A Girl from Yamhill

by Beverly Cleary

  Girls were beginning to rebel, too, making Miss Campbell, our thin, harrassed domestic science teacher, the victim. Miss Campbell’s favorite word was “tend,” as in “White sauce tends to lump if not adequately stirred.” When she announced that our class was to give a demonstration on table setting and napkin folding at a PTA meeting, she learned that many girls tended to object.

  “That’s not fair,” someone said. “You can’t make us stay after school when we haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “Boys don’t have to stay after school,” someone else said. “Boys can get away with anything they want.”

  A girl named Joanne, a blonde who lisped, defied Miss Campbell. She stood up and said, “You can’t make me thtay after thcool,” and walked out of the basement classroom. Miss Campbell ran after her, leaving the rest of us humming with excitement. What would happen to Joanne? Would she be expelled?

  Miss Campbell, looking grim, returned alone. The next domestic science period, Joanne was in class, but she did not stay after school to take part in the demonstration.

  Teacher-pleaser that I was, who also felt sorry for Miss Campbell, I did not object to folding a napkin for the PTA and was assigned the hardest part of all, the proper way to fold a large damask dinner napkin, which I pretended to iron at an ironing board set up on the stage.

  “Always iron the right side of the napkin last,” I said, educating our mothers and teachers. “This tends to polish the design in the damask.”

  I held up the folded napkin to polite applause from the audience and, I suspect, to the relief of Miss Campbell, who, during the remainder of the year, was faced with teaching us the correct way to patch a garment, work a neat buttonhole, darn a sock so it wasn’t lumpy, and make a dress.

  Mother, a pillar of the PTA, was dissatisfied with school. Not enough homework was assigned, a complaint she had made since I was in the third grade. If we didn’t rush about from room to room, we would learn more. Perhaps she felt that folding a damask napkin in domestic science was not sufficiently intellectual. When she was a girl, this was taught at home, not in school. She announced she was going to visit school to see for herself what was going on.

  I was horrified. School visits by mothers were for the first and second grades, not the eighth grade. I could not live down such a visit, ever. I would die.

  “You won’t do anything of the kind,” said Mother. “Mr. Dorman says parents are welcome anytime.”

  Why didn’t nice Mr. Dorman keep his mouth shut at PTA? I lived in dread of Mother’s being as good as her word and bringing disgrace down upon me. But the visit never took place.

  Mother and Dad had worries more serious than what went on at Fernwood. Each evening after I left the dinner table to read the newspaper, they lingered over tea and spoke in worried voices of subjects that did not interest me—high tariffs, the stock market, Wall Street, banking.

  Dad began to come home from work with his shoulders stooped, his face heavy with worry.

  Some Portland banks closed their doors when too many depositors began to withdraw money. What if this happened to the bank where he worked? That year the West Coast National Bank did not give its annual Christmas bonus, a frightening omen. We depended on that bonus and had plans for every cent.

  As it turned out, the bank was bought by the larger United States National Bank, an institution that promised to keep the West Coast employees. Dad had me sell the two shares of West Coast stock he had once given me, and with the proceeds bought me, at a great bargain, an ancient typewriter with an extra-long carriage for typing bank forms. I would need it when I became a writer.

  Dad moved next door to his former bank to stand on another marble floor. We feared a run of worried depositors withdrawing all their money from this bank, where my father was responsible for order in the lobby.

  And then in October 1929 the stock market crashed. Except for school, everything seemed to come to a halt. All around us, men began to lose their jobs. The Miles family lost their money in the stock market. Grandpa Atlee wrote that the logging camps and lumber mills around Banks were shutting down, an ominous sign, for Oregon’s economy depended on the lumber industry.

  At school we charted estimated expenses for a family of four with an income of $2,500 to $3,000 a year. We learned to write checks, borrow money, read interest tables, and compound interest semiannually. We learned the difference between stocks and bonds; we studied real estate as an investment, property insurance, and income tax.

  The Stone Arithmetic Advanced told us, concerning income tax: “In 1924 the normal rate on incomes up to $6000 is 2% less the amount of the exemption.” Mother looked at my arithmetic book and remarked with bitterness, “There aren’t many people around here who earn six thousand dollars a year these days.”

