by Pamela Moses
I no longer remember the other questions from our assignment, but there was still plenty of early-evening light by the time we finished, and someone—maybe Setsu—suggested we head outside and have a photo taken of the four of us to commemorate our first day together as roommates. We agreed on a spot just in front of the university’s entry gates as the most appropriate place, a symbol of all that awaited us. Francesca stopped a boy in a faded NASA T-shirt, with narrow shoulders and arms half the width of mine, and asked him to do the honors. In the picture, Francesca is standing between Opal and me, one wrist draped coolly over each of our shoulders. Opal’s face is turned slightly toward Francesca’s, a flattering angle as someone accustomed to being photographed might instinctively ease into. Setsu is on my left, her fingers folded together, her hands cupped like a neat basket, one delicate ankle crossed in front of the other. I recall, at the time, feeling I was the only one who had not found a comfortable stance. Later, Fran made copies of the snapshot for each of us, and when I look at it now, I still see my awkwardness: the way my right shoulder bends slightly under Francesca’s hand, the way my arm crosses in front of me in an attempt to block my midsection from the camera’s lens but draws attention to it instead.
Returning to our dorm, we talked of other things that night. Of why we’d chosen Brown, of Setsu’s older brother—a musician, of Francesca’s younger brother, and of my sisters. We talked of two Caribbean islands where Opal and Fran had both spent time and of the trip Francesca’s family had taken to South America over the summer, one she declared a total disaster but which made my family’s occasional vacations to the Catskills seem too mundane to mention.
And I learned that Francesca was not the only one who’d had boyfriends. Opal had dated a boy for a summer in Mexico. He was sweet and never pressured her and drove her everywhere on the back of his Vespa. And Setsu told of her senior-year boyfriend from her calculus class whom, she admitted, she’d never found terribly attractive. Still, she had stayed with him to quiet the friends who had started to call her Snow White, never telling them she and the calculus student did little more than hold hands and share dry kisses in the park near her home.
I tried to summon up some anecdote to contribute to this conversation, but my few encounters with boys had been fumbling embarrassments. My first kiss—only my sisters knew—had been with my step-second-cousin, Harold Panter, who had convinced me during a game of Spin the Bottle that, since he was not Benny’s son through blood, we were doing nothing wrong. Second Base I had visited only once, on the night of the prom with Charlie Schoenfeld, who smelled of vegetables and perspiration. At the after-dance party at Elena Richardson’s home in Fieldston, couples had disappeared into shadowy dark corners. I’d known what they were doing, and not wanting to be the only one who wasn’t, I hadn’t stopped Charlie when his hands traveled to the back of my dress where my bra was hooked, or when he’d buried his face in my chest. And that was it—the extent of my interludes. But in college people changed, didn’t they? They grew up. And as the hours passed, as my new suitemates stretched across the carpet, their voices rising and falling, lapping over one another’s like waves, I imagined a time when I might have such stories of my own.
For years Mama had wanted Columbia for me, the only Ivy I could attend and still live at home, or possibly Princeton, not much more than an hour’s drive away. She knew my private school’s reputation for placing students in the most competitive colleges—it was one of the reasons she and Poppy had sent me, after all—and under Mama’s careful watch, I had been making A’s in almost all of my classes. “They’d be lucky to have her,” Mama informed Mr. Radnor, my college adviser, as if she weren’t sure he recognized my qualifications. Her accent had all but disappeared long before I was born, but hints of it returned now and then; and as we sat in Mr. Radnor’s office under his framed diplomas from Stanford and Harvard, it flared. I wanted to sink into the folds of my wool turtleneck as Mr. Radnor explained that even students who were first or second in their classes—his polite way of reminding there were others more qualified than I—could not count on placing into their top two choices. There should be at least six schools on my list and not all of them Ivies. Mama leaned forward in her chair, and for a moment I thought she might argue. But she said nothing, only twisted a button on the cuff of her blouse. So she agreed to adding Yale and Brown (both relatively close to home) and three schools Mr. Radnor referred to as “much safer bets.”
