COMMON APPLICATION WITH SUPPLEMENT by Marian Crotty
Concentration interest (first choice) physics
Concentration interest (second choice) applied mathematics
Parents marital status: (relative to each other) never married
With whom do you make your permanent home maternal grandmother
1) What five words best describe you? inquisitive, intuitive, logical, quiet, miserly
2) Please respond in 250 characters (roughly 40 words) or fewer to each of the questions below:
2a) What excites you intellectually, really?
Calculating the closest stable orbital path of an asteroid circling a black hole.
2b) Think about a disappointment you have experienced. What was your response?
After my mom shot herself, my boyfriend stopped talking to me. I said, “I get it. You want a happy girl.” He said, “Actually, I meant to do this a long time ago.” My response was to fuck his brother.
2c) Suite-style living – four to six students sharing a set of rooms – may be an integral part of your college experience. What would you contribute to the dynamic of your suite?
I can wake myself up at a given time without an alarm clock. The trick is practice, light sleeping, and a childhood of uncertainty. Imagine a suite with an easily spooked but friendly guard dog.
3) Tell us where you have lived – and for how long – since you were born; whether you’ve always lived in the same place, or perhaps in a variety of places. (100‑word limit)
For sixteen years, I lived with my mother in a small yellow house in Albemarle, NC, where the neighbors parked on the grass, whipped their dogs, and launched fireworks for the celebration of all holidays. Since July, I’ve been in Winter Haven, FL, with my grandmother who lives in a dark second-story apartment with a screened balcony and low-hanging roofs that block the sun. The walls smell like mildew and two decades of nicotine, but now she smokes outside in the parking lot with everybody else. At dusk, the alligators glide along the creek by the laundry room, feeding.
4) Please tell us how you have spent the last two summers (or vacations between school years), including any jobs you have held. (250–650 words)
1. Summer before junior year, I worked at Pablo’s Restaurante, a giant green-shingled building in the strip mall off NC-24 that was run by a short muscular white guy named Barry who smiled a lot but always looked tense. He tried to cultivate an air of mystery about his heritage, which was Polish. The windows were double-tinted and gave the dining room a husky daytime fog I’d seen in strip clubs on television cops shows where young hot girls get murdered. Mid-afternoon, the place would be lit up with Christmas lights and every table would have a candle glowing inside a red glass orb.
I worked six lunches every week and sometimes a Sunday or Monday dinner, the worst shifts, assigned to me because I was new and bad at my job. I usually got the food orders right, but I was slow and unfriendly and didn’t like bothering the bussers who were older than me and Spanish-speaking, and so my tables didn’t always get chips and salsa. My strong points were conscientiousness and that I was always on time. I did better when I worked with Andy who had the kind of dopey easygoing personality that made people trust him. If it was busy, he ran my food, and if it wasn’t busy, he sidled up to me in the kitchen and asked, in a voice of true intimacy, about my love for Kanye West.
At our high school, the popular girls treated Andy like a mascot – the sweet funny guy they all thought should have a girlfriend but did not want to date. I was pretty much friendless, but I felt superior to him, too, because I was on the honors track of classes and he wasn’t and because it was obvious he had a crush on me. Sometimes we shared an employee-discounted enchilada on the back patio or strolled over to Big Lots and fumbled through dusty sunglasses and party hats. Almost everything I said seemed to put him in a good mood.
Then one Sunday afternoon, he pulled me into the walk‑in refrigerator and wanted to know if he was crazy or stupid. I was impressed with his persistence but pretended not to know what he was talking about. We were standing by a metal shelf of produce and the yellowing clear plastic strips that separated the refrigerator portion of the walk‑in from the freezer. It smelled like cilantro, salad dressing, and the deep fryer oil that always embedded itself in my hair and clothes. I could tell it wearied him not to look at my nipples.
“I like you,” he said. “You know that right? I mean – I really like you.”
His lips were pink and wet. His chest bobbed up and down with tight shallow breaths. His turquoise Pablo’s Restaurante polo shirt had a smear of daubed-off sour cream under his nametag. I hoped that if I stood still enough he would list all the things he liked.
“I follow you around like a dog,” he said.
He’d worked out a speech about the boundaries we would keep as coworkers and how I would have to stop texting him unless it was about switching shifts and even then it might be better to ask someone else.
“Okay,” I said. “Is that all?”
“I guess.”
Andy was looking at his sneakers – black leather with embossed gold tags printed inside each floppy tongue – and it was clear that he saw our conversation as having come to a close.
“For what it’s worth,” I said. “I don’t think you act like a dog.”
“Thanks.”
