A Girl from Yamhill (8 page)

The teacher put her hand on my shoulder, turned, and smiled at the other teacher. “This one,” she said, “is a nuisance.”

I stared at her in pain, while she looked amused, before I turned and fled, no longer wanting to rehearse, no longer wanting to be a lilac blossom at all. A nuisance, a
nuisance
—the word tormented me.

“What's the matter, Beverly?” Mother asked when I came home from school. “You look down in the mouth.”

I shook my head, too ashamed to tell, because Mother might agree with that teacher. My parents believed teachers were always right.

The night of the program, I balked. “Of course
you're going,” said Mother. “I have been elected president of next year's PTA.”

“Can't Daddy stay home with me?” I pleaded. My father, I knew, did not like to go out in the evening. This time he wanted to go. I scowled and stuck out my lower lip.

“Get that look off your face,” ordered my father.

“Beverly, I don't know what gets into you sometimes,” said Mother with a sigh. “Now stop sulking and come along.”

So, on that dreaded evening, all three of us walked to school and sat on folding chairs in the auditorium, with me in the middle, where I hunched down, trying to be invisible, a wretched, too-short nuisance.

“Sit up,” ordered Mother, who was running out of patience. “Stop that slumping.”

Reluctantly I raised myself an inch or two, while up on the stage the happy lilac blossoms rustled and twirled in their lavender and purple crepe paper costumes. I could scarcely bear to watch, and I never wanted to go to school again.

Father tired of the long streetcar ride to work. Mother dreaded another winter of icy winds sweeping down the Columbia River Gorge. I did not say so, but I was fearful of having for my teacher the woman who thought I was a nuisance.

Mother resigned her upcoming PTA presidency, and early in the summer, we moved to tree-lined Hancock Street, half a block from Fernwood, my former school, which had sprouted two gymnasiums and an auditorium in the past year. Mother said I was just skin and bones, and now I could come home for a good lunch. She felt so cheerful about the advantages of the move for all of us that she went to a beauty shop and had her hair bobbed and permanent-waved. She came home smiling, with her long hair in a paper bag.

I now had a long walk to Sunday School while dreading having to read aloud a Bible verse with the word
womb
, a mysterious word, both in meaning and in pronunciation. However, the new Rose City Branch Library and the new Hollywood Theater were only a few blocks away.

Houses were close to one another, so close we could hear “The Prisoner's Song” or “The Song of the Volga Boatmen” played on Victrolas. All our neighbors had front and back lawns, and most had children the right age to play with. We played hard that summer: jump rope, hopscotch, and O'Leary with hard red rubber balls. Sometimes we did not play, but instead danced the Charleston, heels flying, hands crisscrossing between our knocking knees. If one of us fell down, the rest shouted “I faw down, go boom,” a reference to a silly song about England's Prince of Wales falling off polo ponies.

“Good gracious,” said Mother, “those children have all turned into flappers, and they're going right through the soles of their shoes.”

Evenings when a comedy program was broadcast, neighbors with radios left their front doors open so children could settle like flocks of birds on their porches and listen. Some parent was always willing to take a few children to any civic event that might interest us. We saw Charles Lindbergh, blond and exhausted, paraded
through Portland. We saw Queen Marie of Romania, holding a bouquet of purple flowers, ride down Sandy Boulevard. We saw the statue of Joan of Arc unveiled and were bored by speeches. And, of course, each year we sat on curbs to watch the Rose Festival parade.

We also went to the Hollywood Theater, an art-deco palace with Moorish towers above the box office. Inside, everything seemed red and gold. A Wurlitzer organ rose out of the floor by magic, with the organist already seated, ready to accompany the silent films.

Father took me to every movie with Lon Chaney or Douglas Fairbanks. My favorite was Douglas Fairbanks, who leaped from urn to urn in
The Thief of Baghdad
and slid down the sail of a ship by stabbing it with his dagger in
The Black Pirate
.

Mother preferred Mary Pickford or comedies. In
Sparrows
, Mary Pickford led a group of orphans across quicksand to save them from an evil man who was pursuing them, a scene so scary Mother found a piece of paper in her handbag for me to tear into little pieces so I wouldn't bite my nails until my fingers bled. When Harold Lloyd dangled from the hands of a clock far above a city street, children screamed with fright and excitement, and some of us were left with a permanent fear of heights.

