My Own Two Feet (19 page)

We started life together, Clarence and I, in his bachelor apartment on the ground floor of a Victorian house near California's state capitol, where he now worked in the state controller's office. After Clarence carried me across the threshold in proper bridegroom fashion, I saw hanging above the bed a picture of a weary Indian drooping on horseback. The title was
The End of the Trail
. I took the picture down and hid it under the bed, which annoyed the landlady.

I continued to write to Mother and Dad once a week as if nothing had changed. Mother laboriously answered, hunting and pecking on my old typewriter letters that she tried to make cheerful but that made me sad. She could not hide her depression.

Clarence said he wanted me to choose a place to live, and after looking at Sacramento apartments, we finally moved into another apartment in the same building, which I liked to think of as picturesque. It, too, was on the ground floor but was light, airy, and looked out on the backyard and a gardenia tree. I had not known that corsages grew on trees.

One morning, as I struggled to learn to cook on another three-burner-over-an-oven stove, I found a suspicious-looking insect in a cupboard. I captured it and presented it to the landlady, saying, “Is this what I think it is?”

“Oh, my dear, it's a
cockroach
,” she said as if I were fortunate to be able to present her with such a gift. “They are
so
easy to get rid of.” She gave me a saucer of borax and told me to put it on top of a cupboard. I did, and never saw another cockroach.

Early in 1941 the Bureau of Internal Revenue notified us that we owed twenty-five dollars in income tax. If we didn't pay, our property would be attached. Twenty-five whole dollars? Why? Clarence, calmer than I, explained that because we had both worked the year before, our combined salaries made us eligible to pay income tax. Since our property consisted of an armchair we had bought for five dollars and had reuphol
stered, a card table, and a floor lamp bought with S&H green stamps, we joked about what the government would do with our property, and paid up.

Then Clarence received an offer of a better position, with the U.S. Navy Cost Inspection office in San Francisco.

“It's a plot!” cried our eccentric landlady. “Working in the state capitol is an honor, and someone is plotting to get his job. Don't go!” We went.

In San Francisco we found a two-room apartment that, in our innocence, we did not realize was on the edge of the Tenderloin. Whenever I stepped out on the street alone, men cruising in cars tried to pick me up. This did not stop me from walking downtown to have lunch with Connie or other friends or climbing over Nob Hill to take a WPA course in block printing. On Polk Street, old men with red noses and red hands shucked oysters. Fruits and vegetables strange to me were displayed along the sidewalks. I compared prices and splurged on a papaya, the first we had ever eaten. My experiment with fava beans was a failure, but I was more successful with salsify. For the first time in my life I took an interest in food and cooking. Saturday evenings we went to small French or Italian restau
rants for dinner. Afterward we went to a theater on Powell Street that showed double features for twenty-five cents.

We enjoyed San Francisco, but when Clarence was assigned to work in the navy office at a shipyard in Alameda, we decided to move closer to his work. Knowing little about Oakland, we took a train to the Fruitvale district, which was joined to Alameda by a bridge across the estuary. We found an attractive, unfurnished three-room apartment on the top floor of a Victorian house. The landlady lent us a bed, and we moved in. The large kitchen window looked out on eucalyptus trees at the end of the dead-end street, or cul-de-sac, as real estate advertisements call such a street. A hill rising behind the trees was crowned with a spooky-looking house that could have come from a Charles Addams cartoon.

Neighbors, except for one quiet Japanese family, were mostly Italian and Portuguese. The first question women asked me was “Did you go to college?” When I admitted I had, an invisible curtain dropped between us. When I walked to the branch library and returned with an armload of books, I felt as if the neighbors were eyeing me with disapproval. Didn't this woman have anything better to do than read?

There was no time for loneliness. I shopped for
a few pieces of furniture, and we traveled by public transportation to visit friends in Berkeley. Then one Saturday night, as we waited for a bus, we were struck by a thought:
We could buy a car
. We were so used to the Depression and traveling by public transportation that such an extravagant thought had never before entered our minds. After searching want ads we found a secondhand Chevrolet coupe for sale just half a block away. We bought it, and Clarence started to teach me to drive.

