Hungry Heart Page 8

  Molly was fifteen months younger than I was, petite, and charming, with a cap of shiny, permed dark brown curls and a natural sense of style. In the time-honored fashion of little sisters everywhere, Molly drove me crazy. She’d take my best clothes out of my half of the closet—the Esprit vest that Nanna had bought me in Michigan, the cranberry wool Benetton sweater that I’d saved for—and wear them to school, hiding them under her jacket so I wouldn’t notice at the bus stop. If she happened to cross my path at school during the day, she’d turn on her heel and run, usually with me chasing after her, and a teacher calling after us, announcing that there was no running in the hallways. She eavesdropped on my phone calls; she found everything I hid, whether it was my diary or a copy of Anaïs Nin’s Little Birds, and she’d usually let me know she’d located what I’d tried to hide by doing dramatic readings out loud. She was six inches shorter and many pounds lighter than I was, attractive to boys and maddeningly indifferent to food. At dinner, even if it was her favorite meatloaf, peas, and mashed potatoes, she’d leave most of her meal just sitting on the plate, while I’d wolf down my portion, then seconds, and then eye her leftovers hungrily.

  If I found my niche as a rower, Molly found hers as a coxswain. “PULL on those OARS, you fat BEASTS!” she would yell, or she’d count out the cadence of a racing start: “Half stroke, half, three-quarters, full slide, power ten. ONE! TWO! THREE! FOUR!” I’d pull as hard as I could, then even harder, perhaps imagining that if I pushed with my feet and I pulled on the handle with all my might, I’d actually be able to escape from the eternal sound of my sister.

  As it turns out, I pulled that oar hard enough to make the junior-varsity eight my sophomore year, and the first boat—the top of the crew food chain—as a junior. By 1985, I was stronger than 85 percent of the other girls who submitted to the Junior National tryouts. The tryout, held at Yale’s gym, consisted of a five-thousand-meter “piece” on an ergometer, an indoor rowing machine/torture device that replicated the motion of rowing, measuring strength and time. During my piece, I spent the last eight hundred meters feeling like my lungs and legs were all on fire, the last two hundred meters convinced that I was going to puke and pass out, and the final hundred meters convinced I was going to die. Then there were bench rows. For two minutes, you’d lie facedown on a weight bench, yanking a forty-pound barbell up and banging it into the bottom of the bench as many times as you could.

  I trained hard, and luck was on my side. My athletic prowess reached its peak my junior year of high school, the precise moment that college coaches were paying attention. There were only a handful of high schools on the East Coast that even had crew teams, and almost all of them were prep schools. Being an accomplished rower who wasn’t a legacy and who hadn’t attended Andover or Exeter meant that, even as a girl from an affluent Connecticut suburb with upper-middle-class parents, I was practically an affirmative-action candidate.

  So there I was, with my solid grades, my stellar verbal SAT score, my significantly less impressive math SAT score, and my rowing prowess. Seven Sisters, here I come!

  I visited Smith’s campus the September of my senior year in high school, and it was everything I’d thought it would be: ivy-covered Gothic buildings, a lake ringed by weeping willows, smart, intense-looking young women walking in pairs or groups through quads strewn with gold and crimson leaves, gorgeous old dormitories and a quaint small town with a homey little bookstore and a coffee shop. Smith had all kinds of charming traditions, from Friday teas to “mountain day,” where the dean would pick an especially lovely day in autumn and ring a bell to cancel classes. I loved it there, and thought that I’d fit right in.

  I also had a sense—a small, nagging feeling at first that grew as my senior year progressed—that Smith would be an easy place for me, and not easy in a good way. I was politically liberal; so were most of the people at Smith. I was a feminist, and feminism was woven into the fabric of Smith’s very existence. Everyone would be like me . . . but was that a good thing?

  There was also an issue with my father. My dad, who was in and out of the house (and his marriage) by then, was less than enthusiastic about my chosen institution. Not because it was a women’s college, he took pains to make clear, but because it was a college. A university, he argued, would give me a better education—it would have more resources, more facilities, more opportunities to learn different things . . . and, if he was going to be the one paying, then he wanted to be the one who’d ultimately decide. At least, that’s the case he made in public, although now I wonder if he was actually less worried about my education than my sexuality (EXTRA FORESHADOWING!).

