Clara was the first to sew the pant legs of her jeans tight around the calves, the height of fashion in 1984, and she taught this suburban ingénue, who’d arrived freshman year with untenably bobbed hair and all the wrong clothes—a pair of black-and-white-checked polyester pants; an electric blue, polyester dress with rhinestone spaghetti straps; a neon green polyester sweater with fake pearl buttons that I actually convinced myself looked extremely collegiate the day I bought it—the value of cotton, wool, and understatement.
When it came time to choose rooming groups for sophomore year, Clara asked me to join her. While freshmen at Harvard are randomly assigned to dormitories in Harvard Yard, sophomores, juniors, and seniors all live in “houses”—large dormitories, each with its own dining hall—scattered around campus. The house becomes the center of its inhabitants’ social lives, the place where they sleep, eat, study (each house has its own library), and hold parties on the weekend.
Nowadays, house assignments are randomized, but back then rooming groups chose their houses at the end of freshman year according to type—the jock house (Kirkland); the preppy house (Eliot); the nerd house (Lowell); the artsy house (Adams, where we ended up); and so on and so forth—such that picking one’s roommates and deciding where to live became fraught with existential questions: Who am I? Where do I fit in?
Not knowing the answers to these questions yet myself, I would have been only too happy to have spent the rest of my college years simply basking in Clara’s glow, sifting with her through the rubble of vintage stores to find the gems; reading her cast-off Russian novels; entertaining her rejected suitors, who were only too eager to try to get closer to her through me. But Clara’s glow was potent. It attracted everyone. So I found myself at the end of freshman year agreeing to room with three other women, all friends of Clara, whom I barely knew.
There was Rose, a dark-haired girl from Riverdale, New York, who fell easily into the role of den mother. She was modest, temperate, and politically savvy, a volunteer for all the right causes, wise beyond her years. Rose was the one you’d go to for advice, or if something particularly bad had happened to you, because you knew she wouldn’t try to fix things with false sympathy or platitudes. She understood, implicitly, that some things were beyond words, and she knew just where and how to place her arm over your shoulder so that it felt neither intrusive nor withholding.
Serena, from Washington, D.C., was a porcelain-skinned sensualist who introduced us all to the wonders of the cervical cap and wore clothing only when necessary. She kept the same boyfriend throughout her college years, and even with the door to her bedroom shut, which it often wasn’t, the two of them could be heard in the throes of loud and vigorous lovemaking. Serena adored being in the water, and she couldn’t understand why anyone else wouldn’t choose to skinny-dip in the Adams House Pool every day.
Ashley, the daughter of pro-choice Republicans from Miami, resembled Britney Spears during her “Oops I Did It Again” phase. I’d often see her strolling through Harvard Yard late at night in her tennis shoes and pink sweaters, lacrosse stick and library books slung over her shoulder, in search of distraction. Ashley, who had a special fondness for afternoon soap operas, was our resident party girl, but she had her limits: she once refused to have sex with our upstairs neighbor, a gorgeous Argentine, when in the throes of an assignation with him she said, “Wait a minute, what’s my last name?” and he couldn’t produce the answer.
The two other members of our group, Addie and Ursula, I met only after we were all living in Adams House and had decided to block together with them during our junior year. Adams House, back then, was filled with clove cigarette–¥smoking, polymorphously perverse, LSD-dropping devotees of Derrida. Addie and Ursula didn’t exactly fit that mold, but they did seem, at least at first, interchangeable: both were Deadheads who favored Indian-print T-shirts; both sported manes of long, straight blond hair; both were fine-boned WASPs who cared not a hoot about their families’ listings in the Social Register; both worked on PCs when everyone else was buying those first Macs, the kind without hard drives that crashed if your paper was longer than ten pages, prompting the screen—and all of your hard work—to be replaced by a menacing cartoon bomb.
