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Eine Geschichte für W.R.

Author’s Note

The following is a work of nonfiction. All events are true as I remember them, though I am unapologetically prone to indiscriminate hyperbole, and some dialogue is approximated due to the passage of time. Most names and many identifying details have been changed, and some individuals are composites to further protect their identities.

A small number of scenes in the chapters “Schriftverkehr,” “Ereignis,” and “Schadenfreude” have appeared in a different form in Slate and on my personal website.

All translations from the German are my own.

“Give it up! Give it up!” he said, and turned away with a great swing of his body, like a man who wants to be alone with his laughter.

—Franz Kafka

1.

Jugendsünde

n. teenage folly, from youth and sin.

ex. Among the most egregious of her Jugendsünden was the intellectual gravitas she granted to Pinky and the Brain.

Dylan Gellner wasn’t German. He was a nonpracticing half-Jew from Oregon, just like me. But all of this is still largely his fault, or rather my fault for falling in love with him.

The first time I ever heard of Dylan Gellner was at the beginning of senior year, when he became a household name at South Eugene High School for getting a 1450 on his SATs. I realize that doesn’t sound like much nowadays, when a 1450 is what you get for spelling your own name with just one typo. But in 1993, it was the best board score at my twelve-hundred-student public school—the best, in fact, I had ever heard of in real life. Certainly much better than mine.

I had already taken the test twice, the first attempt resulting in an underwhelming 1160. My parents—who met in 1965 on their Stanford junior year abroad in Italy and married shortly before beginning joint Ph.D.s in English at the University of Chicago—had many opinions and much advice. “The only thing the SAT predicts is the aptitude of parents to force their kids to spend lunchtime doing practice tests,” said Sharon Schuman, Ph.D., the night before my first ignominious showing. “My SATs weren’t great, and I turned out fine. I got a Ph.D.!” She went back to grading her hundredth freshman paper of the night.

“It’s like studying for a urine test!” added David Schuman, Ph.D., J.D., as he dug into his usual postdinner snack of Crispix cereal dipped in I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter! My dad’s own Ph.D. had been supplemented by a law degree after the English-professor employment crisis propelled him to law school just before I started kindergarten. Of course, he’d then snuck back into academia as a law professor, so he had never done anything exciting like defending murderers or helping teenagers divorce their parents.

“Just go to bed early, and do your best,” he counseled. “I mean, look at Grandpa. He never even took the SAT, and he played football at the University of Michigan with Gerald Ford!”

“That’s because it was 1933, Dad.”

“Yes, back when they had active discrimination policies against Jews. So did Stanford when I went there, by the way. Quotas. Good night!”

The Schumans’ laid-back attitude, it turns out, was borne not of their generation’s antiauthoritarian progressivism so much as by the secret assumption that their daughter, who could talk at six months and read her alphabet at a year, was so preternaturally intelligent that she would make a 1500 and be admitted to the elite university of her choice without studying or trying. But they learned in short order that you should never underestimate the mediocrity of your own child—a mediocrity that brought about a universal change in the Schumans’ conception of both my abilities and my future, and their idea of what constituted both parental involvement and a worthy extracurricular activity.

“You,” proclaimed my dad some scant handful of weeks after the urine test/Grandpa conversation, thudding an onerous-looking tome in front of me on the table, “are going to SAT prep class.” (I was still, mercifully, allowed to eat lunch.)

Late nights in the school newspaper office were hastily supplanted by practice tests under the semiwatchful eye of a very bored tutor at a storefront private school in downtown Eugene, which at the time consisted of a handful of record and outdoor-supply shops; my old gymnastics academy; a public library that largely served as a daytime napping station for the less-fortunate; and, of course, every drug dealer and rapist in the greater Willamette Valley. Downtown’s flagship establishment, right around the corner from my new tutoring digs, was a boutique of “imports” that was the only place in town you could get Chuck Taylors in all the colors, but which did most of its business renting porn and selling bongs. The Aerie Academy, where the Schumans laid down substantial dollars to shame their oldest child back into the realm of the exceptional, was sandwiched between a thrift store run by the Junior League, which specialized in mismatched china and shoulder pads, and a place that hosted hacky-sack competitions. Obviously these were the ideal environs to develop some academic rigor at last.

After seven diligent months of drill questions and vocabulary building, the fruits of my labor resulted in a modest 100-point jump in my verbal score. “Oh look,” I said to my mother after ripping open the dread carbon-paper missive from the College Board after yet more months of agonized waiting. “Slightly less mediocre mediocrity.” And this was what I could accomplish with a focus I had never before applied to academics, and would not again until my first year of graduate school. So, to my parents’ shock and my resignation, it was averageness that constituted (to bastardize Ludwig Wittgenstein) the limits of my language, and thus also of my college application pool. Would I be following my parents to Stanford, creating a Schuman legacy? I would not. I contented myself with the fact that my hard-fought improved score made me seem smart enough.

Until, early on in senior year, I realized that among the sea of thirty-nine other college-credit aspirants in my AP Civics class was the infamous Dylan Gellner. “When you apply to colleges, your real competition is the people from your high school,” my guidance counselor had said. And there, three rows back from me, was Dylan Gellner with his damn 1450. On the first try, obviously. (Possibly as a sophomore.) I might as well start that correspondence degree in TV and VCR repair already.

The second thing I learned about Dylan Gellner was that he, who as a junior took all of his math and science classes with seniors, had dated Margaret O’Grady, who was a year older than we were and now went to Princeton.

“Sounds like a match made in dork heaven,” I said to my friend Samantha one rainy afternoon in late September, left again to my own devices now that SAT purgatory was over and my parents had given up. Samantha was busy sifting through brochures for colleges that were now out of my league. “I bet they whispered sweet fractals into each other’s ears,” I said. As Samantha took careful note of Stanford’s on-campus housing policy, I surreptitiously flipped through the yearbook to get a better look at Dylan Gellner—staring during AP Civics would have been (a) rude, (b) obvious, and (c) somewhat impossible, as he normally sat a few rows behind me with his preppy ski-team friends.