Taking My Life

by Jane Rule

  Very shortly the letters began to arrive for Dad. He had three children, and he was a year too old for the draft, but he was a trained officer. His country had paid for his education, and it needed him now.

  His sisters were on the move now, following husbands as far as they could. Uncle Keg was going out to the Pacific. Aunt Pat stopped with twins, Patsy and Artie, who were eleven years old, on her way back east from seeing him off. Arthur and Artie spent hours playing elaborate war games with miniature grey fleets, knowing the real distances guns could fire, torpedoes strike, and they memorized the silhouettes of enemy and allied planes. Patsy, taller than I was, even taller than her brother, still wore bloomers to match her dresses and fancied herself a singer. She had a tiny record she had cut which she played over and over again.

  “God, I thought you were bad,” Arthur remarked.

  It was a small, odd but real comfort to know I had a cousin even more detestable to my brother than I was. I couldn’t stand her either, but was too much like her in her brother’s eyes to be allowed to make common cause with him.

  The war had given boys a new dignity and concentration on real violence, from which girls of any sort could be excluded.

  My father went on working on the house on weekends, finishing the upstairs where Arthur already had his room and where I would eventually move, but he was restless and distracted.

  At school I found a note from my teacher on my desk, “Arthur Rule’s Pig Pen Taken Over by Jane Rule.” I hated being compared to him, knowing every teacher began with negative expectations of me; yet I usually defended him because I had no more allegiance to school than he, only resisted in more passive forms.

  I was sent one day to a room in the school basement to see a speech therapist. Used to being ridiculed for my low voice, always threatened by a stammer when I was nervous, I was tempted simply to hide somewhere until the hour was over, but I hadn’t Arthur’s courage for disobedience. There were only a few students there, lispers and stutterers all. When my turn came to read, I said, “I don’t like to read.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t like to make mistakes.”

  “Do you know any poems or songs by heart?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, sing me one.”

  “ ‘The breaking waves dashed high / On a stern and rock-bound coast,’ ” I began and found it easy enough to go on with so small and daunted an audience.

  When I had finished, she dismissed the other students but asked me to stay behind.

  “I want to tell you something. You have a perfectly beautiful speaking voice. One day, when you’ve grown up to it, you’ll be able to do anything with it you want. Don’t believe anyone who tells you anything else.”

  The intensity of her attention embarrassed me, but into the huge vacuum of my inadequacy, there rushed a sudden hope that growing up could be an answer to my voice, to my body, even to my fear and anger. After that, when I mouthed the words I wasn’t allowed to sing, I began to listen to my own voice in my head at least. When I was told to hand out programs instead of taking part in a school concert, my mother decided she’d take me to a movie instead.

  My fear of junior high, of having to ride the streetcar, of having to find my way around from class to class, of great numbers of new and hostile people, of being in my brother’s territory again, was diminished by the sudden banding together of the children I’d been in school with. We rode the streetcar together providing safety in numbers. We sat together in classes, helped each other with homework, and because Margerie Fraser decided to play the clarinet in the school band, several of us rented clarinets to keep her protective company. We practised together after school, even occasionally played popular tunes in the local ice-cream parlour. I wasn’t asked to exclusive birthday or slumber parties, but I had a public place far more secure than before.

  I even began to feel a bit cocky, brave enough to object when, week after week, I was always assigned to wash dishes in a home economics class.

  “For that you’ll stay after school,” the teacher announced.

  “Can’t. I have band practice.”

  “You’ll go to the principal right now.”

  The principal’s office was in the adjacent high-school building. No one I knew had ever been sent there, except, of course, Arthur. I had to ask hall ushers the way. Waiting in the outer office, I was indignant rather than afraid.

  He was a little man, shorter than I was by several inches, obviously not used to dealing with junior high-school girls.

  “How old are you?” he asked mildly.

  “Eleven.”

  “What’s the trouble?”

  I told him I didn’t need to learn how to wash dishes. I did them every night at home, and I’d done nothing but dishes for a month in class.

  He looked at his watch. “It’s my lunch time. Why don’t we have lunch together, and you can tell me about what you think of junior high.”

  There I sat in the cafeteria with the principal, having an amiable lunch while my friends looked on, amazed. I never did dishes again, but I didn’t learn to cook either. I lived in stiff truce with that teacher all term.

  When Margerie Fraser decided we should take some cooking classes offered by Westinghouse, we all signed up. We were supposed to cook and then eat a dinner each week, but Mother always saved my dinner for me at home. The only thing I learned how to make that I liked was candlestick salad, forcing half a banana into a pineapple round, putting a cherry on top for a flame and dribbling mayonnaise down the side for melting wax. When I tried it a home, the bananas were too large for the holes in the pineapple. The bananas were grey with my fingermarks by the time they arrived at the table.

  “It’s what I call ‘handled food,’ ” my mother said.

  There my interest in cooking ended for some years.

  When our names were published in the local paper for having completed the course, we all got obscene phone calls for some weeks. Learning how to deal with those was more useful to me in later life than anything the classes themselves taught me. And, of course, living through such an experience with my friends strengthened the bonds between us, giving us all a sense of new self-importance. Even Arthur asked, “What did he say? What did he say?”

