wasn’t going to change. When it got to be too much, I’d scoop up her junk and pile it on her bed without comment.
I see now that she provoked me in a good way, introducing me to the idea that not everyone needs to have their file folders labeled and alphabetized, or even to have files at all. Years later, I’d fall in love with a guy who, like Suzanne, stored his belongings in heaps and felt no compunction, really ever, to fold his clothes. But I was able to coexist with it, thanks to Suzanne. I am still coexisting with that guy to this day. This is what a control freak learns inside the compressed otherworld of college, maybe above all else: There are simply other ways of being.
* * *
“Have you ever,” Czerny said to me one day, “thought about starting a little after-school program for kids?”
She was asking out of compassion, I would guess. Over time, I’d grown so dedicated to Jonathan, who was now in elementary school, that a good number of my afternoons were spent wandering around Princeton with him as my sidekick, or at the Third World Center, the two of us playing duets on its poorly tuned piano or reading on a saggy couch. Czerny paid me for my time but seemed to think it wasn’t enough.
“I’m serious,” she said. “I know plenty of faculty members who’re always looking for after-school care. You could run it out of the center. Just try it and see how it goes.”
With Czerny’s word-of-mouth advertising, it wasn’t long before I had a gaggle of three or four children to look after. These were the kids of black administrators and professors at Princeton, who themselves were a profound minority and like the rest of us tended to gravitate toward the TWC. Several afternoons a week, after public elementary school let out, I fed them healthy snacks and ran around with them on the lawn. If they had homework, we worked on it together.
For me, the hours flew. Being around children had a wonderful obliterative effect, wiping out school stress, forcing me out of my head and into the moment. As a girl, I’d passed whole days playing “mommy” to my dolls, pretending that I knew how to dress and feed them, brushing their hair, and tenderly putting Band-Aids on their plastic knees. Now I was doing it for real, finding the whole undertaking a lot messier but no less gratifying than what I’d imagined. I’d go back to my dorm after a few hours with the kids, drained but happy.
Once a week or so, if I found a quiet moment, I’d pick up the phone and dial the number for our apartment on Euclid. If my father was working early shifts, I could catch him in the late afternoon, sitting—or so I imagined—with his legs up in his reclining chair in our living room, watching TV, and waiting for my mom to get home from work. In the evenings, it was usually my mother who picked up the phone. I narrated my college life in exacting detail to both my parents like a homesteader dutifully providing dispatches from the frontier. I spilled every observation I had—from how I didn’t like my French professor to the antics of the little kids in my after-school program to the fact that Suzanne and I had a dedicated, mutual crush on an African American engineering student with transfixing green eyes who, even though we doggedly shadowed his every move, seemed to barely know we were alive.
My dad chuckled at my stories. “Is that right?” he’d say. And, “How about that?” And, “Maybe that engineer-boy doesn’t deserve either one of you girls.”
When I was done talking, he ran through the news from home. Dandy and Grandma had moved back to Dandy’s hometown of Georgetown, South Carolina, and Grandma, he reported, was finding herself a bit lonely. He described how my mother was working overtime trying to care for Robbie, who was now in her seventies, widowed, and struggling with an array of health issues. He never mentioned his own struggles, but I knew they were there. At one point when Craig had a home basketball game on a Saturday, my parents drove all the way to Princeton to see it, and I got my first look at their shifting reality—at what never got said on the phone. After pulling into the vast