My Own Two Feet (10 page)

The housemother was soon replaced. Although I was not sorry to see her go, I always suspected she had moved me ahead on the waiting list because I had requested a roommate who was a good student and who did not smoke. Such virtue would have appealed to her.

A new housemother arrived, Mrs. Ruth Cochran. She was young, sympathetic, and understanding of the times in which we lived. She also understood that we lived in a cooperative house run by students and not by the housemother. She did oversee menus, which the cook prepared with food purchased cooperatively with the two men's houses and adapted to the appetites of active young women. Unlike students who lived in
boardinghouses, we enjoyed the luxury of an egg for Sunday breakfast.

The second semester, I felt I had had my share of corduroy hands and managed to get transferred to the switchboard. This work shift required an hour a day because theoretically operators could study while on duty. In practice, study was almost impossible because of interruptions: plugging in the lines for incoming calls, pulling levers to ring bells, looking over young men as I rang their dates' rooms to announce them. If the man was a blind date, the girl would usually whisper, “How does he look?” If the man had gone into the living room to wait, I could whisper, “Nice,” “So-so,” “Tall,” “Short,” or whatever word I could find to help the girl meet her evening's fate.

Calls for baby-sitters were passed on to any girl I knew who was in real need of money. One call I kept for myself, for as much as I enjoyed my noisy life at Stebbins, a quiet evening in an unusual house in the hills was a treat. This house was built around a circular staircase, and every room was on a different level. The well-behaved little girl, Donna, went to bed early but sometimes called out, “Miss Bunn, I want a dwink of water.” Running around the staircase with a glass of water was the only interruption
in peaceful, comfortable evenings in a quiet living room with a view of the lights of San Francisco. As I absorbed the soothing silence, I felt the Berkeley Hills must be the loveliest spot in the world and longed to live there myself someday.

My senior year I became house secretary, a position that relieved me of a work shift but required that I take minutes of compulsory monthly house meetings and post them on the bulletin board. These meetings were usually short because everyone was anxious to get to the library. The house president made announcements: “Please do not linger over good-nights. Necking on the front steps gives Stebbins a bad name.” To my surprise, for several years afterward, whenever I met someone who had lived at Stebbins, she often said, “Oh, you're the one who wrote those hilarious minutes.” Hilarious? I wasn't trying to be funny. I simply recorded what took place. Years later, when I read a statement by James Thurber, “Humor is best that lies closest to the familiar,” I began to understand.

Council meetings went on much longer—too long, we felt, if we had papers due or tests the next day. These meetings dealt with more serious matters, often individual behavior, and minutes were not posted for all to read. A major problem was the Dean of Women, who felt we should cut expenses by eliminating the switchboard, which
cost what now seems like a ridiculously small amount, something like twenty-eight dollars a month for all of Stebbins. Never, we vowed, would we part with the switchboard. If we could not receive incoming calls, how could men get in touch with us? Then there was the problem of the girl who wore slacks to the library. It was agreed she be told that slacks were inappropriate for wear outside the house. And what about the girl who was conspicuously pregnant but behaved as if she hadn't noticed? Should she be allowed to remain at Stebbins? Someone pointed out that people were saying, “You see what comes out of Stebbins Hall.” Although we all felt we had our good reputation to maintain, we decided, after long and serious discussion, that the girl should stay. We would say nothing. She needed us no matter what others said about the virtue, or lack of virtue, of the residents of Stebbins Hall.

At the beginning of my second semester the house manager announced that the eighteen dollars a month we had been paying did not cover “depreciation of fixed assets.” Our fee must therefore be raised to twenty-four dollars a month. We were aghast. Where could we find an additional six dollars a month when most of us could barely manage eighteen? Some girls felt they would have to drop out of school (as far as I know none
did); others reluctantly wrote home for money, something I refused to do. One girl had a white fur “bunny” jacket that she rented for fifty cents an evening to girls going to formal dances. It shed on dark suits. Some found odd jobs typing or baby-sitting. I was a poor typist, and baby-sitting, except for my one customer, was too time-consuming. Where could I find another six dollars?

