrow at Wellesley and says he’s never heard of it.
“It’s a women’s college,” I tell him. “It’s part of the Seven Sisters, which is like the Ivy League.”
“I know the Ivy League is good because Harvard is in it,” Father says.
“And Brown,” I add. Mom nods.
“I’ve heard that Princeton is good,” Father says, and my mind immediately flashes back to the folder.
“I’m pretty happy with my choices,” I say. Is this a test to see if I’d pick the same schools as Father?
“I think it’s good that Ellen is picking different schools from Michelle,” Mom says helpfully.
Father doesn’t say anything.
The next morning, I am poised with my list of phone numbers for arranging my interviews and overnight stays at the three colleges. Father hovers nearby, telling me what to say.
“Thank you very much. Have a good day. Goodbye.” It sounds suspiciously like Michelle’s old script.
Once the dates are marked in red letters on the wall calendar in the kitchen, I run out the door to catch the bus.
Between classes, I slip into the principal’s office to get my advance-absence pass that has to be signed by all my teachers.
In calculus, Mr. Carlson’s beady eyes light up when I show him the pass. “Are you going to look at MIT?”
“No,” I say. I’ve been in his class for two months and I swear he still thinks I’m Michelle. Doesn’t he notice that I have trouble catching on? Doesn’t he notice that my test scores are not all As? He keeps saying that when Michelle was here, he needed a grade higher than an A to give her—he can’t possibly get the two of us mixed up!
Mr. Carlson signs the pass c2 (Corey Carlson = C squared) and beams at me. I am relieved to take my seat.
“Guess what, class,” Mr. Carlson says, still beaming. “Ellen Sung is going to be taking a little trip. Want to tell us where you’re going, Ellen?”
I resist the urge to crouch down under my desk. “To look at colleges,” I mumble.
“Where?” Mr. Carlson prompts.
“Harvard, Brown, and Wellesley,” I say quickly. I am wondering what’s going to happen in April. Is Mr. Carlson going to make me name all the places I didn’t get in?
“Remember,” Mom says to me on the plane to Boston, “these visits are also for you to decide if you like these schools.”
“Thanks, Mom,” I say, although I still don’t feel that I have much choice in the whole process. I pull back a corner of the foil covering my dinner. Gray meat in beige gravy stares back at me.
Will I know anything for sure besides the fact that being on the East Coast will separate me from Marsha Randall—and Jessie? I cover the dinner again with a shroud of tinfoil.
Mom is poking at the gray meat under her foil.
“Is it okay if I start on the dessert?” I ask, eyeing the square of chocolate cake in its little plastic dish.
“I was just thinking the same thing,” she says, digging into her cake. I dig into mine, and we laugh. I am relieved that Mom isn’t using this time—as Father would—to coach me on interview techniques or something.
From Logan Airport, we rent a car and drive out to Wellesley, where we arrive at the Wellesley Inn. It is a quaint white wooden structure with a dark green roof and shutters. Inside, a beautiful crystal chandelier sparkles right over my head as we check in.
Arkin has two places for visitors. The Days Inn sits right off Route 9, so fishermen coming north from Minneapolis can stop for the night on their way up to the Boundary Waters. The nicer hotel, the Lakeview, used to be a Best Western until Mike Anderson’s father bought it, which might explain the odd choice of name for a building that looks out onto Main Street. The Lakeview has a pool, a bar, and a special room for wedding receptions. With its nubbly orangish carpets and striped wallpaper, however, it can’t even begin to compete with the Wellesley Inn’s whitewashed elegance.
Tonight, as we get ready to snuggle into the cozy bed, which has wooden headboards that look like half of a wagon wheel, I lay out my clothes for tomorrow’s interview: bra, slip, and one of the light wool dresses that Mom and I bought in Minneapolis.
The next day, Mom drops me off at the admissions office on her way to explore the town of Wellesley. I have my overnight bag and a manila folder with my report cards. I stare sadly at the back of the rental car as she drives off.
