I planned carefully what I would wear, so as to appear confident and, above all, healthy. I wanted to play the part of the mythical Vassar girl he had known in his days at Yale. I settled on my new minidress from B. Altman’s.
And, of course, I wore the Pappagallos.
In a rapid yet precise examination, he found nothing out of the ordinary. On the contrary, the fact that I had put on more weight was hopeful. As he poked and probed for whatever mysterious indicators that would signal a problem, he seemed to grow more confident and reassured, and we both relaxed. I hopped off the examining table and took my favorite seat by his desk.
Dr. Lee and I had become close since my malady. I tended to confide in him pretty much whatever was on my mind. But I had no desire to tell him of my despair at college—that going away had turned into a complete debacle.
He was so incisive in the way he questioned me, not simply about my symptoms but about my friends, my classes, even what I was reading, that I often let on more than I’d intended. At some point I blurted out that I wanted “meaning” in my life.
It was the 1970s; everyone was looking for meaning, or talking about looking for meaning.
Everyone except Dr. Burton J. Lee III. He spent his days taking care of the dying, the near dying, and the gravely ill. When he wasn’t seeing patients, he worked in Memorial’s laboratories, and he had helped develop some of the earliest treatments for lymphoma. Dr. Lee didn’t have to think about finding meaning: It coursed through his entire existence.
He didn’t strike me as a man of his times. His clothes were elegant in a classical, studiously unfashionable kind of way—a throwback to some 1950s code of WASPdom. Burton Lee was the ultimate master of high prep. He practically breathed it.
Dr. Lee seemed to view the world around him with amusement and contempt. He loved, for example, to wear a tie that had “MCP”—male chauvinist pig—emblazoned all over it complete with embroidered little piglets. It was clear he had little use for the feminists who were among the loudest voices of this loud decade.
“If you want meaning, baby,” he said, sounding a trifle impatient, “then go to work for the Encyclopaedia Britannica.”
He was only joking, of course—he had a devilish sense of humor. But I took him, as always, dead seriously.
I was dismayed that he hadn’t made note of my Pappagallos. It was if he hadn’t noticed how much I had changed, how different I looked—how I had finally managed to shed my Bensonhurst ways.
Or maybe I hadn’t.
That night at home, I told Mom about my checkup—she tended not to go with me to Memorial anymore. From the start, Dr. Lee had made it clear that his relationship was with me, that he didn’t want my parents in the examining room. At most, when she accompanied me, she stayed in the large waiting area.
She was overjoyed by the news and insisted on lighting a floating wick in a glass of oil. We didn’t have candles at home; besides the custom in Bensonhurst as in Cairo was to use wicks, which my mother would insert in a small juice glass half filled with water, half with Wesson oil. Then, for good measure, she took some incense sticks and lit them. It wasn’t exactly the heady bakhour of Egypt that she and my grandmother had favored, but it was the closest she could find—tall thin brown sticks that were sold by the bundle in outdoor stalls on Fulton Street. Ever since my illness, she had begun to burn incense nearly every night. “Baal Haness, Amelena Ness,” she prayed.
It was an old Egyptian incantation—she was invoking the ancient rabbi Meir Baal Haness, the Maker of Miracles.
The next morning I got up at dawn and caught a train back to Poughkeepsie. I went straight to my room at Noyes and stuffed whatever I could into my suitcase. I put the blue Olivetti in its carrying case and locked the door behind me. I didn’t even look around to see what I could be leaving behind.
I knew that I risked failing some classes, but I figured I could request incompletes and get through the semester by mailing in my term papers and settling for any grade my professors saw fit to give me.
My visit with Dr. Lee had at least calmed me down. I felt more hopeful about my health—at least until my next appointment. And that in turn gave me the strength to begin weighing other options. Summer was nearly upon us; I would look for a job, explore the possibility of another college.
Nothing was clear to me except this: I wasn’t going back to Vassar again.
