A Girl from Yamhill (14 page)

The Depression grew worse. More men lost their jobs. Almost every day, at least one defeated man came to the door trying to sell shoelaces or pencils to earn a few cents. At first Mother bought from them because we were lucky. My father had a job. But finally so many came to the door she could no longer face the sad, gray men. We hid when we saw them coming. Mother always grieved when we did this. “You see what heroes men are,” she said.

All around us, people were having a hard time. A neighbor took in her nephew, a child about five years old. Anger spilled out of her house, and sometimes, after dark, she would lock the little boy outside as a punishment. He ran from the back door to the front door and back again,
pounding with his fists and sobbing, “Let me in! Let me in!”

When I went to bed, I hid my head under the pillow to shut out the sound of the child's sobs until his aunt relented and unlocked the door for him.

Summer was lonely. Claudine went to Puddin'. The Miles girls, those near my age, went out to the homestead their parents had claimed from land returned to the government by the railroad. There they raised and canned food and cut wood for life in the city.

I combined trips to the orthodontist with knitting lessons at Meier & Frank and trips to the main library to stretch twenty cents' carfare as far as possible and keep me away from home for an afternoon.

Halfway through the summer, Uncle Guy, Mother's older brother, and Aunt Ida arrived by automobile all the way from Arizona, bringing presents—a turquoise and silver Indian bracelet for me and chunks of turquoise from my uncle's mine for Mother. Uncle Guy, tanned and fit, seemed untouched by the Depression, and during his visit, Mother became her old vivacious self. When my aunt and uncle drove out to Banks to visit my grandparents and Uncle Henry for a few days, I went along. Grandpa Atlee had built a
post office for Banks so Uncle Henry could have a job as postmaster.

My grandfather's store, which never seemed to change, was a two-story wooden building with “W. S. Atlee General Merchandise” painted across its false front. Living quarters and Grandma Atlee's little millinery shop were above the store. My grandparents' day began with someone pounding on the front door, demanding, “Open up!”

“All right, all right, I'm coming. Hold your horses!” Grandpa shouted as he pulled up his suspenders and hurried down the stairs.

From the time the door was unlocked, old men gathered in the store to discuss politics and spit tobacco juice (“eatin' tobaccy,” they called it) into the stove while they waited for the train to arrive and for Uncle Henry to sort the mail so they could read their newspapers. Their sentences often began with “I see by the paper…” or “Will Rogers says…” That summer there was talk of loggers out of work, lumber mills that had shut down, and the possibility of a chain store opening in Forest Grove. Grandpa worried about competition from one of the new chain stores. Men asked Uncle Guy, “How are things going down there in Arizona?”

Drummers, as traveling salesmen were called, arrived. My grandmother, wearing a black sateen
apron over her blue housedress, hurried downstairs to order dry goods—notions, stockings, underwear, and yard goods—for her side of the store, while Grandpa placed his orders for coffee, tea, rice, crackers, chewing tobacco, and all the items carried on his side. He bought orange wheels of Tillamook cheese and, from farmers, eggs, which he let me candle to test for freshness by holding each over a hole in a wooden box that contained an electric light. If the egg appeared translucent, it was fresh. At the back of the store, coal oil for kerosene lamps was kept in a drum with a spigot, from which customers' coal oil cans were filled, and a half a potato was jammed on the spout to prevent spillage.

Customers came in for spools of thread, overalls (pronounced “overhauls”), coffee, which Grandpa ground in a red coffee mill, tea, and crackers sold in bulk from red metal bins. The cash register rang, but some customers, shamefaced, asked that their meager purchases be “put on the books.” My grandfather obligingly charged the items, often knowing he would never be paid. He said, “I can't see little young 'uns go without.” He had only contempt for people who bought tinned vegetables when they could grow their own. At noon my grandparents took turns going upstairs for a hasty lunch—usually canned Vienna sausage, bread and cheese, and coffee,
which Grandpa “saucered and blowed” in his private deep saucer. He did not have time to let his coffee cool in a cup.

Afternoons, women came in for their small purchases. If they were buying percale for house-dresses, Grandma, with kindly patience, laid their patterns out on the inexpensive fabric, arranging and rearranging the tissue-paper pieces to save every inch of material for women who were so pinched for money. They could no longer afford to retrim their hats each season, so Grandma's boxes of ostrich plumes, now out of fashion, grew dusty along with the ribbons, bolts of veiling, artificial flowers, and cherries that had delighted me when I was younger.

