Taking My Life

by Jane Rule

  At our own parties, fights broke out between the high-school boys and the veterans, unlike the drunken, half-athletic scuffles we were used to, mean and damaging. Arthur, never a fighter, was a target because of his height and looks. “Why would I fight over a girl?” he asked, sounding unpleasantly superior but probably simply bewildered.

  Royal, the trumpet player from St. Mary’s pre-flight days, was playing with a small combo at one of the roadhouses, and we sometimes went there to listen and dance to avoid larger parties, but the mood of any crowd was volatile. Also we were underage and could have been arrested in one of the frequent police raids. What we simply hadn’t told Mother became lying to Dad. I didn’t like any part of it, whether I was being one of the kids at home or one of the threatened crowd.

  Rendering of Jane Rule by Ann Smith

  Jane Rule Fonds, University Archives, University of British Columbia

  These were not problems to discuss with Mother, and Sugarfoot was so preoccupied with her sex life that I became dumb audience for her. Only Ann Smith and I occasionally talked while Henry was off at classes, first because I went to sit for my portrait, then out of the habit that formed. She was willing to discuss all the sense I had of my family and tell me about her own, her unconventional childhood, trailing around the world with an artist mother and alcoholic father, problematic older brother and sisters. Only when she talked about sexuality was I uncertain, guarded, not because I had anything to say but because I didn’t. She’d been sexually involved with her older brother and asked me what my relationship with Arthur really was. The idea was not so much shocking as alien to me. My brother and I were so physically shy of each other we never touched except when we danced together. Though he’d long since stopped taunting me about how I looked, was always courtly to me in public, his private aversion to everyone in the family, against whom he locked his door as well as his heart, was the fact I lived with. I did find him attractive but in no conscious, sexual way. He was light on his feet, graceful. His fair head was beautifully shaped and, when he was neither sullen nor tense, he had a natural gentleness of expression, which Ann had caught in her portrait of him. Bewildered by him, angered by him, deeply hurt by his nearly inhuman indifference, I did love him, not exactly against my will. I wanted to love him, but I wanted him to be a different person, someone I could talk to, someone I could trust, the fantasy brother he played so well at a party.

  Were there any boys I particularly liked? There were boys I admired, and they were all tall and fair like my brother and as remote from girls the likes of me.

  “You have to show them you like them,” Ann said.

  But her specific suggestions embarrassed and repulsed me. I believed what my shy mother had told me, that if you loved someone very much, then you wanted to make love. When Ann told me she and Henry made love at least twice a day, I was reassured in the rightness of my mother’s view.

  “Sex has to do with love,” I said. “I don’t love anyone that way.”

  The first time I said it, I didn’t add that I probably never would. Later I didn’t add, “except you.” It was in my head, but I had no idea what it meant.

  My parents, my grandmother, even Arthur liked Ann. She and Mother were taking singing lessons from the same teacher, to whom Mother Packer had given the Colonel’s old den, out by the garage, for a studio. Mother praised Ann’s voice. Dad admired the likenesses she caught in her portraits, though he didn’t like mine all that well, probably because it was stiffly, fiercely like me. Mother Packer liked Ann’s serenity. She did look serene; yet the more she told me of her childhood, the more her face seemed to me a protective mask. She envied me my parents, the stability of my life.

  The tension between Dad and Arthur mounted.

  “The therapist told me just to shut his door when he didn’t clean up,” Mother explained. “He said not to nag him about little things.”

  For Dad the little things were emblematic of Arthur’s total lack of discipline and his lack of consideration for other people. He was old enough to mow the lawn and wash the car without being told, to attend school and do his homework. Arthur listened to Dad’s orders and lectures with a blandly courteous expression, but he would not answer when he was challenged. To all questions, from why he’d not come home for dinner to why he’d taken forty dollars from Mother’s purse, he was either silent or said, “I don’t know.”

  If I’d been challenged about anything I was doing, my mischief-making at school or my growing involvement with Ann, I suppose I would have offered excuses and explanations which might have convinced. But certainly I didn’t know either why I really did a great many things.

  Miss Espinosa’s explanation, that I was simply an attention seeker and trouble maker, was descriptive enough, but not insightful.

  I took my first IQ test. After the results were returned, Miss Espinosa called me into the office and charged me with doing badly on purpose in order to dishonour the school. Since I’d done as well as I could, I was horrified to discover that my score put me in the category of high moron. She wanted me to take the test again and do it properly. I refused, saying I didn’t approve of IQ tests. I didn’t admit to her charge, but I didn’t deny it either. I couldn’t bear being exposed as a moron. Could I really have done as well in school if I had been? Arthur did brilliantly in such tests and was accused, therefore, of failing his own great intelligence. What were tests for but to label and punish us one way or the other?

  “I rated low moron,” my mother said cheerfully. “And I get along just fine.”

  But I was still planning to be a doctor, not yet having taken chemistry.

