“Ring-ching-ching, ring-ching-ching, ring out ye bells,” Miss Johnson enunciated distinctly. “Not ring owchee bells.”
“Ring-ching-ching, ring-ching-ching, ring OWCHEE bells,” sang musical, carefree Claudine, spraying spit on the back of my neck.
We then had to take turns standing and singing alone. Please, God, let the period end, let the fire drill bell ring, let somebody throw up, before my turn. I sat, rigid, hoping the boy who had the courage to defy Miss Johnson would be called on first. His refusal to sing took up a lot of class time. He simply shook his head and sat mute. First his cheeks turned red, then his ears, while we sat fascinated by his defiance and by Miss Johnson’s anger. The boy always won.
The music class made me so miserable, so sick with dread, that Mother gave up on my gumption and interceded. She went to school and explained my unhappiness over singing alone. On the next music day, Miss Johnson made another singing-dreader and me come to the front of the room and sing “America.” We mumbled through, each trying to sing more softly than the other.
“Sing louder,” ordered Miss Johnson. “Let me hear each word.”
The girl and I exchanged glances of pure misery and mumbled more loudly on our second rendition of “America.”
Fear of singing, however, did not stop me from wanting to be in the Christmas operetta, The Cruise of the Trundle Bed, about a little boy who fell asleep and dreamed he went to Toyland. I enlisted as a tin soldier because a short tin soldier was useful for leading marches, something I had to do almost every rainy gym period when we lined up according to height and marched in columns of two, four, eight; divided into fours, twos; marched single file in circles, on and on. Because I was the shortest girl in the class and always led the girls’ column, I was good at marching, if not at singing.
On the night of the performance, dressed in blue and tan cambric soldier suits made by our mothers, we suffered one casualty, a girl who danced the Charleston on a chair and fell off, wounded, with a broken arm. Our troop regrouped and marched through our formations. When time came to face the audience and sing “The toyshop door is locked up tight. All the toys are quiet for the night,” my courage left me. I mimed the words, a dodge noticed by my parents and every other parent in our neighborhood. “Why weren’t you singing, Beverly?” they asked. “I didn’t notice you singing.” “What’s the matter, cat got your tongue?” I thought they were rude, but I did not care. After my failure to be a lilac blossom, to be a fourth-grade tin soldier was a triumph, especially when a basketball, playing the part of a cannonball, was rolled across the stage and we all fell over with one leg in the air.
While school was often a happy place, sorrow was creeping into our home. Evenings, when my father came home from work, Mother’s gentle greeting was always “Well, how did it go today?”
“All right.” My father said little about his days at work, but then, he always was a quiet man. He could not have enjoyed standing eight hours on a marble floor, but he did not complain in front of me.
After supper, Mother still read aloud to my father and me. At first she read travel books and Greek or Norse myths, but more and more she searched for humorous stories, usually in The Saturday Evening Post, which we bought for a nickel once a week from a neighborhood boy.
When I went to bed, I overheard worried, serious conversations. No matter how hard I tried, I could not hear what my parents were talking about. Finally Mother, desperate for a confidant, said to me in a voice filled with anguish, “Oh, I do pray your father won’t decide to go back to the farm. For me, those years were years of slavery.”
This was a complete surprise. Going back to the farm had never entered my mind. I had forgotten we still owned it. My father never mentioned in front of me his wish to return, for in those days parents did not discuss adult problems in front of children.
Tensions tightened. My father began to fly into rages over trivialities. A gentle man, he now terrified me by swearing, going into the bedroom, and slamming the door. I suffered over these outbreaks because I was afraid of what he might do when he came out. However, he always emerged quiet and in control of himself. Each time, I hoped such an outburst would be his last. I did not connect them with his dislike of the bank’s marble floor or his longing to work outdoors once again.