  I didn’t tell him they were just dumb things like, “Do you wet your panties?” which had no overtly sexual meaning for any of us. He might as well have chanted, with the stupid boys on the streetcar, “I see London, I see France, I see someone’s underpants.”

  The day after my father told us he decided to enlist, he left for Chapel Hill. When he came home months later, he was in a lieutenant commander’s uniform.

  Mother, left to sell the house and be ready to move either with him or back to California if he was ordered overseas, set the back field on fire the day after he left and nearly burned the whole neighbourhood down. She told such stories on herself with gusto: “Just my part of the war effort.” Cheerfully, she sold the Ping-Pong table he’d just been given, most of our books, nearly all Dad’s civilian clothes. I’m sure she sold things of her own, too, but I remember what we objected to. Mother adored sales, “My merchant blood coming out in me.”

  We left, as usual, before school was out. We went to the Colonel and Mother Packer at 1111 Hamilton, and Arthur and I were again walking to school together, this time from the right side of the tracks, passing potentially dangerous bands of children, some of whose faces were familiar.

  The first morning, the principal over the PA system asked students from our homerooms to come for us at his office. He handed each of us a schedule of classes, and that was that. After homeroom announcements, we were all dismissed to find our first classes. The homeroom teacher asked another student to show me where my math class was. When that was over, I went out into the hall with no idea where in that maze of corridors I should go next. Finally I went back into the math room and stayed there all day, the teacher taking no notice of me. The next morning, in homeroom, my name was
called over the PA system to report to the principal.

  “Maybe you can get away with cutting classes in Missouri,” he began.

  “I didn’t cut classes. I couldn’t find them. Don’t you even have a map of this place? Don’t you have any idea how to treat new kids?”

  “You should have asked for help,” he said gruffly.

  “There’s a rule against talking in the halls.”

  A student was assigned to show me around for a week, and my homeroom teacher asked every morning how I was getting along.

  Before the first week was over, Arthur had enough demerits so that he had to stay after school, either working in the victory garden or digging dandelions out of the school lawn. While I waited for him, I caught sight of Wally, my Chinese friend from years ago.

  “Hi,” I called to him. “Where’s Chiaki?”

  Wally laughed. “He got sent to concentration camp with all the other Japs.”

  It was as if Wally felt he’d won a long, personal argument.

  “Chiaki didn’t do anything wrong,” I said at the dinner table that night.

  “Neither did my maid,” Mother Packer said irritably, “but they wouldn’t let me keep her.”

  “They’re our enemy now,” Mother said. “Some of them might be spies.”

  “But aren’t they American, just like us?” I asked.

  “They’re Japs,” Arthur said and pulled his eyes into slits.

  When the Colonel took us to San Francisco, he had a pass that could get us through the restricted zones of the city, but, when Mother Packer and I went to Chinatown, half the shops were shut.

  “You tell the difference between Japs and Chinamen by their feet,” Mother Packer explained.

  I noticed on the way home that all the cutting gardens along the bay shore were gone, even what we’d called Mount Beauty, a hill vibrant with colour at every season of the year.

  “They were Jap gardens,” the Colonel said.

  In Kirkwood, Missouri, there had been nothing at all to indicate that the country was at war. In California, it was impossible to forget it. There were training camps everywhere, and new hospitals were being set up to receive the wounded. We could practise recognizing service and rank even on the streets of Palo Alto, where young men loitered, waiting to be shipped out or recovering from wounds. Even at 1111 Hamilton, there were blackout curtains, vegetables growing where flowers had been, and Mother Packer, after the first submarine scare, had put her flat silver in the bank.

  I joined the school band, was issued a uniform of my own. At my first practice, I discovered Eddie Hootstein, playing the cymbals. Once, after marching in a parade, playing patriotic songs, Eddie tried to walk me home, but his feet hurt and he gave up halfway there.

  I didn’t see any point in trying to connect with old friends or make new ones since we didn’t know from day to day where we were going. School was a way of getting out of the house, of killing time.

  Libby didn’t have that distraction, and she was the one who took the brunt of nervous irritability our presence there created in everyone. Mother Packer corrected and scolded her at every opportunity until that amiable four-year-old turned on her and said, “You don’t love anyone. You didn’t love Granddad, and that’s why he went away.”

  Granddad had never been mentioned in front of Mother Packer. She turned away from Libby in freezing silence.

  “She’s only a little child, Mother,” my mother pleaded after days in which Mother Packer refused to speak to Libby.

  School let out, but there were no preparations to go to South Fork. Gas was rationed. Summers there, like so much else, were postponed “for the duration.”

  We moved instead to Orinda, California, behind the Berkeley Hills because Dad had been ordered to St. Mary’s College, now a pre-flight school where batches of young officers were turned out every six weeks. We rented a house on a small lake, a game preserve, near the college. Among Dad’s duties, which were various and often nebulous, he was band officer. The band was made up, in part, of members of Count Basie’s orchestra. Royal, a trumpet player, was the leader. His brother, Ernie, played the clarinet. Through that summer he gave me clarinet lessons, back of the stage in one of the dressing rooms. We nearly always surprised some of the other band members shooting craps. They would scramble to mock attention for me, and I would say, mocking back, “As you were, men.” It never occurred to my father or to me that I was in anything but the most protective and solicitous hands.