This was when I kissed him, but the part I remember was right before that, when Andy’s face took on this dreamy, panicked glow, like I was his wildest fantasy coming true.
2. This past summer I helped my mom move in with her brother so I could leave for Florida. Her finances were not in any kind of order; her house needed repairs before it could be sold, and because her injuries are what you would guess for a person who survives a gunshot to the head, she was useless. We all knew my uncle was motivated by her disability checks and codeine prescriptions, and my guilt about this, along with the anticipation of freedom, gave me the patience to sit on the cement patio with her each night and listen to her try to talk. “Fuck up,” she would say, pointing to herself. “Ugly.” Her face never moved the way she probably wanted it to, but her eyes were fierce, her self-hatred a spooky, full-force passion.
When I was feeling generous, I would agree that she had done a good job planning her suicide, that the doctors all said a bullet at that angle should have killed her. She also liked to hear about Andy’s brother because he had abandoned me the way my father had abandoned her, and because she thought it was her fault that my life had gotten too sad for him to handle. What she didn’t like was to think about hurting me and how she couldn’t keep herself from doing it.
At first, her ability to speak was even worse than it is now, and she would count on me to listen closely. If I didn’t guess right, she was stuck. I didn’t have to let her say my father’s name or tell me she wished she could die. I could sit there, swatting mosquitos, pretending that I had no idea what words she wanted, and she couldn’t say shit. The woman could barely move.
Sometimes I would beg her not to try to kill herself, and she would gurgle out, “can’t,” meaning, “not physically capable,” and I would threaten to punch her in the face.
“I swear to fucking God, Mom,” I would say, and her eyes would light up, ready for me to hit her.
In August, I moved to Florida and got to know my grandmother, a careful and fastidious woman who works part-time as a teller at Bank of America. In those first weeks, we watched a lot of Judge Judy and talked indirectly about my mother. Once, she left a dog-eared copy of Codependent No More on my bed in the guest room, filled with angry insights about my grandfather written in the margins.
5) Why are you drawn to the area(s) of study you indicated in our Member Section, earlier in this application? (150 words)
In quantum mechanics, the laws of physics no longer operate in the same way that they do with what you can see. In object physics, many things are easy and predictable. The largest force operating on these objects is always gravity, and it’s not hard to make accurate guesses about their motion. Given a few equations, a high school sophomore can chart the arc of a football or the highest possible weight supported by the Golden Gate Bridge, but at the size of the atom and the size of the universe, the unknowns multiply. It’s impossible to know both the current location of an electron as well as its velocity. It’s impossible to see a black hole and currently impossible to explain the origin and purpose of dark matter. And yet – somehow, in these invisible areas of the universe, mathematical equations still predict a lot about how things work.
6) Describe a place or environment where you are perfectly content. What do you do or experience there, and why is it meaningful to you? (250–650 words)
Andy’s family lived in a brick and clapboard house on the west side of town, a couple streets away from where the real estate developers cleared out a big stretch of woods to build a new subdivision. The houses came in seven different models. This was a big part of what the billboards promised along with the fact that you could get to the easternmost edge of Charlotte in forty-five minutes, which, of course, was a lie.
That summer, about half the lots were empty churned‑up red clay, waiting for somebody to special-order a house, and the other half were somewhere between the foundation and the finished product. A few of the houses had families in them already who all seemed to have stern young fathers in their driveways, looking around for new neighbors. Most of these people had little kids and minivans that had seen better days, and you got the feeling that they were first-time homeowners. They were doing better than my mom, I guess, but they made me sad. I could see that these were cheaply built homes scattered across a mucky corner of land that always smelled like car exhaust and sulphur rot from the paper mill, and I knew already that their new neighbors would be like the old neighbors who had woken them up with their domestic disputes and who didn’t always have money to fix a leaky drainpipe or a broken window.
Usually, Andy and I just walked around the neighborhood, holding hands, and talking about nothing, but then other times, we’d duck into one of the unfinished homes to smoke the pot he bought from one of the dishwashers. I guess this was trespassing but we never touched anything or left nubs of joints or even nosed around very much, we just lay there on the plywood with the nails and sawdust and the unidentifiable bits of plastic junk. I liked to have a house with a second floor and the cutout of where a window was going to go, so I could look at the pink sunset and the daylight draining away against the pine frames. In these moments, it didn’t matter that I wasn’t falling in love with Andy the way he kept saying he was falling in love with me.
I was careful not to say lovey-dovey things I would regret later, but I was less strict with myself about the physical stuff, which I understood to be its own force. In the daylight, I was always scolding myself for noticing Andy’s gangling neck instead of his kindness, his lisp instead of his soft eyes, but in the darkness, everything was simple motion. I was a semi-truck wheeling along the highway, a machine without brakes careening through the night.
