Hungry Heart Page 7

  In Jerusalem, where we spent the last week of the trip, we joined up with the hundreds of other American kids on dozens of other trips. Our group was staying near kids from suburban New York, and among them was a boy named Ralph. Ralph liked me. Ralph did not realize that I was uncool. Ralph was cute, in a kind of lunky, no-necked high-school-wrestler way . . . but as you may have surmised, Ralph was not especially smart. (Although, in retrospect, maybe he was actually a genius who’d managed to take me in with one beady-eyed, heavy-lidded assessing glance and realize that I was so lonely that I’d do just about anything for companionship, of the male or female variety.)

  Ralph and I shared a single “date,” during which I clutched his meaty palm as we walked through the cobbled streets of the Old City of Jerusalem, and then, in a bar in the shadow of the Dome of the Rock, tried to order a drink (Israel has no drinking age, but I’m still fairly certain that the vodka and soda I asked for was Sprite and Sprite).

  If the trip had been a movie, Ralph would have been sweet and sensitive; he would have been funny and kind, and we would have stayed up all night talking about art and books and music and dreams, and made plans to meet up the next summer (actually, if it had been a movie, Randy-who-looked-like-Erik-Estrada would have fallen for me). But Ralph could barely string six words together, and communicated mostly through gestures and grunts, and by pulling me into shadowed corners or abandoned dorm rooms and putting his heavy hands on various parts of my body where they lay there like hot water bottles or the poultices I’d read about in Little House on the Prairie. Everywhere he touched me, I was convinced that I was jiggling beneath his fingers; that he could feel ripples and wobbles and discrete bumps of cellulite. He must have thought I was a prude because I kept grabbing his hands and squirming away, or trying to distract him with my own explorations of his body, which felt like a hot, damp slab of rock underneath a Mamaroneck Wrestling Team T-shirt.

  Somehow Ronni got wind of our night together. “Hey, JEN-nee, how’s your BOY-friend?” she would call when she saw me, to the general amusement of the rest of the kids. I went from using my journal to write lies about how I’d wept at the Western Wall and been incredibly moved by the sunrise from the top of Masada to scribbling down the truth: how I’d left the group during our free weekend in Jerusalem and thought about not going back, how I had climbed up Mount Masada and watched the sun come up alone. Finally I just used it to count the weeks, then the days, then the hours, until we’d get on the plane back home. I told myself that all of these kids, the Ronnis and the Randys and the Debbies, would peak in high school; that they’d burn through the best years of their lives before they turned eighteen, and that they’d see me someday on TV collecting some literary award or on the red carpet for the premiere of the movie that I’d written, and turn to their drab and ordinary spouses and shriek, “I knew her!” On our bus rides to Ein Gedi or Yad Vashem, and, finally, on the airplane ride back home, I’d construct elaborate daydreams, about how Ronni, her pear shape swollen after childbirth, her dishwater hair dingy and her teeth reverted to their original state after twenty years without braces, would be walking in New York City when she’d see me—how she’d grab my hands, gushing to her husband or her kids about how she’d known me, back in the day, and how I’d smile with a practiced, distant politeness, then give my own version of her pigeon head-cock and say, “Sorry, have we met?”

  On the bus from LaGuardia back to West Hartford, I sat by myself, as close to the door as I could get. I hadn’t even tried to find a seatmate, hadn’t even flinched when my fellow travelers walked past me without making eye contact and everyone paired up but me. I was done trying, done pretending to be someone I wasn’t, done trying to fit in. When the bus doors creaked open, there was a crowd of parents assembled on the curb, dads in polo shirts and mothers with sunglasses shoved up into their highlighted hair, all of them eager to see their children after six weeks away. My parents weren’t there. They were still out west, finishing up their cross-country trip, and had made plans for me to get a ride home with my former babysitter, then stay with neighbors until they got back.

  I was first off the bus. I remember a woman’s hands reaching for me: painted nails, a gold watch, a diamond ring. Everyone was hugging everyone, it turned out, and maybe she thought she’d generously welcome the first girl off the bus with an embrace.

  “Don’t fucking touch me!” I snarled.

