My Own Two Feet (3 page)

My first day of college I wore a pink dress because everyone said pink was my most becoming color. My stomach quivered with nerves: Would anyone speak to me? Would my dress be right? Would college work be difficult? I walked past orange groves to Chaffey Junior College, where I knew no one and no one knew me. The two-story building was new, earthquake-proof, and built in a “modified Spanish style” around a patio with a lawn and shrub-like palms. Oregonians in the 1930s did not have patios, so
patio
as a spoken word was new to me. In reading I had mentally pronounced it “paysho.”

The students looked strange to me, for deep tans were the fashion, the darker the more fashionable. I listened to girls compare and admire their tans and talk about how hard they had worked to get them. The tree-shaded streets and a rainy summer in Portland left me feeling ghostly in the midst of so much toasted skin. There seemed to be no particular fashion in clothing as there had been at Grant High. Everyone seemed comfortable, casual, and, best of all, friendly to a new girl.

California girls, I soon discovered from bits of overheard conversation, knew more about sex than the girls I had known in high school. Some had actually done “it.” Mothers at home, as far as I knew, did not mention sex to their daughters, apparently thinking that if they kept it secret, sex would go away and their daughters would remain “lovely girls.” What little knowledge I possessed, mostly inaccurate, came from Claudine by way of her cousin who went to Jefferson High, where life was apparently faster than at Grant. As I pondered the difference between Portland and California girls, I concluded that what I had read really was right. Women did mature more quickly in the tropics, and any place that grew palm trees had to count as the tropics.

Students, I soon observed, were of four sorts:
those who lived at home in Ontario or in one of the nearby small towns because it was less expensive than going to the university, those who had completed their freshman and sophomore years but were taking extra courses while they tried to save money to go on to the university, those who were going to school because they didn't know what else to do, and those from out of state, like myself, who were living with friends or relatives and taking advantage of tuition-free education. Today, when we pay our state income tax, I recall with gratitude California's generosity during the Depression. Mother often said, “Oregon does nothing to help its young people,” and in the 1930s she was right.

Although I had been apprehensive, I soon discovered classes were no more difficult, and sometimes less demanding, than my classes at Grant. Chaffey, it seemed to me, was like a small, friendly high school with older students.

In French, my first class, a good-looking young man with blue eyes and a tan light enough to show he hadn't worked at it sat beside me. Completely at ease, he smiled, said his name was Paul, and asked where I was from. I could scarcely believe it. At Grant, on the first day of school, either boys were too shy to speak to new
girls, or they stood in groups looking girls up and down as if they planned to buy them at auction.

In French we were assigned a novel,
Pêcheur d'Islande
, by Pierre Loti, but a more interesting assignment was dividing into pairs to write a dialogue in French that was to be performed in front of the class. I am sure I blushed with pleasure when Paul asked me to be his partner. Because he was studying journalism and working on the school paper, we had trouble finding time to work together, so, with Verna's permission, I invited him to come to the house one evening.

Paul arrived in his old Model T coupe for an evening of serious French composition. When he stepped into the living room, the family tactfully disappeared, leaving Guard snoozing in front of the couch while we went to work at the large library table. What could we write about? And in French? We settled on a dialogue between two strangers on a bus from Oregon to California. We composed a line for Paul to speak that we found hilarious and were to quote that year whenever it rained: “Oregon, bah!
La pluie, la pluie, la pluie!
” We would struggle through a sentence, and our conversation would veer off to some more engrossing subject, ourselves, mostly. Paul said he had noticed me on the first day of school because I was so pink and white in the midst of all
those summer tans. I learned that he was four years older than I, drove a school bus, had been delayed in school because he had broken his back in an accident. Now he was worried about his work on the school paper. I tried to comfort him with experience gained on
The Grantonian
my junior year in high school. He seemed grateful for my superior knowledge.

About eleven o'clock Guard woke up, scratched, and rattled his license tags. Fred called down the stairs in his P.E. teacher voice, “You can put him out now, Beverly.” For a dreadful instant Paul and I, engrossed in each other, thought Fred was referring to Paul. (Perhaps he was.) When we realized, or assumed, it was time to let the dog out, we laughed. I opened the door for Guard, and Paul left soon after. Happy, I gathered up the feeble skeleton of our dialogue. A young man with interests similar to mine who could laugh, and whose company I enjoyed, actually liked me. I could scarcely believe it after humorless Gerhart in Portland.

