Taking My Life

by Jane Rule

  I hated the cruelty that flavoured the intimacy of dorm life. I would have nothing to do with hazing the freshmen, a stand that reminded the sophomores I hadn’t been hazed myself. My radiator was smeared with cheese, my ashtrays dumped in my bureau drawers and onto my papers on my desk, my bed pied. Marty told me who had done it, a group of nearly identical girls who wore cashmere twin-sets and rolled their socks down over their ankles. I confronted them and threatened them with unspecified retaliation if it ever happened again.

  “Well, you warned the freshmen about the room raid.”

  “And I will again,” I said.

  “They want to cut you down to size, don’t they?” Dr. Pope observed.

  “Nobody will, ever,” I answered.

  She cocked an eyebrow at me, for, of course, she cut me down to size all the time, writing comments like, “There is less in this than first meets the eye,” on a particularly florid essay.

  I looked out for rather than made friends with a freshman assigned to me for that purpose. Barbara Carson was a year older than I was. She arrived at college that fall so drunk that she had to sleep it off before I could take her the rounds to get her a mailbox, pick up her trunk and introduce her to the dean. Later I discovered she, like me, was another of the dean’s gambles.

  Barbara was far more contemptuous of dormitory life than I was. I even enjoyed a lot of the concocted nonsense. On the evening of our house mother’s birthday, it was decided that we all should dress up as our favourite billboards. Just as I was about to go down to dinner, a large shell hung round my neck and “Clean Rest Rooms” tacked to the back of my bright-yellow sweatshirt, the dean phoned and said, “Is Barbara in her room? If she is, will you stay with her until I get there?”

  Barbara was in her room, obviously not about to go to dinner. She had just dyed everything in the room black, curtains, bedspread, rug, all her clothes and even her hair. Her fingernails were painted silver. We stared at each other, and then Barbara gave a nervous laugh, at me, at herself, and offered me a cigarette. She was always very formal, her speech elaborately careful, whether she was drunk or sober. It was said she got As because her vocabulary was so esoteric that nobody could understand what she was talking about.

  What the dean thought of the Charles Addams’s cartoon she walked into I couldn’t tell. She nodded a curt dismissal to me and said, “Thank you.”

  I never did find out what that episode was all about, and I wasn’t curious. By that time the dean and I were a working team to keep Barbara from being expelled. Sometimes it required my going out with the dorm assistant at midnight or after to locate Barbara, nearly dead drunk in one of her favourite bars. Once it involved my persuading Barbara to pour a fifth of whiskey down her sink. Students who had drink in their rooms were routinely expelled.

  Barbara would stay up for days at a time, chain-smoking, drinking coffee and writing her brilliantly incomprehensible papers. Then she’d sleep for days in her tomblike room.

  I neither understood nor liked her. She tolerated my interferences with a show of patience laced with disdain. I think what I enjoyed about the task was my conspiracy with the dean, sharing her perverse determination to keep Barbara, if not out of trouble, out of enough visible trouble to get her through the year.

  Barbara’s rebellion gave my own a normalcy which probably reassured me. I didn’t recognize her literary sources in such figures as Renée Vivien until some years later. At the time, she seemed to me an original.

  Not until spring, after one of the assemblies at which we all wore our academic gowns, did Ellen Kay come up and introduce herself to me. She was a freshman at Mills Hall.

  “I want to be your friend,” she said with a candour that caught me off guard.

  Ellen wanted to be a poet. She was not afraid of her ambition as I was of mine, partly because she had been writing poems for some years while I was just now struggling unsuccessfully with my first real short stories. Also Ellen saw nothing to be ashamed of in ambition. I was probably more superstitious than ashamed. I didn’t want to make claims I couldn’t fulfill. So I seemed the more modest of the two. In fact, one of our greatest bonds was the delusion of future grandeur so healthy and so derided in adolescents.

