by Ron Suskind
They arrive on the second floor of Andrews and spend a few minutes searching for Zayd. They knock on Cedric’s door, but the room is locked. Then Bear, who ushered the grown-ups across campus, realizes there’s been a mistake. They’d told Zayd to wait outside for them at a distant entrance to Andrews Hall. He runs off to retrieve his friend, who appears a moment later.
“Oh Zayd, we really fucked you over!” Bernadine yells across the hall, past a few parents picking up their kids as dinner hour approaches. “Didn’t we? We fucked you up leaving you out there.”
Zayd’s face tightens as he weaves toward them. She knows he hates it when she curses like that in front of other people, like she’s still nineteen or something. “Yeah mom,” he says softly. “You really fucked me up.”
The rain is thunderous, flooding dirty downtown Providence as the night train from Washington arrives at noon on Saturday. Barbara and Neddy, dragging suitcases and Hefty bags, emerge from the porticoed escalator and slump into a wooden love seat in the train station’s central atrium.
“Lord, Neddy, it’s been a trip,” murmurs Barbara. “Can’t believe I’m here.”
“This is about the craziest thing I’ve ever done, coming all the way up here to see Lavar for just one day,” says Neddy.
Barbara laughs along, but she doesn’t agree. “Naw. It’s worth seeing him, even if it’s just a day.”
A creeping disarray in Barbara’s life back home conspired against her plan to bake sweet potato pies for Cedric. She missed a Bible study class on Revelations that she planned to attend at Scripture Cathedral early yesterday evening. Then she missed the train—Amtrak’s 10:30 P.M. sleeper from Washington to Providence. At 11 P.M., Neddy was still waiting in the messy apartment on V Street while Barbara packed. The next train was at 3 A.M., so the two of them spent the next hours knocking about, collecting odds and ends. They boxed up Cedric’s Supernintendo along with as many strewn-about game cassettes as they could find and watched TV to stay awake. A friend of Neddy’s drove them to Union Station just in time for the 3 A.M., landing them in Rhode Island a few minutes shy of noon.
But, no matter. They’re here now. Barbara is in an embroidered jean skirt and shirt and a small khaki rain hat. Neddy, next to her, primps, smoothing wrinkles on her pumpkin-colored shirt and straightening her stylish silver necklace.
This is the longest Barbara has ever been away from Cedric, and, with the central focus of her life absent, there’s been some dangerous drift over the past two months.
She had thought her life would change, that it was time to find some happiness for herself, maybe even a man. Nothing too romantic. Just someone to be around, to be a friend, to give as much as she has to give.
For the first few weeks in Washington, Barbara floated forward between work, church, and the living room couch. Figuring she needed to start looking more attractive, she bought a few dresses on a new charge card. She never got around to paying the bill.
Then she ran up her phone bill with calls to Cedric in late August and early September. Then Cedric couldn’t call her at home because her phone was disconnected in early October. When he called her work number, she was out sick. Weeks passed, and Cedric, growing concerned, finally reached Neddy one night to ask if their mother was okay. “You know, Neddy, you know how she can get when she gets down.”
He was right to worry. She was down, low down—sleeping a lot, missing work, even missing church functions. Neddy started coming over to rouse her, bringing by little Lawrence to cheer her. Nothing seemed to boost her. By mid-October, though, she began to look ahead to parents weekend, figuring that a trip to see Lavar could get her on a new footing.
In a last conversation before the phone got cut off, Cedric told her that he didn’t want her to come, like he was ashamed of her. She wasn’t sure if he was playing. But she couldn’t worry about that. She had to get there. So Barbara withdrew all her remaining cash and bought a train ticket she couldn’t afford.
The rain drips down Barbara’s back after five minutes standing outside the locked East Andrews door. She doesn’t have Lavar’s number to call upstairs, so she and Neddy wait, huddled together.
Evan Horowitz’s family pulls into the Andrews dorm parking lot in a black Chevy Blazer with Connecticut tags, driven by Evan’s investment banker dad and carrying his mom, brother, and Evan’s girlfriend from Tufts University in Boston.
