Anybody Can Do Anything (4 page)

In one recital our class, clad in
short silk accordion-pleated skirts with pieces of the same material tied low around our foreheads and cleverly arranged to go over only one shoulder yet cover our budding bosoms, were supposed to be
Greek boys, leaping around, pretending to be gladiators and drive chariots. We were very advanced ballet students by then and the dance was such a success that we were asked to repeat it at some sort of Army-Navy celebration in Woodland Park.

We were glad to, of course; but just after we had come limping in driving our chariots, the top of Mary’s costume came off and it immediately became apparent to the audience that at least some of these dancers were not Greek boys. “Hey, Mary,” I hissed at her, “your costume’s broken.” Mary ignored me. She leaped and whirled and stamped through the entire dance and not until we were taking our final bows did she deign to fix the shoulder strap. I was aghast. “Mary Bard,” I said, “do you realize that you were dancing out there in front of all those people with part of your bust exposed?” Mary said, “My dear girl, did you think that Pavlova or Isadora Duncan would have stopped to fix a shoulder strap? After all, no matter what breaks, the show must go on.” Our teacher, as well as the Army and Navy, was very pleased with Mary. In fact, the Army and Navy asked us to repeat the dance again, which we didn’t, and our teacher held Mary up before the entire dancing school as an example of a true artiste.

Then we started to public high school and Mary gave up ballet and went into girls’ club work, school plays, vaudeville shows and the opera. She had leads in everything and she dragged me along with her whenever she could. Once I stumbled out of a giant grandfather clock and did a scarf dance and another time I was in the dancing chorus in an opera.

As time went on I became more and more convinced that Mary was right and that anybody could do anything, but I had sense enough to realize that it was a hell of a lot harder for some people than for others.

2: What’s a White Russian Got?

When we were eighteen and twenty I married and went to live in the mountains on a chicken ranch, and Mary plunged headfirst into a business career, which eventually resulted in her being fired from every firm of any size in the city of Seattle.

Mary’s being fired was never a reflection on her efficiency, which was overwhelming, but was always a matter of principle, usually involving the morale of the entire firm. “I don’t give a damn if you’re the biggest lawyer in the city of Seattle, you can’t control by bladder,” she shouted at the head of a large law firm, who had suddenly arbitrarily ruled that all his stenographers had to go to the restroom at 10:30 a.m. and 3:15 p.m.

“Labor Day is a National Holiday and I’m an American citizen and won’t work if you call in the Militia,” Mary announced to the front office of a legal firm whose senior partner was anti-labor and got even with the A.F. of L. by making all his employees work on Labor Day.

“Go pinch somebody who can’t type,” she told a surprised and amorous lumber exporter.

“Henry Ford has proven that a rest period and something; to eat in the morning and afternoon raises efficiency two hundred per cent and as Henry Ford’s got a lot better job
than you have, I’m going out for coffee,” she told the personnel manager of an insurance company.

“If you want to say ‘he don’t’ and ‘we was,’ that’s your affair,” Mary told a pompous manufacturer, “but I won’t put it in your letters because it reflects on me.”

Even though Mary’s jobs didn’t last long, she never had any trouble getting new ones. All the employment agency people loved her and she enjoyed applying for new jobs.

“There are only two ways to apply for a job,” she said. “Either you are a Kick-Me-Charlie and go crawling in anxious for long hours and low pay, or you march into your prospective employer with a Look-Who’s-Hit-the-Jackpot attitude and for a while, at least, you have both the job and your self-respect.” Anyone could see that all Kick-Me-Charlie’s kept their jobs the longest but they didn’t have as much self-respect or meet as many people as Mary.

While Mary changed jobs and met people, I raised chickens, had two children and didn’t meet anybody. Finally in March, 1931, after four years of this, I wrote to my family and told them that I hated chickens, I was lonely and I seemed to have married the wrong man.

It was the beginning of the depression and I didn’t really expect anything but sympathy, but Mary, who was supporting the entire family, replied in typically dependable and dramatic fashion by special delivery registered letter that she had a wonderful job for me and that I was to come home at once. I wrote back that I didn’t know how to do office work and it was five miles to the bus line. Mary wired back, “Anybody can do office work and remember the White Russians walked across Siberia. Your job starts Monday.”

It was late on a rainy Friday afternoon when a neighbor brought the telegram but I checked the bus schedule, dressed the children and myself in our “town clothes,” stuffed my silver fish fork, my graduation ring and a few other things into a suitcase, wrote a note to my husband, and leading
three-year-old Anne by the hand and carrying year-and-a-half-old Joan and the suitcase, set off across the burn toward the six o’clock bus to Seattle.

It was not an easy walk. The road, following the course of an ancient river bed, meandered around through the sopping brush, coiled itself around huge puddles and never ever took the shortest distance between two points. When we made sorties into the brush to avoid the puddles, the salal
and Oregon grape drenched our feet and clawed vindictively at my one pair of silk stockings. Every couple of hundred feet I had to stop and unclamp my purple hands from the suitcase handle and shift the baby to the other hip. Every half mile or so we all sat down on a soaking stump or log to rest. The rain was persistent and penetrating, and after the third rest all of our clothes had the uniform dampness of an ironing folded down the night before.

