Part 2 (2/2)

The Clapps invited us to dinner and so did Norma's friends. Connie, a bright-eyed sparrow of a girl who was to be my friend all her life, often dropped in for supper after stopping at the A&P to buy ”whatever meat the girls were having.” In my Argus at the end of the year she reminded me of ”dinners at your apartment when we could not eat for laughing.” We went to football games in Connie's family car and to YWCA suppers where Norma and I were usually given leftover ca.s.serole dishes to take home. We went to school dances, Norma and I, each with somebody's brother, while Connie went with Park, a minister's son, whom she was pursuing and appeared to be gaining on.

One spring day, as I ate my lunch on Chaffey's lawn, I came to know a freshman, Frank, whom I treated with a touch of condescension because I a.s.sumed he was younger than I. At least, that was how he seemed after Gerhart and Paul until he admitted with amus.e.m.e.nt that he was a year older. His ambition was to become a politician, and he treated me with such formality that I felt I had to behave with unnatural dignity. This did not prevent us from having some pleasant times together. We went to a dance at the Red Hill Country Club, where he looked handsome in what every young man aspired to own, a white jacket, which I was pleased to be seen with, but Frank was tall, and I worried about smearing lipstick on his white shoulder as we danced. One day we drove in a borrowed car to Los Angeles to see The Great Ziegfeld at Grauman's Chinese Theatre and to admire the footprints of movie stars in concrete. Could Gloria Swanson's feet really have been that small? We finished the day with dinner at Lucca's-the first Italian meal I had ever eaten. I liked Frank but somehow could never get over feeling we were both pretending to be something we were not. Probably I was wrong and was only responding to Frank's natural reserve.

Norma had another source of recreation, which was exhilarating to her but would have been misery to me. These were Play Days, when she went off with a group of P.E. majors to other schools where they spent happy, for them, days of sports: baseball, archery, swimming, hockey, and tennis. Norma returned glowing with health and always went through her program of exercises while we listened to the news and I lay lazily on my low half of the couch. Norma followed events in Europe closely. She was afraid her brothers might have to go to war.

Norma studied at the kitchen table and solved math problems in ink on the oilcloth, which she scrubbed off before she went to bed. Now the icebox was her problem. The steady drip-drip of melting ice irritated her, so she put our dishcloth in the pan to m.u.f.fle the drips, a nuisance because she had to fish it out, cold and sopping, before we could wash our breakfast dishes. Except when Atlee and Harold dropped in, I studied in the living-bedroom, sitting in the rocking chair with my feet up on the gas heater, which we never turned on.

We were both getting laboratory sciences ”out of the way.” Norma was studying zoology, which required dissecting a rabbit that she fished out of a barrel of formaldehyde on lab days. We joked about serving it for dinner when she finished dissecting it. While Norma was studying the anatomy of her pickled rabbit, I was studying botany because I had enjoyed the study of plants in my high school biology course. I was also taking psychology and two English courses from Mr. Palmer and two units of conversational French from Dr. Miller.

And then there was P.E. in the new women's gym, where the subject of scandalized talk was communal showers in one large room with showerheads along two sides. There was no privacy, people said. Like most gossip, this was not entirely true. There were several stall showers for modest maidens, but many girls adjusted the showerheads so that opposing streams of water met in the center of the room, sending spray in all directions. Then they raced up and down, spluttering and splas.h.i.+ng, dancing and leaping like nymphs. I rarely used these showers because I didn't want to get my hair soaked.

My metatarsal arches must have improved because I was no longer required to pick up marbles with my toes. Instead, I was a.s.signed to a folk dancing cla.s.s, which I enjoyed. To this day, whenever I hear ”La Cucaracha,” I feel an urge to spring to my feet and, with my hands on my hips, stamp out imaginary c.o.c.kroaches.

Of my courses, although I really did not count P.E., English Composition was the most absorbing. Mr. Palmer a.s.signed us a daily three-hundred-word paper on any subject, to be poked through a slot in the locker nearest his office by three o'clock every school day. We were to do this until someone in the cla.s.s earned an A. At first it was easy. I described the view from our kitchen window, the scene inside a shoe repair shop, my grandfather's store in Oregon, the sound of palm trees at night, but as the days went by, I began to feel as if I had written everything in the world there was to write about. Still Mr. Palmer h.o.a.rded his A's. I also began to think, but did not write, about myself in the third person: Her saddle shoes crushed pepper berries into the lawn as she walked under the feathery trees. She joined friends on the school steps, tore open her lunch bag, and bit into a peanut-b.u.t.ter sandwich. Bending over, she tightened the laces of her gym shoes and tied them in a neat bow before she...

