Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [74]
My parents were aware of this, and so to make sure there was some counterpoint, they signed me in to the oldest and most traditional of all the women’s dorms on campus. It was called Stern Hall and it came complete with a “dorm mother”: a square-shaped dowager with a headful of big stiff white hair who, if this had been the 1930s, would have been cast as Mrs. Bissonette, the nettlesome wife of W. C. Fields. Her job was to make sure the “history and legacy” of Stern Hall were carried forth by its current residents. She wasn’t the type of person I would have expected to find surviving in the wilds of Berkeley, any more than I would have expected to find a ring-tailed lemur. But there she was, in her knee-length, pastel frock and low-heeled pumps, presiding over the mandatory dorm meetings.
This was so not what I’d had in mind.
I was already pretending that Berkeley was actually an art school, albeit one with a football team and a bunch of other required courses. It was the art classes that fed my sense of identity. Everything about them felt right. From the very first day, I was in love with the poetry and tragedy that being an art student conferred on me. When I skulked around the long, echoing halls of Kroeber Hall, the concrete-and-glass art building, I was transformed from an insecure, identity-crisis-riddled middle-class girl to a dark, potentially brilliant Chekhovian creature: too sensitive and perceptive for your world. Now if I threatened to kill myself, I’d be taking with me a whole catalogue’s worth of never-to-be-realized mixed-media masterpieces. Very nice.
It took only a couple of weeks for me to begin to fine-tune the details of my new image so that they lined up properly with those of an Important Artist in Training. Through careful observation and data gathering, I ascertained that the Important Artists of the Bay Area dressed like ranch hands. They drank Jack Daniel’s straight up from unwashed water glasses, rolled their own cigarettes, and lived in warehouses where they also worked. Niceties like furniture and expensive clothes were an afterthought for these impressive men, because their art involved dangerous equipment, like acetylene torches, table saws, and Cor-Ten steel. Like everything else that mattered, real art was a man’s job. So I began to make sculpture, not because I liked to work in three dimensions but because of the sense of macho competence I got from knowing how to operate power tools. Though I didn’t smoke yet, I was working on it, aware that I needed a hand-rolled cig balancing on my lower lip when I put on the goggles and stood in that cyclone of sawdust.
The more I hung around the art department, the more embarrassed I became about the gentility expected from me at Stern Hall. No one could know I lived there or hear that I had to show up at those obligatory dorm meetings. They were more embarrassing than living at home with my parents.
That first dorm meeting got off to a rousing start when Mrs. Bissonette remarked, proudly and without a trace of irony, that this very dorm had risen to the heights throughout the years of Berkeley’s star-studded past by having its residents associated with a traditional image of elegance. “The women of Stern Hall spend hours on their hairdos, and it’s the pride and glory of the dorm,” she said, reflecting a value system so out of touch with Berkeley in the late sixties that for a moment I wondered if we were all performing in a satirical improv group sketch.
Even more galling to me was another of our house rules: the gloriously coiffed women of Stern Hall, Mrs. Bissonette explained, were required to participate in a predinner ritual that was like something out of the antebellum South. At five-thirty we all had to gather at the head of a spiral staircase, in our dinner dresses, and follow Mrs.