Love and the Spelling Bee
Except for having mumps, I remember very little about the first half of fifth grade. I do recall that every day after lunch, we pulled out our composition books, and the teacher, a tense, unhappy woman, sat at her desk dictating numbers in sequence. We translated them into Roman numerals and wrote them down in columns. CLXXXIV, CLXXXV, CLXXXVI, CLXXXVII, CLXXXVIII, CLXIX. We had to think and write fast to keep up.
“Can’t you slow down?” we objected. Our teacher ignored us. On and on she droned, her thoughts elsewhere.
Bored, lulled into drowsiness by her monotonous voice, most of us fell behind, skipped, and dropped out, only to begin again after lunch the next day. “Beverly comes home from school exhausted,” Mother told the neighbors.
Miss Sampson, in 5B, was another teacher who wore navy blue and chalk dust and seemed old. She was kind but uninteresting. She gave us one homework assignment, the construction of a paper box the correct size to hold one gallon. Mine was wrong.
Johnny, the boy from Gregory Heights, now sat across the aisle from me. The class had decided, and I did not discourage them, that Johnny and I were in love.
One day Miss Sampson left the classroom for a few minutes. “Kiss her,” someone whispered to Johnny. “Go ahead and kiss her!” The whole class began to hiss with insistence.
I was startled. Being in love was pleasant, but actually—kissing? What would Mother say if she heard about it? Johnny, interested, agreeable, daring, gave me a challenging look.
Accepting Johnny’s silent dare, I extended the back of my right hand. Johnny took my fingers in his, as if he were a nobleman in a pirate movie, and kissed my hand, which I then quickly withdrew.
Miss Sampson returned, and the class immediately reassembled itself and tried to pretend it had been working on fractions the whole time. I sat blushing. A boy had kissed my hand! To this day, I have difficulty with fractions.
One morning I found in my desk a salmon-colored envelope. Inside was a matching sheet of paper with a downhill sentence printed in pencil: “I love you Bevererly.” It was signed by Johnny. Happy that Johnny had finally, after three years, admitted loving me, I took it home to show Mother, who placed it in my Baby Book along with the record of my first tooth and first words. My first love letter is still there.
Acknowledged love was not the only change in my life. Mother found a piano teacher on the next street, and I began to take lessons, thumping away at scales and “The Happy Farmer” while Evelyn, an older girl who lived across the street, played rapid, accurate scales and “Rustle of Spring,” probably counting out each note, on her baby grand piano. I felt hitting the right note should be enough without having to count at the same time.
After school, Mother would say, “Now I am going to have you practice,” phrasing I deeply resented. Even more, I resented her sitting beside me, supervising my practice. However, music lessons had one advantage. Because I was so wretched over school music that I could not eat breakfast on music day, Mother arranged with the principal to let me take my piano lessons during music period. This kept me lackadaisically thumping.
When Grandmother Bunn came to visit, she listened to the frilly, trilly “Rustle of Spring” floating from across the street and offered me fifty dollars to learn to play it.
“No, thank you,” I said politely, refusing to compromise my integrity.
That year a new girl appeared in the fifth grade, a girl who lived in the next block and who passed our house on the way to school. For the first time, I found a best friend.
Her name was Mary Dell. She had a sister seven or eight years old and parents who were younger than mine. Her father worked for a paint company. Mary Dell’s
mother seemed happy and carefree, often with a paintbrush in her hand, painting woodwork or kitchen cabinets. Once she even painted a pair of shoes. The family also kept a pet dog, a lively wire-haired terrier named Winnie. A dog in the house! On the farm we had two working dogs and a stray terrier that hung around, but none of them was ever allowed in the house.
Sometimes I spent the night with Mary Dell, and if my parents went to a party with friends from Yamhill who had moved to Portland, Mary Dell stayed with me. We did this until my parents gave up their modest social life. Long waits for streetcars at night spoiled their pleasure, and the serving of bootleg liquor at some parties disgusted Mother, who now felt she could no longer return hospitality.
I continued to spend the night with Mary Dell, whose mother did something I found surprising. She kissed her daughters. This filled me with longing.
I confronted Mother and informed her, “Some mothers kiss their little girls.”
