The Arrogant Years

by Lucette Lagnado

Unlike lunch or dinner, there were ample foods I could eat—stations where they made eggs or, occasionally, pancakes, shelves stacked with small boxes of every cereal imaginable, fruit salads, blueberry muffins, and the ubiquitous bowls of cottage cheese, each decorated with a maraschino cherry in the center. There was an abundance to these morning displays that I relished. I figured that if I ate enough at this one meal, at least I wouldn’t starve to death while pursuing my Vassar degree.

  I developed a passion for scrambled eggs, which I hadn’t tasted before—Edith didn’t make them at home. To me, they were a piece of Americana, a portion of that exotic culture I craved and that had propelled me to choose Vassar in the first place.

  I’d pile several ladlefuls of scrambled eggs on my plate and look for a table.

  The central dining hall was typically deserted in the morning. Few students came out for breakfast, and those who did tended to sit by themselves, quietly reading the New York Times as they sipped coffee from their large Vassar mugs.

  Breakfast wasn’t a social occasion, not the way the other meals were, and it was a relief to sit alone without feeling self-conscious.

  Although the year was only starting, I looked around me and saw that groups had already formed. Everyone had their circle of friends with whom they dined day in and day out. But how they’d come together was a mystery to me. I could never penetrate the magically protective bubble these groups created around their chosen members.

  It didn’t help my social status when ACDC’s manager approached me one day to say she’d found a solution to my kosher conundrum. Vassar, she proudly informed me, was prepared to order frozen kosher TV dinners. The meals would be from the same company that catered to the airlines; the central kitchen would heat them for me every night. The manager seemed solicitous, and I realized that she was trying hard to be sensitive.

  Dinner, already an ordeal, took on a nightmarish cast.

  Every night, I would report to the back of the kitchen and be handed a large silver package, steaming hot, that I lugged on my tray. As I walked through the dining room holding my little kosher TV dinner, looking for a table where I could sit, for people I could join, I noticed other students staring at my tray, puzzled.

  The food itself was barely edible—some form of meat or chicken with a little portion of noodle pudding or a side of overcooked vegetable.

  I wondered if I’d be better off simply eating cottage cheese.

  A few weeks after school started, I realized that I wasn’t well. I couldn’t stop coughing.

  I felt a suspicious lump near my left shoulder.

  I was sick again, I was sure of it. My Hodgkin’s had come back, I thought, panic-stricken. I raced over to Baldwin, the infirmary, where a cheery woman physician immediately saw me. I told her my history, the fact that I’d been treated for cancer shortly before coming to college.

  “Where is the lump?,” she asked as she examined me; she seemed nervous, too. I pointed to a knob by my shoulder. She chuckled. It was simply a bone, she assured me. I’d lost so much weight that virtually all the padding around my arms and chest had vanished.

  I coughed some more. “Do I have pneumonia?,” I asked her anxiously. I feared the worst. In my months at Memorial, I had noticed that patients didn’t necessarily die of their cancer—they tended to become so thin and weak and emaciated that they’d contract pneumonia and never recover.

  “You are fine, but take it easy,” she replied thoughtfully.

  Some time later, I was back at Baldwin, feverish and unable to stop coughing; I was extremely tired.

  The doctor decided it was prudent for me to stay overnight. I was taken upstairs to a room with a small cot. It was exceedingly quiet, especially in the evening, when most of the nursing staff would disappear. From my window I could see the campus with students walking in pairs or small groups, chatting. I found myself wondering once again if I would survive Vassar.

  The kosher meals followed me even to the infirmary. Somehow, the nurses had been instructed about my diet so that now I was being offered the reheated TV dinners twice, for lunch as well as dinner.

  The first couple of days, I slept constantly; all I wanted to do was sleep. One afternoon, I dreamed that I was back on Sixty-Fifth Street, with Edith taking care of me. I woke up to find her there standing at my bedside peering at me: Had I been hallucinating? How did my mom, who at times struck me as so helpless, who had seemed more confused and befuddled than ever since my illness, manage to find her way to my infirmary room on the edge of a campus where I myself still felt lost? Simple, she explained: When Vassar called to tell her I was ill, she had taken the train by herself from New York to Poughkeepsie and then a taxi to the gate, where she had asked enough students until she’d found the building.