“Hello,” says the lady at the desk. Her gray hair is pulled back into a bun, and there are huge liver-colored age spots on her hands.
“Hi, I’m Ellen Sung, and I’m here for my interview,” I say, then clear my throat because my voice sounds as if it’s rattling.
“Please have a seat,” she says, pointing with her spotted hand.
I perch awkwardly on one of the hard needlepoint chairs. This room is so feminine, I notice. It has puffy curtains, soft-colored rugs under dark wood coffee tables, and chairs that no one would want to sit on for more than fifteen minutes. I want to check to see if the needlepoint gets worn by all the people sitting on it, but of course I don’t.
“Ellen?”
I look up to see a lady in a business suit.
“Yes, I’m Ellen,” I say, extending my hand.
“Hello, Ellen,” she says, returning my grasp warmly. “I’m Margaret McGrath, your interviewer. Welcome.”
She leads me into a room that has a huge wooden desk, lots of books, and portraits of women—who I assume are famous graduates—on the wall. She sits behind the desk and motions toward one of the smaller chairs facing her.
“You’ve come a long way from Minnesota,” she says, folding her elbows on the desk and looking expectantly at me.
“Yes,” I say, already resorting to one-word answers. Father said that was a no-no. “It’s worth the trip,” I add.
“So, why are you interested in Wellesley?”
I cross my legs at the ankle—the way Glamour magazine says you’re supposed to do in interviews—and I try to look thoughtful, not overwhelmed, which is how I really feel.
“I’ve been interested in Wellesley ever since I noticed I was one of two girls in my calculus class,” I say, then pause to hear how it sounds. “I started to think about what it would be like to go to a college where the women run things. At my high school, a premium is placed on being pretty, which leads girls to believe that that’s all they need to succeed in life. The crowning achievement for a girl is to be homecoming queen or a cheerleader, which really involves being pretty and cheering the boys on.”
As I sit back, I realize the truth of these words. But did I need to come all the way to Wellesley, Massachusetts, to find that out?
“Very interesting,” Miss McGrath says as she takes a look at my report cards. She smiles. “You look as though you’d be an excellent Wellesley candidate,” she says. “Have you taken your SATs yet?”
“No,” I say, and groan inwardly. Another thing to add to my “To Worry About” pile. “I’m taking them in November.”
“Where else are you applying?”
“Harvard and Brown,” I say.
She looks at me the same way Barbara did that day I said I wanted to try a Valdez on the beam. “No backup schools?”
Am I supposed to be applying to more?
“Uh, no,” I say. I hate feeling like I’m on a game show where I’m trying to guess what she wants to hear. One wrong answer and bzzz—rejection letter.
We talk a few minutes more, then Miss McGrath rises out of her chair. I get up, too, feeling discombobulated. Already, in my head, I am playing back everything I’ve said, wondering if I’ve said it right.
“I’ve had a very enjoyable time speaking with you,” she says, slipping me a cream-colored card. “If you have any questions, please call. I’m sure that after talking to some of the students here, you’ll find Wellesley is an ideal place for a bright young woman such as yourself.”
I soak up this compliment like a parched patch of soil taking to a cloudburst. Bright young woman.
“Thank you,” I say. “Thank you very much.”
As we return to the waiting room, I see a redheaded girl waiting for me.
“Hi, I’m Caitlin,” she says, and I wonder how to spell that. She is dressed in a kilt, yellow sweater, green turtleneck, and a hairband covered in a fabric that matches the plaid skirt exactly.
“So, where are you from in Minnesota?” she asks as we stroll across the manicured campus.
“Arkin,” I say.
Caitlin gives me a blank look. “I’ve heard of Minneapolis—is that near it?”
“Arkin is on the other side of the state, to the north,” I say, trying to think of anything that Arkin might be known for. I can’t think of anything except the mines. “It’s sort of near Hibbing, where there’s the world’s largest open pit mine,” I say.