I found six dollars in the style of the times. Hems twelve inches from the floor were no longer fashionable, so I opened a skirt-shortening business: fifty cents a skirt if it was straight and didn't have pleats. I could shorten a straight skirt in half to three-quarters of an hour, which beat the forty cents an hour Cal set for student labor, and I saved precious time because I could work in my room. My business, although hardly flourishing, did bring in enough to make up the six dollars without my having to write home for money, something I had vowed I would never do. I wanted independence more than anything.

At the beginning of the semester, on late sunny afternoons, some of us ran up the hill to the Pacific School of Religion to play a children's game, statue, on the lawn. Other times, after dinner, when we had written “Libe” in the sign-out book, we went off to the library singing,

When the library closed at ten o'clock, we returned to Stebbins, most of us to continue studying.

Saturday afternoons the atmosphere of Stebbins changed. We washed our hair, and sometimes I cut Miriam's, which was so curly mistakes didn't show. We exchanged shoe polish and pressed our dresses in the basement laundry. Many of us chose the time before dinner to answer letters.

Next to Mother, my most loyal correspondent was Claudine, who wrote cheerful letters from the cold mill town fourteen miles from Mount Hood. Sometimes she enclosed a dollar bill in her letter. A whole dollar to spend any way I pleased! I bought silk stockings for special occasions, stockings without runs stopped by dabs of nail polish. Once I used Claudine's dollar to take a ferry trip to San Francisco, where I enjoyed a quiet, solitary lunch in a tearoom. Quiet and solitude were as precious as money when I lived at Stebbins.

With letters written, hair washed, and dresses pressed, we were ready for fun. Miriam had a number of male friends. Occasionally I went out with one, and once we double-dated, a memorable evening because one of the men had a car. We drove across the new San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, something every student longed to do, for this bridge that we had seen being built was now open for traffic. The sodium-vapor lights shone
down upon us, turning our complexions green and our dresses hideous colors, the sort of colors children mix from their paint boxes. Looking like specters did not dim our excitement at riding eight miles over water. In San Francisco we danced, without much enthusiasm as I recall, in the Colonial Room at the St. Francis Hotel, or “Frantic,” as students usually called it. After waffles at Tiny's we drove back to Berkeley. I cannot recall a thing about the two men who were our escorts. They could not compare with the excitement of riding across the new bridge, even though the lights made us look like ghouls.

Campus social life centered on dances: club dances, house dances, fraternity and sorority dances. I was taken to one dance in a fraternity house that I found so boring—all that beer drinking—that I simply walked out and went back to Stebbins alone. Largest of all were the biweekly Assembly Dances held in Harmon Gym, admission fifteen cents with a student-body card, dates not necessary. Sometimes Miriam and I went, promising each other we would return to Stebbins together. The orchestras were good, and because Cal had two and a half male students to every female, there was always a stag line of men looking women over as if we were auditioning for the honor of dancing with them, which I suppose
we were. I seemed to attract engineering students, all of them looking tired and overworked, some with slide rules (referred to by Stebbins girls as “sly drools”) in their shirt pockets, which indicated they had dropped in for a breather before going back to their books, belying the campus myth that engineering students entered the Engineering Building and were not seen for four years. All of the engineers were serious, and we had little to talk about as we tried not to tread upon each other's toes. I never once met an engineering student at an Assembly Dance who was cheerful or a good dancer. As they concentrated on their feet, they seemed to have the weight of future bridges and skyscrapers on their shoulders. Apparently they recover from the oppression of the School of Engineering after graduation. Since college I have met a number of interesting engineers who, although they were serious men, could talk, laugh, and even dance like anyone else.

At one Assembly Dance a tall, thin young man with black hair and blue eyes stepped out of the stag line and asked me to dance. He said his name was Clarence Cleary. “Cleary?” I asked, never having heard the name. “How do you spell it?” He spelled it. He was from Sacramento. So were several Stebbins girls whom he knew, which
gave us something in common. I hoped he would telephone me, and I was glad I was wearing a becoming pink dress Mother had made with great care and sent to me a few days before, a dress I found touching because Mother disliked sewing and was usually careless in her work.

