Admissions

A guest essay from Maria Giura

My first boss after college, Doris, was graceful and accomplished, graduated from Vassar, had a doctorate from Harvard. She wore silk dresses and trailed Tiffany perfume, was so slim that when she crossed her legs, one reached all the way around the back of the other. I was a girl who had stayed close to home for college, had only recently lost my lisp and baby fat, bought my clothes at the Limited.

She and her husband, the president, had arrived at the college—my alma mater—a year before I graduated to help save it from financial ruin. A year later she hired me to be part of her Admissions team to increase enrollment and raise standards. I’d wanted to work at a women’s magazine where I could edit articles about relationships and clothes, where there’d be a lot of people my age and we’d go out for happy hours near Madison Avenue, but I hadn’t gotten past a second interview. When Doris offered me the job, I couldn’t deny that it seemed a good fit for someone like me: an education major who didn’t want to teach, who loved my small college and wanted to start working as soon as possible. 

Within the first two years, I tried to leave twice. I didn’t like getting lost trying to find high schools two hours away where guidance counselors forgot I was coming or sent me students who were uninterested or not a match; nor did I like lugging awkward sized marketing materials into college fairs only to have students approach my table to borrow a pencil to fill out a card for another college.

But the part I dreaded the most was having to speak in front of hundreds of families at Open Houses. After a year, I left to try and find the magazine job again. All I landed were temp positions for medical textbooks. Four months later when Doris heard through the grapevine that things weren’t working out, she called me, “We could really use you back.” A year later, I nearly quit again, this time for a job as a gofer for the actor Michael J. Fox (my cousin knew his nanny). I couldn’t help but wonder what doors it would open, but the salary I thought they had offered me was actually going to be split between me and another hire. I couldn’t justify leaving Admissions for a half-salary. When I crawled back to Doris, she said, “I felt like you had run off with a sailor and were never coming back.”

Maybe she saw what I didn’t want to accept: I was where I belonged. When I wasn’t trying to find another job, I was good at the one I had: giving students and their families the kind of personalized attention that helped make the difference, the kind that Doris showed me. Except for my parents, I’d never met anyone who worked as hard or strove for excellence as she did. She worked late nights and weekends, crunching numbers, figuring out how to raise standards without losing money, forging relationships with high school principals, designing flawless recruitment materials.

She didn’t expect anything of her staff that she wouldn’t do herself. She was a good role model, always available, meeting with us regularly, giving us feedback. She took the fall for my mistakes like the time she asked me to write descriptive brochures for every major, and I botched up the endings, which we didn’t catch until they’d gone to print. And she was kind. She gave me the best compliment anyone ever has, “You’ll make an excellent mother one day, Maria.”

She was the main reason I kept returning, the reason I (mostly) stopped looking for another job. Yet, I always maintained a boundary. Of everyone on staff, Doris seemed to hold me to the highest standards. Once when we had a birthday cake for one of the counselors, and we didn’t think to invite her—and another time when she competed in an on-campus run, and a couple of us didn’t attend—it was me who she corrected.

When I got my morning coffee, I often went passed her office without stopping for some small talk. I was afraid if I got too close, she’d want me to be more than I wanted to be: maybe the sibling or daughter she didn’t have, maybe just a friend. She had lost her mother when she was young and had once told me all she ever wanted was a big family. At thirty-eight, with no baby yet, it was just her, her husband and the college. She had suffered a miscarriage that I didn’t acknowledge for the feeble reason of not knowing what to say. 

Around this same time when I was twenty-four, I had moved out of my mother’s house and broken up with my long-term boyfriend, knowing deep down that I’d probably never marry, that it wasn’t my path. Sometimes when Doris and I worked late, the plaintive sounds of Bonnie Raitt would reach me from her stereo, connecting us in a way that neither of us ever spoke of, that I didn’t give us the chance to speak of.   

On my 25^th birthday when I left to go to dinner with a date, and she said, “Now, don’t have too good a time,” I gave her a look that made her edit herself, “But of course have a good time.” Two years later, I left to become the college’s career placement director. I felt free like a rebellious daughter leaving her mother’s house.