  I ended up applying to five schools, which was an average number back then—you’d have one or two safety schools, one or two “reaches,” and a place or two that you were pretty sure you’d get into. I got into Smith and Mount Holyoke early action. Cornell rejected me (their admissions department did send a very nice note about how, if I went somewhere else and did better at math, I should definitely consider trying to transfer). I got into Penn . . . and I got into Princeton, where I’d applied because it struck me, during my visit, as a kind of anti-Smith. Not that it wasn’t lovely—it was. It looked, in fact, like Smith to the next power, with the same kind of gracious, ivy-draped, history-drenched buildings, only more of them, bigger and grander. The slate sidewalks were wider, the grass of the quads was greener, everything was so picturesque and so perfect that I wondered if the university employed set dressers, who’d show up on autumnal mornings when prospective students were visiting to light the marble buildings to their best advantage, to groom the ivy and strew the paths with just the right color and combination of leaves and arrange for attractive, well-dressed, diverse extras to wander around, chatting or studying or singing a cappella underneath the arches.

  Princeton’s crew teams practiced and raced on a man-made lake commissioned and named after Andrew Carnegie. The 1887 boathouse was a mansion, cream with dark red trim. Enormous as it was, it was stuffed to the rafters, crammed with top-of-the-line Vespoli quads and fours and eight-man shells stacked in rows, and an adjoining structure that housed indoor rowing tanks.

  Princeton had beauty and resources and history, a distinguished alumni body, and some of the best writers in the world as faculty. I would page through the glossy admissions brochure, admiring the pictures, memorizing the names and the pedigrees of the professors: John McPhee, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates. Nor did these luminaries just sit around in their endowed-chair offices and host the occasional graduate-student seminar. They taught undergraduates, even freshmen.

  All of that was appealing. So was the cachet of being able to say you went to Princeton—to the Ivy League, my father would intone, his low voice lingering over the syllables, his eyes solemn behind his glasses. That was a very big deal in Simsbury, and an even bigger deal to my midwestern parents, who’d both gotten perfectly solid educations at a state school but who, like many converts, became their religion’s most zealous advocates.

  I was torn. The part of me that had dreamed about Smith still wanted to go there. High school had been such a struggle—to find my people, to finally feel a degree of comfort in who I was and how I looked and how I saw the world sounded amazing. I wasn’t sure I was ready to start that struggle all over again, and I knew, or at least sensed, that at Princeton, I’d have to. Princeton had been the last of the Ivies to admit women and it still had the feeling of being the most southern, old-fashioned, least progressive of the eight institutions. Smith’s purpose was to educate women. At Princeton, women had spent the eighteen years since coeducation fighting for everything, from getting more tenured females on the faculty to convincing the administration to put locks on the dormitory doors.

  Smith would be like spending four years in a bathtub—warm and comforting, unquestionably safe and maybe the tiniest bit confining. Princeton would be like jumping into a plunge pool—icy and bracing and uncomfortable. But I thought that Prince-ton, unlike Smith, was a
place where feminism mattered, where there was still work to be done, as opposed to a place so progressive and evolved that there was no longer anything to be progressive or evolved about.

  I showed up in New Jersey in September of 1987. My dorm room was on the second floor of Campbell Hall, in Mathey College, one of the five residential colleges where all the freshmen—or “first-year students,” as some of the more enlightened among us tried to remember to say—were housed. Mathey and Rockefeller were the two oldest, and grandest, Gothic dormitories and dining halls, with high, arched ceilings and pristine, perfectly maintained lawns and plantings. My college was beautiful, and my suite itself was lovely, with two small bedrooms, each with a set of bunk beds, and a spacious common room, with hardwood floors, and a working fireplace, and a built-in window seat in front of a set of leaded windows overlooking the quad. I guessed that Campbell Hall could be the nicest place I would live in for years, until I really got my career off the ground, and I wasn’t wrong.

