The Brown Reader

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  I was judging from a distance, but I saw—or maybe idealized—her as a rebuke to those preening girls from Manhattan prep schools who glittered on the campus greens: the ones with artfully blow-dried hair, closets full of Guess jeans, and ancestral estates in the Hamptons. On a superficial level, I might have been their West Coast analogue. I grew up in West Los Angeles, sculpted my hair with mousse, gave thought to clothes. At Brown, because I performed in bands and was a Modern Culture and Media major, I often found myself among musicians, actors, and wannabe filmmakers. It was a milieu toward which Brown’s wealthy, famous, and royal (as in the actual offspring of foreign nobility) gravitated, perhaps because it was the closest a college campus came to glamour. In two separate bands I had drummed for, the singers were the daughters or stepdaughters of sixties- and seventies-era rock icons (one was also a countess); the leader of a third band was the daughter of a leveraged-buyout wizard, and, grooving beside me in the rhythm section, on bass, was the son of a Manhattan publishing titan.

  I wore black and went to their campus parties. I accepted invitations to weekend sleepovers at family homes in the Hamptons and on Cape Cod. I faked like I belonged. But deep down, I often felt like a fraud, moments from an unmasking. My father was a penny-pinching Middle Eastern immigrant professor with embarrassingly disheveled hair, and my mom, a geeky social worker who rarely wore makeup or fussed much about fashion. And so when the conversations at those parties turned to weekend jaunts to “the city” or spring break in some European capital, I fell suddenly—and self-consciously—silent.

  The buffet girl at the V-Dub was every bit as alluring as the women at those parties. But I’d never seen her at one. How could someone like her not aspire to that bright world? What kind of nerve did it take to always—and unapologetically—be yourself? I wanted to know. But when I straggled in line, hoping to meet her eye, she seldom seemed to notice.

  * * *

  A couple of months later, I was eating at the V-Dub when a friend approached and said he wanted to introduce his new girlfriend. My heart dropped: it was her. It was apparently her day off, and she and my friend had just finished dinner.

  Her name was Meg, my friend said. She was a sophomore, like us. Wasn’t she great?

  Sure, I said.

  I’d thought we’d exchanged at least a few moments of significant eye contact in the buffet line in the preceding weeks, so I was trying to play it cool. But when she shook my hand, she gave no sign of ever having seen me before. I’d been, I saw now, just one more undergrad with a cafeteria tray.

  * * *

  I tried to be happy for my friend. But his constant bragging about “the greatest girl” he’d ever met made me angry at myself for not acting sooner. For being naïve and timid enough to think that with enough eye contact from a stranger—a cool one, who played in bands—she might suddenly decide she was in love with me.

  The only consolation was that I now saw a lot of Meg, both in the slop line and on social outings with my friend. She noticed that I was shy and perhaps safe, and made sport of flirting with me when the three of us were together. It was an early-1990s ironic kind of flirting: dramatic eyelash flutters, overlong hugs, hand-on-hip Betty Boop poses. I told myself it was probably just a game for her and maybe for my friend, too: tweak the shy kid.

  I acted positively Buddhalike in her presence, responding to her provocations with a poker face and turning away from temptation. It wasn’t just out of loyalty to my friend. I worried that if I let on about my feelings, she’d laugh. I’m just toying with you, she might say. You thought I actually liked you?

  So for a long time, I didn’t call her bluff.

  And then, finally—when she and my friend split—I did. I waited a respectful few weeks before telling my friend how I felt, and how I thought Meg might feel, too. Would he be okay with my asking her out?

  Go for it, he said. (He let me know later that he recalled the conversation differently, and he decided, to my lasting regret, that we could no longer be friends.)

  The next time I saw Meg, it was again at dinner at the V-Dub, on one of her evenings off. She took a seat next to me at one of the long tables near the kitchen. I’d just finished a jog and was in sweatpants and an old T-shirt. She had not just finished a jog or any other form of exercise but was wearing an even rattier T-shirt: a tattered relic from some long-ago family trip, with an illustration of grazing cows and the inscription HOLLAND.

  This time, when she gave me a coquettish sidelong glance, I held her gaze. “Why don’t we go up to your room?” I said, with what I imagined to be a 007-like cool.