“Oh,” she says. A vague flash of recognition. “The Mesabi Range. I read about Hibbing in The Sleeping Giant.”
“Right,” I say.
Caitlin’s dorm is painted a delicate lemon yellow and has a charming porch. I can see myself here with my bio books on my lap, my feet propped up on the railing, and a big glass of lemonade in my hand. There are two girls lounging: one is reading Crime and Punishment and the other a psychology textbook. Both are wearing Wellesley sweatshirts.
Caitlin’s room is on the second floor, and it has the same unmistakably feminine touch as the admissions office. Her wall is graced by a single framed print of a flower, and her cosmetics are neatly stacked on a lacquered tray on her dresser. While Caitlin is intently studying something in one of her class notebooks, I stride over to look at a gem-shaped bottle that’s caught my eye. Les Temps de Paris is engraved on its gold cap. I take a sniff at the bottle and bring the essence of Marsha Randall into the room. I quickly plug it back up.
“I think I’m going to freshen up,” I say.
When I return to the room, Caitlin is still looking at her notebook. By her bed, I notice, are The Advanced Theory of Mathematics, Discrete Mathematics, and Programming with Pascal, all neatly stacked.
I take off my woolen dress, which by now has become stifling in the cozy afternoon warmth of this small room. Caitlin closes the notebook with a sigh.
“What are you majoring in?” I ask.
“Applied math,” she says, taking off her plaid headband and beginning to comb her hair with long, broad strokes. “Also known as Apple Math.”
“That’s great,” I say. I admire anyone brave enough to pursue math.
I pull on my old favorites: a long-sleeved Sid the Killer T-shirt—a happy souvenir from the time Jessie and I went to see the concert in Duluth—and my trusty Levi’s. Then I notice Caitlin is giving me a funny look.
“Who is Sid the Killer?” she asks, finally.
“Oh, he does that song ‘The Flies of Summer.’ It starts out, ‘Flies are vicious . . .’” I stumble a little on the tune. Caitlin’s bronze eyebrows are knitted together in puzzlement. “They might be just a regional band,” I add.
At dinner, Sid the Killer is even more out of place. Most of the girls are in skirts, even the athletes—Caitlin tells me they are field hockey players.
Caitlin introduces me to everyone at our table. The rosy faces look fresh and sincere. They all want to know where I’m from, so I tell them about open pit mines. No one has heard of Sid the Killer.
“I met a really nice guy from MIT last weekend at the Alpha Theta frat party,” the girl to my left says to Caitlin.
Caitlin chews her cooked carrots with interest. “Is he cute?”
“Yeah,” says the girl, absently picking apart a dinner roll but not eating any of it. “I think we are going on a date this weekend, and I invited him to our house party.”
“We have a very social house,” Caitlin tells me. “We throw a party every couple of weeks. A lot of nice guys come up from Harvard and MIT—even as far as Yale.”
“Uh-huh,” I say. So that’s how they “provide a diverse social life,” as quoted from the school catalog. The few party pictures I saw showed a bunch of girls in skirts smiling and talking to guys in preppy sweaters.
I wait for someone to start talking about classes, but no one does, and I’m too shy to bring up the subject. I’m a little disappointed, because I got the impression from all three school catalogs that people spent mealtimes discussing heavy intellectual stuff. Perhaps I need to go to an intellectual house, since this is the social one.
There is an Oriental girl sitting on the other side of the room, and I think about getting up and going over to talk to her. But I decide not to: she’s sitting with a bunch of people, and besides, I would probably be annoyed if someone wanted to talk to me just because I also have black hair and dark eyes.
After dinner, Caitlin goes downstairs to study. I drag out my calc book, which I’ve been dutifully lugging around, then I decide to call Michelle.
“Hi, Michelle,” I say. “It’s your kid sister calling.”
“Hi there,” she says. “How are things going over there?”
“Weird,” I admit.