  I had three roommates. The first, who was there when I arrived, was a chic young woman with high cheekbones and almond-shaped eyes named Lesedi, from South Africa by way of Connecticut, where her father was a college professor. Next to join us was a first-generation Chinese-American girl named Anita who was from Boston. She had a shiny blunt-cut bob, and a boyfriend in CanadaI who made her mixtapes. Our fourth roommate was a science star, a Presidential Medal of Honor winner, a tiny, sprightly blonde named Cole. All of my new roommates were thin and attractive. Anita and Cole were cute; Lesedi, with her swaying walk, lovely face, and elegant, narrow-hipped body, and the designer wardrobe that had won her “best dressed” honors at her prep school in New Hampshire, was beautiful.

  I pressed my lips together as I stowed my brother’s borrowed hockey bag underneath my bunk bed and started to set up the stereo that had been my high school graduation gift. Hello, Inadequacy, my old friend. It had taken me two years to shake the echo of Fat Jennifer, to believe that I looked just fine, that I looked the way I was supposed to. Living side by side by side with these three—not to mention the girls in the suite next to us, an all-American ice hockey player and a tiny, freckled girl named Cindy who had the same bullying attitude, and even the same beady-eyed head tilt as my Israeli traveling companion Ronni—it was going to be hard not to feel like crap.

  I was bracing for misery when there was a knock on the door, and a tall, broad-shouldered blond girl, whose face was flushed with either heat or dismay, stepped inside and shut the door behind her.

  “Oh my God,” she said. “I was carrying my stuff upstairs—I’m on the third floor, right above you—and I say to my mom, ‘It must be a hundred degrees out,’ and this voice from the top bunk says . . .” She pinched her nostrils to imitate a nasal little-girl’s drone. “Fahrenheit or Celsius?”

  Anita and Cole and I started laughing. Lesedi smiled politely, then drifted back to her room. Soon the sounds of Eric B. & Rakim floated out from underneath her door. Lesedi, it turned out, had arrived on campus a week ahead of the rest of us, in order to attend a special seminar for minority students, and seemed to have decided that she’d made all the friends she needed and had no reason to be anything more than coolly pleasant to her roommates. Sarah, which turned out to be the blond girl’s name, became my first real Princeton friend, one of the only other young women on that campus full of sleek, smart, sophisticated beauties who didn’t scare me and make me feel like a fraud.

  Up to that point, I’d felt inadequate about any number of things in my life. But I’d never once worried about being stupid. Turns out there was a first time for everything, and the longer the first semester went on, whether I was standing in line to register for classes, or serving breakfast in the grand, high-ceilinged dining hall, or sitting in my Italian 101 class, which met at nine in the morning (“Genoveffa,” my professor said, a frown pursing his full lips, as he assigned me my Italian moniker. “Ees not—come si dice?—such a beautiful name. Ees name of Cinderella’s stepsister, in Italia”)—the less qualified I felt to be there.

  You wanted a challenge, I reminded myself as I’d struggle to memorize Italian vocabulary or to follow along during the field trips in my Geology 201 class, affectionately known as Rocks for Jocks. The academics weren’t easy, but it was more just the way the place felt, how Princeton managed to take Simsbury’s physical beauty, and the loveliness of its inhabitants, and elevate it to a degree that I’d never imagined possible, and then add sophistication on top. My classmates were the sons and daughters of senators or Fortune 500 CEOs, NPR anchors, soap-opera stars, and even Middle Eastern potentates. Brooke Shields, the model-turned-actress, had graduated the spring before I’d arrived. Wendy Kopp, whose senior thesis gave the world Teach for America, was the year ahead of me; Senator Ted Cruz, who was a champion debater, was the year behind. A significant proportion of the student body had attended private school or boarding school, which meant that, instead of their first experience with independent living, Princeton just meant a new set of dorms.

  I felt like a country mouse, wide-eyed and wrong-footed, doing things like mispronouncing “heinous” in front of a snickering classmate or failing to apply for creative writing classes my first semester because the information on how to do so was published in the Daily Princetonian and I hadn’t gotten a subscription.