  The shock was visible on her face. After a very long moment, as if recovering from an uppercut, she said, “Uhhhh, I gotta go now.”

  I returned to my dorm crestfallen and hit the showers. I was certain I’d screwed everything up.

  I was lonely that sophomore year and living in Spanish House. I’d wanted to bunk again with my freshman roommate, an heir to a drugstore-chain fortune. But he had chosen to room with another of our friends, the roguishly handsome son of an international banker who vacationed at a family compound on the Cape whose stone walls, he had informed me, were originally built by Miles Standish. So I applied solo for a spot at Spanish House. My assigned roommate was a short, muscle-bound Red Sox fan with a mealy Boston accent and the nickname Ballsy. We had nothing in common, except perhaps for a shared search for belonging at Brown. (One of the first things I’d noticed on move-in day was the ten-peg hat rack he’d mounted to the wall; it was positioned so that he could select from among his vast collection of baseball caps before getting out of bed.)

  Late every night, once the lights were out, Ballsy called his high school sweetheart from back home, and their cooing often kept me from sleep. Other nights, he’d badger his friends about their shortcomings at the gym. “You gonna work out tomorrow?” he’d bark into the room phone. If he found the answer wanting, he’d respond, “What are you, a woman?” To outsiders, Brown could sometimes seem like a monoculture of political correctness and privilege. Ballsy was evidence of Brown’s truer ideological diversity, which showed up in neither its marketing materials nor in the prevailing media narrative.

  When I got back from the showers that evening, he’d just put down the receiver. “Hey, some chick named Meg just called. She says to call her back.”

  I had never been happier to hear Ballsy’s voice.

  * * *

  After months of buildup, our first weeks together were ardent and nearly all-consuming. I soon saw that I’d been right about the things I’d intuited in the buffet line. Her father, like mine, was an oddball immigrant—a Dutch farmer who tilled the patch of land they lived on in Connecticut. Her mother was a small-town librarian who cared even less than my own mom about clothes and jewelry.

  To afford tuition, Meg required loans, grants, and a regular paycheck—just as my father had when he was in college. She worked three days a week, cleaning the women’s locker room at the Olney-Margolies Athletic Center at dawn and working the V-Dub buffet in the evenings. But her future was bright. As a high school senior she’d been accepted into Brown’s Program in Liberal Medical Education, which meant she’d go straight from her undergraduate studies into medical school.

  While Brown had its share of Doogie Howsers—students whose teenage identities hinged on future lives as doctors—Meg staked her self-worth on other things. She had a sense of whimsy about the world, and a gift for storytelling that lifted me out of my laconic moods. While I holed up in the library for hours, obsessed with perfecting papers and maintaining a high GPA, Meg often coasted on her native intelligence and took most of her classes S/NC. She devoured young adult novels for pleasure, giggled at goofy movies, and padded for hours along forest paths, and these were as enriching for her as any classroom grade. As I see it now, she was modeling for me a life rooted less in prestige and achievement than in everyday relationships and experience.

  One day, not long after we’d started dating, the c
onversation turned to those willowy Manhattan girls whom I’d seen as her antitheses.

  “Oh, the ‘Neat-hairs’?” Meg said with a knowing smile. I laughed, not just because I admired the phrase, but because of how effortlessly she dismissed Brown’s social elite as irrelevant to her life at Brown.

  Meg had a motley collection of friends: financial aid kids who worked alongside her at the V-Dub, a few geeks and misfits, all fiercely smart and independent. Many she’d met simply because they lived on the same hall in whatever dorm Res Life had assigned her to. She belonged to no scene. If she had any broader renown at Brown, it was only because of the quirky personal essays she wrote for the Brown Daily Herald, in a recurring column she’d titled “Life Near the Bone,” after Thoreau. (“It is life near the bone where it is sweetest,” he had written in Walden. “Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only.”)

  Meg never complained about having to work; nor did I feel any particular guilt that I didn’t. She went off to her jobs, and I went off to band practice, and neither errand carried any moral charge: such were the demands college made of ambitious students. Still, when I groused about a one-week summer stint scrubbing the kitchen at the East Campus Dining Center (the “Greasy Dee-Cee”), Meg rolled her eyes. “Try spending a year picking women’s hair out of shower drains.” That shut me up for a while.

