Beverly Cleary.
My Own Two Feet.
A Memoir.
PART ONE.
Friends, Hopes, Exams.
Bus Trip to a New Life.
The three of us, Mother, Dad, and I, stood on the sidewalk outside the Greyhound bus station in Portland, Oregon, searching for words we could not find or holding back words we could not speak. The sun, bronze from the smoke of September forest fires, cast an illusory light. Nothing seemed real, but it was. I was leaving, actually leaving, for California, the Golden State, land of poppies, big red geraniums, trees heavy with oranges, palm trees beneath cloudless skies, and best of all, no Depression. I had seen it all on postcards and in the movies, and so had the rest of my cla.s.s at Grant High School. California was the goal of many. John Steinbeck had not yet, in 1934, revised our thinking.
And now I was one of the lucky ones going to this glorious place where people made movies all day and danced the night away. I was escaping the clatter of typewriters in business school and going instead to college. As I stood there in the smoky light in my neat navy blue dress, which Mother had measured a fashionable twelve inches from the floor when I made it, and with a five-dollar bill given to me by my father for emergencies rolled in my stocking, I tried to hide my elation from my parents.
Dad, I know, was sad to see his only child leave home, but the decision had been his. He had thoughtfully smoked his pipe for several evenings, mulling over the unexpected letter from Mother"s cousin Verna Clapp inviting me to spend the winter with her family in Ontario in Southern California. I could attend tuition-free Chaffey Junior College, where she was the librarian.
Mother had dismissed the letter, saying, "Isn"t that just like Verna, so impractical." The Depression had made Oregonians relentlessly practical. Dad, however, did not dismiss the letter. Finally, after he rapped his pipe against his ashtray, he said, "Beverly is going." Dad, a quiet man, had watched tension build between Mother and me as I resisted her struggles to mold me into her ideal of a perfect daughter. He had also observed my increasing unhappiness over an obsessive young man I shall call Gerhart, six years older than I, whom I had come to dislike but who was unshakable because Mother encouraged him. "Now, you be nice to Gerhart," Mother often said. "He"s a good boy, and he"s lonely." Mother longed to have me popular with boys. Although I liked boys and was friendly with them at school, I was not concerned with popularity. As the months wore on, I wasn"t at all nice to Gerhart. I was horrid.
At first Mother thought Dad"s p.r.o.nouncement was preposterous-a young girl traveling all that distance alone, she couldn"t think of such a thing. Even though I was eighteen, Mother always referred to me as a young girl. Eventually she relented. She was anxious for me somehow to go to college so I would have a profession to fall back on. "We can"t leave you a lot of money," she often said, "but we want to leave you prepared to take care of yourself and any children you might have. Widows so often have to run boardinghouses."
Now, beside the Greyhound bus, Mother fretted. Fearful dangers lurked in California: earthquakes, infantile paralysis, evil strangers. Heaven only knew what might happen to a young, inexperienced girl. "If she doesn"t have any sense now, she never will have," my father said.
"Maybe we should have packed your galoshes," fussed Mother. "It must rain down there sometime."
Because Dad was present, I did not say, "Oh, Mother." Instead I said, "I might not need them," and then, to soothe her, "and you can always mail them if I do." I had no intention of wearing galoshes in California, not ever, no matter how much it rained, if it ever did rain. Postcards did not show rain in California, and the only rain in movies seemed to be raging storms at sea with sails ripping, masts broken, and sailors washed overboard.
What I really wanted at that moment was to tell my father how grateful I was to him for insisting I should leave, but I could not, not in front of Mother, who worked so hard, who made such sacrifices for me. The Greyhound driver, jaunty in his uniform, bounded out of the station and onto the bus. "Well, I guess I"d better get on," I said. Beneath my hidden elation I was nervous about such a long journey even though Mother had written to former neighbors and arranged for them to meet me and put me up overnight in San Francisco and in Los Angeles.
Dad kissed me. Mother said, "Be a good girl and don"t forget to write."
"I won"t," I promised. None of us noticed that Mother"s requests required two different answers, but of course I always had been, mostly, a good girl. A lovely girl, people said, pleasing Mother and annoying me, for I did not feel lovely, not one bit. I felt restless, angry, rebellious, disloyal, and guilty.
In the bus, I looked down at my parents, who suddenly seemed older. I felt as if I had aged them. We exchanged waves and weak smiles, the driver started the motor and shifted gears, and the bus lumbered out of the station, heading south and away from, I hoped, the Depression and all the grief it had brought to my family and to Oregon. I was limp from the emotion of departure, but I was free!
