The Bennington Girl

I’m seventeen when my father first pegs me as a “Bennington girl.” I’ve never heard the college mentioned, but immediately recognize the name from Franny and Zooey. Salinger’s Bennington girl looks “like she’d spent the whole train ride in the john, sculpting or painting or something, or as though she had a leotard under her dress.” If that’s how Dad sees me—as a weird, messy artist—it’s also how I see myself, in Rockaway Beach, Queens, NY circa 1980. Here, culture of any kind, even a movie or bookstore, requires crossing a bridge. I travel for weekly flute and dance classes, but the rest of my free time is spent smoking weed and drawing with cray-pas, smoking weed and reading novels, smoking weed and, after my father’s uncharacteristic decree, fantasizing that I’m not glum Jill on the Green Line bus but a Bennington girl on the New Haven line, en route to the Yale-Harvard game. Luckily, the tiny, progressive Vermont school accepts me. Sans parental oversight, it’s the only place where I’ve applied.

Almost instantly, I discover that there’s a lot more to the B girl profile than Wannabe Artist/Fictional Character. Upon hearing of my college destination, literally any male over thirty coos, “Ahhh” or “Oooh” as if decoding or undressing me. My dentist, my dentist, licks his lips. Well into my fifties, I’ll be greeted by a certain friend’s father as, wink, wink, “the Bennington girl.” As a redhead, I’m used to lewd, specific innuendo. Red in bed. Wild red. Is it true what they say about redheads? Still, the tarnish to my new image disturbs. Have I missed a suggestive subtext to Salinger’s B girl spending “the whole train ride in the bathroom”? Does my father think I’m a slut? It’s bad enough that I’m still having sex with a Vassar boy, even though he’s broken up with me. Then, the discovery: I’m pregnant.

In desperation, I confide in my flute teacher, the first openly gay person I’ve ever met, and thus, I assume, open-minded. Get an abortion ASAP, she advises in the same practical tone in which she’s urged me to get a piccolo… for more options at college. If you need cash, just hawk some jewelry on Canal Street. About the upsetting male commentary and my father’s opinion: It’s time to grow a thicker skin… considering, well, men.

“Once you begin looking for the Bennington girl, she’s everywhere,” my former classmate, the writer Jonathan Lethem, recently said. I’d just told him about the list I’d, for years, been compiling, whenever I came across Her in print. I hadn’t been looking. She just kept showing up, often a glimpse or cameo, now and then in a starring role. It isn’t until Jonathan’s remark inspires a proper search that I truly begin to grasp Her ubiquity. Since the school’s founding in 1932, the Bennington girl has been referenced in every decade, in literary fiction and non-fiction, memoir, biography, newspapers, magazines, thrillers, romance, satire, mystery, erotica, book reviews, YA, Psychology, Sociology, and Historical texts as well as comedy, film, and TV. This artistic, sexually bold, brilliant or flaky, monied, spooky, (probably communist) free spirit has, arguably,