The Brown Reader

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  “My pleasure,” he said, and with that, he slid his foot between mine, tapping lightly against the inside edge of my boot. “Nice.”

  As I ran up the steps of the Am Civ building late for class, I felt a lightness and a bitter/sad tug deep in my chest. I may have chalked it up to the splendor of the day. If I’d been wiser, I would have guessed that I was a little in love with him even then. But I was twenty, and whatever I knew on that autumn-summer day was a secret to myself. And when a friend who had also known him in high school and noticed his metamorphosis from cute to Adonis later whispered, “God, he’s gorgeous,” I agreed. “Yes,” I said, “but I wouldn’t want to be his girlfriend.” I had seen the way some women looked at him, sharp sideways glances my way simply because he was talking to me. I’d heard about the campus groupies. Besides, I was with the French Canadian, and I thought it would be forever.

  How Brown’s Food Changed My Life

  DANA COWIN

  The food served at Brown University in the late seventies and early eighties was not memorable. Pizza at the Gate. Falafel at the Ivy. Scrod at the Ratty. Because that food was so distinctly unremarkable, so broadly unappealing, I ate out frequently, energetically, and curiously for the first time ever.

  I wasn’t on the lookout for amazing meals; I was unconsciously hunting out exciting experiences. As the editor in chief of Food & Wine, that turned out to have been an important lesson. It’s so easy for me to get caught up trying to identify the most original eighteen-course tasting menu in the world or obsessing over where my dinner grazed and died that I can lose sight of some of the reasons that people want to go out in the first place—to have fun, to be part of a scene, to feel included, to go on an adventure. I learned the value of all this when I was in college.

  At Brown, I’d often start my day with breakfast at a diner. I’d head to Louis’s on Brook Street for perfectly ordinary, somewhat greasy scrambled eggs and buttered toast. And I loved it! With heavy plates and paper napkins, it was such a real diner that it almost felt ersatz, like a movie set. There were students, professors, locals all around me ordering “the usual.” My friend Barbara achieved that vaunted “regular” status and was rewarded by having her photo pinned on the wall.

  Lessons: The atmosphere of a place can be more important than the food. And becoming an insider has its privileges!

  After some classes, like new journalism with Roger Henkle or twentieth-century architecture with William Jordy, I’d drop into one of the student lounges, get a tea, and sink into a seat and watch the people slink past. I was also well trained in eavesdropping by my mother, who was a pro (often to the detriment of dinner table conversation), so I listened in, catching the drift of intense conversations. I went to the lounges where the people were way cooler than I was: Big Mother, the subterranean spot near the mailroom. Or the Blue Room. Or, my favorite, Carr House. Carr House was (and still is) on the RISD campus in an imposing Queen Anne–style building with two wonderful, bowed bay windows overlooking Waterman Street. My friend Bob described it as his Café de Flor, a place “to watch the artsy poseur world go by.” Clearly my affection for this place had nothing to do with the tea. All the lounges essentially had the same tea bags, but they each had a different clique or culture. Though today I will often search out spots with ultrapremium artisanal ingredients (if it’s tea it has to be the first flush picked by the nimblest fingers on the highest mountains to be interesting), it’s important to remember, sometimes going to a restaurant is great just for the scene.

  In search of lunch, I came across the unfamiliar world of the really big sandwich. Growing up, I had come to know the holy trinity of classic little paper-bag sandwiches—PB & J, tuna, and egg salad—but during college I was dazzled by the far more exotic possibilities of what could be put between two pieces of bread. And the sex appeal that could be brought to a dish simply by giving it a person’s name. At Geoff’s on Benefit Street, I had gigantic sandwiches named for politicians, actors, locals. Geoff’s continues the tradition today. You can order a Judy Garland (roast beef and coleslaw) or a Groucho (hot corned beef, melted cheddar, Shedd’s sauce, lettuce, and tomato) or the Will Rogers (hot kosher salami, melted Muenster). There’s an unprecedented trend in high-quality, huge sandwiches today, and I guess Providence was thirty years ahead of the curve!

