Sarahland Read online

  I thought college would be exactly like summer camp, that there was a magic formula where you put a bunch of girls in an enclosed space without parents and we’d become Real. But, I deduced after major sleuthing, two factors were getting in the way: money and boys.

  Neither existed at camp and here both were everywhere. The annual social we’d have with the nearby boys’ camp was the worst day of the year: everyone unearthed makeup and flat-irons stowed under bunk beds for the other fifty-eight days of camp. Normally we spent our days and nights sailing and tie-dyeing towels and weaving macramé wall hangings and trying to get up on one water ski and singing along to Joni Mitchell and the Indigo Girls around a literal bonfire but suddenly on the day of the social we only cared about having the straightest hair and the clearest skin and someone was always being a cunt to her best friend and someone was always crying.

  Here we had the boy infestation, and money that came in seemingly endless forms. One form was the purses that hung on everyones’ doors, Pradas and Kate Spades and Louis Vuittons. I didn’t understand these purses, what they meant, but I sort of understood they had something to do with the Holocaust. These girls’ grandmas wanted them to know that here in America they could not be turned to soap, and these bags proved it. The bags were a display of patriotism; American flags might be goyishe and tacky but Prada bags were little markers of belief in liberty and the pursuit of happiness in the land of the free. Granddaughters could send pictures of themselves standing in a row of flat-ironed and haltered girls, each with a Prada bag, and their bubbes would feel, these girls were so safe.

  I don’t have a Prada bag. My own mother celebrates her freedom by finding excellent deals at Loehmann’s on purses she swears look expensive but, I can see now, do not. My Loehmann’s purses are one of the reasons the other Sarahs feel like they need to teach me how to live.

  “Dr. Sarah,” Sarah A. says. We’re sitting at a lunch table eating salads. It’s the day after the blow job. “I’ve been paying close attention. You actually eat super healthy foods, so I think you’re just eating too much of them.”

  Embarrassment blooms rosacea-like all over my skin. Eating is the world’s greatest shame. I just learned the word slut-shaming from a flyer posted to one of the student union bulletin boards, but as far as I can tell, you can swallow dick in any quantity and no one cares. It’s true that if you were bad at fighting the boy infestation you were known as a slut, which I was. People thought being a slut made it ridiculous that I also planned to be a doctor, but I was a science major and I didn’t see how the two were correlative. Anyway, food and not sex was the real source of humiliation.

  “Maybe try just eating half of whatever you were going to eat,” says Sarah A.

  Sarah A. is putting me in an impossible position. Either I’m going to eat half and act like I didn’t know how to go on a diet by myself or I’m going to keep eating the same amount and make Sarah A. think I have no self-control.

  I’m fatter than the other Sarahs, but I haven’t always been fat. Fourteen transformed my thighs into Spanish hams that spread out wide and flat, sticking to bleachers and peeling off painfully in summertime. My chest sprung overnight C cups. At fifteen, I reduced my calorie count to 400 daily. Four hundred seemed like enough for basic metabolic processes, yet few enough to strip the meat from my thighs and breasts, to make me less like a bucket of chicken and more like a super skinny girl. On 400 calories, I could wear crop halters and black leggings to musical practice. On 400 calories, my mom rewarded me with shopping trips. On 400 calories, I no longer went poo, which was nice because poo had always disgusted me and I no longer bled from my vag, which was also nice because I had been praying not to bleed from my vag ever since I read Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and really really didn’t identify with Margaret but did learn about certain kinds of negotiations you could make with God. Four hundred calories made it difficult to hang out with other people, but this, too, was okay, since only camp was Real Life. I could go home and sit in my room and record tape-letters to Ayelet and listen to tape-letters from her, especially the mix tapes she’d make at the end when she was done talking, Tori and Ani, Fiona and Liz. I listened to her tapes like they were church, or what I imagined church would be like. I listened for secret meanings, for lines about me. At open campus lunch, I could drive home in order to eat one microwaved frozen veggie patty. After musical practice, I declined fro-yo invitations from the naturally skinny girls for whom sugar-free was promise enough. When the taffeta dress I was meant to wear as my costume for the musical arrived, the entire top half fell off my shoulders and down to my waist where it gathered in ripples around my hips. “Did you send in the wrong measurements or did you shrink?” the woman fitting me joked. “You girls are so tiny,” she said. She went to find an extra, smaller dress somewhere, and I beamed.

