My Own Two Feet (9 page)

On the drive up the coast Norma's parents offered to stop in Berkeley for an hour so I could visit Stebbins Hall. Inside Sather Gate, I consulted a map, raced across the campus up Euclid Avenue and Ridge Road to arrive, flushed, panting, and with a stitch in my side, at the granite steps of Stebbins Hall, a three-story L-shaped building with a one-story dining room in the angle of the L. The house-mother, an elderly woman who walked with a cane, came to the door and asked me to sit down before she explained that there was no possibility of my being admitted for the fall semester. My look of despair and disappointment must have touched her because she kindly said that she would add my name to
the waiting list even though there were rarely any cancellations. Perhaps another semester…

I thanked the housemother, then, feeling that I should say something more, added that if I should be accepted, I hoped I would be assigned a roommate who was a good student and who did not smoke. In the 1930s many girls took up smoking as soon as they went away to college. Then I raced back across the campus to meet Norma and her parents and continue the drive home.

Summer vacation was mercifully short because Cal's fall semester began the middle of August. I read and reread the dean's list of approved housing, which listed nothing I could afford and which I did not show my parents, who seemed not to give a thought as to how I would live. I had to manage somehow, even if I had to work for my room and board. I saw my friends, made over some clothes, and at Mother's suggestion made a dark red taffeta formal and a rose moiré dress with three black velvet bands around the hem for parties Mother was sure I would be invited to. Mother also saw to it that I had a beautiful tailor-made coat. I wish I still had it.

The best part of summer was a couple of weekends spent at Puddin' with Claudine and her mother. Claudine had been hired to teach first
and second grades in Dee, a sawmill town near Mount Hood. She was to earn seventy-five dollars a month for nine months plus an extra five dollars a month because she could play the piano. Eighty dollars a month and she would no longer live at home! Lucky Claudine. My own financial independence required two more years of college and a year of graduate work, which seemed forever when compared with the riches Claudine was soon to earn with her brand-new credential.

Then one sunny afternoon late in July the mailman shoved a letter through the mail slot, and Mother, always an eager mailbox watcher, opened the little door in the living room wall, pulled out an envelope, glanced at it, and handed it to me. The leaping heart of Wordsworth beholding a rainbow in the sky could not compare with the leaping of my heart when I beheld a letter from Stebbins Hall. I had been accepted for the fall semester. Joy flooded through me. Now I had nothing to worry about, not a single thing. I danced around, waving the letter.

Mother, who could always find something to worry her, said, “You must not let Stebbins make you wait on table. Once a waitress, always a waitress.”

Dad, when he came home from work and heard the news, said I had had enough of travel by
Greyhound. I must travel by train and sleep in a berth. Mother gave me precise instructions on how to button the green curtains that would enclose the berth, how to go to the dining car, how to tip the porter. Train travel was more comfortable but less interesting than bus travel. The Pullman car was half-empty, and I had no one to talk to. Eating the cheapest meal in the dining car with its starched napkins and rosebuds in silver vases gave me an agreeable feeling of sophistication in spite of an awkward encounter with a catsup bottle that refused to yield its contents until the waiter gave it a whack.

And so, one August morning as the fog was retreating from San Francisco Bay, I disembarked Southern Pacific into a world that smelled like tomato catsup. That's peculiar, I thought as I looked up University Avenue toward the Campanile, why should a university smell like catsup? As I collected my steamer trunk and typewriter crate, I felt academically confident. In spite of the expunged D in Botany, I had always been an honor student. In many other ways, however, I felt insecure. Did I have enough money, were my clothes right, would I make friends, would I choose the right courses? The great University loomed large and exciting, a new field to conquer.

At Stebbins I was given a key and shown to room 228 at the rear of the building, a room I was to occupy for two of the most interesting years of my life. It overlooked a row of garages with clotheslines on the roofs. Beyond, a weedy hill slanted up to the backs of small apartment houses. The room had cream-colored walls and curtains, basic furniture, and, I noted with interest, a wall telephone, which I was to learn could receive incoming calls. Outgoing calls were made on a pay phone on the stair landing. The room was part of a suite, connected by a bathroom to another room.

