MY PARENTS AND I pulled through the gates of Vassar College in our Toyota van and entered another world, one of turrets and ivy and beautiful, almost grown children. I wore a plain black pocket T-shirt from the Gap, inexpertly cut-off thigh-length denim shorts, a Debbie Gibson–style black bowler hat, and an extra twenty pounds.
On our third round of carrying boxes up the stairs into my dorm room, we saw them: Franny, her mother, Claire, and Claire’s live-in boyfriend, Sam. They seemed a different species. Franny was a muse in the making. She was delicate, skinny, disorganized, and brought suitcases crammed with vintage blazers, wool miniskirts, and cream silk blouses. She had wavy brown hair, Dr. Martens, perfectly worn-in Levi’s, and a pair of Bakelite plastic bracelets around her slender wrists. Claire was spritelike, an artist with a pixie haircut in shiny black wide-legged pants she’d sewn herself. Sam was younger, in his late thirties, and wore sneakers and a hoodie. Franny’s father, I’d soon learn, used to write an ultra-hip nightlife column, and lived downtown. Weeks later, Franny shyly showed me a photo of herself as a child sitting on Andy Warhol’s lap. Her family was what my mother, in her color-coordinated teacher outfit, and my father, in his sensible Rockport walking shoes and Dockers chinos, called bohemian.
Franny and I approached each other awkwardly. We’d spoken on the phone earlier that August but only once; I’d dropped a note off with her doorman, and she’d called. At my parents’ prodding, I’d asked if she might want to go 50/50 on dorm room essentials. Sitting on my childhood bed, I’d started down my list. An answering machine? A refrigerator?
“A refrigerator?” She’d laughed. Her lack of concern felt revolutionary. “What music do you like?” she asked, her one question. A test, I realized.
“The Smiths,” I answered. “Depeche Mode? Um, James Taylor.”
“Oh,” she said noncommittally.
Now we were here, together. She tacked up a Bell Biv DeVoe poster and played a Jimmy Cliff album, The Harder They Come, on her record player. I tried to decipher this new formulation of cool. Vassar had fewer than twenty-four hundred students, just twice as many as had attended my high school. We had the run of a pristine campus with tennis courts, a lake, chapel, dorms that looked straight out of the English countryside, and the most beautiful college library in the country. Franny knew everyone already, or at least it seemed that way.
Franny had gone to the best private schools, and she was descended from the Mayflower Pilgrims and a wealthy blue-blood family (though her trust fund had dried up and she was on financial aid, like me). While I’d been at suburban keg parties, Franny had spent her teenage years at downtown clubs.
Vassar attracted similarly well-connected New York City kids who were artistic and intellectually curious—good but not necessarily workaholic students who’d crossed paths at interschool parties and beach houses. And here they were, knocking on the door of my room to see Franny. By the time we’d unpacked, tall skinny boys at the peak of their sexiness, with baseball caps and one-hitters, were sprawled on her bed, playing conscious hip-hop on my pink portable stereo. The sound track of freshman year was A Tribe Called Quest’s debut album: “Bonita Applebum” and “Can I Kick It” and “I Left My Wallet in El Segundo.”
As part of our financial aid packages, Franny and I had work-study jobs, but they were genteel old-fashioned ones that wouldn’t interfere with classes or socializing. I served afternoon tea in the Rose Parlor on the second floor of Main Building. Franny made posters for the career counseling office and could work from anywhere, so she’d join me. We’d bill $4.50 an hour while sitting on Victorian settee couches, a grand piano by the window and the timeworn carpet in college maroon. Franny traced letters onto her poster boards before committing to colored marker or black Sharpie. With my reading sprawled out beside me, I checked the hot-water levels in the tea urn and refreshed the cookie plate on the quarter hour.
Unexpectedly, we became fast and best friends. In those long nowhere-else-to-be afternoons, we’d start up our conversation wherever we’d last left off. Since we were together more than we were apart, our reports were on the smallest, most intimate scale: what happened in class, on the way from class, what happened the summer before seventh grade. We had existential conversations, too, about who we were and who we wanted to be in the world. Money, we felt, was not the goal. What was, then? Love? Goodness? Beauty?
