Along with refreshers in algebra and geometry, the training offered a tour of the ways tutoring could torpedo your artistic ambitions. There was the opera singer who taught graphing calculators, the inevitable actor glossing reading passages, and the writer who explained prepositions. They were all “no longer young”: their hair was thinning, their faces etched, and their waists thick. They were, Griffin had told us, the very best that Ivy Prep had found—no one knew graphing calculators better than this woman who had once sung at Lincoln Center. At breaks I asked, and learned: No, they did not compose music anymore, they hadn’t had time for auditions, they had a kid, would I like to see a picture?
On the last day of training, Griffin himself came into the conference room. His sleeves were rolled up; he spoke to us kindly, as a father might. The rules were simple and, as we would agree, the epitome of fair. Compensation was determined as followed: The difference between our students’ beginning SAT scores and ending ones was divided by the number of hours we had spent tutoring them; this provided a numeric representation of our effectiveness as a tutor. When we reached a certain number—confidential, of course—our rate would be raised. We would start at a hundred dollars an hour, but if we were good there was practically no limit to the money we could earn.
The guy beside me raised his hand. “What if we just happen to be working with a kid who’s really bad at standardized tests? It seems a little unfair to get judged for a test we don’t actually take.”
Griffin gave a beneficent smile. “The only thing that overcomes hard luck is hard work.”
Then came the checks—a thousand bucks—and a final speech. Griffin spoke to us directly, simply, making ample eye contact. We were to be the very best. We were not to try too hard. We should be confident, and never forget a million others would be thrilled to occupy our place.
* * *
—
Later that same week, I received my first assignment. Lupe Quiroz, of Eighty-Sixth and York, had a 1500 on her SAT, but her parents believed she could do better. Would I be available for a month of Sundays, an emphasis on math?
I began to calculate. Five hours, five hundred dollars. Four Sundays, ninety minutes each: six hundred dollars. And this was just the start. Sure, there were taxes, but April was a million years away. I said yes. When I slept on my cousin’s couch now, I dreamt of calendar squares, each marked with tidy sums ending in double zeros, a wave of cash carrying me to a completed novel.
* * *
—
When I arrived at 450 East Eighty-Sixth, having hoofed it like hell from Lex to York, the doorman patiently waited for me to butcher “Quiroz” before sending me soaring in a silver box.
A woman in an embroidered blouse answered the door. “Hi! I’m Rose! So nice to meet you!” I exclaimed, hand outstretched. She looked at me sadly and muttered over her shoulder.
From the depths (but not the deep depths; this apartment did not have deep depths; even on the threshold I could tell) emerged a second middle-aged woman, wearing loose sweats. “Hi, I’m Araceli,” she said. So this was the mother who sent emails from her DE Shaw account; this was to whom I should be directing my obsequious high-pitched flattery. It was the first time I had confused the housekeeper for the mother, but not the last.
I was ushered inside. Lupe, too, was in running shorts and a giant white T-shirt; everyone except the housekeeper was dressed as if for a slumber party.
We settled into the glass-encased breakfast nook, with its view of East Harlem’s gray-and-brown geometry. The apartment, in addition to being spotless and small, was muggy beyond belief. In a far corner, an ancient air conditioner ineffectively wheezed. No wonder the family favored shorts.
Lupe was petite, with dark, serious eyes and delicate cheekbones. Beautiful, and angry: “So, are you guys connected to the Ivy League?”
“Um, it’s sort of umm, a lot of the tutors went to Ivy League schools.” I made a big show of getting out my new pad of paper and sharpened pencils, the folder neatly printed with her name.
“But it’s not, like, official?”
“No.”
“So you can just call yourself that? Isn’t that illegal?”
“Well, it’s not illegal,” and I couldn’t help myself, I smiled a little, and that got Lupe. “That’s weird,” she muttered, but she was done arguing. Adult condescension her Kryptonite, I noted. This was a girl who wanted to be taken seriously.
She was right, though. Ivy Prep. It was a disgusting name, coyly false. We were both trapped, her family so desperate for some Ivy Prep that they’d hire an Ivy grad to do the prepping; and me, the Ivy grad wandering further and further off the path of economic stability, capitalizing again and again on the brand-name school that was supposed to have served as a launching pad eight years ago.
“It is weird,” I agreed. “But let’s get out the diagnostic. How did it go?” The diagnostic was another Griffin tactic: before a family could even begin tutoring, the child had to take a mock SAT. Cost? $225.
Silently Lupe slid the test across the table. The thirty-one questions of MATH TEST 4—CALCULATOR had been completed in very faint, almost unintelligible pencil. “Oh, okay, this looks great. Um. This is good. Okay. Why don’t we go over the answers real quick?”
A D C C B…a chain of letters like genetic code. She read, and I verified: she had answered every one correctly, save the second to last, which was an exponent-and-root question with enough checkmarks and cheeky superscripted numbers to resemble a three-story house. Number 29. What a coincidence. The coincidence was: I didn’t know how to do number 29 either.
Lupe was looking at me with mild interest. “What’s the trick?”
Behind Lupe’s head there was a shelf of square glass jars with round wooden lids, the kind of jars where quaint coffee shops kept biscotti. These jars, however, were filled not with baked goods but with matchbooks. Hundreds of them, each stamped with a restaurant’s logo.
“I thought I had it,” she continued. “But the two and the three don’t cancel out at the end.”
What did the matchbooks mean? Was the father secretly a red-sauce Italian fanatic, did he go to escape the housekeeper’s cooking and bring back, in apology, a little souvenir? Did Lupe, up late plowing through mountains of homework, ever lift a lid, plunge in her hand, and take out a book? Did she ever strike a light?
I forced my gaze down. “Well, yeah. This problem. This guy. Yeah. He’s a bit of a sly one. I think the thing is…”
Here I wasted a good two minutes carefully recopying the question onto my yellow legal pad. Triumphantly I turned it to Lupe. “So what do you think the first step should be?”