  Common sense argued against our getting serious. I was a Jewish boy from Los Angeles, she a gentile from rural Connecticut. I played drums in MuthaFridge, an eight-piece ska-funk band that drew hundreds of fans to its gigs on Spring Weekend and at Campus Dance. She played an autoharp she kept in a cardboard box under her bed and regaled me with recordings from Annie, West Side Story, and other Broadway musicals she had on vinyl.

  I read Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Joan Didion, she Jane Austen, A. S. Byatt, and Miss Manners.

  At Brown, however, our differences were not obstacles but fuel for adventure. I took her to a Jane’s Addiction concert at the Rocky Point Palladium; we rode together in the back of my freshman roommate’s red Porsche. (Though no longer roommates, he and I remained friends.) She took me on hikes through Lincoln Woods, taught me to make rhubarb pies, and recited Robert Frost poems as we cuddled in her single bed. I tried to impress her with semiotic theory from my Modern Culture and Media classes, explaining how The Cosby Show and Rambo were not just entertainment but coded representations of the dominant ideology; she called that a bunch of pretentious nonsense and cutely told me to get over myself.

  Meg came to my bands’ shows but rarely felt comfortable at the cool-kid parties I dragged her to. She didn’t drink and often wanted to go home early. Only occasionally did she mortify me. Straining for small talk with the neat-hair host of one house party, Meg rolled out an expression more suited to a Victorian novel than a house of hipsters.

  “So who’s the founder of this feast?” Meg asked earnestly.

  The neat-hair gave her a look of utter incomprehension.

  * * *

  Graduation put our relationship under strain. Maybe we had only made sense on College Hill, which had shielded us from the headwinds of the real world. Maybe it was smart to see other people, to test whether what we had was genuine or whether hormones had just gotten the better of us.

  After graduation, I moved to California with four other members of MuthaFridge. Our new band, Cleveland Lounge, found a foothold in the emerging “acid jazz” scene, signed with a small record label, and gigged at nightclubs across San Francisco and LA. There were lots of late, booze-fueled nights, and the women I went out with were—on paper anyway—more like me.

  Meg, for her part, stayed back in Providence, for medical school, and dated men who’d shoveled farm soil and composed verse in their spare time.

  But after two years, neither of us had found happiness. Our separation was clarifying: whatever love was, it wasn’t a product of overlapping census data or matching answers on a questionnaire. I parted with the band and moved back to Providence. Four years later, Meg and I were married, on her family’s farm, in Connecticut.

  A decade and a half on, we are not quite as disparate as we once were: our tastes in movies, for instance, have converged, which means she is a little less fond of The Princess Bride and I a little less crazy about John Cassavetes. And though the coexistence of Julie Andrews and Funkadelic on our iPod betrays an abiding rift in our relationship, it has given our two children unusually broad musical tastes.

  In essence, though, we are little changed. Meg is still the early-to-bed country girl, I a party-hardy (LA slang, circa 1989) city boy. As we’ve grown older, we’ve had to work harder to straddle those fault lines. We lived in Providence and Baltimore while I wrote for newspapers in those cities. Then we moved to rural Maine, to a sprawling 1830s farmhouse with a woodstove, giant barn, and sloping field. Meg hoped we’d stay there forever. I felt isolated and missed professional colleagues, and when I turned in the manuscript for my first book, we sold the house and moved to Washington, DC, where I had friends and a new job.

  Meg, who completed her residency at Brown and Yale, works now as a psychiatrist at a mental health clinic in DC, treating immigrants and the poor. She likes her hard-luck patients—the strugglers and the strivers—but I don’t know how long she will survive the city. She longs for the lush quiet of the countryside, and the National Arboretum—though picturesque and a short drive from our Capitol Hill row house—is no match for the ever-unfolding woods of her childhood. We are still searching for a place we can both call home; it is a search we are resolved to make together.

  Looking back, I’m not sure we would have taken a chance on each other were it not for Brown. It was the one place where none of our differences seemed to matter. For a few precious years, we were free enough from the gravitational forces of family and faith and history to see through to the core of another person—to the part that snickers at the neat-hairs of the world, smiles at the well-turned phrase, and values trueness-to-self over status in the world. This last—this living of life near the bone—I know I will always struggle with. When I succeed at all, it is only because of that strange and beautiful girl who ignored and then found me in the V-Dub.

