I Totally Meant to Do That (8 page)

My senseless, self-centered notions of New York life went up in the dust of everything else, the pulverized steel and glass that, no longer erect, followed the whim of the wind, heading to TriBeCa, the East Village, and across the East River, where it blew through open Brooklyn windows, landed on sofas, and embedded itself in the bare legs of those who’d been miles away. It covered us in a toxic patina. We combed it through our hair and breathed it in our lungs, tracked it indoors and hung it in our coat closets, this gruesome reminder that matter had not been destroyed but merely changed shape.

How arrogant I had been to think the city was out to get me.
I was so accustomed to living in a petri dish back home, that I self-indulgently invented an all-seeing scientist in New York. But the reason I was having a hard time here is because, guess what?, life is hard in New York. That I could be daft to something so obvious illustrates how easily I’d gotten by before. I’d never realized that the Southern villagers who watched were also protecting.

Although my cell-phone radar was jammed, my friends and family reached me that Tuesday. In my computer were dozens of e-mails. Everyone wanted to know everything about everyone. Word was delivered to my Luddite parents, and then, through a sprawling train of reply-all e-mails, my college friends began to account for all of our pals in the city, some of whom are still being sought.

When New York restored cell service, Aunt Jane’s call was the first to come through:

“Please come home. Something else could happen. It’s dangerous. Come back and stay with me, where I can keep you safe.”

It doesn’t make much sense, but after discovering a nonfictional threat, I no longer felt threatened. He’s not an all-powerful wizard. He’s a criminal. And even though Aunt Jane could never have imagined to warn me about this, she’d still delivered the advice I needed: Don’t look at him.

It’s true that one cannot fight New York, but the reason is that New York won’t fight back, and therefore we remain invincible. We ain’t studyin’ you. It’s inefficient. That had been a hellish wave—it knocked us over, stole our breath, dragged us through the sand and blinded us with salt—which can mean only one thing: Another will surely be hot on its heels. The best we can do is stand up, shake the water from our ears, and face forward. North Carolina may be the village that reared me, but New York is the one where I was raised.

seemingly pointless lessons of grade school, however menial or inscrutable, are actually preparations for travails later in life. Relay drills in soccer taught me to work with others. Geometry gave me the tools to shape an indefinable world into usable terms. And, thanks to Mrs. Palmer, my dry-mouthed, ninth-grade English teacher, I am acutely aware of when white balls of spittle collect in the corners of my lips.

I abandoned this philosophy in college, when faced with a trial so pointless and trivial, it couldn’t possibly have had an adult counterpart. It was Rush, the week I visited a dozen sorority houses, selling myself at each. But I was wrong. It does have a real-world doppelgänger: the rooms/shared board for New York on Craigslist.org.
Both are facilities designed to help people find places to live. Both aim to pair you with like-minded individuals. In fact, the only difference between the two is that this time around, no one filmed the procedure for a commemorative video.

Most Craigslist ads seek gainfully employed tenants, so I conveniently and consistently failed to mention I was planning to quit my full-time job the following month. I knew I’d still be good for rent, so what did it matter? And the fact that I had a cat currently living at a boyfriend’s apartment? It never came up.

I feel no shame; this sort of equivocation is part of the game, a game whose rules I learned in Rush. For example, at the Kappa house, which was known for having the highest GPA, I said, “I’m thinking about going premed.” That wasn’t a total lie. I
was
thinking about it … thinking that I wouldn’t do it. And at A-D-Pi, whose ladies wore their hearts on their sleeves, I said, “Don’t apologize, Courtney—if I’d just been singing in the candlelight with all of
my
‘sisters,’ I’d be crying too.” This wasn’t a lie because I might very well blubber like a mascaraed fool in that situation—but since I knew I’d never
be
in that situation, the outcome was impossible to prove.

A week before I left for college, Tucker—one of my aforementioned elder and real sisters—knocked on my bedroom door. She headed straight for the closet. Tucker had also been through Rush at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As an expert, she’d promised to help me choose outfits appropriate for each house’s style. It was like packing for a week of costume balls. “Chi-Os go out a lot, so wear something cute and trendy,” she said, pulling from my closet a fitted top and a pair of black pants. “But the Pi Phis are more laid back; they smoke a lot of pot.” Her interpretation of that was a flowery skirt and oversized white blouse. So, clearly my sister did
not
smoke pot. Then, she sashayed out of the room saying, “Just remember, the most important thing is to be yourself!”

This year I wore Marc Jacobs to meet the publicist in Brooklyn Heights and rode my skateboard—a skill learned in New York, mind you, not North Carolina—to the artist’s pad in Bushwick, all the while playing up a different part of my varied past depending on who was listening. The girls in Boerum Hill wanted someone with a sense of humor, so they heard about my gig freelancing for
Saturday Night Live
. Since the guy in Chinatown worked at a hedge fund, I told him about my stint at a leveraged-buyout firm. One time, I misjudged. An ad agency associate ended up being more Goth than Madison Avenue and I spent the hour-long meeting obscuring my designer purse behind my pleated-pant legs. I am not proud of this behavior. But after living through four years of Rush—first you peddle yourself, then the house—I was working off instinct. The eighteen-year-old me was in the driver’s seat. And she said, “I think I remember this from a kegger.”