“How so?” she asks cheerfully.
“It seems like a great idea—all the women learning together,” I say. “So I sort of expected to get my consciousness raised by all the feminine energy, but no one’s really talked about any intellectual stuff, at least during dinner.”
“That’s Wellesley for you,” she says, breaking into peals of derisive laughter. If I decided to go here, I wonder, would she still laugh?
“I saw only one other Oriental girl in the dining place I was in,” I say, to change the subject.
“The right word is Asian, Ellen,” she says. “Oriental is a pejorative, like we’re from the exotic ‘East’ with gongs going off every time we step into a room. No, Ellen, we have our identity and our family histories—we’re Asian and American.”
I’m a little stung, all of a sudden wondering if every time I call myself “Oriental” I’m reinforcing some “chink” image in Brad Whitlock’s head.
“And don’t worry, there are plenty Asian Americans in all the New England schools; you won’t feel left out the way you do in Arkin.”
I’m about to tell her that I don’t feel left out in Arkin, when she plows me over with more words. “Ellen, I’ve got a positively monolithic orgo test to study for. Good luck on your interview tomorrow.”
The next morning, Mom comes to pick me up. I look one more time at the carefully tended grounds and the brick-and-wood buildings. When I said goodbye to Caitlin, she said she hoped she’d see me at Wellesley next year, and she gave me her name and number in case I had any questions later. At least now I know how to spell Caitlin.
“How did you like it?” Mom asks when we’re on the road to Cambridge.
“It was okay,” I say. At this moment, my opinions are just a jumble of unfinished projects. I try to tell Mom about the good interview, the skirts, my math-minded overnight guide, and Michelle’s trademark any-school-that’s-not-Harvard-is-second-rate snort.
“There were some things I liked and some I didn’t, but I don’t know what’s Wellesley and what’s college in general.”
“That’s why it’s good to look at a couple of schools,” Mom says, gliding in and out of the swarming traffic.
“How did you choose where you went to college?” I ask.
“I didn’t go,” she says simply. Her hands are firm on the steering wheel. One of the tendons in her knuckle moves rigidly under her skin, like a worm. “I met your father and we got married.”
Like a clam, Mom closes herself to that subject. Her eyes are still serenely viewing the crazy conglomeration of cars.
I wonder if Jessie misses me.
We park and start making our way to the admissions office. Mom is going to visit Michelle while I’m having my interview, and then we’re all going to have dinner together.
The admissions office is an imposing brick building on a tree-lined street. My heart keeps jumping into my throat, and I swallow hard to keep it down.
“Good luck,” Mom says, giving my hand a squeeze.
I walk through the door into what looks like a cavern, New England style: high wooden ceilings with light fixtures gracefully arching down like stalactites.
“Hello,” says the woman sitting at the desk. She looks very uncomfortable in her thick tweedy suit.
I tell her I’m here for my interview, and she rustles a list stacked with names. She turns one page, then flips to the next. My stomach turns cold. What if I’ve made the appointment on the wrong day? What if they forgot to schedule me? I need this interview!
“Ellen Sung,” she mumbles, as if I’m an acquaintance she’d known long ago but can’t quite place. “Ellen Sung. Oh, here you are. Two o’clock. Please have a seat.”
I seat myself in one of the elegant armchairs. Across from me is a boy in a gray suit—not the slightly unmatched kind guys in Arkin get from the Casual Male, but a miniature of the one Father wears when he’s dressing up. Gray Suit sizes me up with one sweep of his beady eyes and then probably decides I’m a midwestern hick who wears Sid the Killer T-shirts.
I grab a copy of the Crimson, which appears to be the Harvard newspaper, and do my best to look nonchalant.
“Talbot Haverhill Junior?” booms a voice from the hall.
“That’s the Third,” he says as he gets up stiffly and marches like a robot toward the voice.
“Ellen Sung?” booms the same voice. It makes me feel that I need to pick up my little dog Toto before I follow Gray Suit down the hall.