After I got to know them, however, I wondered how I’d ever conflated them together. Addie, the shyer and quieter of the two, hailed from Philadelphia, the only child of a couple who divorced when she was quite young. When she wasn’t visiting her lawyer father in Washington, D.C., she lived in Philly with her mother, a viola da gamba musician who ran around the country performing at Renaissance festivals. Addie, a gifted visual artist, was the only person I’d ever met who’d tripped on acid with her friends before going through adolescence. She was also fiercely loyal to her high school boyfriend who, though a music student at another college, lived in her room. Addie, more than any of us, seemed uniquely suited to going through life as one half of a dyad.
Ursula was socially gregarious and quietly brilliant. The daughter of well-respected book editors, she grew up in the exurbs outside New York City with a brief detour through the halls of Exeter. She didn’t get kicked out. She just couldn’t deal with the prep school scene, and she returned back to her local public high school to finish her education. Of all of us, she seemed the most grounded, the most comfortable with herself, her body, her place in the world. Unlike the rest of us—particularly unlike me—she had nothing to prove. To anyone. After getting accepted to Harvard, she decided to defer for a year, which she spent following the Grateful Dead around the country. Her relationships with men were monogamous and mature; her ego never required stroking; she could always be counted on for a lively conversation with a cold beer or an insight into the plot of a book that seemed inscrutable. She read Ulysses for fun. And she liked it.
Though I might not have chosen this particular group of women on my own, had Clara not pulled me into it, once there, I was grateful to be included. We had one of the biggest suites in all of Adams House, A-17, where we threw legendary, ecstasy-fueled parties; we laughed often and deeply; we were supportive of one another, at least at first. If I had to pin down my own role in the group back then, I’d call myself, depending on how magnanimous I was feeling, either the jester or the fool: I was naive, I made social gaffes, I was unlucky in love, all of which provided excellent fodder for not only my roommates’ late-night conversations but also their playful castigation.
We had our frictions, of course, as any group will have. Serena and Rose were deeply involved in the campus antiapartheid movement, but I refused to wear the black armbands Serena was handing out in the dining hall. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe apartheid in South Africa was wrong or that Harvard’s divestiture of its considerable assets in the country might help to end it, it was just that I didn’t think my wearing a black armband would make a difference. Taking over Derek Bok’s office? Sure. Shantytowns? Build ’em. But I’ve never been comfortable wearing my politics on my sleeve, either literally or figuratively.
Serena vehemently disagreed with my position, and she often took me to task for my lack of active political engagement. One evening, she and Rose held a secret antiapartheid meeting in our common room to plan the building of a shantytown in the middle of Harvard Yard. The meeting was so secret, in fact, that when I turned the key in the lock of our front door, after arriving home late one night from the library, I was told I’d have to leave the premises.
“But I have a Shakespeare paper due tomorrow,” I said to the black-armband-wearing student blocking my entry. It was a fifteen-pager, on the nature of betrayal in King Lear and Julius Caesar. I’d composed it in longhand at the library—the 1986 equivalent of backing up documents on a hard drive—but I needed to type the thing into the computer. I had the typing all planned out: since the paper had to be fifteen pages and the Mac usually crashed after nine, I’d trick my computer into thinking I was actually producing three five-page papers to keep the little cartoon bomb at bay.
“Sorry,”
said the student. “No outsiders.”
“Outsiders? But this is my room,” I said. I waved to catch the eye of Serena, who was sitting amid the enormous crowd. She shrugged her shoulders, raised her eyebrows, and held her palms upward, as if to say, if only you’d taken an active stance against racism this wouldn’t be happening, before the door slammed shut in my face.
Since I had the key, I simply opened up the door again and asked how much longer my living room would be filled with agitators. The student said she wasn’t sure, but it could go all night. “All night?” I said, wondering (a) where I would sleep; and (b) whether students fighting for the equality of black South Africans should really be in the business of casting out the natives from their homeland.
It was finally agreed that I could fetch my pillow and toothbrush, so long as I promised not to return until morning. Luckily, our next-door neighbor was not only not using his PC that night, a new IBM with its own 20 megabyte hard drive, he was also feeling libidinous, so despite being unceremoniously tossed out of my room, I still had a place to sleep and a robust hard drive to borrow.
