Tiny Ladies in Shiny Pants

by Jill Soloway

  I didn’t see much of him until late in the summer, just after Labor Day. Neille and I were on the sundeck, getting in our last few chances for just a soupçon more skin cancer. Faith had deigned to join us, probably because the ogling men she despised were gone for the most part. The pool was pretty empty, so we were surprised to see Randall strutting around at the far end, hovering near a sixteen-year-old with pale skin and straight red hair.

  I turned over, hoping he wouldn’t see me. But fuck, he saw us, and was headed our way. For some reason he still made me nervous, like a police officer or a judge. In a moment he was at the foot of our chaise lounges. We propped ourselves up on our elbows, shielding the late summer sun from our eyes. He was so tan, wood-brown. Only I was privy to the knowledge that up close, his tan was a collection of freckles, all run together.

  “Have you seen my lotion bag?” he asked.

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “My lotion bag,” he said. “It’s missing. My leather pouch? It’s black and I keep my lotions in it.”

  We all looked at each other and shrugged. He fixed his George Hamilton eyes on us, all icy blue accusation. We hadn’t stolen his lotion bag. But I wished we had. It was just the kind of thing we liked to do.

  “No, haven’t seen it,” I said.

  He huffed off, hands on his hips, tiny Jewish ass getting tinier as he headed back to the other side of the pool.

  A millisecond passed. We were waiting, wondering, who would be the first. It was my sister. She said in the tiniest of voices,

  “Lotion Bag.”

  And we all just vomited laughing, hysterical, pounding the chaises trying to catch our breath. It was all that needed to be said. And for years after that, it was the name we would use to identify him: “I saw Lotion Bag today at Water Tower Place.” And somehow, I knew that even if he was thirty-six and I was seventeen, even if I had sex with him when I wasn’t even sure I wanted to, even if he had told me I had hair growing underneath my arms and that I was rapidly falling away from perfect, now that he was Lotion Bag, I had won.13

  4

  Monica, Chandra, and Me

  Maybe you’re not like me. Maybe you had a choice. If you’re a Waspie or a Blondie or an Irish Catholic reddish freckled girl, or if you wore white to a ceremony as a child or walked down an aisle balancing a doily on your head, you had the opportunity to make a decision one day, whether to be bad, or to be good. When they looked at you, O Blondeness, they saw an angel. For you child, you were born pure. On the Madonna–Whore Game Show of life, you had a choice.

  Jewish chicks, not so much with the choice. The typical conversation goes something like this:

  Guy: Hey, you’re pretty. Are you Italian?

  Me: No, Jewish.

  Guy: Oh, so you like sex.

  No one had ever told me that women could do things like slap men or walk away. These women on television who throw drinks in people’s faces are my heroes, seriously. I still want to throw a drink in someone’s face before I die. Me, I’d either smile politely or look down and say, “Well, uh—,” like the guy had pointed out that I was wearing a prescription shoe.

  I’m always desperate for an evolutionary answer for everything. If I can just think of humans as a disease on the planet trying to breed, I can usually understand all I need to know. Maybe this is why Jews are so sexy. Because our genes are still in shock over the slaughter of half of our legacy, the code from our cell memory compels us to make more of us, as quickly as possible.

  Additionally, this evolutionary excuse may account for intermarriage. Temple elders can complain all they want that so many of us marry outside of the tribe, but it makes perfect sense: If you want your genetics to move forward, don’t be the thing that got so many of us killed not so long ago: Jewish. Interbreed. Mix with the ones no one hates, like the Swiss. In fact, as a matrilineally passed-down religion, Judaism was made for this, as long as the women do the intermarrying.

  All of this adds up to my Why People Think Jewish Girls are Whores Equation:

  (1) We have gargantuan insecurity around our identity. Our very first Jewish holiday memories include stories of people trying to steal our leavened bread or take our lamp oil or round us up and kill us since the beginning of time. In response, we’ve developed a bold need to propagate.

  (2) We hold the knowledge that, secretly, we are the Best Ever, God’s Favorite, anyway, because we’re Chosen! So ha ha, do whatever you want! Hell’s for the goyim! This, I believe, creates a recipe for disaster: girls with large breasts who crave attention, have no fear of hell, and will do anything to avoid a train ride.