As the bus rolled along the two-lane highway, I pressed my face against the window and tried to memorize all the scenes that meant so much to me: the falls at Oregon City, where my great-grandfather had built the first mill in Oregon; the little white church squeezed between two poplars that had grown so large they seemed about to lift the building from its foundations, the church where my best friend, Claudine, planned to be married someday; the water tower at Canby that marked the turnoff for Claudine"s family cabin on the Pudding River where I had spent many relaxed summer days. On, on we rode, with farms and woods fading in dusk and smoke.
The bus stopped at Salem, which brought back a memory that made me smile. My parents had once taken me to Salem because Mother felt visiting the state capital was every citizen"s duty and because she wanted me to see the State Home for Girls so I would know what happened to girls who "went bad." Although I was a conscientious girl, a good student more interested in the high school paper, the literary club, and sewing than in boys, Mother worried about my "going bad," as if I were an apple.
The state home had seemed to me a beautiful place where the girls" rooms, looking out on lawns and old trees, were neat, practical, and attractive, quite different from my own room, where I slept in my great-grandfather"s creaky four-poster bed, which Mother had festooned with a ruffled pink voile bedspread to make it look feminine. She had also draped an old dresser with more pink voile. My wallpaper was a pretty melding of pastel flowers, but the windows looked out on the neighbors" tan Stone-tone stucco house. Mother"s Salem lesson in morality had been lost on me. A room in the state home had seemed so pleasant and so convenient it was almost worth going bad for, not that I ever expected to have a chance. I was such a lovely girl.
As the bus rolled out of the capital into darkness, elation faded to sadness and then to grief. Mother, Dad, and the Depression. Joy seemed to have drained out of Mother, who would have been happy teaching but whose credential had not been valid for years, and in those days, work went only to men, single women, or married women whose husbands were disabled. Dad had grown quiet after he had given in and sold the farm that had been in the family for three generations. His abundant harvests had not brought fair prices in the 1920s, and farm life was too strenuous for my small, intense mother. Dad was never comfortable with city life and was lucky, in those grim days, to have a job at all, a job managing the safe-deposit vault in the bas.e.m.e.nt of a bank, a job he disliked. Now I was the focus of my parents" hopes; I must be educated no matter what sacrifices had to be made. I longed to have my parents happy, to share, not sacrifice. The burden of guilt was heavy.
Curled up on two seats, I slept lightly, aware that the bus was laboring over the Siskiyou Mountains. As the sun rose, we pulled into an Agricultural Station shed in a place my bus timetable said was Hornbrook. I was actually in California! The driver ordered sleepy, muttering pa.s.sengers off the bus with their hand luggage, which we were required to open for inspectors looking for wicked Oregon insects that might destroy California"s rich crops. Pa.s.sengers grumbled. Couldn"t inspectors see that insects could fly across the border? I helped eat some of the fruit pa.s.sengers would not allow to be confiscated, including oranges imported from California that were refused re-admittance.
Back on the bus. A greasy breakfast in Weed, a lumber town fragrant with the resinous smell of sawdust. Mount Shasta, a dumpy mountain when compared with beautiful Mount Hood and the perfect cone of Mount St. Helens, Portland"s backdrops. The bus rolled on down the mountains to flat, khaki-colored land where something must have grown because every few miles we pa.s.sed corrugated metal warehouses with DEPEW painted on the roofs. Dirt-colored hills in the distance did not help. The landscape was all so barren and ugly, so different from my postcard dreams, and the worst part was there was no water in the rivers. Never in my life had I seen a dry riverbed. At rest stops I felt as if I were wading through the shimmering heat. After a noontime tuna-fish sandwich and gla.s.s of milk, I closed my eyes to shut out the barren land of DEPEW. This was not the California I expected. I felt too dejected to attempt conversation with seatmates.
In late afternoon a hint of cool air drifted through open windows. Pa.s.sengers sat up, tried to smooth clothes and pat hair into place. Where there was a breeze there was hope. We crossed the Sacramento River and were revived by the sight of water, pa.s.sed through the stench of oil refineries, saw San Francis...o...b..y. Farther, on the left, brown hills were punctuated by a white tower. "What is that?" I asked the woman who had taken the seat next to me.
"That"s the Campanile on the University of California campus," she said. Campanile. What a beautiful word. "And over there," she said, pointing to an island in the bay, "is Alcatraz."
Alcatraz! I was actually seeing the notorious prison. Al Capone, gangsters, machine guns, bodies lying in the streets, just like the movies. Wait till I told my friends in Portland I had actually seen Alcatraz. To the left of Alcatraz, San Francisco was silhouetted against the setting sun. I perked up. The land of DEPEW was behind; excitement lay ahead.
