My Own Two Feet (5 page)

Even the weather took on a new excitement.
When rain finally came, it fell harder and faster than the gentle rain of Oregon. One evening after a YWCA dinner at school, I found I could not cross Euclid Avenue's deep gutters, now overflowing with water carrying rocks and gravel, swifter than a mountain stream, racing straight from the mountains without curves to slow it down. The town had not had time to set out little bridges at intersections. What to do? I returned to school and telephoned the Clapps. Atlee was dispatched to rescue me and arrived in his Rickenbacker, which he maneuvered close enough so that I could, with the help of his outstretched hand, leap onto the running board and, soaked to the skin, fall into the front seat. My galoshes were still dry in my closet in Portland, my shoes were soggy, and I did not care.

And then the earthquake. One evening when I was studying, the old house began to quiver and then to shake and creak. My floor lamp swayed until I grabbed it. No one had told me what to do in an earthquake, so I sat tight, clutching my lamp, for the few seconds the earth took to calm itself.

“Beverly, did you feel that?” Fred called out. I had indeed. Who could study after such an exciting experience? Books shoved aside, I wrote letters to my parents and to Claudine saying I had
just survived an earthquake, a
real
earthquake, just like those we read about in the newspapers. Some years later, earthquakes began to shake up Oregonians, too, but in the 1930s Oregon was considered rock-solid. Only California shook.

Earthquakes were not the only excitement provided by nature. As what passed for winter came to Southern California, Fred turned on the radio every evening at seven o'clock to listen to the frost warnings because he had an orange grove to protect. I had not understood the consequences of these warnings until late one afternoon when I looked out my bedroom window and saw over toward Pomona billows of black smoke. Alarmed, I ran downstairs to tell Verna, “There's a big fire over by Pomona!”

Verna assured me it was not a fire, that the temperature must have suddenly dropped to the point at which smudge pots had to be lit in that area so oily smoke would warm the groves and prevent the oranges from freezing. Those smudge pots affected our social life, I was soon to discover. One night at a school dance, the music stopped and someone announced that the temperature had dropped to the danger point. At this news, a number of young men left the gym to go out into the cold night, leaving their partners to share cars and get home as best they could.

Smudging was dirty for everyone, but it was dangerous for the boys who worked all night to keep the pots filled with oil and who reported to class gray with fatigue and smoke they had not been able to scrub from their pores. Leaping flames casting shadows in the groves were a beautiful sight, hellishly beautiful for the young men who worked through the night and were sometimes badly burned trying to warm themselves by standing too close to the blazing pots in their oil-soaked clothes.

Sometime in the winter, migratory workers from Mexico quietly appeared with ladders and clippers to snip navel oranges from the trees and drop them into canvas bags. Cull oranges, in those days before frozen orange juice, were spread through the groves for fertilizer, and for a few days, until the culls began to decay, Ontario was as fragrant as a vast kettle of marmalade.

And then, in the spring, waxy blossoms burst forth from the orange trees, blossoms with perfume so sweet and so heavy that walking to school seemed dreamy and unreal. Smog had not yet come to Southern California. The skies were blue, and Ontario was an enchanted place.

The enchantment of my new life began to fade when Mother Clapp left to visit a relative, and Verna's mother, my great-aunt Elizabeth, who
had been staying with another daughter, came to take her place. Aunt Elizabeth had visited us in Portland, and it was her idea that I spend the winter with the Clapps and go to junior college. I had found her delightful—chatty, vivacious, full of fun, and fashion-conscious in a way I thought unusual for someone her age. I was grateful to her for Verna's invitation and looked forward to seeing my tiny, lively great-aunt again.

To my surprise and discomfort, Aunt Elizabeth began to criticize me, and I began to feel uncomfortable in her company.
She
set the table the way the family liked, she said. I did not understand. Mother Clapp had not complained, and neither had anyone else in the family. She said I took advantage of Verna. On this point, she may have been right, but I did not mean to take advantage. I did the work Verna outlined in her invitation, and after her hint to Mother, did more, but as I look back, I can see that I should have been more helpful.

Aunt Elizabeth also criticized my clothes. Some of my dresses were too tight. Every day after school I had eaten an avocado from the tree beneath my bedroom window, unaware that I was consuming between five and six hundred calories. For the first time in my life I gained weight. Aunt
Elizabeth was right. Some of my clothes were too tight, but I had no money for new clothes.

My biggest clothing problem was my bias-cut Jean Harlow satin formal, which I had waited months to wear to a formal school dance. It now cupped below my bottom and clung in a way that was sure to make Mrs. Fleming banish me from the dance floor. I couldn't bear not to wear it, so I bought an inexpensive two-way stretch girdle to make me thinner. Unfortunately, as Paul and I danced, the girdle began to stretch up and to roll down until it made a thick tire around my waist. Don't let anyone notice, I silently prayed as I stood up straight so I could breathe more easily between trips to the rest room to tug it down.

When Paul took me home and I stepped out onto the running board of his Model T, he unexpectedly put his arms around me, so that I slithered to the ground. He must have felt, and been amused by, the roll around my waist, but he was too kind to let on. I was glad to say good night, run upstairs, and peel off the two-way stretch girdle and take a deep breath once more. I was annoyed because it had stretched up more than out, and I never wore the thing again. Neither did I wear my slinky satin formal.

