Part 2 (1/2)

”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 b.u.t.toned 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 s.h.i.+ning, 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 a.s.sociation 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...

Mother and I wrote letters of condolence to Verna, who responded by saying her mother's death was quite unexpected and that Atlee, now sixteen, had accompanied his grandmother's body by train to their family cemetery in Michigan. She said nothing about my returning.

Mother was indignant. Why hadn't Verna mentioned my coming back? What was wrong that I was no longer welcome?

”Mother, just forget it,” I begged. ”I had one happy year. Don't spoil it.”

But Mother would not forget. She wrote to both Verna and Lora. I did not know what she said and did not want to know. Whatever it was, she received tactful answers but no invitation for me. Mother despaired. Her cousins must not consider me the perfect daughter she had struggled to bring me up to be. What had I done wrong, she insisted on knowing. I wasn't sure, I told her, but I supposed I hadn't done enough housework.

”Housework!” Mother was indignant as well as desperate. ”You weren't invited to do housework. You were invited to bake cake.”

”And I did bake cake,” I reminded her. I waited for Mother to calm down before I brought up my idea of asking Norma, if I could reach her, to share an apartment. At first Mother was horrified. I would do no such thing. Two girls in an apartment? It would never do.

Once more Dad reminded Mother that if I didn't have any sense by then, I never would have. Gradually she softened and asked the usual motherly questions. Just what sort of girl was this Norma? I described her as a picture of health, full of fun, a model student, a hard worker, a really lovely person. I was sure about the picture of health, and produced my yearbook to prove it, but I was not so sure about the rest of my fanciful description. With such different interests, we had not shared cla.s.ses.

Mother reluctantly allowed me to write to Norma and offer my suggestion. But how? I must have sent my letter in care of the Seattle Watershed. Somehow it reached her. In a few days I received an enthusiastic answer. She, too, had longed to go back to Chaffey, and her parents agreed to our sharing an apartment. Mother wrote to Verna, who volunteered to look for an apartment.

Letters flew back and forth. My parents could let me have fifteen dollars a month, and my grandfather would continue to send my five. Norma would have about the same amount. I found remnants in a department store bas.e.m.e.nt and made some dresses that weren't too tight, wrote frequently to Paul, watched eagerly for his less frequent letters, knit swiftly around and around Verna's skirt, finished it, started the jacket.

Claudine invited me to spend a few days at Puddin', an invitation I was overjoyed to accept, and I went, knitting all the way. I finished knitting the jacket and started the lace blouse on larger needles. Somehow, by the first of September, that, too, was finished. I had earned twenty dollars! Twenty whole dollars, the most I had ever earned.

Verna wrote that she had found us a two-room, share-a-bath apartment next door to the public library, which made it, in Mother's eyes, respectable. The rent was fifteen dollars a month. Joyfully I packed my trunk, this time including sheets, dish towels, and lavender bath towels with purple monograms (Meier & Frank had had a sale), which cus.h.i.+oned a sandwich toaster Mother had bought for us. I met smiling Norma at the Greyhound depot and brought her home on a streetcar. Mother studied her, relaxed, and took me aside to whisper, ”It's going to be all right. She's a nice girl.” I was relieved that Mother was relieved.

Late the next afternoon, Norma and I took off on the bus for California. During the uncomfortable night, she confided that until my letter arrived she had been desolate with longing to return to Chaffey when she was not invited back, but because she had two older brothers in college, she had to wait her turn to continue her education until they graduated. Her parents could not afford three children in universities at the same time. They had been as relieved as Norma by my letter, and her mother apparently did not worry about ”just what sort of girl is this Beverly.”

We had planned to stay two nights at the San Francisco YWCA so we could spend a day sightseeing, but after one night we were so eager to get to Ontario, as if we were afraid it might have disappeared during the summer, that we consulted the bus schedule and found the next bus for Los Angeles left in late afternoon. We arrived at the station early and each rented a pillow, a necessity, not an extravagance, we decided, after our previous night on the bus.

We had not noticed that this bus traveled by Highway 99, a much longer, hotter trip than the route I had taken the year before. It was a miserable journey with many stops.

Bakersfield, in those days before air-conditioning, was an oven at midnight. Inside the station hundreds of sinister-looking large-winged insects swooped and flopped. Norma and I were too sweaty to eat and beat off bugs, so we climbed back onto the bus. Neither of us could sleep. I wondered if this bus driver had pinpoint eye.

Daylight. In Los Angeles we ate a greasy breakfast at a counter in the station before we changed to a bus bound for Ontario, where we arrived grimy and rumpled. After the ritual agricultural inspection of our trunks, we walked, overnight cases in hand, to our new address, a big old gray house on Euclid Avenue.

The landlady, Mrs. Tuckness, who was also a dressmaker, led us upstairs to the two front rooms, identical in size and separated by a closet with a curtain of eucalyptus buds strung like beads. The floors were painted ”robin's egg blue” and had large linoleum rugs. Each room had a door into the hall. We were not given keys and did not think this unusual. After we paid our rent, Mrs. Tuckness said, ”It is going to be fun to have girls around, and as long as I can hear noise when young men come to call I won't worry about you.”