The ferry ride across the bay made me feel like a world traveler. Overnight case in hand, I walked off the ferry into the grim, gray ferry building, where-what a relief-I was met by former Portland neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Reeves and their daughter, Evelyn, two years older than I, who, when we were in grammar school, had rippled through "Rustle of Spring" on the piano while I plunked miserably through "The Happy Farmer." Even though the Reeveses had not seen me for several years, and nearly twenty-four hours on a bus had left me rumpled and unwashed, they welcomed me so warmly and seemed so dear and so familiar that I forgave Evelyn her efficient rippling and rustling on the piano.
San Francisco! Mother had told me of seeing rubble from the 1906 earthquake when she and her two cousins Verna and Lora had come out west to teach school and to seek adventure, but neither her description nor postcards had prepared me for such a city. Buildings taller than any in Portland, stucco houses shoulder to shoulder, up and down hills, sitting on top of their own garages with ap.r.o.ns of lawn so tiny they could be cut with scissors.
The Reeveses drove to their apartment, which had rooms as large as those in a house. In Portland, Mother discouraged me from a.s.sociating with friends who lived in apartments because, according to Mother, apartment dwellers were not "substantial." Substantial people, by Mother"s definition, lived in houses, mowed lawns, pruned roses.
And here in San Francisco, the Reeveses, substantial as all get-out, lived respectably in an apartment furnished with the familiar fringed lamp shades and overstuffed mohair furniture seen in so many Portland houses. Mrs. Reeves served lamb chops for dinner. I had never tasted lamb because Dad, as a boy on the farm, had eaten so much mutton he vowed never to eat any part of a sheep again. The chops were delicious. Dessert, fresh figs with cream, soft sweet circles, cream-colored, with pink spoke-like centers, delectable as well as beautiful. In Portland figs were tan, dried, stewed, and "good for what ails you."
During dinner, when Mr. Reeves told me the city hall was trimmed with real gold, I believed him. Conversation bloomed with colorful words: Marina, Presidio, Hetch Hetchy, Embarcadero, commuter. "What"s a commuter?" I asked, never having heard the word. Evelyn explained that to commute was to travel regularly back and forth between two places. She commuted from home by streetcar, ferry, and train to the University of California. In Portland people did not commute. They walked a block or two to a bus or streetcar line, or if they had a car and could afford gas, they drove.
The next morning the Reeveses put me on a bus to Los Angeles. Courage intact, I settled myself, prepared to enjoy the rest of my journey. Two drunken sailors who had taken the backseat sang until they fell asleep. As we drove through San Jose, feathery fronds of pepper trees stroked the top of the bus. My seat partner, a man old enough to be my father, wanted to talk. Mother had warned me about talking to strangers, but she had not told me I should not listen, so I listened. The man said he was supposed to be in Nevada for six weeks to establish residence so he could divorce his wife. He had slipped away to find his daughter, who had run off with a gangster. Divorce was almost unheard of in my neighborhood in Portland in the 1930s. As for gangsters, they existed in Chicago, on Alcatraz, but mostly in the movies. I couldn"t wait to write to Claudine.
We rolled down the two-lane highway past orchards and acres of lettuce, and, amazing to me, high school boys, unlike Oregon boys, practicing football in shorts. A brief stop in San Luis Obispo, another tuna-fish sandwich, another gla.s.s of milk, and, with a nervous eye on the bus, a short walk along a street of white stucco cottages with hedges of l.u.s.ty red geraniums, real California geraniums growing in the ground instead of in pots. Once back on the bus, the man beside me, unburdened of his troubles, fell asleep. Arroyo Grande, Santa Maria, Los Alamos, Spanish place-names that seemed beautiful to me. So many small towns in Oregon were named after early settlers: Barlow, Heppner, Boring. Some were named after settlers" wives: Beulah, Ada. Others reflected pioneer feelings: Sweet Home, Remote, Sublimity. Still others had Indian names: Owyhee, Yoncalla, Umatilla. I had always found Oregon place-names interesting because they revealed so much about the past, but somehow, as I consulted my timetable, I felt they lacked the musical sounds of Los Olivos, Santa Ynez, Goleta along Highway 101. After a rest stop in Santa Barbara, I must have fallen asleep, for my next recollection is of darkness and of the bus pulling into the Los Angeles Greyhound station.