  Perhaps because we met wearing our academic gowns, I tend to remember us dramatically clothed in black, caught up in the romance of being young scholars. Much of the time we spent together was devoted to work, either our academic pursuits or our own writing. We took many of the same courses, chose research projects that overlapped. We didn’t share acquaintances, living in different dormitories. Nor did we share passionate loyalties, for Ellen was devoted to Donald Weeks, head of the department and a poet. She was never really comfortable in Dr. Pope’s presence. I liked Dr. Weeks well enough, and I came to respect him as a teacher, but there was something snide and at the same time vulnerable in his manner that made me keep my distance.

  Ellen, who dabbled in all the arts, sculpted quite a good head of Donald Weeks and kept it on the windowsill of her fourth-floor room, visible to him from his office window. If custom had allowed such blatancy on my part, I doubt that I would have displayed it. Even then I mistrusted the conventions for loving.

  I left college reluctantly that summer to spend only part of it at South Fork. Mother Packer, who did not walk alone at all now, uncertain of her balance and fearful of falling, did when we were at South Fork practise walking with my steadying arm and her cane. One day we’d walk from the house up to the fig trees, the next down along the honeysuckled fence to our gate. One day we disagreed about which way to turn, and she struck out on her own. We were both proud of those few minutes of her independence.

  Libby, who didn’t really like the place, made friends with some elderly neighbours who tamed squirrels, chipmunks and birds. But she was often bored, missing her friends in Reno. Since she wasn’t interested in fishing or hiking, disliked the moss in the river, the deer droppings in the orchard, she was a reluctant and complaining companion I was glad to leave behind. She and Mother Packer bickered.

  My father, who had taken over a family-owned building supply company in Reno, had so improved it that the family were having second thoughts about the percentage of profit they had offered him originally. He began to mistrust the company lawyer; so he didn’t come to South Fork for the holiday.

  Arthur had joined the army.

  Mother, caught between Libby and Mother Packer, missing Dad, must have been very glad to get back to Reno. There she had to put up with my restlessness and boredom. I made a pledge to myself that I would never spend another summer at home, one I kept the more easily since it was to be the last summer anyone went to South Fork.

  How very different it felt to return to college that fall. I was again sharing a sleeping porch with Marty on junior corridor, and our own classmates had joined us, though I was half a year behind them. More confident of myself academically with a successful year behind me, I was less reluctant to make friends. Sally Millett and Edy Mori, two psychology majors, were amiable, bright companions. Ellen and I saw more of each other in classes we took together, and we made friends with other English majors. At the college shop for a morning or afternoon break, I had a comfortable choice of tables to join, though if Dr. Pope was there, I always joined hers. She made friends with my new friends, and sometimes Sally and Edy and I would invite ourselves to dinner, bringing steaks, making green goddess salad and garlic bread.

  I more often went by myself for long evenings of literary debate. We shared now not only the curriculum but other books. We read C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams and Dorothy Sayers. I didn’t share Dr. Pope’s taste for Sayers’s mysteries, but I loved her plays and her work on the Divine Comedy. We discovered Christopher Fry and read his plays aloud with other friends.

  I would have said I had never been happier. Sometimes, working in the library, I would be so overcome by a sense of wonder at an image in a poem, at the rhythm of a line of prose, that I’d have to stop reading for a mome
nt. I worked in my study at night long after other people went to bed, on essays, on short stories. I could always, even at four o’clock in the morning, telephone Mother Packer for company. She was usually awake listening to the radio and playing solitaire, but she didn’t mind being roused from a light sleep. We’d exchange fond, rude messages, and then I’d sleep for three or four hours.

  Edy, walking over to Mills Hall where we all had breakfast together, would tell me to put my hands in my pockets. She couldn’t stand the greyish purple of my skin at that hour. One morning I fainted in the breakfast line.

  I had the year before fainted even more spectacularly in class as I finished reciting, “I’ll lay me down and bleed awhile, / And then I’ll rise and fight again.” Evaline Wright, the instructor, always after that opened a window when it was my turn to perform, and she harboured a notion that I was too high-strung to deal with college.