Because I was also studying psychology, I began to wonder if I might lose my mind if this went on. Finally, finally, after what seemed like weeks, Mr. Palmer announced that an A paper had been turned in. It was mine, a description of a shabby old man shuffling through a restaurant trying to sell violets, a sad Depression scene I had witnessed when a young man named Bob had taken me to a Portland restaurant for a hamburger. People had money for hamburgers, but no one had money for violets. When Mr. Palmer read my melancholy description aloud, the cla.s.s was grateful to me for commuting our sentence of a daily three hundred words.

One day, when five dollars arrived from my grandfather, I went into a shop to buy yarn to knit Norma a pair of bed socks for Christmas because the cus.h.i.+ons balanced on her feet often fell off, exposing her toes to the chilly night air. Knitting was popular at Chaffey. When the shop owner learned that I could knit lace patterns, she asked me to take on the difficult parts of other customers' knitting. To be paid for something I enjoyed! I was delighted and knit lace yokes, for which I was paid seventy-five cents an ounce. Norma and I then decided to knit ourselves dresses out of raw silk yarn, but because we could not afford to buy all the yarn at once, the shop owner kept the skeins and allowed us to pay for them as needed. I knit along with other girls in cla.s.ses, at YWCA meetings, and at tea at Dr. Miller's home, where we rummaged around in our minds for easy verbs to use in the required French conversation.

Then one day the Dean of Women called me in and asked if I had ever studied Latin. I had, for two years at Mother's insistence, ”because Latin was the foundation of language.” The dean offered me the task of correcting high school Latin papers. I was paid out of National Youth Administration funds for the boring work, which paid for the rest of my silk yarn.

My finances continued to improve. Alberta Schaeffer, the Ontario librarian, knocked on our door. ”Mrs. Clapp recommended you for subst.i.tute work in the library. Would you be interested?” she asked. Would I! Of course I would. Miss Schaeffer cautioned me that the library board would fire without notice any librarian seen drinking or smoking in a public place. I did not find this a problem.

In 1935, in the Ontario library, any librarian who was ill had to pay a subst.i.tute out of her own pocket. Forty whole cents an hour. I didn't want to wish the librarians any hard luck, but I enjoyed working at the circulation desk of the old Carnegie library. One elderly woman was indignant because pitchblende was not in the encyclopedia. Having met the word in Geology, I found it easily; she had not realized it was spelled with a t. Then Miss Schaeffer asked if I could translate a letter from France, which the local nursery, noted for citrus plants, had received. The letter in simple business French was easy to translate, and I was elated to have used both geology and French in real life while earning money in a library. Patrons furnished subjects for English compositions. An old man who spent most of his days in the library confided that he called it his private club. Describing him earned me another A. During the year I banked my earnings, most of them from an unfortunate librarian who suffered a bad case of trench mouth. Fifty dollars! I would not go into the future empty-handed.

The future was a worry to most Chaffey students. Norma, whose brothers were graduating in June, planned to go with hockey stick and tennis racquet to Was.h.i.+ngton State to continue P.E. Many were applying for scholars.h.i.+ps at the University of Southern California. Others hoped to go to Cal, as the University of California at Berkeley was called by everyone before other campuses were built and it became known as U.C., Berkeley. Everyone was filling out applications, so I filled out one, too. Although I had no hope of going there, I applied to Cal because of its graduate School of Librarians.h.i.+p, an application to fantasy. How could I possibly manage three years of attendance at a university that charged $150 a year in nonresident tuition?

Connie and I were both accepted by Cal, with my acceptance stipulating that I must take one year of either philosophy or mathematics. When I wrote this news in my weekly letter home, Mother answered that she and Dad had talked it over and decided that somehow they could manage the nonresident tuition. I learned later that my father, like many Depression fathers, borrowed on his life insurance.

There was, however, another obstacle: living. Because Oregon friends all lived in dormitories or sorority houses, I had a.s.sumed that all college women lived this way, which I knew I could not afford. I soon learned from others that most Cal students had to find their own living accommodations. Five of us talked about renting an apartment. Norma and I got along, with one or two rough patches, but five girls with different allowances, temperaments, interests, and schedules? I was dubious.