The last semester of my freshman year was
coming to an end, and I was elected to Alpha Gamma Sigma, the honor society. Late one afternoon, when Verna and I were working in the kitchen, I worked up courage to ask the question that had worried me for some time: “Do you want me to come back next year?” Even though I had been invited only for the winter, I hoped I would be welcome for another year.

Verna paused in whatever she was doing and answered, “Fred and I have been discussing it, and we don't see how we would have room for you because both grandmothers will live with us next year.”

“Oh.” My disappointment was deep. I thought a moment before I said, “I wonder what I can do next.”

Verna was sympathetic. “Can't your grandfather help you?”

Although Grandpa Atlee sent me five dollars every month, I was sure Mother would not let me ask him for more substantial help. Asking without her permission did not occur to me. Many years later, when the time came for me to go through Mother's possessions, I found a bundle of Grandpa's canceled checks. He had paid for the entire college education of his other grandchild, a grandson who became a distinguished electrical engineer.

After my conversation with Verna, I wrote in a scrawl diagonally across the last page of my diary, “What am I going to do now?” With that I ceased keeping a diary and pushed worry about the future to the back of my mind. I wanted to cling to every moment, and one of the most important was the distribution of the
Argus
, the yearbook. Embossed on the cover was an inaccurate picture of Chaffey's tower, the wrong variety of palm tree, a shield with a strange heraldic animal, possibly a griffin (why?), and the words:

Before and after classes, and sometimes in class, students wrote sentimental messages in one another's books: “Don't forget drama class. Loads of luck.” “Be good and everything.” “Here's wishing a very nice girl a very nice future. It's been swell having you in a lot of my classes.”

Exchanging messages with Paul was an event much too important to be hurried at school even though by now I sensed he was growing bored with my girlish enthusiasm. In his Model T we rattled out toward the mountains, traded year-
books, and began to write. He wrote two pages, beginning: “My dear Beverly: Here I sit under a sweeping oak tree some nine months after I first saw you…” and going on to tell me I had helped make his year complete; advising me to have more confidence in myself—“You really have everything it takes, plus a very fine understanding of people”; and cautioning me about trying to read between the lines—“Unfortunately—or fortunately—no one has found the key….” He ended: “I believe you will understand and appreciate what I have tried to say. You have been a wonderful pal, loyal friend and a perfectly swell girl friend. May we meet again my dear and often. With love, Paul.”

Key? Key to what? His heart, presumably. Oh dear. Paul, like many others, had misinterpreted my feelings for him and seen as serious love what was really my joy in my new life and in the beauty of the world around me, and my pleasure in sharing common interests with a young man. Best of all, Paul was fun. The misreading of my girlish crush by others had embarrassed me, and now Paul's reference to “the key” embarrassed me even more. I wonder what I wrote in his
Argus
. Something cautious, I am sure.

A few days before I was to leave, Verna turned to me in the kitchen and said, “Beverly, I don't
want you ever to tell your mother you didn't make good grades because I made you work too hard.” I was stunned, too stunned to speak. Why did she think I would say a thing like that? I had fulfilled the duties outlined before I came and more and would willingly have done anything she asked of me. But she never asked, just wrote a hint to Mother. Finally I managed to say, “But I did make good grades.” Didn't she remember that I was a member of the honor society?

That was the end of the matter, but for many years I thought about the incident, which left me with an insecurity. Was I failing to please when I thought I was doing the right thing?

Verna's feelings toward me did not appear to change. She was interested, kind, and helpful as always. I went with her in the gray Rickenbacker to Los Angeles, where she attended a library association's monthly book breakfast. So I wouldn't get lost, Fred had me memorize the streets I must stay on: Main, Spring, Broadway, Hill, Olive, Grand, Hope, Flower, and Figueroa. Once we went to the Orange Belt Emporium in Pomona to choose yarn for a suit she had asked me to knit for her during the summer. She had always wanted a hand-knit suit even though Fred held forth on the foolishness of knitting. It was a waste of time, he said. Machine-knit clothes
cost less. Verna and I knew machine-knit clothes could not compare with hand-knit in beauty and texture. Besides, she offered to pay me twenty dollars.

The last day, the day I packed my trunk, Atlee unexpectedly asked me to go downtown for a milk shake. I was both pleased and surprised and have often wondered if the invitation was his own idea. That evening, after my typewriter was screwed into its crate once more, Paul came to bring me a box of candy and to say good-bye and wish me luck in whatever was to happen next in my life. He had a summer job as night watchman at the Little Theater in Padua Hills and in September would go to the University of Southern California on a journalism scholarship. We agreed to write, but in my heart I doubted if I would ever see him again.

The next morning, as I was about to say good-bye to the family on the driveway, Fred looked at my awkward typewriter crate and issued an order: “Atlee, get the brace and bit and some rope from the garage. Let's make Beverly's typewriter easier to handle.” Atlee obeyed, and the two quickly unscrewed the lid, bored holes in the crate, knotted rope handles through them, and screwed the lid back on. I was grateful for this last act of kindness, and I am sure it was appreci
ated by porters and taxi drivers who were stuck with handling the unwieldy wooden box.