  I was living in a restrained intensity I couldn’t endure. I was too much in love, working too hard and far too frightened. Not being able to confront that fear and deal with it, I was living in a state of increasing anxiety. Some days I simply couldn’t face breakfast. And several times I had to skip dinner, unable to climb the long flights of stairs into the dining room. I began to lose weight. Often I couldn’t sleep when I tried to, lay listening to the campanile strike every fifteen minutes until it was time to get up and face another yet-more daunting day.

  When I tried to distract myself, I listened to Sally’s roommate planning to marry in June, not because she really wanted to quit college but because she was sure this was the only proposal she’d ever get and she couldn’t bear not ever being married. Edy, who was being courted by a serious young doctor, saw no reason for such lack of confidence, and Sally went out with five different men, juggling weekend privileges to accommodate them all.

  One midweek evening, they persuaded me to give up my books and go out for a friendly beer. In the ladies’ room of a local bar, a very drunk and handsome woman tried to pick me up. Back at the table, Sally and Edy were amiably fending off young men.

  I tried staying in bed for a couple of days. I went to see the doctor at the infirmary. She gave me pills for low blood pressure, which sent my head pounding every time I lay down. I went back again.

  “Jinx, you’ve got to give up,” she said to me.

  “Give up what?”

  She shrugged. Then she said, “I’m going to send you home. You need complete rest.”

  At home, I was far sicker than I had been at college. The altitude had always troubled me. Now I fainted if I went upstairs too quickly, I couldn’t go anywhere by myself, not even into a store. I didn’t know from moment to moment what negative trick my body would play on me, against which will seemed helpless.

  Mother was attentive, patient, reassuring. She was willing to have me home for the year to let my overtaxed nerves mend. The thought of not going back to college horrified me. After several weeks, I begged to go back. Once I agreed to drop at least one course, Mother agreed to let me try it.

  Dr. Pope, worried and inclined to blame herself for the academic pressure I’d been under, offered to feed me herself if the dormitory dining room was too much for me. She would waive the requirement for a second paper in her course and ask others of my professors to do the same. When I protested, she said, “Jinx, one of your papers is worth two from most other students.” Never one to hand out compliments casually, she was telling me the only way she knew how that my love was returned. I knew it was. I also knew its limits and accepted them. Only a few months ago, Libby Pope wrote to me from a rest house on Mother’s Day, saying that when everyone else bragged about their children, she reminded herself that she’d had about five hundred daughters, “Among whom, you are the most beloved.”

  It did help to drop a course.

  Then Ann, pregnant with a second child, came down with polio and was temporarily, partially paralyzed. It was weeks before she could use her hands to write. Then she gave only the sketchiest of details. Her mother was taking care of Carol. Susan was born prematurely and had to be left in the hospital for some weeks.

  So much in need of getting to her, I had no way of explaining that urgency to anyone. On the bulletin board in the English department, I saw an ad for summer schools in England. Immediately I phoned Mother to say it was exactly what I needed to do the following summer. I could make up the lost credits of the year and see something of England. At first she was reluctant, thinking I shouldn’t work through the summer, but I persuaded her that a change of scene, an adventure, would be the right tonic for me. I wasn’t at all convinced of it myself, still phobic on some days, but I had to get to Ann and was willing to risk anything. Mother persuaded Mother Packer to foot the bill. So I applied to the University of Birmingham to attend the summer school on Shakespeare at Stratford, and I was accepted.

  Dr. Pope was far more excited at the prospect than I was. She had never been to England and took enormous vicarious pleasure in my going. She was also pleased that I had been accepted for what was billed essentially as a graduate school.

  Most people left campus for the midwinter break in February, but some of us stayed on to work on papers, concerts, play productions, dance recitals. I liked the college best when it was nearly deserted. And early spring there was beautiful, the creek high, the scent of eucalyptus pungent, the daffodils in bloom. I always thought what a marvellous place it would be to take a real holiday, hiking up by the lake, swimming, lying in the sun by the high protecting wall at the pool. Yet once everyone came back, I was sorry I hadn’t taken a break, gone to Carmel or down to visit Mother Packer. March was always a hard month, the pressure of work there, the term long from ending.

