Taking My Life

by Jane Rule

  I don’t think for the first five years of my life I had a very distinct sense of myself as a separate human being. I was half of what made up Arthur and Jane … But we were central to each other. [The loss of that closeness, which began when we moved to California just before my fifth birthday, is a greater grief to me than any of those mythical losses that occur before memory or any of the later failures of language with people I have loved. As an odd consolation, it coincided with the loss of Josephine.]

  Josephine moved with us when we left the Gatehouse just before my fourth birthday … What I remember of that house on Harrison Avenue are nightmares and sickness. All of us were sick: Dad with appendicitis, Mother and Arthur with mumps [measles], and I had the only real earache of my life.

  At 727 Cowper Street, we began our real life as a family … My parents, in their prosperous old age, have forgiven or forgotten those slights, attend the weddings of grandchildren, the fiftieth anniversaries of old San Francisco friends[, tolerant of their complacency and bigotry].

  Free of Sunday duty, I expected other kinds of adventures with my brother … Kids did jeer at us … I, the pugilist, jeered back, called our tormentor “a nigger, black trash,” using the weapons Josephine had given me. One boy retaliated by tying Arthur up.

  The first Christmas at 727 Cowper, we were given a set of phones to be set up between our two rooms … Mine stayed on my bedside table and for some time received the secrets and questions Arthur no longer wanted to hear[, symbol of the silence that had fallen between us, more grievous to me than any loss I have had since].

  The first-grade reader was as personally insulting [to me as food had seemed threatening]. I would not read “Dick and Jane.” I said “Arthur.” Corrected again and again, I finally wouldn’t read at all, for the story not only confirmed my separation from my brother, but [the fact that boys ran and played while girls watched or helped Mother] revealed the source of his growing prejudice against girls, who only watched boys play or helped Mother.

  [We were all given tests.] Given tests, Arthur was labelled unusually gifted, one of the children to be studied by a Stanford research team.

  Mother sheltered us the more with her loving attention … Mother Packer was ready for a game of cards, a pastime her own mother wouldn’t have allowed on Sunday, though she saw nothing wrong with playing mah-jong [came in for a game of cards. Mother Packer loved cards and she felt happily wicked playing on Sunday. Her brother had not allowed it, but she had seen nothing wrong with playing mah-jong. Dad slept on the living-room floor. The Colonel read the Sunday paper]. At home for Sunday supper, we always had something delicious, waffles with maple syrup or cottage pudding with chocolate sauce and large glasses of cold milk, just the four of us, like children together.

  The dancing lessons she insisted I take are as bleak in my memory as those San Francisco trips are bright. I had taken ballet lessons … I had begun to ride [I was developing a passion for horseback riding].

  Because the Colonel had kept horses in the army, Mother and he had always ridden … But that, too, was a world irretrievably gone. [Having a horse of my own was only a daydream.]

  Arthur and I were both enrolled in ballroom-dancing class … I actually enjoyed myself. [I even remember the dress Mother Packer sent for the Valentine dance which I couldn’t go to because Dad had been promoted to the position of district sales manager in St. Louis.]

  I could not, as I had in California, simply mount a horse and ride off into a forest. There were a dozen other children to ride with, all with proper riding habits … I went back occasionally [I don’t remember even going back. Perhaps I did once or twice, but there wasn’t the money for a proper riding habit. Often, we had no car to get there], but, since the riding was far more a trial than a pleasure, I gradually gave up any interest in horses.

  An unplanned and, for Mother, alarming family reconciliation took place soon after we got back to Hinsdale. [The other family experience of that year was a trauma for Mother.] Mother’s father phoned her from Chicago, on a honeymoon with his third wife …

  Granddad was not as big a man as we were used to for a relative … Gretchen was a slight, dark woman, too young to be a grandmother. [She was shyer than we were and I’d never ever seen her trying not to like somebody.]

  Granny Rule, [perhaps as a gesture of forgiveness,] perhaps aware that Arthur’s behaviour and moods puzzled and worried my parents and, confident in her ability to handle children, offered to take Arthur and two other cousins on a trip to Washington, D.C.

  For me [us] the peculiarities of the household were a great comfort, for there was always someone awake to dispel night fears, and there was never a family meal to test either my table manners or my appetite.

