Taking My Life

by Jane Rule

  For me the peculiarities of the household were a great comfort, for there was always someone awake to dispel night fears, and there was never a family meal to test either my table manners or my appetite. Like everyone else in the house, I simply told Aunt Ida what I wanted when I wanted it. There was always fried chicken in the refrigerator and large pitchers of fresh milk. Ida baked bread and cookies and fried potato chips every morning early “before the heat of the day.” I could pick vegetables and eat them raw in the garden, and there was a country store across the road where I was sent on small errands in the company of Goggles, the collie, with the direction to keep the change for my penny candy, a Coke or a chance on the punch board. Ida was surprised that I made my own bed. I think I was the only one in the house who ever did.

  Those were Mary Lily’s last few months on the farm. That fall she ran away to New York where Grandfather Rule got her a job as a Powers model, making his own daughters and Granny Rule the more jealous and critical of her. Mary Lily was for me a revelation. Even at my stubborn worst, I had never stood at the top of the stairs and screamed at anyone, Mary Lily’s tactic when she was crossed by any of them. The old men and her mother were worried about her and frightened of her, the very image of Eve, the temptress, for every man in the county. One day she took me to the reservoir to swim and pushed me out on an inflated raft where I dozed in the sun for hours while she flirted with half a dozen young men. I came home badly sunburned and my bed rocked gently all night. The next day, contrite, she read me parts of her diary. I was too flattered by the attention to mind being bored, puzzled and embarrassed by turns.

  Aunt Ida took us to the races. She was the only one who knew how to drive. A great talker at any time, she drove to the mood of her continually shouted monologue, as slowly as five miles an hour for sad parts of stories, up to fifty for the exciting bits. I don’t think any of the men were deaf. She shouted over the phone, too, could often have simply opened a window to converse with her neighbours without aid of the phone. Dark stories were told about Ida. Dad’s sister Mary claimed Ida once chased her around the house with a fingernail file, and Granny Rule said she went berserk at every full moon and sometimes had to be put away. She said Uncle Lucian had been tricked into marrying Ida, her family not telling him she was a lunatic. During my first visit and every other time I went to the farm in Kentucky with the family, Aunt Ida was the warm centre of the world, tending all that odd crew and her guests without even a complaint, making work to make people comfortable.

  Clarence was the other gentle one in the household. As thin as Ida was fat, he had a high, lilting Southern voice. He was also the only other one who laughed, leaning up against a wall as if he might otherwise simply fall down. He took me to the barn and taught me to milk. He let me feed ears of corn into a machine that took off the kernels, saving the stripped cobs for the pigs. He only forbade me to watch when he had to kill chickens, an activity not fitting for a girl. Even when I explained to him that Charlie let me hunt pigeons and rabbits, Uncle Clarence just shook his head. So I took a fly swatter and killed the hundreds of flies always clustered on the screen door that led into the kitchen.

  Later, when the whole family visited, Arthur and I explored the limestone caves Dad had discovered as a boy. We swam in the Ohio River out to the riverboats from which passengers would throw us small change. They were gambling boats, we were told, steering their way across state lines whenever a police launch came out to challenge them.

  I don’t suppose I stayed at the farm more than several times. Though South Fork and Carlotta remained my spirit home, Goshen, Kentucky, with its traces of my father’s boyhood, the stories of his grandparents, his eccentric old uncles, was a masculine counterpart to the very feminine world my mother had grown up in. One of Dad’s brothers-in-law, angry at Granny Rule’s social pretensions, said, “They may talk high and mighty, the Rules, but they were just a bunch of poor Kentucky dirt farmers.” I was grown before it occurred to me that those people were poor, living on Grandfather Rule’s handouts, the only one to have escaped, like Mary Lily after him, to make his way in the world. He was unfailingly generous to them, perhaps sometimes, as Granny claimed, at the expense of his own family. He respected their lack of worldliness, admired their service to the church and did not set his own successes above theirs.