  Beautiful Girls

  KATE BORNSTEIN

  It was a cavernous New York City Hilton ballroom, September 1986. Well, it was roughly 1986, and it might not have been the Hilton. But it was a ballroom, and everything you’re going to read here really happened, except for a few little stretchers.

  It was late afternoon. I’d come up to the city by train from Philadelphia and arrived at the party half an hour early. The two ballrooms were empty except for myself and two friends I’d not seen or spoken with for over twenty years. Jon Charnas and Martin Broomfield—the two most delightfully flaming fags of Brown University theater in the sixties. I myself was not a flaming fag—not then, nor now. I was a closet tranny in those days, and today I’m an old dyke—in all of which identities I’ve endeavored to be delightful, which is an important quality in any gender or sexuality. Was I a fag? A straight guy? Am I a dyke? Which is the truth of gender and sexuality? Which is the lie? I’d only begun to explore that while I was in college at Brown.

  Jon, Martin, and I had all been leading men in our day. We were the first to arrive at the party honoring Professor James O. Barnhill, the charismatic master who’d built Brown’s theater department. JOB was retiring that year, and decades of his students, actors, designers, playwrights, and directors were gathering to say thank you to the man who’d opened their minds and hearts to theater. We hung out mostly with each other, so it wasn’t purely coincidental that many of us in Brown theater had had sex of some sort with one another. It was mostly heterosexual sex, but many of us enjoyed the new era of sexual freedom with partners of all genders. Why, I could tell you the most wondrous story of a boy so beautiful he looked like a girl—she and I in the back of my VW Squareback. I miss her to this day. But telling the tale would be too much of a distraction to this story we’re in the mi
ddle of.

  Jon and Martin were delighted to be spending time with me, the newly out ex-Scientologist and transsexual lesbian actress and director. They fussed over me like a pair of doting older sisters at a debutante ball, fixing my hair and adding flowers here and there to girl up my androgynous lesbian outfit. We talked about the old days, the in-the-closet days. The only place gays and lesbians could be somewhat out was in the theater. Even so, trannies like me remained hidden. The only way to be transgender and out in those days was to be a drag queen and I never thought I was pretty enough to pull that off. It had taken me more than fifteen years to create a gender that was as close to female as I could manage. Now, only five months after my sex reassignment surgery, Professor Barnhill’s retirement celebration was also my coming-out party.

  In the mid-1960s, there was no theater program at Brown—there were less than a dozen theater-related courses hidden away in the English department. Those of us who were die-hard theater nerds quickly found English 23–24, “Play Production”—eight hours a week, not counting all the rehearsal time outside of class hours, two semesters a year. You could repeat those classes every year. There was no classroom, there was Faunce House Theatre: a fifty-foot proscenium stage that seated an audience of up to four hundred. During class hours, twenty to thirty of us students draped ourselves over seats in the first three to five rows of the theater. James O. Barnhill had studied with Stella Adler at the Group Theatre. Miss Adler’s other students included Marlon Brando, Warren Beatty, and Robert De Niro. Professor Barnhill stood before us and sat among us, training us as Method actors. He didn’t treat us as students. He treated us as professional theater people, and we all loved him for it.

  Jon and Martin and I looked up from our reminiscing to see that scores of people had already arrived, and hundreds more were about to arrive. JoBeth Williams—star of stage and screen—would be one of them. In 1967, I was a sophomore. JoBeth was an incoming freshman. It had taken me only a year, but I was known across campus as the university’s Richard Burton—right down to the heavy drinking and reputation with the ladies . . . and with more than a few gentlemen. JoBeth was beautiful, talented, smart, kind, and strong. One look at her, and you’d know that stardom was her destiny. I, too, wanted to be a star, but my gender/sexuality conundrum drove me heavily into weed. I played most of my roles stoned out of my mind—somehow I was able to make it work. And JoBeth and I were madly in love, looking forward to a future together in theater. We were a powerful couple—the “it” couple of Brown University theater—and we burned out brightly in less than one year. She was a star. I was a stoner. That’s how those things go.