Taking My Life

by Jane Rule

  When we arrived at the college gates around four in the afternoon, we decided against presenting ourselves without checking on the climate.

  “Let’s give the fish to Doc,” Sally suggested, a name we’d by then given to Dr. Pope. “She’ll know what’s up.”

  She greeted us with warm relief, but she refused the fish, admittedly large for her needs. She had no idea what was planned for our return, but she suggested that we might better call on the dean and present the fish to her as a peace offering.

  A lot of students were afraid of Dean Hawkes, whose eyes matched her name, whose temper was fierce. But Sally and I both trusted her sense of humour, and I knew her forbearance with Barbara was nearly limitless. She did, indeed, welcome us warmly, accepted the fish graciously and asked me recipes for cooking it. I had not ever eaten one and had no idea what she could do with it.

  “Treat it like a salmon,” I suggested, with no idea of the culinary manners for salmon either.

  We didn’t actually say we’d caught it, but we didn’t correct her assumption.

  “I can’t invite you for dinner,” Dean Hawkes said, maintaining her tone of sociability. “I’m going out. I suggest you’d be wise to check in at your hall in time for dinner.”

  Leaving us with no further clue as to our reception, she showed us to the door.

  When we arrived, we went to the register to sign in, and there we found Dean Hawkes’s own signature of permission which extended to nine o’clock that night. Nobody could touch us, not the house mother, not the student council. With the stroke of a pen, Dean Hawkes had made our holiday legal.

  “But everybody else is mad at you,” Edy told us, and she was irritated herself, for it’s not easy to see even good friends so easily avoid justice.

  Marty was not speaking to me. Along the whole corridor, no one was speaking to us. We’d been sent to Coventry, an expression I didn’t learn until I’d spent a summer in England.

  If the authorities wouldn’t punish us and went so far as to protect us from student court, there were other ways of seeing that we were contrite.

  “They’re simply jealous,” Sally said with a shrug.

  “They think you’re both very arrogant, that nobody should get such special treatment after breaking such an important rule, and, if you think they are going to start talking to you tomorrow, you’re wrong.”

  The next night my Latin professor was a guest of the hall for dinner. Since no one was speaking to me, I sat next to him and regaled him with the story of our fishing trip, slightly exaggerating the size of our quite respectable fish. I did not know until some time later that the fish I was describing was in fact in his own refrigerator. Dean Hawkes had chosen him, for the size of his large family, to cope with our peace offering.

  It was a week before, in the privacy of our own quarters, Marty finally broke her silence, not out of any friendliness to me but from pent-up frustration at not giving me a piece of her mind. I thought I could do anything, didn’t I? Go home for several weeks in the fall, take a fishing holiday in the spring, write what papers I felt like, hobnob with the faculty. She was ashamed to be my roommate, and I’d better start looking for someone else for next year.

  “Well, Sally’s roommate is getting married,” I said.

  “You won’t be allowed to room with Sally,” she said.

  “Why ever not?”

  “Because you’re bad influences for each other.”

  “Who’s to stop us?”

  “You’ll see,” she said.

  I was surprised at Marty’s venom. It seemed to me it must be nourished by months of unspoken grievances. Were my friendships with Dr. Pope and other members of the faculty really enviable to students who devoted their weekends to frat parties and balls, who studied as little as they could and talked of nothing but being free of the prison of college? I certainly didn’t envy them the facts of their entertainments and interests, but I would have given a good deal to have had a male friend to shield me from social failure. My arrogance, the only protection at my own command, had been more effective than I thought. Since I had nothing else, I went on fostering it. For whenever I did try to accept a date, the gross attempts at the conquest of my body so disgusted me that I was less and less often tempted.

  Edy soon relaxed her tone of disapproval, and both Sally and I had enough friends outside the hall not to be overly troubled by the righteous hostility around us on the corridor.

  Only a few weeks after our escapade, we were returning some equipment to the hall from a party held elsewhere on campus. It was one of our amiable gestures toward doing our share of work even though no one was speaking to us. In order most easily to return stacks of chairs to their cupboard, we unlocked a side door to bring them in, then locked it behind us. That very night a member of the student council presented us with a charge of having disobeyed an absolute rule for leaving side doors locked after six o’clock.

  “We were right there. We locked it behind us.”

  Our trial was comic. For our great sin, we were campused on alternate weekends for the rest of term. Since Sally and I rarely shared weekend plans anyway, it was no hardship for either of us. The punishment was enough in the eyes of our fellow students to allow them to speak to us again, but nobody was unduly friendly.

  “They finally got you, did they?” Dean Hawkes asked.

  “That they did,” I said.

  “One of these days they’re going to get Barbara.”

  I HAVE NEVER KNOWN THE DETAILS of Arthur’s discharge from the army. Once he was AWOL, and I expected to be questioned by the military police. Then he was simply out of the army.

  “My feet were too big,” he said. “They didn’t have boots big enough.”