Most of all, children hoped for an “Our Gang” comedy. To me, these comedies were about neighborhood children playing together, something I wanted to read about in books. I longed for books about the children of Hancock Street.

Worried about something I did not understand, Mother began to change. She decided it was time to mold my character. I was too old to call her Mamma. I was to call her Mother. Her rules followed me around the house like mosquitoes. “Use your head.” “Stand on your own two feet.” “Use your ingenuity.” “Never borrow.” “Use your imagination.” And, of course, “Remember your pioneer ancestors,” who used their heads, stood on their own two feet, always stuck to it, never borrowed.

If I lost something, Mother said, “You'll have to learn to look after your things.” I did. If I was involved in a neighborhood squabble, I got no sympathy. “What did
you
do?” Mother always asked, leaving me with the feeling that, no matter what happened, I was to blame. “Try,” Mother often said.

And try I did. When Abendroth's store across from Fernwood announced a contest sponsored by Keds shoes for the best essay about an animal, many of my class planned to enter. I chose the beaver, because Oregon was known as the Beaver State. On green scratch paper left over from printing checks, which Father brought home
from the bank, I wrote my essay and took it to Mr. Abendroth. On the final day of the contest, I ran to the store to learn the results. I had won! Mr. Abendroth handed me two dollars. Then he told me no one else had entered the contest.

This incident was one of the most valuable lessons in writing I ever learned. Try! Others will talk about writing but may never get around to trying. I also wrote a letter to the
Shopping News
, which published the letter and paid me a dollar.

Fernwood was a relief after Gregory Heights. I had not been forgotten, nobody knew I was a nuisance, and my height did not matter. Johnny, my “love” from Gregory Heights, was there; his family had also moved.

Miss Pollock, our fourth-grade teacher, was a serious gray-haired woman who often reminded us that we should believe in “Gawd,” apparently the same God I had learned about in Sunday School. She was kind and easily pleased. The fourth grade seemed to be one long quest for the lowest common denominator in long division. Sometimes I wished Miss Pollock's Gawd would help. For a treat, on Friday afternoons, we were allowed to recite poetry. I once recited “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” after being coached by Mother.

Once a week, we marched off to the music
room. Miss Johnson, the music teacher, always wore a green smock with a pocket that bulged with what we children suspected was a package of cigarettes but was probably a box of chalk. Miss Johnson was not a popular teacher, and I could never please her.

By the time I reached the music room, my stomach was a tight knot. We opened our song-books and sang. Claudine, from the first grade, sat behind me, and when we began “If I were a student in Cadiz,” Claudine sang “If I were a student in Hades.” I admired and was cheered by her courage.

“Ring-ching-ching, ring-ching-ching, ring out
ye
bells,” Miss Johnson enunciated distinctly. “Not ring
owchee
bells.”

“Ring-ching-ching, ring-ching-ching, ring OWCHEE bells,” sang musical, carefree Claudine, spraying spit on the back of my neck.

We then had to take turns standing and singing alone. Please, God, let the period end, let the fire drill bell ring, let somebody throw up, before my turn. I sat, rigid, hoping the boy who had the courage to defy Miss Johnson would be called on first. His refusal to sing took up a lot of class time. He simply shook his head and sat mute. First his cheeks turned red, then his ears, while we sat fascinated by his defiance and by Miss Johnson's anger. The boy always won.

The music class made me so miserable, so sick with dread, that Mother gave up on my gumption and interceded. She went to school and explained my unhappiness over singing alone. On the next music day, Miss Johnson made another singing-dreader and me come to the front of the room and sing “America.” We mumbled through, each trying to sing more softly than the other.

“Sing louder,” ordered Miss Johnson. “Let me hear each word.”

The girl and I exchanged glances of pure misery and mumbled more loudly on our second rendition of “America.”

Fear of singing, however, did not stop me from wanting to be in the Christmas operetta,
The Cruise of the Trundle Bed
, about a little boy who fell asleep and dreamed he went to Toyland. I enlisted as a tin soldier because a short tin soldier was useful for leading marches, something I had to do almost every rainy gym period when we lined up according to height and marched in columns of two, four, eight; divided into fours, twos; marched single file in circles, on and on. Because I was the shortest girl in the class and always led the girls' column, I was good at marching, if not at singing.

