Hungry Heart

by Jennifer Weiner

  Looking back, I can see that I was lucky that I didn’t end up with a drinking problem or an eating disorder, lucky that all I got was fat. But fat was enough to, essentially, get me kicked off the crew team. “You need to lose a lot of weight,” the freshman coach explained to me as he looked across the dining-room table (probably after I’d finished my second plateful of whatever stir-fry or meatloaf they were serving). It was spring break by then, everyone else had gone home, and I’d elected to stick it out on campus and do two-a-day workouts with my soon-to-be former teammates. The coach ordered “seat races,” where two boats race against each other with one rower in, say, each boat’s third seat, and then just those two rowers would switch. Every boat I was in lost every race. I made it back to my dorm room before I started to cry, and I made it through the season—even though it was clear that the coach would have been very happy if I’d left—and then I was done with crew forever.

  I knew, and had probably known for a while, that I wasn’t going to be a college athlete. The practices were harrowing, five-hundred-meter sprints or five-thousand-meter marathons, repeated over and over, on the water or in the tanks or on rowing machines, in all weather, in the spring or fall, workouts that would leave your lungs burning and your hands blistered, your back aching, and your arms so sore that you’d be too weak to wash your hair. On top of the work you’d do on the water, there were weights to be lifted, miles to be run, all in the company of girls with first names like Lasseter and Montgomery, who summered on Nantucket and had all been to Europe and dated blandly handsome boys who’d gone to Exeter or Choate.

  I hadn’t made friends among my fellow rowers. My people were the pale, black-wearing Goth girls and the long-haired, poetry-reading boys who were trying to be vegetarian or gay, or trying even harder (and, in only one case I remember, succeeding) to have threesomes; they were the Monty Python–quoting nerds from New Jersey, girls from Alaska and Montana who joked that they’d gotten in for being “g.d.,” which stood for “geographically desirable.” My friends joined the Wildcats after the Tiger Lilies, the oldest and most prestigious of the female a cappella groups, turned them down, and played club rugby or intramural Ultimate Frisbee after they’d been cut by, or gotten fed up with the rigors of, the field hockey or soccer team. My people weren’t averse to spending a Saturday night drinking tea and playing board games along with the born-again Christians, who also eschewed booze-filled parties.

  Sophomore year, after an unhappy summer at home, I came back to campus not a pound thinner, and with a raging case of impostor syndrome. Without crew, I believed, there was no way I’d have gotten into Princeton . . . so I tried as hard as I could to prove that, academically, I did belong there, and to leave the place better than I’d found it. There were plenty of causes to choose from—divestment, CIA recruiting on campus, abortion rights (then, as now, under attack)—and it didn’t take me long to settle on the one that would be mine.

  When I’d been looking at colleges, I knew I hadn’t wanted a school with a big Greek life. I’d seen Animal House and Revenge of the Nerds multiple times apiece. I knew that I probably wouldn’t cut it as a sorority girl—not unless my chosen institution had a chapter of Omega Mu—and I didn’t want my social life for the next four years to center around beer-soaked bacchanals in run-down mansions.II

  Princeton did not, officially, have fraternities or sororities. What it had instead were eating clubs—a row of mansions, just across the street from the center of campus, where members ate and partied.

  There were twelve clubs in the late 1980s, each with its own character. Terrace, a stucco-and-timber mansion on Washington Street, around the corner from Prospect Avenue and the more respectable clubs, was for Princeton’s artsy undergrads, the English and architecture majors, the actors and the dancers and students identifying, or experimenting with identifying, as gay. Terrace looked fancy until you got close enough to see that it was a mess inside. The food was delicious, but the public rooms smelled like ashtrays and mop water. The carpets were worn, the lawn was patchy, the windows had hairline cracks, and the walls were scuffed and stained with cigarette smoke.