  It is this equation that bred my tortured soul sister Monica Lewinsky, the Patron Saint of Jewish Whores. Monica truly got the really short end of the stick, never getting anything in return for her blow jobs—no cunnilingus, no intercourse. No nada. Just a bunch of really bad publicity. I really feel Monica deserves something. It can’t be inconsequential like a muffin basket or anything you can order off the Internet. Something big. A parade or a musical tribute, at the least.

  Or a statue. When I am president I will carve her out of ivory and place her in front of the Washington Monument, hanging naked and voluptuous and beautiful, not crucified, but Jewcified on a giant Star of David. When you get close to touch her, it will feel like she’s covered in glistening donut sugar.

  Before Kobe’s Michelle, I wrote angry speeches in my head defending Monica. I wanted her to take the press conference stage in handcuffs (I know, there were no handcuffs, but let me have my story) and spit on the lenses of the news cameras, yelling, “Of course I blew the fucking president! You know how it feels to be a woman? Do you know how it feels to be told you will never be president, knowing you can never be the most powerful person in the world? Well at the moment I jiggled the president’s balls in my left hand and stroked his shaft with my right, when Mr. Clinton leaned back to hold onto the door frame and steady himself as he moaned like a lamb, I was the most powerful person in the world!”

  At the University of Wisconsin–Madison the Monica Lewinskys had their own sorority. It was called SDT, or Sigma Delta Tau. Everyone said SDT stood for Seldom Dated Twice or Start Diet Tomorrow. Oh, how we laughed and laughed at these brilliant word plays. As a freshman, I knew two things:

  1) I had to be in a sorority if I wanted my college life to be fabulous like Animal House or Porky’s, which was all I had to go on, and

  2) I would not be in SDT.

  My whole freshman posse was going through rush together—me plus my brand-new forty-five or so Best-Ever friends-for-life. Most of us were Jewish. The University of Wisconsin gave preference for in-state students for official campus dorms, and there was a housing shortage. Wisconsin produces about as many native Jews as it does palm trees, so the end result was a freshman year Minsk shtetl in a high-rise complex off campus, called The Towers.

  Sorority rush came to Madison within the first week of college. Hey, here’s a great idea. Take thousands of seventeen- and eighteen-year-old girls, on their own and living away from their parents for the first time in their lives. Put them in a group and then slowly but decisively, segregate them into smaller and smaller groups, showing them a list where utter strangers have rated them as Good Enough or Not Good Enough. A couple of days later, show them the list again, now adding the possible, You Were Good Enough Yesterday, But Now You’re Not Anymore. Base everything on a one-minute once-over.

  When all is said and done, in a Darwinist survival of the thinnest competition, the weak will be sobbing and begging to go home and work in their Dad’s furniture store; the strongest will get pledge pins and begin a semester’s worth of demeaning slave tasks, culminating in being publicly smeared with food. What a lovely way to begin anew, to cross the bridge from girl to woman.

  Whoever decided this one was really thinking, and was probably responsible for creating The Swan, the only beauty pageant where you can start out putrid, undergo a year’s worth of surgery in a weekend, and still
be a loser.

  The first night of sorority rush, we moved down the street together like a passel of Jewish scrubbing bubbles. As we walked to the student union to get split up into our pledge groups, we exchanged gossip: It was impossible to get into Tri-Delt if you weren’t blond, wealthy, and beautiful. The two close behind were Alpha Phi, who were beautiful, blond, and had one tall half-Italian girl; and DG’s, who were beautiful, blond, and may have had two girls with dark blond hair at some point in the seventies. The rest are just a blur that will only be recalled years from now in a hot saltwater bathtub during intense trauma hypnosis.

  As we came down the street in our Forenzas and Famolares, carrying our rating cards like livestock, the sorority sisters stood betwixt the pillars of their big ugly goyishe greyishe houses, singing queerly and clapping. We stopped and listened and smiled. They really wanted us! They were telling us so in the lyrics of their songs! This was going to be a lot easier than I thought!