Stiff and rumpled, with my overnight bag in hand, I climbed off the bus and searched for the familiar faces of friends who were to meet me. No one, not Rowena Reed, her mother, or her sister, was in sight. I had not seen them for at least four years, since they had boarded with a widow in the next block in Portland. Could they have changed so much I did not recognize them? Had I changed so much? Had they forgotten me? Even with five dollars rolled in my stocking, I had very little money. The station teemed with exhausted, shabby travelers who seemed menacing and may have been. I did the only thing I could think of: I carried my overnight case into a telephone booth, shut the door, sat down on the case, and burst into tears. After a comforting snivel, I pulled myself together and tried to decide what to do. I had wanted adventure, hadn"t I? Well, here it was, staring me in the eye in a bad neighborhood in a strange city. Wasn"t this adventure? Of course it was. I reached for the telephone book, but as I did so, I saw familiar, plump Rowena and her mother sitting at a lunch counter.
Rowena and Mrs. Reed were as relieved to see me as I was to see them. They drove me to a restaurant where we sat in a horseshoe-shaped booth upholstered in fake black leather, which seemed both elegant and sinister after the hamburger restaurants popular with high school students in Portland. In those Depression days, no family I knew ate in real restaurants. Rowena and her mother, saying they had already eaten, ordered for me a daunting platter of crab Louis, and for themselves, coffee. Rowena drinking coffee? Such sophistication! No one our age in Portland drank coffee, at least no one I knew. After fatigue, nerves, and excitement allowed me to make a dent in the expensive crab Louis, Rowena helped out by eating half of it. Then Mrs. Reed dropped us off at a court apartment shared by her daughters: two rooms, bath, and kitchenette, one of ten or twelve similar apartments grouped in a U shape around a strip of gra.s.s. Mrs. Reed went off to the children"s home where she lived and worked as a matron.
Rowena"s older sister, Estelle, said, "Hi, Beverly, you"ve sure changed."
I answered, "h.e.l.lo, Estelle," but my eyes were on one of their friends, who was standing in the middle of the room wearing a black lace bra and panties. How terribly-I pulled a word from my reading vocabulary that I had never spoken-risque. Black lace underwear! Gosh!
"Hi there," said the very blond friend as she pulled a low-cut dress over her head. Didn"t California girls wear slips, I wondered, or marveled. As she clamped a curler on her eyelashes, she said, "I"m madly in love with a race car driver, so I"m going to the races." On her way out the door she said over her shoulder, "I"m going to have him, and I don"t care how I get him."
I was shocked, but Rowena and Estelle did not seem to think there was anything unusual about this scene, so I tried to act nonchalant. Nonchalant was a favorite word with certain Grant High students who worked to achieve an air of indifference no matter how excited others might be. Now here I was, nonchalant, too.
Rowena said she felt a sore throat coming on. "Some whiskey might help," she said as she took a bottle from a cupboard.
"Real whiskey?" I asked, half expecting her to rub it on the outside of her throat. Prohibition had been repealed the year before, but I had never seen anyone drink so much as a beer.
"Sure," said Rowena. "Want some?"
"No, thanks," I said with my new nonchalance, trying to sound as if I drank whiskey every day but didn"t happen to care for it at the moment.
Rowena sipped her whiskey. I watched her and thought with wicked pleasure, If only Mother could see me now!
A New Family, an Old House.
The next afternoon, heat baked through the soles of my shoes as I walked into the Ontario Greyhound station, a station as gritty as all the others on my journey. Yes, the stationmaster informed me, my trunk and typewriter had arrived, but the trunk could not leave the station until the agricultural inspector had examined it. He reached for the telephone, the inspector arrived, I unlocked my trunk and watched him paw through my belongings and p.r.o.nounce them undefiled by Oregon insects and worthy of entry into California.
With shaking hands I found the Clapps" number in the telephone book, a pamphlet compared to Portland"s directory, dropped in my nickel, and placed my call. A man answered, Fred Clapp, Verna"s husband. "Beverly?" he said. "I"ll be right there."
In a few minutes a tall man with curly gray hair strode into the station. He looked like the physical education teacher he was, vigorous, friendly, brisk, and firm. "So you are Beverly," he said in a voice so resonant that, had he raised it, it would have carried the length of a football field.
Fred loaded my trunk and typewriter into an old sedan, a green Rickenbacker, a car I had never heard of. He was not a man for small talk, a relief because I was too reserved to speak freely to a stranger. We drove up Euclid Avenue, Ontario"s main street, which appeared to end in mountains. This was the California I had imagined. A strip of lawn in the center of Euclid was bordered by a double row of graceful pepper trees. Orange and lemon trees grew in yards along the avenue. Squatty palms grew there, too, but silhouetted against the brilliant blue sky were the tall palms with feather-duster tops pictured in geography books and on postcards.
