“H

I see now that she provoked me in a good way, introducing me to the idea
that not everyone needs to have their file folders labeled and alphabetized, or
even to have files at all. Years later, I’d fall in love with a guy who, like Suzanne,
stored his belongings in heaps and felt no compunction, really ever, to fold his
clothes. But I was able to coexist with it, thanks to Suzanne. I am still coexisting
with that guy to this day. This is what a control freak learns inside the compressed
otherworld of college, maybe above all else: There are simply other ways of
being.

ave you ever,” Czerny said to me one day, “thought about starting a
little after-school program for kids?”

She was asking out of compassion, I would guess. Over time, I’d grown so
dedicated to Jonathan, who was now in elementary school, that a good number
of my afternoons were spent wandering around Princeton with him as my
sidekick, or at the Third World Center, the two of us playing duets on its poorly
tuned piano or reading on a saggy couch. Czerny paid me for my time but
seemed to think it wasn’t enough.

“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.