Taking My Life

by Jane Rule

  “Well, I have a surprise for you after dinner,” he said. “I’m going to take you to see your great-grandparents.”

  Remembering the German village, the musical chair, the energetic old man who had scrubbed our hands and napped with us, the gentle sweet-faced old woman who had liked my mother to sing for her, I was wonderfully relieved.

  It was to be a surprise for them, too.

  My great-grandmother opened the door of their apartment, looked at Granddad, looked at me and burst into tears.

  “Lester, she’s too young!”

  “Mama,” he protested. “This is your great-granddaughter.”

  All through our short visit, while Granddad was out in the kitchen following his father’s directions about putting chopped ham onto a butter saltine (press the cracker face down into the ham), Oma apologized to me, obviously hoping I hadn’t understood the source of her distress.

  “I’m an old woman. I cry easily. I was surprised.”

  “Ja, she cries all the time,” Opa confirmed. “Last night I fell out of my bed, and I was laughing too hard to get up. She was crying too much to help me.”

  On Mother’s Day, I recited my grandfather’s poem to his mother:

  I am thinking of a Mother

  Who happily is mine,

  And I can best describe her

  By calling her divine.

  Divine because her nature

  Is free from selfishness,

  Divine because her life reflects

  Her fine ideals, I guess.

  If one could take self-sacrifice

  And understanding, too,

  If one could take a kindly heart,

  A spirit that rings true,

  If one could take these heavenly traits

  And merge one with the other,

  The outcome would perfection be,

  And there you have my mother.

  He might have made a fortune. The stuff was bad enough.

  I never saw those tiny, distressed old people again. Opa died in his nineties, and Oma lived on for ten more years in a rest house, recognizing no one. I was in my midtwenties when she died, and Granddad rode to her funeral, his hat on the seat between him and the woman who became his fourth wife, so that they could hold hands. She was older than me by maybe ten years. She’d been his housekeeper’s daughter, whom he gave away in marriage and then took back. After she bore him his final son, the same age as his first great-grandson, she drank herself to death.

  My brother was fair and blue eyed and full lipped, like the Hinks. His remoteness and indifference, symptoms of an unhappy adolescence, reminded Mother of her father. She hadn’t been raised with brothers. Her stepfather was also a remote, unhappy man. Without the one man she knew and trusted and loved to help her with her bewildering son, she could sometimes assume he was as he was because he was mysteriously male and a Hink. In most crises, he vanished, but he could, like Granddad, suddenly take on a gallant role for himself. He took me to my graduation dance at Anna Head’s, picked out a corsage himself, and did not desert me for my prettier friends, danced with me all the steps we’d learned together back in Hinsdale days, and we even showed off some of the boogie-woogie we learned … where? Maybe at St. Mary’s from the cadets. It was my first experience of Arthur as an attentive, courtly brother with whom my friends all wanted to fall in love.

  At graduation itself, I puzzled over Mrs. Knapp in a dress, her fine, short-groomed head out of keeping in that feminine finery. She looked all of a piece in the tailored suits she normally wore.

  Dad came home from the Aleutians on mercy leave in time to get Libby out of the hospital. She had talked so much about him that the whole staff lined up to meet him. Libby refused the wheelchair, ready to take her to the car. She set off down the corridor herself and had walked about twenty feet when her long, bony legs gave way under her, and Dad caught her before she fell, lifting his tall, frail five-year-old with her shaved head into his arms.

  He stayed long enough to move us back to Palo Alto to the square house on Waverly Street where we would live until the war was over.

  Arthur, all the time Dad was home, nagged him about being allowed to drive the car.

  “I already know how. Why can’t I?”

  “You’re not old enough to have a licence.”

  But, the last day of Dad’s leave, when we pulled up in front of the house and Mother and Libby got out, Dad tossed the keys to Arthur and said, “Okay, son, put it in the garage.”

