For the past thirty minutes, the middle-aged woman sitting across and close to me had been nothing but gentle and patient on what I was arguing to her. Sitting next to me and facing this patient woman was also my mother. She might as well though not be there because she had remained mute during this entire “appointment.” It wasn’t that my immigrant mother couldn’t understand the dialogue or that she didn’t want to help me. She was quiet by choice.
I was the one who arranged this meeting – this appointment, or the official phrase – an appeal, to convince this woman sitting so close to me that our knees almost touched each other, that the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test had flawed questions that year, the year 1999. And these flawed questions were precisely two. Two was the magic number for me – I just had to convince her, an employee of the New York City Department of Education that any two of the wrong answers I had selected were not my mistakes. They couldn’t have been. Because these mistakes had placed me in a cutoff where I could only enroll in the second best high school in New York – Bronx High School of Science, and not Stuyvesant, the top ranked one, my first choice, and my only choice.
I cannot remember the details of the room that the three of us had sat in. It had to be an office space though, in a building, owned by the Department of Education. I want to say the walls were painted with a beige type of white, nothing decorous, fun, or fancy.
That afternoon, I wore the only white shirt I owned, a khaki skirt that hit above my knee caps along with a pair of white pumps. In hindsight, the outfit was probably better suited for a sweet sixteen party instead of this appeals meeting. I did though intentionally select the outfit, based on what my 14-year-old-self believed to be a professional and confident appearance, so powerful that I could persuade this employee into siding with me – that just two questions, any two that I had made mistakes on were at the fault of the exam board.
I was there to convince her that I deserved to go to Stuyvesant. That I must go to Stuyvesant. That I must have a seat in the school the following year – 2000. Because if not, then my future would be doomed. The chances of me getting into an Ivy League would shrink. And I just needed to get into any Ivy League. Ideally, one that was as close to tier as the one that my mother had done her postgraduate studies in so I could be as accomplished as she was, if not more.
How did my immigrant mother feel about my test results? Was she disappointed? I had always assumed that she was. Perhaps it was my own perception. Perhaps she was not. She never used those words – “Tiffany, I am disappointed in you.” I never asked her. But I felt that she was. She never congratulated me when she learnt of my acceptance to the school, located in a borough called the Bronx, that only 12% of test takers that year were qualified to enroll in. It was a 30-minute drive from Queens, the borough where we lived in and to get there, we had to cross a bridge, the Whitestone Bridge, with a roundtrip toll cost that was enough to buy school lunches for four days.
When my mother learnt of my exam results, she acknowledged it as if I was telling her that Monday had passed and now it was Tuesday. Perhaps getting into a specialized high school was an unspoken requirement because of the effort already spent on it. I had committed an entire summer, from Monday to Friday, from 9 in the morning to 3 in the afternoon, studying for it at a private after school program and every Saturday in the fall once school resumed. Not to mention how much money was spent on this service which could cover one year’s worth of school lunches for seven students.
As I was giving my appeal to this woman, who kept her eyes on me the entire time, I already knew that I was not at all convincing. I couldn’t even convince myself. I was only trying to come up with every logical reasoning I could think of to make a case. And as I continued making my arguments, I only saw how it was my fault that I chose the wrong answers. Why couldn’t the test scoring machine just deduct 12 from my answer of 124, producing the correct angle value to the parallelogram? And why didn’t I comprehend that the main idea in one passage about graffiti art really was about the pie chart analyzing the number of them in the state of Denver and not the one I chose – artificial heart transplant.
The exam was not flawed.
It was I, who just did not score high enough to qualify a seat in Stuyvesant. I was just not a part of that top 5% of test takers.
Looking away from this woman who was old enough to have teenage daughters of her own, I ended my debate. My face dropped to a deep state of hopelessness. The debate, actually, wasn’t even a debate. This woman’s responses to my appeals were affirming and gentle, without any “No’s,” “You were wrong,” or “It looks like you just failed to do the proper math.” Midway through my arguments, I already knew the outcome.
At the age of fourteen, I did not yet learn the business etiquette on how to end a meeting, which by now, I had mastered from fourteen years of working. So, I didn’t leave by saying scripted corporate phrases of “I really appreciate your time,” followed by a sweaty handshake or a “That was really helpful, we should do this again sometime.” I did what any 14-year-old girl did – gave the woman a weak “Thank you,” and stood up to leave.
While I did so, I felt the wrinkle that my sitting posture had made against the khaki skirt I bought from a mail order catalogue. This patient woman, who looked to be the same age as my mother, held onto a few beats of hesitation before she opened her mouth and comforted me, words traveling slow and natural, like the the bubbles I blew out from a bubble wand. “You know.” She gave another pause. “My daughter went to Bronx Science. She had a great time there.”
Meeting her eyes, I nodded. My face remained down, almost touching the neutral colored floor. My eyes were no longer with any desires – the desire that she would agree that a team of exam experts made mistakes. My energy was hollow like a crumbling tunnel, not ready for any visitors. And off, my mother and I walked out of the bland colored room, leaving this farsighted woman back to being by herself.
I did end up having a good time at Bronx Science. I also had a good time at the university I later attended, one that was not an Ivy League.