On the night of the performance, dressed in blue and tan cambric soldier suits made by our mothers, we suffered one casualty, a girl who
danced the Charleston on a chair and fell off, wounded, with a broken arm. Our troop regrouped and marched through our formations. When time came to face the audience and sing “The toyshop door is locked up tight. All the toys are quiet for the night,” my courage left me. I mimed the words, a dodge noticed by my parents and every other parent in our neighborhood. “Why weren't you singing, Beverly?” they asked. “I didn't notice you singing.” “What's the matter, cat got your tongue?” I thought they were rude, but I did not care. After my failure to be a lilac blossom, to be a fourth-grade tin soldier was a triumph, especially when a basketball, playing the part of a cannonball, was rolled across the stage and we all fell over with one leg in the air.

While school was often a happy place, sorrow was creeping into our home. Evenings, when my father came home from work, Mother's gentle greeting was always “Well, how did it go today?”

“All right.” My father said little about his days at work, but then, he always was a quiet man. He could not have enjoyed standing eight hours on a marble floor, but he did not complain in front of me.

After supper, Mother still read aloud to my father and me. At first she read travel books and Greek or Norse myths, but more and more she searched for humorous stories, usually in
The
Saturday Evening Post
, which we bought for a nickel once a week from a neighborhood boy.

When I went to bed, I overheard worried, serious conversations. No matter how hard I tried, I could not hear what my parents were talking about. Finally Mother, desperate for a confidant, said to me in a voice filled with anguish, “Oh, I do pray your father won't decide to go back to the farm. For me, those years were years of slavery.”

This was a complete surprise. Going back to the farm had never entered my mind. I had forgotten we still owned it. My father never mentioned in front of me his wish to return, for in those days parents did not discuss adult problems in front of children.

Tensions tightened. My father began to fly into rages over trivialities. A gentle man, he now terrified me by swearing, going into the bedroom, and slamming the door. I suffered over these outbreaks because I was afraid of what he might do when he came out. However, he always emerged quiet and in control of himself. Each time, I hoped such an outburst would be his last. I did not connect them with his dislike of the bank's marble floor or his longing to work outdoors once again.

Except for having mumps, I remember very little about the first half of fifth grade. I do recall that every day after lunch, we pulled out our composition books, and the teacher, a tense, unhappy woman, sat at her desk dictating numbers in sequence. We translated them into Roman numerals and wrote them down in columns.
CLXXXIV, CLXXXV, CLXXXVI, CLXXXVII, CLXXXVIII, CLXIX
. We had to think and write fast to keep up.

“Can't you slow down?” we objected. Our teacher ignored us. On and on she droned, her thoughts elsewhere.

Bored, lulled into drowsiness by her monotonous voice, most of us fell behind, skipped, and dropped out, only to begin again after lunch the
next day. “Beverly comes home from school exhausted,” Mother told the neighbors.

Miss Sampson, in 5B, was another teacher who wore navy blue and chalk dust and seemed old. She was kind but uninteresting. She gave us one homework assignment, the construction of a paper box the correct size to hold one gallon. Mine was wrong.

Johnny, the boy from Gregory Heights, now sat across the aisle from me. The class had decided, and I did not discourage them, that Johnny and I were in love.

One day Miss Sampson left the classroom for a few minutes. “Kiss her,” someone whispered to Johnny. “Go ahead and kiss her!” The whole class began to hiss with insistence.

I was startled. Being in love was pleasant, but actually—kissing? What would Mother say if she heard about it? Johnny, interested, agreeable, daring, gave me a challenging look.

Accepting Johnny's silent dare, I extended the back of my right hand. Johnny took my fingers in his, as if he were a nobleman in a pirate movie, and kissed my hand, which I then quickly withdrew.

Miss Sampson returned, and the class immediately reassembled itself and tried to pretend it had been working on fractions the whole time. I
sat blushing. A boy had kissed my hand! To this day, I have difficulty with fractions.

One morning I found in my desk a salmon-colored envelope. Inside was a matching sheet of paper with a downhill sentence printed in pencil: “I love you Bevererly.” It was signed by Johnny. Happy that Johnny had finally, after three years, admitted loving me, I took it home to show Mother, who placed it in my Baby Book along with the record of my first tooth and first words. My first love letter is still there.

Acknowledged love was not the only change in my life. Mother found a piano teacher on the next street, and I began to take lessons, thumping away at scales and “The Happy Farmer” while Evelyn, an older girl who lived across the street, played rapid, accurate scales and “Rustle of Spring,” probably counting out each note, on her baby grand piano. I felt hitting the right note should be enough without having to count at the same time.