  One night Sally Millett came into my room and said, “I’m simply fed up with this place. If I don’t get out of here, I’ll go mad.”

  “Then let’s go,” I said.

  “Where?”

  “Let’s go to South Fork,” I suggested.

  There was no provision in the rules for students to declare short holidays of their own and simply take off. If we had asked permission, we would have been refused. So I signed us out, giving the address of the lodge across the river from our summer cabin, without going to the house mother to sign her permission. Then we took off.

  It was an eight-hour bus trip from San Francisco in those days. We rode all night. Sally was small enough to curl up in the seat and sleep. Every time I stuck my long legs out in the aisle, the man in the seat in front of me reached down and took hold of my ankle. But we were going to South Fork, and I doubt that I could have slept under any circumstances.

  The house, closed up for the winter with wooden battens on the screened porches, would be anyway too cold and damp to stay in at that time of year; so we checked into the lodge, and then set off on foot to cross the river, walk the bar to the stand of redwood trees through which we passed to the gate. I suppose the place must have looked dilapidated and unwelcoming to a stranger to it. For me it was alive with childhood, its lonely safety and wonder. I knew why Mother Packer could walk here over this rough ground. We spent the day walking, into the orchards, the meadows, the woods, back down onto the river bar, across the swinging bridge high above the spring-running river. I slept that night as I hadn’t slept in months, woke hungry and ready for another day out of doors.

  Sally Millett and Jane Rule

  Jane Rule Fonds, University Archives, University of British Columbia

  The steelhead trout were running. At the lodge, we met a man who ran a radio program called The Fish Finder. Each week he fished in a different place and reported the conditions of the place for other fishermen. He complained good-naturedly that he had a trunk full of steelhead, and his wife and all his friends were sick of fish. He opened the trunk to prove his claim.

  “Would you like one?” he asked.

  Sally and I looked at each other.

  “It just might help,” Sally said.

  “Help yourself,” he said.r />
  I reached into the trunk and shoved a fist up inside the head of a ten-pound steelhead.

  “How are we going to get it back, though?” Sally asked.

  “We’ll get them to freeze it for us.”

  That evening I was called to the phone.

  “Dean Hawkes here,” the familiar voice announced. “Are you enjoying your vacation?”

  “Very much,” I said.

  “When do you intend to come back?”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “We’ll expect you then, tomorrow,” she said and hung up.

  In the morning, we stowed our frozen fish on the luggage rack overhead, and then Sally went back to sleep. I was content to watch for all the familiar landmarks of the road, one every two or three miles for the first fifty, whether the peach orchard where we stopped to buy particularly good peaches or the suicide bend where large trucks had gone over into the river. I knew the very place where Dad had had a head-on collision coming up to see us one summer when I was young enough still to be sleeping in my parent’s room. He had hitchhiked the rest of the way and walked in cut and bruised but otherwise all right. I knew the legends of the road as well: Black Bart’s Rock, behind which he had hidden to rob stagecoaches; the cliff off which the proverbial Indian maiden had leapt to her death in unrequited love. There was a favourite picnic site; there the turnoff to buy salami.

  I looked up from my musing into the landscape to see our frozen fish drooping its tail over the luggage rack. The heating system was located in the rack. I took it down and, because Sally slept on, wrapped it in her coat as a way of insulating it. It had become more of a peace offering than a joke, though we still hadn’t decided with whom we’d make the peace.

  Into wine country, the weather getting warmer, I began to feel not apprehensive but eager to be back. Though I assumed we would be in some sort of trouble at the dormitory, I didn’t imagine our punishment would exceed the pleasure of the trip. After so many months of illness and struggle, to feel younger again, reckless, and more or less sure of loving reproof, restored for me a kind of courage, a simple pleasure at being alive and in comic trouble.