7) Please briefly elaborate on one of your extracurricular activities or work experiences that was particularly meaningful to you. (100–250 words)
These days Pablo’s has two stars on Yelp – one star less than the fine citizens of Albemarle gave the incubated hotdogs at QuikTrip, but most of the reviews came from an older lady who got fired. Carla was a horrible waitress, most definitely stealing from tipout, probably on drugs, but she’d been fucking Barry for years. Then he got another girlfriend in addition to the wife, and her bad waitressing was noticed. This was a quiet woman who had, for whatever reason, loved Barry, but now she wanted him to suffer. She made up stories about rat meat in the albondigas soup, maggots in the ice machine. She said, maybe this was true, that Barry was missing a testicle. One night, she drove over to Pablo’s, slashed Barry’s tires, and then banged on the office window, screaming about what a motherfucker Barry was, what a goddamned motherfucking one-balled liar. There were a bunch of us in the office, and I could tell that everybody else thought this was funny, but Carla scared the shit out of me. Until that night, I had thought of her as someone who knew that disappointment was inevitable and had taught herself to bear it.
8) Why this school in particular? (200‑word limit)
In my dreams of college, I am always at the front of a classroom, solving a math problem so complicated that sound fades and I forget where I am except for the numbers. I haven’t faced any problems this hard yet because the better of my two high schools only goes up to Calc. I and AP Physics. At your school, there are research labs that test nuclear fission and galaxies, and scholarships to study abroad in the southern hemisphere and spend a semester looking through a world-famous telescope. There are also thousands of students who come to your school from the kind of communities where kids are taught to expect good things to happen to them, and I think I would like this a lot.
9) Recount an incident or time when you experienced failure. How did it affect you and what lessons did you learn? (250–650 words)
In the weeks before my mom shot herself, she was displaying all the classic warning signs. Namely, she was giving away her possessions and the gloom that had clung to her for the past several months was lifting. She had been working through some changes in her medications but most of her depression that winter was the same kind as usual – a guy had dumped her and now she hated herself.
When my mom was at her worst, she exercised twice a day and replaced her meals with the protein bars and muscle milk she got from Gold’s Gym, where she worked at the front desk. Her body turned gaunt and bony, and she spent a lot of time in the bathroom emitting bad smells. Her other depression activities included watching action movies, curating playlists of 1990s punk songs for her workouts, and sleeping.
That winter, when I was not at track practice, studying with my friend Regina, or working at Pablo’s, I was at Andy’s house, doing whatever Andy was doing that day. Officially, we were not dating, but this was just my way of letting him know not to count on me. I figured I wasn’t leading him on since I was honest about my feelings and had given him my virginity, but Andy, who is an optimist by nature and slow at hearing bad news, saw things differently.
My mom started cooking dinner again in March, and by April, she was taking me to the movies once a week, which she could not afford to do, and we were having long talks about the good things my teachers said about me and how she wanted my future to be different than hers. One day, she said, “If something were ever to happen,” and I said, “Don’t – okay? Please don’t.”
Then she went on about this emerald ring from her great aunt that I was supposed to hide from the bill collectors. The other thing I had to promise was that I’d move in with my grandmother, who had been a bitch to my mom but good to me, and that I wouldn’t move in with my uncle, who has a drug problem and an evangelical wife.
I knew what she was telling me, but I also thought, “Maybe this is a fantasy.” Maybe this is like getting yourself to sit through the anti-bullying assembly by reminding yourself you can pull the fire alarm.
Still, when my mom said that she thought it would be a good idea to put her car in my name, I called the guy who’d prescribed the anti-depressants. I could tell he thought I was right to worry but also that he was more concerned with doctor-patient confidentiality and liability. The phone call lasted about four minutes.
I also called the ex‑boyfriend, who said my mother was a kind but troubled woman and that he wished her the best. He did not seem to think he owed anything to a woman he’d dated for two years, and this kind of attitude, I suppose, is how he manages to own a Mercedes. I used to drive over to his house on the way home from the hospital and stare at his perfect floodlit yard, wondering what it would do to him if I threw a rock through his window. Would he even know who did it?
To sum up, I learned that 1. Knowing the future can’t always change it. 2. Tragedy looks inevitable when enough people refuse to help.
10) Describe a problem you’ve solved or a problem you’d like to solve. Explain its significance to you and what steps you took or could be taken to identify a solution.