  Because he had been in the army, a requirement for high-school graduation was waived for him, and he enrolled in college in San Francisco. When I asked him what he was taking, he simply shrugged. He told me instead about the people he was meeting in North Beach, poets and philosophers. Once or twice, I went with him to his favourite bar, but everyone there was too drunk to talk sense, and I was embarrassed for my brother that he was impressed with such pretensions and incoherent shouting. He sensed a genuine energy which I did not. Perhaps he also recognized his own pain in all that directionless passion. Out of it came Kerouac with On the Road and Ginsberg with Howl.

  I remember the shock of recognition when I read On the Road, so different from the distanced aesthetic pleasure I had reading other books. It was the first time someone was speaking directly about experience which most people tried to pretend didn’t exist. There were the crazed young men I knew, suicidal and violent, the human rubble of the war. I accepted the literary judgment of the book as undisciplined, negative romance, but I couldn’t dismiss it.

  I meanwhile wrote obscure, symbolic stories for my writing class. Most of my main characters were young men, violent and in violent pain. They had biblical names like Cain and Peter. One of them was black with yellow hair and green eyes whose fate was to rape sheep. For weeks after that one was read out in class, I was greeted in the college shop by a chorus of “The Whiffenpoof Song.” “Ba, ba, ba,” followed me everywhere. Another had an invisible band of steel around his head. The few realistic stories I wrote were about troubled relationships between fathers and sons.

  So much of my own experience didn’t seem to me experience at all, a mixture of daydreams and righteousness, out of which I could make nothing. My brother’s suffering was dramatic, full of grand gestures and observable defeats.

  His presence on campus changed my social status. The twin-set, rolled-sock clutch were suddenly very friendly, and everyone was candidly envious of me for having such a handsome and attentive brother. Unlike most young men who found having dinner at the hall an ordeal, Arthur enjoyed himself. An audience of a dozen young women sharpened his wit and warmed his charm.

  Mother Packer sent us tickets to the opera. I’d come down to the living room and find him standing in front of the
great round mirror in his evening clothes entertaining a group of girls. He’d take the coat over my arm from me and hold it, then offer his arm, enjoying the role of courtly brother. He was usually no more than slightly drunk, but his driving terrified me, as reckless and aggressive as the stories he’d tell on our way across the Bay Bridge and into the city. I don’t think it was any longer his conscious desire to frighten me. He simply lived on the edge of hysteria and could at any moment have killed us both. It never occurred to me that I could say no to him, but it amazed me that everyone else would go out with him more than once.

  But Edy did, and it did not surprise me that Arthur chose the person I found the most attractive of my friends. Edy had a taste for people more adventuresome than she was, and she liked being needed. What did she make of his transparent lying, his sudden flickering cruelties, the absolute isolation of his self-centredness? Perhaps they weren’t so obvious to other people. Perhaps I unfairly exaggerated his faults. Edy once accused me of being in love with him myself and jealous of anyone else he was interested in. I was amazed, but of course Edy didn’t see that his courtliness to me was a charade. If I ever asked him to do anything like drive down to see Mother Packer, remember our parents’ birthdays or help out a friend, he simply didn’t hear me. Or he agreed and then “forgot.” Edy then didn’t have many such things to ask him and perhaps didn’t notice how often he didn’t hear what he didn’t want to. And I’m sure she loved his future, as I still tried to.

  Sometimes I wondered if Arthur wasn’t like everyone else after all, and I was peculiar. Certainly most of the relationships I observed between the young women and men I knew had the same flavour of inauthentic romance I so mistrusted in Arthur. The men wanted sex as cheaply as it could be had. The women wanted sex for as much as they could charge in attention, entertainment and engagement rings. The women didn’t want to be known as cheap lays. The men didn’t want to be easy meal tickets. The ones who were, were called Hall Johnnys. One of them was known to have proposed to ten of the women on senior corridor. The impersonality of it all shocked me. When anyone claimed to have fallen in love, the frenzied exaggeration of feeling seemed to me even less genuine than the more calculated wrangling of dinners, dances, theatre tickets, weekends in the mountains.

  My love for Ann, its eroticism so curtailed by guilt and fear, was something that had grown slowly out of my admiration for her singing voice, her painting, her willingness to treat me as a friend, the range of her experience and understanding. My love for Dr. Pope was chaste and passionate. It would not have occurred to me to charm or lure or make use of either one of them. Was it because we had nothing to offer each other but ourselves that our relationship seemed to me to exist in a world entirely apart from the courting games going on all around me? Those loves, so precious to me, so joyfully requiring of me, meant nothing, did not exist, in the world of my friends. If I had confessed them, I would have been seen as sick and depraved.

  Sally and Edy both liked using me as a victim for their course in psychological testing. They discovered in me all kinds of pathological evidence for schizophrenia, manic depression and sexual perversion. They loved to reconfirm the moronic level of intelligence. They even found that only two percent of the population had less mechanical aptitude than I had.

  Then Sally got into an argument with her psych professor about my IQ. I was too clearly a good student not to be a challenge to the validity of the tests. Tested in the department, I was told that I lacked a natural competitive spirit, failed at solving any meaningless problem like remembering nonsense syllables, at being able to repeat nine digits backward.

  “You say you can’t, but you really just don’t see the point.”

