INTERLUDE: 2 Dickinson, The Sequel

I promised myself I would get to 2-Dickinson today, to cross its threshold and enter the place where 21 of us, give or take, lived together from fall of 1978 through the spring of 1979 academic year, in a moment of hope just before the Reagan years closed in. This would entail moving across time and space into my senior year, the year my father died, and the year I decided that I was an academic. That’s a lot of crossing.

Perhaps it is easier to begin with what other people might have felt crossing that threshold. I am thinking of the people we at 2-D called “adults” or even “grownups,” although the feminists among us insisted on calling people our age “men” and, especially, “women.” To open the front door of 2-D was to directly enter the kitchen—and likely as an adult to look around for the drugs and dirt that would signal “commune.” There were certainly a lot of nervous entrances, a lot of lingering on the porch.

Although there were certainly drugs in 2-D, drug use was by no means universal, and they were not usually to be found in public spaces. We did have a jar of marijuana on our spice shelf, but I do not remember anyone consuming it. It was there-- between the turmeric which for us was a sign of worldliness, and the dried basil, about which I remember us being quite snobby-- as a placeholder, a sign of communal identity reflected precisely in the hesitation and embarrassment of visiting parents and, more rarely, teachers. Our visitors—perhaps even the fellow students who often showed up for dinner—tended to conflate our cooking with our assumed drug-taking as if every casserole were laced with hash, every brownie a pot brownie. This conflation extended to what might be thought of as 2-D takeout: when I brought some brownies to my English class to celebrate Dickens’s birthday, there were glances exchanged around the seminar table. The professor seemed actively disappointed that there was “nothing” in the brownies, although I was quite proud of them, with their crackly tops  and  gooey drug-free middles. Of all the many dishes I have, (long story) made for Dickens’ “birthday” over the years (surely he stopped having them at his death in 1870), I still remember with satisfaction   this first attempt, this entrance into the sweet and nerdy world of Victoriana.

Dirt was another story. There was indeed a lot of it. I say this with some hesitation, because at the time I did not really have a category for household dirt—although as a late seventies self-identified “clean hippy” I was all about bodily hygiene. It would be two years until my not entirely happy graduate- school revelation that stovetops could get dirty and that I could— and perhaps should—do something about it. There must have been some among the 21 of us who could see dirt and who might have been horrified by the lack of cleanliness in the public areas of 2-D. I apologize to them across the gulf of time that stretches between the self of Homing, and the self who found herself at home in 2-Dickinson.  Parents coming into the co-op would almost always immediately start to clean it. Some would buy cleaning supplies, others would get down and dirty with the sink or suggest putting lists of maintenance chores on the fridge. Outside the confines of the kitchen, one mother, not my own, actually washed and shrunk my already tiny bikini that my uncle and aunt had bought me in Paris.

Still, we did not poison anyone, and we made some good food. I would have said that 2-Dickinson was the inspiration for my lifelong romance with eggplant, although I have found, in my self-archive, evidence that at the early age of ten or eleven I was already imagining having twins called Aubergine and Melanzana (Gina and Mel for short). In any case, my relationship with that beautiful nightshade deepened during the year at 2-Dickinson. It was something of a shared obsession; a group of of us wanted in fact to write a house cookbook entitled “Only Eggplant.” My friend Tom did not agree, freely employing “eggplant” as a capacious profanity and as an example of all that was wrong with vegetarianism, sanctimoniousness, or smugness of any kind. We mainly, as I recall, used two cookbooks (although there were some who did not believe in recipes). These were classics for the times: The Moosewood Cookbook (the first one, before the cloying figural cuteness of The Enchanted Broccoli Forrest) and the much more severe Vegetarian Epicure, with its sad insistence on potato peel broth. This is the broth that kept me from true vegetarianism; for years I would make an exception for chicken stock. There was a third cookbook, whose name escapes me. It was less about recipes than vegetable porn: the point, at least as far as my fellow cooks at 2-D were concerned, was to pore over closeups of hallowed out peppers in red, green, and yellow, and to stare at full-page images of perfectly green snap peas floating, for some reason, in beautifully bubbly water. Three of us cooked at a time, wielding enormous tools in a giant (come to think of it, filthy) wok. We never made dinner for fewer than 30 people; it took me years to be able to produce a human-sized quiche or a single 9-inch pie. I learned many things about cooking from my shifts at 2-D, although it was a boyfriend who did not live there who made the most useful contribution to my future at the stove: “Always,” he admonished me (perhaps we would now say “mansplained”) treat onions as a vegetable.”

