My Own Two Feet (6 page)

Fred and Atlee lifted my trunk and typewriter into the green Rickenbacker, I said good-bye to Verna and Virginia, and Fred drove me to the Greyhound station. As my bus pulled out, I burst into tears. “Why, she's crying,” I heard someone say.

Yes, I was crying. I had been so happy and now I faced a blank future. What would happen next? What
could
happen next? I had no idea, but I did know that year had changed my life forever.

The long journey in reverse with no overnight stops in California. “We don't want to impose on friends,” Mother had written. The land of
DEPEW
had not changed, but I had. Beauty, to my eyes, now replaced desolation. The silvery gray warehouses made a foreground. As the sun moved across the brilliant sky, hills and barren fields turned to gold, and shadows shifted across canyons. An occasional live oak, lonely and determined, cast its lengthening shadow as it clung to a hill. Would I ever see this golden state again? Probably not. Sadly I concentrated on remembering all that had given me so much happiness in the past year.

As California rolled by, I became aware of the
man seated next to me, who seemed as dejected as I. He glanced at me and initiated a conversation. He told me he was a deadheading Greyhound driver who drove at night but did not know how much longer he could work because he was developing pinpoint eye. Curiosity overcame Mother's warnings about not talking to strangers. What was pinpoint eye? He explained that constantly facing oncoming headlights was affecting the pupils of his eyes, which contracted as the lights approached but no longer expanded as rapidly as they should when the lights passed. He was worried about finding work when he could no longer drive.

I felt as if the Depression were coming closer with every revolution of the Greyhound's wheels. The man talked on about his troubles as the bus carried us into Oregon without stopping for luggage inspection. Oregon trusted California's insects to observe state lines. We pulled into Ashland, where Dad wanted me to spend the night in a bus stop hotel to break up my long trip. Mother had written precise instructions about registering at a hotel along with her usual warnings about strangers. As we climbed off the bus, the deadheading driver asked me if I would have dinner with him. The invitation was so unexpected I did not know how to answer, and so
in my confusion I said abruptly, “No, thank you!” The man looked as if I had slapped him. I quickly registered and fled to my room, where, haunted by the look on the man's face, I came to realize he was a decent, lonely man. I went down to the coffee shop hoping to find him and tell him I had not meant to be rude. He was nowhere in sight. I sat down at the counter and ate the usual Greyhound meal of hamburger “steak,” canned peas, and mashed potatoes with a crater filled with tasteless brown gravy.

The next afternoon, after an eye-soothing ride up the Willamette Valley, I saw Mother and Dad, smiling but anxious, waiting for my bus. Their relief when I disembarked, rumpled but alive and well, was obvious, and they plied me with questions. Yes, Oregon looked good to me; everything was so green and the snow-capped mountains so beautiful. Yes, the trip was tiring, but the night in Ashland helped. Yes, I had gained weight. Yes, I was glad to be home. The truth of this answer was questionable, but I could not hurt the feelings of my loving parents by saying, “Sort of.”

On the streetcar ride home, Mother and I talked and laughed while Dad, quiet as always, chuckled. After supper, friends dropped in to trade anecdotes of our first year away from home, or their first year working. There was much
laughter, and Mother served ice cream and cake. She enjoyed my friends and they enjoyed her. After all, she did not expect them to be perfect.

The next day, I washed California out of my hair and was unpacking my trunk when Gerhart came to see me. I was cool, courteous, and, I hoped, discouraging. He did not stay long.

That evening, when Mother and I were in the kitchen washing and drying dishes, she began what I thought of as a cross-examination, just as she had when I had come home after a day in high school.

“Did Paul ask you to marry him?”

“No.”

“Why didn't he?”

“Probably because he didn't want to marry me, and besides, he has two more years of college.” I did not admit to a passage in my diary in which I had written that Paul once said he could get serious about me. I had passed this off lightly, not really believing he meant it. Still, I wondered. “Anyway, I'm not interested in marrying anyone at this time in my life,” I told Mother.

“Well!” said Mother. “If I had seen as much of a young man as you have seen of Paul, I would have had a marriage proposal.”

Was I supposed to feel like a failure because I had enjoyed the company of a congenial young
man? At this point I lost my calm. “Mother!” I was exasperated. “I am not out to collect scalps!”