  It seemed so simple: Just BE YOURSELF! they constantly told us, as if we even had selves yet. But it was nerve-wracking. I stared at my face in the mirror constantly, asking questions like, Am I cute enough? Do I need more Sun-In? and When will the diarrhea stop? I even got a wee little zit on my chin, something I had managed to get through all of high school without doing.

  As the exciting days of the rush process progressed, I realized I was passing. I may have been a Jew but with my skinny little hips, huge, freshly baked breasts, and richy clothes from richy downtown Chicago, perhaps I appeared to be an asset. During the week of parties, it was my duty to carry a cup on a saucer (without spilling the tea), follow a girl whose name started with a K to a spot where I’d have to sit on a couch (without spilling the tea), carry on a two-minute conversation with K, stand (without spilling), and place the cup and saucer back down on a counter.

  Against all odds, I carried it off. The only sorority I got cut from was Tri-Delts. I made it all the way down to the very last two second-best—but still really great, guys, I’m not lying—DG and Alpha Phi; and Alpha Phi really seemed to want me. I was finally going to ascend to my destiny—the token darkie in the hot (but keepin’ it real compared to Tri-Delts) sorority. Soon that would be me standing on the steps, clapping and singing, my eyes filled with the kind of light you only get from having eighty-five best friends ever for life. Soon I would wear a light blue oversized sweatshirt with an A and an O with a line through it, grazing the ends of my royal blue and white-striped Dolphin shorts, demanding envy from all who passed.

  A couple of days before the last party, the sacred party where we would see consecrated sorority things that could never ever be shared, we were hanging out in our suite looking at ourselves in the mirror, when I noticed my tiny zit was growing. By nightfall, it was huge and pus-filled and painful. I’d never had bad skin. I knew nothing about painful pus-filled zits. I’d seen other girls standing in the mirror and squeezing, so I tried it.

  An hour later I had a face full of blood and a hole on my chin. No problem, I thought. I’ll just cover it. We were all going out to some stupid bar to drink to traverse the very edges of our date-rape-ability that night, and I sure didn’t want to miss that. I did the only sensible thing: blew dry my gaping wound with my hair dryer set on cool, dabbed in some concealer, powder, more concealer, and more powder to make a delightful spackling that I’m sure did a fine job. It was nighttime anyway.

  The next morning when I awoke I had something where the zit had been that looked like a Volkswagen made of scabs. It was dark brown and crusty and oozing out something glowing and orangey from its very core. No problem, I thought as I peeled it all off and re-spackled, in order to look cute in case I saw a cute guy on my way to Food Science 134, which all the cute guys took. Even though it was now daylight, the spackle had to look better to the cute guys than the crusty wound, right?

  But that night, when I got back to my room, it was clear I had a pretty big problem. The strength of the impetigo disease was threatening to outperform the disease that was Jill Soloway. I refused to contemplate my future as a Seldom Dated Twice. I asked around about the rumor that I had another alternative—the news that another Jewish sorority was forming. Word had it there were some skinny Hebe girls with Jewfros, glasses, and opinions who needed to separate themselves from the lusty, busty SDTs. The AEPhi’s were more like our other production-line prototype: Chandra Levy, the Patron Saint of Dead Jewish Whores.

  Chandra, oh, my sweet sister Chandra. She didn’t get anywhere near as much press as Monica but I loved her just the same. She was my sister, too. In 2000, when the news broke that she was missing, I knew she was dead and I wrote in my head for her as well, not angry speeches but mournful lullabies from the bottom of the river where I was sure she was waiting to be found. I was proved wrong when her remains were found in the park, but I was certain a ghost had dragged her body there.

  I had watched those familiar Jewish parents on Nightline and The Larry King Show: Monica’s proud, Hebress mother, Marcia Lewis, plus the honorable Dr. Lewinsky defending their daughter’s right to blow the president. Now Chandra’s distraught parents were taking the media stand, fiercely owning her, freely admitting their beautiful daughter may have had sex with grody Senator Gary Condit, but that didn’t mean she deserved to die.

