by Jane Borden
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.
In Tri Delt, we used note cards and the numbers one, two, or three. In the ten minutes between the time one round of Rushees left and another arrived, each member of the house was to grade every girl she’d met. In what remained of the ten minutes after the house was cleaned, the plates restocked, and the decorations fixed, each of us was to sum up an entire person’s worth—based on five minutes of conversation—and distill her talents, history, idiosyncrasies, and endeavors into one number. One number of three. Not big fans of gray area, these sororities. I wasn’t sure how it would specifically work with New York lease holders, but I knew the effect and intention had to be basically the same.
And so I found myself standing in the bathroom of an affordable, spacious four-bedroom in south Greenpoint, carefully considering how I’d say good-bye, when I noticed a trinket on a shelf by the sink: a purple candle in the shape of a pansy. Normally, chintsy candles don’t betray anything about their owners beyond a misguided taste in interior design. But this one was different. The pansy is one of Tri Delt’s symbols. It’s upward-facing bud represents optimism and a hope for the future. The pansy is the third status—or third delta, if you will—of sisterhood: alumnus. I leaned in for a closer look and, sure enough, discovered three small triangles etched into the tiny statue’s wax base. Someone in that apartment had been a Tri Delt. And she openly admitted it.
My fears were confirmed when I returned to the living room to find one of my hosts, the one wearing sweatpants with literature on the ass, holding a Polaroid camera. “Would you mind if we took a quick shot?” she asked. “We’ve just met so many people, you know; it
really helps to put faces with names.”
I couldn’t believe it. I would be in another multimedia gab session. How foolish I’d been to think I’d met my last. How much I wished I’d never met any. I thought of all the twentysomething girls who’d smiled for the same camera, unaware of what it meant, of how their images would be used. I would have killed for their blissful ignorance.
Of all the callous and catty ways to judge someone, using her picture is the worst because, although it happens behind a girl’s back, she is also technically in the room. She’s there, but helpless to defend herself. While her sense of worth is bluntly assessed, she smiles back without a clue, unmoving and optimistic. In her graduation gown or cheerleading uniform, wearing her yearbook best or prom dress, with her family at the beach, sitting in a mall with a Slurpie, standing next to a shiny new Volkswagen Jetta, at the top of Pikes Peak on a hiking trip. Her suntanned face smiles back, unfazed and unaware, like the mentally challenged kid in school who interprets your mocking as friendship.
Standing against the wall of that Brooklyn apartment—smiling, posing, pretending—I wondered what my three adjectives would be.
a pair of sunglasses, I found my new home in the last place I looked. Again, I thought of Rush, during which each girl is assigned a counselor at the start of the week. The counselors are all in sororities, but remain anonymous so as not to sway the decision-making processes of those in their herd. Therefore, they are absolved of all duties within their own sororities. There are two ways one becomes a counselor. Either she requests the position because she is an enlightened woman who’s already realized that Rush is insipid. Or she is nominated for the position by her house’s Rush chair because she is deemed an embarrassment to the house. Perhaps she is geeky. Or overweight. Or has cankles.
When I was a freshman, my counselor said to our group, at least a dozen times, that we didn’t need to worry about how to choose a house because as soon as we walked inside the right one, we’d know it. It would speak to us.
This is categorically false. Sorority houses can’t speak to anyone in particular because they have no individuality. At best, they’re amalgamations of hundreds of women, and, at worst, creations of their national business offices. In effect, they all kind of feel the same—synthetic and affected. Therefore, anyone who claims to feel an instant bond either is lying or will end up working for Corporate.
So you can imagine my surprise when I discovered that what isn’t true for sororities is on the nose for apartments. A New Yorker’s home speaks volumes. The four-story walk-up littered with incense sticks hinted that my potential roommate didn’t like to clean. The two-bedroom with sheets and blankets taped over its windows told me that its resident was either depressed or a vampire. And the inch of mold growing in the corner of the three dudes’ shower mocked me for having considered that a man under the age of thirty would take responsibility for anything, ever.
Then, in the three-bedroom, third-floor walk-up in north Greenpoint, I knew. Real-estate lightning struck. When Mary met me at the door, I thought, I like her dress. And her hair. Then I realized that she looked exactly like me. So at the same time I found a home, I also discovered that I’m narcissistic. The place was clean, cheap, and not too far from my office. And then, without taking a photo, offering me nachos, or stealing an inquisitive glance at the girth of my ankles, she offered me the room. I said yes, realizing that this time around I wouldn’t be forced to chug a bottle of Boone’s Farm the night I moved in. I know; I was disappointed too.
strains relationships. During long journeys through foreign country, animosities brew and small disagreements flare into full-fledged fisticuffs. And ours had been a long and taxing journey indeed: We’d been on Staten Island for three hours.
