My Own Two Feet (7 page)

Mother and I wrote letters of condolence to Verna, who responded by saying her mother's death was quite unexpected and that Atlee, now sixteen, had accompanied his grandmother's body by train to their family cemetery in Michigan. She said nothing about my returning.

Mother was indignant. Why hadn't Verna mentioned my coming back? What was wrong that I was no longer welcome?

“Mother, just forget it,” I begged. “I had one happy year. Don't spoil it.”

But Mother would not forget. She wrote to both Verna and Lora. I did not know what she said and did not want to know. Whatever it was, she received tactful answers but no invitation for me. Mother despaired. Her cousins must not consider me the perfect daughter she had struggled to bring me up to be. What had I done wrong, she insisted on knowing. I wasn't sure, I told her, but I supposed I hadn't done enough housework.

“Housework!” Mother was indignant as well as
desperate. “You weren't invited to do housework. You were invited to bake cake.”

“And I did bake cake,” I reminded her. I waited for Mother to calm down before I brought up my idea of asking Norma, if I could reach her, to share an apartment. At first Mother was horrified. I would do no such thing. Two girls in an apartment? It would never do.

Once more Dad reminded Mother that if I didn't have any sense by then, I never would have. Gradually she softened and asked the usual motherly questions. Just what sort of girl was this Norma? I described her as a picture of health, full of fun, a model student, a hard worker, a really lovely person. I was sure about the picture of health, and produced my yearbook to prove it, but I was not so sure about the rest of my fanciful description. With such different interests, we had not shared classes.

Mother reluctantly allowed me to write to Norma and offer my suggestion. But how? I must have sent my letter in care of the Seattle Watershed. Somehow it reached her. In a few days I received an enthusiastic answer. She, too, had longed to go back to Chaffey, and her parents agreed to our sharing an apartment. Mother wrote to Verna, who volunteered to look for an apartment.

Letters flew back and forth. My parents could let me have fifteen dollars a month, and my grandfather would continue to send my five. Norma would have about the same amount. I found remnants in a department store basement and made some dresses that weren't too tight, wrote frequently to Paul, watched eagerly for his less frequent letters, knit swiftly around and around Verna's skirt, finished it, started the jacket.

Claudine invited me to spend a few days at Puddin', an invitation I was overjoyed to accept, and I went, knitting all the way. I finished knitting the jacket and started the lace blouse on larger needles. Somehow, by the first of September, that, too, was finished. I had earned twenty dollars! Twenty whole dollars, the most I had ever earned.

Verna wrote that she had found us a two-room, share-a-bath apartment next door to the public library, which made it, in Mother's eyes, respectable. The rent was fifteen dollars a month. Joyfully I packed my trunk, this time including sheets, dish towels, and lavender bath towels with purple monograms (Meier & Frank had had a sale), which cushioned a sandwich toaster Mother had bought for us. I met smiling Norma at the Greyhound depot and brought her home
on a streetcar. Mother studied her, relaxed, and took me aside to whisper, “It's going to be all right. She's a nice girl.” I was relieved that Mother was relieved.

Late the next afternoon, Norma and I took off on the bus for California. During the uncomfortable night, she confided that until my letter arrived she had been desolate with longing to return to Chaffey when she was not invited back, but because she had two older brothers in college, she had to wait her turn to continue her education until they graduated. Her parents could not afford three children in universities at the same time. They had been as relieved as Norma by my letter, and her mother apparently did not worry about “just what sort of girl is this Beverly.”

We had planned to stay two nights at the San Francisco YWCA so we could spend a day sightseeing, but after one night we were so eager to get to Ontario, as if we were afraid it might have disappeared during the summer, that we consulted the bus schedule and found the next bus for Los Angeles left in late afternoon. We arrived at the station early and each rented a pillow, a necessity, not an extravagance, we decided, after our previous night on the bus.