The children were cheerful and didn’t seem to mind the discomforts—I was as one possessed. I was leaving the dreary monotony of the rain and the all-encompassing loneliness of the farm to go home to the warmth and laughter of my family and now that I was started I would have carried both children and the suitcase, forded raging torrents and run that last never-ending mile with a White Russian on each shoulder.

Just before we got to the highway, the road had been taken over by some stray cows and a big Jersey bull. Under ordinary circumstances this would have meant climbing a fence and going half a mile or so out of our way, because I am scared to death of bulls, especially Jersey bulls. Not that day. “Get out of my way!” I shouted at the surprised bull and small Anne, brandishing a twig, echoed me. The bull, sulkily grumbling and shaking his head, moved to one side. If he hadn’t I think I would have punched him in the nose.

When we finally reached the highway, I sat the children
on the suitcase and listened anxiously for the first rumble of the bus. I knew that I would have to depend on hearing it because the highways had been braided through the thick green tresses of the Olympic Peninsula by some lethargic engineer who apparently thought that everyone enjoyed bounding in and out of forests, clipping down into farmyards and skirting small rocks and hillocks with blind hairpin turns, and at the intersection where I hoped to catch the bus, and catch was certainly the right word, the bus would be visible only for that brief moment when, having leaped out of Mr. Hansen’s farmyard by means of a short steep rise, it skirted his oat field before disappearing around a big rock just beyond his south fence.

I knew that I had to be ready to signal the driver just as he appeared over the brow of the Hansen’s barnyard and in my eagerness, I flagged down two empty homeward-bound logging trucks and the feed man before I heard the bus. When its gray snubbed nose peered over the hill, I rushed out into the road and waved my purse but the driver saw me too late and for one terrible sickening instant I thought he was going on and leave us to walk back up the mountains in the rain. But he screeched to a stop and waited at the big rock and I grabbed the suitcase and the children and ran down the road, and then we were aboard, in a front seat where I could urge the bus along and be ready for the city when it burst upon me with its glory of people and life.

The bus driver was not at all friendly, due no doubt to a large angry-looking boil on the back of his neck, the bus smelled of wet dogs and wet rubber, there were two drunken Indians in the seat across from us and a disgusting old man in back of us who cleared his throat and spat on the floor, but everything was bathed in the glow of gay anticipation and I smiled happily at everyone.

Down the mountains, through valleys, up into the mountains again we sped. We were going very fast and the bus
lurched and swayed and belched Diesel fumes but we were heading toward home. I was going to live again.

Once when we went around a particularly vicious curve, the drunken Indian woman rolled off her seat into the aisle. The Indian man, presumably her husband, peered over at her lying on her back on the floor, her maroon coat bunched around her waist, her fat brown thighs exposed, and burst out laughing. The woman laughed too and so did the other passengers. The bus driver half-turned around and said, “For Krissake, you Bow and Arrows pipe down or I’ll throw you out.” The woman turned over and got up on all fours so that her big maroon fanny was high in the air and a tempting target. The other Indian reached out and kicked her hard and they both began laughing again. Anne and I laughed too but the bus driver stopped the bus, pushed his cap to the back of his head and said, “For Krissake, you two, do you want me to put you off?” The Indian woman climbed back into her seat and they quieted down to only occasional silly giggles. We started up again and after a while drove onto the dock and the big bus lumbered aboard the ferry and all of us passengers got out and went upstairs for supper.

Anne and Joan and I shared our booth in the ferry’s small smoky restaurant with a Mrs. Johnson, a large woman in navy blue and steel-rimmed spectacles, whose eyes very handily operated on different circuits so that while her left eye looked out the window, her right eye was fixed on the waitress or on her food or on me. Mrs. Johnson told me immediately that her ankles swelled and everything she ate talked back to her but she was going “upsound” to get recruits for Jesus. I told her that I was going to Seattle to work in an office.

She said, “The city is a wicked place full of the works of the Devil. Stay on the farm. Jesus is on the farm.” I said that I had heard that He was everywhere but I hadn’t
noticed Him on our farm. Mrs. Johnson, who was busily fishing the lettuce out of her hamburger and putting it on a napkin beside her plate, said, “Praise His name! Praise His name! You can always count me out when it comes to greens. Just like ground glass in my intestynes.”

I said, “I’m going to live with my family.” She gestured with her fork and one eye toward Anne and Joan, who were quietly eating scrambled eggs, and said, “The Devil is in the city. Have those poor little tykes been babtyzed?” I said no and she said, “Throw them in. Throw them in! Wash their sins away. Praise His name.”