According to Andy, he has a good memory about the two of us, and my memory is bad. He can recall specific conversations and quote back promises I’ve made. For instance, in October, apparently, I told him that I would be ready to revisit the issue of dating in December. Then December came, and I’d forgotten about all of this, and so when he tried to be my boyfriend, I wouldn’t hang out with him for a week. According to Andy, I did this on at least six separate occasions, and, whether or not I meant to, it was a way of teaching him never to ask for anything. He said that if a guy did this back-and-forth business to a girl, he would be an asshole.
According to Andy, he said he loved me four times, and I only ever said it once, kind of, after he forced me. It was a January afternoon, overcast, and we were on opposite sides of his computer room – me by the window in this unsteady papasan chair that felt like it would fall apart if I moved too much, and him pacing back and forth along the wall. His parents were out for the night; his brother was playing video games in the den; but instead of having sex, we were talking. Andy said it didn’t bother him that other people thought he was pathetic but that he needed to know I cared about him, too.
“Okay,” I told him. “I care about you.” I was tearing up the way I always did at the first sign of tension between us, but I was angry. It didn’t seem fair that Andy got to use his love as proof that he was a good person when all it really meant was that he was a guy who knew what he wanted.
“But do you?” he said.
“Do you want to stop seeing each other?” I was only a couple feet away from this glass-eyed taxidermy fox that Andy was proud of having purchased himself from the Goodwill in High Point. Its tail reminded me of a dust mop coated in dog hair.
“That’s your answer to everything.”
I squinted at him. I couldn’t explain why, if I didn’t love him, it felt unbearable to let him leave. I figured it had something to do with my mother – the way I had lived my whole life toggling between the fear that she would abandon me and the fear of being crushed by how much she needed me – but I also knew that this was my fault. I was a small-hearted person who wanted to be loved completely without having to give anything in return. It felt safe this way, and I was pretty sure it was how I would always feel.
“I do love you, Andy,” I said, kicking a wool sock against the carpet. “But it’s with the love of a small and stingy heart.”
Saying this made me feel wise and stupid at the same time.
I said, “You shouldn’t wait around for me to change.”
I was sure that I would lose him. But Andy loved me back then, and, for a little while, this was enough.
11) We all exist within communities or groups of various sizes, origins, and purposes; pick one and tell us why it is important to you, and how it has shaped you. (250–650 words)
I grew up in a family of two. My mother was a small woman with wavy brown hair, blue eyes webbed with white, and porcelain skin that bruised easily. I understood from a very young age that it was my responsibility to keep her safe. When I was little, I would beg to sleep in her bed so that I could watch her in the night and make sure that she kept breathing.
She liked stock car racing and loud music with electric guitars. She often wore her hair looped up with a pencil. She drank so much Diet Coke that her front teeth lost their enamel. She did not go to college and this embarrassed her if it ever came up. Men loved her, and she needed their attention too much to ever tell them no. Every time a man wanted her, it felt like a surprise and a cure – the thing that would finally sustain her.
When I was in middle school, I broke up with two of her boyfriends, a skinny guy with a red beard that glinted in the winter sun and a beefy old man who threatened to kill her.
“She doesn’t want you,” I told them both, through the screen door. “Now you have to go away or I call the police.”
The bearded guy stayed there for a long time, sobbing, but the beefy guy calmed down when I explained that there was no other guy in my mom’s life.
My mom shot herself at 9:00 in the morning, while I was at school. She did it outside on the back patio, where, she has told me many times, it would be easy for somebody to hose off the blood. She wanted someone who wasn’t me to find her and then clean up her mess, which was mostly what happened, except that the neighbor found a living person with her face exploded, screaming, and the blood stain on the cement is still there.
When I saw her in the hospital, she apologized for doing such a bad job at killing herself and said that she had hoped I would think it was an accident. This was why there had been no note.
“An accident?” I said. “How is getting shot in the head going to look like an accident?”
She didn’t have an answer to that, but I could see that she was sincere, and so I shut up.
In health class, Mrs. Sheehan said that scientists have found fetal cells in the bodies of women who were pregnant many years ago and that the cells can heal things. We were supposed to feel some big poetry about the connectivity between us all – the way it’s confusing where one person starts and another person ends – but just about everybody in the class threatened to puke. They didn’t want to think about their moms’ bodies, and they definitely didn’t want to imagine parts of themselves lurking around in their moms’ organs. I was the only one who thought this was so obvious that it wasn’t worth talking about. If my mother was in pain, I felt it; if she needed a part of me to heal herself, it was my job to help.
12) In this essay, please reflect on something you would like us to know about you that we might not learn from the rest of your application, or on something about which you would like to say more.
On the day that my mom shot herself, Andy and I had been on a break for almost a month. When I called to tell him, he was upset with me for making contact.