Mother laughed, pulled me to her, and gave me a hug and a kiss—a sweet, isolated moment. It was never repeated. I often look back on that kiss and wonder why Mother never felt she could kiss me again. She and my father often hugged each other, and my father was affectionate toward me.
One rainy day, Mother agreed that I could invite Mary Dell to our house to play. When I telephoned my invitation, I overheard Mary Dell speaking to her mother. “Beverly wants me to come over.”
“Do you want to go?” her mother asked.
“Not especially,” was Mary Dell’s answer.
Shocked, I spoke into the telephone. “I heard what you said.” I hung up, went to my room, closed the door, and cried. I cried because I understood Mary Dell’s answer to her mother. My house was always cold and drab compared to Mary Dell’s house; Mother was always tired and nervous. Why should Mary Dell want to come to my house? I understood perfectly, which made my distress even more difficult to bear.
The next morning on the way to school, I told Mary Dell, “I’m mad at you for what you said yesterday.”
“What can I do to make up?” she asked.
Somehow I had not expected this reasonable answer.
“Get down on your knees and say you’re sorry,” I said.
To my horror, Mary Dell knelt on the sidewalk, placed her palms as if in prayer, and said, “I’m sorry.” Then she rose, and we walked on to school as if nothing had happened. I cannot recall my reply, but I do recall the shame I felt (and still feel) over this incident that was so painful to me. There was no reason Mary Dell should have to be forgiven for a truthful answer to her mother. I wished my mother could be happier, more welcoming to my friends, who were almost never invited to our house.
A citywide spelling bee was announced. Mother was determined that I should enter. In school, when we took a spelling test, I slid through by somehow imprinting the words in my mind for a few minutes before they faded. If the test was given immediately, I spelled most of the words correctly.
The Oregon Journal printed whole pages of words in print so small I could not photograph them with my mind. Mother insisted I spell aloud as she pronounced each word. I stood on one foot and then the other, not wanting to spell at all.
“Stop wiggling,” ordered Mother. I stared out the window; I scratched. Sullenly I spelled. Mother’s lips compressed into a thin, straight line; my sighs of boredom and resentment grew more gusty.
When the preliminary spell-down was held in my classroom, I was given beautiful. “Beautiful. B-e-a-u,” I began. Someone gasped, confusing me and making me feel I had made a mistake. I began again. “Beautiful. B-a-e-u—”
“Wrong,” judged Miss Sampson. The class giggled. Everyone knew how to spell beautiful. So did I. Even though I felt silly, I was glad to be free of that city spelling bee.
Mother was so cross with me that I became angry. Without letting her know, I decided to do something bad, something really terrible. I decided to go a whole week without washing my face. That would show her, I thought, not exactly sure what would be shown, except a dirty face. Not washing my face that week gave me great satisfaction, except for one thing: no one noticed, not even Mother.
Mother bore down on me. “Don’t sit on the edge of the bed. You’ll break down the edge of the mattress.” “Sit up straight. You’re growing round-shouldered.” “Stop scuffing the toes of your shoes.”
Clothes became the subject of the sort of argument Mother called a “battle royal.” In winter she was adamant about two things: woolen underwear and high brown shoes that laced.
“No one at school wears woolen underwear or high brown shoes,” I protested.
“You catch enough colds as it is,” she said, “and no daughter of mine is going to grow up with thick ankles.”
“Why don’t you bind my feet while you’re at it?” was my mean and sulky answer.
“Don’t give me any of your back talk,” Mother ordered.
“I don’t care. I hate them,” I cried, tears beginning to come. “I hate them, I hate them!”
No answer. Thin-lipped, unrelenting silence.
Every morning, sick with misery, I pulled on that short-legged, drop-seated woolen underwear, laced up those high brown shoes, and toyed with my breakfast in sullen silence before setting off for school, where, I was sure, everyone secretly laughed at my shoes. The underwear I was careful to keep hidden.
Adults, however, felt free to comment on my appearance, as if a child were unable to hear. “Beverly looks more like her mother every day,” they said, “but she’s just skin and bones.”