In the meantime Miriam received a letter from a friend, a physics professor at the University of Washington, telling her a British physicist in this country on a Commonwealth Fellowship would be at Cal working with Dr. Ernest Lawrence and would call on her. Miriam hoped he would, and sure enough, Wilfrid called in person. He was handsome, very British, and was immediately entranced by Miriam.

Through Wilfrid I met several Commonwealth Fellows whose stipends must have been generous, for they had cars and seemed to have plenty of spending money. Wilfrid's roommate was Campbell, a chemist from Scotland who had once worked in a coal mine. We went as a group to Faculty Club dances, a dinner at the home of a professor, to Harmon Gym to hear George Gershwin play
Rhapsody in Blue
with the San Francisco Symphony. “Dreadful,” pronounced Wilfrid.

Another time Miriam and I went with Fellows to see the cyclotron housed in a shack on the campus. I remember we had to take off our
watches before we approached the invention where atoms were smashed to produce new radioactive species. The cyclotron was the reason Wilfrid was at Cal. All I knew about atoms I had learned in Philosophy 5A from studying Lucretius, an ancient Roman philosopher, who got it all wrong. I kept still and tried to look impressed by the strangely shaped device. If I had understood what the smashing of atoms would lead to, I would have been genuinely impressed and probably frightened.

Only once did I think of myself as going out on a date with a Fellow, an Oxford graduate and, as I recall, also a physicist. His dancing was as bad as or even worse than that of any undergraduate engineering student, or perhaps the English danced differently. When we were not dancing, I eluded his clutching hands. For some reason the Fellows left the Faculty Club dance early to go to another dance, in the Hotel Oakland, a place that was to play an important part in my life half a dozen years later. The ride to Oakland was harrowing. My date, fresh from England, drove on the left-hand side of the street while I clutched the door in fright. We rode over round metal buttons that protected streetcar riders from traffic as they boarded streetcars. Some people had to jump out of his way as we bumpety-bumped past.
I was relieved when what I had come to think of as the mad Englishman returned me safely but unnerved to Stebbins. He telephoned the next evening, but I told him I was much too busy to see him. He did not telephone again and probably thought of me as too American to appreciate an Englishman.

Clarence called, and so did other men. One I had met at the Masonic Club, which my parents arranged for me to join so I would “meet nice people.” His name was Jack, and he was a graduate student in entomology. I went out with him two or three times, but somehow my intuition told me not to trust him, probably because he never asked me more than a day ahead. His explanation was that he was on call for inspecting incoming ships for foreign insects, an explanation that seemed logical after my bus experience at the California border. Nevertheless, I once said something about his being a bachelor and added, “But are you a bachelor?”

Jack laughed and said, “Where do you get such ideas in your pretty little head?” Having a pretty little head struck me as so ridiculous it was funny, but I managed not to laugh. To this day, when I do something stupid, I blame it on my pretty little head.

One night at an Assembly Dance, where I had
gone with Miriam, Jack stepped out of the stag line. As we were about to join the throng circulating the gym, a thin, tired-looking older woman interrupted and said to me, “I think we should know one another. I'm Jack's wife.”

I was too numb with embarrassment and humiliation to say anything. There followed a bit of dialogue etched in my memory forever. Jack's wife said to her husband, “What do you see in her anyway?” Indignation erased my embarrassment.

He said, “She's young and fresh and there's a shine about her.”

His wife snapped, “Don't worry. Men will take it off!” and stalked away.

Jack turned to me and said, “Believe me, Beverly, I wasn't making a play for you. Can't we talk this over?”

“No,” I said, and walked away with tears of anger in my eyes.

In this assortment of social life there was Clarence. He was six years older than I and was putting himself through Cal by working part-time in the Bedding and Linen Department at Breuner's Furniture Store in Oakland. We went to a couple of Assembly Dances and ate bacon-and-tomato sandwiches and drank milk at the Jolly Roger. He was kind, gentle, quiet, and, best of all, single. I made sure of that. By now I was wise enough
to go to the lobby of Cal Hall to consult a card file of students filled out when we registered. At the time I had wondered why we had to give our marital status. Now I knew.