  Grandfather Rule, always sentimental about family if often not very practical, wrote a monthly newsletter which was sent not only to his own children but to other members of his family. Scattered as we increasingly were, we always had news of our cousins. The family for me was my own private soap opera, often more interesting than those I listened to after school on the radio or in the morning if I was sick in bed. Mary Lily’s face on an increasing number of the covers of national magazines underlined the glamour of my relatives, but I was always more drawn to the old stories, fixed in people’s memories and told over and over again, like ballads.

  Arthur’s trip to Washington, D.C., was not such a success if Granny’s report of it can be credited. While young George comported himself with dignity, going into famous buildings, Frank and Arthur chased squirrels around the grounds until Granny locked them up in the car. She had particularly high expectations for Arthur because he was Arthur Richard Rule III, and he was not carrying that dynastic burden with grace.

  Again there were rumours at Dad’s office of promotion and transfer. Mother was inclined to think that nothing could be worse than Hinsdale. I, having been assigned the task of making a leaf notebook and terrified of any project that took longer than half an hour, put it off in the hope that we would be gone long before it was due. I did not know the names of trees in Hinsdale, nor was I interested. Real trees grew in forests and orchards. The only authentic wonder we found in Hinsdale was the ruin of one of the hideouts of the underground railway where we could play at being runaway slaves. There were no black children to play with, or Chinese or Japanese either. But again the move was postponed, and Mother finally had to go with me into the neighbourhood to collect the leaves and identify them. The first snow had fallen, the day I lined up to get on the bus with the notebook finally completed. The girl next to me knocked it out of my hand, the papers scattering in the slush. I tried to turn away, to run home, but the kindly driver—surely not the one who had reported us the winter before?—got out and collected my soggy leaves for me and coaxed me to school. Something of the dread and then grief of that project made me fear long assignments all through my school life, to hope for reprieve rather than to settle to work. I think it odd, nearly perverse, that I have spent my adult life, pursuing the difficult, therefore precious and vulnerable business of writing books.

  DAD’S TRANSFER CAME THROUGH just about the time my Valentine’s Day dress arrived from Mother Packer. We had to leave before I could wear it and enjoy the last episode of my brief social success. Dad had been appointed district sales manager of the St. Louis region. Mother found a house in Kirkwood, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, and once again the large Gatehouse furniture, including the grand piano, and all the wedding-present china, silver and glassware, was moved into a house crowded by its pretensions.

  It seemed a happier place for Mother, mainly because Dad was much more often at home. Our neighbours on Circle Drive were friendly. They gathered at each other’s houses and sang in harmony all evening. Though I couldn’t understand why they sang so many different tunes at once or why they laughed at so sad a song as “Miss Otis Regrets,” I liked to fall asleep to the sound of their singing. For the first time since Westfield, Mother and Dad had a circle of friends.

  Arthur and I weren’t as lucky. Out of necessity, we banded together walking to and from the local school, I having learned to be passive before the jeers, the occasional rocks thrown at us, thinking bitterly that sticks and stones would break our bones and names did hurt.

  I sat, as always, in the back of the classroom, far behind in work and bewildered. I was expected to do long division when I had not been taught the multi
plication tables, to pick up the meaning of a book halfway through it. The only familiar subject was geography. In the course of my first years of school, I studied South America three times and had never heard of Europe or Africa. I could draw a map of South America free hand. Other students volunteered to run errands to the principal’s office to escape the boredom of the classroom. I couldn’t because I didn’t know where the principal’s office was. I didn’t even know where the girl’s bathroom was. I hadn’t in Hinsdale either, but long trips had disciplined my bladder.