  At camp, we bonded by sneaking chocolate into our cabins. In the dorm, though, chocolate’s allowed so we have to sneak vodka. One tiny shot glass is 100 calories and then you have to chase it with some kind of juice, and at three a.m. you’re starving and when you get to the pizza place, spinning with vodka and a snow-blasted face, it’s impossible not to devour the whole slice.

  It’s Sarah A. who has, in the first place, encouraged us to get burritos, beer and vegan hot wings, Doritos and wine. Sarah A. with her long black hair and super selective smile and overall tininess is convincing. And while the other girls are still petite even with their fifteen pounds, I am fat now and trying to distract from it with glitter powder on my eyes and décolletage. While the other girls stay in their packs, puking and having snacks, I am bent on being independent. I relish the time after two a.m. when there’s no laminated information about where I should be and I’m suddenly free. But I’m also drunk, even after puking and/or snacks, and terrible at fending off my own boy-infestation—I wake with them lying on top of me, breathing into my mouth.

  This is what eating leads to. You start recklessly putting things into your body and you just become permeable. When I become a dolphin, I will eat only raw fish, catching them in my teeth as they swim by.

  Even though all the kids in the private dorm have a list of the easiest classes the university offers and enroll en masse for Scandinavian Literature in order to meet their Comm B requirement, I care about learning and do not care about Scandinavia. I am a rebel in this small way. So spring quarter I enroll in a class called Integrated Liberal Studies, which promises to “imagine a method of critical thought that produces writing with the potential to change the world.” This is exciting—I’ve been discovering the pleasure of getting stoned and writing in my journal under the covers—and secretly I guess I do want to change the world, to make it void of money and boys at least.

  For the first day of Integrated Liberal Studies, I wear my edgiest outfit, a kelly-green minidress over jeans, and let my hair dry wavy instead of flat-ironing it. Still, I feel like an impostor, an obvious JAP, when I see the other looks in the lecture hall—dreadlocks and pants held together by patches; cropped hair dyed yellow. Leaving class, I see Sasha, in a gray V-neck and skinny jeans, putting a notebook into her brown leather bag, which looks like the kind the professors have. Sasha’s hair falls to mid-back, straight without being flat-ironed, just a few choppy layers in the front. She looks like a celebrity photographed at Starbucks in the “Stars—They’re Just Like Us!” section but also like a serious philosophy student.

  “Hey,” she says. “How’s it going?”

  I have never been someone who knew how to answer this question. I nod enthusiastically.

  “I’m surprised to see you here,” she says. “I didn’t know you cared about philosophy. No offense.”

  “I don’t know,” I reply.

  “Wanna get lunch?” Sasha asks. I do. I text the Sarahs: Have to meet with my TA; I’ll see you guys later, but I worry that they’ll wait at our meeting spot anyway, so I lead Sasha down a side street where we’ll miss them. We walk to the Mediterranean place where you ge
t a plate of whatever combination of vegetarian things they’re serving that day for $5: spinach pie, olives, hummus, rice, cucumbers. We start arguing about the thinkers from class. I love Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who wants us to live free of society, to throw off our JAP-y chains and roam wild like bears or geese.

  Sasha rolls her eyes, pours hot sauce into her soup. “Rousseau is just some clueless dude with a dumb romantic fantasy of living like the savage brown people,” she says, using bouncy single-digit air quotes around savage brown people. I’d never heard anyone talk like this, in a way that could make me feel like the Great Men were just dudes we could know. It makes so much sense though. What other kinds of dudes would they be? “It’s all about Rawls,” she insists. “The original position. We have to design our morality imagining we’re all sitting in a boardroom, all starting over, and we don’t know where in society we’ll start out.”