  Edith stayed by my side that afternoon, stroking my hair, and then left as I slept to catch a late evening train back to Brooklyn.

  I lived in my blue B. Altman’s sweater. The sweater was one or two sizes too large and I found it oddly comforting. I would slip it over my jeans, sometimes without even bothering to wear a shirt underneath. It was like wearing body armor—or maybe a potato sack.

  The pursuit of beauty, one of my primary objectives for so many years, going back to my fascination with Emma Peel, was over. My arrogant years had officially ended in the summer of 1973.

  There were no visible scars from the treatment, but that was almost beside the point.

  I wasn’t the same. As a little girl, I had been deeply vain, always looking at myself in the mirror, posing this way and that, pretending to be Mrs. Peel. Now, it was as if I couldn’t even bear to look at my own reflection. As I grew up, I’d favored edgy clothes in lively colors, sexy dresses, low-cut sweaters, tight jeans. I wore my hair long and loved how it flowed so luxuriantly past my shoulder.

  Though it had grown back even thicker than before once the radiation ended, to my eyes I looked nothing like I did before. I didn’t feel in the least bit attractive. Actually, I felt … invisible. The true “sequela”—the aftereffect the doctors had failed to mention—was that I had been completely diminished by my illness. I felt inferior to every woman I saw at Vassar—it didn’t matter if she was a plain Jane or an aristocratic beauty out of the pages of Mary McCarthy. The feeling, never articulated—perhaps not even to myself—was this: She has what I don’t have. She can have children and I never will.

  Life was now simply about fitting in. That was the essential—to blend, to mimic, and to resemble the other women on campus.

  But no matter how hard I tried, I realized that I wasn’t a bit like them. No matter that I, too, now wore crew necks and turtlenecks. I would observe the girls walking on the quad or reading in the library and realize that what I couldn’t approximate was their easy elegance, how even at their most casual, it was clear they were children of privilege and I was not.

  I tried to find comfort in my work. I had always been in my element in a classroom—never afraid of voicing my opinions. But suddenly, I felt fearful—so fearful that I stayed silent, even when I most wanted to speak up. I listened as my classmates spouted whatever came to their heads, but I could never so much as raise my hand or volunteer an answer or offer a point of view. Whenever I tried to speak, my voice seemed alien and almost disembodied.

  I worried about sounding foolish, no longer sure of my ideas. The self-confidence and drive that had propelled me since I was a child were gone. My exuberance, my enthusiasm—my arrogance—had all seemingly vanished in the Hudson Valley mist.

  Instead of focusing on what my professors were saying, I found myself staring at my classmates’ watches. My eyes would wander from one arm to another. I was fascinated by how many wore gold watches—solid gold, gleaming, opulent. Even in a classroom, where everyone took pains to look casual in their jeans and sweaters, there seemed to be small but significant displays of wealth.

  When I was in the hospital months earlier, my brother César had bought me a watch as a gift one night. It was a Tissot
, extraordinarily sleek, silver, with a blue suede bracelet. I had loved it and taken it with me to Vassar. Yet here, my Tissot seemed to lose its value amid the softly gleaming golden watches of the other Vassar women.

  When I didn’t look at my classmates’ wrists, I stared at their feet.

  Where were the Pappagallos?

  I spotted a few of them. Mostly though, along with the crew necks and jeans and corduroys, students favored not the slender loafers my brother had urged me to buy but thick, odd-looking maroon shoes with white rubber soles they called “Top-Siders.” I’d never seen them before. I didn’t know that they were boat shoes, emblematic of the lifestyle many of my classmates enjoyed beyond school—a life of summer homes and sailing expeditions that was completely foreign to me.

  I finally scrounged up the nerve to ask a friendly girl in my dorm where I, too, could get a pair of Top-Siders.

