Goodbye to All That, and Good Riddance

I WAS RIPE for something rotten even before I got it here. And that freshman year, four years ago, was rotten from the start. I can check off the reasons.

First, I was rich, and I didn't know then that money was a Bad Thing. I'd traipse in thrilled with news of an upcoming African cruise and naively read the tight-lipped hostility that greeted me as polite Eastern reserve, Or I'd be tanned in December and wonder why no one asked me where I'd been. First strike--I was a political pariah.

Second, I was from the Midwest, and the nouveau riche out there have a notion of high-falutin' Harvard. At Detroit cocktail parties when someone drops the name, a shock of respect invariably registers on the listener's face. Second strike--I suffered from a feeling of cultural inferiority.

Third, I was straight out of a provincial private school that failed to teach the tools of academic bullshit. I was bowled over by my first reading list, and understood not a word of my first lecture. Third strike--I thought I was one of the admissions' test tries, and a goof, at that.

Fourth, I was a virgin. And being fed on nineteenth century novels, I believed in "romantic love." And I had no intentions of losing my precious status until I was good and ready. Fourth strike--I was, by virtue of my female sex, a prick tease, a Bitch Goddess.

These were the seeds of the problem. But what brought the rotteness to bloom was a glamorous picture in the Freshman Register. Not that it was a glamorous picture by the standards of any other place. In any style-conscious suburb, it would have passed as an ordinary look, made out of the touch-up job that money buys: the dentist-made perfect teeth, the smooth complexion, the tan from the West Indies, the European sense of style, the hair subtly streaked, the wide open look and confident carriage from knowing none but a comfortable world. The picture looked like every other rich girl that looks like the "California Girl." But at Harvard, it was glamorous. And that was where all the trouble started.

It started with the phonecalls. I'd get about 20 a day, almost all of them from strange males, each after, in his own way, the same thing. That thing I was none too eager to lose. Now I can't really be sure that that was what they wanted, because I didn't let them get close enough to try. Not that I wouldn't have liked them individually given time. But a mass siege/assault hardly left me that time to find out.

THEY WERE CLEVER, though. The normal Clever Caller would follow up a polite introduction with a catch-her-off-balance fast jab, "What are you doing now?" And I'd be stupid and fumble for excuses, "I'm studying." "Great, then you'll need a coffee break." Panicked, "Well, actually, I was going to sleep." His oh-so-cool and patient laugh, "Oh come on now. At 10 p.m.?" "Yeah, well, I got bored." "Great. I'm downstairs" (the dorm was guarded by a switchboard) "I'll come right up and entertain you." At which point, having let myself in for it, I'd either go through with it and suffer, or I'd drop the niceness act--"Look, I just don't want to" and hang up mortified by the cruelty in rejection.

Then there were the not so clever but persistent ones. "You can't make it tonight, huh? What about tomorrow?...the night after? after that?...Well, what about Sunday morning?" And I, oh innocent me, would try to explain, "Look, I'd love to meet you. But this happens fifty times a day, and I just can't come through on every one, see? I mean, I'm sorry. I really am. Maybe I'll run into you and it will be love at first sight. Let's put our money on that, OK?" And he'd laugh and say OK and God would I feel guilty.

And there were the Rude Ones who'd slam down the phone with a snarl that usually had to do with my being just like all the others. Now I'd heard about "Cliffie bitches." I kept a lookout for them vowing to be different. But here I was fitting right into the groove--lacking the experience then to know it as a groove carefully carved out for me.

Back to phonecalls; because there were more, too many more. I could hang up on the Breathers; I ignored the men who exposed themselves at me in the streets at night; I ran away from the guy who grabbed my hand and placed it on his penis in the library; I bit--a bloody bite--the grad student who followed me from Harvard Square, hurled himself upon me, and tried to rape me in the Commons; and I called the cops when I spotted him waiting in a grey Chevy outside my dorm the next day. These Painful Perverts threatened me physically, therefore I had a right to hate them. The others, less brutal, were not so easy to dismiss. There were the Friends of Friends and the Hometown Boys, the Hustlers--"I saw your picture and I fell in love"--and the Hipsters--"Look, baaaa-by, I don't wanna..."--, there were the City Slickers and the Hicks, the Machos and the Movers. There were roommates on dares, painters after subjects, photographers after models, the set man who needed an extra for "Love Story." And I'd say no, no, no and pray they wouldn't take it personally.

AFTER A WHILE I wised up. I started telling them that I had a possessive boyfriend so nobody's feelings would get hurt. And somehow, the message got around. They must have warned their friends of me, because I got fewer calls. Of course, my pretended boyfriend was an empty wish. I wanted, at this point protection, and I was very lonely.