"We"ll stop at Chaffey so you can register," Fred said. He was not a man to waste time, money, words, or anything else.
A block and a half from the college, Fred steered the Rickenbacker into a driveway between a row of eucalyptus trees and a gray two-story house that I knew had once been a downtown boardinghouse until Fred bought it for seventy-five dollars, moved it to his property, knocked out part.i.tions, and turned it into a family dwelling. Ahead, in a large garage, I was surprised to see two more Rickenbackers, one a gray sedan and the other a red topless touring car that looked like a big bathtub on wheels.
As Fred hoisted my trunk and typewriter crate out of the car, a German shepherd left his spot in the shade, moseyed over, languidly wagged his tail as if the heat had drained its energy, and returned to flop down in his patch of shade. "His name is Guard" was Fred"s introduction.
Verna came out of the house and walked across the lawn with her hand extended. My hand in hers felt comfortable. Her long dark hair, twisted and pinned, made me wish Mother had not bobbed her own beautiful black hair, which I took such pleasure in brushing when I was a little girl. "So you are Beverly," Verna said. "I would have known you anywhere: You look so much like your mother." That"s what everyone said.
As Verna led me into the house, I noted that the front door had a bell that twirled and a frosted panel surrounded by squares of crinkled colored gla.s.s like the doors of many old houses of my early childhood in Yamhill, Oregon. The living room, converted from two, perhaps three, rooms, was long and narrow, with a high ceiling. I had an impression of a couch and chairs bright with flowered slip-covers, an antique fireplace between bookshelves that reached the ceiling, fresh flowers on a marble-topped table. The side windows looked through eucalyptus trees with peeling bark to an orange grove (a grove, not an orchard!); the front windows looked across the lawn, a privet hedge, and another orange grove to the San Gabriel Mountains.
"I have never seen mountains without trees before," I remarked. In Oregon, mountains that did not have trees were capped with snow.
"Why, they"re covered with trees," Verna said, surprised that I could not see trees. The mountains looked brown and desolate to me. In the excitement of my arrival, the significance of my not seeing trees did not occur to either of us.
Verna led me upstairs to my room, explained that it had two doors because it had once been two rooms in the boardinghouse, showed me the bathroom, and left me to freshen up. My room had a slanting ceiling and two sash windows set so low the sills were only a few inches from the floor. Between the windows was a black drop-front desk with a pair of gilded flatirons for bookends, a floor lamp, and an antique chair. The bedspread was Indian cotton with a paisley design softened by many washings. A pair of j.a.panese prints hung above the bed. At the opposite side of the room was an oak dresser set between two small closets, one with shelves and the other with hangers. Fred had already set my trunk against one of the doors, and my typewriter crate waited for the lid to be unscrewed. The room was as convenient as a room in the Oregon State Home for Girls but much brighter and more attractive.
When Verna left, I went to the window. There was the Chaffey tower, seen through a tangle of strange shrubs and trees, and close to the house-it couldn"t be-yes, it was, an avocado tree! Alligator pears, some Oregonians called the fruit Claudine and I sometimes bought and shared, if we could sc.r.a.pe up the money. In Oregon, in the 1930s, money for luxuries was "sc.r.a.ped up." And here in the yard was a tree loaded with fruit that reached to the second story. A gray bird with a saucy tail sat in its branches singing an elaborate song, repeating phrases over and over as if he were trying to get them right.
As I turned from the window, I noticed for the first time the wallpaper, the same soft mingling of pastel flowers that covered the walls of my room in Portland almost a thousand miles away. Was this pretty paper part of some conspiracy to remind me of the home I so desperately needed to grow away from? Of course not, I told myself. It was just a coincidence, and coincidences were not unusual in life even though I understood they were best avoided in stories that I planned to write. Someday.
I unlocked my trunk, shook out a cotton dress, and went of to the bathroom, which had once been a boardinghouse bedroom, to take a cool bath and wash away the perspiration that seemed to exude from every pore. A breeze fanned out the yellow curtains. Towel racks labeled with family names printed on adhesive tape lined the walls. Every towel had the name of a different school woven into a stripe: Santa Ana High School, San Bernardino, Riverside, all apparently left behind in the Chaffey High School gym by visiting teams. I dried myself on a Citrus High School towel.
Back in my room, not knowing what to do next, I sat down on the bed, actually sat on the bed because there was no one to tell me not to. And then I heard footsteps on the stairs, whispers, and a knock on the door. When I opened it, I faced my cousins Atlee and Virginia.