“Hi, I’m Jeff Rose.”
Jeff Rose’s hand seems to be coming out of nowhere. Just in time, I remember to offer my own. We end up clutching fingers awkwardly.
“Nice to meet you, Mr. Rose,” I say.
He leads me into another book-filled room, with one big desk facing two smaller chairs and pictures of, I guess, famous male graduates on the wall.
“You’ve come here all the way from Minnesota?”
“It’s worth the trip,” I say, cribbing from my Wellesley interview. Mr. Rose has a mahogany-brown mustache that lends an intelligent cant to his face.
“How do you like going to high school in Minnesota?”
I am turned around. Isn’t he supposed to be asking me why I want to go to Harvard?
“It has its ups and downs,” I say, quickly shelving my ten why-I-want-to-go-to-Harvard reasons and groping for new material. “I have some good friends and some good teachers, but I would like to come out east for a change.”
“Anything specific?” Mr. Rose’s eyes are the color of strong coffee, and they remind me of Jessie’s—the way Jessie listens to me when I tell her something important, how she is so intense with her listening that her eyes seem to try to hear, too.
“I wouldn’t mind being in a more diverse environment, one where being, uh, Asian isn’t such an anomaly.”
“I was wondering about that,” he says thoughtfully. “Isn’t Arkin a largely Scandinavian community—blond hair and all that?”
“It is,” I say. “And every so often I am treated to a racial remark or two.”
I am telling this to Mr. Jeff Rose, a person who has a hand in determining my fate at Harvard.
“How do you react to such remarks?” he asks.
“I usually ignore them. I don’t think I can change these people’s way of thinking,” I say. “And sometimes I study for revenge.”
“Revenge?” he says, probably having visions of me buying a machine gun and dispensing Rambo-type justice.
“The people who call me names don’t study,” I say. “I guess I feel I can use the negative energy to do something productive, like prepare to go to college while they’re preparing to live in Arkin and work as dental technicians.”
“What’s wrong with being a dental technician?” He is smiling, but I hear the challenge in his voice.
“Nothing,” I say quickly. “But it’s not a life I’d like for myself, so I think of studying as a way to get me to college and away from those people.”
“That’s a pretty complicated thought process to go through when someone calls you a name,” Mr. Rose says.
“The hurt from someone calling you names is complicated,” I fire back. “It’s not easy to make it go away. The olden times were simpler: if your name was ever smudged, you could just challenge that person to a duel.”
“Right,” Mr. Rose says. He is smiling under his furry lip.
“Whom did you have as your interviewer?” Michelle asks as we’re walking back to her dorm after dropping Mom off at the Harvard Motor Inn.
“A guy named Jeff Rose.”
“Oh, Jeff,” she says. “He’s good. He just graduated last year; he’s very impressed by intellectually creative people.”
“How do you know all this?” I demand. I wish she’d told me sooner. I don’t know if I gave any intellectually creative answers today, but maybe I would have come up with some.
“Richard worked in the admissions office this summer,” she says. “And Jeff was getting trained, and they became pretty good buddies.”
Richard, her boyfriend, had come out to dinner with us. I’ve met him a couple of times, but I don’t feel that I’ve gotten to know him any better because he’s so quiet. He does seem nice, though. His hair is cut short and is sea urchin spiky, and he wears round wire-rimmed glasses that make him look like an accountant. He spoke to Mom in Korean at dinner and she blushed, saying her Korean was kind of rusty.
“Can you give me any other hints?” I ask. Michelle looks at me like a queen bestowing a favor.
“Richard says they’ve started having unofficial quotas for Asians,” she says. “Now the word is that you have to get over seven hundred on your math SATs, or you’re out.”
I groan. “Can I do anything to study for it?”
“Buy a practice book—I’ll give you the name of one—and do the practice problems,” she says. “Oh, and memorize all the vocab words for the verbal section. That’ll give you a good start.”