  I remembered the look of shock on her face, the way her lipsticked mouth fell open, and how it sent an icy thrill right through me. I’d never been the aggressor, never been mean like that, never been rude, hardly ever said “fuck” out loud, and absolutely never said it to a grown-up . . . but the chances were good that one of the kids who’d made my life so awful for the past month and a half was her son or her daughter and thus her responsibility. She’d raised a monster. Fuck her.

  I shoved through the crowd, collected the one piece of my luggage that El Al hadn’t managed to lose, and found my sitter, Carrie.

  “Did you have fun?” she asked, putting her parents’ car in reverse, flicking on WTIC, her tone letting me know she didn’t really care one way or another.

  “Fine,” I said. “It was fine.” She drove us back over the mountain, back to Simsbury, and I fished the house key out from underneath a rock by the front step and let myself inside. The house was empty. Instead of reporting directly to the neighbors who’d agreed to keep me overnight, I unpacked and took a long shower. Naked, I looked at myself in the mirror, standing front, then sideways, inspecting my tanned face and arms, the shocking white of my breasts and belly, and I stood on the scale in my parents’ bathroom long enough to see a number lower than I’d ever see again in my life. Fat Jennifer, I thought. Fuck them.

  Then I got a garbage bag from the laundry room, where my mother kept them, and went to my bedroom, and scooped up every copy of Seventeen magazine that I’d kept stacked next to my bed, and threw them all away. Whatever I’d learned, whatever I’d done, whatever I’d shaved, saved for, or convinced my parents to buy me, it hadn’t been enough. It would never be enough. I would never be enough.

  I called the McDanielses and thanked them for offering to host me, and told them I’d be fine at home by myself.

  “Really?” said Mrs. McDaniels, sounding dubious but harried. There were five McDaniels kids, four around the age of me and my siblings, and a toddler.

  “Really,” I said. That night I slept in an empty house, in the guest room, spread out in the queen-size bed. It felt like the first night of my adult life, the beginning of a new epoch, the Era of Not Giving a Fuck.

  Two weeks later, junior year began. For once, I didn’t pester my mother about Guess jeans and Ocean Pacific tops, or beg her to take me to the Limited. I wore a pair of hot-pink overalls and a white T-shirt and pink high-top Chuck Taylors—trendy enough for 1985, but not necessarily what the other girls would be wearing. I didn’t care. I rode my bike to the high school, locked it in the rack, and walked inside, for once not worrying about how I looked or who was or was not saying hello to me, or who was noticing that I was or was not being greeted. I was friendly but not trying too hard in classes. At lunch, I sat down with my crew teammates, and paid more attention to my meal than to who was sitting where or who was talking to whom.

  And then, suddenly, people were talking to me. They were laughing at my jokes, which were as cruel as all the things the Israel-trip kids had said about me (“Do you know that Libby Lessner’s breath is so bad it smells like her braces are made of rotten seaweed?”), they were asking my opinion, they were admiring my sneakers. Just like that, I had friends.

  Maybe it was because I was thinner, because the Middle Eastern sunshine had tanned my skin and put golden highlights in my hair. Maybe the six-week trip had been the equivalent of a stint in a blast oven, where my personality was baked into something more pleasant. But what I think happened is that I gave up. I stopped trying to be popular or quieter; I stopped trying to be cuter or more fashio
nable. I wasn’t biting my tongue to prevent the weird jokes from escaping, or modeling my hairstyle on one girl, my clothes on another, and taking care to let my backpack dangle from one strap. I wore my backpack over both shoulders; I wore clothes I liked; I kept my hair cut short, shaved at the back of my neck, in a kind of modified, Molly Ringwald–esque crop that wouldn’t look too bad even in the absence of a blow-dryer and hot rollers and a curling iron. I was done trying to be anyone except who I was, and if nobody liked me, if I didn’t find my people until college or graduate school or ever, well, then, I’d manage. I’d hung on for six weeks, all by myself, halfway around the world. I could do it in high school; could do it, if I had to, for the rest of my life. I was going to stop saving up my money to buy the Tretorn sneakers or the Benetton sweaters the popular girls wore, because I’d worn them, and it hadn’t made a difference. I was going to stop lying about the music that I liked and boys I was crushing on with the hope that I’d sound more palatable and mainstream, because that hadn’t worked. I was going to wear my high-top sneakers with everything from jeans to overalls to a white eyelet lace-trimmed skirt and a pale-pink henley top. (It was the 1980s. That was almost a thing.)