"We"ve come to meet you." Virginia, thirteen years old, was small, blond, pert, with a look of spirit and mischief.
"Come on down to supper," Atlee said. He was fifteen, tall, tanned, curly-haired, and handsome.
I followed my cousins downstairs, through another long narrow room, with a rolltop desk in one corner and french doors leading out to the yard, past a dining room table painted gray with red trim, through the kitchen to a screened porch where a table was laid with place mats, the first I had ever seen. Everyone I knew in Portland used tablecloths, washed on Monday, ironed on Tuesday. Mother Clapp, Fred"s mother, was introduced. A tall thin woman who wore round spectacles and a cotton dress that reached her ankles, she reminded me of faded photographs of ancestors that we had stored in a trunk at home. A gray cat rubbed against my legs. "A good mouser," someone said, introducing the cat. I was charmed. A house with mice sounded like a story by Beatrix Potter.
My place at the table faced the grove of tidy orange trees that never shed their leaves and the eucalyptus trees with peeling bark that gave off a pleasant, faintly medicinal fragrance in the heat. Verna asked about my parents. Atlee and Virginia were interested in my long bus trip. I described my amazement at waterless rivers and was surprised that no one found dry riverbeds unusual. The whole family was pleasant, relaxed; no one was nervous, tense, or worried. No one mentioned anyone who had lost his job, the high cost of fuel, shoes that needed resoling, or any other Depression subject. The knot of tension between my shoulders slowly loosened. Maybe I really had left the Depression behind.
I began to ask questions. "What are those square gray things I have seen in so many backyards?" Incinerators for burning trash. At home what little trash we had went into the garbage can, the furnace, or the fireplace. "What was the gray bird with the tail that sticks up?" A mockingbird, something I had never expected to see. "Listen to the Mockingbird" was a sad song about a bird singing over a grave that I had struggled to play on the piano when I was in the fifth grade because it was my grandfather"s favorite song. Grandpa was pleased and said I played it like a jig.
When we had finished supper, darkness fell as quickly as a curtain, a surprise to someone used to long summer dusks in Oregon. Then I realized I was closer to the equator, and night was falling just as my grammar school geography teacher had described.
Virginia went into the living room to practice her violin, skillfully bowing from "Humoresque" into a piece I recognized, something about "You can do the cha-cha-cha." Atlee found a screwdriver and accompanied me to my room to unscrew the lid of the crate and lift out my typewriter, an old standard model with an unusually long carriage for typing bank doc.u.ments that Dad bought for a few dollars when a bank he worked for merged with another bank. He bought it because a writer would need a typewriter.
When Atlee left, I unpacked my meager wardrobe: two woolen dresses, one brown serge and the other navy blue, the fabric cut from bolts of cloth that had lain for years on shelves in my grandfather"s general merchandise store. "Such beautiful fabric, and n.o.body appreciates it these days," Mother said. "It will wear forever." I was afraid it would. A skirt made from a remnant, another that I had made from a pair of my father"s old gray pants. I had cut them off at the pockets, ripped the seams, washed and turned the fabric, which was perfectly good on the wrong side, and made myself a four-gored skirt to wear with a pink sweater I had knitted. A couple of cotton dresses; a bathing suit; a badly made skirt and jacket left over from high school; my precious bias-cut cream-colored satin formal, which made me feel as if I were slinking around like Jean Harlow in the movies; my white georgette high school graduation dress; a quilted taffeta evening cape, narrow in the shoulders because I had to skimp when I made it from a remnant.
When I finished unpacking, Fred called out, "Come on, Beverly, let"s go over to the plunge for a swim." (Plunge, not a swimming pool!) With Atlee and Virginia, we went to the high school plunge, where Fred was the swimming coach. My cousins, who probably learned to swim before they could walk, swam like fish. Having barely pa.s.sed the Polliwog level at the Camp Fire Girls" camp where we swam in the icy Sandy River, I was embarra.s.sed to swim in front of a coach, but he tactfully did not try to improve my strokes.
Afterward I sat down at the black desk to write a letter home, a bland but rea.s.suring letter my parents would like to receive. I did not mention gangsters, black lace underwear, or whiskey, and somehow I could not tell my hard-pressed parents how released I felt to be in this pleasant old house where meals were eaten on place mats, the cat caught mice, and the family went swimming at night. When I licked and stamped the envelope, I took it downstairs to a table where I had seen outgoing mail waiting.
