Becoming: Chapters 5–8

The school itself was striking and modern, like no school I'd ever seen—made up of three large, cube-shaped buildings, two of them connected by a fancy-looking glass skyway that crossed over the Jackson Boulevard thoroughfare.

I was also operating, for the first time ever, without the tacit protection of my older brother.

We browsed the designer jeans and the purses at Marshall Field’s, often surreptitiously tailed by security guards who didn’t like the look of us.

Like me, she could be frivolous and goofy when we were with a larger group, but on our own we’d get ponderous and intense, two girl-philosophers together trying to sort out life’s issues, big and small.

She wore colorful, billowy clothes and served meals at a massive table in the dining room, hosting anyone who turned up, mostly people who belonged to what she called “the movement.” This included business leaders, politicians, and poets, plus a coterie of famous people, from singers to athletes.

As I remember it, Santita and I hadn’t intended on joining at all. We’d been conscripted at the last minute, maybe by her mother or father, or by someone else in the movement who’d caught us before we could follow through on whatever ideas we’d had for ourselves that day.

“I’m not sure,” she said, giving me a perfunctory, patronizing smile, “that you’re Princeton material.”

One night I went to a dinner with him off campus, at the well-appointed home of one of the basketball team’s boosters, where sitting at the dining room table I was met by a confounding sight, a food item that like so many other things at Princeton required a lesson in gentility—a spiny green artichoke laid out on a white china plate.

One night I went to a dinner with him off campus, at the well-appointed home of one of the basketball team’s boosters, where sitting at the dining room table I was met by a confounding sight, a food item that like so many other things at Princeton required a lesson in gentility—a spiny green artichoke laid out on a white china plate.

It was a heady experience, being around her—as close-up as I’d ever been to an independent woman with a job that thrilled her.

She was also, not incidentally, a single mother raising a dear, precocious boy named Jonathan, whom I often babysat.

Czerny seemed to be recharging her soul by running through a list of mundane errands.

She double-parked on busy cross streets as she dashed in and out of buildings, provoking an avalanche of honking ire from other drivers, while the rest of us sat helplessly in the car.

I was learning in the obvious academic ways, holding my own in classes, doing most of my studying in a quiet room at the Third World Center or in a carrel at the library.

They were simply emboldened, floating on an ancient tide of superiority, buoyed by the fact that history had never told them anything different.

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.

I spilled every observation I had—from how I didn’t like my French professor to the antics of the little kids in my after-school program to the fact that Suzanne and I had a dedicated, mutual crush on an African American engineering student with transfixing green eyes who, even though we doggedly shadowed his every move, seemed to barely know we were alive.

Home was my past, connected by gossamer threads to where I was now.

He was a genial high school principal who’d take me over to his school and let me sit at his desk, who graciously bought me a tub of peanut butter when I turned my nose up at the enormous breakfasts of bacon, biscuits, and yellow grits that Aunt Dot, his wife, served every morning.

When he did return, it wasn't to some idyllic little river cottage with a white fence and tidy backyard but rather (as I saw when Craig and I made a trip to visit) a bland, cookie-cutter home near a teeming strip mall.

And as I’ve said, I was a box checker—marching to the resolute beat of effort/result, effort/result—a devoted follower of the established path, if only because nobody in my family (aside from Craig) had ever set foot on the path before.

Robbie, my great-aunt, my rigid taskmaster of a piano teacher, passed away in June, bequeathing her house on Euclid to my parents, allowing them to become home owners for the first time.

After Southside’s funeral, my mother’s enormous family piled into his snug little home, along with a smattering of friends and neighbors.

I felt the warm tug of the past and the melancholy of absence—all of it a little jarring, accustomed as I was to the hermetic and youthful world of college.

I put in long hours at Sidley & Austin, often eating both lunch and dinner at my desk while combating a continuous flow of documents, all of them written in precise and decorous lawyer-language.

I knew the relaxed patois of the South Side and the high-minded diction of the Ivy League, and now on top of that I spoke Lawyer, too.

She knew how tardiness drove me nuts—how I saw it as nothing but hubris.

As I walked him through the corridors to my office, introducing him to the cushy mundanities of corporate law—showing him the word-processing center and the coffee machine, explaining our system for tracking billable hours—he was quiet and deferential, listening attentively.

This was the boon of having a summer associate to advise: It was an excuse to eat out and eat well, and to do it on the firm’s expense account.

Compared with my own lockstep march toward success, the direct arrow shot of my trajectory from Princeton to Harvard to my desk on the forty-seventh floor, Barack’s path was an improvisational zigzag through disparate worlds.

After high school, he’d passed two relatively laid-back years as a student at Occidental College in Los Angeles before transferring to Columbia, where by his own account he’d behaved nothing like a college boy set loose in 1980s Manhattan and instead lived like a sixteenth-century mountain hermit, reading lofty works of literature and philosophy in a grimy apartment on 109th Street, writing bad poetry, and fasting on Sundays.

At some point early in the summer, he pumped out a thirty-page memo about corporate governance that was evidently so thorough and cogent it became instantly legendary.

I knew he loved basketball, went for long runs on the weekends, and spoke wistfully of his friends and family on Oahu.

For contrast, we'd been shown pictures of florid pink lungs that were healthy, uncontaminated by smoke.

The paradigm was simple enough to make their behavior confounding: Good/Bad. Healthy/Sick. You choose your own future.

I had feelings for the guy, but they were latent, buried deep beneath my resolve to keep my life and career tidy and forward focused—free from any drama.

Avoiding everyone we knew from work—the other advisers and their summer associates bubbling effusively in the lobby—we slipped out of the theater and into a balmy evening.

I exhaled, my relief so palpable that it caused Barack to laugh.

The whole milieu was a portrait of affluence and ease, a less-than-subtle reminder of the payoff that came when you committed yourself wholeheartedly to the grind.

Maybe he’d given up and now just saw me as a good, stalwart friend—a girl with an air-conditioned Saab who’d drive him around when he needed it.