  It turned out that there were people—not the princesses or the soccer stars, but smart, quirky, funny people, some of whom had just started to come into their own, too—who liked me. They wouldn’t laugh when I told them that I liked Broadway musical soundtracks and I hated the Grateful Dead; they would laugh when, after Meredith Markson stumbled through reading out loud in science class, I’d turn to her and ask, slowly and loudly, “HOW ARE YOU ENJOYING YOUR TIME IN OUR COUNTRY?” or when I described a skinny blond boy in a black Lycra one-piece ski racing outfit as looking like a sperm. (I suspect that my teenage years have a lot in common with the episode of 30 Rock when Liz Lemon goes to her high school reunion, complaining that nobody was nice to her and learning that, in fact, she wasn’t nice to anyone.)

  Still, people wanted to sit with me on the bus when the crew team went to Worcester or Middletown for meets, or when the cross-country ski team went to Vermont for races. Suddenly I had invitations to parties on the weekends, at kids’ houses where the parents weren’t home, where there was drinking (drinking!) and smoking and people making out in the bedrooms. I had people to giggle with over Jell-O shots and invite me to sleep over or go to the mall or drive to the movies with on Fridays. I had—very briefly—a boyfriend when I was a junior, and even after he dumped me for one of my teammates, I didn’t feel like such an outcast.

  My last two years of high school weren’t perfect, but they were infinitely better than my previous nine years in public school had been. Because I was younger than my classmates, I didn’t turn sixteen and get my license until the tail end of my junior year. I rode my bike to school and to crew practice, to my babysitting assignments and my after-school and weekend job busing tables and waitressing at Hop Brook Tavern. I had a look that I put together from thrift-store finds and Marshalls purchases, a budget wardrobe that let me spend my money on books and concert tickets—books I wanted to read, bands I wanted to hear. I learned that I could make people laugh, and that if not everyone got me or my humor, that was fine, because, someday, maybe, there’d be enough people in the world who would.

  Admissions

  McCosh 50 was one of the largest lecture halls at Prince-ton University. With its sloping hardwood floors and wooden desks bolted in place, you could imagine it looking the same fifty or a hundred years earlier, when Princeton had been a male-only bastion for the wealthy white sons of privileged East Coast professionals, doctors and lawyers, ministers and politicians. That night in November 1989, every seat was taken, and there were people standing in rows near the back, craning to see the stage.

  Up front, beneath the bright lights, there were two wooden tables with a single podium between them. At one table was Russel H. “Cap” Beatie Jr., Princeton class of 1959 and the lawyer for Tiger Inn, one of Princeton’s eating clubs, the university’s substitution for fraternities and sororities, where upperclassmen ate their meals and socialized. Sitting next to him was Mike Palermo, class of 1990, the current president of what its denizens called the Glorious Tiger Inn. At the other end was Sally Frank, class of 1980, who, as an undergraduate, had filed a lawsuit against the all-male clubs, charging that, as part of the university, they could not legally discriminate against female students. And next to Sally Frank was me.

  The room looked enormous, and it seemed to be expanding with every breath I took. So did my thighs. I could feel my heart hammering, feel my palms sweat, as I heard the people in the crowd murmuring and laughing and settling into their seats. This is what you wanted, I told myself. I’d wanted a stage, I’d wanted a microphone, I’d wanted a challenge and a place to find my voice. But, in that moment, on that stage, with what looked like half the student body in front of me, I didn’t want any of it at all.

  • • •

  My parents—my mom in particular—had raised me to be a liberal, a Democrat, and a feminist. From the time I was old enough to understand politics, I was taught that the Republicans were the party of the rich and the Democrats stood up for the workers and the poor. One of the first things I can remember is my parents leaning toward our television set, watching the Watergate hearings . . . and then my father lifting me into the seat of a metal grocery cart, his beard tickling the top of my head as he reached over me to put a newspaper into the basket and saying, “We have a new president now.”