Just then the waitress brought her apple pie a la mode and my coffee. Tapping on my cup with her spoon she said, “I like coffee but it don’t like me. Binds me up tighter’n a drum. Without it I keep regular as clockwork, but let me drink one cup and I’m threw off for a week.” She fixed her great big good eye on me and waited and I was not sure whether she expected me to say, “Praise His name, praise His name,” or to retaliate with a list of foods that bound me up, so I said, “Wasn’t it funny on the bus when the Indian fell in the aisle?”

Mrs. Johnson swelled her nostrils until they were like twin smudge pots and said, “I am going to report that driver to headquarters. He took the name of the Lord Jesus our God in Heaven in vain.” I said, “Well, he has a boil on his neck.” She said, “Poison coming out of his system. Blasphemy is a stench in the nostrils of God and I’m going to report that driver.”

I was pleased to note, when the ferry docked an hour or so later and we all climbed aboard the bus, that the only scat left for Mrs. Johnson, who was late, was way in the back with the Indians, by then much drunker and much noisier and destined to be a stench in the nostrils of both Mrs. Johnson and God before we reached Seattle.

It was dark and still raining when we landed. The water
was gray and rough and the ferry banged into the dolphins and backed up several times before it was able to edge into the slip and the deckhands could let down the flimsy chain that had presumably kept the bus from plunging off the deck into the water.

As we rumbled onto the dock a train, bleating mournfully, and with the beam from its terrible fiery eye swinging across the water, came hurtling along the shore. The children, who had never seen a train before, were terrified. “What is it? What is it?” wailed Anne, as it streaked past, clackety, clackety, clackety, woooooo, woooooo, its lighted windows a ribbon of light in the rainy evening. “It’s a train, darling. A nice choo-choo train,” I told her comfortingly. She said, “It is not. It’s a Mickaboo full of Bojanes.”

To Anne all frightening things were Bojanes and Bojanes lived in Mickaboos, which were nailholes or tiny cracks in the floor. Now apparently Bojanes flew through the night inside fiery dragons. Anne wailed, “Take it away, Betty, take it away.” And I did. I shooed it around another curve and it went wooo-wooing off into the night, jerking its red tail lights along behind it. When the red warning light by the tracks stopped blinking and the gates were raised, the bus gave a lurch and we were off.

“Going home, going home,” I hummed to myself as the bus nosed its way along in the thin early evening traffic, its tires saying shhhhh, shhh to the nervous wet highway, its lights making deep hollows and sudden mounds out of shadows on the smooth pavement. We went slowly and carefully through the little town by the ferry landing, then for miles and miles the road was dark with only an occasional lonely little house peering out of the night, and we sailed swiftly along.

When we hit the main highway, small boxy houses with gas stations attached flashed by and showed cheerful glimpses of family life—mother, father and children eating supper in
the breakfast nook—father reading the paper in the parlor—a baby silhouetted at the window watching the cars go by in the rain. On the highway small tacky grocery stores and vegetable stands, open late to catch an extra dribble of trade, littered the spaces between the gas stations. Every few hundred yards or so a palely-lighted sign pleaded “Bud’s Good Eats” or “Ma’s Home Cooking” or “Mert and Bert’s Place.”

Some of the gas stations also cozily announced “Wood and Coal,” and I could just make out the untidy, uncozy outlines of wet slab wood and soggy sacks of coal stacked near the gas pumps. When the houses began to be closer together and neater and whiter, the dreary gas pumps became lighted gas stations, and finally once in a while the bus would stop and pant at an intersection while a traffic light geared for a busier time of day, stopped the hurrying impatient north and south traffic and kept it teetering for a full minute at the edge of an empty highway.

At each such stop the Indians’ pushing and shoving and giggling became audible but the bus driver, though he muttered angrily, kept the bus moving back and forth like a runner making false starts before a race and to my intense relief didn’t take the name of Lord Jesus our God in Heaven in vain, at least not so Mrs. Johnson could hear.

Both children were now asleep, their bodies warm and soft like dough against me, and I must have dozed too, for suddenly we were in downtown Seattle and lights were exploding around me like skyrockets on the Fourth of July. Red lights, blue lights, yellow lights, green, purple, white, orange, punctured the night in a million places and tore the black satin pavement to shreds. I hadn’t seen neon lights before. They had been invented, or at least put in common use, while I was up in the mountains and in that short time the whole aspect of the world had changed. In place of dumpy little bulbs sputteringly spelling out Café or Theatre, there were long swooping spirals of pure brilliant
color. A waiter outlined in bright red with a blazing white napkin over his arm flashed on and off over a large Café Puget Sound Power and Light Company cut through the rain and darkness, bright blue and cheery. Cafés, theatres, cigar stores, stationery stores, real estate offices with their names spelled out in molten color, welcomed me to the city. The bus terminal was ringed in light. Portland, New York, San Francisco, Bellingham, Walla Walla, it boasted in bright red. How gay and cheerful and prosperous and alive everything looked. What a wonderful contrast to the bleak, snag-ridden, dark, rainy, lonely vista framed for four long years by the farm windows.