Berkeley

After prison, Berkeley becomes the setting for Jenny’s tentative return to ordinary life. Two years after coming home, she finds a place in a communal household, takes a job at a juice bar, and begins to allow herself modest desires again. The city offers neither a clean break from her past nor the reunions she anticipates; instead, it gives her a provisional home from which to live with their absence.

Return and Readjustment

Back in Berkeley, Jenny is surprised to miss the East Coast, whose quiet and lushness remain connected in her mind to a former self. She recognizes that she has used politics to justify wrong turns and lost time, and that this defense makes it harder to acknowledge desires that seem small by comparison, such as wanting a pleasant room. She does not feel that she deserves such comforts. Berkeley therefore marks not a triumphant restoration but the beginning of a change in what Jenny can permit herself to want.

Her circumstances also follow an unequal passage through the legal system. Pauline’s case attracts extensive public discussion of her condition, while Jenny is scarcely mentioned. Their sentences and later outcomes differ: Pauline is convicted in connection with the bank robbery but serves less than two years before her sentence is commuted; Jenny receives a minimum sentence for the recruitment-center bombings and is transferred to work release after a year for good behavior. The account presents these legal outcomes as only part of what each woman pays. Jenny carries a new sense of shame about being treated as an unusually deserving recipient of leniency, and prison leaves her conscious of how racial expectations shape that treatment. Her return to Berkeley follows this uneven experience rather than erasing it.

A Room Chosen for Its Window

Jenny answers an advertisement for a roommate in a Berkeley house. The room initially offered to her is an upstairs bedroom under the eaves, with four walls and a door but little light and a view of a neighboring roof. What draws her instead is a three-sided nook off the kitchen, technically the dining room, with a large bay window overlooking a rosemary plant and a lime tree. She is determined to have that view. The preference is modest, but its importance lies in her willingness to act on it: she is beginning to want something for herself again.

The household’s response turns that private preference into a shared decision. Its members enjoy gathering around the large wooden table in the dining room, and after meeting Jenny they hold a house meeting and vote to invite her in. They propose making a partition for her nook and turning the upstairs bedroom into a quiet library. Younger than Jenny, the residents are graduate students or people searching for their direction; their communal routines include sharing staples and tending compost. The novel presents these arrangements as forms of resistance belonging to a different generation and a different political climate from Jenny’s earlier life. Her place in the house is thus both personal and communal: she gets the window she wants, while the household reshapes its shared space to make room for her.

At twenty-nine, Jenny senses that a transition in herself is nearly complete. She thinks increasingly about having a child, not primarily through romance or marriage, but through the possibility of becoming a companion to one. She imagines this new life as something for which she is accumulating knowledge and ability, while understanding her Berkeley home as a temporary station and perhaps a preparation. The desire remains a hope, not an accomplished future, but it signals how far her attention has moved from the collective certainty of her earlier political life toward care and personal possibility.

Work and Public Recognition

Through her housemates, Jenny finds work at a juice bar run as another collective. Its relative permanence matters to her: she has missed regular work and values leaving home for a workplace with its own social order. The labor is ordinary and physical, turning fruit into juice, and she welcomes its earthy simplicity and the freedom to let her mind wander while she works. Berkeley gives her a routine that is neither a political mission nor an extension of household life.

The juice bar also makes her public identity visible in a new way. Some customers recognize her as a minor celebrity and seem to hope she will acknowledge that they know who she is. Jenny neither confirms nor denies their recognition; she smiles, asks her usual questions, and makes their juice. Her practiced nonacknowledgment lets the encounters pass without an explanation, but it does not remove their effect. Her notoriety creates a fresh kind of estrangement: strangers become tentative around her, and she can keep them at a distance by appearing not to notice what they know.

Deferred Reunions and the Meaning of Home

At the juice bar, Jenny privately marks the dates that seem likely to bring changes. William has received parole, and she knows he would remember the date of her own release even if he did not know that she had been paroled. She waits without knowing whether she feels hope or dread, but he does not come. Berkeley is consequently not the place of the reunion she once might have imagined; it is where she has to continue after waiting for it.

Pauline’s release raises a different expectation. Jenny half-expects her to appear at the juice bar, then pictures the clothes and watchful manner in which she might arrive. Pauline never comes through the door. These absences give the Berkeley episodes their quiet tension: the city is a site of restored routines and chosen shelter, but not of restored closeness. Jenny has begun to make a life there—with a room selected for its green view, shared space, work, and an imagined future—while William and Pauline remain elsewhere, present chiefly in the meetings that do not happen.