Anybody Can Do Anything (14 page)
Another simple pleasure we enjoyed in those poverty-ridden days was looking at real estate. My brother Cleve
through a long involved series of trades, beginning, I believe, when he was ten years old with a saddle Mother had had made in Mexico, had acquired a long low cream-colored Cord convertible with dark blue fenders and top. On spring Saturday afternoons we would all climb in the Cord and go house-hunting.
I suppose in a way it was taking an unfair advantage of the real estate dealers, who invariably, when they saw our gorgeous car drive up, often primed with Mary’s and my cleaning fluid, came careening out of their offices brandishing keys and carrying fountain pens and a contract. But on the other hand they tried awfully hard to take advantage of us.
“This magnificent structure,” they would say, as they tried to force open the sagging door of some termite-infested old mansion, “was the home of one of Seattle’s finest old families and is being sold for taxes. Just given away, really.” In we would all troop, the children racing up the stairs or down to the cellar, the rest of us walking slowly, examining everything and noting with amusement the empty whisky bottles, lipstick-smeared walls, and other irrefutable evidence that this fine old family must have been supplementing their income by making whisky or dabbling in white slavery.
Sometimes we found wonderful bargains. One was a huge brick inn, north of the city, about an $85,000 structure, on sale for $5,500. There were thirteen bedrooms, a living room eighty feet long, a dining room, breakfast room, library, music room and billiard room, every room with a fireplace, magnificent barns, a stream and ten acres of land, and we had many violent fights over who would have which room and how we would furnish it. The real estate dealer finally got so sick of taking us out there that he gave us the keys and we used to take picnics and make plans while we ate our peanut butter and pickle sandwiches. The real estate dealer was more than anxious to make an even trade for our very
salable house in the University district and we were all ready to move in when Mary, distressingly practical, pointed out that the nearest bus line was five miles away, the nearest school about eighteen miles and the former owner had, upon questioning, admitted that it cost from $200 a month up to even take the chill off the lower floor.
We were all so disappointed that Cleve went right out and rustled up an enormous yacht which was on sale for almost nothing and would really be a much more economical home for us because it would eliminate real estate taxes, light, gas and telephone bills, we could catch fish from it and we could pull up the gangplank when bores or bill collectors approached. The yacht unfortunately was in Alaska and Cleve never did get around to sailing it down.
Once we found a whole block of brand-new empty houses, each uniquely hideous, each on a forty-foot lot and each priced at $40,000, which at that time would have bought the Olympic Hotel with Puget Sound thrown in for good measure.
When we stopped by the first one, the owner who lived in the middle house popped out of his front door and came running up to the car before Cleve had turned off the motor. “Wonderful buy, wonderful buy,” he said rather thickly, swallowing the last of a doughnut but not bothering to wipe the powdered sugar off his chin. “Come on in, all of you. Go through them. Lots of time.” We all trooped out and into the first house.
Hours and hours later we were only on the next to the last and it was dark, the children were hungry and we were all surfeited with bad planning, unrelieved ugliness, chromium, peach plaster and maroon tile. Mother, pointing to the miles and miles of woodland stretching away in all directions, asked the eager little builder why he had put such expensive houses on such small lots. He said, “Big development out here. Gotta make room for everybody.”
We drove away then and left him in front of his big development whose only signs of life were a single lighted window in his own house and the hoot of a night owl from one of the trees across the road.
10: Nightschool
Until I started to nightschool, my life was one long sweep of mediocrity. While my family and friends were enjoying the distinction of being labeled the prettiest, most popular, best dancer, fastest runner, highest diver, longest breath-holder-under-water, best tennis player, most fearless, owner of the highest arches, tiniest, wittiest, most efficient, one with the most allergies or highest salaried, I had to learn to adjust to remarks such as, “My, Mary has the most beautiful red hair I’ve ever seen, it’s just like burnished copper and so silky and curly—oh yes, Betty has hair too, hasn’t she? I guess it’s being so coarse is what makes it look thick.”
Then I started to nightschool to learn shorthand and after ten years of faithful attendance, realized that now I was eligible for some kind of a medal for being the slowest-witted, most-unable-to-be-taught and longest-attender-at-school-studying-one-subject.
I went to every nightschool in the city of Seattle, both paid and free, studied under expert teachers, but I couldn’t learn shorthand. It had something to do with my coordination I believe, because I was never able to learn arm-movement writing in school either.
