New buildings appear on campus. I think my colleagues see them just "appearing"--but I see them being built, in all the intimate detail of building. I see each floor joist, each sheet of 4x8 3/4" tongue-and-groove subflooring, each 2x4 in the framing, each cut with the hole saw to put through conduit, each piece of sheetrock, cut around electrical boxes and plumbing pipes, around doorframes and windows, each nail dimpled, each joint taped to accommodate the joint compound, each stringer in the roof, each bale of shingles placed along the peak, ready to be laid out and tacked down with the nail gun.
And I see the men doing the building. Most of the students and faculty pass them by with less attention than they give to the squirrels and the birds.
But I don't want to romanticize building too much, because while its sensuality and satisfaction call to my memory the smell of pine pitch in a newly-milled 2x4, the heft of a framing hammer, the solidity of a well-built wall, and the sounds of the words plumb, level, and square--the very tangibility of it all--I also remember the other side of the truth of it. I remember the running sore turned to scar covering the whole of my father's left knee--the result of contact with cement while he worked a slab dry, kneeling at the edge to smooth and level it, crawling on the kneepads, the caustic cement oozing inside the rubber, eating away the skin right through the cotton pants. I remember the stiffness and pain of the frozen muscles in my shoulders and back after digging pier holes by hand with a pick and shovel. I remember the grinding effort of trip after trip to move a stack of sheetrock in out of the rain--one of the guys on one end, me on the other--lift, turn vertical, walk, carrying the weight in one arm pulled down hard by the 10x12s, lengthening out the arm tendons. Balance the sheet with the other hand, turn horizontal, slide onto the new stack. I remember the work of it all, the coming home with no resources left in body or mind--too tired to read a book, almost too tired to eat, to think, to be.
Now I wonder about my relationship to the guys making the new college buildings appear, and my relationship to my colleagues who will work inside these buildings. I am an academic worker now, an intellectual worker, not a construction worker.
I make it a point to say hi to the guys working, to recognize that they're there, but I know that they see me as one of the college people. I want to show them my scars, my still-present callouses, but they'd just think I was flirting with them.
And, the truth is that I was never wholly one of them, just as I am not now wholly and unreservedly an academic. In that last year of working, when I was doing my Master's degree at the same time, I never told the guys I was working with that I was taking two hours in the middle of the day four days a week to go to classes--they thought I was going to the lumberyard, or the other job site, or to deal with subcontractors, or something--only my Dad, who I was working for, knew what I was doing. I couldn't have told them, because it would have been difficult between me and the guys I was working with--the old, about-to-retire electrician who thought I was sort of cute, doing this work, the plumber who was my age, but secure enough in his identity as a "stud" that he didn't need to feel threatened by working with a woman, and told me about his girlfriends as if I were one of the guys, the concrete cutter who told me at lunch, sitting in the bed of my pickup, about how much fun he had had in Viet Nam. More important, it would have undercut my authority with the labor crew of teenage boys I supervised. They would immediately have seen me not as the competent worker that my performance, day after day, forced them to see, but as an egghead, a snob, an "intellectual," with all the pejorative force that carries among anti-intellectual working people who would never use a word like "pejorative."
So I never told them that I was going to San Jose State to get a Master's degree in Linguistics. Because I wanted to be one of them. I worked with them, drank beer with them, and I fought hard to win acceptance as a woman working in a job traditionally reserved for men. Like on the day when I was putting up a redwood lattice on top of a brick wall, a lattice that my dad had custom-designed to the owner's specification, and a guy walking by on the sidewalk stopped and watched me. After I'd gone through the motions of picking up a slat, placing it so the slant cuts at top and bottom lay even on the edges of the framing beam, and stapled top and bottom, the guy says, "You know you can buy that stuff pre-made?" in a tone of voice that indicates that he really believes I don't know that, and I'm going through a lot of work for nothing.
Or the time I was "mudding" drywall--laying the mud-like joint compound over a sheetrock wall to make the joints and nailholes smooth before it's painted--and a guy watched me for a while and finally said, "I guess you do know what you're doing, after all." Or my own grandfather, who watched me lay hardwood floor--fit in a piece, drive a chisel underneath it, pull it over so the tongue-and-groove joint is tight, then nail it down with the air gun--for fully a half an hour, then said, "I guess your dad taught you how to do that ok."
To be a woman doing carpentry (or any such job) is to be a target for stares. People behave as though you were performing a spectator sport, instead of a job.
But in spite of all that, I loved it. I wanted to do well at it. And I did.
When I left the job site between twelve and two Monday through Thursday, I drove to San Jose State and went to class in my work clothes--paint-splattered boots, jeans with a hammer loop on the right leg, a screwdriver pocket on the left leg, t-shirt. I took off the rolled bandanna I wore around my forehead, and put it back on to drive back to work.