When I had finished unpacking, the work-shift manager knocked on the door and told me I had been assigned to wash glassware after lunch. Would Mother approve, I wondered as I made up my bed with its terra-cotta-colored spread. Then I sat down to write a note to my parents telling them I had arrived safely and would not be waiting tables. To be on the safe side, I did not mention what I would be doing.

When I returned from mailing my note, I found my roommate had arrived and was unpacking. Her name was Miriam. She was a tall, slender girl with curly hair who was wearing blue shorts and a pink blouse. We exchanged fundamental roommate information. She was a sophomore
from Utah and was putting herself through Cal on a scholarship awarded each year to the Utah student with the highest grade point average. She had won it twice and had every intention of winning it two more years. At Stebbins she chose to wait on tables at dinner because waitresses ate before the other girls. This allowed her to go to the library early.

“I'm so glad you're here,” Miriam told me. “My last roommate tried to keep a puppy in the bathroom.”

Miriam's wardrobe, as limited as mine, was quickly unpacked. She tacked her shoe bag above mine on the closet door. Stebbins had a rule that nothing was allowed on closet floors or under beds. Then she set about making up her bed as if the foot were the head, placed her pillow at the opposite end, and covered her bed with the spread so our beds looked alike.

How odd. “Why do you make your bed that way?” I asked.

“The dean says we have to sleep with our heads eight feet apart, and the only way we can do it is for one of us to sleep with her head at the foot of the bed.”

Diagonally our heads were eight feet apart. Maybe that's Cal's way of preventing the spread of germs, I thought.

Then Miriam made an astonishing remark. “Someday I'm going to marry a physicist.”

To me physics was a course in a catalog. I had never given the subject a thought, other than to avoid it. “Any special physicist?” I asked.

“No.”

“Then why a physicist?”

“Because they are so nice,” she answered. “I am sure one will come along someday.”

I could see that I had an unusual roommate.

While Miriam and I were getting to know each other, the house was filled with thumps of trunks and boxes, and the laughter and greeting of girls, all sorts of girls, I was to learn in the next few days. Tall, short, shy, “fast,” brilliant, struggling, colorless, beautiful, neat, sloppy, confident, brokenhearted. Most were wearing homemade clothes. One girl had tailored a coat from a blanket. They came from small towns, ranches, mediumsized cities outside commuting distance of Oakland and San Francisco, and other states. Girls from small high schools were confused and bewildered in a university of more than fourteen thousand students. Many girls had no idea of the sort of education they wanted or needed. Sheltered girls were overwhelmed by the freedom of a university that expected them to be adults. Some girls knew exactly where they were going in life
and how they would get there. Some, and I was one, were sure where they wanted to go but did not know if they could find the money to get there.

A few girls were ashamed of living in a cooperative house, but most were glad to be there. Some had had unsatisfactory experiences working for room and board even though the university set the pay and the number of hours worked. Fitting into a strange household was awkward, and they were usually expected to baby-sit weekends when they longed for fun. One girl had been treated as a maid and required to wear a little white apron and a cap. For them Stebbins was a relief.

During the two years I lived at Stebbins, four girls occupied the other half of the suite at different times. One was a statuesque girl from Carmel who had worked as an artists' model. “Naked?” I asked, shocked.

“Oh yes,” she answered, and made a face. She had not enjoyed the work.

Another girl, short and plump, suffered because she felt she was too fat. Sometimes when I came in from classes, I would find her, florid and sweating, wrapped in a woolen blanket, lying on her bed after soaking herself in bathwater as hot as she could stand. Her weight loss, if any, was only temporary, and to me did not seem
worth the misery, but then I was, as people often said, “just skin and bones.”

Then there was a girl from Montana who padded around in beaded moccasins. Her roommate was tall, beautiful Nellie, who once came to me in desperation. She had been elected to the history honor society and was told that for her initiation she was required to read an original poem about the War of Jenkins' Ear. Since I was an English major, would I
please
write it for her? I did not fancy myself a poet but was willing to try if she would tell me what the battle was about. She told me about the eighteenth-century battle between England and Spain that began with Captain Jenkins displaying in the House of Commons his ear, which had been amputated by Spaniards before they pillaged his ship. This colorful event seemed to lend itself to the ballad form, and so, tapping out rhythm with my pencil, I wrote “The Ballad of Jenkins' Ear.” Nellie reported that it was well received at the dinner. I wish I had kept a copy.

