A Gefilte Fish in a Goldfish Pond

I spent my entire freshman year at Skidmore College feeling like a fish out of water, feeling Jewish. Nothing in my life had prepared me for the rich, beautiful, WASP-y girls I encountered when I got there. Suddenly I was surrounded by willowy blondes wearing twin sets and pearls to class and driving brand new sports cars. Growing up I thought I knew what it meant to be rich, but it wasn’t until I got to Skidmore that I got a clear picture of what rich really meant. This was my first taste of us and them, and I was most definitely one of them.They wore cotton turtlenecks and fair isle sweaters over their khakis, I sported Huckapoo shirts over my carpenter’s pants. They slept in Lanz nightgowns and it was old T-shirts for me. I felt odd and conspicuous everywhere I went.

They took ski trips to Switzerland on long weekends, one girl invited some of her friends to her family’s island on their jet, and clothes, tons and tons of clothes all made of  natural fibers. Sure I was envious, but I mainly felt alien and strange, I felt hideous and ethnic. It was there that I  got rid of my Long Island accent, and learned to drink cocktails when I was awake, and at night I had horrible dreams of  my face covered with oozing acne, so real that when I woke I would tentatively touch my cheeks to check. This was my life as a gefilte fish in a goldfish pond.

The culmination of my gefilte fish experience was an event scheduled in the spring called Happy-Pappy weekend. During one of my weekly calls home to my parents my dad asked about the upcoming festivities and I forbade him from attending. I think I hurt his feelings, but this was an emergency situation, and I’m sure if he had come he would have been as uncomfortable as I. The idea of a weekend long date with my dad was out of the question! The weekend included cocktail parties, dances and brunches for this long-standing tradition. I watched with a mixture of awe and confusion; was this normal? My people didn’t do this, clearly there was something wrong with me and my father.

What was I doing here? It felt like it snowed every day. My first roommate, a Jewish girl from New Jersey dropped out of school in November and eloped with a guy from town, leaving me alone in my huge room until the arrival of my second roommate a blond who never went to class, skied almost every day, and entered wet T-shirt contests. I made some friends, but most of the time I felt isolated and cold.

Did I give up, or give in? I ultimately raised my white flag, admitted defeat and on a snowy May day packed up and left Saratoga Springs for good. My bad dreams eventually stopped, and I enrolled at NYU, among thousands of students in a huge city; my version of the anti-Skidmore. In some ways that fish out of water feeling has remained at the periphery of my self-awareness all these years, but it was only that one year out of my whole life that I have felt like the Jewish girl.