It was a small program, and everybody got used to me. They had to. I was the most successful student in the department--I got the best grades, got the highest scores on the comprehensive exams. But I was never wholly present in that program. I resisted. I had a crisis of identity, a crisis of epistemology. I had believed in "science" with an understanding of science formulated far away from it--a (what now seems) naive belief that there was really knowledge. In the academy, I discovered that there was only theory.
Now, with my PhD in literature almost in hand, I work in a classroom, rather than a construction site, and I no longer wear my workboots to class, but I feel as much outside as I ever did. I speak in class as if I were giving work orders to my crew, or shouting up to somebody shingling a roof--I try not to, I've tried for years now to change the tone and timbre of my voice to match the way I've changed the vocabulary and syntax of my speech. I've tried to disengage how much I care about what I'm talking about in order to not let my voice slide up that register. I've tried to make my gestures less florid--make it look like I'm pointing a pencil, instead of swinging a hammer. But the workboots and yellow bandanna are still there, ghost-presences, marking me.
There are other consequences of the past I carry into the university with me. "Work" is a relative term--because of my background, I have a hard time defining the activities of reading a book or writing a paper, as work. (Teaching is a borderline--sometimes it seems like work, and sometimes it seems like a privilege). Work, to me, is something you do with your hands. My middle-class boyfriend says that's labor, this is work. But, because I can't really believe it's work (I hear my mother's voice saying to me--get your nose out of that book and go do something) I take on too much. Overcommit myself. Do half again, or even twice as much, as my colleagues, work seven days a week, long hours. My old self doesn't respect my new self. My old self says I'm living a lazy, overprivileged life. My new self says, what more could I do? My old self says, you're not doing anything productive. My new self says, you don't know how to think.
Of course what I call my "old self" was never really my "self"--it was the internalized voices of the world around me, to which I never really felt like I belonged. Now, living in the new world, I tend to identify with that semi-imaginary "old self," just as, at the time, I wanted to identify with some as-yet unimagined "new self." Because I am now here, on University ground, feeling ill at ease, I take the values of my old world as a baseline. Back home, feeling equally ill at ease, I hear myself arguing for (some of) the values of the new world (mostly racial equality and feminism, two things of which my grandfather and various other relatives objected to stringently, although my mom and dad approve in principle of the first, and are almost silent on the second.)
There are other consequences--having been raised among women who do not speak in public, I am often left, after asserting a position, arguing an idea, wanting to apologize for having spoken. For having taken up the time in class to speak. One day I did apologize to a professor. And he was taken by surprise by the fact that I apologized for speaking up in class. He answered, "This would only happen in California." My unspoken answer was that this would only happen in a University where there were students like me.
I watch a carpenter carrying shingles to a new roof. He stands on the plywood that's been nailed over the stringers, and a conveyor-crane brings bundles of shingles up to the roof level. He lifts them off the conveyor, carries them up the roof, lays them out so they can be opened as they're needed. Two roofers will finish the roof, one of them laying out the shingles, the other tacking them down with an air gun, the compressor chugging on the ground below. My brother and I took turns laying out and tacking. But I've never done a roof as big as this one. I've only done houses, and this is a large building that will hold classrooms and offices. I want to be up there with that guy, carrying the shingle bundles across the roof, showing off my ability to walk on the roof's slant, to balance the bundle, to flop it down just right.
So when I walk by the building sites, I say hi and wave to the guys working. It's not enough, of course. Nothing will ever be enough to stitch together the before and after of this life.
I remember what must have been the first time I was ever in a middle-class home. The summer after my first year of high school, my dad was building a deck for my gym teacher, Mrs. Meyers, and her husband, who was an electronics engineer. Mom and I went over one afternoon to see how he was doing. Mrs. Meyers was home, and she invited us into the house.
I remember, even all these years later, being struck by the neatness and orderliness of the place. There was a tile-floored hallway that was cool and completely empty (not full of shoes, coats on pegs and so forth, like our hallway, which was in the back of the house, not the front, because our house had been added onto in an unplanned, free-form sort of way over its 80 year-or-so life). In Mrs. Meyers' living room there was a light-colored carpet that was absolutely clean. There was an arched doorway into the kitchen, which had a dining room on the other side. There wasn't much furniture in the living room, although one wall was covered by a huge finished-oak bookcase with decorative scallops carved on top. There was no TV in the living room--I found out later that it was in the "den," a room that looked like a much more comfortable place to me, with its slightly worn sofa and the dog bed in the corner. The den was where Mrs. Meyers' two young boys were allowed to put their feet up on the furniture.