Franny was taking the famous Vassar art history survey, a math class, and beginning Spanish. I had introduction to theater, a Shakespeare course, and American politics. Together we signed up for intro to sociology. We took ourselves and, on occasion, our studies seriously. That first year I went home for the Jewish holidays with a thin copy of The Yellow Wallpaper and a fat copy of Émile Durkheim’s Suicide, which I read on the family room couch, to my grandmother’s dismay. Franny and I listened over and over to the music we could agree on—cassettes of the Police, Talking Heads, Squeeze’s Cool for Cats, Bob Marley, that Jimmy Cliff record, and lots of early R.E.M. Our room was kept warm, all the campus buildings were, and we’d go around shedding and donning layers. Franny signed up for drawing and painting classes and carried her oversize sketchpad across campus. She didn’t bother getting the charcoal out from under her fingernails and was always doodling in her notebooks. She wore her hair back off her face in barrettes. The vintage jackets and the wool skirts and the cream blouses stayed in our closet; instead she put on the same Levi’s and two thin wool sweaters layered under a blue zip-up sweatshirt that reminded me of the kind my father wore. In our room with a cigarette in one hand, she’d draw micro-universes in shades of gray. Sometimes she’d draw me.
We smoked everywhere: in our rooms, in the large smoking section of the dining hall, in the bar, on the steps in front of the library. Franny smoked Marlboro Lights, and I got used to the taste and switched my brand to hers, sometimes even daring to charge entire cartons at the school bookstore on my student account, which was paid for by my parents and to be used for books and tampons and toothpaste. The cigarettes were itemized under “miscellany.”
We bought cheap forties of beer to drink before going out, to save ourselves money and the effort of waiting on long lines at the kegs. When Franny drank, she was sweet beyond measure. At parties, affectionate and giggly, she’d sit cross-legged in a corner and focus in on me for the umpteenth time that day. Unlike a boy, who might talk to me when drunk or high while scanning the room for better options, her attentions were unflagging. We’d wake up together and go to breakfast at the dining hall, walk each other to class, meet at the library, make plans for dinner and for later on at the campus bar. We’d part and meet and part and meet again. We fell asleep talking and woke up with more to say. When she found an older boyfriend with a single room, she made a point to spend some nights at home with me. With Franny, I came to feel safe, chosen, awash in friendship, companionship, and love. These were new feelings.
In our room, with the beds pushed along opposite walls and our heads still only a few feet apart, we told each other our life stories. Her parents’ divorce, our respective family money problems. As another late-night talk session edged toward dawn, each of us smoking in our bed, I decided I would do it. I would tell Franny the truth about my father. I had never told a friend before.
“If I tell you something,” I asked, “something about my father, will you promise not to hate him?”
She nodded.
I took a deep breath. “My father hit me,” I said. That’s how I formulated the problem in my mind. It was easier to think about and say hit than abused. I put it in the past tense like that—hit rather than hits—because 1) the violence had pretty much stopped by then, and it had been a while since he’d done anything worse than yell or threaten; and 2) I thought it sounded better, like I’d already put the problem behind me.
“What?” Franny said, startled, reaching for another cigarette. Her father hadn’t been around much after he and her mother had separated when Franny was two. But I could tell by her voice, and the way she looked at me from across the width of that narrow room, reevaluating me, that she thought this was a much bigger deal. I hadn’t realized before that it would be.
Franny was sympathetic and asked the right questions but didn’t judge or question why I accepted my parents’ money and kept up the front of having a happy family. We were used to imperfect fathers, to pretending that everything was fine when it wasn’t.
Franny’s father wrote an essay for a magazine about their relationship. She’d gone to the city for the photo shoot but was embarrassed about the piece now that it was actually coming out. We walked to the college bookstore for a copy and read it on the checkout line. He described being a shitty, absent father until Franny was in high school and old enough to go out clubbing with him. He mentioned that she sometimes went to sleep in her clothes and slept until the afternoon. She was mortified but also half flattered. I understood. I knew the familial trick of scraping off the bad, humiliating parts of an experience. Her father was a famous writer. Her photograph was in a magazine. I bought my own copy and brought it home to impress my family.
* * *
Semesters passed. Intimidated by the classically beautiful, waiflike girls with creamy complexions and oatmeal-colored hair looking over their lines while waiting for their names to be called at auditions, I gave up on being a theater major. I wasn’t meant to be onstage after all, I decided. I couldn’t compete. I’d rather be in the library reading and avoiding rejection. I’d rather be with Franny and the rest of our friends, drinking and talking all night.
Franny didn’t judge me for my failure. I took women’s studies, personality theory, modern dance, abnormal psych, a class on gender and colonialism. She studied Caravaggio and began an independent study on Chicano mural art. We read Virginia Woolf and bell hooks and Hannah Arendt and Audre Lorde and John Berger and Adrienne Rich and Susan Sontag and Karl Marx. Together we took a class on the 1960s, and later, a philosophy course on love.
During those four years, I spent more time with Franny than I’d ever spent with anyone outside my family—more, considering the difference between a shut door and a shared room. We even became depressed at the same time: Who could go the longest number of days without showering, without shampooing? Who could stay in studying more than two nights in a row? We egged each other on, whether to drink more or to get better grades. We read our papers aloud to each other. We got bronchitis and kept on smoking anyway. When my father cursed or threatened me, I held the phone up so she could hear. She shook her head, reminding me that he was the crazy one, not me. Franny was appalled that my father would ever have laid a hand on me, and I loved her for her indignation. We made pacts. She read to me from her journals, and I confessed what I’d been afraid to write in mine. Then my nightmares started up, nightmares that would plague me for the next twenty years. I dreamed of my father chasing me with a knife, of my father coming to kill me. I’d wake up soaked and screaming. Franny was there to comfort me.
Along with the rest of our friends, we’d jump up and down on our single beds and sing and dance at two in the morning to Billy Joel’s “All for Leyna” or the Violent Femmes’ “Blister in the Sun.” We’d sprawl on a couch in the turrets of the college library, holed up in the reading rooms there, alternating between studying and intimacies. In the dorm, we procrastinated on our papers in the early-morning hours and pulled all-nighters, talking through our problems with our tight-knit group. We’d lie on a bed together, two or three or four girls at a time, sharing family secrets. One father had done time in federal prison for a white-collar crime.
Late one night, my head on a friend’s lap, I decided to say something. I felt cocooned by them, protected and safe and far away from my family. Franny knew my secret, but the others didn’t.
“My father abused me,” I told them. I had gained confidence by then. Their eyes widened. “Physically,” I rushed to add.
I played down even this confession. It wasn’t like he’d raped me. He hadn’t ever broken a bone or sent me to the emergency room. I hadn’t been locked in a closet, or deprived of food, or choked until I passed out, or made to bleed until I lost consciousness. It wasn’t that big a deal.
“He’s changed, though . . . I think.” I wavered. Maybe I’d miscalculated. Maybe this was a mistake. “He wouldn’t do that to me now. He hasn’t hit me in over a year.”
My girlfriends smoothed my hair. I wanted them to know I still loved him. I didn’t want them to act weird on parents’ weekend. Though I ached to talk about my childhood and needed my friends to take my side, I couldn’t stand to have any of them hate my father, not even Franny, in part because that meant I’d no longer pass as a “normal” person, with parents who loved me.
* * *
I found out the truth about my great-uncle Leo during a phone conversation with Josh in my freshman year. Either Josh forgot that I hadn’t been told or he figured I should have been.
Uncle Leo hadn’t died of lung cancer after all, Josh said. Leo had hanged himself.
I couldn’t believe it. Leo had committed suicide in his seventies, after escaping the Nazis, moving to New York, and devoting himself to taking care of Bertha. Everyone in my family knew but me. So that was why I hadn’t been allowed to go to the funeral, I realized, furious at my father for deceiving me. Mostly, I couldn’t stop picturing Leo hanging by a rope in his apartment.
When I called my parents and asked why they’d kept this from me, they said at sixteen I was too young to handle the truth. They’d lied in order to protect me, they explained. Maybe they didn’t want to put any ideas into my head.
* * *
Back home in Rockville Centre over Thanksgiving or Christmas break, I wanted to tell Kathy about my father but was scared of what she’d say or think. Would she believe me? We were in her room, sitting on her bed. She listened and went pale. Kathy had known it was bad, that something was off about my father and family, but she hadn’t realized just how bad. She didn’t know about the hitting.
“Please forgive me?” she said. She hugged me for a long time, and together we cried.
* * *
Mark asked a girl to marry him at the end of my freshman year. Abigail had gone to an exclusive Manhattan private school but ended up at Washington University rather than Sarah Lawrence or Smith after she’d secretly bailed on the SATs twice. She dressed in long flowered Putumayo dresses, or in plain mom jeans paired with seasonally themed sweaters, worn with the barest minimum of irony. She said things like yessireebobdoodle, and none of us could figure out if she was joking, but it seemed she wasn’t. Abigail’s younger brother went to an Ivy League school and was into juggling. Their family lived on Park Avenue.
When he’d first started dating Abigail, Mark had told Josh, who had told me, that she was rich. Really, really rich. The family apartment was a vast and gracious too-many-tastefully-decorated-rooms-to-count home in a prewar co-op building with high ceilings and huge living and dining rooms and a luxurious all-white kitchen straight out of a design magazine. The kind of place with fresh-cut flowers arranged in a vase on an oval table in an entryway, real artwork, and views of Central Park. Her parents were vice presidents at their respective investment banks. They served on boards and attended charity functions and had elite name-brand friends and business connections. Abigail’s mother came from money, but her father was self-made, Mark said. Which gave my brother hope that he might end up with a Park Avenue apartment someday, too.
But Abigail was sick. She was painfully, excruciatingly underweight. Her hair was so fine and patchy that she looked almost like a cancer patient. She skipped breakfast and lunched on apples or cantaloupe or celery and ate big bowls of steamed cauliflower or broccoli for dinner. She ran religiously or went to the gym, or both, every day. Mark worried about Abigail’s emotional sturdiness but had a warped admiration for the way she could control herself around food, mistaking her illness for discipline and willpower and health, and her obsessive running for athleticism.
Maybe Mark was in denial. I’d heard rumors from Josh that she’d been through treatment, perhaps more than once. Her problems struck me as tragic but glamorous. A serious eating disorder like that was something only rich girls could afford. Maybe Mark had the same thought. He loved her, sick or not. Abigail, Mark declared, was the kind of girl who wouldn’t nag or pester or criticize or dwell on the negative. She might even go camping. She was the kind of woman he wanted raising his children.
It was important to Mark, and to our mother, that I like Abigail and that we become good friends. Abigail wrote me letters on stationery, filling pages with her childlike bubble handwriting. She took me to the Frick and Shakespeare in the Park. After she graduated, Mark presented her with the engagement ring he’d been keeping in his sock drawer in Florida, where he worked for Procter & Gamble. Abigail’s parents gave Mark a watch from Tiffany. They were to be married the following May.
* * *
At the end of my freshman year, I came down with mono and had to leave school early and take incompletes, finishing two papers in the summer. On a drive into town to check my nearly empty bank account, I noticed the sign in a storefront office window advertising summer jobs for the environment. NYPIRG, the environmental and consumer protection group started by Ralph Nader, had opened their Long Island summer canvassing office in downtown Rockville Centre. I walked in and met the two young canvassing directors who ran the office. Joe was tall and greasily handsome and from the UK. Alex was sarcastic and funny and wore Birkenstocks. He was Asian-American and his family lived in Freeport, near the canals, the next town east on Sunrise Highway. He was going into his senior year at Columbia.
We were to knock on doors, fund-raise for the environment, and keep a cut for ourselves as salary. Against my mother’s protests about my safety and her concern that I wouldn’t make enough money, I took the job. (My father took my side.) It was easy for me, a nice Jewish Vassar girl, to ask strangers for donations on their doorstep. My first day out, my field manager, Miles, handed me a turf map and a couple of membership renewal cards. I came back to the pickup spot that evening with a thick stack of checks tucked into my clipboard, including one for a hundred dollars. Miles laughed, pleased. Alex and Joe promoted me to field manager and invited me to a training weekend at an old summer camp upstate.
Alex sat next to me on the drive up and packed a bowl, passing it around with his fluorescent lighter on top, and we got stoned driving through the darkness from the suburbs into the country, listening to Van Morrison’s Moondance album. We shared a blanket in the car and gradually allowed our hands to touch. That Saturday night, after a day of workshops and a vegetarian dinner, Alex found me sitting on the porch and put his arm around my waist. By morning we were a couple.
Alex wore tie-dye and listened to hip-hop and classic rock. He’d once had lunch with Ralph Nader, who, Alex reported, had personally told him to quit smoking. He was passionate about politics, and now he was passionate about me, too. Alex wrote me love notes and made me mixtapes and kissed me in front of everyone when the office closed and the regulars hung out and smoked in the back room. He told me that I was beautiful and that he would take care of me. He called me his koala bear.
Six weeks into our relationship, my parents went away on vacation. I’d been the one to convince Alex that we were ready. We took an old towel from the very back of the linen closet and put it on top of my bedsheet. He showed me what to do. Afterward, Alex said he loved me.
My mother found out that we were sleeping together from Josh, who was living at home that summer after his college graduation and told on me. At first she freaked out because she didn’t know Alex. How dare this boy have sex with you and not show his face here? After a few days, she calmed down. She and my father weren’t mad, exactly. They knew my brothers had been having sex with their girlfriends for years. At least I was in a serious-seeming relationship with an Ivy League–educated boy. It was probably a relief to her that I finally had a boyfriend, especially because my family had thought I might be more interested in women. My mother even brought me to her Park Avenue gynecologist to get on the birth control pill.
