Chapter 17 - Mr. Schmidt
Cecilia was so busy during the month of November that she did not realize how quickly the days were speeding by. Thanksgiving week came, along with the chaos of hundreds of freshmen trying to get out of Huntington Hall to see their families. Mike and Lisa left early in the week to travel to California, flying out for a rather frantic couple of days to spend time with his parents and later with her father in Reno. Ken was gone as well, off to visit his family, minus the tattoo he had been planning to have on his body by now. Perhaps that was just as well...one less thing to fight over with his father.
Cecilia felt very nervous as her trip to meet Jason's parents and his sister Cassie loomed. From what she had managed to learn from Jason about his family, it seemed they were typical upper class people with typical upper class problems. They had a very nice house in an affluent area just across the state line in Wisconsin. However, it seemed that his parents had a lot of problems in their marriage and there was tension between both parents and Jason's sister.
The trip to Wisconsin began on a cold, dreary Wednesday afternoon when Jason's father came to the university to pick them up. A large, imposing, well-groomed man shook Jason's hand and then greeted Cecilia. He was dressed in jeans and a University of Wisconsin sweatshirt. Mr. Schmidt's casual appearance surprised her somewhat. Cecilia felt very uneasy, as Jason's father looked her over with a somewhat disapproving expression. She was dressed in a nice business outfit, but that was part of the problem. The rich tended dress casually and to Mr. Schmidt, Cecilia's outfit looked out of place. Her dark skin bothered him as well, although he realized he could not make an issue out of that. This wasn't 1950, after all.
Cecilia was perceptive enough to know that she had not made a good first impression on Jason's father. She wondered what to do next, and realized something important. She had been planning to watch her grammar and pay close attention to keeping her accent under control. Suddenly she had second thoughts about doing that. To hell with it, she thought, I'm going to be who I am, and they're just gonna have to deal with it. I'm not gonna try to be someone I'm not. Cecilia's decision turned out to be a very fortunate one, because had she gone with her original plan to try to artificially change her speech, Jason's father would have seen right through it and turned her efforts against her.
The car Mr. Schmidt stepped out of was a new BMW. Jason had previously explained that his father was partial to BMW's and bought a new one about once every two years. As she pondered the expensive, well-kept vehicle, Cecilia thought bitterly about her own mother's car, a huge, very beat-up 1972 Chevy that only somewhat worked. Her brother briefly had a flashy convertible, but it was seized by the police when he was arrested, and later sold at auction.
Cecilia began to wonder; if Mr. Schmidt replaced his own car once every couple of years, why Jason did not have a car. That seemed rather strange. He had everything else, but why not a car? She would have to ask him about that the next time she was alone with him.
They set out, taking a major road to the west to bypass the main part of Chicago and then proceeding north through the city's western suburbs. The trip itself was rather tense. Jason's father pummeled him with questions about his studies, only to be pleasantly surprised to learn that he was doing well in college. The conversation topic moved to his social life. Jason talked about his three friends and his relationship with Cecilia. As he talked, she wondered if he might mention her dominance over him. Fortunately Jason did not bring up that aspect of his relationship, nor did he mention anything about his strange notoriety from the Tri-Alpha 10-K run.
Mr. Schmidt's sudden interest in Jason's studies was another mystery to Cecilia. Jason had made no mention of any contact between his parents and himself since the beginning of the semester. It seemed that Cecilia was the only person who really took an interest in Jason's studies and over-all well being over the three months that she had known him. Now it seemed that Mr. Schmidt was trying to make up for lost time. Cecilia badly wanted to blurt out "Mr. Schmidt, I was the one who got Jason to study and kept an eye on him over the last three months. I was the one who kept him out of trouble. How come he hasn't heard from you, and how come you're now askin' him all these questions?" However, she held her tongue, not wanting conflict to ruin this trip any sooner than necessary.
They crossed the state line. It was the first time Cecilia had seen Wisconsin; in fact, it was the first time she had traveled outside Illinois since arriving nearly a year and a half before. As they drove along back roads over the pleasant countryside, Mr. Schmidt began talking to Cecilia, probing her to find out as much as he could about her. She recognized what he was doing; he was probing her in the same way she was used to probing people when she was getting to know them. She responded in her usual evasive manner, turning the questions back to Mr. Schmidt to try to get information out of him instead. He seemed irritated, but answered her questions: talking about his time in college, relating how he met Jason's mother, and explaining why the family had settled in Wisconsin instead of Illinois.
Seeing Jason's neighborhood was a bit of a shock, even though he already had shown her pictures of his house and his high school. Cecilia had thought that Dr. Burnside's house and neighborhood was nice, but the development where Burnside lived was nothing in comparison with the area Jason's house was located. Enormous flashy residences with vaulted entrances and fancy yards passed by Cecilia's eyes. There was an expensive SUV, BMW, or sports car parked in each driveway. There were attractive carved signs pointing to golf courses and country clubs, and other signs announcing that a particular lake or park was restricted to residents only.
Cecilia was impressed, but not in a positive way. She looked around at what seemed to her a sterile, alien environment. She had entered another world, a landscape that was appealing to the eye, but at the same time a world that was very cold and hostile. What struck her the most about the neighborhood was the absence of people. The yards and sidewalks were almost completely empty. She saw an occasional middle-aged jogger and one older man riding a lawn mower picking up leaves. That was it; no children, no younger people in sight at all. There is something very wrong about all this, she thought to herself. This place is just as bad as my housing project. Maybe it's bad in a different way, but it's just as bad.
Finally they arrived at Jason's house. The family had an additional BMW (which was being used to teach Cassie how to drive), and a new full-sized SUV. The garage had a full workshop, although Cecilia could tell by the condition of the tools that it rarely was used. There were two living rooms downstairs, one of which Cecilia later learned was called a "sitting room" and was not used on a day to day basis. That's just as well, she thought to herself, that furniture doesn't look very comfortable to sit in.
Not only were there two living rooms, there also were two dining rooms. There was a large table near the kitchen where the family ate on a day-to-day basis, but then there was a more formal dining room with antique cabinets and a very expensive-looking dining set. And to think, this huge house, with its two living rooms, two dining rooms, basement, den, five bathrooms, and six bedrooms, was the residence of four people, now reduced to three with Jason no longer living at home. Cecilia peeked out through the bay window of the "informal" dining room, to see an air tent covering the family's pool. She suddenly realized she had forgotten to bring a swimsuit, which was too bad, because a few minutes wading in the water might have relieved her stress a bit.
She became more and more nervous. She clearly was out of her element, being in this over-sized house with its vaulted ceilings and impractical decorations. It seemed to her that a large portion of the house was not for living at all, but rather for show. This is totally ridiculous, she thought to herself. A house should be a comfortable place to live in...something practical, maybe like what Ruth Burnside has...not...this monstrosity. There was something enormously oppressive about the place and all its wasted space and resources. She had the feeling that even if she had grown up with too little space, perhaps Jason had grown up with too much.
There was more unpleasantness coming her way. Mrs. Schmidt came home with Cassie and another teenager. All of them were dressed in expensive sweatsuits, all of them carrying tennis racquets. The woman and the two girls gave Cecilia a hostile dismissive glance. She still had not realized what the problem was, that she had over-dressed to meet Jason's family. The detail of her clothing gave her away as a poor person trying to be better than what she was.