We had not noticed that this bus traveled by Highway 99, a much longer, hotter trip than the
route I had taken the year before. It was a miserable journey with many stops.

Bakersfield, in those days before air-conditioning, was an oven at midnight. Inside the station hundreds of sinister-looking large-winged insects swooped and flopped. Norma and I were too sweaty to eat and beat off bugs, so we climbed back onto the bus. Neither of us could sleep. I wondered if this bus driver had pinpoint eye.

Daylight. In Los Angeles we ate a greasy breakfast at a counter in the station before we changed to a bus bound for Ontario, where we arrived grimy and rumpled. After the ritual agricultural inspection of our trunks, we walked, overnight cases in hand, to our new address, a big old gray house on Euclid Avenue.

The landlady, Mrs. Tuckness, who was also a dressmaker, led us upstairs to the two front rooms, identical in size and separated by a closet with a curtain of eucalyptus buds strung like beads. The floors were painted “robin's egg blue” and had large linoleum rugs. Each room had a door into the hall. We were not given keys and did not think this unusual. After we paid our rent, Mrs. Tuckness said, “It is going to be fun to have girls around, and as long as I can hear noise when young men come to call I won't worry about you.”

We stepped out onto the shaky balcony outside our living-bedroom to look at the library and the palms, grevillea, and pepper trees along Euclid Avenue. We were exhausted, ecstatic, and in need of baths. I shared my farewell gift of lavender bath salts, and we emerged in turn, fragrant and ready to set up housekeeping. Lunch? Our Greyhound breakfasts still weighed on our stomachs. Our trunks were delivered, and we unpacked, dividing our meager wardrobes between a closet off the kitchen and the closet between the two rooms. Norma had brought an unexpected luxury, a small radio that we placed on the lamp table. She set photographs of her two handsome brothers on her half of the dressing table.

We placed a sign for the iceman in the front window before we walked to the A&P to lay in a supply of groceries. Then, groggy with fatigue, we prepared a hasty supper on the three-burners-over-an-oven stove and, like the good housekeepers our mothers had brought us up to be, washed and dried the dishes and returned them to the china cabinet.

By then we could barely stay awake, so we tackled the studio couch Mrs. Tuckness had bought for us to sleep on. She had explained, “When young men come to call, it wouldn't do to have a bed in the living room.”

That green couch! It had three cushions propped against the wall. The bottom of the couch pulled out like a drawer to make a second place to sleep and for storing bedding during the day. We had to move the mattress from the top to the pull-out section. Because Norma was tall, she took the foundation of the couch, which had springs and was a few inches longer and about six inches higher than the lower half. When we made up our uneven bed with our new sheets, we discovered there was no place for Norma to tuck in her half of the bedding. “Never mind,” she said. “I can balance the cushions on my feet to hold the blanket down.”

Exhausted, I fell into my half of the bed and watched, fascinated, as Norma went through a series of exercises. That's a P.E. major for you, I thought. When she had completed her exercises, Norma climbed into bed, as exhausted as I, and balanced the green cushions on her feet. We both slept soundly.

In the morning we awoke to the song of a mockingbird. Because we were so happy, we lay in bed singing at the top of our voices a popular song: “You push the middle valve down. The music goes 'round and around, wo-ho-ho-ho, and comes out here!” We had actually made it back to Chaffey and one more year of college.

The next afternoon, when Norma and I had recovered from the day before, someone knocked on our kitchen door. A strange man introduced himself, said he lived in a room at the rear of the house, and held out a basket of tomatoes. We were delighted, accepted them, thanked him, and closed the door. Late the next afternoon he knocked again and offered us the evening paper, which he could not have had time to read. Again we accepted his gift, thanked him, and shut the door. This went on for several days before he gave up and kept his paper. We were so naïve we did not realize that he expected to be invited in. After all, he was old. Probably thirty.