We have reached the door of Michelle’s redbrick dorm. She fishes out her key.
“Any other hints?” I ask her hopefully.
“Yeah. For your achievement tests, take Math Two and not wimpy Math One.”
I’d already signed up for Math I, but I know I’ll have to unsign myself. I’d beg for alms in Harvard Square if it would improve my chances of getting in.
Michelle has yet another test to study for, so we head to the library. On the way out of the dorm, we are passed by two guys in harvard hockey windbreakers. They are carrying cans of beer and one of them burps loudly.
“It looks like they’re in for a hard night of studying,” I say.
“Harvard is a very diverse environment,” Michelle says, a little snappishly.
We spend a good three hours holed away in the bowels of Widener Library. I study calc, but the problems don’t seem any easier, even here at Harvard. I wouldn’t mind talking to some more Harvard students about how they like it here, but I see now that the idea is for me to get in first and like it later.
The next day, Mom and I drive to Providence, Rhode Island, to see Brown.
My Brown interviewer is nice—with her straightforward manner, she reminds me of Mrs. Klatsen.
“What kind of personal goals—that is, not the usual I-want-to-help-people ones—do you think you will achieve by being a doctor?” she asks, and I really have to think.
Among other things, I tell her, I want to try to achieve the high educational levels and the discipline I see in my father.
If she is surprised by my answer, she doesn’t show it, but smilingly jots a few things down while still keeping an eye on me, like a gymnastics judge.
My overnight host is a jock named Betsy, who wears her brown hair in braids, like a little kid. She takes me to see the gymnastics facility, even though I’m pretty sure that I’ll be retired by next year.
“Wow,” I say when we enter the huge gymnasium. This place looks as if it’s set up for the Olympics: a set of rings suspended from the ceiling, a big padded floor mat—unlike our thin one that curls at the edges—vault springboards that have air bubbles instead of the harsh springs, and two padded beams that are out of this world.
“This is nice,” I say, patting the beam as if it’s a horse. Rolling bare bones on this beam would feel so much better than on our plain wooden one.
“Actually, athletics at Brown aren’t that great because they don’t get the money some schools do, say Harvard or Yale, where the alums are constantly pushing more money in,” Betsy says. She is on the crew and track teams. “But it’s a good way to meet people and let off steam from studying.”
I still can’t get over this nice equipment, though. It seems that if you get into a good college, there are a lot of excellent things waiting.
For dinner, we go to a big dining hall, which Betsy calls the Ratty. We sit with a bunch of girls. None of them are in skirts—and a lot of them aren’t even wearing makeup—but the conversation is a lot like the one I heard at Wellesley: boys. I am beginning to think that intellectual mealtime conversations are just something that the school catalog people wishfully make up. I could live with that, though: while all the people I’ve met on this tour have been smart, they seem to be normal people, just like Jessie or Beth—or me?—which gives me some hope.
Mom and I fly home older, maybe wiser. We skip our sandwiches, which appear to be made of the same gray meat we had on the flight out, and eat our brownies instead.
I still don’t really know how I feel about the colleges; I think I could be happy at any of them. But then, is the question where would I be happiest going or where would Mom and Father be happiest sending me? I guess everything would work out quite nicely if I got into Harvard.
“Thanks for taking the time to bring me out here, Mom,” I say. Mom smiles, a few brownie crumbs clinging to the corner of her mouth like dirt. I wipe them away.
“It was my pleasure,” she says. “Hopefully, you’ll be inspired now in writing your applications.”
Applications, SATs, gymnastics, calculus, grades. I’m going to have to sit down and clear out the clutter from my mind, or else I’m probably going to let something important pass me by.
I look out the window. Big, colored patches of land lie sprawled below me, a quilt over which the plane is slowly moving, back to Minnesota. I can see the plane’s shadow on the land, and it appears to be barely moving. Yet, if we were closer to the ground, the plane would be moving almost faster than the eye can see.