We stepped out onto the shaky balcony outside our living-bedroom to look at the library and the palms, grevillea, and pepper trees along Euclid Avenue. We were exhausted, ecstatic, and in need of baths. I shared my farewell gift of lavender bath salts, and we emerged in turn, fragrant and ready to set up housekeeping. Lunch? Our Greyhound breakfasts still weighed on our stomachs. Our trunks were delivered, and we unpacked, dividing our meager wardrobes between a closet off the kitchen and the closet between the two rooms. Norma had brought an unexpected luxury, a small radio that we placed on the lamp table. She set photographs of her two handsome brothers on her half of the dressing table.

We placed a sign for the iceman in the front window before we walked to the A&P to lay in a supply of groceries. Then, groggy with fatigue, we prepared a hasty supper on the three-burners-over-an-oven stove and, like the good housekeepers our mothers had brought us up to be, washed and dried the dishes and returned them to the china cabinet.

By then we could barely stay awake, so we tackled the studio couch Mrs. Tuckness had bought for us to sleep on. She had explained, ”When young men come to call, it wouldn't do to have a bed in the living room.”

That green couch! It had three cus.h.i.+ons propped against the wall. The bottom of the couch pulled out like a drawer to make a second place to sleep and for storing bedding during the day. We had to move the mattress from the top to the pull-out section. Because Norma was tall, she took the foundation of the couch, which had springs and was a few inches longer and about six inches higher than the lower half. When we made up our uneven bed with our new sheets, we discovered there was no place for Norma to tuck in her half of the bedding. ”Never mind,” she said. ”I can balance the cus.h.i.+ons on my feet to hold the blanket down.”

Exhausted, I fell into my half of the bed and watched, fascinated, as Norma went through a series of exercises. That's a P.E. major for you, I thought. When she had completed her exercises, Norma climbed into bed, as exhausted as I, and balanced the green cus.h.i.+ons on her feet. We both slept soundly.

In the morning we awoke to the song of a mockingbird. Because we were so happy, we lay in bed singing at the top of our voices a popular song: ”You push the middle valve down. The music goes 'round and around, wo-ho-ho-ho, and comes out here!” We had actually made it back to Chaffey and one more year of college.

Life with a P.E. Major.

The next afternoon, when Norma and I had recovered from the day before, someone knocked on our kitchen door. A strange man introduced himself, said he lived in a room at the rear of the house, and held out a basket of tomatoes. We were delighted, accepted them, thanked him, and closed the door. Late the next afternoon he knocked again and offered us the evening paper, which he could not have had time to read. Again we accepted his gift, thanked him, and shut the door. This went on for several days before he gave up and kept his paper. We were so naive we did not realize that he expected to be invited in. After all, he was old. Probably thirty.

For two such different people, Norma and I got along surprisingly well, although she said I made her feel tall and lanky, and I said she made me feel short and dumpy. We enjoyed housekeeping without our mothers telling us what to do even though we did exactly what they would have wanted us to.

The first one home from school shopped for groceries with money from the $7.50 apiece that we had deposited in a cookie jar for a month's supply of food. Sometimes, if our schedules permitted, we went to the A&P together because marketing was fun. The young men who worked there were lively and often stuck a thumb into an avocado. ”Oops! Damaged goods. Can't sell that,” they would say, and present it to us. Once when they marched up and down the aisles with brooms over their shoulders whistling ”The Stars and Stripes Forever” for our amus.e.m.e.nt, the manager appeared. Suddenly the men were diligently sweeping while Norma and I examined the vegetables.

One joint attempt at was.h.i.+ng sheets and towels in the laundry tub in the shed behind the house was enough for us. We sent our linens to a laundry and subtracted the money from the cookie jar. Every morning we walked to school with our dishes washed, our lunches packed, and our bed converted to a couch. Our mothers would have been proud.

The icebox somehow turned into my responsibility because Norma had a carefree att.i.tude toward it. During the day she simply put it out of her mind. I could not. That icebox haunted me. Suddenly, in the middle of cla.s.s, I would remember that we had forgotten to empty the pan under it that, at that very moment, might be overflowing and leaking through the floor onto Mrs. Tuckness's bed downstairs. Between cla.s.ses I would rush to telephone her. She was always grateful for my warning.

That first semester our social life was limited. Paul came to see me a couple of times before he went off to his junior year at U.S.C. and a part-time job on the Los Angeles Times. We walked up Euclid Avenue to see the new Chaffey library and the new women's gym built with government funds. We talked about our futures and Paul revealed, without actually saying so, that even with a scholars.h.i.+p and a part-time job he had to manage on very little money. Once when Verna drove into Los Angeles to attend the book breakfast, I went along and met Paul to sit for a few minutes on a bench in Pers.h.i.+ng Square before he had to go back to the Times. He looked tired. I wondered about his living conditions in Los Angeles but did not ask and did not expect to see him again. His work, our studies, and our lack of money, I knew, made meetings impossible. I was sorry, but our goals were more important than our friends.h.i.+p.

Sometimes Atlee and his friend Harold would drop in to listen to Norma's radio. Norma and I were always careful to walk around and to laugh heartily from time to time so Mrs. Tuckness would not be alarmed by silence overhead. Once the boys drove us to a movie in Pomona in the topless Rickenbacker. They sat in the front seat while we sat in the back with our hair tousled by the wind. They paid our admissions, but they refused to be seen sitting with us. What could we expect of sixteen-year-old boys?