Evenings, people in Banks dropped into the store to chat and enjoy a bit of company, to discuss politics and harvest, and to exchange gossip. Women, except during berry harvest, led lonely lives. When the berries were ripe, the town came alive.

Strawberries were picked by Filipinos and taken to a warehouse with an open side where women hulled berries and packed them in barrels between layers of sugar for shipment by train to New York. All of Banks was perfumed by crushed ripe strawberries, and that summer, in the evenings after a field had been stripped of berries, I went with my two uncles into the fields and ate
dark, ripe berries, rich with juice, that had been overlooked. Uncle Guy said there was nothing like the fields of Oregon berries in Arizona.

When the last customer drifted away and my grandfather locked the store, we climbed the stairs to the living quarters, where Grandpa snapped on his radio to listen to the Alka-Seltzer news at ten o'clock. He turned his radio on a few minutes before ten in case the news came on early, and when the program began with the fizz of an Alka-Seltzer tablet dropped into water, he always said, “Yep, there she goes!” After the news, bed, and in the morning, another pounding on the door.

My grandparents' whole lives were lived in that old tinder-dry building with its one staircase leading past the drum of kerosene. Grandma cooked on a wood range and often gave the fire a fast start with a splash of coal oil from a can beside the stove. Somehow the store, the center of community life in Banks, never caught fire.

When Uncle Guy and Aunt Ida took me back to Portland and were saying goodbye, Uncle Guy ran his hand over my head and said, “She'd be a good-looking chick if she had a permanent wave.”

Mother smiled and said, “She's a little young. She has plenty of time for that.” I was inclined to agree. A permanent wave was something else
that somehow belonged in the mysterious future. When Uncle Guy left, Mother wept.

My uncle's remark made me look at myself in the mirror and fiddle with my hair. What was the use? I would never look nice with my mouth full of metal and wire. Mother began to look thoughtfully at me. The week before school started, she said, “Why don't you spend the five dollars your uncle gave you on a permanent wave?”

Well! A bit of the future had appeared through the mist.

Mother sent me to a neighborhood hairdresser, an experience fraught with suspense. The woman, widowed or divorced, who had sons to support, could afford neither a license nor a proper shop. She operated her business illegally in her dining room and lived in fear of a city inspector finding out about it. If someone rang the doorbell, customers were instructed to run and hide in the bathroom while she hid evidence of her business.

The woman shampooed my hair while I bent forward over the bathroom washbasin. Then, in the dining room, she pulled strands through slits in felt pads and wound them so tightly around metal rods I felt as if my eyebrows were raised. Next she soaked my hair with evil-smelling liquid and fastened to each roller clamps that dangled
from a heavy electric machine. The electricity was turned on. What if the inspector rang the doorbell? How could I run and hide when I was fastened to this hot, heavy contraption? Would the hairdresser leave me? Would my hair burn off? Would she be fined, even arrested? Then how would she earn her living? A permanent wave gave me plenty to worry about.

The machine heated and turned into an instrument of torture. I was silent as long as I could bear the heat. Then a small “Ooh!” escaped.

“Where does it burn?” the hairdresser asked. I pointed. She aimed a blower at the spot. My whole head seemed to be burning. I pointed; she blew. “It won't be long now,” she said over and over. The ordeal seemed to take forever. Somehow I got through it all without the inspector calling and without my hair being burned off. When the clamps were removed and my hair unwound in a Medusa-like tangle, it was neutralized, shampooed again, set, and dried. I looked in the mirror. This rite of passage, this trial by permanent wave, left me feeling better about myself, and the hairdresser still had her illegal business, which helped her survive the Depression.

When I think of my mother now, I remember her as I so often saw her when I came home from high school. She is lying on the davenport, her legs covered with a blanket, a magazine fallen to the floor beside her. This is another day when Mother feels blue. She worries constantly, unable to recover from the days when Dad was out of work. She seems unable to get warm.

A fly buzzes against the window. Mother throws back the blanket and springs to her feet. “Get that pesky fly!” she cries and seizes the nearest weapon, a newspaper that she rolls up. The chase is on. Thump. Whack. “Beverly, help me get that pesky fly before it spots the windows!” The fly grows angrier, Mother more determined, while I continue to stand, schoolbooks
clasped to my chest, fascinated by the drama of Mother versus the fly.