Still, no matter how hard the sell, someone has to buy. Craigslist, like Rush, is a popularity contest. Once, while leaving a particularly dreamy loft in Williamsburg, I ran into the next appointment coming in. Not only was she gorgeous and carrying architecture books but they already knew her! She was a legacy. Everyone knows that “legs” automatically get bids. I briefly considered pulling a Tonya Harding on her, perhaps by planting uncool contraband in her paint-speckled messenger bag … like a Goo Goo Dolls CD or
The Wall Street Journal
. Any sorority girl worth her weight in insignia T-shirts knows how to throw the competition off the scent of a nice young freshman. Sometimes the end justifies the means. But even this srat-brat has her moral limits. So, as the current roommates greeted her with hugs and “How’s Greg doing?”s, I did nothing but take one last look at the exposed-brick bedroom that would have been mine. Good-bye, sweet, sunlit oasis two blocks from the subway.

There were other times when it became clear that my Craigslist suitors would dump me pre-U-Haul. While chatting on a couch in Cobble Hill, I watched one roommate make eye contact with another and roll her eyes. She’d broken the cardinal rule: Never reveal your true opinions about a prospect
to
the prospect. It’s much more polite to do so behind her back. Perhaps, for example, when her picture pops up on the wall during a pre-Rush slideshow presentation of incoming freshmen. This little multimedia gab session is, of course, kept secret from the prospects themselves. Then, along with the rest of the seedy side of Rush, it’s revealed to each pledge class when the girls return their second year to work the system from the other side. “I’m so glad I didn’t know any of this when
I
was going through,” Tri Delt sophomores could be heard saying during various phases of the process.

We required Rushees to attach photographs of themselves to the applications they mailed in before arriving. Then, via a grade-school-style projector, we threw the snapshots one by one onto the white lunchroom wall. If and when you knew the girl whose image appeared, you were instructed to describe her with only three adjectives. (With approximately four hundred pictures to file through, the system relies on brevity.) Such descriptions usually went like this: “Outgoing, academic and … and … beautiful on the inside
and
out!!” Now, even those for whom English is a second language will recognize that the third adjective in that series is actually one adjective, two adverbs, a preposition, a conjunction, and a defining article, all of which ultimately add up to
two
adjectives, giving the speaker a total of four. Still, the infraction was repeatedly allowed. And each time, I imagined particularly pulchritudinous intestines.

The use of whole sentences, however, was explicitly forbidden. Still, that did not stop Susan Barrow from standing, when Joan Wimberly’s Polaroid shot on the wall, and saying, “Yeah, I know her; she
slept with every guy at our high school.” This was followed naturally by a few gasps, after which someone else said, “Well, I certainly don’t want to eat lunch next to a slut.”
That
would be the time when, whispered from somewhere in the darkness, a gentle voice could be heard: “I’m glad I didn’t know about this when I was going through.” Such a statement implied, depending on who heard it, that the speaker was either one of the few sane people in the room or was a slut herself.

Once the Rushees arrived at the Tri Delt house in the flesh, sisters could no longer talk about a girl behind her back. It would have been too risky. So we did so behind
our
backs. We used a secret body-language code to signify when a prospect was particularly difficult to talk to. Perhaps she was extremely shy. Or had belligerently accused us of caring what girls’ fathers did for a living. Or had mentioned her dad was a plumber. Regardless, I was never allowed to leave my keep unattended, so my instructions were to smile sweetly and, while asking one more time what her major was, make a fist with my right hand and place it firmly in the small of my back.

“May Day! May Day! SOS!!” The small gesture spoke volumes. Within seconds, a “floater”—the girl whose job it is to troll for back fists—would appear. She aided in the conversation, made sure the poor freshman was having a good time, and ensured she’d still want to be one of us even though the use of the back fist had already secured her a spot on our C list. This is probably what happened to poor slutty Joan, who was no doubt greeted with a rousing hello when she arrived, in spite of the fact that it had already been silently decided she’d never get a bid. Joan would have been hugged, entertained, and invited to partake of the queso nacho feast available in the back house—a tactic designed to find out if, in addition to being a slut, she was also a heifer.

Food is typically available during the open houses of Craigslist apartments too. It’s almost always cheese, fruit, and crackers—to
be specific, Brie, white grapes, and Wheat Thins. I’m still not sure what it is about this selection that unanimously screams, “Welcome to our home!” Perhaps it is a way of proving that the area bodegas sell more than Slim Jims, white onions, and beer.

Sometimes there is also red wine, but it was usually gone by the time I arrived, the purple-stained lips and teeth of my hosts betraying who’d consumed the lion’s share. I could forgive the transgression. Running through a Rolodex of vapid questions with strangers is not fun. It’s a discomfort akin to watching Andy Rooney on
60 Minutes:
not painful per se, just boring and insulting to my intelligence. Therefore, having to do this with twelve people—in a row—would be like spending an entire Saturday in Andy Rooney’s home while he cleans out his bathroom cabinets. And that is enough to send even the sanest to drink. I understood my hosts’ desire for social lubricant; during each of the three years I Rushed freshmen, I kept a bottle of vodka under a friend’s bed inside the house.

From the other side, whether as a prospective pledge or tenant, there is one relief far more profound than alcohol: a trip to the bathroom, the one room in the house or apartment where I could be alone and sit in silence for at least three minutes without drawing suspicion. It was rare that I actually needed to use the room for its intended purpose; I’d seen the insides of several others that day. But hosts were never the wiser. During these dubious respites, I understood the word “restroom” as anything other than a euphemism. While searching for an apartment, I also used these rests to script the perfect closing statement. Leave them wanting more, right? Be so charming that when the door clicks behind you, they say only nice things—because you can be sure there will be categorical judgment.