· 17 ·
The Princess of West 116th Street
It felt so odd but here I was, starting college once again. In September, instead of a train to Poughkeepsie, Mom and I took the subway to Broadway and West 116th Street and my new home at Columbia University.
Over the summer I had found a respectable way to maneuver out of Vassar, at least temporarily: I had requested and been granted a one-year leave of absence to attend Columbia as an exchange student.
I had no intention of returning to Poughkeepsie, of course—even thinking about it filled me with dread.
As I’d considered my options in the relative calm of summer—when I had finally stopped running—a leave seemed a less drastic solution than dropping out of college altogether.
I had new luggage I’d purchased with the fifty dollars in Social Security Disability I now received each month in the mail. It was a benefit my family had wangled with the help of Memorial. I didn’t stop to consider what it really meant—that in the eyes of the government I was considered disabled. I was thrilled simply to have a steady flow of pocket money.
Fifty dollars seemed like a luxurious amount to me, far more than I’d ever had at my disposal.
Together Edith and I made our way to the dormitory I’d been assigned at 616 West 116th Street. It turned out to be not a dorm at all but a series of suites with private rooms built around a small kitchen.
I immediately felt relieved: I wouldn’t have to worry anymore about the humiliations of a central dining hall and whether there’d be kosher food and if I’d be eating alone or in a group. I could prepare my own meals and eat them in my cozy kitchen. “Six Sixteen” as it was called, was for women only, and that, too, was comforting to me.
Edith was overjoyed with my new arrangement. I was in Manhattan. Although I wouldn’t be living at home, I would at least be close by. She raved about all the nice girls who were going to be my suitemates and who shook her hand and introduced themselves one by one as we arrived.
She offered to go back to Brooklyn and bring me some food as we hadn’t thought of bringing any with us—I had assumed that, like Vassar, there’d be dining halls or student cafeterias.
A couple of my suitemates suggested we walk over to Broadway instead. We spotted a Chock full o’Nuts coffee shop at the corner, went in, and sat side by side at the counter. I ordered a nutted-cheese sandwich because I liked the sound of it—it was their classic bargain lunch fare, a couple of slices of date-nut bread with a layer of fresh cream cheese that cost less than a dollar.
Edith with her gift for slightly mangling names dubbed it Le Sandwiche Cheese Nutty-Nutty. It tasted so delicious I decided I would be absolutely fine at Columbia even if I only dined on Cheese-Nutty-Nutties for the next year.
At a local grocery store that catered to students, we stocked up on supplies. My mother kept adding items to my little cart—bread, milk, butter, potato chips, and a box of Entennman’s banana nut cake because she had an almost religious belief in the curative powers of cake.
It seemed remarkable to me to be buying groceries again. Vassar had been so cloistered and remote, its campus thoroughly cut off from town, that even a trip to a supermarket had been an impossibility.
After Edith left, I went to a gathering for new students downstairs. I was determined not to repeat my lonely Vassar experience: I told myself I had to find a way to break through my isolation and reach out to others.
It helped that I felt better than I had in months. Lately, I’d find myself at times wondering if I had imagined it all—the horror of the last couple of years, the fact that I
’d had cancer.
No one will ever know, I thought.
I was going to forge a new life on West 116th Street, a life without any reference to the past.
Columbia would be like a foreign country where I would invent a brand-new identity for myself.
A tall, slender girl with honey-blond hair that flowed past her shoulders greeted me with a wave and a broad smile. She was surrounded by other girls and seemed to be holding court: A sea of them had encircled her, and they were all chatting amiably with one another.
She promptly introduced herself as “LaurieLauriefromNorth-Woodmere.” She spoke in an anxious, rapid-fire pace. Laurie Wolf was a freshman, and at seventeen, a year younger than me, but we were oddly in the same boat, trying to make our way in unfamiliar terrain.