Mother's lips tightened. She said nothing; neither did I. I was home, really home.

Years later, when I was clearing out Mother's house, I found a box of eight or ten photographs of young men in the high stiff collars worn in the period of her youth. On the back of each was written a name and the words “An admirer.” Mother had treasured her scalps.

That summer I knit my nervous energy and my worries into Verna's suit. I was eager to earn money, difficult for women during the Depression. When I mentioned applying for work at Meier & Frank, a department store that hired young women for summer work, I was told by my parents no daughter of theirs would be seen working there. Some of my friends were going out to pick strawberries, but when I suggested going, Mother said, “Absolutely not,” which was just as well. The work was backbreaking. I suggested going out to Banks, staying with my grandparents, and working in the woods with the local women who cut sword ferns to be shipped to florists in New York. Once more, no. Mother often said I must stand on my own two feet, and now she wouldn't let me.

Then there was the problem of my father's va
cation. “He does need a change,” Mother told me. “He needs to get away from the city.”

What could we do? Where could we go? In those Depression days, most people were too proud to admit to being hard up, but they were quietly understanding and offered help to one another. The Klums, Claudine's parents, offered us the use of their cabin on the Pudding River for about ten days. One of my father's customers at the bank who ran a secondhand car lot offered the use of a car. “Nobody's buying cars these days,” he told Dad. “You might as well get some use out of it. Otherwise it will just sit there and rust.” We loaded the big old sedan with provisions, a tent, two army cots, and bedding and took off for the Pudding River. “Puddin',” Claudine and I called it.

The Klums' one-room cabin was located in a campground under Douglas fir trees on flat land bordered by the river that was part of the Colvin brothers' farm. We carried water in five-gallon cans from one of the farmhouses and used toilets in the communal bathhouse.

Mother, always anxious not to impose, insisted we use the cabin as little as possible. Dad pitched the tent nearby and set up the camp cots. I slept on a couch on the cabin porch with my head on a pillow embroidered with pepper berries and the
words “I love you, California.” We cooked on an outdoor camp stove under the trees. The borrowed car was parked nearby, awaiting our journey home. Dad felt it should be used strictly for transportation to Puddin' and back to Portland. No joyriding for us.

Dad and I swam. Mother had never learned how. “My head goes down and my feet go up” was her reason, so she sat in the shade with a book. I read, knit, and tried to think of a solution for my future, a problem we had avoided mentioning. Dad hiked, refreshed by the sight of farmland once more.

On the weekend the campground took on new life. A stream of old cars arrived bearing campers and picnickers, a cash crop harvested by the Colvin children, who collected admission fees at the gate. Picnickers parked their cars, marked their spaces on tables with boxes and baskets, built fires in camp stoves, and organized baseball games in the meadow and horseshoe-pitching tournaments under the firs, where chipmunks raced and scolded. Cooling watermelons, penned in by rocks, bobbed in the river under the alders, and smoke drifted through the trees. Children hurried into their bathing suits to swim. High school students, those who had nickels to spare, fed the jukebox. Big-band music—Artie Shaw,
Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman—mingled with laughter, shouts, cautions to children, the thwack of a bat against a ball, the clang of horseshoes against metal stakes, the thump of the diving board, splashing in the river.

Then came the fragrance of picnics: chicken and hamburgers frying, coffee boiling. Late afternoon, more nickels were dug from deep in pockets, and more music swung out under the firs. Everyone danced: boys with girls, husbands with wives, mothers instructing their young sons, fathers helping small girls eager to learn to dance, women with one another. As dusk crept in and mist rose from the river, picnickers left the dance floor, loaded their cars, and joggled down the rough road past the cabin, and I was alone with my parents once more.

Late one afternoon I was sitting on a picnic table near the river knitting and enjoying silence and solitude while I tried to work out my future. No one had mentioned business school, but I could see no other possibility. Living at home, long carsick streetcar rides, the racket of a roomful of typewriters, unbearable pressure for speed and accuracy, the unknown horrors of shorthand, bookkeeping, another carsick ride home. There had to be a way out. There
had
to be.