My friend Morgan organized the trip as a destination birthday party. She called it “an exploration” and posted a call for crew members over Evite. The first item on the itinerary, after we were to arrive on the island: “6:30 p.m.: Drop anchor and plant flags in new territory. Commence conquering of natives.”
She promised to provide streamers and tissues for our loved ones during the bon voyage “from the Manhattan port of call.” She told us not to worry about communication as her friend Annemarie spoke “Islandese.” She explained that we wouldn’t come home until we’d concluded “the spreading of smallpox.”
Like proper pirates, we prepared for our work by drinking. Blessedly, the Staten Island Ferry sells beer. Unless you’re a commuter, and sometimes if you are, boozing is the paramount reason to ride. On a Saturday afternoon, the experiential combination of sun, wind, and buzz eclipses even the stunning views of Lady Liberty. She may as well have said, “Give us your poor, your hungry, your weekend warriors.”
Once on the island, the drinking continued. By the time we’d settled in at the second destination on our journey, a curiously empty saloon on Hylan Boulevard, we were good and toasted. I really should have seen it coming.
While standing by the bar in the saloon, someone in the party said, “This was my last borough. I’ve hit them all now. I guess I’m finally a New Yorker.”
And then Jake snorted. “Bullshit,” he said, wiping the underside of his nose.
“Why?” asked the befuddled offender.
“First of all,” Jake explained, “this doesn’t count as a trip to Staten Island.”
At this point, I agreed with his argument, if not his bullish method. In spite of the fact that we’d eaten with local families at an old-school Italian restaurant, and would soon be rubbing groins with local teens in a terrifyingly loud, underwater-themed dance club called Atlantis, this didn’t feel like an authentic trip to Staten Island—perhaps because we referred to these locals as “natives.” Our journey was, by design, ironic. We didn’t have fun; we had “fun.” We kept enough of a distance that it was impossible to tell whether the wax spiking the teenage boys’ hair was manufactured by Goody or Madame Tussaud.
To their credit, the locals just as obviously gawked at us: a clan of buttoned-up twentysomethings who referred to themselves as the Blogerati. I know what that word means, yet I still don’t really know. It would also be an appropriate title for tiny gnomes who clean castle moats.
So did the circumstances of our trip warrant the checking off of Staten Island from the list of boroughs visited? Jake seemed to argue that dancing inside an oceanic nightclub—just so you can say you did—does not. And when compared to truly authentic Staten Island visits, such as meeting a new boyfriend’s parents or identifying a body, it was difficult to argue otherwise.
“Furthermore,” Jake bloviated, “visiting all of the boroughs is not what makes you a New Yorker.”
He paused momentarily, waiting for someone to ask, “What does?” However, so impatient was he to play the pedant, he continued before anyone had the chance. “You’re only a New Yorker after you’ve told a stranger to fuck off.” He accented the last word by sucking air through his teeth.
In that case, Jake must be the New Yorkiest of us all: He’d already blessed out a car on Hyman for failing to light its headlamps, taken a shot at a too-bold seagull in the ferry terminal, and assaulted the end of a beer for growing warm. Put off as much by him as his point, I rolled my eyes and mumbled, “Here we go.”
Jake shot back: “Yes?”
“Well, I mean, come on,” I said, “plenty of people in this city get by without shouting obscenities.”
“And I’m saying that those people aren’t truly New Yorkers.”
“That’s too narrow a—”
“Why? Because you’ve never done it?” he interrupted.
“Done what?” I stalled.
“You’ve never shouted ‘fuck you’ to a total stranger.”
I quickly scanned the street scuffles from my past, but the answer was already clear to us both.
“No,” I admitted.
“Then you’re not a New Yorker,” he said, raising one eyebrow and slightly cocking his head toward the other, a movement that
caused one dribble of sweat to swim precariously from forehead to nose so that when he self-satisfactorily pulled his glass of whiskey to his partially curled lips, I was able to pray that the perspiration would drip into his drink.
“Well, that definition works for you,” I said out loud. Because you’re an aggressive asshole, I said in my head.
Walking around accosting one another: what a self-destructive way to behave! It always escalates. If Jake had been piloting the Titanic, he would have claimed that the iceberg nudged him first.
And, besides, it’s ridiculous to argue that there could only be one answer to the question “When does one become a New Yorker?” There are as many answers as there are people living in the city. It’s a very popular topic of conversation. No matter how varied their origins or social statuses, every naturalized New Yorker has, at one point or another, entertained the question. However, depending on who you are, your response might be, “The first time I got mugged” or “The first time I mugged someone.”
When the bodega owner knows how you like your coffee.
When you leave the city and get carsick from all the driving.
After your first conversation across a subway platform.
When you learn to like to eat alone.
