Page 216 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
interest in eighteen-year-old boys, much less in me—notwithstanding my great sophistication, which they had no way to assess. Second, just as a huge percentage of the boys at Amherst consisted of WASPs or prep- pies, so too did a large, perhaps larger, percentage of the young ladies at Smith and Mount Holyoke. It was only years later that a very blond young lady might be interested in interacting with a sharp and scruffy New York guy who knew the ways of the street, who had a certain rough-hewn charm, and who displayed a sense of humor different from that of the boys from the boarding schools. That magic was not going to work now. Anyway, at that stage, those girls were incredibly intimidat- ing, and many of them could outdrink me with both ease and disdain.
None of this mattered anyway. When I was a frosh, we were still operating under a regime that forbade automobiles (and—so what?—I didn’t have a license) and did not permit girls to be in the boys’ dorm rooms. So, even if I got lucky, and I didn’t, I couldn’t get lucky. There were—short of knowing someone at Smith or Holyoke who could and would fix you up (I didn’t)—only two ways to meet the local ladies. First, there was the institution of “mixers,” where everyone would stand around in terror, and only the very cool—or handsome or pretty, as the case may be—could connect. They were intolerable for me. Worse than the general mixer was the Hillel mixer, where Jews could go to meet other Jews. I was not interested in meeting, or being surveyed by, Hadas- sah members in training. So that was that.
The other way took a bit more courage, but its advantages were prescreening and the opportunity to connect by being cool on a blind telephone call. At some point in the early part of the first semester, both Smith and Holyoke would publish the books that contained high school graduation or other photos of their freshman girls, together with the name of the secondary school where each young lady had been “pre- pared.” Known, unfortunately, as “pig books,” these publications were somehow obtained and circulated. They were prized, but they did me little or no good. One could have fantasies about some of the young ladies, but calling for a blind date was another matter (and let us not forget that the Amherst freshman picture book was likewise in circula-
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