My thoughts were interrupted by Dad calling
me. I was startled to face Mother and Dad, both angry. Mother said, “Just because you have gone to college you needn't feel so snooty toward your parents.”

Now I was angry. “What's wrong with going off by myself to try to think out what I can do next?” I demanded. “I can't sit around home all my life. What am I supposed to do?”

This outburst surprised and calmed my parents. Finally the three of us could worry together. But I knew I could not waste time worrying, or, as Mother would say, stewing. I had to
do
something and do it soon.

In desperation I found inspiration. At Chaffey I had met a girl from Washington State who had spent the winter with a faculty family in Ontario and who had not been invited back. Her first name was Norma. Norma what? I did not know. I pieced together snippets of memory. She was tall, blond, and athletic and was planning on majoring in physical education. Her home was in the mountains, where her father worked for the Seattle Watershed. Verna had once told me that the woman Norma lived with was annoyed because Norma came home from school, sat down, and read the paper. That was all I knew about her. If I could find out where she received her mail, perhaps I could write and suggest we share
an apartment in Ontario for our sophomore year, if Ontario had apartments. I couldn't recall seeing any. I did not mention my idea to Mother and Dad, who might crush it before it was fully hatched.

Then one night, as I lay awake trying to recall more about Norma, rain began to fall, quite hard for summer, and I fell asleep to the sound of heavy drops pounding on the porch roof. Sometime in the night, I was awakened by male voices nearby. I could see the beam of a flashlight and two shadowy figures on bicycles.

“This must be it,” I heard one of them say. They dismounted their bicycles and approached the cabin.

“What do you want?” I asked bravely as I sat up, the blanket pulled to my chin.

“Is this where the Bunns are staying?” The voice was that of a high school boy. The pair stepped onto the porch at the foot of my bed, out of the rain.

Dad had heard. I saw him, dimly, by the wavering light of his flashlight as he tried to hold it while he buttoned his pants. Rain had plastered his hair to his forehead. “What's going on here?” he demanded.

“We have a telegram for Mrs. Bunn,” one of the sodden boys answered.

A telegram! And in the middle of the night. No one ever sent telegrams or made long-distance calls unless there was a calamity.

“Where did you kids come from?” Dad asked as he signed for the telegram.

“Canby,” one answered. “The telegraph office thought we could find you out here.”

“Some ride in the rain.” Dad reached into his pocket for change to give to the soggy pair. They thanked him, grateful for anything they were given, and rode off into the darkness by the unsteady beam of their flashlight.

But who would send a telegram so important it had to be delivered in the woods in the middle of a rainy night? By now Mother, with a sweater over her nightgown, had joined us. We huddled around the flashlight while she tore open the yellow envelope. “Why, it's from Verna,” she said. “Aunt Elizabeth died.”

“She was well when I left in June.” I didn't know what else to say.

(Today I wonder if her personality change might have been due to a health problem. Perhaps I did not deserve all her nagging. Perhaps I did. I'll never know.)

“I wonder how Western Union tracked us down,” said Dad.

“Poor Aunt Elizabeth,” said Mother, and we all went back to bed with our own thoughts.

The next morning the sun was shining, Mother was smiling, chipmunks scampered through the trees, and Dad had built a fire in the camp stove. “Now you can go back and stay with Verna and Fred another year,” said Mother as she laid bacon in the frying pan.

I was sure I could not. “If they invite me,” I said. Now, having thought of an alternative plan, I was not entirely sure I wanted to stay with relatives again. Even though I loved them all, there had been moments of discomfort, of not knowing where I stood, of feeling I was not doing the right thing. Beneath my happiness there had been some strain, even before the arrival of Aunt Elizabeth.

“But Verna promised you two years of college.” This was wishful thinking on Mother's part. I tried to remind her that I had been invited to spend the winter. “No,” insisted Mother, and Mother was a great insister, firm and unrelenting. “She promised two years.”

In a day or two we packed up the car and headed for home, the mailbox, and my yearbook. A welcome letter from Paul was waiting. After I read it, I studied my yearbook for Norma's picture. There she was, N. Crews, a tall girl in the
last row of the Women's Athletic Association picture. N. Crews was also on a victorious hockey team and the freshmen women's basketball team. I looked for a written farewell message but found none. Obviously N. Crews and I had little in common, but still…