It was outside the large sliding glass door of the formal living room that my dad was building the deck, but I didn't go out that door. I stopped by the massive bookshelf, full of neatly lined-up hardback books. Looking back, I realize that they were probably book club editions. I hadn't seen that many hardback books outside of a library ever before. (The only bookstore in town sold used paperbacks, mostly romance novels, which it stacked up in piles on the floor and on metal revolving racks, like in the drugstore.)
Mrs. Meyers must have noticed me looking. I was sort of a pitiful student in gym, because I wasn't any good at team sports, but my friend Kelly Crawford and I had been participating in the after-school gymnastics club, inspired by Olga Korbut's performance in the 1972 Olympics. Kelly even wore her hair in those dumb over-the-ears pigtails that Olga wore. My hair was short, so I didn't have to go that far, but I would have liked to have one of those nifty white USSR gymsuits. That probably wouldn't have gone over very well, though, considering how everybody I knew felt about the evils of communism. Despite Kelly's and my dedication to the fabulous Olga, neither of us could do much more than turn cartwheels and do slow back walkovers. Neither of us had taken ballet, so we weren't very graceful, and back then women's gymnastics was more like dancing than anything else. Mrs. Meyers, herself a tanned "outdoorsey" type, must have thought I was pretty useless until she saw me looking at the books. Then she must have thought she'd figured out my number and thought that she could work a little noblesse oblige magic on me.
She pulled one down. "Would you like to borrow this?"
I think I must have looked at my mom for permission, but I don't remember anything she might have said. I was in a stage of being embarrassed by anything my talkative and outgoing mother said to anyone. She undoubtedly told Mrs. Meyers what a big-time reader I was, how I walked into doorways and bruised myself black and blue because I walked through the house reading a book. I said I would like to borrow the book, and Mrs. Meyers started to give it to me, then asked me if my hands were clean. "Books are my friends," she said. "If you borrow this you have to take good care of it."
I held out my hands, suddenly feeling guilty, although I didn't have a clear idea what I should have felt guilty for. My hands must have looked OK to her, because she handed me the book, which turned out to be Down All the Days by Christy Brown, the Irish writer disabled by cerebral palsy. The book was a stream-of-consciousness narrative that I did not understand, that I could find no entry into.
Over that summer Mrs. Meyers must have loaned me other books, because I can remember riding my bicycle into her driveway (I clearly remember seeing the satellite dish her husband was building as a prototype slowly taking form in her yard). But I don't remember what any of the other books might have been, except that one I couldn't really read, since I didn't understand it.
The memory of all this came back to me in a rush yesterday. I could feel again exactly what it was like to stand in that clean, orderly, sterile living room--how small I felt--and I suddenly heard Mrs. Meyers' distinctive, low voice with very sibilant "s"s saying "My books are my friends."
And I realized that this incident had been the first episode in an ongoing series of similar episodes in my life--some representative of "polite society," of "learning," of bourgeois values, holding out to me some icon of culture, but telling me, the little savage, to be sure my hands were clean before touching it. Over and over I've been invited to take the book, but only if my hands are clean enough, if I agree to speak in a manner acceptable in that living room in terms of volume, vocabulary, and tone, if I agree to disassociate myself from my dad in his toolbelt and out-at-the knees pants, sawdust in his hair and paint stains on his face, sawing redwood planks just outside the door.
Why do I write about this painful memory now? To find the me-then, and try to understand her. To try to understand the gap between her and the me-now as I understand myself to be after 11 years of higher education, with a completely different kind of consciousness than I had then. What I'm doing is performing a work of archaeology, sifting through the artifacts of memory to find a lost history.
But this incident and my recollection of it twenty years later also show me how much discontinuity there is between me-then and me-now. Then, I simply held out my hands for Mrs. Meyers' inspection--no reaction, no anger, no recognition, even, of the situation Mrs. Meyers' request makes so clear to me-now. The I who I was then performed a habitual gesture of obedience to authority that makes me-now burn with shame. The recognition that I-then had no basis for resistance to authority, no consciousness with which to rebel, is one of the greatest factors of the discontinuity between me-now and me-then. Now, remembering the incident, I am consumed with anger. I-now would like to re-animate the scene, give me-then the arrogance and flippancy that I've cultivated over the years, have me-then enact a different scene: to refuse, flatly, to co-operate. "Keep your lousy book," I would say, and saunter out onto the half-built redwood deck. But it didn't happen that way, and I-now feel great pain over the passivity, the desire to enter that book-lined world, the willingness to please powerful people that me-then's holding out of her hands demonstrates so clearly.
And I did enter that world. The great paradox is that my entry into that world is what has given me the literacy to talk back.