I quickly learned that Laurie had at least one major advantage—she knew dozens of members of the new freshman class, including several of the residents at 616 who were from the same corner of Long Island. Laurie looked formidable and rich, but unlike the formidable and rich girls I had met the previous year, she struck me as down-to-earth and deeply friendly.
She was also Orthodox, and so it turned out were many of the girls I was meeting.
I was home again, no longer an alien. Although many of the students came from affluent suburban homes in Long Island or New Jersey or Westchester and were in their own way as privileged as the young women of Vassar, they had none of their coldness or standoffishness.
There was significant common ground—primarily the fact that faith and family were as central to their lives as they were to mine. Most of the students I was meeting seemed very traditional, as if the turbulent world of the 1970s had nothing to do with them, even though Columbia was at the epicenter of the turbulence.
It was the fall of 1975, yet for many of the girls, it may as well have been the fall of 1955. I bonded immediately with Laurie, drawn by her effervescence and optimism, which was in such contrast to my dour outlook.
We started having meals together—lunch, then dinner, then lunch as well as dinner, often sitting in her kitchen where we’d be joined by one or two of her suitemates, and I realized I had found myself a real home on West 116th Street.
At the time, Barnard, an old-line women’s college, was affiliated with Columbia yet apart from it. It was proud of the fact that it had its own identity, its own professors, and granted its students a Barnard degree. Still, while I was technically enrolled at Barnard, it was Columbia that I loved—the energy of it, the expanse of it, the intense hopefulness of it, the range of classes it offered, the boys that I began meeting in those classes.
My nascent interest in men had vanished after the illness. It was as if desire itself had been obliterated along with the malignancy. But some of those feelings were coming back.
I found to my shock that I was more like my wayward older sister than I’d ever thought possible. I seemed to be drawn to les blonds aux yeux bleus—exactly as Suzette had been. And while Columbia had no shortage of Jewish guys, students with similar backgrounds to mine, I invariably developed crushes on boys with sandy-blond hair and last names like “Evans” or “O’Neill” with whom I had almost nothing in common.
I took a walk each day to the English Department where Robert Evans worked as an assistant. He was older—a junior, possibly a senior—with shaggy, dirty blond hair and wide-set blue eyes. I learned fairly quickly that he had a steady girlfriend, but that didn’t dissuade me. I kept stopping by to see him and chat hoping against hope for… For what?
I wasn’t altogether sure.
I developed a similar passionate attachment to a boy in my French class who was married. I found him wonderfully attractive with dark hair and green eyes and Irish-Catholic charm. I took to leaving after class with him for long walks across campus. He was very kind, but there, too, nothing ever progressed beyond a series of ever more intense conversations.
One of my suitemates gave me a glimpse of how such encounters could work out very differently. She was new to 616 and we’d heard she had recently lost her mother. She began to bring home different boys that she would take to her room and shut the door. They came in shifts so that she received two, four, five guys in a single day, every day.
We were both amused and horrified. One of us finally asked her about her freewheeling lifestyle. She replied evenly that after the death of her mom, she had decided to deny herself nothing. I couldn’t help feeling somewhat envious at her freedom, at the pleasures she allowed herself to have in the midst of her mourning.
I, too, was in mourning, I suppose, mourning what I had been before my illness, mourning my shattered sweet sixteen and my ruptured girlhood and all that was lost inside of me and would never be again. But the difference between us was that I would allow myself nothing.
Part of it was, of course, my background. Old Cairo, Ancient Aleppo, Nouveau-Syrian Brooklyn—none of these places exactly encouraged a woman to be libertine. It was all but unthinkable, even to someone who had fancied herself a rebel, who had longed to shatter dividers. I was as much a prisoner of these antiquated moral codes as anyone I’d grown up with in the women’s section.
But it was more than that. My illness had been like a knockout punch; it had extinguished all sense of desire, any belief in romance, and with it, any hope of experiencing one or the other.