It was when I started hearing rumors about myself from the slightest of acquaintances that I began to realize the extent of my notoriety. And those rumors were rich. I'd learned that I was the biggest bitch to hit the 'Cliffe; that I was the most promiscuous miss in town, well-nigh a nymphomaniac; that I was, get this, a Moaner, a Screamer, a Scratcher; that I was the Body-by-Fisher Fisher (I wasn't) and as a baby heiress I'd been promised to a son of my daddy's tycoon pal; that I was a Lesbian.

I had a good laugh of incredulity Part of me was even flattered. But another bigger part of me was bothered, and bothered intensely enough to do some grapevine legwork. As it turned out, most of the rumors were my rejectees' revenge. It was simple: roommates are checking out the register for a top-twenty; the rejectee bargains for their attention when he casually drops my name, and wins their respect when he slanders me, getting back at me at the same throw.

It was so obvious, so predictable, a syndrome. The high school bigshot comes to the Home of The Bigshots and gets his ego smashed right off the bat. So he spends most of his conscious energy working out a strategy to piece it back together. A woman, of course, is prime target for his peacockery, meat for his projected fantasies. But if she slights him, however inadvertently, he takes it as a threat, and the war is on.

But it's not fair. I'd call justice to my defense. No matter. Defensive action meant being an enemy of the male cause. I didn't know enough then to have any confidence that that cause might be wrong.

For I still lacked the distance that could analyze. I was too busy learning how to cope with my new status--the status of "Beautiful Person," i.e. rich bitch. I found it pinned upon me like an epithet. Glamor, I was discovering, signalled at Harvard a licensed free-for-all for aggressive attention. Be it jealousy or secret sex dreams, contempt just depended on the particular form of the particular insecurity. Glamor got attention all right. Glamor meant a presence to be dealt with, to be talked about, gossiped about, pigeon-holed, and dismissed with a movie magazine's form of voyeurism. It was impossible to start anything with anybody off cleanly. I was (looked) an enemy to the radical politicos, someone fit only for preppies; I was a scatterbrain for intellectuals; I was fantasy material for the dreamers, a never-neverland for the shy, a threat to the sexually insecure. I started carrying around my good looks like a guilt stained Scarlet Letter.

This glamor business was fast festering as the royal ass pain of my life, and one with a built in Catch-22 at that. Harvard, you see, has an ongoing hate-love affair with glamor. It pretends to despise what fascinates it most, and presents an indifferent face to what it cannot leave alone.

After a while, I developed a strategy designed for disarmament. I would scout out each new face for insecurity blemishes. And I'd play up to that particualr lack of confidence in a seductive effort to waylay its defensive instinct. I would, in other words, convince them that I was unworthy of their attack, that I was harmless. At first this meant telling funny stories at the dinner table about the various fuck-ups in my private life: about being paralyzed with fear when a beautiful sailor tried to seduce me; about trying, bravely in the now or never spirit, to throw away my virginity one night, and waiting with eyes clenched and a rigid back, only to find that he was impotent; about having a Persona hallucination (where the faces merge upon the screen) with a best girl friend; about my family's bankruptcy. And fairly soon I heard that I was crazy. And I figured I was safe. Better crazy than cruel.

But this confidence of cool dismissal, then, was only surface deep. At night I used to play back scenes of the day like tapes, editing out the blunders for next time. Such safety, I was finding fast, was no cure-all for loneliness.

BY THIS TIME I was spending most of my time with the girl who lived beneath me. She was small and squat with frizzy hair and with a grim tightness at the corners of her mouth, like the look of middle age. She was Jewish, from New York City--compulsive about studies, socially insecure, socially ambitious. She wanted to marry a rich Eastern preppie, and she had come to Harvard looking for him. And when she didn't find him she wanted to transfer to Wellesley. I think, now, that part of her attraction to me grew out of her thinking that I could lead her to him. I never understood this delusion of hers, but I'd drag her to parties anyway. And she would torture herself beforehand into the Look, a wasp-haired caricature, binding her curls tightly in a turban around her head, in a towel steamed for straightening. And she would chatter, and the pink would glow in her face. But then she would stand mum and prudish all night and hate herself in a corner. Afterwards, I'd try to comfort her, doing a stint of complaining myself to cheer her up. She never believed though, that I could hurt, too. She wanted, you see, what she only imagined I had.