Thwack
. “There,” she says, triumphant. “I got him!” The corpse is brushed from the sill and tossed to an ashy grave in the fireplace.

“That's the end of him,” she says in satisfaction. Her adrenaline is flowing once more. She folds the blanket, picks up the magazine, and sits down on the davenport. “Now tell me about your day at school,” she says. I tell her, making an ordinary school day as amusing as I can. I feel responsible for Mother's happiness because she sacrifices for me.

Mother and I, relieved of maintaining peace to protect my father during the terrible days when he was out of work, were now free to disagree with each other.

Nothing I did pleased Mother; nothing she did pleased me. I wanted to wear lipstick. She said, “Certainly not. Lipstick on young girls is vulgar.”

“But I wear rouge.”

“That's different, and you don't wear much, just enough so you won't look peaked.”

School had taught me always to fold paper, as well as damask napkins, neatly; she left the newspaper in a crumpled heap on the floor. I wanted to do my homework in the evening; she wanted me to do it immediately after school “to get it out of the way.” I never touched the piano,
and after she had sacrificed to give me lessons; I reminded her she no longer touched it herself.

Mother's requests began, “I am going to have you…” I did not mind cleaning up my room, dusting, making the salad, but I resented her manner of asking me.

When spring came, I wanted to wear bobby socks like the other girls. On a trip to the orthodontist, I detoured from my usual route to buy, with twenty-five cents saved a nickel at a time, a pair of red bobby socks at Woolworth's. Mother made me return them on my next trip overtown.

Risking Mother's disapproval of lipstick on young girls, I bought a tube of Tangee lipstick at the dime store and applied it the minute I got home from the orthodontist.

At supper, my parents apparently did not notice the lipstick. No comment was made. Finally I announced, in case they had not noticed, “I am wearing lipstick.”

“So we see,” said Mother, her lips tightening into the straight line I was beginning to dread more than anything in the world. I gave up lipstick. It was not worth Mother's devastating disapproval, no matter how much I needed to make little decisions of my own.

Mother made me a white dress and a red jacket. The two halves of the collar were tied in a bow, the ends of which hung down over the
jacket at the back of my neck. I thought the collar fetching, but Mother said the bow looked too heavy and wanted to cut it off. I protested. One day, when I came home from school, I discovered that Mother had amputated the bow. For once I could not contain my anger. “You had no right to do that,” I stormed. “It is my dress, even if you did make it.”

Adults of Mother's generation did not believe children should ever cross their parents. Parents were always right. “That dress looked terrible with that bow,” she said, not giving an inch. Again her mouth tightened into the thin, disapproving line.

“You have a mouth like a buttonhole!” I hurled at her.

Mother looked stunned. I had often rebelled against her, but this was my first attack. “I'll put the kibosh on you, young lady,” she informed me. “You can't talk that way to your betters.” We did not speak until supper, when she said to Dad, “Beverly tells me I have a mouth like a buttonhole.”

Dad, weary from his day in the basement of the bank, looked at me and said, “Did you say that?”

“Yes, but she—” I did not finish the sentence. My father slapped my face, hard. I left the table and did not speak to my father for two weeks,
during which I ate supper in sullen silence and avoided looking at either parent.

As I grew up, both parents had slapped or spanked me, usually for being sassy when I was little or, as I grew older, for talking back. This time I felt I had had enough. I was too old to be slapped by my father. Talking back was not always wrong, I felt, and I would not have spoken such unkind words to Mother if she had left my dress alone and had been willing to listen to me explain my feelings.

I longed to tell my father that I was sorry I had added to the unhappiness in his life, that I understood his irritation and weariness after a day at work; but my generation was never encouraged to talk openly with our parents about feelings. Whenever I tried, I was always judged wrong. This time I did not want to revive a painful episode or involve my father in a silly argument over a bow on the collar of a dress. Neither did I want to be forced to apologize to Mother.

Finally Mother said, “Daddy wants you to know he's sorry he slapped you,” and added softly, “You know he loves you more than life itself.” I did know.

We went on as if nothing had happened, but after that episode I was careful to avoid confrontations with Mother that would involve my father. His life was hard enough.

I began to spend more and more time at Claudine's house. Mrs. Klum was almost the exact opposite of my mother. She was plump and pretty, with beautiful prematurely white hair. When Claudine and I went into a fit of giggles, she looked up from the Christian Science lesson she was often studying and said affectionately, “Oh, you silly little girls.” She did not interfere with Claudine's schoolwork and put no pressure on her to make better grades.