  Then there was food.

  I’d never been skinny, but I’d always been fit in high school, with my weight kept under relative control by three-hour-a-day, three-seasons-a-year practices. I was rowing, I was running, I was skiing, cross-country and downhill, and working out on the ergometer in the off-season, and riding my ten-speed bike everywhere. When my mother put dinner on the table, there’d be enough breaded baked chicken or meatloaf or pasta for everyone to have seconds, but not thirds.

  But in college, there was food everywhere. The dining halls served eggs and bacon and English muffins and French toast every morning; soups and salads and at least two different entrees at lunch and dinner, and desserts at both meals, plus soft ice-cream dispensers and bottomless bins of the sugary cereals I was used to seeing maybe twice a year. At least once a week the dining hall would serve a dessert called Crazy Cake, which was a half-cake/half-pudding hybrid served in towering, dense squares. Every Monday, the International Student Union hosted a four-dollar lunch where you’d get a paper plate that sagged under the weight of rice and gravy and curried chicken and salad, and at least once a month, the dining halls would throw a fancy dinner with a steamship roast of beef that was the size of a small child, and a man in a white toque and a white chef’s jacket to carve off as much as you wanted.

  There were no limits in the dining hall, where the food never ran out. In addition to meals, there was the student center, which served bagels and muffins and other starchy, carb-laden treats around the clock. And there were study breaks. Just about every day, some team or group or club or cause that was recruiting would invite freshmen to attend a speech or a meeting in the common room, luring us with greasy wedges of thin-crust pizza or Thomas Sweet ice cream, homemade and meltingly rich. For ten dollars—eight if you’d clipped a coupon from the Daily Princetonian—you could get a one-topping pizza delivered right to your room, and, for twice that, you could splurge on pan-fried pork dumplings and General Tso’s chicken—a novelty for a girl who’d grown up in a town with zero delivery options. There were bags of mint Milanos from the U Store, and candy bars and sugar-laced bottles of Snapple. You could get drunk (or, in my case, just act like you were drunk) and have an excuse to stuff your face with Wawa hot dogs and squishy-soft salted pretzels in the wee small hours of the morning, and then show up for breakfast, where there’d be apple Danish and pancakes and sausage and quiche.

  I did not handle this new bounty well. I ate because I was hungry; I ate because the food was there and it tasted good; I ate because I was lonely and homesick, anxious about my ability to do the work and insecure about the way I looked on a campus full of beautiful people. By October, an
y pair of pants without an elastic waistband was getting tight. By November, when it was cold enough to require sweaters, my arms were looking disturbingly sausage-y in my cardigans. Worse, at practice, I could feel the dubious eyes of the women’s freshman coach upon me.

  I knew that I had to lose weight, except I really had no idea how. I hadn’t grown up in a house with a dieting mother—the only evidence of attempted weight loss I ever saw was a dusty, long-past-its-expiration-date tub of SlimFast in the back of the pantry. Signing up for Weight Watchers felt unimaginably embarrassing. I’d try to exert my willpower, day by day, or even meal by meal. I’d sit with Jamie Desjardin, a women’s studies major from Berkeley with spiky brown hair who’d whisk mustard and soy sauce in a cup to make salad dressing. Listening to the tink, tink, tink of the tines of her metal fork against the glass, dousing my own iceberg lettuce and chickpeas in the ugly tan sauce, I’d think, I can do this. Then Jamie would head off to class and I would slink to the automated ice-cream dispenser, squirting a cereal-bowlful of chocolate.

  I had, I knew, other options. Any girl who visited the bathroom after mealtime knew what those options were, when you’d glance toward the bottom of a row of stalls and see pairs of feet turned the wrong way, or you’d smell bile in the air, or see the grim-faced janitors toting mops and buckets and plungers down to the bathroom every other day, to clear the toilets, and sometimes the showers, of vomit. I gave bulimia a few halfhearted attempts, but I hated throwing up so much that I knew I’d never be able to make it work as a long-term plan.