For two such different people, Norma and I got
along surprisingly well, although she said I made her feel tall and lanky, and I said she made me feel short and dumpy. We enjoyed housekeeping without our mothers telling us what to do even though we did exactly what they would have wanted us to.

The first one home from school shopped for groceries with money from the $7.50 apiece that we had deposited in a cookie jar for a month's supply of food. Sometimes, if our schedules permitted, we went to the A&P together because marketing was fun. The young men who worked there were lively and often stuck a thumb into an avocado. “Oops! Damaged goods. Can't sell that,” they would say, and present it to us. Once when they marched up and down the aisles with brooms over their shoulders whistling “The Stars and Stripes Forever” for our amusement, the manager appeared. Suddenly the men were diligently sweeping while Norma and I examined the vegetables.

One joint attempt at washing sheets and towels in the laundry tub in the shed behind the house was enough for us. We sent our linens to a laundry and subtracted the money from the cookie jar. Every morning we walked to school with our dishes washed, our lunches packed, and
our bed converted to a couch. Our mothers would have been proud.

The icebox somehow turned into my responsibility because Norma had a carefree attitude toward it. During the day she simply put it out of her mind. I could not. That icebox haunted me. Suddenly, in the middle of class, I would remember that we had forgotten to empty the pan under it that, at that very moment, might be overflowing and leaking through the floor onto Mrs. Tuckness's bed downstairs. Between classes I would rush to telephone her. She was always grateful for my warning.

That first semester our social life was limited. Paul came to see me a couple of times before he went off to his junior year at U.S.C. and a part-time job on the
Los Angeles Times
. We walked up Euclid Avenue to see the new Chaffey library and the new women's gym built with government funds. We talked about our futures and Paul revealed, without actually saying so, that even with a scholarship and a part-time job he had to manage on very little money. Once when Verna drove into Los Angeles to attend the book breakfast, I went along and met Paul to sit for a few minutes on a bench in Pershing Square before he had to go back to the
Times
. He looked tired. I wondered about his living conditions in Los Angeles but did
not ask and did not expect to see him again. His work, our studies, and our lack of money, I knew, made meetings impossible. I was sorry, but our goals were more important than our friendship.

Sometimes Atlee and his friend Harold would drop in to listen to Norma's radio. Norma and I were always careful to walk around and to laugh heartily from time to time so Mrs. Tuckness would not be alarmed by silence overhead. Once the boys drove us to a movie in Pomona in the topless Rickenbacker. They sat in the front seat while we sat in the back with our hair tousled by the wind. They paid our admissions, but they refused to be seen sitting with us. What could we expect of sixteen-year-old boys?

The Clapps invited us to dinner and so did Norma's friends. Connie, a bright-eyed sparrow of a girl who was to be my friend all her life, often dropped in for supper after stopping at the A&P to buy “whatever meat the girls were having.” In my
Argus
at the end of the year she reminded me of “dinners at your apartment when we could not eat for laughing.” We went to football games in Connie's family car and to YWCA suppers where Norma and I were usually given leftover casserole dishes to take home. We went to school dances, Norma and I, each with somebody's brother, while Connie went with Park, a minis
ter's son, whom she was pursuing and appeared to be gaining on.

One spring day, as I ate my lunch on Chaffey's lawn, I came to know a freshman, Frank, whom I treated with a touch of condescension because I assumed he was younger than I. At least, that was how he seemed after Gerhart and Paul until he admitted with amusement that he was a year older. His ambition was to become a politician, and he treated me with such formality that I felt I had to behave with unnatural dignity. This did not prevent us from having some pleasant times together. We went to a dance at the Red Hill Country Club, where he looked handsome in what every young man aspired to own, a white jacket, which I was pleased to be seen with, but Frank was tall, and I worried about smearing lipstick on his white shoulder as we danced. One day we drove in a borrowed car to Los Angeles to see
The Great Ziegfeld
at Grauman's Chinese Theatre and to admire the footprints of movie stars in concrete. Could Gloria Swanson's feet really have been that small? We finished the day with dinner at Lucca's—the first Italian meal I had ever eaten. I liked Frank but somehow could never get over feeling we were both pretending to be something we were not. Probably I was
wrong and was only responding to Frank's natural reserve.