  Those were Mary Lily’s last few months on the farm. That fall she ran away to New York where Grandfather Rule got her a job as a Powers model, making his own daughters and Granny Rule the more jealous and critical of her. [He adored her.] Mary Lily was for me a revelation. Even at my stubborn worst, I had never stood at the top of the stairs and screamed at anyone, Mary Lily’s tactic when she was crossed by any of them. The old men and her mother were worried about her and frightened of her, the very image of Eve, the temptress, for [she was so beautiful] she attracted every man in the country.

  Again there were rumours at Dad’s office of promotion and transfer. The first snow had fallen, the day I lined up to get on the bus with the notebook finally completed. The girl next to me knocked it out of my hand, the papers scattering in the slush. I tried to turn away, to run home, [I did not want to get on the bus,] but the kindly driver—surely not the one who had reported us the winter before?—got out and collected my soggy leaves for me and coaxed me to school.

  It seemed [“seemed”] a happier place for Mother, mainly because Dad was much more often at home.

  The new lawn was up at our new house, measuring for me the century I’d been away. Mother did momentarily gloat at my being glad to be home. [My mother thanked my rescuers who told her I’d entertained them grandly all the way home. I knew they were amused by me, but they’d been very kind.]

  His sisters were on the move now … Patsy, taller than I was, … had a tiny record she had cut which she played over and over again.

  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. [Once he nearly electrocuted himself while I was helping him.]

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

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

  The day after my father told us he decided to enlist, he left for Chapel Hill. [I don’t remember what my father said when he told us he had decided to enlist. We were supposed to be proud of him and of ourselves for helping make the sacrifice. The day after he told us, 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 … Mother adored sales, “My merchant blood coming out in me.” [Dad had his orders to St. Mary’s pre-flight school in Orinda, California. We rented a house on a small lake, very near the college. Art was signed up at the local school, and Lib enrolled in kindergarten, but I was finally to be sent to private school 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, grey shirt, white blouse, grey sweater. Drab as it was, I was delighted not to have to think what to wear every morning. And I would be entering a world that had nothing to do with my brothe
r.

  He is the one who should have been given that opportunity, far more alienated than I was, in much greater need of the attention he would have had in small classes. Even though I had a serviceman’s scholarship, Mother and Dad couldn’t afford to send me on his navy pay. Mother Packer paid the bill because nothing but private school could take a six-foot tall, twelve-year-old barbarian in hand and make a civilized young woman out of her. She 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.]

  “You should have asked for help,” he said gruffly [but backing off].

  The school physically was so different … 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.

  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 students are nice to each other,” I told my mother in amusement. “I like all of them.”]

  She had the virtues of cheerful respect and fairness, and, though she devoted herself to us, she stayed aloof.

  I could not look at her or at anyone, feeling at once betrayed and ashamed and in terror of being shut out of the only school I had ever liked [world I had ever loved].

  My brother was fair and blue eyed and full lipped … In most crises, he vanished, but he could, like Granddad, suddenly take on a gallant role for himself. [There was a graduation dance at Anna Head’s. I don’t know how Mother talked Arthur into going with me, but he picked out a corsage himself.]

  He stayed long enough to move us back to Palo Alto to the square house on Waverly Street where we would live until the war was over. [Mother Packer and the Colonel, who earlier might have been some help to Mother, however critical they were, were now so frail themselves they were an added burden. They needed the help they were used to and couldn’t find any. The Mexican cleaning woman and gardener stayed on, but Mother Packer had to cook. Often she hadn’t the strength to, suffering from a range of real ailments and nervous disorders. I used to bike over to run errands for them, but more often Mother had to go on emergency calls.]

  I could hardly remember now what Mother and I had found to quarrel about when I was younger. [I listened to my friends’ complaints about their parents (very few people my age had fathers overseas) without anything of my own to contribute.]

  The troubled and troubling bond I had with my brother … I loved all poems about the death of lovers, particularly Amy Lowell’s “Patterns,” ending with that fine, “Christ! What are patterns for?” which she may have written with motives similar to mine. [Sara Teasdale, Edna St. Vincent Millay both mourned death satisfactorily.]

  One night I woke vomiting and had to wash out my sheets and blankets without letting Mother Packer know. To my great surprise, my brother offered to take my place for a night [two nights].

  These were not problems to discuss with Mother … 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 [unfit] mother and alcoholic father, problematic older brother and sisters.