I no longer made demands of God to find love or a boyfriend or a husband. I simply wanted to survive.
Yet I was changing. My energy was coming back, and with that so was my vanity.
This was in large part Laurie’s influence. She was the archetypal girl from the Five Towns, a wealthy enclave of villages on Long Island with a distinct personality: wealthy, overwhelmingly (and devoutly) Jewish, and a culture that fostered a kind of extreme narcissism. But I found it to be a benign form that went hand in hand with an abundance of sweetness and caring. She and her friends dressed meticulously, agonized far too much about their appearance, and fretted constantly about “socializing.” But theirs was a starkly different dress code than the one I’d encountered at Vassar—worlds apart from the high prep ethos that counseled looking casual, low-key, and almost asexual.
No need for Top-Siders or dark, shapeless crew necks around here. The mantra was to “make the most of what you have.” These Orthodox girls favored tight-fitting sweaters and clingy polyester shirts known as “Huckapoos” that were very fashionable and rather expensive. They added layers of gold chains and rarely ventured outside without some makeup and perfume.
Then there was the obsession with hair. Blow-driers had come into general use—the bigger, the more powerful, the better. There were girls in my suite who devoted entire evenings struggling with the high-wattage contraptions to twist and curl their shapeless strands to create the perfect pageboy. But even more important was finding a great Manhattan hair salon. What had been a simple neighborhood affair—going to the local beauty parlor—was passé. Instead, boutique establishments were opening up in the toniest quarters of the city, promising women not simply a haircut but a total transformation.
I was definitely in the market for that.
Laurie and I launched exhaustive investigations to find the leading salons in the city. We favored West Fifty-Seventh Street off Fifth Avenue, where some of the top hairdressers operated, book-ended by Bergdorf’s on one side and Henri Bendel on the other. The tab typically came to fifty dollars—money I didn’t have.
Then I remembered my Social Security Disability check.
Instead of using it for textbooks or groceries, my monthly SSI money became my way of paying for voyages to West Fifty-Seventh Street where I made appointments with the hairdressers favored in the latest issues of Vogue or Glamour. I’d even call the magazines’ beauty editors to ask for suggestions. Laurie and I took turns—one month she would go to a fancy salon, then I would go some days later. We competed to find the most arrogant, self-assured, outré stylists in New York.
Loulou shortly after graduation from Vassar, Ne
w York, 1978.
Invariably, I’d find myself standing in front of a young, fashionably dressed male hairdresser who would deliver a withering assessment—my hair was all wrong for my face, it was too long (or else too short), I should never have bangs (or I should absolutely have bangs), until I was ready to throw myself at their mercy.
Which I suppose was the point of the torturous exercise.
I would emerge if not transformed then certainly much improved with my sleek new do. I never could maintain the look on my own, but for a couple of days at least, I felt at home among the princesses of West 116th Street, at last almost their equal.
Laurie occasionally invited me to go with her when she left for the weekend. Home was in North Woodmere, a neighborhood of placid ranches and cookie-cutter colonials set on identical one-acre lots. It wasn’t exactly luxurious, not that part of it, but it was certainly prosperous—the destination of choice for upwardly mobile families who had sought to flee Brooklyn and Queens in the late 1950s and 1960s. A developer had built scores of starter homes and sold them to couples such as Laurie’s parents who longed for a piece of the suburban dream.
I looked around, enchanted by the rows of homes with neat lawns and beautifully apportioned interiors. When we went to visit Laurie’s friends, it was often to take part in sample sales. Despite the wealth, hers was a culture consumed with bargain hunting and “buying wholesale.” A couple of the adults Laurie knew seemed to have a sideline selling discount designer clothes out of their basements and dens.
I was less interested in the clothes than in the homes. I was struck by how immaculate they were—modern, clean, decorated with magnificent furnishings that seemed to be there almost for show—not really to be used at all.
The Arrogant Years Page 24