“Yes,” he said, “I thought you were from the Middle West.”
“Have you ever been through there?”
“Once,” he said. “When I was a kid. My father took us on a trip. Buying some kind of farm machinery. We had a truck.”
Mrs. Alt said, “You certainly upset Liz Bonner. She flew out of here…but she gets like that. She has an infinite capacity for misunderstanding what people say to her; she gets everything wrong and nobody can ever straighten it out. She’s one of those sweet, earnest people who hang onto every word and then—God knows what goes on in their brains. If any. For example, we have to keep special toothpaste here for her two boys because she read somewhere that the regular toothpaste—the big brands—has diatomaceous earth in it and that wears away the teeth. I don’t think they’ve used diatomaceous earth in toothpaste since the ’twenties. Maybe they do, though. Maybe she’s right. That’s the trouble; there’s no way you can prove she’s wrong. She’s sort of a—” Mrs. Alt searched for the word. “I don’t want to say lunatic. That isn’t it. She’s sort of an idiot with a touch of mysticism. In the Middle Ages she’d probably have been burned at the stake and sometime long afterwards canonized. Yes, she’s the way I think Joan of Arc must have been. I can see Joan overhearing discussions about the war with England, and the Dauphin, and completely reconstructing the whole situation in her own mind…and then running out the door about the way Liz ran out of here when I told her you weren’t putting Gregg in the school after all.”
“She drove down to Ojai looking for us,” Roger said.
“Really?” Mrs. Alt grimaced.
“What line is he in?” Roger asked.
“Oh, he’s part of the bread company. A vice-president. You know. Bonner’s Bonny Bread.”
“Sure,” he said, making the connection.
“Originally his grandfather operated a small bakery. Then his father merged it with some other independent bakeries in L.A. They kept the name.” Mrs. Alt was quiet for a time. “You know, there’s only one thing I can’t forgive Liz Bonner for. No matter what you tell her, she swears you didn’t. It just rolls off her back. As if she’s in another world. Tell her something and the next day she stares at you with those big brown eyes—No, I didn’t know that. What do you mean? She’s amazed all over again. At first it’s sort of—what should I say? Let’s say, at first it doesn’t drive you crazy. But wait until you see it month after month, her discovering the same thing over and over again.”
“How does he stand it?”
“Oh, Chic’s easygoing. He’s off in his dream world, too. I don’t think he hears her, to tell you the truth. They go their own ways.”
Across the lobby two women came toward them. One of them was Virginia and the other was Mrs. McGivern, the science teacher. “What’s the discussion?” Mrs. McGivern asked, drawing a chair over.
“Liz Bonner,” Mrs. Alt said.
“There’s nothing to discuss,” Mrs. McGivern said. “She’s just dumb.”
To Roger, Virginia said, “I let Gregg go off with some other boys and Mr. Van Ecke. A hike down into town.”
“Okay,” he said.
“I don’t think so,” Mrs. Alt said. “Scatterbrained, maybe.”
“That’s the same,” Mrs. McGivern said.
“No,” Mrs. Alt said. “She isn’t plodding. She’s not slow; I always associate a sort of pedestrian, dulled personality with dumbness. Liz is alert—too alert. She picks up everything she sees and hears; that’s part of the trouble. She isn’t selective. She just grabs it all in, without sorting through it.”
“She has no perspective,” Mrs. McGivern said. To Virginia she said, “Aren’t we clever? Sitting around here tearing down someone who’s seventy miles away?”
“If we’re going to talk about somebody behind their back we really better be sure it is behind their back,” Mrs. Alt said.
“Oh, Liz wouldn’t care,” Mrs. McGivern said. She had her own slow, pedantic way; she was a rather masculine woman, with short hair and a rough, square face. “She’d think it was funny.”
“I guess I don’t know her,” Virginia said.
“She’s the woman I mentioned to you,” Mrs. Alt said. “The one who comes up every weekend for her kids.”
“Oh,” Virginia said. “Well, I hope she’s intelligent enough to be able to make the drive.”
“She is,” Mrs. McGivern said. “That has nothing to do with intelligence anyhow. Just lack of imagination.”
Roger said, “Or an eye for traffic situations.”
“What’s that?” Mrs. McGivern said.
“The ability to size up the road,” he said.
Mrs. McGivern made a gesture of dismissal. “With all these new automatic shifts and power steering and power brakes, all they have to do is turn the key.”
“And go right off the road,” Roger said, angered. “Driving is a skill. Either you have it or you don’t. How much driving have you done? What do you do when you feel your rear end break away on you? Slam down on the brake?”
Mrs. McGivern did not answer. She drew her chair so that she faced Mrs. Alt. A conversation began, having to do with science lab tables. He felt Virginia’s hand on his arm; she put her finger to her lips warningly.
“Okay,” he said.
“I’m surprised at you,” Virginia said.
“Okay.” He lapsed into silence.
On the trip back to Los Angeles both he and Virginia were downcast. It was going to be hard on them; they felt it already. Roger drove. Beside him, she stared out at the scenery. The useless land, she thought. Miles and miles of it. Worth nothing to nobody.
“God damn woman,” Roger said.
“Who?”
“That science teacher.”
“Yes, she did seem sort of horrible.” She remembered the occurrence, then, and she said, “But you didn’t have to start yelling. What ever got into you?”
“The reason women are such lousy drivers is because they have that attitude,” he said. “They figure all they have to do is turn the key; that’s why they drive right into you.”
“Mrs. Alt seemed tired.”
“Yeah,” he said.
“I’d hate to have all that responsibility.” After a time she said, “I’ve been thinking of things we overlooked. We didn’t pack his heavy wool socks, those long ones he puts on over his regular socks. I’d better make a list. We can take them up to him, or we can give them to him when those people, the Bonners, bring him down.”
“You better call them,” Roger said.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s right. That all got mixed up. I better get in touch with her myself; Mrs. Alt probably won’t think about it again. Anyhow, the Bonners aren’t up there now. At least, that’s my understanding. Did you see them?”
“Not today,” he said.
“I’ll call them this evening.” In her purse she found a pencil and note paper. She made out a list of things for Gregg, and she also jotted down: Find phone number, call Liz Bonner. But then she got to pondering the gossip between Mrs. Alt and Mrs. McGivern. “I don’t know,” she said. “From what they said about her, she sounds unreliable. Did you get that impression when you met her?”
“No,” he said.
“What impression did you get?”
“She seemed all right.”
“Maybe she’d leave him off somewhere along the way.”
Scowling, Roger said, “Get a bunch of old women together and look what you have.”
Virginia said, “Is she pretty?”
“No. Not particularly.”
“What does she look like? Maybe I met her and didn’t know her.”
“She wasn’t there.” He chewed his lower lip. “They’re both around thirty. He’s getting bald. When I saw him he had on a sports shirt; he looked like anybody else. She has brown hair.”
“I met Jerry and Walt,” Virginia said.
“Who the hell is that?”
“Their children.”
“Oh.” He glanced at her.
“The boys have red hair. And freckles. They’re—”
“I saw them,” Roger said. “They’re big.”
“Well,” she said, “they’re twelve.” She calculated. “Then she’s older than thirty. Unless she was married at seventeen.”
“Thirty-five, then,” he said.
“I don’t think Mrs. Alt likes me,” Virginia said.
“She likes you okay.”
“I always run into women like her head-on,” Virginia said.
When they got back to Los Angeles, Roger parked the car in the yellow zone in front of Modern TV Sales & Service. “I’ll see you later,” he said. “If you start feeling lonely, go to a movie or something.”
“He’d be in child-care anyway,” she said. “During the afternoon.” It was the evenings she was thinking about.
She drove home and parked the car in the garage. For an hour or so she did things around the house, and then, oppressed by the quiet, she opened the phone book and looked for a Charles Bonner who lived in San Fernando. Two were listed. She called the first, and got no answer. So she called the other.
“Hello,” a girl’s voice said, a breathy teen-aged voice close to her ear.
With great uncertainty she said, “Is—this Mrs. Bonner?”