“Okay,” I said. “But it’s an emergency.”
“I’m not your boyfriend. You’ve made it pretty clear this is what you want.”
I waited on the line for a minute. It sounded like Andy was driving.
“What is it?” he said, finally, and so I told him.
It is true that he came to check on me, and it is also true that he helped me figure out some logistical issues with the hospital and with school, but this was all done with an attitude of pity and obligation. He no longer wanted me.
As a joke, I said, “It’s been so long, you must have a new girl now,” and as it turned out, he did. I had seen them hanging around at school together – a popular girl with shiny blond hair, perfect teeth, a laugh like a wind chime. I’d figured that he liked her but never considered for one second that she would date him.
“What did you expect?” he said. “You want me to pine over you forever?”
“No,” I said, though, of course this was exactly what I wanted – that no matter what went bad in my life, I would have this one person who longed for me.
The next day, I went over to Andy’s house with the excuse of returning a lasagna pan to his mother and the intention of breaking up his relationship, but he wasn’t home. His brother, Jordan, said he would probably be gone for a long time. Jordan and Andy were Irish twins, but Jordan seemed a lot younger. He was skinny, quiet, less good at making friends. They both had freckles and small rounded ears that stuck out like barnacles. The effect was worse on Jordan, who wore his hair in a buzz cut.
“He’s with her isn’t he?” I said and wrinkled my nose. “Emma.”
“Probably,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
He’d answered the door in mesh gym shorts and a racing sweatshirt from Dupont. His face was flushed, and I had the distinct feeling that I had interrupted him masturbating.
I shrugged. “I’ll get over it.”
It was April, and a loop of crocuses was blooming around an oak tree in their front yard. It was breezy, but I was sweating. I’d worn my tightest jeans and a burgundy turtleneck that Andy called my “sex shirt” because of how big it made my boobs look, and I could see Jordan noticing my efforts and feeling sorry for me.
“How’s your mom?”
“Not dead.”
“That’s good, right?”
“Yeah.”
Rocco, the lab that I had walked many times with Andy, was wagging his tail and trying to get past Jordan’s legs so that I could pet him.
“Do you want to play on the Wii?”
I nodded.
The Wii was in the den along with the washing machine and the old couch where Andy and I lounged around, watching movies and making out, but I walked right past the den and up the stairs toward Jordan’s room, kicked off my Converse sneakers, and sat on his bed. It was the only room in the house that I hadn’t paid attention to, and I was surprised that it was so neat and so empty. Aside from the furniture, the only decorations were two photographs of him and his friends at the beach that he’d printed out on typing paper with a color printer and taped to the wall.
“What are you doing?”
“Don’t ruin it,” I said. “If we talk about it, it won’t happen.”
He shut the door behind him and walked toward me. “This is about Andy, right?” he said. “You want to make him jealous.”
He didn’t sound mad at me so much as confused. He could tell that there was a larger plan at work but couldn’t make sense of it.
“I don’t think so,” I said, truthfully. “I think I just feel lonely.”
He nodded as if he accepted this rationale and walked around the bed to sit beside me. We started kissing, and then I took off my shirt, and the rest was easy. He was nice. I waited for the blank moment where my mind wandered away from my body and then scrubbed itself clean, but the moment didn’t come. I stayed exactly where I was, staring at the blurred photographs of Jordan’s friends and the oval sunspots gliding across the low popcorn ceiling. I was a seventeen-year-old girl whose father was long gone and whose mother was probably going to be paralyzed forever. I had been loved once by someone who had given up on me, and now I was on my own.
A strained but empty feeling came over me – like the sensation of being lost in a familiar neighborhood, trying hard to remember something that should be easy. I thought about that night at Pablo’s when Carla slashed Barry’s tires and then banged on the door like a psycho while everybody laughed and about my mom’s ex‑boyfriend in his fancy house, hoping he never had to talk to her again. I thought about the black holes I’d read about that were too small for anybody to ever know they were there, and I thought about how if I told my mom what I did with Andy’s brother, she would be proud of me. She would be glad that I was stronger than she was, that I didn’t need a man in my life to prove that I existed, and she would be proud of herself, too, for raising me.
I was thinking about her in a judgmental way, but I understood, too, that she was right: she had raised me to take care of myself, to survive on my own once she was gone. In some small bright corner of my mother’s brain, this was the thing she wanted. I wasn’t ready to imagine myself shaking loose of her, but it was the first time I realized that I could. There was another life out there for me, a tiny pinprick of light in the distance, waiting.
Marian Crotty’s stories have appeared in The Southern Review, Harpur Palate, Confrontation, Third Coast, and The Potomac Review.