  My parents kept up with politics—through newspapers and magazines, and the constant background hum of NPR. When the four of us begged for music in the car, instead of Top 40, we’d get Pete Seeger protest songs and Holly Near love songs (foreshadowing!) and the Rude Girls’ rendition of old labor movement and antiwar songs like “Mothers, Daughters, Wives” and the lesbian ballad “The Girl in the Red Velvet Dress” (MORE FORESHADOWING!). My mother lived her feminist beliefs, that clothes and makeup weren’t important, opinions and actions were. Her outfits were functional and activity-specific—bathing suits for swimming, tennis clothes for her weekly game, sneakers every place she could get away with them, and for when she went back to work as a teacher, loose-fitting, all-cotton, elastic-waist skirts and cropped pants paired with tunics in colors that were not necessarily complementary. Fran kept her hair short, in a version of the same cut for what’s now fifty years and counting. Her dangly, beaded earrings were her only vanity. She didn’t own a tube of lipstick or a pair of high-heeled shoes. Instead of purses, she preferred to keep her wallet and her keys, her folded-up New York Times crossword puzzles, her hairbrush, and, if we were going on a trip, her jar of generic peanut butter and loaf of white bread in one of a series of canvas tote bags that were the premiums for her gifts to the local public-radio station.

  Being a young feminist in New England meant you grew up knowing about the Seven Sisters, the all-female counterpart to the Ivy League. From the time I’d started considering college, I had wanted to go to Smith, in nearby Northampton, Massachusetts. Madeleine L’Engle, who wrote A Wrinkle in Time, went to Smith. Sylvia Plath went to Smith. Gloria Steinem went to Smith. Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique, went to Smith, along with the activist, law professor, and antiporn activist Catharine MacKinnon, and the journalist Molly Ivins. (So did Nancy Davis, who became Nancy Reagan, and Barbara Pierce, who became Barbara Bush. I tried not to dwell.) In the days before the Ivy League opened its doors to female students, women’s colleges produced the most brilliant women in the world, and I wanted to join their ranks. I imagined that I’d combine my love of reading and writing and my interest in politics and feminism and become a speechwriter, the way Susan Isaacs had, or that maybe I’d write magazine articles and novels and screenplays, like Isaacs and like Nora Ephron.

  My grades were good. My writing samples were solid. But what was better—what made me stand out from all the other smart girls who could write—was the spot I’d held for two years on the varsity crew team,
which meant that I was a recruitment-worthy rower.

  For the uninitiated, crew involves sitting on a sliding seat in a super-lightweight boat made of wafer-thin fiberglass, with an oar in your hand, pulling on those oars as hard as possible for a distance of three miles (in the fall season) or 1,500 meters (in the spring). Crew turned out to be the perfect sport for me, because you don’t have to be coordinated (I wasn’t) or speedy (I wasn’t) or a quick thinker who could memorize plays and come up with strategies under pressure (I couldn’t). All you had to be was strong, with a certain amount of endurance, and the kind of mulish temperament that lent itself to sitting in a boat, staring at the back, and the backside, of the girl in front of you, yanking on your oar in time with your teammates, going backward, through a body of water, while a coxswain, the ideally very small, light person who sat at the front and steered the boat, called out the cadence and screamed exhortations through a megaphone or microphone. My performance was only enhanced by the fact that, by senior year, our varsity coxswain was my sister, Molly, who was incredibly profane, and whose voice I heard, it seemed, from the moment I woke up with her in the twin bed six feet to my left until the moment I fell asleep, typically with Molly still talking. My brothers had their own bedrooms, due to some retrograde notion on my allegedly progressive parents’ part about which gender required privacy. I was condemned to nights of Molly, who talked incessantly, usually while I was trying to read. (“Jenny, do you think Tim Cavanaugh likes me? Jenny, if we asked Mom to get us a curling iron, she probably would, if we paid for half of it and we told her it was for both of us. You didn’t spend your babysitting money yet, did you? Did you? Jenny? Jenny? JENNY, ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME?”)