  I failed in verbal skills because mine were too highly developed for the text. I avoided cliché opposites, defined words too subjectively, rejected oversimplified general statements.

  “So,” Sally said, “we’re going to teach you to take IQ tests.”

  Her own skill was legendary.

  I did learn. I worked my way up from 86 to 127 in a month. But I was a disappointment when I was tested in the following year. I’d skipped back down to 95. Like playing the piano, like tennis, intelligence obviously took a kind of practice I hadn’t the competitive spirit to maintain.

  The experience did relieve me of a secret fear that my competence was somehow a hoax.

  “Mine is the hoax,” Sally said, grinning.

  In the one literature course we took together, she got As in quizzes from the summaries I gave her of what we were supposed to read. I very often didn’t do that well, but on the essays and exams my method of actually reading the assignments worked better.

  Sally’s attitude toward her work bewildered me as much as her attitude toward useful young men did. It was a game played against teachers to do as little work as possible for as much credit.

  In the few courses I had to take which I didn’t enjoy, I was ashamed of high grades for so little effort. I knew my A in biology, achieved by a couple of nights of memorizing my notes, wasn’t worth the C of a student too caught up in the real love of lab work to be bothered with memorizing details which would be forgotten in a week.

  Most of the work I did in college I loved. Other students like Sally were perfecting an ability to avoid all but absolutely necessary work and to tolerate boredom. They are survival skills for a life I couldn’t have lived, though it has always gone on all around me.

  Except for Ellen, whose love of learning was pure of any other motive, my friends considered the seriousness with which I took my work a tolerable quirk as long as I didn’t burden them with my enthusiasms. There were other good scholars on campus, but they tended to be conservative in their behaviour and looked askance at my breaking of rules or extravagant silliness. One of them told Dr. Pope she didn’t think I deserved an A in Shakespeare because I didn’t really take my work seriously.

  I was hurt by the accusation because she was a student I admired. Before the final exam, I had begun to tape impossible-to-identify quotations on the floor beside her door late at night, things like “Bum, sir?” or “I take my leave, my lord.” After the first several, she began to retaliate. For me such play was a way of dealing with the tensions of the exam period. The morning of the exam, she was sitting at breakfast memorizing speeches of important secondary characters.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “There’s sure to be a question on there. Haven’t you noticed how interested Dr. Pope is in them?”

  I spent so much time talking Shakespeare with Dr. Pope that I couldn’t possibly isolate such a narrow interest, nor would it have had occurred to me.

  Sure enough, there was the question. I was full of admiration for such a divining skill, but it would have been useless to me. I had to focus on what seemed most important and interesting to me.

  I’VE ALWAYS BEEN GRATEFUL to Donald Weeks for conducting our writing classes so that we could focus on those forms and themes important to us. He could, like Dr. Pope, be sharply critical of what seemed to him inauthentic or insubstantial. I remember a well-deserved “So what?” on a short piece of moody description. What manuscripts he dealt with in class he chose for the strengths he could see in the work. He, not the student, read the work aloud. I learned so much more about effectiveness and failure in my own work from those readings than I did from any discussion or written comment that having my work read aloud by a good reader continues to be an essential part of my working method.

  If Donald Weeks didn’t read the tone, it wasn’t there. If he missed a rhythm, it was faulty. I could hear what explanations went on too long, what images were too complicated. I could also hear a line of dialogue that worked, a shift of pace that was graceful.

  Because I did not have to go on from stories to poems or plays or novels or essays, I could work long enough at technique to see my own improvement. I could also watch Ellen’s work grow and change. She learned by imitation and, though Dr. Weeks wasn’t always enthusiastic about t
he models she chose, he didn’t object to her method. Nor did he protest when another student found most of her poems in notes left on doors or scraps of conversation. As a consequence, we did not begin to sound more like each other but each more like herself.

  I have heard it argued that all writing students should be exposed to all forms.

  “How do you know you’re not a playwright if you’ve never tried?”

  In the same way I know I’m not a mountain climber, I suppose.

  We were exposed to other forms both by other students’ work and in our academic courses. Waki Ballard, for instance, wrote poems, children’s stories, short stories and plays, and she went on to write a novel which was published. Ellen devoted herself to poetry, until she was in graduate school, when she began to write plays and act. Her volume of poems, published when she was in her twenties, was the first of our ventures into print.

  Donald Weeks had open houses for his students. I went only once. The conversation was flippant and clever, full of punning rudeness and literary references. Barbara Carson was a regular, and so was Harry Bacchus, a young instructor Dr. Weeks had hired to expand the writing program. Harry’s workshop methods included imposing his own tastes and his own theories about the creative process. He was an intense and shallow young man whose exclamations of approval tended to be “Boy!” and “Wow!” He seemed to me an odd choice for Dr. Weeks to have made. Dr. Weeks was given neither to jargon of creative theories nor to disarming enthusiasms. But he gave Harry every opportunity to show off, laughed in tight, excited approval at observations which seemed to me both pompous and puerile.

  “What does he see in Harry Bacchus?” I asked Dr. Pope.