In the living room Fred and Virginia were sitting on the couch. Fred was reading Shakespeare to his daughter, who leaned her head against his shoulder. I listened a moment before I tiptoed up the stairs to my room, put on my pajamas, turned off the lamp, and stood at the window, looking out into the darkness, now soft as warm velvet with stars nearer and brighter than any I had ever known. I thought of my weary, discouraged father who disliked his job and longed for outdoor life. I thought of my restless, nervous, worried mother, whose sense of fun had been drained by the Depression and who now made me the center of her life to the point where I felt responsible for her happiness. I knew they were thinking of me and missing me more than I, on the brink of a new life, was missing them.
I stood in the dark by the window a long time before I climbed into bed and fell asleep, exhausted.
"Chaffey, Where the Fronded Palm..."
My first day of college I wore a pink dress because everyone said pink was my most becoming color. My stomach quivered with nerves: Would anyone speak to me? Would my dress be right? Would college work be difficult? I walked past orange groves to Chaffey Junior College, where I knew no one and no one knew me. The two-story building was new, earthquake-proof, and built in a "modified Spanish style" around a patio with a lawn and shrub-like palms. Oregonians in the 1930s did not have patios, so patio as a spoken word was new to me. In reading I had mentally p.r.o.nounced it "paysho."
The students looked strange to me, for deep tans were the fashion, the darker the more fashionable. I listened to girls compare and admire their tans and talk about how hard they had worked to get them. The tree-shaded streets and a rainy summer in Portland left me feeling ghostly in the midst of so much toasted skin. There seemed to be no particular fashion in clothing as there had been at Grant High. Everyone seemed comfortable, casual, and, best of all, friendly to a new girl.
California girls, I soon discovered from bits of overheard conversation, knew more about s.e.x than the girls I had known in high school. Some had actually done "it." Mothers at home, as far as I knew, did not mention s.e.x to their daughters, apparently thinking that if they kept it secret, s.e.x would go away and their daughters would remain "lovely girls." What little knowledge I possessed, mostly inaccurate, came from Claudine by way of her cousin who went to Jefferson High, where life was apparently faster than at Grant. As I pondered the difference between Portland and California girls, I concluded that what I had read really was right. Women did mature more quickly in the tropics, and any place that grew palm trees had to count as the tropics.
Students, I soon observed, were of four sorts: those who lived at home in Ontario or in one of the nearby small towns because it was less expensive than going to the university, those who had completed their freshman and soph.o.m.ore years but were taking extra courses while they tried to save money to go on to the university, those who were going to school because they didn"t know what else to do, and those from out of state, like myself, who were living with friends or relatives and taking advantage of tuition-free education. Today, when we pay our state income tax, I recall with grat.i.tude California"s generosity during the Depression. Mother often said, "Oregon does nothing to help its young people," and in the 1930s she was right.
Although I had been apprehensive, I soon discovered cla.s.ses were no more difficult, and sometimes less demanding, than my cla.s.ses at Grant. Chaffey, it seemed to me, was like a small, friendly high school with older students.
In French, my first cla.s.s, a good-looking young man with blue eyes and a tan light enough to show he hadn"t worked at it sat beside me. Completely at ease, he smiled, said his name was Paul, and asked where I was from. I could scarcely believe it. At Grant, on the first day of school, either boys were too shy to speak to new girls, or they stood in groups looking girls up and down as if they planned to buy them at auction.
In French we were a.s.signed a novel, Pecheur d"Islande, by Pierre Loti, but a more interesting a.s.signment was dividing into pairs to write a dialogue in French that was to be performed in front of the cla.s.s. I am sure I blushed with pleasure when Paul asked me to be his partner. Because he was studying journalism and working on the school paper, we had trouble finding time to work together, so, with Verna"s permission, I invited him to come to the house one evening.
Paul arrived in his old Model T coupe for an evening of serious French composition. When he stepped into the living room, the family tactfully disappeared, leaving Guard snoozing in front of the couch while we went to work at the large library table. What could we write about? And in French? We settled on a dialogue between two strangers on a bus from Oregon to California. We composed a line for Paul to speak that we found hilarious and were to quote that year whenever it rained: "Oregon, bah! La pluie, la pluie, la pluie!" We would struggle through a sentence, and our conversation would veer off to some more engrossing subject, ourselves, mostly. Paul said he had noticed me on the first day of school because I was so pink and white in the midst of all those summer tans. I learned that he was four years older than I, drove a school bus, had been delayed in school because he had broken his back in an accident. Now he was worried about his work on the school paper. I tried to comfort him with experience gained on The Grantonian my junior year in high school. He seemed grateful for my superior knowledge.