“Such big brown eyes,” they said and canceled out my big brown eyes by adding, “but isn’t it too bad her teeth are so crooked?”
Shoes and underwear worried me much more than my teeth, which were crooked, overlapping, and leaning in all directions. They were my teeth, and I was accustomed to them.
Toward spring I had tonsillitis again. In the night, once again the sensation of sinking downward through a white tunnel toward a light while the telegraph wires of Yamhill hummed in my brain.
“She looks like a ghost,” the neighbors said, as if I could not hear. Why did adults think children had no feelings at all?
My parents were so worried about my health that Mother took me to a pediatrician—something almost unheard of in our neighborhood—who examined me, to my great embarrassment, and said I suffered from malnutrition and that I needed to get out and run on the beach. He also prescribed some sticky green medicine and told Mother to buy me some Scott’s Emulsion, a tonic that made me gag.
When Father’s vacation came, my parents dutifully packed a trunk with blankets, pots and pans, and new bathing suits for all of us; and we took the train to Rockaway, where we stayed in a one-room cottage equipped with beds, a table and chairs, and a wood stove. The pediatrician was unfamiliar with the Oregon coast, which can be cold and foggy in summer; or perhaps he did not expect to be taken literally.
Obediently I ran on the beach in spite of cold and fog, and like everyone who vacationed on the coast, we went into the Pacific Ocean every day—that was why we were there, wasn’t it?—first consulting tide tables to make sure the tide was coming in so we would not be carried out to sea by undertow. Father enjoyed going out into the big breakers, but women and children jumped and squealed in small waves as we turned blue with cold and our teeth began to chatter.
The best part of that chilly vacation was raking crabs from tide pools and digging clams. I walked on wet sand, stamping my feet until a bubble appeared. As fast as he could move, Father cast aside a shovel or two of sand, knelt, and plunged his bare arms into the numbing grit to pull out a razor clam for chowder or fritters, which I refused to eat.
I am not sure this trip to the coast improved my health, but we all enjoyed it. The highlight for me was accompanying my parents to a dance. Because they felt I needed some sort of reward, they bribed me, quite unnecessarily, with a paper parasol to go along and behave myself. I was happy sitting under my open parasol on a bench, watching my parents have
a good time fox-trotting to the music played by a small band. If only they would have fun more often…
Daytimes on the beach, I was instructed to stay away from the members of the dance band and what Mother referred to as “their women,” who sat on blankets on the sand, passing around a flask. The women sometimes danced the Black Bottom while someone played a ukelele. Mother said I needn’t watch. I peeked, and as soon as we returned to Portland, I showed the other girls how to dance the Black Bottom.
This journey for the improvement of my health took only two weeks, which left the rest of the summer. As in most of my grammar school summers, I passed the time sitting on the front porch, reading or embroidering. I embroidered smiling teakettles on potholders or knives chasing forks on tea towels until Mother bought a bedspread stamped with flowers to be worked in the lazy daisy stitch and big enough to keep me busy for a long time. My stitches never matched those of the mice in The Tailor of Gloucester, but I discovered how soothing handwork could be.
Awful Boys and a Decision
On warm evenings in the late summer of 1927, as children played statue or hide-and-seek, we caught scraps of adult conversation: “If interest rates go any higher…” “Wall Street.” “The stock market.” “Inflation.”
Boring, grown-up talk, I thought, until one word, “inflation,” came to have meaning for me. “It’s terrible the way prices keep going up and up,” said Mother. “Your father’s paycheck doesn’t stretch as far as it used to, and the worst of it is, the farmers aren’t getting one cent out of it.”
Because money would not stretch, Mother had our telephone converted to a private line. She set up the card table and, with the telephone book in front of her, began to solicit subscriptions to McCall’s magazine, work she could do at home, so she would be there to prepare the lunch I barely touched, and again when I returned from school—the sixth grade in Miss Charlotte Stewart’s room.
A Girl from Yamhill Page 8