Mary, as I have pointed out, was never in favor of my attendance at nightschool. She thought it was a waste of
time and she was right, but learning shorthand got to be an obsession with me, like swimming the English Channel. I bought a book of stories in shorthand and for years mouthed them out on the streetcar riding to and from work—I worked at memorizing the Gregg dictionary, symbol by symbol—I spent from seven to nine or six to eight of most of my Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays for ten years in some shorthand class. But at my jobs the minute anyone ever said to me, “Take a letter,” or “Get your notebook, Miss Bard,” I would get such a case of buck fever I’d make wiggly little scriggles instead of smooth curves and little lines and would get far behind trying to remember whether “a” went on the inside or outside of the angles.
Nightschool differed from dayschool, I learned, not only in time of day but in atmosphere and type of students. Day-school students, who were usually young, career-conscious people, eager to get jobs and get started (the fools), exuded an air of cheerful self-confidence. Nightschool students, predominately young foreigners and old Americans suddenly faced with the necessity for earning their own livings, were even in times of great prosperity badly handicapped by language difficulties, the wrong color of skin or old stiff fingers. Nevertheless they zealously, gallantly and in spite of the inadequacy of their tools, tried to carve niches for themselves in the stone face of the business world.
Often when I attended the Public Evening School, which was almost free, my shorthand class would be comprised entirely of old ladies and young Japanese girls. The old ladies worked feverishly at their speed studies and over and above the teacher’s precise nasal dictation of dull business letters I could hear their labored breathing and creaking joints, like old hulls straining at their moorings during the stress of a storm.
The frustration I experienced over my inability to master shorthand was overshadowed by the tragic realization that
even if those little old secretaries and young Japanese ones learned to take shorthand five hundred words a minute and could type faster than the speed of light, nobody would hire them. Not just because of the depression but because of a horrible practice in American business of seldom hiring any female office worker who does not have white skin and is not under thirty.
The little Japanese girls were wonderful at shorthand. Naturally quick, studious and imitative, the rapid accurate transcription of someone else’s thoughts was just their dish. When the teacher gave us final impossible tests of long articles, read at two hundred words a minute and then asked for the hands of those who had gotten it all, only the little tan hands shot up and waved eagerly. “Read your notes, Miss Fukiyama,” the teacher would say and Miss Fukiyama would read in her soft, sweet little voice, with only a little hesitation and giggling, exactly what had been dictated. But when Miss Fukiyama went to apply for a job, all she was offered was housework.
The Public Evening School was housed in a large gray stone building that smelled of old bodies, stale sandwiches and chalk. My shorthand classes were usually from six to eight, which meant that I could go right from work and eat dinner when I got home. Sometimes, however, I would have to take the seven-to-nine class and then to kill time and to avoid the long trip home and back downtown again, I took another subject from six to seven. Once I took French, another time Speech and another time Creative Writing.
The Speech woman, who wore a big brown felt tarn and rough tweed suit, said, “Korrrrect speeeeeech is more eem-portant than korrect post-eur. A person is eemeejutly judged by hees speeech.” As she talked she rolled back her lips, swung them to the sides or pulled them down so she looked like a red snapper. I used to imitate her at home at night for the pleasure of the family but I left after the sixth time.
Each session of the Creative Writing class was jam-packed with frustrated people who wanted to be writers and live Bohemian lives. Almost every student carried a large briefcase bulging with manuscripts which either the publishers were too timid to publish, were too crooked to publish, or else had kept just long enough to steal the idea and give it to some big writer. After about the fourth session I began to wonder if frustration produced bad breath because halitosis accompanied so many of these unpublished writers.
In addition to their frustration and bad breath, most of the students were violently jealous of each other. The teacher, who confided to me one night that trying to teach people with nothing to say how to write it down was a sad business, had us write stories and little articles and then read them aloud and invite criticism.