  Rawls is boring to me. I hate boardrooms. I don’t need society, I tell her—I can roll around in the dirt and eat fruit from trees.

  Sasha rolls her eyes. “You’re such a white girl,” she says.

  Sasha was raised in a Jewish suburb, but she was born in the Caribbean. This is part of what makes her a little exciting, I know: you look at the Jewish girls and just see your own issues, your same mom trauma, a little fun-house-mirrored but still. The white kind of goyim are mysterious, too, but not in a way we care about—we mock their taste for mayonnaise and floral print, for promptness and guns. We avoid them in our classes without even trying.

  “Let’s get a drink,” Sasha says once we’ve eaten every single thing on our plates. It seems like Sasha can eat whatever she wants, like eating involves neither shame nor calculations, and she still ends up a super skinny girl. We go into a bar with our fake IDs, where Sasha orders a dark-colored microbrew. The bar is dim and empty, we sit on stools. I somehow hadn’t realized you could just wander into a bar in the daytime. The possibilities for interacting with the world feel expanded and I don’t know what to order. I’ve never been in a bar except for Going Out on Thursday through Saturday nights, and it seems like it would be weird to order a Cosmo here. I ask for what Sasha has. It feels cool to drink something heavy and bitter on purpose.

  I tell Sasha about the boy I’ve now given two blow jobs to, only I don’t phrase it like that, I say, hooked up with, and how I can barely find anything special about him to like, except that now that he’s not calling me I feel like I’m not special and want his attention. And I start thinking, well, he does have a really cute smile and he plays the guitar, which is cool, and he talks so little that he’s probably secretly really smart.

  “I’m going to read you bell hooks,” Sasha says, and fishes a book from her professor bag, opens it. She reads an underlined sentence: “If any female feels she needs anything beyond herself to legitimate and validate her existence, she is already giving away her power to be self-defining.”

  “I guess,” I say. I only feel real, I know, as a reflection, as part of a Sarah horde. I feel like Sasha’s full of shit also because what is she crying about in the bathroom, then, if she doesn’t want to be legitimated.

  “I want to at least not have to be legitimated by anyone in our stupid dorm,” Sasha clarifies, as if reading my mind. “Or by boys, generally.”

  I feel a surge of very intense feeling in my chest because I’ve never heard anyone acknowledge that our dorm is stupid or that boys ruin everything.

  “You think our dorm is stupid?” I say. “I do, too.”

  “It’s a Jewish marriage machine,” Sasha shrugs. Sasha has this cheery nihilistic vibe that makes it seem impossible that she spends her evenings crying in the bathroom.

  “I think boys are stupid, too,” I blurt.

  “Yeah. I made out with my girl TA last weekend,” Sasha says.

  I don’t know what to say to that; I feel shocked in a way like the world has exploded open and anything on earth is possible, like I could be a dolphin after all.

  “What about your boyfriend?” I ask.

  “I think I’m done with him,” Sasha says. “I’m over Jewish boys.”

  She says it as though I haven’t heard her crying in the bathroom over and over, as though she’s the coolest person on earth.

  “It’s not like they’ll ever be serious about me anyway,” she adds. “I’m, like, a fun island vacation before they find their Jewish wives.” What she’s describing sounds painful, but she is smiling, so I don’t know what to say.

  A pasty bearded dude in a beanie and flannel next to us asks Sasha what she’s reading.

  “It’s bell hooks,” says Sasha, “but we’d like to be left alone to enjoy each other’s company please.”

  The guy looks startled, and when Sasha turns back to me, he mutters “Bitch” under his breath but loud enough that we can hear. I look at the way Sasha’s hair curves around her elbow, the way a combination of smoking and crying has made her look so sick-good in her V-neck tee tucked into high-waisted jeans.