  I didn’t have time to get out before Arthur was behind the wheel. He gunned the car around the corner and smashed it into a telephone pole.

  “Well,” my father said to my mother later, “it’s an expensive lesson, but I don’t think he’ll nag you about the car for a while.”

  Angry as I was to be left to be a victim of that accident, I was angry for Arthur as well. So many of Dad’s tests for him seemed designed to humiliate.

  “The clutch stuck,” Arthur said, determined to maintain the bluff that he knew how to drive.

  Dad laughed.

  The Rule family

  Jane Rule Fonds, University Archives, University of British Columbia

  THE LONELY SUMMER BEGAN. Libby, playing on her tricycle out in front of the house, stopped a high-school boy walking along the street and asked if he knew any little girls her age with whom she could play. Arthur wandered farther afield and found the local pool hall and bowling alley. Mother and I had an appointment at Castilleja School for girls, only a block away, where I was registered to begin high school in the fall, Libby to begin kindergarten. When I wasn’t settling into my new room or arranging a sunroom I shared with Arthur where our player and record collection were kept, I was reading poetry and writing letters to Mrs. Knapp, who answered them for the few months before she died of cancer. And I walked, round and round the school property, trying to imagine what it would be like to be a student there. I often walked at night and saw the light on in the principal’s office. Once I dropped in to see her, and she welcomed me easily enough, but she was younger and cooler and less sure of herself than Mrs. Knapp. Miss Espinosa had been a student at the school, then a Spanish teacher there, now principal in her early thirties. There was fear rather than laughter underneath her guard.

  “Not enough experience in the world,” was my mother’s judgment of her.

  I could hardly remember now what Mother and I had found to quarrel about when I was younger. Dad’s leaving, Libby’s long sickness, Arthur’s increasing withdrawal from us had all contributed to a growing closeness between my mother and me. I had not looked up to her as I had to my father until I watched her coping without him and began to understand the power of her steadfastness, courage and love. Her fierce loyalty to us was in such contrast to her father’s total indifference, her mother’s sharp criticism. Though Mother complained about her parents and was often hurt by them, she did what she could for each of them as long as they lived. To other people, she was always inclined to make funny stories of her troubles, a clown rather than a martyr to hard events.

  “Don’t you take anything seriously?” her mother would complain.

  “Not if I can help it,” Mother replied.

  She never came home from even a quick trip to the store without a silly story or two.

  “I stuck out my hand to turn, and the man in the next car shook it!” or “A woman at the butcher asked for the left leg of the lamb. When I asked her why, she said it was the leg with the tail on it. You learn something new every day.”

  Her advice was nearly always irreverent. “Don’t learn to do anything you don’t like, or you’ll end up having to do it the rest of your life.”

  When I was bored with something I had to read, she’d read it aloud to me in changing accents.

  Laughter was the antidote to pain, boredom, fear, hurt pride.

  “Never mind, darling. It will make a good story later on.”

  Mother did what the British call “dining out on” her life, a survival
technique I owe her, for I was not a natural comic.

  In fact, at thirteen, I was chiefly aware of a great capacity to suffer without the experience to spend it on. I had, of course, decided to be a doctor, an ambition I cherished for three years until I took chemistry and could get nothing but original results in all my experiments, had no hand for lighting Bunsen burners and couldn’t clean out a test tube without getting a sponge stuck in the bottom of it.

  A more tentative interest in being a poet prompted me to write metrically correct, rhyming verses on topics like “My Blindness,” an avocation brought to a premature end by my mother’s laughter. Stung as I was, I did have to admit the comic potential of my morbidities.

  I have been able to use quite a lot of the material of my childhood in fiction, but I have never been able to use the years of my adolescence. In the great range of characters in novels and short stories, it is as if people between the ages of thirteen and fifteen didn’t exist. And I not only lived through those years but taught students that age for two years with comprehension and delight.

