Chapter 6
Every Monday evening, my mother called the dormitory phone line at seven on the dot to ask me how the week had been.
How my social life was going. Had I met any French girls?
What about Irish ones? Were there any—deep breath here—Jewish or Muslim girls in the building?
Did they pray in front of me? Did they smell like me, or was the odor different?
My mother had given birth to my sister when she was eighteen, then me when she was twenty.
College hadn’t been a consideration. Worldly travels were not an option.
The farthest she had ever traveled was to Arizona for a wedding.
At the airport, her anxiety about my decision to go to college had been palpable, but now—perhaps because she’d never had the opportunity to do so herself, or perhaps as a means of redirecting her anxieties about her daughter living so far away—she talked nonstop about how exciting it was for me to be there.
I can’t imagine how many interesting people you’ll meet!
In response, for the first time in my life, I lied to my mother. I told her it was exactly as she was picturing it, because I thought she’d have a nervous breakdown if I told her the truth.
No, college was not the intellectual oasis I had hoped it would be.
There were no lecture hall sparring matches of the likes of Socrates and Plato, no passionate debates over free will and creation and the divine, intellectual light of man.
Nor, though, was it Gomorrah, as my sister and mother had worried it would be.
Or at least: not as they might have imagined it to be.
Rather, I’d found myself in a highly claustrophobic holding tank for rich kids.
An artificially intelligent Eden: a warm, incubated landscape designed to keep the worst kids in America safe and warm and well-fed until they matured past the urge to peck each other’s eyes out.
At first, I thought my roommate troubles would be my biggest challenge, but Reena hadn’t brought anyone home since that first night, and then school began, and the true nightmare revealed itself to me.
In the first several weeks, I sat frozen in the front row of each class while brash, marble-mouthed kids from Chicago and Los Angeles and Darien talked loudly from the back row.
The boys complained about power hegemonies and overseas military interventions, waving their uncalloused palms, even their fingernails unnervingly clean.
As for the girls, they proclaimed their horror at the wage gap between the sexes, and while I first thought a shocking number of them had the same medical issue, I soon realized their fingers and hands and forearms were all tie-dyed a grim shade of orange from the fake tanner that passed through our dorm hallways like a spiritual totem.
On weeknights, the girls in my hall piled into one room and drank Smirnoff Vodka mixed with zero-calorie grapefruit juice while they complained about their parents, their boarding schools, their high school boyfriends.
No one was grateful to be here. As far as I could see, no one was grateful for anything at all.
They all planned to be wives and mothers, and yet they absolutely hated men and kids.
They talked about nuclear families the same way they talked about the nuclear bomb.
It was a destructive, sexist, militaristic, heteronormative force designed to ruin the world.
Literally, they would add for emphasis, at the end of every statement they made that could not possibly work in any literal sense.
Lit-tral-ly. When they talked about stay-at-home mothers—specifically about their stay-at-home-mothers—their eyes didn’t go misty with gratitude.
Instead, they argued bravely that old-school femininity was a scourge.
Any woman who chose to stay in the home instead of working in the world was complicit.
Any woman who identified as a homemaker was both a victim and a perpetrator.
“Of what?” I made the mistake of asking once, in the beginning.
The girls exchanged a series of looks. The Amish girl has spoken!
Then Reena—who, over the early days of school, had been visibly disappointed to realize she wasn’t going to climb as high up on the social ladder as she had clearly planned to, and who obviously found me at least partially responsible for this fact—cleared her throat and said tiredly, “The patriarchy, Natalie.”
Duh.
Someone always had a sister who’d left her job to take care of the kids because the daycare costs compared to her salary didn’t check out.
Someone always had a cousin whose nipples and sleep schedule and sex life were being destroyed by breastfeeding.
Someone always had a mother who was actively drinking herself to death in the suburbs while the father played 52 Pickup with some restaurant hostess in the city.
One night, one of the girls said (I kid you not, I quote her verbatim), “I really want to get an elective C-section because then the baby’s head won’t be all lumpy when it comes out.
” On another night, Reena told everyone about what happened the first night of school, about the horrible night she’d spent with that boy.
He was a predator, she insisted. He gave off major rape vibes.
He’d skull-fucked her, she said—she could barely breathe!
—and then he’d pressured her into sex, and everyone should write his name down, they should remember it and never go home with him, because men like him could not, could never, be trusted.
I sat on the opposite bunk bed, mute with horror, while she went on.
I was already aware that these young women enjoyed blurring the line between fact and fiction—nuclear families were destructive?
C-sections desirable? Pray tell, ladies, in what world?
—but here, now, was a glaring journalistic error, a false insurance claim about a hit-and-run that never happened, and I was the only witness.
Be nice, my mother warned.
I stared into the cup of sparkling water in my lap.
Each night, after two or three hours of this kind of group discussion, the girls would say good night, and I would slowly put my nightgown on, feeling lightheaded and a little bit sick.
It felt like I was being waterboarded to death by modernity.
As I got into bed—my fingers shaking so hard I could barely pull back my sheets—it was my mother my mind groped blindly toward, like a dying plant twisting itself into contortions toward the light.
I thought of the aprons she hand-embroidered for my sister and me, our names in perfect pink cursive across the breast pocket, and I bit my tongue until it bled.
An excruciating thing to admit: I missed being around women who were nice.
It was grim. I’d gotten exactly what I wanted: a school where everyone was profoundly, jaw-droppingly unlikable. I could practically hear the Lord whispering in my ear: Be careful what you wish for, little lamb. You just might get it.
The situation was not tenable. But each time I filed a request to move to a single room in another dorm building, the request was denied.
“Are you in an unsafe situation?” my RA adviser asked one day. After my seventh formal request to move, she had paid me a visit while Reena was in class.
“Well,” I hedged. “Not physically, no, but spiritually?” I nodded vigorously. “Very much so.”
But she was already handing my request back to me. “I’m sorry, but they’re not going to approve this.”
And then one night, the Lord delivered in the most unexpected of ways.
It was a Thursday evening. Reena was getting ready to host another pregame in our room.
Tonight was going to be a big night for Reena, I had gathered, through the conversations she had with other girls in front of me.
She was going to hook up with a guy she’d been talking to for weeks.
Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Reena take her fourth shot of vodka in twenty minutes.
Predator, I thought, from the safe cocoon of my bed.
I’d long since given up the pretense of drinking at these events.
I was in pajamas, under the covers, a textbook open in my lap.
A trio of girls arrived, looking nervously around at our empty dorm room. Undoubtedly they had thought more people would be here. “Are we early?”
“Ohmigod, hi!” Reena trilled, sailing past the awkwardness. “Come in, come in, come in, I was just pouring your drinks.”
Two of the girls lived in our hall and therefore had learned over the early weeks of school not to talk to me. That Catholic girl is weird! But one of the girls was from another dorm. “Hey,” she said. “Natalie, right?” When I looked at her, she added, “We’re in the same gender studies class.”
Reena frowned. “Isn’t that, like, a four-hundred-person lecture?”
“Well, yeah, but Natalie got into this intense debate with the professor the other day about biological differences. She had all these studies lined up in her arsenal, too, like bam, women are physically weaker, bam, men aren’t good at domestic chores because their eyesight is designed for predatorial work, bam, the female body is designed to nurture, and what do you think of that?
The professor was sooooo pissed,” the girl said, and laughed. “It was honestly hilarious.”
I didn’t say anything. I had thought that the professor had enjoyed that debate. A terribly lonely thought fell over me: everyone here, even the faculty, seemed to hate me.
“Whatever,” Reena said. “Natalie doesn’t care what other people think. Do you, Natalie?”