Evan lets Barbara and Neddy inside. He knows who they are, but he doesn’t introduce them to his family as they all head up the stairs. Barbara, with Neddy in tow, wanders the second-floor hallway, mostly vacated, looking for a familiar door. Chiniqua, just out of bed, emerges from her room in robin’s-egg-blue pajamas. “Hi there,” Barbara says impulsively, delighted to see a black girl. A startled Chiniqua blinks a greeting and slips down the hall into the bathroom.
Barbara stops at the door of Mimi Yang, the peer counselor, and looks at the envelope of condoms. “I know this ain’t his room,” she says, rolling her eyes. She’s still uncertain until Rob opens the door on the adjacent hall and slips out. “Oh yeah, hey,” he says, fleeing quickly, and she says, “Hi, Rob,” to his back.
Inside, the room is dark, shades drawn. It’s half-past noon. Cedric, in his pajamas, sits up quickly. “Oh God. What time is it?”
“I can’t believe you’re still in bed,” Neddy chirps. “You still in your pajamas.”
“Turn on some lights in here,” Barbara says.
“PLEASE, NOOOO … ” he cries, laughing, ducking under the covers.
The women prowl the room proprietarily, Neddy fingering through the CD collection, Barbara poking around the laptop computer, while they gently bust on Cedric in the familiar, sometimes affectionate, call and response that they’ve been at for years.
Cedric lies there with a dazed smile while mother and daughter turn resolute and industrious, with Barbara heaving the suitcase up onto the foot of the bed. “Oh Ma, don’t put that wet thing up there.”
“Just shut up.” She pulls his leather jacket out of the suitcase and chucks it on the bed. “You wanted this?”
Neddy goes straight for the Supernintendo. “Lavar, where the other remote control? … ”
“I don’t know, in the drawer, I think.”
“You didn’t cut your hair,” chides Barbara, looking him over. “Whatchya doin’?”
“You should have done that yesterday, Lavar,” Neddy follows, “for our arrival.”
“Nuh uh,” Cedric mutters, finally rising from the bed. “I gotta do it today …. I need to get some new electric clippers for my hair.”
Barbara nods, delighted. That’s one mission for today—something for her to do. Get new clippers, “Get dressed, Lavar, let’s get going,” Barbara snaps.
There’s no hugging or touching, just this good-natured fussing, and Cedric bids for a bit more. “You didn’t even say ‘hi’ to me or ‘I miss you’ or nothing.”
“You ain’t said ‘hi’ to me either,” Barbara curtly counters.
“I did say ‘hi’,” he mutters, walking over to the sink. Then, more gently, “You wet?”
“A little bit,” Barbara says, now gentle herself. She looks him over as he washes off his face at the sink. Looks like he put on some weight and maybe an inch. So this is where he lives. Her eyes take in every detail of the room. She’s been worried about him not having a church up here and has worked up a provisional plan, which she now springs.
“Talked to Bishop on Thursday and he wants you to call him at his home, make sure that you’re staying right with God. I got his number with me.”
“You serious? He does not want me to call. He said that?” Cedric is flattered and surprised, but the prospect of a call seems to make him anxious, which concerns Barbara. Bishop warned about drinking, drugs, and strange white customs. If Cedric doesn’t want to talk to him, Barbara wonders, it might mean that he’s struggling with temptations.
“I ain’t got no money to be making no calls.”
“He said
you should call collect,” she’s says, trapping him next to the sink.
Cedric slips away and sits back on the bed. He says, “I just don’t think my calling him is appropriate ….”
She’s on him in an instant. “Appropriate?! You know, you’re getting toooo smart.” She starts smacking him on the head and back, and he’s laughing, trying to grab her hands, but she’s too fast, and she’s now laughing, too, light and airy.
“Okay, Ma, stop,” but she keeps it up. “Okay Mommy,” he says, affecting a little boy’s voice, and she pulls back.
“Don’t give me that ‘Mommy’ stuff. Listen, Pastor expects you to call him.”
“What do I say?”
“‘How you doing? … I’m fine … Praise the Lord.’ That’s all. You just scared to call him, Lavar. Admit it.”
