My Own Two Feet (2 page)

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 grass. 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, “Hello, 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—risqué.
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.
Noncha
lant
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!

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 pronounce them undefiled by Oregon insects and worthy of entry into California.

With shaking hands I found the Clapps' num
ber 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 partitions, 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 glass 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 Japanese 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 scrape up the money. In Oregon, in the 1930s, money for luxuries was “scraped 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 documents 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 nobody 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 passed the Polliwog level at the Camp Fire Girls' camp where we swam in the icy Sandy River, I was embarrassed 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 reassuring 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.