A Girl from Yamhill (9 page)

On warm evenings in the late summer of 1927, as children played statue or hide-and-seek, we caught scraps of adult conversation: “If interest rates go any higher…” “Wall Street.” “The stock market.” “Inflation.”

Boring, grown-up talk, I thought, until one word, “inflation,” came to have meaning for me. “It's terrible the way prices keep going up and up,” said Mother. “Your father's paycheck doesn't stretch as far as it used to, and the worst of it is, the farmers aren't getting one cent out of it.”

Because money would not stretch, Mother had our telephone converted to a private line. She set up the card table and, with the telephone book in front of her, began to solicit subscriptions to
McCall's
magazine, work she could do at home,
so she would be there to prepare the lunch I barely touched, and again when I returned from school—the sixth grade in Miss Charlotte Stewart's room.

All the girls in my class seemed to have grown during the summer, but I remained the smallest. Most of the girls were nice, or tried to behave as if they were. By the sixth grade, many of us had caught on to the importance of pleasing the teacher, something I could do with part of my mind. This led to “Beverly, are you paying attention?” but did not really interfere with my being a nice girl.

The boys, who had not yet grown as much as the girls, had divided into two subspecies: quiet, serious boys and
awful
boys, feisty and rebellious, many of them swaggering because they had gone away to Boy Scout camp.

Miss Stewart's reputation, which had preceded her, proved accurate. Her favorite subjects were penmanship and spelling.

In penmanship, our pencils whispered around and around and back and forth on our papers while Miss Stewart walked up and down the aisles overseeing our work, repeating, “Sit up straight. Elbows on desks. Use your whole arm as you write.”

We all worked at this dutifully, except for Ralph, a blond boy who sat across the aisle from
me. Miss Stewart punished gum-chewers by making them stand in front of the class with their gum on the ends of their noses. Ralph modeled his gum into a small rhinoceros horn and faced the class with a defiant grin.

Ralph enjoyed teasing me. “Here comes Hot Cross Bunn,” he said every morning.

“Pooh to you,” I always answered.

With Ralph across the aisle, school was interesting. He once stirred up a little excitement by starting an
awful
boys' fad of eating garlic—a seasoning not widely used in our neighborhood at that time. Soon the room reeked of garlic. Girls held their noses and said “Ooh-eeh!” Boys grinned. Miss Stewart looked grim but said nothing.

Then one afternoon, Mr. Hugh Dorman, our principal, appeared. He ordered, by name, the garlic-eaters to stand. “March to my office,” he commanded.

Girls murmured with delighted excitement, sure something terrible was going to happen to those awful boys, now looking so sheepish as they preceded Mr. Dorman to the office. We waited for them to come back chastened and contrite, but they did not. We exchanged puzzled looks. What could the principal have done with the boys? Would they never come back? Had they been expelled forever? We would not have admitted it,
but we missed those boys who made the schoolroom lively.

The boys were not expelled. They returned the next morning, embarrassed and silent about their punishment.

Mother found out in that hotbed of information, the PTA. Mr. Dorman had gone across the street to Abendroth's store, bought a dollar's worth of garlic, and made the boys sit in his office and eat it all before he sent them home. A dollar bought a lot of garlic in those days.

About that time, a beautiful new girl moved into the neighborhood. I was eager to play with her to get away from the drone of Mother's voice soliciting magazine subscriptions. However, the girl's mother could be heard screaming at her family, none of whom ever smiled. Mother advised me to stay away. The girl and I eyed each other across the street, and at school we became bitter enemies. This was the first enemy I ever had. I felt sorry for her, and at the same time I genuinely admired her beauty and her fairy-tale hair. Probably she was hurt because I did not invite her to play, even though she was given a desk across the aisle from mine; perhaps she got back at me by making fun of my high shoes.

Miss Stewart now bore down on spelling. For each correct spelling test we were given one white star after our name on the blackboard. Five
white stars were changed to one yellow star, five yellow stars to one pink star. After each spelling test—and we were tested frequently—we exchanged papers to be corrected by the person across the aisle.