About eleven o"clock Guard woke up, scratched, and rattled his license tags. Fred called down the stairs in his P.E. teacher voice, "You can put him out now, Beverly." For a dreadful instant Paul and I, engrossed in each other, thought Fred was referring to Paul. (Perhaps he was.) When we realized, or a.s.sumed, it was time to let the dog out, we laughed. I opened the door for Guard, and Paul left soon after. Happy, I gathered up the feeble skeleton of our dialogue. A young man with interests similar to mine who could laugh, and whose company I enjoyed, actually liked me. I could scarcely believe it after humorless Gerhart in Portland.
First-semester French taught me that male companionship could be pleasant, even fun, a lesson as valuable as any vocabulary memorized for reading knowledge. Despite our French dialogue, in the 1930s most French teachers did not expect us to actually speak the language of a country so far away we could never afford to go there.
This French teacher did an amazing thing: She left to marry a man who ran a Mexican restaurant in a San Francisco hotel. She was replaced by Dr. L. Gardner Miller, a blond young man fresh from France with an authentic French wife, sandals on his feet, and a degree of Docteur de I"Universite. That Dr. Miller expected us to actually speak French every minute in cla.s.s came as a shock. He said we did not know enough, and he was right.
The second cla.s.sroom I entered that first day was History of Drama, an English course taught by Mrs. Ruth Tremaine Kegley. And there was Paul. This time I sat beside him. Mrs. Kegley stood with her left hand on her hip, her right arm extended with her hand palm up, as she spoke of "the cheap, the blatant, the tawdry" plays on Broadway. She savored the shape of the words, as if she expected them to roll out of her mouth, down her arm, and onto the palm of her hand.
History of Drama did leave me with one valuable thought. One of the playwrights-was it Lope de Vega?-believed that ideas were somehow spewed into the atmosphere to be seized by anyone with a receptive mind, and that upon receiving an idea, one should use it immediately because others were sure to pluck the same idea from the spheres. This one wisp of philosophy, no more than a sentence or two from a college course, has haunted me all my writing life.
The required course in hygiene was taught by short, stout Mrs. Harriet Fleming, whose gray hair was twisted and coiled into a snail on top of her head. Mrs. Fleming required us to write a tiresome paper ent.i.tled "Health Heroes" and to outline a boring pamphlet on prenatal care. She not only waded through our papers but was the guardian of our morals who chaperoned college dances. She stopped music if she felt it was too fast or too slow. She once attended a dance in a wheelchair with her leg in a cast, a disability that did not stop her from whizzing out onto the dance floor to reprimand a couple she felt were dancing too close to each other. At one dance I attended, she ordered a girl who was wearing a black dress that left one shoulder bare to leave the floor until she covered her shoulder with a sweater or jacket.
Mrs. Fleming did not object to boys lying on the gra.s.s on sunny days, but girls must always sit up or they could expect a reprimand. In her cla.s.s she once informed us that any girl who wore red was "asking for anything she got." Of course word spread throughout Chaffey. The next day every girl who owned a red dress, skirt, or blouse wore it to school.
One day toward the end of the semester, Mrs. Fleming faced the cla.s.s and said, "Is there anything you would like to ask me? Anything at all?" Silence. We all knew that anything was her code word for s.e.x. Experienced girls looked superior and as contemptuous as they dared, several timid girls looked anxious but were afraid of being laughed at, but most of us exchanged looks of amus.e.m.e.nt. Even though we might have been eager for information, we certainly were not going to risk asking for it in cla.s.s.
The silence grew embarra.s.sing. Mrs. Fleming repeated, "Anything at all." More silence, broken at last by an earnest, colorless girl who raised her hand and asked, "How do you get rid of dandruff?" Mrs. Fleming, visibly let down, gave suggestions while the rest of us stifled our laughter. As the bell rang, I wondered what went on in men"s hygiene.
In physical education I was unexpectedly lucky, for the physical therapist decided my metatarsal arches were in need of strengthening. This put me in a remedial cla.s.s where I picked up marbles with my toes while strong-arched girls ran around in the hot sun chasing a ball with hockey sticks. I was deeply grateful to my metatarsal arches for not measuring up to Chaffey"s standards and for sparing me the sweaty misery of chasing a ball with a stick under the hot sun.
When I entered the geology cla.s.sroom that first day, there was Paul once more. I was taking the cla.s.s for two reasons: to fulfill a requirement for laboratory science in case I should ever get to a university, and as a small rebellion against Mother, who had remarked when Verna wrote she was studying geology, "What earthly use is geology to Verna?" She did not stop to think that all knowledge is valuable to a librarian.