First-semester French taught me that male companionship could be pleasant, even fun, a lesson as valuable as any vocabulary memorized for reading knowledge. Despite our French dialogue, in the 1930s most French teachers did not expect
us to actually speak the language of a country so far away we could never afford to go there.

This French teacher did an amazing thing: She left to marry a man who ran a Mexican restaurant in a San Francisco hotel. She was replaced by Dr. L. Gardner Miller, a blond young man fresh from France with an authentic French wife, sandals on his feet, and a degree of Docteur de I'Université. That Dr. Miller expected us to actually
speak
French every minute in class came as a shock. He said we did not know enough, and he was right.

The second classroom I entered that first day was History of Drama, an English course taught by Mrs. Ruth Tremaine Kegley. And there was Paul. This time I sat beside him. Mrs. Kegley stood with her left hand on her hip, her right arm extended with her hand palm up, as she spoke of “the cheap, the blatant, the tawdry” plays on Broadway. She savored the shape of the words, as if she expected them to roll out of her mouth, down her arm, and onto the palm of her hand.

History of Drama did leave me with one valuable thought. One of the playwrights—was it Lope de Vega?—believed that ideas were somehow spewed into the atmosphere to be seized by anyone with a receptive mind, and that upon receiving an idea, one should use it immediately
because others were sure to pluck the same idea from the spheres. This one wisp of philosophy, no more than a sentence or two from a college course, has haunted me all my writing life.

The required course in hygiene was taught by short, stout Mrs. Harriet Fleming, whose gray hair was twisted and coiled into a snail on top of her head. Mrs. Fleming required us to write a tiresome paper entitled “Health Heroes” and to outline a boring pamphlet on prenatal care. She not only waded through our papers but was the guardian of our morals who chaperoned college dances. She stopped music if she felt it was too fast or too slow. She once attended a dance in a wheelchair with her leg in a cast, a disability that did not stop her from whizzing out onto the dance floor to reprimand a couple she felt were dancing too close to each other. At one dance I attended, she ordered a girl who was wearing a black dress that left one shoulder bare to leave the floor until she covered her shoulder with a sweater or jacket.

Mrs. Fleming did not object to boys lying on the grass on sunny days, but girls must always sit up or they could expect a reprimand. In her class she once informed us that any girl who wore red was “asking for anything she got.” Of course word spread throughout Chaffey. The next day
every girl who owned a red dress, skirt, or blouse wore it to school.

One day toward the end of the semester, Mrs. Fleming faced the class and said, “Is there anything you would like to ask me? Anything at all?” Silence. We all knew that
anything
was her code word for sex. Experienced girls looked superior and as contemptuous as they dared, several timid girls looked anxious but were afraid of being laughed at, but most of us exchanged looks of amusement. Even though we might have been eager for information, we certainly were not going to risk asking for it in class.

The silence grew embarrassing. Mrs. Fleming repeated,
“Anything at all.”
More silence, broken at last by an earnest, colorless girl who raised her hand and asked, “How do you get rid of dandruff?” Mrs. Fleming, visibly let down, gave suggestions while the rest of us stifled our laughter. As the bell rang, I wondered what went on in men's hygiene.

In physical education I was unexpectedly lucky, for the physical therapist decided my metatarsal arches were in need of strengthening. This put me in a remedial class where I picked up marbles with my toes while strong-arched girls ran around in the hot sun chasing a ball with hockey sticks. I was deeply grateful to my
metatarsal arches for not measuring up to Chaffey's standards and for sparing me the sweaty misery of chasing a ball with a stick under the hot sun.

When I entered the geology classroom that first day, there was Paul once more. I was taking the class for two reasons: to fulfill a requirement for laboratory science in case I should ever get to a university, and as a small rebellion against Mother, who had remarked when Verna wrote she was studying geology, “What earthly use is geology to Verna?” She did not stop to think that all knowledge is valuable to a librarian.