Within two years, though, the college sent an untenured professor, Karen, to be my co-director, and Doris was asked to oversee us both. When Doris called me to check up on Karen’s performance, I gave the least amount of information possible, passively taking my frustration out on her. I was angry at the college for forcing me with someone who they were just moving around and then expecting me to tattle on her, a high extrovert who was constantly in my office to spout college politics and who was obsessed with shoes.

I didn’t understand how afraid Karen was for her job nor that each pair of shoes was her way of trying to fill the void of never having the daughter she’d always wanted. When I saw her patent leather pumps in front of me for the third or fourth time in a day, I’d keep my eyes down on the student resume in front of me, mutter “uh-huh, uh-huh” hoping she’d go away, then feeling remorseful when she did. This was the same woman I’d come to trust with the surprising news that I was moving in with an order of nuns for a period of candidacy, that I was considering entering religious life. She even wrote me a letter of recommendation. 

After five years in career development, I shocked Doris and everyone else with the news that I was leaving to enter the convent. I was struggling with my choice, unhappy but still pursuing it, convinced it’s what I was supposed to be doing, in part because none of my relationships had worked out.

“I’m much more spiritual than I’ve let on, Doris,” I tried to explain.

“You’re also pretty secular. All the nuns I know drive the same basic car. I don’t think that’s you.” I drove a Honda prelude with sunroof and spoiler, which I’d bought years earlier after admiring hers. She sounded disapproving, maybe even angry that my choice would distance us more, for good. Then she said about her seven-year-old daughter, softening her voice, “She’s my best friend.” She was trying to say, how can you not become a mother? 

During that final month at the college, I pulled away from Doris completely. Her doubts would have forced me to face my own, which I wasn’t ready to do. A year later when she and her husband left for another college, I wrote her a letter thanking her for all she had done for the college. By this point, it had been named top tier in the Northeast and one of TIME Magazine’s 'College of the Year' Finalists. 

I don’t think I said “thank you” for all she had done for me. It’s only now, all these years later, that I realize the important role she played in my life, the positive influence she had on me. She helped me get to a better version of myself, showed me what it looks like to stay the course, to trust I’m in the right place even when it doesn’t feel that way, even when it isn’t easy. She helped me figure out I’m happy when I’m working hard, when I’m completing the very thing I didn’t think I could. She showed me that the only real way to lead is by example. 

All these years later, I appreciate the maternal feelings Doris had for me, that I now have toward younger staff members, especially women, how I want to help show them what they’re made of. I understand the need she had to be supported, included. I can even understand why she tried to cajole me into motherhood—she didn’t want me to miss out on the happiness she had found. 

Without her knowing it, Doris helped me trust beyond my own wants. If I had gone into magazine publishing, it would have never lived up to my fantasy. I wouldn’t have wound up in education, where I’ve learned there’s more than one way to be a mother, to nurture the next generation. I realize just how much she cared about me, how easy it was for me to take her for granted. If I were to go back in time to that twenty- something girl, I’d probably still be my careful-self, still drawing some boundaries, but they’d be softer, more generous. After I’d finish pouring creamer into my coffee, I’d pick up my cup, lean my head in her doorway, and say, “Beautiful dress, Doris. Where did you get it?”

Maria Giura is the author of Celibate: A Memoir, a 1^st Place Independent Press Award winner, and What My Father Taught Me, a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Book Prize. Her writing has appeared in New York Quarterly, Prime Number, Presence, Liguorian, and (Voices in) Italian Americana, among other publications. An Academy of American Poets winner, Giura has taught writing at multiple universities including Binghamton University where she earned her PhD in English. She currently teaches memoir workshops for Casa Belvedere Cultural Foundation. Follow her on Instagram @marigiurawrites, on Fb, and on her website mariagiura.com

Author’s Note: “Admissions” started out as a poem about my first car, but as I continued writing, two things became apparent. Though the car makes an appearance in the piece, it wasn’t about the car, but about the woman I didn’t realize I was trying to emulate. Also, poetry was not the right container for this particular story. This is what still amazes (and challenges) me about being a writer—how the act of writing shows me what wants to be written.