Despite my many memories of eating and cooking, I have only one that involved the expense and labor of procuring the food. Every few weeks, a group of about five of us would be the designated shoppers, led by someone with a car. Once, early in the year, a bunch of us went to a supermarket a few towns over and spent what was then an incredible sum, perhaps $200. Our housemate with the car had a somewhat mysterious connection in that supermarket: the young man at the check-out counter waved us through without asking us to pay. Sitting in the car on the way home in the back-middle seat where people stash their small friends, I was hunched with agony over what I saw as an ethical dilemma. When we got back, I, along with an equally uneasy friend, called what may have been the first house-meeting of the year. As someone who has endured such meetings with exceptionally bad grace in the intervening years, I am stunned that I was the one to initiate what could only have been a long and dreadful meeting for which we did not yet have the useful category of privilege. We worried about stealing, about those of us who were “poor” and those of us who were “rich,” about the potential negative effects on the check-out person and on our own characters. This may have been my first introduction to the financial diversity of our backgrounds and to the dangerous security of being somewhere in the middle.

So far, I have spoken of 2-D as if it was all kitchen and dining room—as indeed in some sense it was. Tom’s death has prompted other housemates from that year to reminisce and to express confusion about 2-Ds maze-like layout, its unevenly sized bedrooms originally designed for other, inscrutable purposes, its rooms within rooms that completely upended any sense of privacy.  Although we would have all vehemently rejected any notion of separation by gender, in my mind the ground floor of 2-D was the boys’ (that is, the men’s) floor, a warren of undecorated rooms with the Grateful Dead constantly playing. My own bedroom was the inside room of a pass-through; I do not envy my (sort of) roommate who must have endured my friends traipsing through her room in the middle of the night to lodge (see previous blog) at the end of my bed. When I imagine that room now, it is always both full and empty. My friends are on the bed or lying on the floor. Some of them are reading or writing. Some are staring into space as they listen to records. In my imagination, I am always at my desk writing my senior thesis on images of Eve in Milton, Charlotte Bronte and—can it be?—D.H Lawrence. This is the first time I have used a desk—or a chair—to write, and my back feels better for it. I am typing on my father’s old portable typewriter and, as I will do to the end of my life—typing badly. This is in a way my father’s fault—he pulled me out of typing lessons in high school because he felt that if I were good typist, I would only be considered for secretarial jobs. While I can only admire, at this distance, his gender analysis, my bad typing cost me internships in his own field of journalism and would probably, if word processors had not been invented in the nick of time, have precluded my becoming an academic.

It is hard not to think of my father when I think of that room, and the house in which it was embedded, although he never got to see it. That summer, when Naomi and I had reconnected as roommates in Washington D.C., I got a call from my father in Italy explaining that he needed to come to New York to be treated for a “little lump.” I had just left my parents in Rome a few weeks before and remembered that on an otherwise idyllic trip to the Italian coast, my father had choked several times on the delicious food at the hotel where my parents had spent a second (and now perhaps a third) honeymoon. By the time the semester began, my father was struggling with chemotherapy at Sloan Kettering, and my parents were living with my uncle the doctor, in my grandmother’s old apartment on west 90th street in Manhattan. Every two weeks, after my classes were over on Thursday afternoon, I would take the bus to New York and take a taxi either to the apartment or to the hospital to which my father was more and more frequently admitted. Like my mother many years later, my father died between semesters, in his case on Boxing Day, a holiday only he celebrated. After his death, my mother and I returned to the apartment on the West Side, the apartment she had been living in during the courtship with my father and the apartment from which they eloped. Of course, I remember darkness, unmitigated by my uncle’s beautiful lamp collection. What I remember most clearly from those days between Christmas and New Years was how my mother and I both moved restlessly from chair to chair, as if trying to find a new place, a new position: like Goldilocks I tried my grandmother’s straight-backed seat on which she perched keeping an anxious eye on the kitchen; then the softer one from which she had watched her favorite TV shows in old age. I even sat in the “comfy” armchair where my father had all too briefly rested as a cancer patient. This went on for several days until my mother, possessive in good times and heroic in bad, told me (it must have hurt for her to say it this way) to go “home” to my friends at college.