  Dad, like Mother before him, tried positive approaches with Arthur. Dad had learned to exercise on a trampoline while he was still at St. Mary’s, and he’d ordered one for his ship so that he and other officers could combat the pounds their otherwise sedentary life encouraged. He bought one in army surplus and brought it home for our backyard. All three of us tried it. Libby and her little friends liked simply to bounce up and down on it until they fell into a giggling pile. It gave me such severe headaches, I soon very reluctantly gave it up. Arthur, surprisingly, enjoyed it. Though he wasn’t interested in developing much skill at flips, he liked getting great height on it. It amused him to be able to peer in at me in our second-floor porch listening to records. He even made silly faces at me of the sort I remembered when we were little children.

  One day, when Mother had to be with Mother Packer, I came from school early, in order to supervise Libby. I found her already home, sailing boats in an overflowing bathtub. As I turned off the taps, I caught sight of Arthur on the window ledge of our porch, about to try a jump from there onto the trampoline.

  “You’ll break your leg!” I shouted.

  He didn’t jump, but soon after that he did pull a ligament. He walked the metal peg off the cast he had to wear for some weeks.

  Then quite suddenly Arthur was gone, and the trampoline went with him to a private school in southern California.

  “They understand boys,” Dad explained when he came home from delivering Arthur and his equipment, “even difficult boys.”

  Those first days the house was filled with a mood of silly, guilty relief. The long war of nerves was over. We could approach dinner now without wondering whether or not Arthur would come home. We could go to sleep without waiting for his footsteps on the stairs. We could answer the phone without fearing it was one authority or another to report his misdeeds. Mother didn’t have to anticipate the car’s being tampered with or taken just when she needed it most. Libby and I began to have glimpses of a father whom we’d nearly forgotten, who had time for jokes, surprises, treats.

  He even took me on a business trip with him up through northern central California and over the mountains to the coast. We fished some of the way and arrived at Carlotta muddy and hungry at dinnertime. Aunt Etta was dead by then, the big house shut up; but Charlie greeted us warmly. He had nothing to offer us but whiskey and pi
nk marshmallow and coconut cookies. We soon drove on into Eureka, and the next day stopped at South Fork on our way south again. I’d never seen it in May before, the meadow full of wild iris, the river high and smelling of dead eels.

  I was shy with my father as I suppose he was with me. I was determined to be no nuisance to him, to entertain myself happily while he was doing business, to eat without complaint at greasy spoons. I had outgrown carsickness and could last longer than he could between comfort stops.

  He made only one complaint. “Your mother talks to me when I drive.”

  I had no ambition to compete with my mother’s ability to entertain my father. He and I were companionable because we were more alike in temperament, less interested in comfort and amusement than in meeting deadlines, able to accommodate long sidetracks for things we really wanted to do. Dad had his own love for South Fork. That our hours there meant we’d have to drive late into the night to get home troubled neither of us. And it was wonderful to drive toward home without the familiar half dread of what Arthur had been up to.

  That taste of family ease made me much more resentful of Arthur when the school reported him missing about six weeks later. Dad drove down to talk with the authorities and came home bringing not only the trampoline but all Arthur’s other belongings. He’d left, as he so often did, with nothing but the clothes on his back.

  “His adviser said it was understandable that a boy with his experience would find it hard to adjust to school. Arthur told them he’d been in the merchant marine. His ship was sunk and he’d spent over a week in a life raft before he was rescued. And they believed him!”

  The story didn’t surprise us. I’d been with Arthur often when he took delight in lying about his own experience and getting away with it. He particularly liked claiming to have been somewhere another person had just visited. Always a voracious reader, Arthur held not only cathedrals and museums in mind but street and restaurant names. It never bothered him to have me there. In fact, he enjoyed having one person in the audience who knew how well he played his one-sided game.

  Arthur turned up not long after Dad and the trampoline.

  “Mostly what I did was work on a road gang,” he said. “Can’t see much point in that.”

  Summer was so nearly arrived that new plans for Arthur’s rehabilitation could be postponed. I would teach swimming again in July. We’d go to South Fork for the month of August, taking Mother Packer with us.

  She had fallen and broken her arm. That accident made her the more reluctant to walk alone. She had an elevator installed on the staircase and again had live-in help. She would have been more reclusive if it hadn’t been for visits not only from the voice teacher but from some of her pupils. Mother Packer kept chocolates and salted nuts to offer drop-in guests, but it was her own wit and attentiveness that called to those younger women. She didn’t have to be critical of them as she did of her own daughter.

  I sometimes met Ann there after her voice lesson and biked or walked home with her.

  Nancy Lockwood, the woman who rented Ann and Henry their garage room, was Mother’s age with three daughters younger than me but older than Lib, and a husband who worked for the telephone company. Nancy taught piano, and they had a studio with two pianos that they also used for family parties, to which my family were often invited. Nancy and Ann were confidantes, and I liked Nancy, too, sometimes stopping to chat if I found Ann not at home.

  “Nancy says you have a crush on me,” Ann said one day.

  “That’s stupid,” I answered hotly.