Before the unfortunate victim had read his last word, the stiff upraised arms of the criticizers were as numerous as wheat stalks on a stubble field. The criticism ran to: “I don’t like your style and nothing you said was true to life,” “I don’t like to say this, honey, but your grammar is terrible,” or “I think that the author of this piece of material should put in deeper meanings and make the material a thing of lasting importance and more general import so that when the material is read by intellects other than those of this community they would have something to recall in the material,” or “I don’t think that fella would have married the girl after she treated him like that, I know I sure wouldn’t have,” or “I think the story wonderful and I don’t think we should be so hard on our fellow authors because think how you’re going to feel when you get up there,” or “I noticed that in one place she said that the cabin was twenty feet long and in another place she said it was eighteen feet long.” There were a few poets whose works were of the:
“Oh beautiful waters of Puget Sound
You are bluer and softer than the hard dry ground,
Oh, Mount Rainier so majestic and pink
Every night in your beauty I drink”
school and got much less criticism and more praise than the works of the fiction writers.
I noticed that the people with the worst breath were the ones most anxious to corner you and outline their trilogy on the life of a Butter Clam. The consensus of opinion seemed to be that all successful authors owed their success to illicit relations with their publisher and/or dirty books.
A large florid woman, who sat across from me at each session and had a terrible time forcing her stomach behind the school desk, was interested only in religious poems, several of which she gave me as keepsakes. One of my favorites ran, as I remember,
Here I am, Jesus, take me to your bosom,
You didn’t bleed for nothing, Jesus,
Nor from the grave was risen.
Now I am all alone, Jesus,
You are my only friend
I want to come home to you, Jesus,
So an angel down for me send.
I want to be with Papa
He’s up there with you too
So are Johnny and little Mildred and Bertha
They all died of the flu.
The woman’s name was Mrs. Halvorsen and according to her she had buried everyone she could get her hands on. In addition to Johnny, little Mildred, Bertha and Papa, who had all gone out just like lights and within minutes of each other during the flue epidemic after World War I, there had been innumerable little Charlies, Dannys, Carls, Helwigs and Irmas who smothered in their beds, swelled up and died, choked to death on baby teeth, or just came in and announced they were going to Jesus and did.
Talking to Mrs. Halvorsen was the equivalent of attending hundreds of funerals but she was very kind and brought me little bags of Sirup Spisser, Fattigman and Sand Kakers, which I ate during shorthand so that that winter my notes were not only wrong but always crumby. Mrs. Halvorsen was one of the very few of us students who had been published. Her poems had been published in religious papers both in Norway and the United States and though she hadn’t been paid anything we were all very proud of her.
Another friend of mine at Writing class wrote personal experience stories, all very depressing, about how she was fired and not paid, about one place she worked where the woman was so stingy they only bought a half a pound of hamburger for dinner for themselves and their two servants and about the time she slipped on the sidewalk and broke her hip and the city wouldn’t pay her. She had a stack of rejection slips about nine feet high and couldn’t understand why.
“I tell de trut,” she said. “Dere is not vun vord I write dat is not de trut.” I told her that I thought she should write about happier things, not be so sad, and cited Mark Twain as an example. She said, “You mean I should make yokes?” I said yes and so she went home and laboriously inserted Pat and Mike “yokes” here and there in her sad little manuscripts.
A little fat Greek man thought the idea behind successful creative writing was quantity not quality and he came staggering into each session with about a hundred pounds of badly written, greasy manuscript in pencil on scratch paper, about a moronic detective and an even stupider police captain who could never catch a big gang of killers and robbers who continually robbed a little Greek grocery store run by the cleverest little fellow ever to appear on a grubby piece of scratch paper.
The class criticizers were so relentlessly cruel to him they
almost made him cry, so Mrs. Halvorsen and I invited him to have coffee with us and we told him we thought he was a genius. He said, “I got lotsa ideas. I write all night lotsa times.” We told him that someday he would be famous and he was so grateful he brought us each a bottle of Metaxa brandy.
One time during the depression I tired of the regular Public Evening School and registered in one run by the WPA. This nightschool had one shorthand teacher, who for some strange reason held the class in a different room every night and lived in mortal fear of Government spies.
When I had dates pick me up at the school, as I often did, and they came early and signaled at me through the door, she would jump up from her desk, shout, “Who’s out there? Who is he—what does he want?” in her excitement dropping her books and her pencils, even her glasses, which she stamped on one night. Once, when she seemed more upset than usual, a friend of mine, a shy young lawyer, appeared and she threw open the door to the hall and shouted at him, “Let me see your credentials. If you’re going to snoop around here you’ve got to show your credentials.”
Mary was right, I never met any executives at nightschool, and it didn’t improve my shorthand much, but there were many times when I found it most comforting to look around a big class and feel that we were all failures together.