My enemy and I exchanged, along with our papers, hostile looks that subtly changed into looks of collusion. No word was spoken, but somehow we had made a pact. We used our pencils, when we thought Miss Stewart was not looking, to correct each other's mistakes. I have no idea why we cheated for one another. Brought up to stand on my own two feet, I was contemptuous of cheaters and was now contemptuous of myself. Perhaps this was the beginning of adolescent rebellion, or perhaps beneath our hostility we were united by the tensions in our lives at home. Even though Miss Stewart surely must have been aware of what was going on, pink stars bloomed after our names. Perhaps she understood that the guilt those pink stars caused was enough.

At home, Mother grew hoarse and discouraged as she checked off names in the telephone book and recited her spiel about the stories of Gene Stratton Porter and Harold Bell Wright. When I came home from school that dark and dreary winter, I felt as if Mother, bundled up in an old sweater, had shut me out by endlessly repeating
the merits of
McCall's
to strangers over the phone.

To escape her weary voice, I went to Mary Dell's house or to a Camp Fire Girls' meeting; but most days I flapped in my galoshes to my haven, the red-brick Rose City Branch Library. The library had wicker furniture, plain parchment lampshades, blue-green shelves, and attractive paintings on the walls. It was warm, quiet, and peaceful. After finishing the mysteries by Augusta Seaman, I read over and over
Dandelion Cottage
, by Carroll Watson Rankin, because it was a humorous story about girls playing together. Like Mother, I sought funny stories about real people, but all the librarian produced was
The Peterkin Papers
, which I thought was silly. The adults I knew did not behave like the Peterkins, who seemed to me stupid rather than funny. I read my way through the shelves of fairy tales with their comfortable happy endings and started on Myths and Legends.

There I came upon the story of Persephone and her mother, Demeter. The flowers that enticed Persephone to stray from her companions reminded me of our pasture in Yamhill, where I had often been enticed to run on to a thicker clump of buttercups or a patch of fatter Johnny-jump-ups. In my imagination I became Persephone. Turning into the daughter of a Greek
goddess was easy—I had had so much experience turning from a brown-haired girl with crooked teeth into a golden-haired or raven-haired princess in fairy tales. At home, the wet Oregon winter with its sodden leaves became the dark underworld, and somehow Mother's telephone soliciting kept the world from blooming. Demeter's search for Persephone comforted me. What would I have done without the library?

I read the beautiful myth over and over and each time found solace. I also came to understand that we cannot expect flowers to bloom continuously in life.

That winter, the dreaded tonsillitis again. My worried parents made a decision. My tonsils had to go.

As soon as I recovered, and the news of impending surgery spread around the sixth-grade classroom, Ralph rolled his eyes and made, with his forefinger, the throat-slitting gesture of a pirate.

“Pooh to you,” I said, jaunty but apprehensive.

The dreaded day arrived. Mr. Brown, our former neighbor, offered to drive us to St. Vincent's Hospital on his way to work and bring us home in the evening as well.

The hospital was strange-smelling and awesome, with nuns in their mysterious long habits. An unsmiling nun assigned me a bed in the chil
dren's ward, a gloomy room with six beds. With shaking hands I undressed, put on the hospital gown, and climbed into bed. In the opposite bed, a frightened little girl was sobbing because this was the day her stitches from her appendectomy were to be removed, and she was sure it would hurt. Above her hung a picture of Jesus with a bleeding heart. The Jesus I knew sat with little children gathered at His knee, suffering them to come unto Him, or knelt at a rock with His hands clasped and a ray of light shining on His face.

“When it's over, you may have all the ice cream you want,” Mother promised.

Terrified as I was, strapped to a gurney and wheeled down the hall, I fought to be brave. I would
not
cry. Outside surgery, my doctor paused to look down on me. “Well, well,” he said, “and what are you here for?” If he didn't know, what was going to happen to me? Numb with terror, I could not answer. Inside surgery, something with a sickening smell was held over my nose, the world grew vague, and I sank into darkness.

I awoke fighting off blankets in the children's ward. My throat was raw. Mother stood beside the bed pulling up blankets as soon as I pushed them back. “Honey, you mustn't,” she pleaded. “Please, honey, you must stay warm.”
Honey
. Never in my life had Mother called me by an
endearing name. In my groggy state, I wasn't sure I heard right.