Because we needed furniture and because I felt I should keep up with children's books, I went to the Sather Gate Book Shop in Berkeley, where Quail Hawkins was a well-known seller of children's books. I introduced myself and found her instantly enthusiastic about hiring a children's librarian to help during the Christmas rush. She took me upstairs to meet Mrs. Herbert, the store manager, an elderly woman with glasses so thick she made me feel like a mouse caught in the gaze of an owl. This formidable woman was inclined to dismiss me because I had no selling experience. “But she knows
books!
” cried Quail, her cheeks beginning to flush.

“But we don't know if she can sell,” insisted Mrs. Herbert.

“If she knows books, she can sell them,” coun
tered Quail, her cheeks now flaming with emotion.

Quail won out. Commuting by two buses and a streetcar, I went to work for eighteen dollars for a six-day week in the store that had the largest collection of children's books west of Chicago. Quail, I soon learned, was a rapid, omnivorous reader with a retentive memory, a love of books, and a passion for persuading others to read them.

Bookselling was full of surprises. First of all I learned, but had trouble remembering, to stand back when punching the cash register so the drawer of that hostile machine would not hit me in the stomach. I learned that information could be located without the use of the card catalog. I learned that it was easier to persuade a customer to buy a book than it had been to persuade a library patron that a book was worth borrowing. When a grandmother asked for a book for a twelve-year-old, I soon caught on that the child was usually only ten but was “as smart as a twelve-year-old,” at least in Berkeley.

From Quail I learned to disarm disgruntled local authors who felt the store was neglecting them because their books were not displayed in the front window or who had counted their books on the shelves the previous week and returned
to count again and complain that we had not sold a single copy in the entire week. We smiled and said, “We were hoping you would come in. Would you mind signing some of your books?” Authors never minded. Someday, when I found time to write, I promised myself, I would never behave in bookstores like Berkeley's local authors.

The pace was fast. “Count the little brown things,” cried Quail my first morning at work. Baffled, I asked what she meant. The Little, Brown publisher's representative was coming, so the number of copies of each Little, Brown title in stock must be counted and marked in a catalog so there would be no delays when Quail gave her order. The time of publishers' reps was precious, she explained. To count, we climbed the ladder in the stockroom and crawled on our hands and knees to reach books behind books on lower shelves. In between, we waited on customers, replenished stock, and wrapped books for gifts. Little Golden Books, which sold for twenty-five cents, were a popular item. We wrapped endless copies of
The Poky Little Puppy
and
Saggy Baggy Elephant
, but no matter how busy we were, somehow the catalog was counted by the time the publisher's rep arrived.

The work was exhilarating, and the customers in the university town were pleasant—except
one. That customer was a world-famous scientist who shall remain nameless. He strode through the store and demanded my name. When he got it, he roared in a voice that must have reached Telegraph Avenue, “Mrs. Cleary, show me the most beautiful book published this year.”

“How old is the child?” I asked, trying to find a starting place.

“Mrs. Cleary,” he boomed, “I want the most beautiful book of all.”

I do not recall the book that satisfied him, but I do recall the difficult forty-five minutes I spent trying to produce it while other customers fumed. When I checked the charge account of the world-famous scientist, I had the embarrassment of asking him to please step up to the office—there was a problem with his credit.

I was to work as Christmas help four different years, which, except for the first year, have mostly blurred into one. Business expanded and so did my pay—ultimately, to twenty-five dollars a week when four of us manned the children's department, and there was no room to stand back when we punched the cash register. Two episodes stand out in memory, besides hiding in the stockroom when the world-famous scientist entered.

