When I transferred from Yale to Stanford junior year, I found myself marooned in a sophomore dorm with a bunch of strangers. Everyone seemed to speak in a foreign tongue: “Meet me at the CoHo for FroYo before my seminar in FloMo.” I tried to translate this into Yalie-speak (“Meet me at Commons for crepes before my colloquy in Calhoun”), but the arduous process left me sentences behind. I felt like a complete outsider.
Then I saw the sorority rush signs, writ large in fluorescent Magic Markers and posted everywhere from Tresidder to Hoover Tower: “Friends for life!” “Not your mother’s tea party!” I can only explain my joining Kappa Kappa Gamma with three words: I was desperate.
Admittedly, the All-American bodacious blondes in Kappa Kappa Gamma weren’t exactly my niche. A quirky Jewish tie-dyed intellectual from Los Angeles, I often felt like a charity case from a Heathers affirmative action program while gazing around the semicircle of stylish coeds singing at the close of each Kappa meeting. Attending events like the Kappa Krush, in which my Lycra-clad kin would blindfold each other and—well, I’m not sure what—I’d pretend to be Margaret Mead infiltrating an exotic culture. So when it came time to pair a Big Sister with each member of the new pledge class, I appeared to have been adopted by my polar opposite: senior goddess Brooke Ramel.
A word about Brooke Ramel: perfect. The girl-next-door beauty from Kansas had not only brains, a boyfriend and a body to die for, but also the vocal prowess of Natalie Merchant and the charisma of Madonna. Juggling her guitar, international relations midterms and the leading role in Gaieties, she still managed to minister to my mini-crises and surprise me with an ultra-worldly cocktail party on my birthday. Brooke’s sophistication and self-confidence astonished me. While she seemed perched on the launchpad to stardom, I was traveling through a tunnel on a bus with no headlights.
Ten years later, it didn’t surprise me to read about Brooke’s success in Stanford’s Class Notes. According to the blurb, tracks from her well-regarded albums had been showcased on popular TV series like Dawson’s Creek. She had opened for Sophie B. Hawkins. Her website featured flawless photos, Brooke’s serene smile an external manifestation of what I assumed to be her flawless, serene personal life. Although I had worked in film, written for magazines and newspapers, published a memoir and recently enrolled in Stanford’s medical school, Brooke, to my mind, was the one who’d “made it.” Me? I still lacked a soulmate and stability, direction and dental insurance.
Then last year, at one of my book signings in Los Angeles, I looked up and saw Brooke for the first time since 1990. Afterward, introducing her to a friend using the facts I’d gleaned from Class Notes, I filled in the blanks with embellishments from my imagination.
“You know,” Brooke corrected me when we were alone, “I’m actually still single and, well, I’m not as together as you think.”
Thus began our ad hoc reunion: not the one attended by hundreds of classmates we never really knew, but an intimate, Oprah-style confessional.
“College wasn’t the happiest four years of my life,” Brooke confided after I mentioned how much I’d idolized her as an undergraduate. Amazingly, she’d grappled with problems similar to mine, including feelings of alienation and a skewed self-perception. She was afraid of trying out for Dollies freshman year, for instance, because even though she’d been a dancer and cheerleader in her Kansas high school, she worried that she might be considered “too fat” in California. (This from a woman who probably weighs less than anyone on Friends.)
Just as I was wondering how this person who always appeared to have everything together could have felt even remotely like me, she said: “You always appeared to have everything together, and your life now seems so perfect.”
“Nah, it’s pretty normal,” I replied. “Perfectly normal.”
Indeed. As we’ve both come to realize that “normal” isn’t a pejorative and that “perfect” is an illusion, I no longer feel like my Big Sister’s ill-suited sibling. Moving through life as best we can, Brooke Ramel and I have more in common than I ever thought possible. Even if she’s still a goddess to me.
Lori Gottlieb, ’89, is the author of Stick Figure: A Diary of My Former Self and the recently published Inside the Cult of Kibu: And Other Tales of the Millennial Gold Rush. She lives in Los Angeles.