  We walk back to the dorm sharing a clove cigarette and talking about bands Sasha likes. She promises to burn me CDs. It’s my first clove and it makes me feel like we’re art kids in some movie in the ’70s instead of 2000s JAPs, like with Sasha I can time travel. When we get back inside, boys are seeping from wall crevices and popping around corners. Sasha waves her Longchamp tote around like a dangerous wand and the boys seep back into the walls.

  The following Thursday night, Sarah B. IMs us: Hey girls, what’s the plan?

  Sarah A. IMs back, My room at 9? Everyone’s going to Stills.

  Sarah B. sends back a sideways smiley. Fun! See you girls soon!

  I feel a sick fluttering feeling. I feel weird about being in Sarah and Sasha’s room in my halter and glitter décolletage, weird about Sasha watching me take vodka shots with the Sarahs, or else only seeing her as she slams the bathroom door behind her, revealing her over-it-ness to be a lie. I need to do what I can to preserve our idea of ourselves as girls who day drink, arguing about philosophy. I write back, I’m feeling kind of sick, I think I’m gonna stay in.

  Are you really sick, Dr. Sarah, or are you just being weird?

  The Sarahs are always calling me weird and it’s oddly effective. I don’t want to be weird. I hesitate. I’m going to stay in, I type.

  She’s being weird, Sarah B. IMs. I roll my eyes and shut my computer.

  I sit on my bed with the Bible open in front of me. We’re reading it for the Integrated Liberal Studies class, focusing on the red parts, what Jesus said. It’s my first introduction to Jesus. Jesus is all right. I always thought Jesus was tacky because I’ve mostly seen him rendered in pastels made out of cheap-looking plastic or all boo-hoo anorexic and tacked up for display. Along with reading, I’m sitting on my purple flannel sheet watching Shira straighten her hair in her vanity mirror with adjustable zoom and lighting. “Do I look okay?” she asks, watching me watch her in the reflection. Shira is slightly too fat to ask if she looks fat; it’s embarrassing, I think, for the word fat to even come out of her mouth. The best she could try to make you say was okay.

  “Yeah,” I say, not really wanting to say anything more, even though I think she would look actually pretty if she didn’t look so anxious and sad. She has the right brand of jeans and the right pointy-toed boots, a good haircut and highlights, heavily mascaraed yellow-green eyes. Somehow I can’t be nice to Shira, though. She wants so badly this thing that I feel stuck in. The dorm’s Shiras didn’t cluster the way we did and even though Shira has friends of camp friends in here, too, none of them seem to want to hang out with her. “Where are you going?” I ask, deadpan and staring like she’s probably going somewhere dumb.

  “I think people are going to Stills?” she says like a question. “Jenny’s coming to get me.”

  Jenny is Shira’s one friend and it’s clear they don’t like each other that much, just both failed to work their ways into the group of girls they’d wanted. It’s sad to see them together—Jenny has curls cu
t into a bushy shape, a too-obvious nose job, and darting owl eyes that make her look like she wants to gouge yours out. She arrives, and after she and Shira greet each other awkwardly, they leave. I lie on my bed and read about Jesus.

  Like an hour later there’s a knock on my door. I don’t want to deal with any of the infesting boys. SARAHHH one yells. I don’t respond. He keeps banging. I realize that the boys aren’t slithering through the crack in the bottom of the door or emerging from the walls: Shira’s just opening the door and letting them in. She’s so desperate to be a cool girl, I think, and the way to be a cool girl is to be in cahoots with the boys. I feel mad at Shira and then smile a little at the loyalty of the boys, who wait just for me.

  The knocking stops finally and then starts again and persists and I hear a decisive voice say, “Sarah!” but the voice is female. It’s Sasha’s voice. I’m wearing sweats with the school’s initials on the butt and even though she’s seen me in these sweats countless times in her room, I feel embarrassed by them now. “One sec,” I call. I throw on a floral baby-doll dress that covers my butt. Is a baby-doll dress with sweats cool and arty looking? I’m not sure but I look in the mirror and the overall impression is: cute. I gather my unstraightened hair into two giant buns, with fuzzy waves dangling from each. I open the door.