The news of cooperative houses at Cal filtered down by way of former Chaffey students, mostly brothers, for in the 1930s when money was hard to come by, many parents felt it was more important to educate their sons, who would have to support families, than their daughters, who would be supported by husbands. First we heard of cooperative houses for men: Barrington and Sheridan. Then we learned that in January of that year a women's cooperative, Stebbins Hall, had been established. Room and board were eighteen dollars a month plus half an hour of work a day. I began to be hopeful, but the catch, I soon learned via rumor, was a waiting list so long there was no point in applying so late in the year. Still...

Worrying about living conditions would do no good, so as Mother so often advised, I took one day at a time. Except for Dr. Miller's spoiling Christmas vacation by requiring us to read Madame Bovary without a dictionary, the winter days, most of them, were pa.s.sing happily by, interrupted by another phenomenon, almost as interesting as an earthquake. One night the notorious Santa Ana winds began to blow in from the desert. Pepper trees tossed their tousled heads, and palm fronds danced and rattled. As the winds increased, we closed all our windows and went through our usual bedtime ritual of Norma doing her exercises, putting our hair up on curlers, and listening to the news while Norma worried about her brothers.

Then we climbed into our uneven, uncomfortable bed, but that night we slept very little. The winds increased. We felt as if we were breathing dust and our skins were drying up. We pulled the sheet over our noses. The grevillea twisted, branches broke off, clattering palm fronds were ripped away, trash cans bounced down the street. We were afraid the windows were going to blow in. Finally, when daylight came and the winds calmed, we dragged ourselves out of bed. Everything was covered with dust, and under the closed kitchen window sand was a quarter of an inch deep. Good housekeepers that we were, we cleaned it all up before we left for school, and I had another subject for a composition.

And then the first semester grades came out. I leafed through the report slips, found more A's than I really expected, even an A in Conversational French, which was kindness on Dr. Miller's part, a B in P.E., but who cared? And then D in Botany, a terrible shock. A D! No one gave me D's, not even P.E. teachers. It simply wasn't done, I felt, because along the path of education several teachers had told their cla.s.ses that they didn't want to hear any complaints about grades because what went into our heads was more important than a grade. I believed them. I worked hard at subjects that interested me, was satisfied with disgraceless B's in others, and didn't care what I got in P.E. But a D! I would be drummed out of the honor society. The humiliation was too much to bear.

I accosted Mr. Stanford after cla.s.s. Why had he given me a D? ”Because that is what you earned,” he said. I stopped and thought. There was that exam question that required us to identify samples of wood and tell how they had been sawed. I had been surprised by the question and guessed at the answers. Then there were my struggles with the microscope. I wasn't very good at using it. Mr. Stanford insisted the proper way was to look through the microscope with one eye and use the other eye for drawing what we saw. I usually gave up, looked back and forth with both eyes, and emerged from the lab feeling seasick.

No one else reeled out of the lab pale with nausea. Then I recalled that I was unable to see trees, visible to everyone else, on the mountains, so I wrote home saying I needed gla.s.ses. Mother's reply was prompt and definite. Rather than wear gla.s.ses, I was to drop out of school and come home. Never! I said no more about my eyesight.

As I stood before Mr. Stanford, I must have looked so humbled that he told me that if I raised my grade the second semester, he would average the two semester grades and give me one grade for the year. I thanked him, determined I would manage an A.

In pursuit of that A I found a useful pamphlet called How to Study that advised s.p.a.ced repet.i.tion and reviewing work at bedtime for subjects requiring memorization. I lugged my botany text around and went over memory work several times a day. At bedtime, while Norma exercised her body, I exercised my mind on botany.

My test grades shot up, but that left my microscope problem. I shared the microscope with a young man, Said Shaheen, who had come from Palestine to study citriculture. As I frowned through the lens, he asked me if I was ”stuck up.”

Surprised, I answered, ”I hope not.”

”Perhaps I can help,” he offered.

Then I realized he meant ”stuck,” not ”stuck up.” Together we struggled on, he with his idioms, I with the microscope.

That second semester we were to find and identify a collection of wildflowers. But where was I to find wildflowers? Atlee came to my rescue in his Rickenbacker. We drove out into the desert, where he steered with one hand, and, keeping our eyes out for flowers, we both leaned out open doors. If either of us saw a flower, he stopped while I jumped out and picked it.

Identifying desert flowers was difficult for an Oregonian. Other students knew what they were aiming for before they started. I struggled, wis.h.i.+ng I were studying botany in Oregon, where I was familiar with the trilliums, Johnny-jump-ups, and lady slippers of Oregon woods and pastures, and hoping the little brown book, the key to flowers, would lead me to the right answer. My semester grade was A, the D was expunged from my record, my grade for the year was B+, and I no longer felt I was in disgrace. I had learned a lesson more valuable than botany. The whole experience was humbling.