Clarence, authentic bachelor, began to telephone me every afternoon at five before he left work, and I began to look forward to his calls. He was the middle of five children, and his mother, a widow, was a nurse in the emergency room of Sacramento Hospital. After junior college, and a series of low-paying jobs, whatever he could find in Depression times, he had returned to school at the California College of Agriculture in Davis, a sixteen-mile hitchhike from Sacramento. Drivers were kind to students. In two years, he was late for class only once. His interest was veterinary science, but he felt he should no longer live at home when his mother had younger children to support, so he became a dairy technician because he could earn a certificate in two years. He had worked for a dairy in Palo Alto, an experience that left him critical of ice cream. “Too much air incorporated into the mixture,” he often commented when we bought ice-cream cones. As the Depression deepened, he had been laid off and decided to return to school. He was studying economics and history.

Men did not make up all of my social life. One
of the Stebbins girls stood out. I noticed her the first week of the semester at lunchtime when she bused heavy trays of dishes from the dining room to the kitchen. She was small, attractive, and wearing a becoming red-and-white-checked dress obviously made from a tablecloth, which suggested she was a girl of originality, initiative, and independence. Her name was Jane Chourré, and we soon became friends, lifelong friends, as it turned out. Jane was calmer and better organized than I and aspired to become a teacher. “Teaching is an honorable profession,” she often said. “A teacher has a respected place in the community.”

English was her major, and we shared several of the same classes. She often went home weekends and returned with begonias in vibrant colors, yellow, red, orange, and apricot, which her father grew as a hobby. If she was too busy to go home, her mother sometimes mailed her begonias, with each stem carefully secured in a balloon of water. Fresh flowers meant a lot at Stebbins. Mrs. Chourré understood this.

Jane invited me to spend Thanksgiving vacation with her in Mill Valley. Jane's parents were an unusual couple for those days, for Mrs. Chourré was both older and taller than her husband. Their children—Jane's sister, Marianne,
and her brothers, Bud and Dick—were close in age because, as Mrs. Chourré put it matter-of-factly, “We wanted four children, and because I was older, we had to have them close together.” She had been a home economics teacher and was always serene in her role as homemaker and mother. Mr. Chourré liked teaching in the print shop of Tamalpais High School. They were a happy couple. Their home was unpretentious and immaculate. Windows shone, curtains were crisp, chairs were comfortable, but there was no particular color scheme. Mrs. Chourré thought women who went in for “interior decoration” superficial and their families probably uncomfortable. A house should be comfortable for the people who lived in it. Even Dick's dog, Chuck, had his own ottoman in the living room. At the Chourrés' even the dog was comfortable. I thought sadly of Mother closing the blinds so our furniture would not fade and not allowing me to sit on the bed because I might wrinkle the spread and break down the edge of the mattress. Jane and Marianne shared an L-shaped bedroom furnished with two cots and a dressing table made of orange crates. They sat on their cots anytime they felt like it.

And the food! After the quantity cooking at Stebbins, every meal was a treat, for Mrs.
Chourré was an exquisite cook whose kitchen habits fascinated me. As she cooked, she kept a pan of soapy water in the sink. As soon as she used a utensil, she washed it. When Thanksgiving dinner for twelve was on the table, there wasn't one dirty dish in the kitchen.

The Chourrés were a family who found pleasure in small things: the begonias Mr. Chourré grew in a lath-house, the richness of their compost heap, a game of Scrabble, a casserole dish they called “Smells to Heaven.” Jane was making an afghan out of squares of bright scraps of yarn woven on a small loom. Her whole family helped out. Mr. Chourré wove a yellow square on which Jane embroidered
POP
in turquoise yarn. It seemed to me that everything the Chourrés did had a touch of originality about it. Mrs. Chourré kept on the mantelpiece a small box of misspellings of the family name that she clipped from envelopes that came to the house. One of the misspellings was “Chowsie.” Jane and I often referred to her family as the Chowsies.

After Thanksgiving, Clarence began to meet me at the library in the evening and to walk me back to Stebbins. Women were warned against walking alone on the campus at night. Once we went by way of the Greek Theater, where we ran
out on the stage and pretended to lead a yell at a football rally: