Nine Women, One Dress(23)

My father, David, the product of Upper West Side Jewish political activists, dismissed them outright at first: “I went to public school and it worked out fine for me!” My mother, Sheila, the daughter of conservative black schoolteachers from Buffalo, was a little more understanding: “She seems to really want this, David. It can’t hurt to just tour the schools.”

Actually it can, and that was exactly what I was counting on. Once we toured the first one, even my liberal dad couldn’t deny that private school was the best place for me.

I wowed the admissions committee, asking calculated questions like “What community-service opportunities will be available to me at Dalton?” and “Would it be possible for me to start a knitting club to make baby booties for Chinese orphans?” Between that and my stellar grades on the entrance exams, I was able to make up for the fact that my parents had both graduated from state schools, leaving me legacy-less and therefore not a shoo-in for the Ivy League. Top-tier college acceptances sit like a pot of gold at the end of the New York City private school rainbow; all the touring parents (except for mine) pretend not to care, claiming to be more interested in inclusion and diversity, but really the bottom line is how many kids got into Ivies last year.

As soon as I was accepted to Dalton I changed my focus to the next goal in life—the Ivy League. I was in eighth grade, and starting the next year everything would count. I met my new classmates and sized them up one by one. Since it was a numbers game, my legacy-less acceptance to an Ivy League college depended heavily on who in my class had a legacy and where. I found casual ways to ask my classmates where their parents had gone to college and wrote down the results in a little notebook I kept under my bed so my parents wouldn’t find it and send me to a shrink. In retrospect, it’s unfortunate they never found it—I probably could have benefited from a little therapy. Though of course they noticed that my competitive nature was a bit obsessive. Even if they hadn’t, it was pointed out to them at nearly every teacher conference.

By Christmas of ninth grade I had created a detailed spreadsheet of the competition, with Ivy League schools listed across the top and classmates who were legacies of them underneath. In the end the tally included a whopping seven legacies from my original first choice, University of Pennsylvania, and, even more discouraging, nine from the easiest to get into, Cornell. As I was not in the academic league of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or Columbia, this left me to choose between Dartmouth (2) and Brown (3). I studied the acceptance rates to those two schools from Dalton over the previous five years—all good—and then looked at the candidates themselves. The Dartmouth legacies were strong, both of them girls, one black like me, but the Brown legacies were all boys, and sniffling, boring white boys to boot. I ordered a Brown sweatshirt online and set my mind and my every move over the next three years on my future admission to Brown University. As you can see from my byline, I was accepted.

At Brown my drive to compete changed dramatically, in that I quickly realized I no longer could. Everyone had my stellar SAT scores, and if I had knitted enough baby booties to cover every orphaned foot in Beijing, population 11 million, then the girl across the hall had knitted enough to cover every orphaned foot in Shanghai, population 14 million. I spent my first semester trying to be the best, but somewhere in the late winter, as the snow began to melt, my focus shifted from realizing achievements to managing disappointment. I gave up on the idea of being at the top and ended up four years later graduating smack in the middle of my class, with no idea what was next. Unceremoniously dumped into the world, and without my usual clearly charted path, I took my double concentration in comparative literature and art history and headed home to NYC to take my place in the postgraduate abyss. And since I was not yet gainfully employed, I moved back in with Sheila and David.

Everyone I knew seemed to be landing jobs, getting paid, and doing lots of fun and interesting things with their paychecks. I, on the other hand, was going on one unsuccessful job interview after another and was totally broke. My parents had laid down hard-and-fast ground rules when I moved back in, and those rules did not include money for fun or interesting things. “We will provide a roof over your head and food on the table, but we are done subsidizing your life,” they told me. Their parents hadn’t given them a cent after college, and, as they loved to remind me, they’d also had student loans to pay off.

Just as the rejection was beginning to really take hold on my psyche, I stumbled onto an instant ego-booster while browsing through Bloomingdale’s. Often, to cheer myself up after interviews, I’ll get off the subway at 59th Street and exit into the basement of the store. Sometimes I’ll try a new perfume; sometimes I’ll get a free makeover, though not totally free, since I pay the price in guilt for not making a purchase. One day back in September when I was dressed in an interview suit with a particularly good makeup job, I bumped into an old Dalton classmate, Bitsy Bouvier. She too was dressed in a suit and looking pretty fabulous. She was always a step behind me at Dalton and went to a little Ivy—Hamilton, I believe. She squealed when she saw me as if we’d met crossing the Ponte Vecchio, as opposed to in the department store we’d both been frequenting since we could walk. “Sophie, I love your hair! You look so…cool!”

I couldn’t help but laugh at the absurdity. If she only knew my new hairstyle was a DIY special. The week before, my mother had caught me staring at myself in the mirror, forlorn. She’s more of a softy than my dad, and sometimes I play on it. So when she asked me what was wrong, I saw an opportunity.