The second pitfall on the path to higher learning was the second semester of P.E. While Norma cavorted in the suns.h.i.+ne with hockey stick or badminton racquet, I was a.s.signed to a tap-dancing cla.s.s with other girls who would never leave their mark on the world on the playing fields of Chaffey. To borrow words from Ruth Tremaine Kegley's freshman drama cla.s.s, I ”hated, detested, abominated, and despised” tap dancing. At the end of the semester Mrs. Quackenbush announced that each of us was required to compose an original tap dance for our final examination.

A final in P.E., how ridiculous, I thought as rebellion rose within me. After cla.s.s I approached Mrs. Quackenbush and asked, ”What will happen if I don't compose a tap dance?”

She promptly squashed my small rebellion. ”Then you won't graduate,” she said.

I fumed. When no one was looking, I tried to compose a tap dance, but I was no Ginger Rogers. Neither was I s.h.i.+rley Temple tapping down the stairs with Bill Robinson. I was plain old me with feet heavy with resistance. On what I thought of as execution day, still not knowing how I was going to come up with an original tap dance, I borrowed a pair of tap shoes that made a rea.s.suring clackety-clack as I walked across the gym floor. Grimly I waited my turn while other girls went through their neat composed routines. My name was called, I asked the pianist to play ”A Little Bit Independent,” took a deep breath, gritted my teeth, sacrificed my integrity, and hopped, stepped, brushed, and slapped down in no particular pattern. Finally the pianist stopped. ”Good,” said Mrs. Quackenbush, but I didn't believe she was referring to my dancing. Oh well. At least I pa.s.sed P.E. with a semester grade of B.

Years later I met a tall, somewhat awkward woman who had been given the same a.s.signment at another junior college and refused to go through with it. She did not graduate and never finished college.

While I dragged my feet in P.E., I was eager to attempt the last a.s.signment in English Composition, a short story. My trouble was I couldn't think of a plot, and in those days a short story was supposed to have a plot. I thought and thought. I had lived in several settings, known a variety of people, and had a good memory for dialogue, but I could not hatch a plot.

Finally I sat down in the rocking chair, placed my feet on the gas heater, and commanded myself: Write! The first thing that came to mind was my wretched experience in the first grade when I was learning to read. I turned myself into a third-person child, miserable and frightened in the reading circle, who in desperation misp.r.o.nounced city, calling it kitty even though she knew it was wrong. I wrote of the snickers of the cla.s.s, the harshness of the teacher. But where was my plot? I finally fabricated an ending having the teacher ask if anyone could tell a story, something my own teacher would not have done. My timid alter ego volunteered, stood before the cla.s.s, and told a folktale her mother had read to her many times. The cla.s.s listened, the teacher praised her, and my story had a happy ending. Mr. Palmer gave me an unqualified A, read my story to the cla.s.s, and said, ”This story is nothing to be ashamed of,” lighting me with joy with this, for him, lavish praise. Without knowing it, I had begun to write the story of my life.

The semester was ending. Yearbooks were exchanged. Norma wrote a word or two beside every picture of herself. ”Nut!” under the cla.s.s picture, and beside others, ”Roomy,” ”Athlete!” ”What again!” ”Yes me!” Norma was no sentimentalist.

Connie wrote an honest, tender letter telling me I had been sweet to her when she didn't deserve it. She hoped I was her friend for life (I was) and that I would be ”one true friend, who would sympathize and understand.”

Frank wrote a somewhat pompous message telling me I was ”too perfect” and that I ”would be a wonderful wife for a politician. You have every charm and quality that such a woman needs. This is not a proposal-just an explanation.” He closed his message with ”Love” and a footnote: ”Love-Strong likeing (sic). The state of feeling kindly toward others.” Such caution was quite unnecessary.

As the semester drew to a close, days pa.s.sed much too fast. Norma's parents drove down from Was.h.i.+ngton to see us, in our gray caps and gowns, receive our a.s.sociate of Arts diplomas.

The next morning Norma and I climbed into the backseat of her parents' car. We were both sad to leave Ontario, but this time I did not shed tears. I was going, as Mother would say, ”by hook or by crook” to Cal even if I had to live under a bush, but I wanted to remember every geranium and pepper tree, the brown mountains, and Chaffey's tower against the blue sky.

Photographic Insert I.

”Chaffey, where the fronded palm uplifted to the sky...”

Virginia gives Guard a bath.

Atlee hugs Guard.

P.E. teacher, fifty-three, and son, nineteen, flex their muscles.

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