“Yes.”
“Are you Mrs. Elizabeth Bonner?”
“Yes.”
Virginia said, “I’m Mrs. Lindahl.”
“Who?”
“You have two boys up at the—” And then, at that point, she forgot the name of the school. “Up in Ojai,” she said. “Jerry and Walter.”
“Oh!” the voice said. “Yes, certainly. Who did you say you were?”
“Virginia Lindahl,” she said. “Mrs. Alt was going to talk to you about me.”
“Who? You mean Edna?” There was no recognition in the voice. “What about? Just a moment.” The phone, at the other end, was put down; Virginia heard the noise of a radio and then the noise ceased. She heard footsteps and the phone being picked up again. “Say it again,” Mrs. Bonner said.
Very distinctly, Virginia said, “Mrs. Alt said she was going to talk to you and your husband about driving my son Gregg home on weekends from the school up in Ojai.” The name came back to her. “The Los Padres Valley School.”
“Yes?”
Exasperated, Virginia said. “I’d like to discuss it with you. Maybe we can work out some sort of arrangement. Either I could pay you or we could alternate or something. Mrs. Alt thought we could work something out.”
“Are you down here in L.A.?” Mrs. Bonner said.
“Yes I am,” Virginia said.
“I thought you weren’t going to put your little boy in the school.” The voice rushed on in bewilderment. “Didn’t your husband come and get him?”
“We changed our mind,” Virginia said.
“Oh. That’s fine. It’s a wonderful school. Is he up there now? We already took our boys up; we left them there this morning. It was yesterday when we met your husband. I forget his name, his first name. What was your little boy’s name? George?”
“Gregg,” Virginia said.
“He’s real cute. They were all out playing football. Sure, I’d love to bring him down when I come. I’m going up Friday night; I can get him then, if you want. Or maybe you should get him the first time; what do you think? It’s up to you. I’m going anyhow. Or we could both go together; why don’t we do that? Just take one car. I could drive up and you could drive back or something. What do you think?”
“That sounds all right,” Virginia said. “I guess it doesn’t matter which car we use.”
“We better go in the station wagon,” Mrs. Bonner said. “If the boys get tired they can crawl in the back and go to sleep and that way they won’t be climbing over us all the time. I leave around one in the afternoon, on Friday. I’ll drive by and pick you up. Or maybe you better come by here in your car, so when we get back you can take Gregg right home. Okay? I’ll give you my address.”
“I have it,” Virginia said. “From the phone book.”
“Oh,” Mrs. Bonner said. “Okay. Well, then I’ll see you Friday afternoon around one.” A long hesitation, and then she said, “Well, I’m glad to have met you, Mrs. Lindahl. I’m looking forward to—seeing you.”
“Thank you very much, Mrs. Bonner,” Virginia said. “I appreciate your help a lot. I’ll see you, then.” She hung up and closed the phone book.
Real scatterbrain, she thought. They’re certainly right. But she sounded nice.
7
During the winter of 1944, when his divorce became final, Virginia married Roger Lindahl. She quit her job with the Washington military hospitals, Roger quit his job as stand-by electrician at the Richmond Navy Yard, and by train the two of them left for Los Angeles, California.
The weather in California was warm; there was no snow, no icy streets, cars with chains, children wearing knickers and wool socks, or old men puffing along in overcoats and ear muffs. The sight of palm trees entranced her; it seemed to her like another country entirely, even another continent. The aircraft plants had become the center of all activity; nothing else mattered. Workers’ cars were parked in lots as far as the eye could see. The plants never closed; as soon as one shift ended another began, day after day, the swing shift, the graveyard shift, the regular day shift. Men and women flowed into and out of the plants, carrying their lunchpails, the men wearing jeans, the women wearing slacks and bandanas. To Virginia they looked tired and quarrelsome and she saw fights break out on street corners and in cafés and bars and even on the public buses. The workers put in long hours, made more money than they could count or keep or even remember; they were tired, growing rich, most of them had come from the Middle West, lived in cramped rooms with children yelling under their windows as they tried to sleep. On their free time they drank beer in the bars, carried their dirty clothes to the launderettes, ate their meals, bathed and returned to work. It was a fast-paced, frantic life; they did not seem to enjoy it, but they realized that they would never earn so much again. Every day more of them arrived, searched for places to live, joined the lines at the plant gates. The jukeboxes in the cafés played the “Strip Polka” and at night, on the streets, soldiers and sailors from the nearby bases roamed energetically, stared at by rows of elegantly-dressed Mexican boys who lined the lit-up shop doorways looking, to Virginia, like wooden Indians in brand-new varnish.