  Gary Condit was no Bill Clinton, but he may as well have been. The attraction to tall gray-blond men with ties and the Dry Look hair is an undeniable one. Men like that are a Jewish girl’s version of a challenge. They make laws or they chuckle or chortle, their shirts are pressed and possibly tucked into their saggy whities beneath their exclusionary Brooks Brothers pants. They nod and read sheafs of drafts of legislation; they are stern bosses and sensible managers. It is their ethos to remain strong and humorless, sort of like a flagpole. There is nothing more tempting than a flagpole to the crashingly violent sensual waves that are Jewish girls.

  We need to see if we can take them down. We need to see if we are strong enough. We need to know why they can be president and rule the world, and we can’t. We want to prove something to someone, holding our jizz-covered dresses up with the plea, But look! He loved me!

  It was time to go to the last night of sorority rush. The Volkswagen on my face was now one of those plastic relief maps of the Western Hemisphere. I sanded and spackled for a few hours, then laid out my brand-new outfit: a gauzy white Esprit dress with tiny purple dots. I slipped it over my head, careful not to mess up my hair or my sculpture. If I stood this way, head tilted and to the left, it could pass for a townhouse development instead of a mountain range. I would keep my head down; after all, I was going to a sacred ceremony. Maybe no one would notice.

  When I first got to the Alpha Phi house, everything seemed okay. No one was staring, and I was sure I would be fine if I could just stand in the corner and blot any errant leakage on a curtain. But then, there was an announcement. It was time go to the basement. Carrying candles.

  My Rush Sis, whose name had to be Kim, handed me my candle. At the top of the stairs, we stood silently, hushed, respectful of the sacred ceremony-ness of it all. A girl whose name had to be Kristin handed Kim some matches. Kim turned to me. She struck the match, and it glowed bright with the secret fire knowledge that illumination is the heart of truth, and truth is beauty, and—

  Kim lit the candle. I looked down at it, feigning sacred humility. I lowered the candle to as far away from my face as possible, but I could only get it as far as my arms were long, which wasn’t anywhere near enough. The sound of something consecrated and Christian came floating up from the basement, and someone whose name had to be Kathleen told us to please pause for a moment.

  I paused. Kim paused. Time and space and the very essence of the universe paused. But the truth of the light of the flame persevered. Something had to be known. Kim looked at me, scrunched her tiny nose and said, “What’s that thing on your face?”

  “Huh? What?” I asked like I didn’t have a clue what she was talking about. “Oh, this?” I po
inted to my chin. “I don’t know! It’s just—I don’t know! This weird thing, that, uh, I think I fell down or something.”

  “It is now time to enter the secret ceremony space. What goes on in our special basement must never be shared with anyone.” It was the voice of KimKathleenKristin welcoming us into the ritual room. But I knew it was all over for me. As we stood in a circle and made promises in case we were chosen, I could see it all unfolding. That night, after we’d all left, the sisters of Alpha Phi would sit in the living room with their index cards. KatieKathrynKelly would say “Did anyone find out what that thing was on her face?” echoed by, “I thought she was cute until she came down here with that thing on her face,” and a random “What was it?” Their voices would trail off and no one would even need to ask if I was a Yes or a No, it would be obvious. My card would be thrown on the floor, there would be a few giggles, and someone would say in a chipper voice, “Okay, moving on…”

  The next day had a name like Bid Day but should have been called D-Day. We all were to go to the student union to find out which sorority wanted us. Anything could happen. We had written down our top two and they had written down their top two. There was also the terrifying possibility you could be crosscut, which was what happened if you picked ones that didn’t want you. You would end up in no sorority at all.

  As we walked over, stopping every few feet to vomit, we cheered each other on with the infinite optimism of the moments before things get posted on bulletin boards—test results, play auditions, class rankings. I could be anything, I could have an A or be Juliet or be number two, I could be anything!

  I was nothing. Alpha Phi had rejected me. Okay, not nothing. I had one invitation to join a sorority. SDT. My sweet pudgy sisters, even though they had seen on my card that I wanted nothing to do with them, had invited me anyway. They welcomed me with their thick arms and tiny little sorority house on a street blocks away from the action. They wanted me. They saw beyond what was on my face.