“Yeah, I guess you right.”
Barbara sits down in Cedric’s desk chair and watches her children argue over some rhythm and blues singer she’s never heard of. She would just as soon stay in this room until tomorrow’s departure rather than venture out among the other parents and students, with their luxury cars and American Express cards. She thinks about Cedric not wanting her to come, about how he may be ashamed of her and ashamed about where he comes from, but she pushes the thought away.
Cedric is now a Brown student, at the threshold of full citizenship on behalf of lots of Jenningses. Jenningses who would want her to make a good showing. She’s a Brown parent, after all.
“Come, Nanette, we should let him shower and then he’ll need to get dressed in private,” she says decorously, rising and gathering herself. “Cedric,” she says, calling him, maybe for the first time, by his “professional” name, “you do what you have to, don’t worry about us. We’ll be waiting outside.”
Though Brown has set up parents weekend programs—seminars and coffees, just like at orientation—they’re sparsely attended. No one wants to stay around the campus. The idea is to locate the lost child and get him or her OUT OF HERE.
The abducting has been going on steadily since Friday morning, when Dr. and Dr. Burton—Rob’s parents—arrived to attend some of his classes. Both sturdy Ohioans who came East after medical school, they sat through Political Theory, trundled off to Chemistry, and soon stole Rob off to go mountain climbing for the weekend. They managed to not encounter Cedric. The casual and wealthy Phillip Arden, who lately has been getting “come hither” e-mails from girls who’ve met him around campus, greeted his father—who flew in on his Lear jet—with an unwelcomed development; mononucleosis, just diagnosed. After sheepishly passing on the news, he retired to his dad’s suite at the Westin hotel for a weekend of sleep.
The few kids whose parents didn’t show—like Sonya Garza, the Hispanic girl from far-off Sanger, California—tended to be adopted for a lunch or dinner by the parents of a roommate.
By Saturday, Thayer Street—with its five-block run of shops and eateries and boutiques—has the harried concentration usually found on the last shopping days before Christmas. It’s an army of bill payers on parade. Every shop is jammed, with smiling, ruddy parents wielding plastic.
Each parent is a paying customer of the university, and the grounds have been clipped, mowed, spackled, painted, and adorned for all their money’s worth. Even the cafeterias are offering uncommonly strong fare—meat loaf and veal parmigiana, beef stews and lemon meringue pies—just in case parents join a child for a real taste of college life.
As Cedric takes his sweet time showering, Barbara and Neddy go to a drugstore a block from the dorm to pick up an economy size Nivea lotion for him. Barbara looks down Thayer Street—overrun by hordes from Westport, Grosse Point, and Palo Alto. “It’s a mob, look at them all,” she says to Neddy. “I don’t want to be any part of that.”
And she won’t be. A little later, the family catches a ride to some nearby malls and they pass the afternoon strolling through familiar discount chains like Ames, Duane Reade, Payless, Marshals, and the Dollar Store, not buying much except a $19.95 ConAir hair clipper for Cedric to shave his head.
Cedric doesn’t say much, but Barbara senses that he’s content just to listen to the language of home and news of Southeast. “Some Asians bought a store near my house,” Neddy tells him as they finger through a huge sock bin at Marshalls, “and they be jacking up the prices and hoarding money and, now, they selling malt liquor. They don’t sell malt liquor in Georgetown, but they sell it in my neighborhood, and it keeps black people down.”
Barbara considers this for a moment, examining a pair of argyles, before offering a counterpoint. She’s talking to Neddy, but, like everything else she says this weekend, she’s most mindful of what Cedric is hearing. “Well, they work hard and do whatever they have to do to get ahead, to get to the next step. The problem with black people is that someone gets a little more than them, everybody jump on him, saying he think he’s better and all. For Asians, it’s a goal that everybody get better and everybody get in on it. They come over here, living fourteen to an apartment!”
“There are a lot of Asians at Brown, and they stick together here, too,” Cedric mumbles, letting Barbara know he’s been listening, as he pulls on a leather hat that no one at Brown would be caught dead wearing and looks at himself admiringly.
