one day, when you’re fading into a life of country club obscurity as nothing more than a proper prop for an uninterested husband, you’ll read it somewhere and wonder how the girl you pegged as such a loser could somehow come out on top.
I wonder if she now remembers that passage as clearly as I do.
3
Jill White ’83, Awarded Full Scholarship to Bennington
—Hillander Alumni News, September 1983
The one positive side effect of being an outcast was a 4.0 average, which guaranteed another all-tuition-paid trip to an institution of higher learning. But this time, I did some research, and this time, I made sure that my next campus culture would be as different as it could be from Hillander. Though my first instinct after graduating from Hillander was to beat it out of New England faster than you could say “summa cum laude,” I fell in love with Bennington College in Vermont the minute I saw it.
Instead of the limestone and ivy that other New England colleges were known for, Bennington’s farmlike enviornment, with its converted barns and rural surroundings, comforted me. It had a small student body (under 1,000), a no-athletics policy (no tenniswear to be seen!), no grades (no worrying about that 4.0), and a strong arts and humanities curriculum. But mostly, I loved Bennington because when I visited campus, I saw a lot of people like me. No cliques, no Alissa Ford clones; just a bunch of individuals dying to express themselves through dance, art, writing, drama, their clothing and hairstyles—any way they could.
My essay and grades won me a full scholarship, so I decided to become a literature major. Once again I spent four years reading and writing, dabbling in fiction and expanding my literary literacy. But most of what I learned at Bennington had to do with friendship, something I was absolutely starved for when I arrived. I may have entered Bennington a loner, but I emerged with a tightknit circle of friends who vowed to stay that way for life.
This time, my roommate and I became best friends. Sarah Annastasatos was an art student from Long Island who loved to draw dreamy fantasy scenes of long-haired princesses riding on unicorns through enchanted forests. Despite her subjects, she was actually very talented, and it was amazing to watch her real skills and real self emerge over the years. By our junior year, her cynical, honest, red-streaked self-portrait so impressed the head of the art department that he arranged for a showing of her work at a local gallery.
Sarah’s bigger talent, however, was being a great friend.
Sarah looked a lot like her princesses; she had long, flowing, wavy dark brown, waist-length hair; giant brown eyes, topped by expressive eyebrows that always gave away what she was thinking; and a lovely, oval-shaped face with a flawless olive complexion. I liked to think of Sarah as the rock tied to the end of my kite. When I’d be dizzy with distraction, she’d focus me. If I became too worried about minutiae, she’d calm me. When I drank too much and puked, she held back my hair. And she’d never mince words when I wanted a forthright opinion. It was almost as if Sarah were the parent I never had growing up.
But Sarah was more than a caretaker to me. She was fun. She made friends easily and constantly and was always excited to share them. She was the least judgmental person I’d ever met and, as a result, our large, ever-expanding but close-knit group comprised all types of people—musicians, potheads, gays, aspiring philosophers. She was the center, the one who brought us all together. Thanks to her, for the first time in my life, I felt normal, accepted—even average. And thanks to my newfound self-esteem, I no longer felt the need to cut myself.
It was a really happy time. We’d all spend nights hiking the trails on the fringes of the campus, smoking clove cigarettes and dreaming about our futures. Sarah had admittedly the lamest taste in music and she loved to dance. She and I would spend giddy late nights in our room making up interpretive pantomimes to her cheesy Rick Springfield cassettes, laughing until our sides hurt. We remained roommates for all four years.
My other best friend was my boyfriend. Yes, believe it or not, the pariah of Hillander was actually able to land one. Joe Dryer came from a family of local dairy farmers. He studied music and was an in-demand dj with the most popular radio show on campus. Sarah introduced us one night when we were having a floor party. She knew him because she had a part-time job in the record library at the station. I nearly died of embarrassment when she called him over and said, “This is the Jill who calls in requests to your show all the time!”
“Really?” he asked, immediately interested. “The same Jill who likes to play ‘stump the dj’?”
“That’s me,” I said, trying to seem bored and not at all like I was glued to his show whenever it was on.
Joe had the best taste of all the djs, in my opinion. And he had a sexy voice. So I liked to call in and talk to him and make requests that I thought might throw him off guard. One time I thought Klaus Nomi—this bizarre German performer who wore a lot of white make-up and had a strange, operatic voice—would do it. But Joe knew him right away. “I think we have a copy of ‘Simple Man’ around here somewhere,” was his answer.
I laughed. “You finally, truly impressed me with the Klaus Nomi thing,” I said, tossing him the bone that he deserved. He wasn’t my physical type, really, though he was cute in an offbeat way: small and slender with short, spiky hair dyed Gothic black. And I loved his unique sense of style—vaguely preppy oxford shirts a size too big with the shirttails always out; faded jeans; shiny black wingtip shoes. But strip him of his postpunk dj style, and he would look ordinary…like a dairy farmer. Though I wasn’t physically attracted to him, I liked him immediately—selfishly, because he seemed like a nice guy, and more selfishly, because he seemed like he was very into me. It’s hard to turn down someone who thinks you’re the coolest chick since Chrissie Hynde, especially after four years of not a soul showing any interest in you. Besides, everybody else on campus started to hook up, so I thought it was due time for me, too. Soon, I started hanging out with him when he did his shows, and he introduced me to a whole world of music that I am still obsessed with: Joy Division. REM. The Smiths.
I even lost my virginity to Joe right in the radio station. It started when I playfully sat on his lap, launching a marathon make-out session. When he cued up a particularly long song—a remix of “Everything’s Gone Green,” by New Order—one thing led to another. Making out turned into foreplay, which turned into full-on sex acts. I was the aggressor, having decided it was high time I had sex. Joe seemed scared to death at first, but then he just relaxed and went along for the ride, despite his frantic glances at the studio door. He was concerned that the station manager would pop in, or that Sarah might want to scoop up some records. But we just went at it, right there in the dj chair. Sure, it was clumsy and a little bit painful, but it was also fun and so animated that while bouncing on top of Joe’s lap I inadvertently knocked the needle across the record right as he came. After a jarring screech and some dead air, Joe threw on another platter, and then we laughed until we nearly cried. From that night on we were officially a couple.
Our sex life throughout most of our three-year relationship was pretty mediocre, however, as we were both amateurs. Still, we were inseparable for most of our time in college. I enjoyed being around him simply because he liked me for me, always making me feel beautiful with his easy acceptance and friendship.
One of my fondest memories of how sweet Joe was back then was when he took me skiing for the first time in my life. We laughed so much that day as I tumbled down the mountain. Though he was an expert, Joe didn’t seem to care that he was missing out on the black diamond trails or that I was a complete klutz with frozen red cheeks and snot running out of my nose. But that was his true essence—he was kind. I had nearly forgotten all about kindness after four years of Hillander.
But another thing I learned at Bennington, unfortunately, was how to break a heart.
Like I mentioned before, Joe’s radio show made me more music crazy than ever. I was an especially devoted fan of Third Rail, a postpunk indie band from Chicago that was just starting to pick up steam on the college circuit. I adored the lead singer, Richard Ruiz, a sexy, wiry, androgynous man whose mess of curls set off amazing fantasies that I put to use many times during sex with