  At Penguin’s on Thayer Street, I discovered the hippie combo of sprouts and Muenster poked into a mustard-slathered pita, then microwaved to gooey perfection. Even now, on the odd winter night, I still crave that salty, stretchy, chewy sandwich. For most people, food nostalgia is rooted in childhood. For me, it all started in college.

  In the afternoon, if I didn’t have classes, I’d set out for an adventure, with food as the final destination. My first discovery was Faria’s Bakery on Wickenden Street. Inside the dimly lit, spare shop, they sold a couple of different kinds of Portuguese sweet bread with smooth, rounded tops. If cotton candy were a bread, it would be Faria’s sweet breads. Light, sweet, delicious. I’d eat the loaf as I walked around the nearby vintage clothing and antiques shops, before getting back to my dorm room almost empty-handed. The bread came with a history lesson: I learned that the store thrived because of the large Portuguese population that had landed in Fox Point in the early twentieth century and had stayed on.

  An even bigger adventure was going to the Italian enclave on Federal Hill. It wasn’t the restaurants I fell in love with there (I’m not sure the pasta with red sauce was much better than that offered by the Ratty) but the poultry shop off Atwells Avenue called Antonelli’s. You’d walk through the shop into a back room and choose a live bird, and they’d kill it on the spot, so you could bring it home still warm. Admittedly, this is something I never did, but it was a spectacle: it felt tinglingly exotic and foreign even though it was just twenty minutes from campus.

  Going on food adventures is one of the most exciting things I do for my job, looking for trends or new talent. Now, though, it isn’t always by foot. A couple of years ago, I flew to Copenhagen just to try the number one restaurant in the world, the fanatically naturalistic Noma. Or just this past winter, I went to India on a food safari. I ate in a palace restaurant that celebrated maharaja cuisine, but also took crazy rickshaw rides to street-food vendors—the most memorable of which was the fried chicken stall where the coated chicken was hacked with a machete and then tossed in a huge vat of boiling oil.

  Dinner out during my Brown years was a big treat, sometimes requiring someone else’s car and checkbook. Each semester my dry-witted, indulgent grandmother would send me a check with a simple note: “Please go get yourself a decent meal.” I’d find a friend with a car and a big appetite and head to the Old Grist Mill Tavern in Seekonk, Massachusetts, for a juicy, medium-rare prime rib, queen’s cut, a meal reminiscent of those I would have had with my grandmother back home. It was a primal experience at the Mill—a Paleolithic feast before the Paleolithic diet was born. Other dinners introduced me to entirely new foods that are now as common as the pizza slice was back then, such as the oysters at Blue Point and cheesy French onion soup at Rue de l’Espoir.

  My eating experiences never went much past midnight. I was (and still am) an early-to-bed person. But I always had a huge amount of curiosity about late-night expeditions. The place I longed to go was the Silver Top Diner. I’d heard about the huge bran muffins, split, slathered with butter, then griddled. I wanted a taste of the muffin, sure, but what I really wanted was the experience of being there late, under the moon, near the shiny diner, with a group of friends, cool.

  If I ever get too pretentious about food, I can look back to my time at Brown, the time before I became a judge on Top Chef, before I began eating out for a living, before I began choosing the best new chefs in the country, and remember that, at the end of the day, sometimes all you want from food is an amazing experience.

  The Net

  DAVID LEVITHAN

  We were pioneers, but we had no idea what we were exploring. We were venturing
into new territory, but we didn’t realize how soon the entire topography would change.

  There were fewer than seventy of us in Littlefield in 1991 when we were chosen to be a pilot dorm for what we didn’t know to call the Internet. We were given special jacks to hook up to our Mac SEs. I doubt everyone installed them, so we’re probably talking fifty people here at the most. The appeal—the way they hooked us in—was email.

  We were given identity numbers; I think mine, drawn from the recesses of my memory, was something like ST101540. We were given rudimentary instructions to get to an even more rudimentary interface. It took a few minutes to dial up. It was called Ethernet.