Norma had another source of recreation, which was exhilarating to her but would have been misery to me. These were Play Days, when she went off with a group of P.E. majors to other schools where they spent happy, for them, days of sports: baseball, archery, swimming, hockey, and tennis. Norma returned glowing with health and always went through her program of exercises while we listened to the news and I lay lazily on my low half of the couch. Norma followed events in Europe closely. She was afraid her brothers might have to go to war.

Norma studied at the kitchen table and solved math problems in ink on the oilcloth, which she scrubbed off before she went to bed. Now the icebox was her problem. The steady drip-drip of melting ice irritated her, so she put our dishcloth in the pan to muffle the drips, a nuisance because she had to fish it out, cold and sopping, before we could wash our breakfast dishes. Except when Atlee and Harold dropped in, I studied in the living-bedroom, sitting in the rocking chair with my feet up on the gas heater, which we never turned on.

We were both getting laboratory sciences “out of the way.” Norma was studying zoology, which
required dissecting a rabbit that she fished out of a barrel of formaldehyde on lab days. We joked about serving it for dinner when she finished dissecting it. While Norma was studying the anatomy of her pickled rabbit, I was studying botany because I had enjoyed the study of plants in my high school biology course. I was also taking psychology and two English courses from Mr. Palmer and two units of conversational French from Dr. Miller.

And then there was P.E. in the new women's gym, where the subject of scandalized talk was communal showers in one large room with showerheads along two sides.
There was no privacy
, people said. Like most gossip, this was not entirely true. There were several stall showers for modest maidens, but many girls adjusted the showerheads so that opposing streams of water met in the center of the room, sending spray in all directions. Then they raced up and down, spluttering and splashing, dancing and leaping like nymphs. I rarely used these showers because I didn't want to get my hair soaked.

My metatarsal arches must have improved because I was no longer required to pick up marbles with my toes. Instead, I was assigned to a folk dancing class, which I enjoyed. To this day, whenever I hear “La Cucaracha,” I feel an urge
to spring to my feet and, with my hands on my hips, stamp out imaginary cockroaches.

Of my courses, although I really did not count P.E., English Composition was the most absorbing. Mr. Palmer assigned us a daily three-hundred-word paper on any subject, to be poked through a slot in the locker nearest his office by three o'clock every school day. We were to do this until someone in the class earned an A. At first it was easy. I described the view from our kitchen window, the scene inside a shoe repair shop, my grandfather's store in Oregon, the sound of palm trees at night, but as the days went by, I began to feel as if I had written everything in the world there was to write about. Still Mr. Palmer hoarded his A's. I also began to think, but did not write, about myself in the third person: Her saddle shoes crushed pepper berries into the lawn as she walked under the feathery trees. She joined friends on the school steps, tore open her lunch bag, and bit into a peanut-butter sandwich. Bending over, she tightened the laces of her gym shoes and tied them in a neat bow before she…

Because I was also studying psychology, I began to wonder if I might lose my mind if this went on. Finally,
finally
, after what seemed like weeks, Mr. Palmer announced that an A paper had been turned in. It was mine, a description of
a shabby old man shuffling through a restaurant trying to sell violets, a sad Depression scene I had witnessed when a young man named Bob had taken me to a Portland restaurant for a hamburger. People had money for hamburgers, but no one had money for violets. When Mr. Palmer read my melancholy description aloud, the class was grateful to me for commuting our sentence of a daily three hundred words.