  “I order mine from a catalog,” she replied helpfully and offered to lend it to me.

  But as with the Pappagallos, I couldn’t afford the mail-order Top-Siders either, and I continued wearing my discount shoes from Eighteenth Avenue, the shoes that I hoped would pass muster and, of course, didn’t, because there was a tyrannical element to the rules of high prep and individuals’ social status; their ability to make friends or not, and the kinds of friends they made, could be determined swiftly, ruthlessly, by glancing at their feet.

  I preferred to travel incognito in this new world of mine. I favored dark clothes, dark shoes, and a long dark woolen coat. But I couldn’t help wondering whether my new affinity for grays and blues and blacks—in contrast to the luminous reds and greens I had always loved—was in some way connected to the previous summer, the summer that had been devoid of any color, any light.

  Side by side with the rigid rules, I was glimpsing a freer and more open lifestyle than I had ever known before. There was a strong, almost militantly feminist culture that was flourishing at Vassar, and it made me uneasy. The English Department, I learned, had multiple Sylvia Plath scholars. It was as if the only book worth reading, studying, and analyzing in the fall of 1973 was The Bell Jar.

  In my dorm, some of the freshmen women had boyfriends who visited them on weekends and stayed with them—two levels of freedom I had never known and couldn’t even have imagined prior to coming. I was secretly shocked, but couldn’t really confide in anyone: My classmates all seemed to take it as part of the natural order.

  There were also women who were openly gay, and they enjoyed a kind of lesbian chic. They had their own groups and they, too, enshrined Mary McCarthy. They were often conjuring up Lakey, the novel’s beautiful lesbian character, as a role model.

  They all terrified me—the women with girlfriends, the women with boyfriends. I kept my distance from both.

  It was very gradual, my decision to run away from Vassar. It wasn’t really conscious, at least not at first.

  At first, it was simply a matter of catching a slightly earlier train Friday to go home for the weekend. No point lingering in Poughkeepsie, a hopelessly run-down little city, I thought as the weekend drew near and my classes ended. The idea of staying put, of going back to my dorm and trying to unwind and make new friends, held little appeal for me. I dreaded my bare room, which still lacked curtains and a rug. I didn’t like to look out my window—more and more the cemetery below filled me with terror. Being stranded in this room for an entire weekend was unbearable. It made sense to head home Friday the minute I was done, to rush from my last class to catch a taxi to the train station.

  I felt more of an outsider with every passing month.

  By the late fall and winter, I had made inroads with only a handful of students. I had befriended a group of girls who came from, of all places, San Francisco high society. A few had attended the same tony boarding school—the Santa Catalina School for Girls—and they lived near one another in Pacific Heights. They had wonderful names; my favorite was Lucia Blair, whose bearing matched her aristocratic moniker, yet who still managed to be remarkably sweet and friendly and down-to-earth. I had a strange feeling that, like me, they weren’t in love with Vassar—that it had somehow disappointed—and they didn’t feel a part of it either. They obeyed the rules of high prep, but they did so with a kind of California mellowness, as if they preferred not to take any of it too seriously. Most wonderful of all was the fact that they seemed willing to let me enter their charmed circle.

  By winter, a few like Lucia were excitedly planning their debutante balls back home. I was regaled with stories of the gowns they would wear and the coming-out parties that were being planned for them by their families. This was much more the Vassar I had envisioned.

  The coming-out parties my friends were holding were like my Aznavour records—stirring, soulful, and hopelessly antiquated.

  On campus all around me, students were wearing “Impeach Nixon” buttons. The favorite social activity wasn’t sipping sherry but going for a beer at Pizza Town or Frivolous Sal’s, the two popular local bars. There were rock concerts held on the edge of campus or in neighboring towns, and I had no interest in them, either. The only music I enjoyed was Aznavour and his songs of a prior generation. I would have loved that sherry the admissions literature had promised, but if it was being served anywhere at Vassar, no one told me. There was a drinking culture and a drug culture but no sherry culture.