  Around the corner, on Prospect Avenue, there was Tower Club, affectionately known as the “tool shed,” where the Woodrow Wilson School majors, future politicians and government types, congregated, and Quadrangle, or Quad, for the engineering students. Cottage and Cap and Gown were the “bicker” clubs for Princeton’s prettiest people and its best athletes, the clubs you had to rush, like a fraternity, to get in. Charter and Colonial were where the kids who’d been rejected, or “hosed,” during bicker, ended up. Ivy, one of the remaining all-male clubs, had been immortalized by F. Scott Fitzgerald as “detached and breathlessly aristocratic.” There, waiters in tuxedoes served dinner, and women weren’t allowed inside without a male escort. Tiger Inn, or T.I., was Ivy’s raucous, party-hearty little brother, which could be counted on to send kids to the hospital with alcohol poisoning a few times each semester. T.I. was for the jocks and the serious drinkers, a place where, in addition to Beer Pong and Quarters, you could play Trees and Trolls. The game was not complicated: the tall guys (“trees”) would line up on one side of the room; the shorter guys (“trolls”) would assemble on the other, and, at a signal, they’d charge at each other, screaming.

  Back in 1980, Sally Frank had taken on the all-male clubs in court for gender discrimination. If women pay the same tuition, why shouldn’t they have the same opportunities? Why shouldn’t all of Princeton, not just parts of it, be available? Frank filed a lawsuit, which, seven years later, was still wending its way through the system. When I got to campus, conventional wisdom seemed to be that only a handful of hairy-legged, strident, shouty feminists cared about the two clubs’ exclusionary policies. Most women figured they got into the all-male clubs on Friday and Saturday nights, at parties, when it mattered.

  The all-male clubs were allowed to persist in their all-maleness because, technically, they were not an official part of the university. Practically, though, it was clear that the clubs were essential to Princeton’s life. The university depended on the clubs to feed its upperclassmen; precepts and study groups and concerts all were occasionally held there. Maybe my classmates didn’t care, as long as there were some clubs that would consider them, but I found the sexism galling. Why did men get eleven choices, and we had only nine? Goddamnit, what if I wanted to play Trees and Trolls . . . or, more pertinently, what if I’d wanted to belong to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s old eating club, or rub shoulders with Frank Deford or James Baker, both Ivy members who presumably might come back for reunion and meet a promising young writer in search of advice or employment? The truth was, I had no interest in bickering, in trying to get into a fancy club that I couldn’t afford and from which I’d surely be rejected . . . but why did certain clubs get to make that choice for me? Besides that, taking up arms against the eating clubs was, unlike a seat race, or a battle with my own body, a war that I might win, a place to use my words and make my parents proud.

  In Mathey’s shared computer lab, I wrote op-eds that made my case (after a pair of male Mathey residents found what I’d written on the hard drive and read it out loud, in cruel falsetto, I took pains to delete my drafts and began petitioning my parents for my own computer). I wrote speeches and op-eds and letters to the editors of various campus publications. I made posters and made up chants (“Two, four, six, eight, why won’t you coeducate?”). I made friends with a girl named Melissa Hardin, a willowy classmate who’d grown up on Park Avenue in New York City. (“Was that your prom?” I asked, spotting a photograph of her in a fancy white dress in a silver frame on her bedside table. Melissa’s dorm room had a bedside table, draped in a floral fabric that coordinated with her bedspread, and her pictures were in frames, not tacked to her walls. “No,” she said, sounding a little shamefaced, “that was my debut.”) We led a demonstration during bicker, and while a steady stream of khaki-and-oxford-shirt-clad male classmates streamed by us and into
the club’s front doors, we walked in a circle on the sidewalk outside (public space, Sally Frank—who was by then a lawyer—had assured us), brandishing our picket signs and chanting. My friend Sarah, whose father had been a member of  T.I., walked with us. I wasn’t sure whether she did it because she cared or because she cared about me, but either way, I appreciated having her there, with her MY DAD JOINED T.I.—WHY CAN’T I? poster.

  Which brought me to that November night at McCosh. In my lace-up brown ankle boots, elastic-waist olive-green skirt, and black turtleneck from the Gap, in front of a standing-room-only crowd of six hundred students, professors, and administrators, I delivered the speech that I’d written out by hand and practiced in front of the full-length mirror Fun-Takked to the door of my single dorm room in Henry Hall. Women were at Princeton, for better or worse. It was time for us to be at the same Princeton as our classmates, a Princeton where all the doors were open.

