You Think It, I'll Say It(12)
When I started college, my father had been the one to accompany me to campus—this time we flew, changing planes in Chicago—and prior to classes, I’d attended a freshman orientation camping trip in the White Mountains. The night after the trip ended, several girls on my hall assembled by the stairwell to walk to a fraternity party; it was a minor triumph that I’d managed to attach myself to this group. As we descended the steps, the girl in front, a very pretty blond tennis player from Washington, D.C., named Annabel, called over her shoulder, “I heard they call this the GFU party.” She paused, then added merrily, “Short for Get Fucked Up.”
There were eight or nine girls in the group, and I was bringing up the rear. When I froze, I’m sure no one noticed. I stood there while they descended another flight, and then I returned to my room and lay on my bed and listened to a Garth Brooks CD (my father and I had attended two of his concerts together) and eventually pulled out the MCAT study guide I sometimes looked at before bed; it was a five-hundred-page eight-by-eleven paperback, and something about it was very comforting to me. The girls did, apparently, notice my absence eventually, because the next day one of them said, “Where did you go last night? We all were wondering!” I said I’d felt sick, which in a way I had. For my entire freshman year, I didn’t set foot in a fraternity house or, for that matter, a sorority house.
Over the summer, in Des Moines, I spent mornings babysitting for a family with two little boys and afternoons volunteering at the hospital where my father worked. On my bedside table I kept a list of concrete things I could do to improve my life at Dartmouth, which included:
-Once a week if someone seems nice and approachable ask if they want to go out for pizza at EBA’s
-At least say hi to but try to also smile at people I pass
-Join the debate team?
Back on campus, I lived in a single again, and as I pulled sheets over the twin mattress for the first time, I wondered, but not optimistically, if this was the bed where I’d lose my virginity.
As it happened, I didn’t join the debate team, and I didn’t execute my EBA’s pizza initiative because, after the very first English seminar, I was leaving the classroom in Sanborn House when a female voice behind me said, “What a douchebag.” There was a boy walking not with but parallel to me, about five feet away, and we made confused eye contact, unsure if the comment was addressed to either or both of us.
When I looked over my shoulder, I saw that the speaker was Rae Sullivan. In a disgruntled but chummy tone, as if we’d previously had many similar conversations, she added, “I heard he was full of himself, but his arrogance exceeded my wildest expectations.” She was referring, I assumed, to the seminar instructor. Although it was a literature class, he had started by telling us he was a poet and spent fifteen minutes describing his work. He’d called it language poetry, a term I had never heard. But I hadn’t been bothered by the personal digression; I’d found it impressive.
“I read one of his poems, and it’s literally about having anal sex with his wife,” Rae was saying. “And I’ve seen her, and she’s a total cow.”
I said, “I’m taking the class to fulfill the English requirement.” This was as close as I could get to disparaging a professor.
The boy, who had introduced himself in class as Isaac, said, “I found the poems in his first book derivative of Ashbery.”
Rae looked between Isaac and me, intensely, for a few seconds, as if making a decision, then said, “Do you guys want to go smoke a joint?”
* * *
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After Rae and Isaac and I became best friends, it occurred to me only occasionally to wonder whom we were replacing. Who had been Rae’s previous best friends? I somehow knew that her freshman roommate had been a girl named Sally Alexander, but she and Sally didn’t seem to hang out anymore. Much like my freshman-year neighbor Annabel, she of the GFU party, Sally was blond and very pretty; on the Dartmouth campus, there was a disproportionate number of blond and very pretty girls, socially adept girls, sometimes gracefully anorexic or anorexic-ish girls. I’d observed several who ate no fat, ever; for breakfast, they had a bagel, for lunch a bagel and salad without dressing, and for dinner a bagel, salad without dressing, and frozen yogurt. Not that I witnessed it, but they apparently drank a lot of beer; as a freshman, I had found the term boot and rally so anthropologically interesting that I’d shared it with my parents, thereby disturbing my mother. I had a strong sense that, among these poised, preppy, winsomely eating-disordered girls, I couldn’t compete for male attention; faced with the enticements of such creatures, what boy would want my dowdy Iowan virginity?
Like me, Rae avoided fraternity parties, which at Dartmouth in 1994 meant avoiding parties. Unexpectedly, she too had a single—hers was in Allen House—and in the evening, after dinner, she liked to sit on her bed, roll and smoke a joint, and watch a VHS tape of Edward Scissorhands on her TV. I’d usually leave just before the part of the movie when the housewife tried to seduce Edward, because it stressed me out on behalf of both Edward and the housewife. We were often joined by Isaac, who had grown up in Atlanta and whom I intuitively understood to be gay and closeted. He was short, slim, black haired, and excellent at participating in long, analytical discussions of Rae’s two favorite topics, which were her relationship with her boyfriend and people on the Dartmouth campus she hated. In retrospect, I realize that I learned a lot from Isaac about the art of conversation—asking specific follow-up questions, offering non-sycophantic compliments (sycophantic never seemed sincere), and showing patience in the face of repetitive subject matter. Unlike me, Isaac did share Rae’s joints; I’d tried a few times, felt like possibly I was smoking wrong and definitely I was reaping no clear benefit, worried about the short-and long-term impacts on my memory, and declined from that point on, which neither of them seemed to mind.