  What has put me off, I think, is the odd blurry line between emotional ignorance and dishonesty which characterized those years for me and misshaped my understanding for much longer.

  The troubled and troubling bond I had with my brother made me mistrustful of the few boys I knew, grateful for the protection of a girl’s school which could put off the question of how I could ever be a woman loved by a man. But I was frightened enough by that eventual failure to invent “David,” off fighting in the Pacific, my only fantasy life with trying to decide how he would die, how I would mourn him. I loved all poems about the death of lovers, particularly Amy Lowell’s “Patterns,” ending with that fine, “Christ! What are patterns for?” which she may have written with motives similar to mine.

  Mother laughed about a lie she’d told her French teacher about a baby brother who had been drowned at sea.

  “I was an awful liar—anything to get out of my homework.”

  That sort of a lie I would never have told. Even after my humiliation as judge of the lower school court, I was a fanatic about “the truth.” So my “David” fantasy, which I occasionally committed to paper on a free theme day for English, was of a more desperate order of lying, a defence against future humiliations and pathetically unoriginal, since every old maid school teacher, however unattractive, was rumoured to be faithful to someone’s memory.

  I must have voiced something, my fear, to my mother who said, “Who you want to be is what’s important. If someone comes along to share life with, fine. It’s not something to worry about.”

  But Dad was her whole life. And I didn’t question his masculine idealism which separated him from her and from us for years. He was off making the world safe for democracy.

  I couldn’t have known that first year in high school how much I presented myself to my teachers as a potential lover. I was arrogant and hopeful, willing to earn their attention with hard work, passionately loyal to those who taught me well, disdainful and rude to those who didn’t. Though I made friends among the students, could win elections, be class captain of a team, it was the adults who mattered to me. I didn’t have “crushes” on any of them. I wasn’t a teacher’s pet. I wanted to be known to them. I wanted to be, in the literal sense of the word, remarkable. An A without comment was less pleasing to me than a B with an explanation. I was intoxicated with the potential of my own mind and wanted the power that learning promised.

  Miss Grant, the math teacher, a dry, ageless stick of a woman, with a jaw rewired as the result of an accident, was puzzled by any report of my misbehaviour because in her class my attention was fixed on the pure beauty of mathematics, the balancing equations of algebra, the unfolding logic of geometry. Among students who memorized or despaired and failed, I made Miss Grant’s day, and she made mine. But poor little Miss Dively, the Latin teacher, who wasted the first ten minutes of each class counting the homework papers and kept discipline by not excusing students to go to the toilet, was tormented by my pranks and bewildered that I didn’t respond meekly to threats of lowering my otherwise good grades. I was both interested enough and unsure enough in English—I couldn’t spell and had a horror of reading aloud—to keep my mind on the lesson. I slept through German so often, Miss Espinosa complained to my mother that I wasn’t getting enough sleep.

  “She’s bored,” my mother replied.

  I was in the office frequently to be reprimanded. Miss Espinosa said with some irritation, “We could do a good deal more with you if it weren’t for your mother.”

  “Thank God for my mother,” I replied.

  I wasn’t sleeping enough. I worked long after Mother went to bed, then often walked around the neighbourhood, and more than once I stood watching the late light in Miss Espinosa’s office, knowing she didn’t sleep enough either, irritated by her cold, humourless propriety, drawn by some half-sensed wish to break through it.

  I was, in part, the same sort of challenge for her, I suppose, an undeniably bright student—and she had ambitions to improve the school scholastically—which was too wild, too lacking in respect, a threat to her control.

  She added extra courses to my schedule to keep me from disrupting study hall. She suggested that the young Spanish teacher become my informal tutor to encourage me to read more widely and to be guided more firmly in matters of behaviour. Miss Read was only twenty-three, lived at home with her parents, waiting for the war to be over, for the young men to come home so that her real life could begin. I called her Sugarfoot for reasons I don’t remember, walked her home in the afternoon, listened to her records and her complaints about her job, about Miss Espinosa.