After school, Mother would say, “Now I am going to have you practice,” phrasing I deeply resented. Even more, I resented her sitting beside me, supervising my practice. However, music lessons had one advantage. Because I was so wretched over school music that I could not eat breakfast on music day, Mother arranged with the principal to let me take my piano lessons dur
ing music period. This kept me lackadaisically thumping.

When Grandmother Bunn came to visit, she listened to the frilly, trilly “Rustle of Spring” floating from across the street and offered me fifty dollars to learn to play it.

“No, thank you,” I said politely, refusing to compromise my integrity.

That year a new girl appeared in the fifth grade, a girl who lived in the next block and who passed our house on the way to school. For the first time, I found a best friend.

Her name was Mary Dell. She had a sister seven or eight years old and parents who were younger than mine. Her father worked for a paint company. Mary Dell's mother seemed happy and carefree, often with a paintbrush in her hand, painting woodwork or kitchen cabinets. Once she even painted a pair of shoes. The family also kept a pet dog, a lively wire-haired terrier named Winnie. A dog in the house! On the farm we had two working dogs and a stray terrier that hung around, but none of them was ever allowed in the house.

Sometimes I spent the night with Mary Dell, and if my parents went to a party with friends from Yamhill who had moved to Portland, Mary Dell stayed with me. We did this until my parents gave up their modest social life. Long waits
for streetcars at night spoiled their pleasure, and the serving of bootleg liquor at some parties disgusted Mother, who now felt she could no longer return hospitality.

I continued to spend the night with Mary Dell, whose mother did something I found surprising. She kissed her daughters. This filled me with longing.

I confronted Mother and informed her, “Some mothers kiss their little girls.”

Mother laughed, pulled me to her, and gave me a hug and a kiss—a sweet, isolated moment. It was never repeated. I often look back on that kiss and wonder why Mother never felt she could kiss me again. She and my father often hugged each other, and my father was affectionate toward me.

One rainy day, Mother agreed that I could invite Mary Dell to our house to play. When I telephoned my invitation, I overheard Mary Dell speaking to her mother. “Beverly wants me to come over.”

“Do you want to go?” her mother asked.

“Not especially,” was Mary Dell's answer.

Shocked, I spoke into the telephone. “I heard what you said.” I hung up, went to my room, closed the door, and cried. I cried because I understood Mary Dell's answer to her mother. My house was always cold and drab compared to Mary Dell's house; Mother was always tired and
nervous. Why should Mary Dell want to come to my house? I understood perfectly, which made my distress even more difficult to bear.

The next morning on the way to school, I told Mary Dell, “I'm mad at you for what you said yesterday.”

“What can I do to make up?” she asked.

Somehow I had not expected this reasonable answer.

“Get down on your knees and say you're sorry,” I said.

To my horror, Mary Dell knelt on the sidewalk, placed her palms as if in prayer, and said, “I'm sorry.” Then she rose, and we walked on to school as if nothing had happened. I cannot recall my reply, but I do recall the shame I felt (and still feel) over this incident that was so painful to me. There was no reason Mary Dell should have to be forgiven for a truthful answer to her mother. I wished my mother could be happier, more welcoming to my friends, who were almost never invited to our house.

A citywide spelling bee was announced. Mother was determined that I should enter. In school, when we took a spelling test, I slid through by somehow imprinting the words in my mind for a few minutes before they faded. If the test was given immediately, I spelled most of the words correctly.

The
Oregon Journal
printed whole pages of words in print so small I could not photograph them with my mind. Mother insisted I spell aloud as she pronounced each word. I stood on one foot and then the other, not wanting to spell at all.

“Stop wiggling,” ordered Mother. I stared out the window; I scratched. Sullenly I spelled. Mother's lips compressed into a thin, straight line; my sighs of boredom and resentment grew more gusty.

When the preliminary spell-down was held in my classroom, I was given
beautiful
. “Beautiful. B-e-a-u,” I began. Someone gasped, confusing me and making me feel I had made a mistake. I began again. “Beautiful. B-a-e-u—”

“Wrong,” judged Miss Sampson. The class giggled. Everyone knew how to spell
beautiful
. So did I. Even though I felt silly, I was glad to be free of that city spelling bee.

Mother was so cross with me that I became angry. Without letting her know, I decided to do something bad, something really terrible. I decided to go a whole week without washing my face. That would show her, I thought, not exactly sure what would be shown, except a dirty face. Not washing my face that week gave me great satisfaction, except for one thing: no one noticed, not even Mother.