My boyfriend came from Boston to accompany me to Princeton and to Dickinson St.  I expected the house to be cold and dark but there were a lot of people there, caught between semesters by choice or by circumstance. Life continued there in defiance of the university calendar. From that moment and for a very long time I judged people by how they reacted to the news of my father’s death: those who ignored it, those who mumbled “sorry,” those who slipped cards and letters under the door, those who looked me in the face and talked about it. Tom, my friend who died last week and who was the inspiration for my revisitation of the days at 2-Dickinson, was in the last, smallest, group. He insisted on using my father’s name, even his first name; on asking questions about him; on reminiscing about him. This was painful at first. Especially since Tom, who always wrote in capitals—this made his letters to me easy to find last week—also almost always spoke loudly.  I was not, initially ready to hear my father’s name spoken loudly and aloud, but then I was. I wanted the fact of my father’s death—and life—acknowledged. 

Of course, Tom knew much of what I was feeling. The summer before our senior year his own father, his namesake father who had been an international correspondent for NBC, had had a heart transplant. Although it was far from being the first such procedure, it was, I think, the first to be televised; the Google sources to which I must turn now that Tom is dead, record that NBC “documented” the transplant. I remember Tom wondering if he could or should watch the show—and I remember that he decided to do so. I offered to watch with him, but he said no. Tom and I had sometimes joked about the fact that our fathers were both journalists of an older, more swashbuckling generation of hard-drinking, deadline-meeting, desk-thumping, risk-taking “newspaper men,” although Tom’s father was now in television, and my own had left journalism to be an internal correspondent for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. In our long conversations about writers and writing, our fathers continued to loom large.

As did other fathers at 2-Dickinson. The following is a memory of which I am still a little ashamed, and thus perhaps a memory that is especially unreliable. Sometime in the spring semester, one of my female housemates hosted her father at 2-Dickinson. He may have stayed for a night or two, or even just for a day, but in my mind he moved in. He had been very ill—I think it was heart trouble, perhaps a heart attack. One day, I wandered down to the first floor of the house to watch TV and found him sitting in one of the odd little quasi-sitting rooms that made 2-Dickinson feel like a maze. He was sitting with his daughter, my housemate, my friend, holding her hand, glowing with love for her.  She had, he said, “seen him through” his illness. Without her, he would not have made it. If the details of his story are vague, I can call up with searing precision the feeling those details inspired in me. At that moment, I hated this father who had come back from the dead, and also his daughter who had been able to save him. I could not stand in the room, exchange pleasantries, join in congratulations. I stumbled out of the room and to the porch, where I tripped over a pile of furniture I just saw captured in a photograph today. For once—it was cold—the porch was empty and I was alone with my resentment. I have not mentioned names in this part of the story, because I honestly don’t know how much of it was true. I can feel the hot resentment, the shame that could make that resentment disappear, and the cold metal of the porch chairs. The feelings are true, and I can slip into them without warning, albeit it in more adult and attenuated forms, like the slight shock I still feel when I encounter fathers of friends my age who are unaccountably—unimaginably— still alive. 

Tom’s father died of a heart attack the year after we graduated. I hope I was kind to him and said his father’s name, which would of course mean also saying his own. My archive of letters is so far silent on the subject. A mutual friend tells me that in the early 80s Tom was especially understanding about his own father’s death—for me the memory of Tom is inextricably linked to both revelry and to mourning.

And of course, to 2-Dickinson. In my parochial schoolgirl way, if you had told me that I would be able to live with my male best friend in a place where that felt unremarkable, I would probably have not believed you. I was still a creature of the dorms, of the Princeton mainstream. Tom’s (capitalized) letters from our sophomore and junior years are full of complaints about our relationship: a persistent theme is that we no longer “hang out” enough. I do not have my own letters, but I suspect, at different moments, they would have complained about the same thing—not hanging out. 2-Dickinson, whatever else it might have been, was a place of hanging out. A place where you bumped into someone—or seven someones—on the way to the fridge in the middle of the night. A place where if you argued or fought, you stayed to work things out because there was no alternative to staying. A place where everything was done with other people, and where being alone, although precious, was more like parallel play than isolation. Of course, in the days after Tom’s death, I romanticize him, and our friendship, and the places where that friendship unfolded. But when I think of my own students now, in their dorm rooms, or fully equipped apartments with one or two carefully chosen other people; when I think about how so many of my students live with their parents until they can afford a place that is not ramshackle or dirty; when I think of how quickly couples isolate themselves from friends; when I think about how all this is complicated by the distancing protocols of COVID, I count myself one of the lucky ones of a lucky generation. I know that some people still live in communal arrangements and that inter-household “bubbles” might be pushing at the envelope of nuclear regimes. I hope that after COVID there will be more, rather than less, “hanging out,” more acceptance of all kinds of friendships and of their evolution over time.