by Jane Rule
I went home to write an angry criticism about wasting our own funds on such blatant nonsense when we should be being taught to walk to the nearest college.
Our faculty adviser, the timid Miss Dively, saw the article, but, when she was confronted by Miss Espinosa’s wrath, she claimed she hadn’t, that we’d sneaked it into the paper.
I suspect Miss Espinosa, who had been irritated by my attempt to find a better school and goaded by my increasingly serious criticisms, had been waiting for a moment when she could severely chastise me for something inside my own moral framework. I was a sneak. Perhaps Miss Dively, too, lied not only out of fright but with scores of her own to settle at my merciless mockery of her own ineptitude.
I was, not for the first time, “sent home to think.” After a week, I was granted an appointment with Miss Espinosa. Her terms for my reinstatement were that I give up all extracurricular activities, the paper, clubs, sports, that I leave the school promptly when my classes were over, that I voice no criticisms of the school myself and report to her anyone who had done so. I walked out of her office to Palo Alto High School, where I was immediately enrolled.
“It’s your decision,” my father said.
“Oh, how I’d like to get that woman!” my mother said.
Miss Grant, who never involved herself in school politics, came to call on my mother and said she had pleaded with Miss Espinosa. Students protested by stealing the school sign and setting it up in our front yard, but the revolution I longed for did not, of course, take place. Instead, my friends among the boarders accepted the order that my house was out of bounds. When Joy Ahrens’s mother phoned Miss Espinosa to ask what I had done, her reply was, “For Jinx’s sake and the sake of the school, I’m afraid I can’t say, but she’s a very bad influence.” Joy was forbidden to see me.
Again, I found myself in the large hostile walls of public school. And once again my brother had been there before me, underlining the scandal I had created for myself. When my English teacher sarcastically chided me for not handing in a paper before I arrived in class, I stood automatically (something public school students never did) and defended myself. She apologized at the end of class.
“My name is Jinx, not Arthur Rule,” I answered.
I was so far ahead of most of the public school students that teachers either dismissed me to go to study hall or set me independent projects. Except, of course, in chemistry. There, extraordinarily, in the last row of the class sat Wally and Chiaki, top students and apparently devoted friends.
There were other familiar faces from kindergarten, from junior high, but I was now not one but two grades ahead of most of them.
I joined the swimming team and made friends with a girl named Gerda Eisenberg. She invited me to dinner and to spend the night at her house in Woodside. I was reluctant to go, having been so recently excluded from that rich neighbourhood where I’d never been very comfortable. But she lived in an old farmhouse with large vegetable gardens, farm animals. She and her brothers and sisters had chores about the place. We ate homemade bread and jam for breakfast. It was like South Fork or Carlotta, if they had been real places, lived in by large families, rather than ghostly places of the past. At the first meet, when Gerda and I were swimming in the same race, I looked over and wondered what the point was. I didn’t want to be better than she was. I wanted to be her friend. Yet I was shy of her and her large, wholesome family, where there was no place for the dark, complicating angers I felt.
After I’d been at Palo Alto High School for about a month, one of a group of girls came up to me and said, “We wouldn’t mind if you ate lunch with us.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I go home for lunch.”
After school I’d call on Ann or Sugarfoot.
“Why don’t you have a cigarette?” Sugarfoot suggested. “She’s not telling anyone why you were kicked out, you know.”
“I wasn’t kicked out. I left,” I said. “What is she trying to make people think?”
I asked Ann the same question.
“Maybe she wants people to think you’re a lesbian.”
“But why?” I asked, astounded.
I was fifteen years old. My sexual experience went no further than a single struggle in the back seat of a car with a tall, blond veteran who was really more interested in finding a wife than in deflowering a virgin. He got no farther than my buds of breasts, laughed and gave up. I’d involved myself with that only because Ann thought I should.
Sugarfoot invited me to her engagement party. I have no recollection of the man. They didn’t finally marry. I stayed afterward to help clean up. Sugarfoot was drunkenly triumphant. In her bedroom, she put her arms around me, her head on my shoulder while I stood in stiff surprise.
“Well, goodbye to all that,” she said.
The high-school swimming coach sometimes gave me a lift home or to Ann’s after practice. Occasionally, I went home with her and played with her two-year-old boy. She’d been dismissed from a school, and the students had staged a protest strike but she hadn’t got her job back either. Once, also when she’d had too much to drink, she kissed me on the mouth and said she didn’t want to interfere with my more important friendship with Ann.
“You don’t,” I answered, not meaning it as the rejection it must have sounded.
There was no one moment when I confronted my own sexuality. Consciously, I didn’t desire any of these young women. If they desired me, they were too frightened to be anything but circumspect. Each obviously assumed I was lesbian, and all but Ann, of course, assumed I was having an affair with Ann. Had Miss Espinosa, too? Ann lived right across the street from the school, and I had never made a secret of going to see her. At the time I was blind with outraged innocence, but I suppose I must have seemed for each of them a sexual time bomb that could go off at any moment.