  My parents, my grandmother, even Arthur liked Ann … Mother Packer liked Ann’s serenity.

  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 [included a couple of struggles in the back seat of a car with a young veteran] who was really more interested in finding a wife than in deflowering a virgin.

  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, [as now it seems they must have,] they were too frightened to be anything but circumspect.

  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. [The counsellor’s advice was that I should return the next fall and take two periods of gym and whatever else interested me for the first term. I could finish in February and then have some time off to look around.] I was really too young to start college anyway.

  From the moment she moved in, I sensed something was very wrong … If any of my friends came over, she pleaded a migraine headache and retreated [went] to her room … When she woke and threw up, I changed her bedclothes and her pyjamas, then sat wiping her face with a cool, damp cloth[, did what I could to make her more comfortable].

  Ann and Henry did not move east, and I did not get into Stanford … I reapplied for the winter quarter. [My energy came from my anger rather than my confidence.]

  Ann’s guilt and fear [and restraint] troubled me more for her than for myself.

  I made my application … I had what I knew were good references from teachers, from my German tutor who was angry [annoyed] that I’d been refused at Stanford.

  I not only didn’t know what was expected of me in assignments, I didn’t know that anything in particular was expected … I was simply suspicious of questions like “Does a Drowning Man Really Drown?” I didn’t want to be made a fool of [my leg pulled] by a bunch of condescending, smart-aleck male professors.

  Our own self-obsessed and sheltered life … In a way I didn’t much think about, Carol seemed somehow mine as well. [I was awed.]

  I discovered some days later that he was Egon Petri … Darius Milhaud taught composition every other year at Mills, the alternate years in Paris at the Paris Conservatoire, and some students commuted with him.

  In 1948, Dr. Pope was in her early thirties. Her PhD thesis on Paradise Regained had been published, and she had been at Mills long enough to have established herself as a central power in the department, cherished and admired by Donald Weeks, the sensitive, cynical head of the department. [Though the majority of the faculty at Mills were unusually dedicated teachers, most of them also had lives apart from the campus. Elizabeth Pope did not.]

  Because Dr. Pope went to chapel, I began to attend … Discussions of morality tended toward various kinds of [political] responsibility rather than definitions of sin.

  Still, often when I bowed my head in prayer, it troubled my conscience … It was among the few important things we didn’t discuss. [I had told her all about my battles in school, the bitterness I still felt at how I had been treated. She told me of her own lonely adolescence, the sadism of a particular nurse, the difficulties there were for her in college.]

  When the lovesick graduate student asked me outright how I managed to win such favour, I was frightened as well as embarrassed, for I knew she recognized the nature of my own devotion as clearly as I recognized hers. [If I’d been older I might have been able to tell her that wanting to die for someone else was not a sentiment to be shared, even with the beloved.] I felt sorry for her, but I wanted nothing to do with her or her self-despising, painful devotion.

  Arthur had joined the army. [added and then deleted from page 115a of the typescript: I don’t remember my last summer at South Fork, probably we weren’t there very long. My father, who had taken over a family-owned building supply company, had so much improved it that the family was having second thoughts about the percentage of profit they had offered him. He began to instruct the company lawyer, so he would not have wanted to be away for long. I do remember long, tedious days in Reno, the tension in the family and my pledge to myself that I would never again spend a summer at home, isolated with problems without solutions.

  What I wanted to do was to go east again to see Ann. She was pregnant again, the baby due in March. Late that fall, Ann came down with polio and was temporarily partially paralyzed. It was some weeks before she could use her hands. Susan was born prematurely, and they both spent some time separately in the hospital.

  I saw
an ad for summer schools in England and phoned Mother to tell her it was exactly what I had to do the following summer. She, in turn, persuaded Mother Packer that I should go. So I applied to Stratford for the session on Shakespeare and was accepted. I gave very little thought to what I had contracted to do. What mattered to me was that I would see Ann, Henry, Carol and the new baby in June and again late in August.

  It was Dr. Pope who was excited about the prospect of my going to England. She had never been.]

  [An alternative version, added to and then deleted from page 115b of the manuscript: Part of the summer we spent 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 the help of my arm and her cane. One day we’d walk from the house up to the fig trees, the next town 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 very proud of that 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 we were 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 was having second thoughts about the percentage of profit they had offered him. He began to mistrust the family lawyer, so he did not want to be away for long.

  Art was in the army.]

  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.