INTERLUDE: 2 Dickinson St

The last image from my previous post, I realize as I begin this one, is of me sitting in my back yard after a chaotic Thanksgiving dinner, thinking about COVID, and death, and the imperfect and sometime painful necessity of celebration. Two days later, after the paper turkeys had been collected from the table, the platters washed and put away, I learned that one of my closest friends from college had died, suddenly and of a heart attack, on Friday morning in London. 

No musing about death, about COVID, about the ritual marking of time, could prepare me for the news, from the other side of the Atlantic that sliced through the sedentary pleasures of a post-Thanksgiving weekend.  Just two days before Thanksgiving, three days before Tom died, he had sent me birthday wishes expressive of  both closeness and distance. “See you in London. When they let you lot back in.” The Briticism “you lot” underscored for me the transformation that had taken place in Tom; his home, his family, his work belonged in the UK. The last time I had seen Tom in person it was in my home in Houston, where he stopped by for the night while filming a documentary about Texas. He was, of course, alert to my own transformations, which he expressed through a series of questions about my use of “y’all.” I pushed back against what I saw as his exoticization of the state—he was off, among other things to find cowboys and overweight people. Today, reading his letters from the period right after college, I was reminded by a return address that he had lived for several months among the fat cowboys and cowgirls of Houston.

I have spent parts of the last week thinking and writing about Tom, sending messages to mutual friends and to his family, looking through my Facebook correspondence with him, and reliving, as they say, the past. My intention in this post is not to write directly about Tom, although he lives behind every word. The original idea was to write about a house that we shared our senior year with 19 other people—a house and a way of being in the world defined by an address: The 2 Dickinson Street Cooperative, more familiarly, “2 Dickinson.” My plan for this post was to get quickly to that house, to cross its threshold, as it were, and to talk about layout, shared responsibilities, and liberal politics in the years just before Reagan. Instead, I have found myself telling a slower story of living and belonging during my college years, a story of which Tom was a crucial part and to which 2-Dickinson was for the time, and for the times—can I really say this­­­—a happy ending. I will get there and to Tom next week.

I joined 2 Dickinson in what I believe was its second year of existence, the fall of 1978. It had emerged—I don’t know quite how—as an “alternative” living arrangement on the Princeton Campus, which at that time had two residential colleges and a series of traditional dorms. I had lived happily enough in Wilson college for my first two years, joining in a variety of group activities and refusing others, especially those that involved eating with faculty. (I think of this often when encouraged to be a College Associate at Rice; the idea, someone’s idea, is that students are dying to eat with professors.)  Wilson college did not look like what most people think of when they hear the word “Princeton”: it was newish, square, and utilitarian. In my own mind I exaggerated the difference: Mussolini not Fitzgerald, brutalist not gothic. Many of the dorms were called by numbers instead of names. People in the older part of campus trafficked in “Witherspoon” or “McCosh” –names that signaled at the time some vague and romantic history, and only now speak to me of a chillingly specific racist past. We at Wilson college had some names to conjure with, but mostly our building names were dates—presumably signifying the graduating years of the classes who donated funds for the new structures. The temporal thrust of these buildings and of my life in them was forward: A freshman in in 1937 Hall, when I moved back to Wilson college as a junior, I found refuge in 1940 Hall, at the time the last building on the edge of campus overlooking empty fields. Wilson College was Princeton’s cutting edge—a sign of the reconfigured residential campuses of the next millennium. 

That first year I grew to love the severe common spaces of the college—the rec room, the courtyards, and especially the dining room where I knew everyone and most people knew me. I probably spent longer at meals than any college student has before or since: often I was the first in line to eat and one of the last to leave as shifting groups of students joined the table until they were called away by work or higher pleasures. The food was bad, but for once in my life I didn’t care.  I learned to drink coffee and to linger over as an excuse to sit and talk. As an only child, I craved company of people my own age, crafting out of that need a generational identification, a politics of inclusion, and a “lifestyle” as we sometimes said then, without many temporal or spatial boundaries.  

A big part of that lifestyle meant keeping what I might have thought of even in my dorm room as an open house. Partly as a reaction to a very private childhood in which my mother resolutely drew lines around her home to avoid the domestic fate of her own mother, who cooked every night for her husband, her bothers, and her adult son, I almost never asked (or wanted) my friends to leave my room. My time at college and beyond was marked by (imperfectly) adult forms of parallel play: I loved reading, writing, eating, or even talking on the phone as other people sat on the edge of my bed, similarly employed or simply listening to music or sleeping. My housemates over the years made fun of the “puppy pile” of friends who would show up in my room and sit at the end of my increasingly capacious beds. (In late middle age, even before COVID, I retreated to a more dignified form of domesticity; the “puppies” are actual dogs (and cats). I still struggle with boundaries, but am proud to declare that six pets now feel like too much.)