But beyond these minor scuffles, the seven of us seemed well suited enough that if you’d asked me, on the eve of the housing lottery back in the spring of 1987, whether I could feel that Et tu, Brute moment coming, I wouldn’t have known what you were talking about.
They sent Serena. Or Serena sent herself. Or, well, actually, it was never really made clear how, when, and why the decision to send an emissary had been reached, only that it had, in the passive tense, been reached. “Hi,” Serena said, stepping into my room, fresh from either a swim or a postcoital shower, one could never be sure, but I remember her hair was damp, her pale skin flushed. That was the year Ashley and I were sharing a room, but Ashley, who had suddenly expanded beyond pastel clothing, questioning everything about who she was, where she was from, and where she was going, had taken her soul-searching semester off, so I had the place all to myself. Clara, too, had decided to take time off, so it would just be Ursula, Rose, Addie, Serena, and me blocking together.
“Hi,” I said, my voice rising at the end of the diphthong. Of all the roommates, Serena was the one with whom I was the least close, and we were not in the habit of chewing the fat late at night. This was nobody’s fault; it just was.
She’d been meaning to come talk to me all week, she said, but she’d been nervous about saying what she had to say.
While Serena paused to collect her thoughts, I scanned through my conscience, trying to remember what, if anything, I might have said or done that could have been construed as injurious. I was hardly a saint. I gossiped as much as anyone, and I sometimes had sex with other people’s boyfriends, and I often borrowed clothes for longer than necessary, but I couldn’t conjure any crime with regard to Serena. I knew I wasn’t her favorite—that spot was reserved for Rose—but I was not aware of how deeply I’d fallen out of her favor until she explained that it had been decided, again in the passive tense, that the rooming group would be better off without me.
“Really?” I said. My heart froze. My eyes slowly started to water. “Why?”
What a dumb question, I thought, even as I was asking it. Why? Why? How could such a thing ever be explained? The love was gone, end of story. I’d been on the receiving end of that question too many times to have expected a logical answer: the friend who’d wanted to know why I’d stopped playing hopscotch with her; the other who’d asked why I didn’t want to come over to her house to play; the sleepover date who’d wondered why I’d joined the Tibbar club—rabbit spelled backward—if their unwritten rules practically required, along with wearing red bandanas and doing penny drops at recess, a rejection of her. Because, I’d told them all. Just because.
Serena, however, had come prepared with an answer. “Because,” she said, “we think you’re overconcerned with money.”
“What?” I wasn’t sure what this meant. I was the only one of our group who hadn’t gone to private school before Harvard, so I was, it’s pretty safe to say, the least moneyed. I was hardly poor either, but I was also the kind of person who, when offered unpaid summer internships, had to either turn them down or work a second shift as a waitress in order to accept them, because summers, insisted my parents—themselves the children of Depression-era struggling immigrants—were meant to be spent making enough money to survive the rest of the year. “What do you mean?”
“You think about money a lot,” she said.
Well, yes, I thought. That’s true. I do think about money a lot, but only because I don’t usually have any. It was a luxury not to have to think about money.
The conversation went on for much longer—around an hour or so, if I had to estimate—but I can’t recall a single line of it other than the one about money. I kept turning it over in my head. Did I talk about money more than other people? Was it bad to be concerned with money? Was Serena referring to my fascination with the children of extreme wealth at our college, the ones who’d gone to schools with pretty names—St. Paul’s, Andover, Deerfield—and were themselves given otherworldly monikers such as Thorn, Struan, and Alistair?5 What did it mean that someone saw me as a person who was “overconcerned” with money? Was that just Serena’s phrase, or did everyone see me thus?
I wondered about Serena’s own relationship to money. I’d assumed she came from some, since she graduated from one of the top private schools in the country, but she presented herself as having less. I came from less but presented myself as having more: a transparent attempt to fit in, learned from my own parents, who’d often take my whole rooming group out for brunch when they came for a visit, even though such shows of largesse probably killed their food budget for the month. Was this what was bothering Serena, the disjunction between my family’s appearance and our reality? And why was it okay for her to pretend to be less well-off but not for me to pretend to be more?