“I don’t believe this full list is really necessary,” she said to me later, after we’d been ushered out of Mr. Radnor’s office, but I saw that she had chewed her bottom lip until only traces of lipstick remained.
When some months later we brought my applications to the post office, paying extra for proof of receipt to the clerk in his collared uniform, Mama closed her eyes briefly, and I knew she was casting a prayer to heaven for the “top schools.” “They’ll take you,” she said, as though pronouncing the words made it more likely to happen. “Let’s hope,” I said. Over the past two years, I had agreed to the SAT courses, to Tuesday afternoon math tutoring with Mrs. Lieberman, and then to the Thursday sessions with her as well for “general homework help,” to the hours spent with Mama carefully wording my college essays. Mrs. Lieberman’s study system had seemed to do the trick: for the last four semesters I had made honors. Before each test or assigned paper, I would repeat to myself what Mrs. Lieberman always reminded: that I knew the material, just needed to trust myself. And with this, I rarely froze up as I had in years earlier. Still, an Ivy seemed too much to believe for, and I had never told Mama I was afraid she was only wasting wishes.
Princeton and Yale arrived first—both no’s. Then Columbia—a wait list. Mama searched the letters again and again, as if there must have been a mix-up. “Maybe I should call their admissions departments, just to check?”
So the next afternoon when the white envelope arrived from Brown University, Mama pulled it from my hands before I could unseal it. A large envelope, we both knew, was a good sign; still, a single page would mean bad news. She lifted it to the light by the living room window, trying to determine what was inside, shifting its position; but the sunlight could not penetrate its heavy paper.
“Just open it, Ma!”
But she was already tearing the envelope’s edge, peering in at its contents. “Oh, Ruth!” Mama kissed my mouth, wet flecks of mascara speckling her cheeks. “I knew it! Oh, I knew it!”
I took the envelope from her, yanking out the folder inside, wanting to see it with my own eyes. In the top drawer of my desk lay the Brown University brochure I had taken from Mr. Radnor’s office, inside photographs of Brown’s thick-boughed elms with leaves dappled by New England sun, its wrought-iron fences and velvety deep lawns where pensive-looking students curled over the books propped on their knees.
That night Mama phoned Aunt Bernice and Aunt Helena, and then Aunt Nadia in Scarsdale. “Guess where your niece is headed in the fall!” Most of my cousins were still in grammar or high school, but Gregory attended Kenyon—though we all knew he’d hoped for Harvard—and Larry was finishing his final year at SUNY Binghamton. The week before, Bernice had called to announce Larry would be graduating Phi Beta Kappa, but Mama knew Ivy League trumped honors from a state school. And Brown, which had once been low on her list because of its greater distance, had become, within the last hours, her very favorite. She winked at me from where she sat at one of the kitchen chairs, still chatting.
At temple, when the Neiers and the Colemans came to give their congratulations, Mama eased around in her seat, sliding one leg over the other, cool and smooth as cream, as if she had known all along this was how things would turn out. But when they returned to their pews, she squeezed my hand hard.
• • •
We drove north—Poppy, Mama, and I—in the blue wagon we’d owned for as long as I could remember, with crates and canvas bags and wicker baskets stuffed with my belongings. How strange it seemed not to have Sarah and Valeri
e in the backseat on either side of me. I tried not to think about how, as I’d left, I’d seen Sarah bury her head in Valerie’s neck, heard the soft snuffle of tears they couldn’t quite hold back.
“How are you feeling, Ruth? Excited?” Mama pushed her sunglasses to the top of her head, twisting in her seat to face me as we finally approached the Providence exit and Poppy signaled our turn off Interstate 95. She smiled, but her cheeks stiffened as they did when she was preparing for a photograph. From my window, I could now see two church steeples and a tall, modern building I thought I remembered, from my visit the previous year, belonged to the college campus. Providence was small, I knew, in comparison to cities like New York, but from here the structures seemed so spread apart. I tucked a finger through the braided pink and yellow string bracelet Sarah and Valerie had tied around my wrist that morning. “A friendship bracelet,” they’d whispered, having already fastened matching ones to their own wrists. “Always even more than sisters.”