  The gang of girls I would have liked to play with was a closed clique, the leader of which had broken her arm in first grade and consolidated her position by letting only a select few write and draw pictures on her cast. I tried to figure out a way to break my own arm without having it hurt. Failing that, I made friends with a twin brother and sister, but their closeness and kindness to each other underlined my unhappiness with my brother. I played with other girls who hung around the edges of Margerie Fraser and gang. Their idea of adventure was to steal their older sisters’ sanitary napkins and peel them open to discover the mystery, to tell dirty jokes I didn’t understand. I would so much rather have been roaming the fields with my brother who had finally been given a BB gun, but he went alone or with a foul-mouthed boy my age who was the terror of the neighbourhood and with whom no one else was allowed to play. He told incomprehensible jokes, too, one of which I repeated at the dinner table.

  “Do you know what that means?” my father asked.

  “Not exactly.”

  That evening my father came to my room and explained to me how babies were conceived. That a man had to put his penis inside a woman was unbelievably disgusting.

  “They do?”

  “Yes, they do,” he said brusquely and went off to my brother’s room, which proved a less difficult assignment.

  Though it was clear to me that under such circumstances I would never have a child, I drew some comfort in the knowledge that my father was not simply the man my mother had married but actually my father. There was a reason for my looking like him. At about the same time, he discovered that I needed to learn the multiplication tables and taught them to me, solving the mystery of long division.

  I was now growing taller than even the tallest boy in my class. The taunts which had before been impersonal were now physically mocking. “Giant. Big nose. Big feet.” For the first time, too, I was forced to notice how much lower the pitch of my voice was than any other child’s. The music teacher asked me not to sing because I carried my part a full octave lower than any other child.

  At the same time, my mother began to fret about my hair. I was sent to the torture of a permanent, which made my hair impossible to comb. “Suitable” clothes were increasingly difficult to find, and I had to go to a special shoe store for corrective shoes.

  Finally, it was discovered that I needed glasses, a disappointment my parents could not hide. I had turned from a pretty child into a great, lumpish ten-year-old, negatively self-conscious and sullen.

  For me, neither my parents’ depression over my glasses nor the new taunt “Four Eyes” could lessen the wonder of being able to see leaves on trees, individual pebbles in the driveway, birds in flight, what the teacher wrote on the board, people’s expressions in the movies.

  Mother, who had grown progressively heavier after each of us was born, began to worry at me about the weight I was putting on, lining open-faced peanut butter sandwiches up the length of one arm every day after school and sitting by the radio listening to soap operas. Arthur could do the same thing and stay thin as a fast-growing young tree. The doctor decided I needed thyroid pills, which turned me from depressed wordlessness into shrieking fury. One day, Dad took both my mother’s and my thyroid pills out of the medicine cabinet and threw them in the field. We were, for a while, able to be civil to each other.

  My parents found a not-quite-completed house just a block away which they could buy for a reasonable amount and Dad could gradually finish. I suppose the down payment cancelled our summer trip west. I campaigned for at least two weeks at a summer camp in the Ozarks, away from my disappointed father, scolding mother, boring little sister and hostile brother.

  I had no real friends to go with and chose a time when the friends I had wanted wouldn’t be there. But, of course, I took my baffled and unhappy self along. Camp made Yosemite, in retrospect, magnificent. It was at least beautiful, and I hadn’t had to eat and sleep and even share an outhouse with strangers. In my cabin were five other girls and my last winter’s teacher, who looked very odd in shorts or jeans and appalled me by trying to be friendly. The river we swam in was a mudhole, and I was disqualified after winning a race because I didn’t breathe at every stroke.

  “Neither did my father, and he’s a champion!”

  I was terrified of the food, of the physical intimacy with people I didn’t know and of the friend each of us drew to do nice things for in secret. I didn’t so much mind leaving candy bars and wild flowers for the girl I had drawn, but I was threatened by the secret and extravagant affection I received.

  “Yours must really love you,” my cabin mates taunted, jealous I suppose, but I would gladly have traded that passionate attention for lacklustre duty or even failure to respond.