Mrs. Klum and Claudine had mother-daughter arguments, which they usually laughed about in a few days. Although Mr. Klum's income was reduced even more than my father's, Mrs. Klum continued with her bridge club and Eastern Star activities. She and Mr. Klum went dancing at the Masonic Lodge.

Mother objected to my stopping at Claudine's house after school and going there evenings. “If I were you, I wouldn't go to Claudine's house until she comes here,” she told me.

“But you and Daddy never go out,” I said. “You're always here.” Dad spent his evenings smoking his pipe or dozing over the newspaper. Mother read or worked
the Journal
crossword puzzle and yawned.

At supper, Mother announced, “Beverly feels we are not welcome in our own home.” She knew very well that what I wanted was a little privacy;
but even more, I wanted, desperately, for my mother and father to have some fun, to have friends, to go to movies—anything. They seemed to have given up happiness.

When Claudine did come to our house, she was made welcome, as were all my friends. Dad sometimes tactfully retired to the breakfast nook with his pipe and newspaper, but Mother dominated. “Do you girls really like jazz?” she asked. “Do you really like Bing Crosby?” We did, of course. Then Mother always said, “Claudine, play something for us.” Claudine graciously sat down, rose to twirl the piano stool to the right height, and sat down again to play some popular songs of the day until she and I could escape to the kitchen to make hot chocolate. We could not go to my room as I had planned when we bought the house. My room was too cold, for Mother kept the bedroom doors shut to conserve heat.

At Claudine's house we studied or read together. On a visit to my grandparents, I picked up a book,
Chip, of the Flying U
, by B. M. Bower, a humorous story of a romance between a ranch owner's daughter, a tenderfoot from the East, and a cowhand who turned out to be a distinguished artist of the West. I took the book home and passed it on to Claudine, who read it and said, “That was
good
.” We were both starved for romance.

We enjoyed that book so much we fell in love with the West, which for us was actually East. Oregon did not count as the West.

We discovered that our branch library carried the works of B. M. Bower, an Oregon author, a woman, who wrote Western stories from a woman's point of view. We checked out the books as fast as we could read them:
The Flying U's Last Stand, The Voice at Johnnywater, The Phantom Herd, The Ranch at the Wolverine
, and all the rest.

Saturday evenings, when Claudine's parents were out, we read and hoarded the power of the radio batteries so there would be enough left for us to listen to the songs of the Arizona Wranglers, whom we pictured as a group of cowboys, all looking exactly like Gary Cooper, whose movies we never missed. Gary Cooper was one actor Mother approved of. “His movies are always clean,” she said, although later she would not let me see him play opposite Marlene Dietrich in
Morocco
. She had her doubts about Marlene Dietrich.

When we had read all of B. M. Bower, we started in on Zane Grey, a better writer, but one we found funny. A girl disguised as a man was shot. The hero unbuttoned her shirt, and wow! was he surprised! Claudine and I found this hilarious. In one book, the hero fried an egg on a
rock, and as he handed it to the heroine, the text read: “‘Eat,' he said.” After that, whenever we offered each other something to eat, we quoted in our deepest voices, “‘Eat,' he said,” and went off into a gale of giggles.

Mother began to object to our infatuation with the West. I should be reading worthwhile books, Dickens and Thackeray, the books she had read when she was growing up. I pointed out that I had already read
David Copperfield
. She kept an eye on any book I was reading. When I picked up what seemed a rather boring English novel she was reading, she refused to let me finish it because, she said, it was about a woman “who had no modesty.” I began to read at Claudine's house the books I was forbidden at home but never understood what it was that Mother did not want me to see.

Although Mother and I had an uncomfortable relationship, her softer moments revealed her hopes for me that told me she might love me even though she showed no tenderness toward me. At these times she looked sad and said to me, “I hope you won't have to scrimp and pinch all your life,” or “I hope you will go ahead and be somebody.” She also impressed upon me, “Every woman should have some money of her own,” and, saddest of all, “I do hope you will marry a man who has the world by the tail.”

These touching remarks pointed to a future I was unable to visualize. Everyone had some kind of future, even though in those Depression days many said they did not.

I had no dreams of marriage and few thoughts about boys, although the boys I had grown up with had progressed through the awful, terrible, horrible, and shy stages and had turned into reasonable human beings. They were even courteous, sometimes.