“Sweetheart, you mustn't throw back the covers,” she said. “You might catch pneumonia.”

“Honey.” “Sweetheart.” Those words astonished me. Did they mean Mother loved me? Dizzy and confused, emerging from the dark underworld of anesthesia, I did not know what to think. Mother never said she loved me, and I must have felt that, sometime after we moved to Portland, she had stopped. Now—I was too groggy to think about such a puzzle. The room blurred. My tongue felt too thick to talk. Mother never called me by an affectionate name again. I have often wondered why.

As the day wore on and my mind cleared, I begged for water and the promised ice cream. Finally a nurse brought me a battered aluminum cup of orange juice, which felt like fire on my raw throat. Father had ice cream waiting when we returned home.

My health improved after the removal of the infected tonsils. Cheating in spelling ended by mutual, wordless agreement, and something unusual took place in the classroom. Miss Stewart read aloud
Smoky, the Cowhorse
, by Will James, winner of the
1927
Newbery Medal. The whole class, even Ralph, sat silent, engrossed. Here was a book about the West, written in language we
had heard spoken in Oregon, that was not about noble pioneers. Anyone who had ever ridden a horse bragged. I had ridden behind my father when he rode a saddle horse on the farm, and on a pony rented for an hour at the beach—I felt I had much to brag about.

Ralph, with a jeering look on his freckled face, asked, “Do you know what a remuda is?” No. Well, he did. I was outbragged.

While life at school continued in its orderly way, stress at home increased slowly, like the jaws of a vise. My father's rages were more frequent. Mother said over and over, “I pray your father won't decide to go back to the farm. If only he would sell it.”

I have never doubted my parents' love for each other, but I began to see they were locked into a problem they could not solve. My father could no longer bear to stand all day on a marble floor when he longed for an active life outdoors. Mother could not face the endless heavy work of a farmer's wife in the big cold house, or the long days of loneliness.

As Mother became more exhausted by the dreadful monotony of soliciting magazine subscriptions, she began to lose the beautiful black hair she was so proud of. First she discovered a small bare spot on the back of her head. Then other spots appeared and spread until a patch
the size of her hand was bald. She combed her hair back over the bald spot, wore a hat every time she stepped out of the house, and, frantic, visited a dermatologist. Yes, she would probably lose her hair, he told her, but she could always buy a wig.

Dad looked sad and worried, Mother was too distraught to continue telephone soliciting, and I was filled with almost unbearable anguish. Secretly, at night, I wept for my mother's hair.

Then one day Mother received a telephone call from a stranger, a friend of a neighbor, who had heard of Mother's plight. She, too, had once lost her hair, and told Mother of a home remedy that had saved it. The remedy sounded dangerous, and may have been, but Mother was willing to try anything. She obtained it, and my father applied a bit to a small spot on Mother's bare scalp to see what would happen. It was painful; a blister formed, and when the blister peeled away, as the stranger predicted, tiny black hairs were beginning to grow. Section by section, my father treated Mother's scalp, which gradually healed. Slowly, slowly, Mother's hair grew back.

My parents scraped up enough—or, as Mother said, “made sacrifices”—to send me for two weeks to Camp Namanu, run by the Camp Fire Girls. In the days before sleeping bags, I made my bedroll correctly, fastening it with blanket pins, and col
lected the required equipment. Dressed in a blue middy and black gym bloomers, I boarded a chartered train full of strange, singing girls also dressed in middies and gym bloomers. I was off for two weeks of fun. I knew, because I had read
Camp Ken-jockety
, by Ethel Hume Bennett, and series books passed around the neighborhood, in which children had happy times at camp.

For me, Camp Namanu, a beautiful place of woods and meadow, did not live up to camp in a book. Most of the campers had come in groups. Required swimming lessons in the cold Sandy River were misery. I did, however, earn the rank of Pollywog. The Namanu Honor, to be awarded to girls who were the best campers, was a worry. I strove to live up to mysterious, unspecified qualifications, but I failed, apparently a bad or perhaps unnoticed camper. I was not sorry to leave Camp Namanu, even though I enjoyed a dessert called Namanu Delight, a mixture of whipped cream and fruit. I felt guilty because Mother had sacrificed so I could have a good time.