My sophomore-year roommate, Naomi, and I could have stayed in Wilson college, but, for reasons that are not clear to me, we did not. Perhaps it was a sense that we had not experienced the “real” Princeton, the one featured in its brochures and legends, the Princeton of beautiful gothic buildings. By moving to Patton Hall, with its turrets and its narrow staircases, I was finally living (in) the Princeton of my parents’ dreams. In my letters to them, now far away in Italy, I did not tell them how very lonely I was. And I was not the only one. Every time over the years I have spoken to Naomi about our time in Patton, she shudders. She can only remember literal and figurative darkness. I heard that shudder over the phone only a few nights ago when I brought up the topic. “It was so gray.” She said. “Surely it can’t have rained every day?” Reading our letters from the time reminds me that we had planned to move into the suite in Patton with a third roommate, but that we had found out (who knows if we were right about this?) that she was a thief. After exchanging many agonized letters over the summer, we decided to go ahead as a unit of two and to be matched randomly with a third person. Our new roommate seemed like a lovely person, but we did not get to know her well: indeed, caught in our separate darknesses, Naomi and I must have also lost touch with each other. In late December, Naomi told me she was moving out to join that new co-op at 2 Dickinson. 

I know, having seen it now so often with myself, my students and my sons, that college rooming arrangements are fragile things, seemingly designed to produce anxiety, vulnerability, rejection, and humiliation. I felt all these things, and also anger, shame, guilt, and loss. At that time I thought of Naomi and myself as a household—and the breakup of that household as a divorce. Years later, when she and I coauthored a book about pregnancy and infertility (tellingly, perhaps, entitled Confinements), I referred to her, when people asked who she was, not as my college friend or best friend, but as my “college roommate.” For a time—a long time—I felt that the breakup was my fault. After all, just before she broke the news to me in December of our junior year, I had forgotten her birthday. (She, no doubt, had remembered mine two weeks before.) Confronted with her very visible hurt on the day after, I ran to the bookstore and bought what under happier circumstances would have qualified as what my family calls a “good present”: three new books of feminist poetry. Like the stock figure of the husband who has forgotten his wife’s anniversary, I tried to make up for something that was already over.  I literally ran up Patton’s steep and uninviting stairs with the books, which I had hastily wrapped in the wind and rain between the bookstore and our room. I don’t remember the details, but Naomi was not appeased. It would take more than the Dream of a Common Language to heal a breach that was in any case, something neither of us understood. 

I think I understand it a little better now, as one understands things more deeply when the details are forgotten. We were depressed, certainly, but we were also isolated by the structures of belonging that accompanied the junior year. This was the moment at Princeton in the ’seventies when most students joined an “eating club,” Princeton’s classier (read: classist) version of fraternities and sororities. Except for those students willing to buck the trend and eat in cafeterias filled with first- and second-year students, this meant a radical separation between living and eating—and an atomization of community. It also, for many students, meant finding a place in a culture shaped in unmistakable ways by Princeton’s exclusive and exclusionary history. Three of the clubs at the time were all-male and “selective,” with a rush-like process that had--perhaps still has--a name I am happy to have forgotten. Other clubs were “open,” although they were referred to more colloquially, as I noted in a letter home, as “non-selective.” These nonselective clubs were open to women. This may have been the last time I heard the word “co-ed” regularly. I finally joined an “open” club, and I believe, Naomi joined a different one. Oddly, I had until a few days ago, forgotten the name of the club I joined—and I don’t mention it in any of my letters to my parents. I do, in those letters, sometimes say “my club,” but always in quotation marks, which may not have done all the work I hoped they would. It turns out, I learn from other people’s letters, that I joined Cloister Club, which was famous for its food. In my letters, Cloister had a chef, without quotation marks.

Of course, I could have chosen, as braver people did, not to join a club at all. I was very unhappy at Cloister, despite its truly excellent food. In fact, my memories of the place almost all involve standing in the kitchen watching the famous chef at work. The following year, when I joined 2-Dickinson, marked the beginning of a multi-decade legal fight by my friend and feminist fellow- traveler, Sally Frank, who sued the all-male eating clubs for sex-discrimination. She won her suit in 1992. I am ashamed to say that I did not enthusiastically support Sally in her effort, preferring to think of myself as inhabiting a parallel university if not a universe, in which we could ignore these bastions of Princeton history, eating, studying, reading, protesting in a world where they did not cast much of a shadow. Eventually, I stopped eating at Cloister, and, for once in my life, have no story about where or what I ate. I have no idea where Naomi ate either.