Sugarfoot offered me cigarettes. Ann loaned me Lady Chatterley’s Lover and The Well of Loneliness. The coach took me to a fortune teller, who told me I might not marry but would be involved with many children, and she remarked with surprise at how feminine my hands were. My hands were very much my father’s, long and slender and accurate at small detail. No one ever mentioned that loving me would be a criminal offence.
In the spring, I discovered that I couldn’t graduate because I hadn’t had four years of gym. I had to return in the fall and take two periods of gym and whatever else might pass the time, finish in February and then have some time off to look around. I was really too young to start college anyway.
Dad, who had been looking for another job for some time, had accepted work in Reno, Nevada, as a manager of a building company. He suggested I fly up there and see if I could graduate from a Reno high school on schedule. Ushered into the principal’s office with deferential ceremony, I discovered I’d been mistaken for the new gym teacher. As a student, I was of no interest at all.
The anger I felt at all authority was constant for me now. I wanted nothing more to do with any of them. Mother raged with me, but she was as helpless as I was.
She had the house on the market, waiting for its sale to join Dad in Reno, a town she looked forward to no more than she had Chicago. More seasoned a wife by then, having learned to count the blessings she had, she simply set her mind to going.
I didn’t. My own plan was to spend the summer taking whatever I had to complete high school and be on my way to Stanford in the fall. I’d always planned to go to Stanford, and even now that my interest had shifted from medicine to English, no other university occurred to me. I hadn’t reckoned on the fact that Miss Espinosa had a brother on the faculty there, or that the competition for the relatively few places reserved for girls was fierce, since not only men but women were returning from the war to complete their educations. None of us coming straight from school was a match for them.
Why my tutoring in third-year German became an acceptable substitute for another year of gym I don’t remember. I agreed to it because I could get through it in a summer.
From the moment she moved in, I sensed something was very wrong. She had no patience with her own child, slapped him the first night at the dinner table and that alarmed my eight-year-old sister. Feeling responsible for the sense of a person I suddenly did not know, I tried to do what I could to make her stay easy, but she was edgy and sarcastic with me. If any of my friends came over, she pleaded a migraine headache and retreated to her room, complaining of the noise we made. One night she didn’t hear Libby call, though their rooms were next to each other. I took Libby into my room and let her sleep in the other bed. When she woke and threw up, I changed her bedclothes and her pyjamas, then sat wiping her face with a cool, damp cloth.
“You’re being so nice to me,” she said in surprise. “I thought you’d be mad.”
Because Mother had always been there to care for Libby, I had never needed to protect or reassure her about anything, or I had never thought to, and I had turned times of looking after her into a chore rather than a pleasure. She had no reason to expect help from me or protection from the hostile stranger in the house. I was both chagrined by and surprised at the fierceness of my need to shield her from what seemed to me somehow my own lack of judgment. Before a week was up, both mother and child were gone, and Libby and I moved to Mother Packer’s until our parents came home.
The coach explained herself by saying she was in therapy, and her nerves were simply shot. She was very sorry.
When I puzzled the tale out with Ann, she had no comment to make. I sensed, as I often did with Ann, that some answers I’d have only when I figured them out for myself. I did not like being incompetently, ignorantly young.
The high-school German teacher set and marked my exam, which I failed, for, though my tutor and I had followed the outlined curriculum, questions having nothing to do with what I’d studied were on the exam. My tutor, from the authority of his university position, made a formal protest, and my mark was changed to a pass.
We went to South Fork at the end of the summer, taking Mother Packer with us. Ann came for a week, Henry joining us at the weekend to drive her home. She did watercolours for everyone in the family: the view from the porch of the dead trees at the end of the valley for Mother Packer, the corn crib for Mother, the view of the river from my rock and willow nest for me. She did an oil of the redwoods which she gave to Libby.
I loved being near her while she painted, reading poetry out loud or chatting or drowsing in the sun. I loved the pleasure everyone took in her presence. During that week, she told me she and Henry, who had finished his work at Stanford, would almost certainly be moving east early in September. She was expecting her first child in February.
“But then I won’t see the baby,” I protested.
She gave me an old, fond look. “You really do care about the baby, don’t you?”
“Of course.”
“You won’t be jealous of it?”
“Why should I be?” I asked.
Missing the birth of the child had been the first thing that crossed my mind, but the fact of Ann’s leaving gradually darkened the days for me. She was both more affectionate and more wary of me, and I began to memorize her face, the tones of her voice, her laugh, her hands. They were large, strong hands for a woman her size.
Ann and Henry did not move east, and I did not get into Stanford, but I didn’t move to Reno with the family either. I stayed with Mother Packer and got myself a job as a typist in the purchasing department at Stanford. I had convinced myself that I’d been refused only because I hadn’t finished high school until the end of summer. I reapplied for the winter quarter. Two of my Castilleja classmates had been accepted at Stanford, and I had lunch with them a couple of times, but I felt the gap between our circumstances bitterly and knew they were being nervously kind rather than friendly. I couldn’t bear to think that anyone believed I deserved to be where I was.
