I'm not your Mama

Freshman year, my room bordered on the size of a football field. After meeting my RCA Jennifer, however, I learned my first lesson at Princeton: good things in this life are never free. How clearly I remember my first RCA orientation meeting: sitting in a circle, wondering how many pieces of candy I could take before being branded as the hall glutton and trying to think of inventive alliterations for the name-game. As my turn approached, I panicked, discarding "Bison," "Beaver" and "Butterball" for the memorable, but decidedly less appealing, "Botulism Becca."

Then our RCA, Jennifer, let out a labored sigh and began reading aloud the strictures of substance-free housing. She finished her list by saying, "I will not cook for you; I will never clean up after you; and I can't fix your mistakes. I'm not your Mama." An uncomfortable silence settled upon us; her abrupt shift from a listless premed student into a hardhearted matron smacked of a split-personality disorder. She glanced down at her clipboard and read aloud her final bullet point. "However, if you ever feel lost or upset, please approach me." She looked up again. None of us moved. "That's all ... unless you really want to stay here and discuss racial tolerance for another 20 minutes." Walking back to my room, I seriously began to doubt my RCA's capabilities as a social shepherdess of her freshman flock.

The first weeks of class progressed uneventfully — I passed by Jennifer's room and saw her hunched over biology books late into the night. Once, in a fit of naive optimism, I attempted to bond by sitting with Jennifer for breakfast. Making conversation was challenging not only because of our lack of common interests, but also because Jennifer's thought-to-speech pattern did not follow any discernable rhythm. Her questions and statements were frighteningly identical. Both were punctuated mid-sentence by airy pauses, during which Jennifer would roll her gigantic, glazed eyes upwards in a mixture of ironic self-commentary and sleep deprivation.

I bridged these silent lapses with tentative laughter while trying to ignore the fact that she was eating her omelet with a spoon. Fishing for anything to keep the conversation going, I asked what kind of doctor she wanted to be. "Well ... (a pause of epic proportions) ... I like babies." She elaborated, "But not healthy babies — sick babies. There's less pressure when a doctor treats infants because he's less morally accountable for their survival as individuals." Jennifer wasn't exactly the sharing-and-caring, let-me-braid-your-hair type of RCA.

After her first few lackluster emails, it became clear that Jennifer wasn't planning on throwing any study breaks until "second semester, after I finish my thesis." A restive wave of bourgeoisie rebellion swept the sub-free wing of Forbes. Was she really going to sit on her RCA budget for months, only to spend an eighth of it on pizza in late March? And were we going to stand by and watch? The boys living next door decided to exact revenge: Every night, they opened their window (near Jennifer's), yelled "Fuck" at full lung-capacity, closed the window and returned to whatever they were doing. The first few times, Jennifer took no notice. Soon, however, we began getting frenzied visits from her. Jennifer would appear, panting in our doorway, her eyes bulging to twice their already saucer-pan size: "Did you just hear a loud 'Fuck' noise?"

She could keep her pizza party. Our shenanigans tasted better. Some of our shortest-lived jokes made the fondest memories. One night, fidgety and brain-bloated from too much studying, my roommate and I decided to actually call upon Jennifer's RCA duties and ask for a condom. Our scheme was not particularly well-executed: We walked up to her door together and asked pointblank. Her egg-like eyes rolled toward us, showing neither shock nor amusement (I wonder if she was looking at something behind me) until finally she asked why we needed it. The situation began to look fruitless. After some persistence, however, we walked away with our prized possession of the year, a bright yellow Happy-Face condom, packaged to resemble a lollipop. The plastic wrapper read: "Sex is sweet: so is Safety!" Collapsing in a fit of laughter back in our room, we realized that Jennifer was dearer to our hearts than we'd first thought.

Jennifer graduated last spring and moved on to medical school. Looking back, I sometimes wonder what possessed Jennifer to become an RCA. Or who gave the go-ahead to an RCA applicant aspiring to be a callous baby-doctor. Whatever the reasons, my memories of Forbes sub-free housing are all the richer for Jennifer's awkward pauses. Becca Foresman is a. sophomore from Del Mar, Calif. She can be reached at foresman@princeton.edu.