Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [22]
WITH THIS F, I was now officially on “double probation,” which meant that I could not participate in any sports after school, which was fine by me. If I was too lazy to open a book, why in the world would I want to spend my afternoons running down a field in a hideous tartan skirt with a supersized boomerang in my hand, trying to hit a small ball into another girl’s overdeveloped calves?
By junior year, although I showed absolutely no interest, I was being prepped for college and I found myself on interviews at schools I would never get into.
“What are three adjectives other people would use to describe you as a person?” the interviewer at the University of Vermont asked, looking up at me from a manila folder on the desk.
Three seems awfully limited as far as seventeen years of living goes—can we really be expected to have accumulated only three self-describing adjectives? What about faults and weaknesses? Everyone has those, so should I include those in the three? I’m smart, attractive and gassy? I’m clear-complected, a good eater, and violent when drunk? Also, which people describing us are we talking about? Are we talking about my parents? Because they might say I’m a naturally good speller, articulate and don’t live up to my potential. Teachers, on the other hand, might say I’m foul-mouthed, lazy and unscrupulous. My sisters could very well opt for: ham-handed, moochy, and dragon-breathed. If the question was posed to my boyfriend, he’d probably lean toward flat-chested, thoughtless and pretty. My friends would go for daring! hilarious! and INSANE! Sit me in that admissions director’s assistant’s intern’s office chair today and I might choose wrinkleless, goal-free and alcoholic in describing my teenage self.
My parents had contracted a bad case of Bronxville’s ivyleague fever.
“I’ll give Lattie Coor a call,” my father said when I got home from my interview in Burlington. I told him I didn’t really do so well and he came up with the idea of calling the president of UVM, Lattie Coor, someone he knew from St. Louis, to “call in a favor.” My father always knows someone, someone who can get the job done, get you into that college; he knows editors of magazines, people who run theaters, and famous philanthropists, but not one deal has ever been closed on account of these connections, ever. These calls he makes are about as effective and insidery as chain letters. “We drove up together with a WU student to Wisconsin, La Crosse, to campaign for McCarthy—Lattie was provost at the time and trying to stay close to the kids. I’ll give him a call after dinner.”
I didn’t mention to my dad that I had been totally hungover after doing blow and beer bongs all night at a frat party, that I’d been exhausted after employing my Jackie Chan maneuvers (my tendency to get all ass-kicky when drinking) to fight off trust-fund rapists, and could barely answer the questions I’d been asked at the interview. That stuff seemed like, well, a given.
I thought my problem was academic, Lazie-onnaire’s disease, Layme Disease, Dumbentia. Because no one ever said anything about my drinking. We drank on weekends but also did a fair amount of drinking during actual school hours at Bronxville High School. We had daytime kegs at nearby Scout Field. When someone put a sock up on a post in the school courtyard in the morning that meant some people were going to the beer distributor in Tuckahoe to get a keg and there would be a party at “the field” around noon. “Sock’s up” somebody would say, looking out the window of Mrs. Ribner’s English class that overlooked the