Most freshmen were assigned double rooms, but I would be sharing one of the few suites on Brown’s campus with three other girls. “It’s here, Aaron! Don’t miss it. On the corner of Charlesfield and Benefit,” Mama announced, reading from the orientation packet that the admissions office had sent weeks before. She directed Poppy to a street behind the brick dorms where we could park.
By the campus map included with the orientation information, we found the entrance to Keeney Quadrangle, where a swarm of laughing students crowded before the building entries, calling to one another with teasing voices, jostling past us as we crossed the green. Mama lifted her eyebrows and her shoulders at once as she turned to me, as if to say, “Won’t this be fun!” But she reached for my hand as she used to do crossing a street with me when I was little, as if she were afraid we might lose each other in the throng.
Inside Jameson House, most doors were closed, soft music and the thud-thud of hammering behind a few, others quiet where residents had not yet arrived or had already unloaded their bags and headed off to explore new things. The door to my suite was ajar though, and inside, we found it empty save three matching leather suitcases, each the size of a small hill! with the initials F.L.C. in shining brass. They filled the central living area with a sharp, flowery scent I recognized from the samples Mama sometimes tested at Whitman’s cosmetic counter but never bought. Near the entrance to the closest room sat what must have been Francesca’s fourth suitcase. Mama inspected the three unclaimed rooms, then stepped into the one just past Francesca’s.
“I think this is the best of what’s left,” she said, pointing to its window with a view of the grassy quad and a small tree. “We’ll make it nice.” She fingered the strand of coral beads at her neck, but I saw how the edges of her mouth sagged at first sight of the sparse walls, the narrow metal-legged bed and curtainless window. She and Poppy would stay until I was completely unpacked, she insisted. “You’ll want to make a place for everything, won’t you, Pea?”
I was certain my suitemates’ parents would not be making such arrangements for them, but since Mama, more quickly than I, seemed able to make sensible order of my belongings, I watched as she folded my underwear into dresser drawers, stacked books on shelves, set a ceramic-framed photo of my sisters on the faux-wood desk.
After the last of my clothes and linens and toiletries had been unpacked, my posters taped to the walls above my bed, a spare set of keys made for my room “just in case,” Mama and Poppy had walked the campus with me, remembering the buildings from our tour the previous fall: Faunce House, John Carter Brown Library, Wilson Hall, the Sharpe Refectory, where I would eat most of my meals. On Wriston Quad, we passed the fraternity houses, one with a spray-painted sheet draped from a third-floor window announcing a party later in the week.
“You coming?” two boys in shorts and flip-flops and blue baseball caps called from the patio beneath the banner. But I knew they didn’t mean me, sandwiched between my mother and father like a child. Even on my own, I had never been the one boys phoned late at night or followed down the sidewalk, asking my name.
“Who’s that?” Mama asked, as if I could possibly know. She frowned, then checked over her shoulder, scanning the patios of the other fraternity houses as if to be ready in case someone else should call out.
Later, after Mama and Poppy had kissed me for the final time, Mama holding my face in her hands once more before climbing back into the car, I returned to my room. There I retouched little of what Mama had organized earlier, only hiding away the pink ballerina music box and stuffed mother and baby koala bears, which she’d brought from home and left embarrassingly in plain view. Which was worse—the fact that she had packed these girlhood toys or that, before tucking them behind my sweaters on a closet shelf, I’d hugged the bears to me and cried into their gray matted fur?
On my desk chair, Mama had placed a white paper bag with the remainder of the lunch she had prepared for our car ride—corned beef and mustard on rye bread—just like what she had made for Sarah and Valerie and me time and time again. Flopping onto the bed, I unfolded the sandwich’s protective wax paper. It was already six o’clock. My admissions packet informed me that, in the Sharpe Refectory, an orientation dinner was being held for all first-year students at six-thirty. But, still, I bit a corner from the sandwich Mama had made, the bread softening on my tongue as I chewed. My last taste of home.