So perhaps the story of our broken household is in some ways about eating—or rather, not eating. I am, I hope it goes without saying, not suggesting that, on this campus of abundant resources, with the backing of our middle-class parents, that we could not get food. That kind of hunger must have existed: there must have been quite a few students who could not afford a meal plan or the fiendishly expensive groceries in a town without a supermarket, who were suffering from food insufficiency. There must have been students for whom the culture of the university produced or exacerbated an eating disorder. I know that I must have eaten, but also that I lost all sense of belonging on a campus that had in all senses turned gothic. 

In one of our conversations after Naomi left, I remember minimizing the impact of the breakup: “I survived,” I said. I had quickly arranged to return to Wilson college, where I was able to move into a single room overlooking fields that are now covered in the buildings of a new residential college. Although I could have framed it as a retreat, a return, or even as a regression, I told myself, and rejoiced in, a story of newness. After all my room was not merely in “the New Quad,” but in what was at least colloquially known as “the New New Quad.” This was clearly a place for new beginnings, a place to watch an early and particularly beautiful early spring unfold outside my window. It was in February, when I first began anxiously watching for buds, that I got the first phone call—it was from someone in the administration, an undergraduate dean, perhaps-- telling me that Carolyn, the roommate we had left behind in Patton Hall, had committed suicide by jumping off Princeton’s tallest building. 

Carolyn, it seems had not been able to share in our story of renewal and survival. I was haunted then—as I am now—by how she took the news of Naomi’s and my departure. I have no memory of how Naomi and I, separately or together, told her we were leaving Patton Hall, or how the information registered with her. I do not know if she felt our darkness, or even whether she found our room dark before or after we occupied it together, Naomi and myself in something approximating bedrooms, her in the living room of the suite. She was always the “third” roommate, the unplanned one, the one to whom we were unfailingly and impersonally polite. Two days ago, I found the letter to my parents—a heartless letter, I think—announcing Carolyn’s death to my parents. Carolyn’s suicide takes up one paragraph of my letter—the first—before I move to Elizabeth Gaskell. I do not speculate about what she might have felt.  I also make no mention of my own feelings, except to say that I am fine but I feel helpless when I think about her parents. As I reread the letter, I am less sure about the heartlessness. Like many of the letters I addressed from Patton Hall to my parents across the Atlantic, its job was to reassure. My mother, in particular, was always anxious, always on the verge of coming back to the States to check on me. My parents—and perhaps by extension all parents—were the locus of feeling. It would be like me at the time to have thought of a daughter’s suicide primarily as it impacted her parents.

I say that I heard about Carolyn by phone. I honestly don’t remember what the person on the other end of the line said to me. I do remember precisely what was said in a second phone call, two months later, with the world in bloom outside my window. It was from my father telling me that my uncle Barry had died. “Poor Barry is dead,” he told me. And then, “Poor Mummy is flying in for the funeral.” Barry was a former vaudeville singer with classical training who worked for the city government in New York. He was funny, glamorous, and loud. When I was in high school my mother would often say he was the only grown up I would talk to. Certainly, he and I spent a lot of time giggling on a gold-painted phone he had given me. I carried from room to room and later from home to home a nameplate he had made for out of the letters on the doors of the outgoing John Lindsey administration. He swore the second “I” in my name came from Lindsey himself. For me, Barry was a powerful figure for what I would in my academic life come to call “the avuncular” —that magical relationship to the side of the parental embodied, for example, in the “courtesy uncle” or, in children’s books, the fairy godmother. Barry was my real uncle, but he was magical. Without the help of a pumpkin-turned coach, he could transport me out of the world of my nuclear family, whom I loved so much and with so much guilt and obligation.

 There was, that spring, a time between phone calls, a time that was not about death and mourning. A “serious” boyfriend. Awakening to a sense of political purpose. Learning to like my own company. Early episodes of Saturday Night Live. Playing my own music. Reading Victorian novels into the night. Finding out what I liked to wear. Cooking elaborate meals in an illegal toaster oven. Some of these things were very much aligned with the grain of what I had thought the Princeton experience might be; many of them were not. But there were pleasures distinctively brochure-like: magnolias and the nighttime smell of them, walks through the Institute woods; reading under flowering trees.

After my semester of aloneness, I was ready to rejoin the world, but differently. This would mean another move across campus to a messier and richer life in 2-Dickinson. This would mean living out the fantasy of the puppy pile, where there was always someone awake, always someone to eat with and talk to. There would be other horrible phone calls, other and even more important deaths that year, but also a new way of being at home. It was also a reunion with Tom, whose letters indicate that we had stopped hanging out quite as much in my year of darkness. I’ll cross that threshold next week.