“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 parking lot outside Jadwin Gym, my father reluctantly slid into a wheelchair and allowed my mother to push him inside.
I almost didn’t want to see what was happening to my father. I couldn’t bear it. I’d done some research on multiple sclerosis in the Princeton library, photocopying medical journal articles to send to my parents. I’d tried to insist that they call a specialist or sign Dad up for some physical therapy, but they—my dad, primarily—didn’t want to hear any of it. For all the hours we spent talking on the phone while I was at college, his health was the one topic he wouldn’t touch.
If I asked how he was feeling, the answer was always “I feel good.” And that would be that.
I let his voice be my comfort. It bore no trace of pain or self-pity, carrying only good humor and softness and just the tiniest hint of jazz. I lived on it as if it were oxygen. It was sustaining, and it was always enough. Before hanging up, he always asked if I needed anything—money, for instance—but I never said yes.
7
Home gradually began to feel more distant, almost like a place in my imagination. While I was in college, I kept up with a few of my high school friends, most especially Santita, who’d landed at Howard University in Washington, D.C. I went to visit her there over a long weekend and we laughed and had deep conversations, same as we always had. Howard’s campus was urban—“Girl, you’re still in the hood!” I teased, after a giant rat charged past us outside her dorm—and its student population, twice the size of Princeton’s, was almost entirely black. I envied Santita for the fact she was not isolated by her race—she didn’t have to feel that everyday drain of being in a deep minority—but still, I was content returning to the emerald lawns and vaulted stone archways of Princeton, even if few people there could relate to my background.
I was majoring in sociology, pulling good grades. I started dating a football player who was smart and spontaneous, who liked to have fun. Suzanne and I were now rooming with another friend, Angela Kennedy, a wiry, fast-talking kid from Washington, D.C. Angela had a quick, wacky wit and made a game of making us laugh. Despite being an urban black girl, she dressed like a preppy out of central casting, wearing saddle shoes and pink sweaters and somehow managing to pull off the look.
I was from one world but now lived fully in another, one in which people fretted about their LSAT scores and their squash games. It was a tension that never quite went away. At school, when anyone asked where I was from, I answered, “Chicago.” And to make clear that I wasn’t one of the kids who came from well-heeled northern suburbs like Evanston or Winnetka and staked some false claim on Chicago, I would add, with a touch of pride or maybe defiance, “the South Side.” I knew that if those words conjured anything at all, it was probably stereotyped images of a black ghetto, given that gang battles and violence in housing projects were what most often showed up in the news. But again, I was trying, if only half consciously, to represent the alternative. I belonged at Princeton, as much as anybody. And I came from the South Side of Chicago. It felt important to say out loud.
For me, the South Side was something entirely different from what got shown on TV. It was home. And home was our apartment on Euclid Avenue, with its fading carpet and low ceilings, my dad kicked back in the bucket of his easy chair. It was our tiny yard with Robbie’s blooming flowers and the stone bench where, what seemed like eons ago, I’d kissed that boy Ronnell. Home was my past, connected by gossamer threads to where I was now.
We did have one blood relative in Princeton, Dandy’s younger sister, whom we knew as Aunt Sis. She was a simple, bright woman who lived in a simple, bright house on the edge of town. I don’t know what brought Aunt Sis to Princeton originally, but she’d been there for a long time, doing domestic work for local families and never losing her Georgetown accent, which sits between a Low Country drawl and a Gullah lilt. Like Dandy, Aunt Sis had been raised in Georgetown, which I remembered from a couple of summer visits we’d made with my parents when I was a kid. I remembered the thick heat of the place and the heavy green drape of Spanish moss on the live oaks, the cypress trees rising from the swamps and the old men fishing on the muddy creeks. There were insects in Georgetown, alarming numbers of them, buzzing and whirring in the evening air like little helicopters.
We stayed with my great-uncle Thomas during our visits, another sibling of Dandy’s. He was a genial high school principal who’d take me over to his school and let me sit at his desk, who graciously bought me a tub of peanut butter when I turned my nose up at the enormous breakfasts of bacon, biscuits, and yellow grits that Aunt Dot, his wife, served every morning. I both loved and hated being in the South, for the simple reason that it was so different from what I knew. On the roads outside town, we’d drive past the gateways to what were once slave plantations, though they were enough of a fact of life that nobody ever bothered to remark on them. Down a lonely dirt road deep in the woods, we ate venison in a falling-down country shack belonging to some more distant cousins. One of them took Craig out back and showed him how to shoot a gun. Late at night, back at Uncle Thomas’s house, both of us had a hard time sleeping, given the deep silence, which was punctuated only by cicadas throbbing in the trees.