After a day or so they found an apartment in a six-unit war-time housing building in a village of identical buildings. Special streets, blocked during part of the day to through traffic, connected the buildings, and at the entrance to the village a large sign read:
2,400 adults and 900 children
live here! So drive carefully!
Go slow! Don’t exceed 15 mph!
Only white people lived in the village, but a mile away, on the far side of a steam laundry and supermarket, was a second village for Negroes, set up just like theirs.
Both she and Roger got jobs at once, she as an inventory clerk, Roger as an electrician; their shifts came at the same time so they were able to eat their meals together and shop together. Across the hall from them the young married couple had opposed shifts; the man arose from bed at noon, started to work at two, arrived back home after midnight, while his wife slept from ten o’clock at night to six in the morning and left for work at seven-thirty a.m. Several people in the building tried, from time to time, the business of holding down two shifts in a row, collecting time-and-a-half overtime for the second eight hours. If the second shift took place on a weekend during the night their income from the two shifts was enormous. She and Roger both worked a seven-day week. A sign on their door read: WAR WORKER ASLEEP. DO NOT DISTURB. Later on he nailed a sheet of galvanized iron over the door, to deaden the voices and noise from the hall. By the fall of 1945 they had a good-sized savings account and a locked box full of War Bonds.
It seemed to her that the long hours of
work at the aircraft plant made both of them excessively tired. They became quarrelsome, like the people in the bars. Both of them became thin—they had arrived thin enough as it was—and somber. Most of their free time was spent lined up at the supermarket, buying groceries, or at the launderette waiting for their clothes. In the evenings they listened to the radio or walked down to the corner for a beer; some nights she read a magazine and Roger slept. On the radio the Bob Hope program held forth, and Red Skelton and Fibber McGee. That made up everyone’s exhausted pleasure: lying fully dressed on the bed listening to the Hit Parade on Saturday night or the Jello program—Jack Benny and Dennis Day and Rochester—on Sunday night. The war came to an end by stages; the aircraft plants began to discharge groups of employees and cut down the number of shifts, the overtime, the seven-day week. But they did not move on like migratory workers; they had earned enough money to stay. By now they considered themselves Californians, as good as the Native Sons. Los Angeles had become the largest populated area in the world; everyone poured in and no one left.
Near their wartime housing village a colony of stores had come into existence, clustered around the supermarket. First, after the launderette, appeared a shoe repair shop, then a beauty parlor, a bakery, two bar-and-grills, a real estate office. Later, the real estate office moved elsewhere and the store became vacant. One day a new sign was hung up, announcing: ONE DAY RADIO REPAIR. Presently the first post-war table model radios appeared in the window beside displays of tubes, batteries, flashlight bulbs, phonograph needles. Within the store a man in a cloth smock could be seen puttering at the counter.
Their Emerson radio had stopped working, so one morning Virginia carried it to the One Day Radio Repair to be fixed.
“I think its just a tube,” she said to the man. “I don’t think it’s anything serious. It just stopped playing.”
“Well we’ll see,” he said, plugging the radio in and clicking the knob on and off. Bending over it he tapped the tubes with his knuckle, peered inside, listened with his ear against the speaker. He was large, round-faced, and he reminded her of Irv Rattenfanger; he seemed pleasant in a preoccupied fashion. The little shop, new and barely open for business, had already become littered with discarded tubes and ads. “I’ll make out a tag,” the man said, reaching under the counter. “I can’t work on it now.”
Puttering About in a Small Land Page 9