Mother bore down on me. “Don't sit on the edge
of the bed. You'll break down the edge of the mattress.” “Sit up straight. You're growing round-shouldered.” “Stop scuffing the toes of your shoes.”

Clothes became the subject of the sort of argument Mother called a “battle royal.” In winter she was adamant about two things: woolen underwear and high brown shoes that laced.

“No one at school wears woolen underwear or high brown shoes,” I protested.

“You catch enough colds as it is,” she said, “and no daughter of mine is going to grow up with thick ankles.”

“Why don't you bind my feet while you're at it?” was my mean and sulky answer.

“Don't give me any of your back talk,” Mother ordered.

“I don't care. I
hate
them,” I cried, tears beginning to come. “I hate them, I hate them!”

No answer. Thin-lipped, unrelenting silence.

Every morning, sick with misery, I pulled on that short-legged, drop-seated woolen underwear, laced up those high brown shoes, and toyed with my breakfast in sullen silence before setting off for school, where, I was sure, everyone secretly laughed at my shoes. The underwear I was careful to keep hidden.

Adults, however, felt free to comment on my appearance, as if a child were unable to hear.
“Beverly looks more like her mother every day,” they said, “but she's just skin and bones.”

“Such big brown eyes,” they said and canceled out my big brown eyes by adding, “but isn't it too bad her teeth are so crooked?”

Shoes and underwear worried me much more than my teeth, which were crooked, overlapping, and leaning in all directions. They were my teeth, and I was accustomed to them.

Toward spring I had tonsillitis again. In the night, once again the sensation of sinking downward through a white tunnel toward a light while the telegraph wires of Yamhill hummed in my brain.

“She looks like a ghost,” the neighbors said, as if I could not hear. Why did adults think children had no feelings at all?

My parents were so worried about my health that Mother took me to a pediatrician—something almost unheard of in our neighborhood—who examined me, to my great embarrassment, and said I suffered from malnutrition and that I needed to get out and run on the beach. He also prescribed some sticky green medicine and told Mother to buy me some Scott's Emulsion, a tonic that made me gag.

When Father's vacation came, my parents dutifully packed a trunk with blankets, pots and pans, and new bathing suits for all of us; and we
took the train to Rockaway, where we stayed in a one-room cottage equipped with beds, a table and chairs, and a wood stove. The pediatrician was unfamiliar with the Oregon coast, which can be cold and foggy in summer; or perhaps he did not expect to be taken literally.

Obediently I ran on the beach in spite of cold and fog, and like everyone who vacationed on the coast, we went into the Pacific Ocean every day—that was why we were there, wasn't it?—first consulting tide tables to make sure the tide was coming in so we would not be carried out to sea by undertow. Father enjoyed going out into the big breakers, but women and children jumped and squealed in small waves as we turned blue with cold and our teeth began to chatter.

The best part of that chilly vacation was raking crabs from tide pools and digging clams. I walked on wet sand, stamping my feet until a bubble appeared. As fast as he could move, Father cast aside a shovel or two of sand, knelt, and plunged his bare arms into the numbing grit to pull out a razor clam for chowder or fritters, which I refused to eat.

I am not sure this trip to the coast improved my health, but we all enjoyed it. The highlight for me was accompanying my parents to a dance. Because they felt I needed some sort of reward, they bribed me, quite unnecessarily, with a paper
parasol to go along and behave myself. I was happy sitting under my open parasol on a bench, watching my parents have a good time fox-trotting to the music played by a small band. If only they would have fun more often…

Daytimes on the beach, I was instructed to stay away from the members of the dance band and what Mother referred to as “their women,” who sat on blankets on the sand, passing around a flask. The women sometimes danced the Black Bottom while someone played a ukelele. Mother said I needn't watch. I peeked, and as soon as we returned to Portland, I showed the other girls how to dance the Black Bottom.

This journey for the improvement of my health took only two weeks, which left the rest of the summer. As in most of my grammar school summers, I passed the time sitting on the front porch, reading or embroidering. I embroidered smiling teakettles on potholders or knives chasing forks on tea towels until Mother bought a bedspread stamped with flowers to be worked in the lazy daisy stitch and big enough to keep me busy for a long time. My stitches never matched those of the mice in
The Tailor of Gloucester
, but I discovered how soothing handwork could be.