Free Come to the Edge: A Memoir by Christina Haag

NOW in black and red—were draped over dorm walls of brick and limestone.
    On the Green, the patch of calm surrounded by the oldest buildings on campus, dogs chased after tennis balls and Frisbees or lounged in the still-bright grass. On the Faunce House steps, theater majors bummed cigarettes, and aspiring novelists and semioticians sparred over Derrida. Rich foreign students congregated in the middle of the terrace: the men, with Lacostes tucked tight into jeans and collars flipped high, the women, impossibly sleek, their tousled heads thrown back in charmed laughter.
    Brown, one of the nation’s first nonsectarian universities, was founded by Baptists in 1764. Its charter ensures religious diversity and “full, free, absolute, and uninterrupted liberty of conscience.” This emphasis on intellectual freedom was shored up in 1969 by student-led curriculum reforms. The New Curriculum, as it is still called, did away with distribution requirements and rigid grading, and encouraged choice and exploration. Education was placed squarely in the hands of the undergraduate. You could major in ethnomusicology or Egyptology, Portuguese or population studies, or take up gamelan or welding. And if the standard offerings didn’t suit you, you could design a course that did. It was also possible to get by with doing very little, but that was rare. Most students were busy, galvanized by opportunity and sparking off one another’s curiosity.
    I was a junior in the fall of 1980. I had just gotten back from a trip to Ireland, but for most of the summer I’d stayed in Providence to act in three plays. In New York, I’d done commercials, but this was the first time in my life I’d cashed a paycheck for a play. And Oscar Wilde, no less. I was incredibly proud.
    Sophomore year, I’d moved out of the dorms to a rambling house on Waterman Street, five blocks east of campus, one of three student-run co-ops. There was a couch on the porch, a caricature of Nixon in one of the windows, and a king-size water bed with a sign-up sheet in the living room. My parents refused to set foot inside, proclaiming it “filthy,” but I loved it. It had a measure of expressiveness and rebellion that I craved. In the basement, a mute computer science major slept, worked, and tended to large vats of sprouts, his sole source of nutrition. For the rest of us, jobs rotated and dinners were a festive event. That night, I was in charge of cooking a vegetarian casserole for twenty.
    As I crossed the Green, a knapsack slung over one shoulder, my mind was racing. The coffee from the Blue Room hadn’t helped. A paper due. Lines to learn. Cooking at the co-op that night. And the dark-haired French Canadian hockey player I’d met, who took art classes at RISD and spoke of training as if it were poetry. He slipped notes under my door that read like haiku. I, who had previously had zero interest in collegiate sports, now shivered in the stands of Meehan Auditorium and watched as he, outfitted like a gladiator, knocked equally well-padded men into the walls of the rink. Terrified and thrilled, I looked up at the bright banners and the fans cheering and the clean white ice below and thought, this is performance. On a cool night, when the embers were dying in his fireplace and there was no more wood to burn, he broke a table apart—wrenched the legs off, then the top, plank by plank—to please me, to keep the flames going. But the beginnings of love were distracting, and I kept forgetting things.
    I couldn’t find my bike for days, then realized I’d left it outside the Rock, the main library on campus. Hoping it would still be there, I walked quickly down the corridor between two of the buildings that bordered the Green. Light and noise began to fade. I kicked the heels of my new cowboy boots along the walkway, and the wine-colored gauze skirt I wore fluttered over the cement. When the path dipped down to the more shaded Quiet Green, I saw the Carrie Tower. Redbrick