By the end of my first week of college, a care package arrived from Mama—fancy assorted nuts, dried cherries, her own homemade shortbread cookies. I had hesitated before cutting open the package, knowing that as soon as the familiar smells escaped, the loneliness I had pushed from my mind all week would return with a throbbing rush. How disorienting everything seemed when the yeasty, sugary scents from home mingled with the must of my dorm room carpet and the slightly acrid odor of its cinderblock walls. How odd to see Mama’s shortbread in Tupperware on my dormitory bed, beside my Brown University notebooks, instead of in the yellow earthenware jar on the kitchen counter, and I felt somehow I was in the wrong place.
I wondered if such anxiety ever plagued Opal or Setsu or Fran. But they all appeared perfectly adjusted as they strode in and out of our suite, their canvas bags slung carelessly over their backs. At night, I stuffed a towel into the crack beneath my bedroom door, afraid my suitemates might hear my sniffles of homesickness. I had lied our first evening together, claiming I’d spent part of the last summer on an Outward Bound trip with high school friends, not wanting to be the only one away from home for the first time. (Opal had traveled everywhere and had passed the month before school began at a youth art program in San Diego. Francesca’s parents had sent her on teen tours throughout Europe, and Setsu had spent her Augusts at camps.) I could never let them know that, when I closed my eyes at night, I pretended I was in the bedroom beside Mama and Poppy’s, with the rosebud wallpaper and faded pink curtains—this the only way I could drift into sleep.
• • •
At Mama’s insistence, I had enrolled in Survey of European History and a political science course entitled American Constitutional Law—courses she declared would give me a solid foundation for a host of more advanced classes in the future. Then, just days later, I had met with my student adviser, Dean Salkin, in her office among its countless stacks of books. The far section of the floor seemed a haphazard arrangement of paperbacks and faded, fabric-bound books and new hardcovers with glossy jackets; but in the area nearer the entrance, there seemed an order to the spacing of the stacks, like columns from some ancient temple ruins.
“Perhaps I should employ this as an intelligence test for my students,” Dean Salkin had joked, running a hand through the fringed ends of her cropped, gray-blond hair, as I’d carefully wended my way through the maze of books to a leather chair across from hers. After a long discussion involving many questions about my interests, I had added Psychology 10 and Beginning Fiction Writing, which, she’d advised, would round out my course load nicely.
“Fiction writing? Tha
t was the dean’s suggestion?” Mama was surprised.
“I think she’s been teaching for a while, Ma. You could practically circle the campus with the books she’s collected!”
Still, wasn’t it the dean’s job to help me make the most of my opportunity? Storytelling seemed something I could do during free time. Did I know how saturated the world was with authors whose names would never be heard? Too many to count. She hoped for the following term I would consider some economics or even engineering classes, subjects more practical, subjects that opened doors.
• • •
How’s my scholar?” Mama would ask when she called each Sunday and Wednesday evening. “Great, Ma.” I didn’t say that I sometimes wished I still had Mrs. Lieberman’s assistance, that the pep talks I tried to give myself now seemed far less effective. Or that almost daily my hand cramped as I scribbled down as many of my professors’ words as I could catch, but when I pored over my notes later, hunched with a bag of Starburst candies at my dorm room desk, occasional portions of what I’d written made little sense at all. I never told that when I’d asked Opal and Setsu, who took European History with me, to review a rough draft of my paper on humanism, they had found two sections they thought needed strengthening.
I spent a week on the humanism essay—“Humanism and the Art of Leonardo da Vinci”—but received only a “Pass.” Next time use fewer quotations. Rely more on your own arguments, Professor Stone had scrawled in black ink across my cover sheet.
“A ‘Pass’? What does that mean?” Mama asked. “Are any other marks given?” I thought I could hear the click-click-click of her nails against the Formica kitchen counter.
“I don’t know, Ma,” I said, though this wasn’t true. I had seen the large A on Opal’s essay. And later, after Opal was asleep, I had read through what she’d written, her paper having been left on the low, rectangular table of our common room beside some sketches for her art class. Sartrean thought asserts that “Existentialism is Humanism,” her first line read, a reference I was not sure I entirely understood.