  Some of the audience members applauded. A few of the rowdier guys hissed. A few more groaned when T.I.’s lawyer clumsily defended the eating club’s members as broad-minded and inclusive because, a few years back, they’d elected a “big black guy” as their president. Sally Frank leaned over and whispered that I had to clap for him, no matter how offensive I found his remarks. There was no victor declared that night. The next day’s story in the Daily Princetonian didn’t quote a single line of my speech. But I walked home, through that grand, ivied campus, for once, feeling like a winner, feeling like no one could tell me that I didn’t belong.

  By spring, the issue of coeducation wasn’t just the concern of a tiny clique of radicals. Undergrads and graduate students, staff and administrators and alums were showing up and speaking out. Melissa and I organized a rally in front of Robertson Hall. For weeks leading up to the event, professors would teach wearing pro-coed buttons that we’d had made. On the night of the rally, Sally Frank spoke to the crowd, along with the university’s vice president, Thomas Wright, class of 1962, a lean, tweedy, perfectly correct man and a onetime member of Ivy, who denounced his club’s practices. Still, it was a sophomore, Hillary Hodges, speaking on behalf of sixty sophomore women who’d petitioned to bicker at the clubs, who was probably the most convincing when she said, “Let us join. . . . We want to help you pay for your beer!” Two weeks after the rally, the undergraduate membership of both remaining all-male clubs voted to admit women. Later that spring, the Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal that Tiger Inn’s legal team had pushed for on the grounds that the club’s membership should be able to choose, instead of being forced, to accept women.

  After that vote—which I’m still proud of—I wrote letters to the Daily Princetonian, opinion pieces for the Nassau Weekly, and columns for the monthly Princeton Progressive, where, thanks to a course on ancient Greek drama, I had the best pseudonym ever: Liz Sistrata. I sang Mozart pieces with the Glee Club and organized buses for pro-choice demonstrations in Washington. I worked fifteen hours a week, first at the dining halls and then as a waitress at one of the eating clubs, and still found time to stay, nominally, with my older hometown boyfriend while nursing a dead-end crush on a senior classics major named Jon Sender, whose thesis included the unforgettable line “Sacrificial pig in tow” (it sounds better in Greek).

  At the Nassau Weekly, Princeton’s news, culture, and opinion magazine, I became a staff writer, then a senior writer, then an opinion editor, and spent long Tuesday nights on the top floor of Aaron Burr Hall with a pot of glue and an X-Acto knife, printing out stories from the paper’s Mac Classic, then cutting and pasting copy and headlines that would be driven to the printer in Trenton, then distributed on Thursday mornings.

  On weekends, when the rest of the campus got drunk on Prospect Avenue, I would disappear into one of the subterranean levels of Firestone Library, sometimes with a cup from Thomas Sweet ice cream, chocolate chocolate chip topped with bittersweet hot fudge. I would sit with a book, spooning my treat into my mouth faster and faster, until my tongue, then my lips, then my entire face went numb, until I couldn’t feel anything but the sweetness and the cold and how hard my heart would beat when all that sugar hit my veins. Sometimes I’d study, or I’d lose myself in a novel. I would tell myself that I wasn’t lonely, and wouldn’t even think of the shame that was underneath the loneliness and how I felt like a failure and a fraud. This will get better, I would think.

  A college story: I remember one night sitting on the saggy porch at 2 Dickinson Street, the vegetarian co-op called Two D where I took my meals my senior year, not because I was a vegetarian, but because it was the least expensive option, a few hundred dollars a semester versus the thousands that even Terrace cost. The porch, with rotting boards and flaking paint, was lined with cast-off couches and battered armchairs, and I was passionately making the case for equality with an Ivy member nicknamed Trip, a fellow who had a first name that sounded like a last name, and a Roman numeral at the end of his actual last name, and who seemed more bemused than irritated. “Membership has its privileges,” he kept saying, as if repeating a credit-card slogan could change my mind. I’d argue that merely being born with the right kind of genitalia over another shouldn’t be the qualifying criteria for anything. “Princeton discriminates,” he said. “It discriminates against dumb people.” I rolled my eyes, thinking that right there before me was a walking, talking example that such discrimination did not always apply.

  “You need a brain to do the work at Princeton. So tell me,” I said, winding up for the grand slam, “exactly what’s going on in your eating club that requires a penis?”