  Ethernet. In the beginning, emphasis was on the ether, because it was like the words would condense out of the air, the ever-instant telegraph delivered to the Apple screen. It was only later—much later—that we would start to feel the net.

  Since we were the only ones with a connection in our rooms, the only people we could reach were . . . each other. We would spend the five minutes it took to log on and compose and send, just to contact someone two floors down to see if he was ready to go to dinner. And then we’d wait five minutes—at least—for the reply. It didn’t matter that it would only take a minute to walk to his door or five seconds to call him on the phone. We preferred—instinctively, tellingly—the less vulnerable remove of sending typed-out words as our emissaries. Efficiency was secondary to novelty and avoidance.

  Certainly there were other people on campus with email accounts, but they had to log on at a computer center. And maybe there was a computer science concentrator among us who knew the tricks of this trade, who understood that the connection we were establishing could lead to places beyond our dorm, beyond mail. But mostly, when we used it at all, we kept it within the closed circuit of our already close quarters.

  It was the year I got my first CD player. (I was a late adopter.) It was the year a friend would come over every Thursday to watch L.A. Law, each of us talking about everything besides the fact that we might want to kiss boys more than we wanted to kiss girls. Whenever someone I didn’t know was mentioned to me, I would pull out my well-worn copy of the facebook from last year, to see who they were. When the girl across the hall from me wanted to share her music, she left her door open. I was always forgetting to turn my answering machine on.

  It did not occur to me, on any level, that things would change.

  It was only the next year that things got serious. Because when we arrived at the dorms in the fall of 1992, everybody had access to email. Or at least everybody who had a computer that had a modem—a somewhat small percentage—had access to email. The transformation hadn’t completely taken hold; I remember having one high school friend at Stanford who also had an email address and exchanging a few messages with him, but mostly my words remained postal when they left Brown. And for the most part, people still stopped by the doorway when it was time for dinner.

  At the same time, though, we were acclimating. By the time the fall of 1993 hit, we were more and more used to being wired. There were still the haves and the have-nots—but as a result, the have-nots leaned on the haves. My SE didn’t have a modem, so I relied on the kindness of my dormmates. (I was a dorm counselor, so I was relying on the kindness of my freshmen, for the most part.) It was almost old-school of us—we were like a dorm with only three or four pay phones, and lines would form to use them. Only they weren’t pay phones, but computers in other people’s rooms. In Perkins, I think the most gracious among us was a girl named Phil, who never seemed to begrudge our constant presence in her room, on her computer. If anything, the room became a social hub, as we would congregate to talk while we waited to use her modem-enabled device.

  If 1991 showed us email’s potential for communication, by 1993 we had a deep awareness of its capacity for drama. We became essayistic in our diatribes and perpetual in our expectation that there would be a reply waiting for us whenever we logged in. Life histories would be divulged not in a late-night, common-room, too-giddy-drunk-to-sleep conversation, but in long emails sent while sitting solo. There were not yet things to forward; there were not yet sites to link to. We were our own sole content providers, and more often than not, the content came from our more discontented emotions. Email became not only the place to ask someone if they wanted to go to dinner, but also the place to examine why dinner had gone so wrong.

  We walked through the door before we knew what it led to. We thought we were rewiring our computers but we were really rewiring ourselves. When I was a kid, I thought the most mind-blowing science fiction concept in the world was a video phone. Now I have one in my pocket. And this first wiring—this first step into the Internet—was the hinge between the science fiction and the reality. More than anything else that happened to me in college, or happened to the world while I was at college, this was the biggest change. This was the generation-defining transition.

  Soon all of the possibilities, good and bad, would come flooding in. In college, I never felt like I was broadcasting myself farther than the other side of the room. There were hours at a time when no one could find me. I wrote letters. Many, many letters. And at the same time, I remained oblivious to so much about myself, so much about the world. The only voices I heard were the ones immediately around me and the ones I found in books.