  “What’s stupid about it?”

  “Crushes are stupid. I love you, but I don’t have a crush on you.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “I’m not a stupid kid. I’m your friend.”

  “You come to see me nearly every day.”

  “Would you rather I didn’t?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  Until summer school started, I was careful to see Ann no more than a couple of times a week. Nancy’s friendly greeting which I’d taken at face value now irritated me. She’d become a spy rather than a friend.

  “Don’t be irritated with Nancy,” Ann said. “She’s very fond of you. She just doesn’t want to see you hurt.”

  “How could I be hurt?”

  “Nancy once fell in love with a woman herself.”

  “How silly!” I said.

  “It isn’t silly,” Ann said sharply. “Women do sometimes fall very deeply in love with each other. It’s very important for you to have your first experience with a man. After that, well …”

  “I don’t care what other people do. I’ll have my first experience with a man when I’ve married him … If I get married.”

  “Oh, you’ll get married,” Ann said. “You’ll want children.”

  I wasn’t at all sure I did want children. I’d had enough first-hand experience with Libby to know how much time mothering took, and I was not patient with her as I could be with other children. Marrying I simply couldn’t imagine.

  I was beginning to meet young men with whom I could make friends, chief among them Bill Hennessy who had come back from being in the occupying army in Germany. He was a slight, dark, curly-headed Irishman, three inches shorter than I was, with a rollicking humour when he was sober, black anger and depression when he’d had anything to drink. He joked about his drinking, too.

  “My widowed mother doesn’t dare buy anything but black. She’s never sure I’ll live out the week.”

  Bill was taking education courses at San José State University, one of the very few men in those days interested in teaching in the primary grades.

  He was having a hard time in an English class. When he asked me to help him with his term paper, I agreed if he’d choose a topic I was interested in. I chose American women poets, a subject which so startled and pleased his teacher that she gave him an A. By the time he heard the results, we had left for South Fork where there was no phone. He drove 250 miles to give me the news and stayed the weekend, delighting even Mother Packer who was usually suspiciously critical of young men.

  Arthur shared in that friendship, more often dealing with the negative side of Bill than I had to. Drunk, Bill would seek Arthur out as the biggest man around and challenge him to a fight. Arthur kept him off, his large hand against Bill’s forehead, his long arm keeping Bill at a flailing distance, saying gently, “Billy, Billy, come on now,” and tried to keep him from driving, for he always seemed to pass out parked on a train crossing or in the middle of a highway.

  Once Bill said to me, “The Germans weren’t any more monstrous than we were. Men are evil.”

  He was among a number of our friends who survived the war, bringing unacceptable nightmares into the new peace, and did not live long. Bill ran himself into a tree four or five years later, after he’d become a very good teacher. He had said to me, not long before, “We’re such good friends, we ought to have the sense some day to marry, but we never will.”

  That was as much romantic involvement as I could report to Ann, and neither of us was impressed with it.

  I HAD GROWN INCREASINGLY RESTLESS and critical about school. Mother suggested I might like to go away to school for my last year. I was serious enough about it to apply to a girl’s school north of San Francisco, to visit the campus and to feel a mixture of excitement and dread at the possibility of spending a year there. I was accepted, but a combination of their higher scholastic requirements and my low IQ scores would have made it necessary for me to stay for two years. I was far too impatient to contemplate that, and I’d invested a certain pride in doing four years’ work in three. So I went back to Castilleja in the fall.

  Aside from my impossible chemistry course, I settled well enough to my work. I was taking two English courses in order to complete graduation requirements, and I was also printing a column for the school paper.

  Because I tended to comic insolence, most of the students as serious about their work as I was were cautiou
s in their friendliness, except for Joy Ahrens, gifted and acerbic, who edited the paper. We wrote endless notes to each other, exchanging them between classes. She was a five-day boarder who went home each weekend. Very occasionally we exchanged weekend visits, but it was essentially a friendship of words on paper, as so many of mine have been over the years.

  The other friends I had were the scallywags of the school, whose mothers hoped in vain that I would be a good influence. My friends overlooked or excused my academic seriousness for the fracases I could also inspire. But I was less involved in rebellious pranks and more seriously protesting that fall.

  Along with required uniforms, we were not allowed to wear any sort of makeup, on or off campus while we were in uniform. Still, Miss Espinosa saw fit to hire a woman from a charm school in San Francisco, paid for out of the student treasury, to give us lessons in makeup, wardrobe and deportment. First, she demonstrated makeup, using the girl who had been chosen to play the Virgin Mary in the Christmas pageant. There in chapel the Virgin was transformed into a whore. Then in the gym we were instructed to imitate our instructor as she walked to music—in stocking feet I was as tall despite her four-inch platforms. I threw myself into that exercise with such abandon that Miss Espinosa, ever watchful, hissed me off the floor.

  “But she said to imitate her,” I protested.

  “There is a difference between imitating and making fun.”

  “Ah,” I exclaimed in admiration of that fine distinction.