When a customer telephoned and asked us to hold a book, the last in stock, until she could
come in, we wrote her name on a slip of paper and set the book by the cash register. Sara, one of the saleswomen, noticed that invariably other customers wanted that book. She began to choose slow-moving books and insert slips of paper on which she wrote, “Mrs. Wogus will call.” The book always sold even though Mrs. Wogus was a cow in Walter R. Brooks's “Freddy” books.

Then there was the year Quail was offered a large discount on five hundred copies of Margaret Wise Brown's
Little Fur Family
, a tiny book with a jacket made of fur packaged in a box with a hole in the center that gave the Fur Child pictured on the lid a real fur stomach. Mr. Kahn, the owner of the store, bet us a box of candy that we could not sell five hundred copies by Christmas. We sold all five hundred, explaining five hundred times that the fur jacket was made from the pelts of kangaroos, varmints in Australia, and that no good American rabbits had been sacrificed. Mr. Kahn paid up.

Of my four years as Christmas help, that first year, when Quail and I were the only employees in the children's department, remains most vivid of all. One Sunday afternoon, Clarence and I were listening to
The Mikado
on the radio when the broadcast was interrupted by a bulletin:
Pearl Harbor had been bombed by the Japanese. “I'll be damned!” said Clarence.

“Where's Pearl Harbor?” I asked.

We stayed by the radio the rest of the day, and the next morning went to work as usual. That week the store, with almost no customers, was in a state of nervous confusion. Quail, who had a brother who was a naval officer stationed at Pearl Harbor, was on the verge of tears, hoping for a telephone call with news from him. As we all waited with her, we passed the time catching up on stock work and counting catalogs in what seemed like slow motion while we talked of blackout curtains and bombings. Then Mrs. Herbert paid us a visit to keep us on our toes. “Girls,” she said, “we must sell even though we are at war.” As we were wondering to whom, she turned to Quail and said, “Darlin', we do not accept personal calls at work.” When Quail finally heard over the store telephone that her brother was safe, the sales staff rejoiced for her.

After work, Clarence and I nailed layers of newspapers over our kitchen windows in place of blackout curtains, listened to President Roosevelt's “date which will live in infamy” speech, and prepared hasty dinners. At night, when air raid sirens sounded, we leaned on the bedroom windowsill, looked out into the black night, and lis
tened to the drone of circling planes. Dogs, upset by sirens, airplanes, and darkness, barked until the all clear was sounded and lights came on again.

Gradually customers trickled back to the bookstore. Children should not be disappointed, they said, and one indignantly added, “I do think the Japanese might have waited until after Christmas.”

Quail came down with flu, and I was left to face the department alone. When she returned, Mrs. Herbert, a kind woman in her own way, took me aside and whispered, “Darlin', we don't discuss our salaries, but I am so pleased with your work I am raising your pay from eighteen to nineteen dollars a week.” This was the same woman who wrote the date on every light bulb installed so the store could be reimbursed if bulbs did not live up to their guarantees. She also required us to show her a very short pencil stub before she would issue us a new pencil. Money was still tight in 1941.

After Christmas, still unscathed by bombs, I returned to being a full-time housewife. I stood in line at the meat market, but when my turn came, all the butcher had left to sell was pig tails.

Gas rationing ended my driving lessons. From our kitchen window I watched the Japanese family, laden with bundles and suitcases, quietly
leave their home and climb into a taxi on their way to the Relocation Center. It was a sad scene; they were such gentle, courteous people. Our landlady gave us a plot in the backyard for a Victory garden, which I enjoyed, remembering, as I had been taught in grammar school in Portland, to rotate our crops and to plant legumes to replenish nitrogen in the soil.

College friends married, had babies, were called into service, returned to their homes, or disappeared, leaving us to wonder where they had gone. Someone sent a newspaper picture of the Upshot who had been eager to see the inside of an airplane. He was sitting in a BT-14 training plane at Randolph Field. In spite of his high draft number, we were not sure how long Clarence would remain a civilian, and we did not feel it was time to start a family. I had no intention of going back to Portland to live with my parents. We finally decided it would be best if I were settled in a job. Now all I had to do was find one.