The class was taught by Mr. Russell Dysart, a man with a wry sense of humor. Once, when we came to take an examination, we saw, at the edge of a map pulled down over the blackboard, the ends of questions, clues to what we should be prepared to answer. We riffled pages of our textbooks hunting for answers to questions we were about to be asked, but when Mr. Dysart raised the map, the blackboard was blank. With an I-fooled-you grin he passed out to his groaning students sections of U.S. Geodetic Survey maps and told us to write down every geological formation we could find. This was the only examination I have ever enjoyed taking. Today, as I fly across
the country, I look for mountains, valleys, extinct volcanoes, meadows, oxbow lakes….

The laboratory periods I found tiresome. We studied and identified various rocks. Several times we went on field trips, with Paul driving the bus, and once we looked at the San Andreas Fault. That famous crack in the earth, which I had read about in newspapers, could cause the surface of the earth to quiver, or it could flatten cities, and was a good reason, according to some of my Oregon relatives, for me to steer clear of California, where a building might fall on me or a crack in the earth open and swallow me. Even though the city of Long Beach had recently been reduced to rubble, Californians seemed interested but unworried about the perils of the San Andreas Fault, but then, many Oregonians suspected Californians of being a carefree, irresponsible lot.

Mr. Dysart's class taught me that nothing on earth is stable. Mountains rise only to be worn down. Rivers change courses. Lakes appear; lakes evaporate. Fertile lands become desert. I left the geology classroom realizing that not only was the earth unstable, life, too, was constantly changing.

And then, toward the end of the year, word filtered down from former Chaffey students that
the University of California did not accept geology as a laboratory science. My first thought was, All that for nothing. My second thought was that geology was one of the most enlightening courses I had ever taken.

English was my favorite subject, and Mr. Frank Palmer soon became my favorite teacher. He was a tiny man with a wen on the tip of one ear that gave him an elfin look. He sat on a high stool, with his Phi Beta Kappa key attached to the fob chain of his watch, twinkling against his vest. In the 1930s in the heat of Ontario, male teachers wore suits, although not always vests, to class, but of course not all of them had Phi Beta Kappa keys to twinkle.

Mr. Palmer guided us through
Beowulf
and
Macbeth
, which I had studied in high school,
The Mayor of Casterbridge
, biography, essays, and modern American poetry. He required us to learn to spell Nietzsche, the name of a German philosopher I have never had occasion to use. Best of all, he assigned original compositions but instructed us never to use the expression “broaden our horizons” because, he said, “the horizon is the point at which the earth and sky meet, and it is impossible to broaden a point.” I never have, even though I am not sure I agree.

Mr. Palmer read many of our compositions
aloud, always in a monotonous voice. No “reading with expression” for Mr. Palmer. His comments were matter-of-fact, and so sparing of praise that we could be sure any compliment was well earned. One of my compositions was a description of a place on the Oregon coast, probably called Devil's Slide, where strollers along the beach were sometimes trapped against a shale cliff by the incoming tide. Anyone trying to climb the disintegrating cliff found himself sliding back toward the hungry breakers. The harder the victim struggled, the more he slid, sometimes fatally.

I wrote an imaginary description of a girl caught on the cliff by a high tide. I recall one sentence from this piece of writing: “Hot tears ran down her cold cheeks.” Mr. Palmer paused in his expressionless reading, thought a moment, and said, “That ought to warm them up.” The class laughed.

Wresting an A out of Mr. Palmer was a real challenge. A parsimonious, hairsplitting grader, he sometimes wrote B++ or A-- on my papers. For one assignment, the writing of our autobiographies, I found I recalled so much that I described, with fictitious touches, the early years of my life on the family farm in Yamhill, Oregon. For this I was actually awarded an unadorned,
unqualified A. I was ecstatic until I turned to the last page and found Mr. Palmer had encircled with his red pencil every
little
, which I had repeated several times, and joined them with a line, like beads on a string. At the bottom of the page was a single word writ large:
TRANSITIONS!
My joy at wresting an A out of Mr. Palmer was not dimmed, but ever after, I tried to be more careful about transitions.