  As a little girl new to America, I had watched with such longing the annual debutante ball at the Waldorf Astoria on TV. I loved listening to the emcee’s flowery descriptions of the debutantes’ blanc d’ivoire peau de soie gowns. Mom and I would stare at the girls with their handsome escorts; even the ones who were overweight or plain beneath their finery seemed to have wonderful-looking companions.

  I had asked Edith if I, too, would have a debutante ball and she had assured me with her usual optimism that I would indeed. It made perfect sense to my mom that I’d have a coming-out party, that I would be introduced, as she liked to put it, à la haute société—to high society.

  She expected nothing less from life, though life had bitterly disappointed. And perhaps because it had disappointed so completely, her dreams for me—her last hope on this earth—became more and more outsized, more and more outlandish.

  Perhaps that is why she hadn’t objected too strenuously at first to Vassar. She was torn between her grand ambitions on my behalf—which meant casting me off into the greater world, letting go to allow me to fulfill my destiny—and her passionate desire to keep me as close to her as possible in that four-room apartment on Sixty-Fifth Street, though she realized that meant I may not have much of a destiny at all.

  I was only a spectator as my California friends chatted about their upcoming balls, much as I had been as a child, as cut off from the real-life galas being planned in Pacific Heights as if I were watching the International Debutante Ball with Edith on our TV set in Bensonhurst, both of us hypnotized by the splendor of the ballroom, the swish of the gowns, the loveliness of the young women as they dipped and curtsied across the Waldorf’s Grand Ballroom.

  Come the winter break, we dispersed—my friends to their coming-out parties on the West Coast and me home to Brooklyn. The apartment felt smaller, shabbier, quieter. I found my father exactly where I’d left him, praying. He barely looked up when I arrived, refusing to acknowledge either that I had left or that I had returned.

  Mom was still in her little half kitchen, making herself some Turkish coffee. With the years she had become exactly like her own mother, Nona Alexandra, who survived by drinking cup after cup of café turc, a ritual that went on late into the night.

  Was she even bothering to eat?

  I had finally put on weight in my months away—rather surprising in view of my daily struggles around meals. Somehow, between the hefty plates of scrambled eggs in the morning and the kosher TV dinners at night, I was nearly back to what I’d weighed more than a year or so earlier, before the illness had manifested itself.

  Edith, on the other hand, loo
ked frightfully thin. Always a wisp of a woman, she seemed to be disappearing. I suspected that she wasn’t eating much beyond her beloved bâtons salés, the sesame-covered Stella D’oro breadsticks that were among the few items of food I found in the house these days.

  In the past, the two of us would always dine together in the evenings. She loved to cook for me, typically a large pot of hamed, the stewlike dish where she mixed in small meatballs along with potatoes, carrots, artichoke hearts, and celery, the lot simmered in a lemony, garlicky, minty broth. It was such a fragrant dish, especially when she added the green mint leaves into the pot, that its scent would fill the kitchen.

  With me gone, had Edith simply decided to forsake eating? Had she stopped making hamed?

  But on this winter break, we fell back into our old routines. She cooked for me—and herself—as I regaled her with stories about life at Vassar, trying to be light and entertaining so as not to betray how I really felt. I wondered if she’d guessed that going away had turned out to be an enormous disappointment. She would gingerly ask me if I planned to go back to Poughkeepsie in January, in the same way as on that first day of college in September she had questioned whether I wanted to stay.

  We both strenuously avoided any discussion of the previous year. She used only vague, elliptical terms when discussing my bout with Hodgkin’s—it was always about ta maladie—your illness—and she would never, ever say “cancer.” And because she couldn’t even say the word, we couldn’t talk about how I was doing, couldn’t have a heart-to-heart on whether I was coping now that the crisis had supposedly passed.

  Even more taboo was any mention of marriage. It had never been a popular topic in my house: My parents had failed so miserably with Suzette, unable to persuade her to settle down and have a family. As I grew up, my mom liked to pretend I was being groomed for a special destiny that would transcend what other women expected out of life. I looked at my friends—who even at a young age fantasized out loud about the weddings they’d have—with disdain. I was sure I was meant for so much more.