These four suite-mates, all so different, shared one thing in common: Each took her turn at cleaning the bathroom without complaint. In addition to our bathroom-cleaning schedule, roommates took turns dusting furniture, vacuuming rugs, and making sure there were no dust mice
under beds or on closet floors. All rooms were inspected once a week. Slovenliness was not acceptable at Stebbins Hall.

I spent the first day or two of that first semester hurrying up and down hills, campus map in hand, inhaling the smell of tomato catsup, which someone had explained came from a cannery “down in the flats.” Downhill to Harmon Gym, where I waited in a long, long line to register for classes, uphill to the women's gym for a physical examination. There all the girls were handed ancient gray bathing suits to wear for modesty. Why I cannot guess. They were ill-fitting and all had large holes in the crotches. Off to Cowell Hospital for a hearing test, but I do not recall an eye test. Downhill again to register at the Employment Office, which had nothing to offer someone who had earned money only by knitting or by working in a library. New students did not rate even the most menial job of shelving books. With ravenous appetite I hurried back up the hill to Stebbins while music rang out from the Campanile, making my feet lighter as they carried me toward food.

Meals at Stebbins! Eighty-two girls plus fifteen boarders who lived in rooming houses across the street. The low ceiling of our crowded dining room compressed conversation, laughter, and the
rattle of dishes into a din that forced us to raise our voices to high pitches as if we were talking to people who had hearing problems. Waitresses hurried, balancing as many as five plates at a time. Busgirls leaned to one side under the weight of heavy trays of dirty dishes they were carrying to the kitchen. Nevertheless, from the babble I learned that at Cal grades were important, and something to worry about. Required courses were often dreaded and certain professors should be avoided if possible. When I shouted my name and “I'm majoring in English,” I was surprised at the sort of answers shouted back: “Poor you” or “I'm glad I'm not in your shoes. You get to take English Comprehensive!” What's so terrible about an English exam, I wondered. Their remarks stayed with me as I joined another girl in the kitchen to attack glassware.

We filled two sinks with hot water, poured into one strong granulated soap that made us sneeze. We came to dread days when sherbet glasses doubled our work, but we felt our job was better than that of girls who scraped plates and loaded them into the antique dishwasher. We worked as fast as we could, entertaining ourselves with knock-knock jokes, and left the kitchen damp with perspiration and with hands that looked like
wet pink corduroy. The luxury of rubber gloves did not enter our frugal minds.

After my first day of glass washing, I ran upstairs to consult my copy of the General Catalogue and read in the English section, “The Comprehensive Final Examination must be taken at the end of the senior year. It will consist of two three-hour papers, the second of which will take the form of an essay. The examination will cover English literature from 1350 to 1900.” There goes Beowulf, I thought. He would be no help at all. Neither would the modern American poetry, biography, or essays I had enjoyed at Chaffey. Mrs. Kegley's course in drama, although called English, had been mostly about playwrights of other countries. I consulted the lower-division courses taught at Cal, which included Survey of English Literature, which I had not had, at least not as described in the catalog. Somehow I would have to manage.

I soon put the Comprehensive out of my mind because of the struggle going on at Stebbins Hall. Almost as soon as the semester began, girls began to mutter with dissatisfaction over the food. Menus were planned by the housemother, who sat erect at the head table with her mouth set in a straight line. Plainly, she expected us to eat without complaint the meals set before us. Since food had never particularly interested me,
I was not much concerned until the day stewed rabbit was served. The rabbit had been shot. We knew this because we found shot in the meat. And then there was a lunch of inedible, lightly scorched oyster soup with cantaloupe for dessert. Hungry girls who burned energy climbing hills and stairs pushed their dishes away while the housemother sat erect, eating her scorched soup as if she savored it. Madeline, the student manager, a young woman of intelligence and character, rose from the table and headed for the office of the Dean of Women while the rest of us faced a hungry afternoon.