“There’s only so long you could wait,” she said on the way home from the doctor’s office. “I was engaged when I was nineteen.”
But Alex had to come to dinner. That was nonnegotiable.
The following Saturday, Alex showed up right on time in a button-down shirt, carrying flowers he couldn’t afford. To him I was a privileged Long Island girl. He hadn’t been brought up like me, with a family account at the pharmacy in town where I could charge maxipads and Advil without paying. He hadn’t gone to musical theater day camps and fancy college preparatory summer programs, even if I had paid for part of them myself.
When Alex made money at a part-time job, he shared it with his family. He majored in engineering not because he wanted to but because his parents expected him to get a real job and help support the family. Activism wouldn’t pay the bills, he told me. He was looking forward to making “forty G’s a year” after graduation, which sounded like a lot to both of us. Like my father, Alex was a child of struggling immigrants and the first in his family to attend college. Also like my father, Alex went to Columbia on a scholarship. His mother was a postal worker and his father a draftsman. They were Buddhists, not Christians, he told my mother as we sat down at the kitchen table; Alex and me on one side and my parents on the other, like we were couples with equal weight and power. Buddhist. That helped. My mother liked Alex well enough and said he could convert before we got engaged.
School started. We visited each other on the weekends when we had the train fare and the time off from studying. Seeing him after a week or two or three apart, I’d bury my head in the folds of his wool Guatemalan sweater. We’d make out in the library stacks, and he’d go down on me in my dorm room while we held hands. In the city, he’d cook me a stir-fry with oyster sauce in his communal dorm kitchen, or else we’d go to Ollie’s for wide chow fun noodles, or to Tom’s Restaurant for eggs and toast, or splurge on guacamole cheeseburgers at the West End on Broadway and 114th Street. Walking huddled together against the bitter winter wind of Riverside Drive, we noticed the way the sidewalk glinted and shimmered after dark under the streetlight. On Sundays we had to say goodbye. This was before the Internet or cell phones, and long-distance calls were expensive. When we were apart, we mailed each other love letters until we could have another weekend together. Occasionally we’d argue in a late-night phone call, and then Alex would take the next train up to see me.
For Chinese New Year, Alex brought me to a holiday meal at a restaurant in Flushing, Queens. Around a large round table loaded with plates of food, I met his family. Neither his mother nor grandmother spoke much English, but they squeezed my hand and gave me red gold-embossed envelopes stuffed fat with dollar bills.
One Sunday, Abigail’s parents came to our house for brunch. The two sets of parents had never met. The day reminded me of the long-ago trip to visit Aunt Edna and her family deep in Brooklyn or Queens, except this time Abigail and her parents were the ones slumming it, and we were the poor relations. Since I went to Vassar and was growing familiar with the type, I was unofficially nominated the family emissary for the wedding season. At the bridal shower, in yet another intimidatingly decorated Upper East Side apartment, I mingled and made small talk about my major and study-abroad plans. As bridesmaid, I dutifully organized the bachelorette night out and went with Abigail for her dress fittings.
The wedding was held at the Waldorf-Astoria on the last day of May. Abigail looked lovely. She was twenty-three and Mark was twenty-five. My parents cried because my mother always said that a daughter is a daughter for life, a son is a son until he takes a wife, and they were losing him. It rained, and everyone said that was good luck.
I studied Alex at the reception. He pretended not to notice the unfortunate cut of my bridesmaid dress. Was I actually going to marry my first boyfriend? I wondered if I could ever make Alex mad enough that he might hit me.
* * *
Alex and I worked at NYPIRG again that summer. A group of us hung out. Miles was older than the rest of us. He was black and liked to rap and lived in Queens. One night during an after-work party, I asked him to clean up a beer he’d accidentally knocked over. Who was I, he said. His mother? His boss? Was I seriously going to disrespect him? I guess we were both in the wrong. I was insensitive, oblivious to the obvious racial dynamics, and he was quick to anger. But when the conflict escalated and Miles called me a bitch and a spoiled JAP and Alex remained neutral, I felt abandoned. I wanted Alex to stick up for me and take my side. I didn’t say any of that to him, though. Maybe I didn’t realize it.
At the end of the summer, Alex was offered a full-time organizing job with NYPIRG at the state university in New Paltz, right across the river from Vassar. Forgoing the forty G’s, and against his parents’ wishes, he accepted and moved into a one-bedroom on Main Street with a bay window overlooking head shops and new-age bookstores and the health food store that sold Japanese rice-cracker snacks by the pound.
A few weeks later I ended things, telling Alex I needed to “see other people.”