  The one person my father both mistrusted and detested was the captain of the station. At one of the marvellous USO shows put on to entertain the men, Royal announced that the band would play a special piece dedicated to the captain, who sat through it smiling broadly while the rest of the audience stifled laughter. It was an instrumental piece called “Big Fat Butterfly.”

  As band officer, Dad had to attend football games. We went with him in a station wagon filled with guns, with which the drill team would perform at the half. Thirteen busloads of cadets followed us, and, when we reached the Bay Bridge, we were picked up by a police escort. We drove across the bridge and through the city, sirens screaming, traffic lights ignored.

  The beauty of the college, the glamour of all those men in uniform, formal graduation ceremonies every six weeks at which at least two or three men would faint from the heat and be carried off in ambulances waiting at the edge of the parade ground for that purpose made that summer, which might otherwise have been lonely, a wonderful time. I could finally imagine what it must have been like for my mother, growing up on army posts. For Dad, though I’m sure he enjoyed providing so much happy entertainment for us, the place was a mockery of everything he understood about the military, and his jobs were pointless, even sometimes humiliating. A man of his age, with three children, would not be sent to active duty unless he volunteered for it. He was facing yet another crisis of conscience.

  ARTHUR AND LIBBY WERE ENROLLED in local schools, but I was finally to be sent to a private school, Anna Head’s, in Berkeley, three-quarters of an hour’s drive from where we lived. The father of another student would drive four of us in each morning, and mothers would take turns picking us up. I had to have a uniform, a grey skirt, white blouse and grey sweater. Drab as it was, I was delighted not to have to think about what to wear every morning. Mother decided it was also time for me to have stockings and high-heeled shoes.

  I initiated them when Arthur and I took Libby to see her first movie. I walked into the lobby, feeling like a large puppet on strings. Libby stood amazed at the size of the room, the carpets, the murals on the walls. The place impressed her far more than the film, and all I remember was my physical uncertainty and my growing sympathy for a whole population of grown women for whom that sensation was constant.

  “What does your tie feel like?” I asked my brother.

  “Like a tie, stupid,” he answered, a discomfort he’d been familiar with for years.

  Arthur is the one who should have been sent to private school, far more alienated than I was, in much greater need of the attention he would have had in small classes. But Mother Packer was paying the bill which, even though I had a serviceman’s scholarship, Mother and Dad couldn’t have afforded on his navy pay. Nothing but a private school could take a six-foot-tall, twelve-year-old barbarian in hand and make a civilized young woman out of her. Mother Packer had no similar interest in Arthur, whose natural manners had always been better than mine, whose even greater height was a social asset rather than a disaster.

  I was introduced to my travelling companions before school began, and, though I felt the usual dread at new beginnings, at least I would begin with a few girls that I knew, though none of them was to be in my class. There were only fourteen of us, and five of us were named Jane. I was already restless with the jokes people made over the phone about big Jane and little Jane, old Jane and young Jane. My mother’s godmother had called her Jinx when she was growing up, a name that appealed to me. I accounted that I would be call
ed Jinx, but it took me about a month to get used to it. Mother indulged me at home, but Dad would have nothing to do with my new name, resisting as he always did any change in his children.

  The school physically was so different from any place I had ever been. The two- to three-storey buildings surrounded a courtyard large enough for basketball games but edged with trees under which were benches for shaded sitting. Paths led to small patches of garden, intimate and quiet. The school buildings, too, had nooks and crannies, having been built before people were concerned about waste of space, which has always made a place liveable. The main house, where the boarders lived, had a large imposing entrance hall, lounge and dining room with real rather than institutional furniture.

  The eighth-grade classroom was on the second floor of the school building, wedged in under the eaves, windows opening onto a sunny, gently sloping roof, onto which we occasionally climbed without more cost than a gentle reprimand. We were encouraged to feel at home, taking all our studies but art and music in one place.

  About half of us were new girls, and those who had come up from the lower school, rather than banding together to exclude us, the only social strategy I expected, went out of their way to make us feel welcome.

  The absence of boys from that whole city block the school occupied gave me a sense of giddy freedom and then growing power. Being the tallest girl in the school was a mark of distinction rather than a bad joke. Because we did all our academic subjects until one o’clock, and chose from an offering of sports in the afternoon, I was allowed to join the high-school basketball, volleyball and swimming teams. I was welcomed by the older girls, and my classmates were pleased with my distinction because it reflected favourably on them. As the highest class in the lower school, it was important for each of us to be looked up to.

  Academically I was much less successful, bringing with me such uncertain skills from the grab bag my education had up to that point been. The one highly developed talent I had, which was hiding my ignorance, was of no use to me. I had not been in school a week before I discovered that teachers at Anna Head’s wanted to find out what we didn’t know not to mock and judge us but to help us.