  I forgot to spit out my gum one night and woke up with it in my hair. I ran out of clean underwear. I got a migraine headache and was refused pills for it. At the end of the first week, I demanded to go home. When I was refused that, too, I found some visiting parents and was so eloquent they offered to drive me home.

  When we stopped for lunch, I insisted on paying for my own. Then I bought presents for each member of my family so that I wouldn’t have to present them with the grotesque clay bowl and the wallet, so thick Dad couldn’t get it into his back pocket, which I’d been forced to make in crafts.

  The new lawn was up at our new house, measuring for me the century I’d been away. Mother did momentarily gloat at my being glad to be home.

  Arthur that fall went on to junior high, which meant he had to ride the streetcar and I had to walk to school alone. But I was no longer new to the neighbourhood or to my class. The new girl now really was fat and nearly blind, and she made a mistake I never did: she looked frightened. One afternoon other kids in the class invited me to help chase her off the playground. I ran at her, snatched one of her galoshes and threw it down the steps after her. A few minutes later, on my way home alone, I threw up my lunch and breakfast. I could not bring myself to make friends with that outcast, but I never took part in tormenting her again.

  The Colonel and Mother Packer came to visit, he staying only a few days before he was off on a trip of his own, perhaps to visit his spinster sister in the East. Mother Packer stayed on, sleeping in my room with me, which meant I could no longer read comic books by the radio light at night. We had a maid at the time. Though that meant less work for Mother, it also gave her no escape from her mother’s company. Except for Libby, who was a generous, affectionate and cheerful child, Mother had much to answer for in the looks and behaviour of her children. Critical of and baffled by us herself, she nonetheless defended us fiercely.

  In that defence, I heard more clearly my mother’s dissatisfaction with the world we lived in. How could we learn good manners when Dad’s office staff gave us a surprise housewarming and got drunk and sick all over the house, leaving water stains on the grand piano, when our neighbours had murals of naked women in their recreation room and raised vicious dogs, when there was no civilized entertainment for adults or children, bring-your-own-bottle parties and rowdy public Easter egg hunts? When schoolchildren were taken to the symphony in St. Louis, the conductor finally refused to go on with the concert they were so badly behaved. It was an awful place. The people were awful.

  My mother was as unhappy as I was. My own loyalty was roused; I took her side against Mother Packer when I could. And I tried to remember how to be a child again, easily amused by card games, easily pleased by ice
-cream cones, obedient. Mother had hay fever. I had migraine headaches and, finally, a kidney infection.

  When Mother Packer left, the doctor said, “You’re allergic to her, all of you, that’s all.”

  Yet Mother wanted, above all things, to move back to California.

  I don’t think that I did, except for summers I missed at South Fork. I didn’t like it where I was. I was afraid of the black children who went to separate schools and even separate movies, who stepped off the curb when I passed but spat at the same time. I was afraid of my own classmates, too, and yet the most persistent cruelty I suffered from was at home where Arthur rarely spoke a civil word and was frequently violent if we were left alone with the maid or a babysitter. He would have to go wherever I did, intimate evidence that the scenery changed but unhappiness was probably a constant. I began to wonder, even then, if the world my mother wanted to live in really existed.

  “We were nice to each other when we were children. We had fun together.”

  “You didn’t have a brother.”

  “My friends did. If you were nicer to him, he’d be nicer to you. Somebody has to begin.”

  During one of our uneasy truces, Arthur and I had gone to a Sunday afternoon movie together. When Dad picked us up, he was unusually solemn.

  “Japan has just attacked Pearl Harbor. We’re at war.”

  There had been talk of war ever since I could remember, and it had increased in the last two years. Two of Dad’s brothers-in-law were graduates of West Point, professional soldiers, and another, a classmate of Dad’s at Annapolis, had already re-enlisted in the navy.

  “Will you fight, Dad?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  Walking to school the next day alone, I kicked through the last of the autumn leaves, thinking over and over again only “we’re at war.”