The next day, reeling from the rejection, I entered the housing lottery as a single. I sat apart from my roommates, in the dining hall in which it was held, and waited for my number to be called. Adams House did have a few single rooms available to seniors, and I was hoping to snag one, but before my name was picked, all of the singles had already been taken.
Trixie, a girl with asymmetrical hair, ran up to me. She was wearing one of her typical outfits, kind of punk-meets-Madonna-meets-Edie Sedgwick in her later years, with fishnet stockings and pointy boots. “So should we go for it?” she asked. Trixie and I, though barely acquaintances, had hatched a last-ditch plan the night before, just after Serena appeared in my room like the bomb on my Mac: if we were unable to procure singles for ourselves in the lottery, we would join forces, pretending to be roommates so that she and her boyfriend, Matt, could live together in a double, while I moved in with Josh, Matt’s roommate. At the time we’d made the plan it had seemed perfectly logical. I knew Josh well enough; Harvard did not officially allow males and females to live together; Trixie and Matt were determined to cohabitate; Josh always had good pot. But now that all the singles were gone, and we were about to announce our fake alliance, the plan seemed deeply flawed.
What if we got caught? What if Josh and I didn’t get along? What if Trixie and Matt broke up? What if Josh was a slob? What if this silly transgression kept me from graduating?
That summer, when I wasn’t slaving away during the day as an unpaid intern or working the dinner shift at a sushi and steak restaurant, I spent what was left of my free time worrying about my rooming situation, licking my wounds, trying not to think about money, and periodically having sex with Serena’s boyfriend.
Oh, please. You would have too.
That September, Josh and I moved into a sun-splashed corner suite overlooking the Harvard Lampoon castle and Mount Auburn Street. We each had our own private bedroom off the common room, and we shared a bathroom, which I noticed, to my great relief, Josh liked to keep as tidy as I did. I nearly chastised myself for spending so much time agonizing over our living arrangements u
ntil the giant green garbage bag arrived.
“What’s in there?” I asked.
“Pot,” said Josh.
The bag, it should be noted, was nearly my height. By my estimation, you’d have to smoke a joint an hour for several years to finish it off. “Where’d you get that much pot?” I said.
“That’s not your concern,” he said, slipping into his room to weigh and measure out dime bags. On his desk, along with a scale and little Baggies, were stacks of perforated blotter pads of LSD.
“Wait, you’re a dealer?” I said.
“Come on,” Josh said with a smile. “You didn’t know?”
“I knew you always seemed to have an endless supply, but no, I guess it never occurred to me that you were a dealer.” Once a suburban ingénue, always a suburban ingénue.
Josh shook his head at my stupidity and laughed. “How do you think I was able to afford all my equipment?” He did have an impressive stereo system: flat speakers stretching from floor to ceiling, a floating turntable, microphones and tape decks and a high-end CD player—still an expensive novelty back then—and stacks and stacks of the latest music.
I’d never before thought about where it had all come from. Neither the equipment nor the drugs nor anything the kids around me seemed to have in such copious supply. So many Harvard students seemed to have so much, nothing they ever owned or did with it or snorted it through ever surprised me. One time, a guy I barely knew drove me and several others into Boston in his brand-new BMW, treated us all to a lobster and champagne dinner at Locke-Ober, then capped off the evening with a cocaine-fueled, all-night bacchanal in his dorm room. Another time, a friend of a friend sent a bus to Cambridge to shuttle sixty or so of us down to Newport, Rhode Island, for an end-of-the-year celebration, held in a Gatsby-esque mansion overlooking the ocean, replete with a ballroom to rival Versailles’ paved in black-and-white-checkered marble that reminded me of the pants I’d brought with me to college. “Where do you want us to sleep?” I’d asked the host around 3:00 A.M., to which he responded, flinging open a door leading to a hallway choked with guest rooms, as if proffering a deck of cards, “Pick a room. Any room.”
Hell Is Other Parents Page 10