The young tough boss of the purchasing department arrived every morning to stand by the water cooler, drinking glass after glass in order to put out her hangover. When I called her attention to lack of delivery date information on an order for a carload of live monkeys, she answered her standard answer, “You’re paid to type.” The monkeys arrived on a Sunday when no one was around, and they were all dead by the time they were discovered. Routinely, we were told to throw away any orders we hadn’t got round to typing up at the end of each day. Departments, knowing not all orders were put through, often put in duplicates. If I spotted a duplicate, I was told to type it up anyway. When there was a staff cut, I was the one to go. My next job was in the general-secretary’s department. I typed addresses on envelopes all the first day. The next day, they were all torn in half in a pile on my desk. I was supposed to have looked up new zip codes for each of them. About to protest the waste of a whole day’s work, I remembered, “You’re paid to type.” Why should it make any difference to me what waste there was when I was paid by the hour?
I was terribly unhappy, bored and angry and increasingly frightened by my circumstance. I half knew I was in love with Ann, had no idea what that meant or what I might be expected to do about it. I had begun to lie to her about my sexual involvement with boys I occasionally saw.
I made an appointment to see the therapist my mother had gone to.
“Do you have your parents’ permission to see me?” he asked.
“I have my own money,” I said. “I don’t want them to know, I don’t want them to worry about me.”
Reluctantly, he agreed and halved his fee when I looked shocked at the first amount he’d mentioned. What I needed to tell him was that I’d somehow lost a grip on my life, felt both pressured and stalled. The people around me who wanted to help, like my parents, didn’t seem to know what I should do. And I was beginning to behave oddly, to lie to my best friend, for instance.
“What do you talk about with your therapist?” Ann asked.
“All sorts of things. That I’ve begun to lie to you, for instance, because I don’t want to do what you expect me to do.”
“Did you tell him you’re in love with me?” she asked.
It wasn’t the first time she’d kissed me on the mouth, but it was the first time I felt the ache in my gut turn to fire.
“You have to understand,” she said, holding my face in her hands. “We can’t make love. You have to make love first with a man, adjust to that, or you’ll be a lesbian. You have to marry and have children. I want that for you just the way you want it for me.”
“I want for you what you want,” I answered.
“If it gets too bad, masturbate.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Don’t you ever touch yourself?” she asked disbelieving. “You don’t have to be ashamed of it. You don’t have to lie to me about it. It’s a perfectly healthy, independent thing to do.”
“I’m not lying,” I said.
Nightly after that I taught myself how to bring myself to orgasm, not even knowing the name for it.
Sometimes when I was with Ann, she didn’t want me nearer than across the room. When I resigned myself to no gesture of affection, much less desire, she wanted me to lay down, holding her in my arms. There between us the baby kicked. I held them both.
I had given up the therapist. I did not want to tell anyone about my feelings for her, not out of shame which she so feared, but in protective wonder.
Ann’s guilt and fear troubled me more for her than for myself. That she could acknowledge my love at all and teach me what it meant gave me so much new insight and so much more delight than pain that I accepted its restraints and understood her commitment to Henry, whom I also loved, for he was always a good fri
end to me. Ann didn’t understand my lack of jealousy either of Henry or the baby. I didn’t understand what there was to be jealous about.
“A child will mean more to me.”
“So it should,” I said, shocked that anyone would want to be more to a woman than her child, testimony to the mothering I had had.
The general-secretary’s office had finished with a fund drive, during which I’d forged the president’s, vice-president’s and dean’s signatures on acknowledgments, depending on the amount of the donation. Now we were set to send out the acceptances and rejections for the winter quarter. I typed my own rejection and signed the registrar’s name. It didn’t cross my mind to send an acceptance instead. What I did do was quit the stupid job. The woman at the desk next to mine had a BA from Stanford in creative writing; so what did an education matter anyway?
But it did matter. I hadn’t direction enough in myself to get on with my own education. I wrote in a random way what usually turned into love letters to Ann. I didn’t find books to read which really interested me. The routine at my grandmother’s house suited a reclusive old woman better than a restless sixteen-year-old, though we got along very happily.
I went alone to a mother-and-daughter tea at the house of a friend, whose mother rather championed my cause. She introduced me to a woman who was a trustee at Mills College.
“I want you to tell her your story, Jinx.”
I hadn’t had enough opportunity to talk about what had happened, and I was still rawly indignant. Fortunately for me, my listener was indulgent. When she’d heard me out, she asked, “Would you be interested in going to Mills?”
“Don’t know anything much about it. I’m interested in going anywhere I can get an education.”
I made my application. I had to send for transcripts from Castilleja as well as Palo Alto High School. I had what I knew were good references from teachers, from my German tutor who was angry that I’d been refused at Stanford.
Without the sponsorship of the trustees, I doubt if I would have been called for an interview, for at that meeting I discovered that Miss Espinosa had also written to say that my academic standing should be disregarded since my moral character was such that I wouldn’t be acceptable at the college.