  Zing! I stood on the porch, flushed with triumph, until one of the Two D denizens, a girl with creamy skin and straight, gleaming blond hair, pulled me aside and whispered, “Your fly is down.”

  Princeton.

  Inadequacy and impostor syndrome are painful. They’re also great motivators. I worked my ass off in college, eschewing parties and flirtations and late-night, dope-and-booze-fueled bullshit sessions about What It All Means in favor of work and work and more work. I didn’t drink. I never once skipped class—not after the morning freshman year when, bored in an anthropology lecture, I’d calculated how much each class cost, dividing the tuition check by the number of times each course met each semester. I don’t remember what the exact number was, but it was high enough to convince me not to skip a single lecture or preceptorial. Rather than settle for the required four classes, most semesters, I took five. I was determined to wring every possible advantage out of my expensive education, studying with every star professor who’d have me, learning as much about every subject as I could, taking on extra projects for extra credit, turning my senior thesis in early. I was a girl in a hurry, a girl in an extra-large black cotton Gap dress and black tights and knockoff Doc Martens from Payless, with her books in the same purple backpack she’d bought in high school, long hair pulled into a velvet scrunchie, head down, race-walking to the library. I was eager to get my degree and let it start opening the doors I’d been promised it would unlock, eager to stop costing money and start earning it, eager to begin to find my feet, and start to find my place in the world.

  * * *

  I. The rare boy/girlfriend in Canada who was actually in existence.

  II. A few words here about the Mus, the sorority sisters in Revenge of the Nerds. The movie is one of my favorites, and it is both hugely entertaining and hugely problematic (the scene where Lewis basically tricks the pretty sorority girl Betty Childs into letting him go down on her by disguising himself as her football-hero boyfriend? We have a phrase for that, pal, and that phrase is date rape). Then there were the Omega Mus, the sister sorority to the socially outcast Tri-Lams, heavy and unattractive women whose looks were played for laughs. On the one hand, the portrayal of the ladies of Omega Mu confirmed everything I’d learned about how the world treats fat women, and confirmed my worst fears about how college boys would treat me. The nerds are so nerdy that the only girls who will come to their party are the fattie
s! The Mus—pronounced “Moos,” of course—are so hideous that of course the BMOC frat taunts them by releasing a herd of greased pigs at the Lambda Lambda Lambda bash! However, the Mus gave me the all-too-rare chance to see women who looked like me on-screen. And the scene where Dudley “Booger” Dawson is blissfully dancing with, and squeezing on, the big behind of one of the Mus left me with the teensiest flicker of hope. Even if it was clear, when one of the Mus cut in on her sister, and Booger, with his eyes still shut, instantly began squeezing her butt, that he, and the movie, saw the larger ladies as completely interchangeable and nothing more than objectified body parts. Plus, the Mus, “clappin’ along” during the Nerds’ big performance, looked pretty damn good. And one of the Nerds ended up with a Mu as a girlfriend. Not one of the fat ones, but they were in love, and she didn’t get the classic movie makeover, or pull off her glasses and emerge as a babe—she just stayed nerdy. Message: someone needs to do a feminist update of Revenge of the Nerds, and it absolutely must include Curtis Armstrong’s cry of “You Mus sure know how to party!”

  Worth

  On our way home from visiting colleges in the fall of 1986, my mother told me that my father was leaving. We were at the Vince Lombardi Service Area on the New Jersey Turnpike, where we’d stopped to get gas. I don’t remember what we were wearing, how she looked or even exactly what she said, but I remember how it smelled—like fried chicken and disinfectant—and how the other people had their travel faces on, the blank looks people wear when they know they’re not going to be seeing coworkers or bumping into neighbors or spouses or children.

  “He might be gone by the time we get back,” she said. I was shocked, even though there had been clues. The cross-country trip they’d taken the summer I was in Israel had gone disastrously, culminating with my mom getting out of the car and walking in a breakdown lane in Utah while my father drove behind her, muttering, “This trip has come to a grinding halt.” When they came home, there had been fights, conducted in whispers, late at night. Sometimes my father didn’t come home at all, and worse than both the fights and the absences were the nights when he’d stood out front with the light on, underneath the window of the bedroom I shared with my sister, smoking.