One day, when five dollars arrived from my grandfather, I went into a shop to buy yarn to knit Norma a pair of bed socks for Christmas because the cushions balanced on her feet often fell off, exposing her toes to the chilly night air. Knitting was popular at Chaffey. When the shop owner learned that I could knit lace patterns, she asked me to take on the difficult parts of other customers' knitting. To be paid for something I enjoyed! I was delighted and knit lace yokes, for which I was paid seventy-five cents an ounce. Norma and I then decided to knit ourselves dresses out of raw silk yarn, but because we could not afford to buy all the yarn at once, the shop owner kept the skeins and allowed us to pay for them as needed. I knit along with other girls in classes, at YWCA meetings, and at tea at Dr. Miller's home, where we rummaged
around in our minds for easy verbs to use in the required French conversation.

Then one day the Dean of Women called me in and asked if I had ever studied Latin. I had, for two years at Mother's insistence, “because Latin was the foundation of language.” The dean offered me the task of correcting high school Latin papers. I was paid out of National Youth Administration funds for the boring work, which paid for the rest of my silk yarn.

My finances continued to improve. Alberta Schaeffer, the Ontario librarian, knocked on our door. “Mrs. Clapp recommended you for substitute work in the library. Would you be interested?” she asked. Would I! Of course I would. Miss Schaeffer cautioned me that the library board would fire without notice any librarian seen drinking or smoking in a public place. I did not find this a problem.

In 1935, in the Ontario library, any librarian who was ill had to pay a substitute out of her own pocket. Forty whole cents an hour. I didn't want to wish the librarians any hard luck, but I enjoyed working at the circulation desk of the old Carnegie library. One elderly woman was indignant because
pitchblende
was not in the encyclopedia. Having met the word in Geology, I found it easily; she had not realized it was spelled with
a
t
. Then Miss Schaeffer asked if I could translate a letter from France, which the local nursery, noted for citrus plants, had received. The letter in simple business French was easy to translate, and I was elated to have used both geology and French in real life while earning money in a library. Patrons furnished subjects for English compositions. An old man who spent most of his days in the library confided that he called it his private club. Describing him earned me another A. During the year I banked my earnings, most of them from an unfortunate librarian who suffered a bad case of trench mouth. Fifty dollars! I would not go into the future empty-handed.

The future was a worry to most Chaffey students. Norma, whose brothers were graduating in June, planned to go with hockey stick and tennis racquet to Washington State to continue P.E. Many were applying for scholarships at the University of Southern California. Others hoped to go to Cal, as the University of California at Berkeley was called by everyone before other campuses were built and it became known as U.C., Berkeley. Everyone was filling out applications, so I filled out one, too. Although I had no hope of going there, I applied to Cal because of its graduate School of Librarianship, an application to fantasy. How could I possibly manage
three years of attendance at a university that charged $150 a year in nonresident tuition?

Connie and I were both accepted by Cal, with my acceptance stipulating that I must take one year of either philosophy or mathematics. When I wrote this news in my weekly letter home, Mother answered that she and Dad had talked it over and decided that somehow they could manage the nonresident tuition. I learned later that my father, like many Depression fathers, borrowed on his life insurance.

There was, however, another obstacle: living. Because Oregon friends all lived in dormitories or sorority houses, I had assumed that all college women lived this way, which I knew I could not afford. I soon learned from others that most Cal students had to find their own living accommodations. Five of us talked about renting an apartment. Norma and I got along, with one or two rough patches, but five girls with different allowances, temperaments, interests, and schedules? I was dubious.

The news of cooperative houses at Cal filtered down by way of former Chaffey students, mostly brothers, for in the 1930s when money was hard to come by, many parents felt it was more important to educate their sons, who would have to support families, than their daughters, who
would be supported by husbands. First we heard of cooperative houses for men: Barrington and Sheridan. Then we learned that in January of that year a women's cooperative, Stebbins Hall, had been established. Room and board were eighteen dollars a month plus half an hour of work a day. I began to be hopeful, but the catch, I soon learned via rumor, was a waiting list so long there was no point in applying so late in the year. Still…