By nightfall, everyone is back on the terra infirma of College Hill. It’s the big Saturday dinner rush of parents weekend, and Barbara, wanting to do what Brown parents are supposed to do, asks Cedric about restaurants. He’s heard of a place called Adesso, and soon she leads the family there. It’s the area’s restaurant of choice just off Thayer, with blond wood, ficuses, California stylish cuisine, and a fifty-minute wait.
The Jennings contingent leaves its name with the hostess and walks back into a long alcove hallway lined with chairs, almost all filled with laughing parent—child clusters, mostly white. Barbara spots an elegantly dressed Hispanic family a half-dozen seats away, a mother and father talking animatedly to a daughter. A black family is vacating a table and making for the exit, the father folding his credit card receipt and putting it in his wallet.
Barbara sees some faces of color but feels little comfort. There is nothing to match the conspicuousness of poor and black—the lot, she is certain, of only one family she knows among the dozens here.
Eventually their name is called, and the Jennings family is led to a table. Barbara looks at the menu and then looks again.
“I never spent this much money on food, ever,” she whispers to everyone and no one. “What could they do to the food to make it worth this much?”
But the hive is buzzing all around—chattering clusters seeming to close in from all sides—and she pushes down the list of wood-grilled entrees.
The waitress, a platinum blonde practicing her pronunciations, arrives and describes the specials. Barbara orders the shrimp and scallops on angel hair pasta special; Cedric, shrimp and chicken over rigatoni, off the menu; and Neddy, the half-moon spinach-stuffed pasta with mascarpone sauce.
As the waitress leaves, everyone sits in silence, breathing lightly. Barbara looks at the yellow pansy in a flute vase on the table.
“Is that some kind of red sauce on that flower?” she says, and everyone looks. Seems to be marinara.
They all begin looking for things, trying to find seams in the restaurant’s elegant fabric to ease their discomfort. A complimentary appetizer comes and is set near Cedric.
“This is beet flan,” the waitress says, and everyone nods meaningfully at the news until she’s gone.
Barbara looks at it, perplexed, and then at Cedric. He takes her cue and begins gazing at the little round plateau of reddish mold. “What’d she say it is?” she riffs, leading on the others. Cedric pokes at it with his fork. “Oh Gaawwd. It moves!”
Evan Horowitz and family are within earshot at the next table, talking about plans for their upcoming winter vacation in Hawaii, Evan’s classes (“a piece of cake,” he chortles) and goings-on at home in Connecticut, one long stretch of uns
elf-conscious discourse suited to this place, Brown University, and the presumption of ongoing success.
Meanwhile, at the Table of the Marinara Pansy, the discreet charms of the upper-middle class have been shrunk to the manageable notion of beet flan.
“Go ahead, Lavar, try it,” Barbara says. “You the family pioneer.” He ventures a spoonful.
“Alpo,” he says. “It tastes just like Alpo,” and they laugh good and loud, not caring who hears them. The waitress comes by to check if everything is satisfactory, and Cedric asks her, “People actually eat that beet stuff?”
The blonde looks both ways and leans in conspiratorially over the table’s corner between Cedric and Barbara. “If you wanna know the truth,” she whispers, betraying an up-the-hard-way East Providence patois, “we’ve been scraping it off the plate all night.”
A small victory won. Barbara offers a warm, winking smile to the waitress and seems to settle into her blond-wood-and-polished-chrome chair. The Jennings clan, she feels, has something to bring to this room, as well.
The entrees come and everyone eats hungrily, while Barbara talks between bites of shrimp about Cedric’s graduation speech. “Oh, how Dr. Jones’s face changed when you started into that Dreambusters thing.”
“Everyone’s always hearing about how well Cedric did, when you did good yourself,” she says earnestly to Neddy.
“Back then, they didn’t even keep the grades as GPAs,” Neddy says with mild disinterest as she spears a half-moon and pushes it through the cheese sauce.
“Yes, you were good,” Barbara continues, undeterred. “You’d a gotten a 3.6 average or something, if they’d figured it up.”