Anyway, we saw more and more of each other, growing closer as we grew more unhappy. One especially grey day I was down in her room unburdening myself as she was stretching her hair and wrapping it up again before the mirror. I was telling her, finally, what I'd always been too embarrassed to tell anybody: it had to do with my hating sexual objecthood--that all the male attention was too big a cross to bear, that it made me feel like an animal on the defensive, all the time. And suddenly she wheeled around with a screaming red-blotched face, ripping herself out of bathrobe and bra until she was white and naked before me. She pointed hysterically to her stomach and she was shrieking "Shut up! Shut up, will you? I've got hairs on my stomach! Look at them! Can't you see them? They're hairs there! Spiky black hairs. They're ugly. They're disgusting" she stuck her stomach into my face, and then she stiffened coldly and turned away as I heard a low "I--hate--them" wrenched out from somewhere deep inside her.

IT WASN'T LONG after that before I fell in love. But I found soon enough that he was gay. And so sophisticated. Our first time out, he told me about his Oedipal complex, about how everybody he knew was in psychoanalysis, about how he spent his freshman year staring hour after hour out the window. He talked with a double-tongued irony I didn't understand. Neither did I get the clipped idiom in his humor, nor the whimsy behind his taste. I didn't get much at all. But I did a lot of listening, night after night long to his storytelling.

Stories about a friend who could boast of having put fewer than 30 attended lectures under his belt in his entire Harvard career because he spent his daytime gambling at the race track, and his evenings getting laid. Stories about a friend who liked to liven up dead and dull cocktail parties by whipping his penis out of his unzipped trousers to dangle bare for all to see; he would then approach a professor and carry on in all dignity until the professor looked down and choken on his liquor, at which point he would unobtrusively take leave and approach someone else. Stories about another friend who walked into an administrator's office one fine fall day and politely asked the secretary if she'd like to fusk; when she said no and backed against the wall, he neatly stipped and chased her through the building.

And then there was the friend who had always wanted to rape someone and talked about it so incessantly that X decided, as a birthday present, to let him purge his fantasy. So X scoured around town until he found a girl who happily had always wanted to be raped. A weekend was assigned and the girl was assured of no more than that someone would show up sometime during the weekend to rape her. And sure enough, Saturday morning as she was puttering around her apartment, the birthdayboy rapist snuck in and hid himself in the broom closet. When she eventually came out to the kitchen to make her lunch, he leaped out of the closet and raped her. She was terrified, he was unstoppable, and both were quite pleased when it was finished. They parted cordially and never saw each other again.

In my innocence, I took most of these stories heavily to heart as the Harvard way of doing things. And I figured I should conform. But then I really didn't want to, and here I was stuck with a gay boyfriend who tucked me into bed at night with just a peck upon the cheek. This on top of all the orgy stories, and the phonecalls, and the confrontations with perversion, and the rumors, and the sex-starved suicidal best friend.

Well, to make a long story short, I started to get sick. I couldn't eat, and I lost 30 pounds, and eventually I looked like what I was, which was sexless. I couldn't sleep either, and I'd obliterate those ungodliest of hours with mindless roaming around the city. I guess that I was unconsciously looking for rape. I wasn't even any good at that.

All this strange behavior, so different from their Emily, disturbed my parents somewhat when they whisked me off to the Virgin Islands on a vacation. They suggested I see a doctor, a head doctor that is, and I was incredulous. Still naive and laughing, I chalked it up to "identity crisis." I returned to Cambridge full of good intentions which lasted all of a week. I ended up, finally, in a mental hospital in Chicago. There they put me through an intensive psychoanalysis and I discovered that I hated men.

But it was hardly, in this case, unnatural, now was it? And analysis was quite useful for a while, a little while. I could go on and tell you about its setbacks. After all, I've told you a lot of juicy stories now. And I've got a right, don't I, to put it to you straight, to dig in my message so it sticks. About this screwed-up system of sexual power, so intransigient, that is built into your head from birth. And about how I finally came round to this picture of things. About finding psychoanalysis to be only half a science; about its being dedicated to the health and happiness and long life everlasting of the bourgeois morality; about how it robs you of your beliefs in just about everything except the Method, i.e. the Word. But forget it. You don't want to hear it right now. Maybe you'll find out soon enough.

I'm a senior now, jaded and Harvard-weary. I suppose that I am a bit tougher, a bit less vulnerable than I was that freshman year. I live alone, but I'm not so lonely anymore. You could explain me away with ease: a rich girl radicalized, a neurotic psychoanalyzed, and then the political radical rejecting psychoanalytic individualism for feminist collectivism. You could type me and pigeon-hole me and attach your label to my name to discredit me by such convention. And I know you will. Go right ahead. But my experiences are as true as your explanations.

MY FRIENDS who have graduated tell me that coming to Harvard is nothing next to the shock of leaving it, a mere ripple next to a tidal wave of vibrations in your head. And I believe them. But my belief is something digested in the brain rather than felt, a shaky acceptance for lack of knowing. So I'll just tell you what I'm telling you: if you think you're lost now, baby, just wait. Because you are really in for it.