  I think a lot about Littlefield when I think about what the connectivity of technology is doing to my life and my mind. I think about the fifty or so of us, dipping our toes into the tub that would turn out to be an ocean. There we were in the middle of campus, at the height of our youth, and when given the right tools, we would use our time to send brief messages to the people in the room next to ours, or down the hall, or two floors down. To someone my age or older, it’s comical to think of the slow dial-up connections and the primitive screens and the way we would hang on every electronic word. To someone younger than me, what was once comical is now commonplace and instantaneous. I have to imagine that the residents of Littlefield now spend a lot more time on their devices, communicating with each other. It’s just a question of what else has fallen away, what we knew that they no longer know.

  When I think about college, I picture myself walking to class from Pembroke, cutting through parking lots to get to the Green. I have my headphones on—my black, fuzzy headphones, plugged into my Walkman, playing 10,000 Maniacs, or REM, or Suzanne Vega. I am in my own world, but every now and then I step out of it as I bump into friends. To find out what’s going on with them, I have to talk to them. And when I’m done talking to them, I can return to my own world.

  I have to imagine it’s different now.

  Love is a long, close scrutiny

  DAVID SHIELDS

  From the sound of things, the girl who lived next door to me my sophomore year of college was having problems with her boyfriend. One night Rebecca invited me into her room to share a joint and told me she kept a journal, which one day she hoped to turn into a novel. I said Kafka believed that writing in a journal prevented reality from being turned into fiction, but as she pointed out, Kafka did nothing if not write in a journal. I liked the way she threw her head back when she laughed.

  The next day I knocked on her door to ask her to join me for lunch. Her door was unlocked; she assumed no one would break into her room, and in any case the door to the dormitory was always locked. Rebecca wasn’t in and neither was her roommate, who had all but moved into her boyfriend’s apartment off campus. Rebecca’s classes weren’t over until late afternoon, I remembered, and I walked in and looked at her clothes and books and notebooks. Sitting down at her desk, I opened the bottom right drawer and came across a photo album, which I paged through only briefly, because underneath the album was a stack of Rebecca’s journals. The one on top seemed pretty current and I started reading: the previous summer, she’d missed Gordon terribly and let herself be used on lonely nights by a Chapel Hill boy whom she had always fantasized about and who stroked her hair in the moonlight and wiped himself off
with leaves. When Rebecca returned to Providence in the fall, she knew she wanted romance, and after weeks of fights that went all night and into the morning, she told Gordon she didn’t want to see him anymore.

  Me, on the other hand, she wanted to see every waking moment of the day and night. As a stutterer, I was even more ferociously dedicated to literature (the glory of language that was beautiful and written) than other English majors at Brown were, and I could turn up the lit-crit rhetoric pretty damn high. She loved the way I talked (my stutter was endearing); her favorite thing in the world was to listen to me rhapsodize about John Donne. She often played scratchy records on her little turntable (this was 1975), and when I said, “The Jupiter Symphony might be the happiest moment in human history,” her heart skipped a beat. Toward my body she was ambivalent: she was simultaneously attracted and repelled by my strength. She was afraid I might crush her. These are near-verbatim quotes.

  I finished reading the journal and put it away, then went back to my room and waited for Rebecca to return from her classes. That night we drove out to Newport, where we walked barefoot in the clammy sand and looked up at the lighted mansions that lined the shore in the distance. “The rich, too, must go to sleep at night,” I said, offering Solomonic wisdom. We stood atop a ragged rock that sat on the shoreline; the full tide splashed at our feet. The moon made halos of our heads. I put my hands through her hair and kissed her lightly on the lips. “Don’t kiss hard,” she said. “I’m afraid I’ll fall.”

  Tuesday and Thursday afternoons—when she worked in the development office—I’d go into her room, shut the door, lock it, and sit back in the swivel chair at her desk. She always left a window open. The late fall wind would be blowing the curtains around, and the Jupiter Symphony would always be on the little red record player on the floor. She often left wet shirts hanging all over the room; they’d ripple eerily in the wind. On the wall were a few calligraphic renderings of her own poetry. Her desk was always a mess, but her journal—a thick, black book—was never very difficult to find.