  “She wants me to spy on you, you know,” Sugarfoot said. “She wants me to spy on the gym teacher and the history teacher, too.”

  “Why?”

  “She wants to spy on everyone.”

  I would not have said I wanted to spy on Miss Espinosa, but I was as intently interested in her as she was in me. There were students and teachers in the school she wanted to wear her colours. Because I would not, she came to basketball games to cheer the opponents’ team; to swimming meets to comment that I won too easily, being so tall. We wooed each other as stupidly and negatively as children pulling each other’s braids.

  Because I lived so close to the school, I made friends among the boarders and made a nuisance of myself after school hours as well, delivering contraband food and even cigarettes to the older girls. Also, I invited them home for weekends.

  Among that group was a girl named Hina Gump, the half-Tahitian ward of Mr. Gump of the famous San Francisco store. She was no relation to him, a stray, unwanted child of one of his daughter’s husbands on whom he had taken pity. A blind, ailing, old man, he couldn’t care for her himself, but he could afford to educate her. Hina loved to come home with me. She would play with Libby and her friends, flirt with Arthur, talk with Mother.

  “You’re so lucky to have a home. Do you know how lucky you are?”

  Mr. Gump, to express his gratitude that Hina could spend weekends in a family atmosphere, invited me to San Francisco for the weekend. His female driver came in a huge black car to collect us as well as another boarder, signed out to Mr. Gump for the weekend but dropped off before we arrived to meet her lover for the weekend. Hina and I taunted the throngs of sailors on the streets of San Francisco from the safety of that large car until the driver threatened to put us out. I suppose we were trying to seem as sophisticated as our friend. Perhaps Hina was.

  Grandpa Gump’s house on the Marina was filled with paintings and beautiful furniture. Hina had her own bedroom and sitting room, next to his study where he sat in the dark, smoking cigars. He had a nickel slot machine, into which he put five nickels each night, keeping any winnings he made. And there was a bar, arranged so that he could make his own drinks.

  My first sight of him, sitting in the dark so that only the coal of his cigar lighted his wide-open blind eyes as he took a drag, f
rightened me a little. But he called me “Captain Jinx” affectionately and took my arm to go down the stairs for dinner. I was used to helping grandparents, felt comfortable with the weight of his arm on mine. Every few steps he paused, nodded to a painting and told me about it.

  At dinner, his housekeeper presented Hina and me with full plates of deliciously cooked meat and vegetables in rich sauces. He had rice and a bit of white fish.

  “You’re having meat. I can smell it,” he said crossly. “Aren’t you, Captain Jinx?”

  The housekeeper glanced a warning and shook her head. “They’re eating just what you are.”

  “I should hope not. They’d starve. I am a prisoner in my own house, that’s what I am, everyone lying to me.”

  I minded for him, but he settled to his meal resignedly. Both Hina and the housekeeper had such obvious, protective affection for him that their transparent deceptions became less painful to me, but I found it hard to lie to him myself.

  How much more comfortable I would have been if I’d spent the weekend in his company at the store or in the house, learning about the great Oriental collection, listening to his grievances about his ungrateful and unhappy children, but he didn’t suspect that a fourteen-year-old would find him interesting company.

  Hina was allowed to go to a parking garage he owned across from the store and borrow a rental car though she had no licence. We careened around the steep streets of San Francisco until the car somehow caught fire and we had to be rescued by the fire department. Then we rented horses and cantered along the beach until we got tangled up in surf fishermen’s lines. We went somewhere to a bar where prep school boys made oddly hostile advances to Hina, racially beneath them but rich. Then we went home and Hina got two pints of rum from Grandpa’s bar, a large bottle of Coke for me, ginger ale for herself. I had never drunk anything but a beer or a Tom Collins, and, before that night was through, I had drunk the pint of rum and quart of Coke and was crawling to the bathroom to be sick.