  In spite of what was going on in the country, Fernwood trained us to save money. One of the banks started a school banking program with a teller, the boy who was best in arithmetic, in each class. We brought our bank books to school, along with nickels, dimes, and quarters to deposit in our accounts. One boy often brought a whole dollar. Speculation on the size of his account was the talk of the class.

  Mrs. Drake gave us lessons in algebra to ease us into high school mathematics. “Your teachers won’t spoon-feed you the way I do,” she warned us.

  In reading, we studied a chapter of The Mill on the Floss, by George Eliot; another from Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville; Robert Browning’s “Incident of the French Camp”; Abraham Lincoln’s “Address at the Dedication of the Gettysburg National Cemetery”; and Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Flower in the Crannied Wall.” Mrs. Weaver required the memorizing of “If,” by Rudyard Kipling. We hated it. The only twentieth-century selections I can recall were short stories by O. Henry—“The Gift of the Magi” and “The Ransom of Red Chief”—but of course the century was only twenty-nine years old at that time.

  That winter I became ill once more, with what was assumed to be influenza—in those days almost any sickness was called the flu or grippe. When fever, weakness, and sore throat persisted, Mother finally called a doctor. He examined me, felt my glands, leaned on the foot of the bed, and asked, “Mother, does she know about the moon?”

  Weak as I was, I was infuriated. He spoke as if I were absent or deaf, he addressed my mother as if she were his mother, and he insulted my intelligence by his silly reference to “the moon.”

  I knew very well he was referring to monthly periods. Why didn’t the stupid man say what he meant? And what business was it of his, anyway? The old snoop. Mother was angry because he charged five dollars for the visit, even though he had to pass our house on his way to his office, and because he did nothing to help me recover.

  After I had been in bed two weeks, Mother sent me back to school because, she later ruefully admitted, she was worn out taking care of me. I felt so weak I paused to rest against every fire hydrant along the way and almost immediately had to return home for another two weeks of fever and weakness, lying in my great-grandfather’s four-poster bed, looking out at rain and sleet. Mother began to read me The Little Minister, by James M. Barrie, because for once I felt unequal to reading. Halfway through, she laid it aside. I finished it a few pages at a time.

  After my illness—whatever it was, it would be my last for many years—I looked so bedraggled that Mother bought me rouge for my pale cheeks and, every morning before school, insisted on curling the ends of my hair with a curling iron heated over the flame of a burner on the gas stove.

  “Yow, you’re burning my neck!”

  “Stand still a minute, can’t you?”

  The odor of singed hair filled the kitchen when Mother overheated the curling iron. By the time I had walked to school, because bicycle riding was unsophisticated for an eighth-grade girl, the damp air had usually wilted my curls.

  The lingering debilitation of illness subdued me to the point of studying harder, with the result that, on one report card day, Mrs. Drake announced that I was the only membe
r of the class to earn straight E’s for Excellent. No one at school held this against me, but Mother said, “You see? You could always earn straight E’s if you would only apply yourself.”

  About that time, Mrs. Drake confided that she was taking a course in short-story writing. Because she was taking this course, we should write, too, a paragraph of description. The class groaned.

  After some thought, I recalled the moment when the mule deer sprang out of the juniper trees and hesitated in front of our car as the sun was rising over the mountains. I handed in a short paragraph entitled “Sunrise on the High Desert.”

  My description was returned to me inflamed with red pencil corrections. Mrs. Drake had changed almost every word. This was a shock. After so much encouragement from Mrs. Weaver, I did not know what to think.

  Mother, in a day when parents supported teachers, merely remarked that she did not agree with some of Mrs. Drake’s corrections, but she kept the paragraph. Years later, after I had published several books, I ran across it. The morning sun in the clear, cold desert air I had described as “blazing”—not a particularly good word—as it rose above the juniper trees. Mrs. Drake crossed out “blazing” and wrote in “burning,” apparently believing that “burning” was the only acceptable modifier for a desert sun, even the sun on a cold Oregon morning. Perhaps she had read The Sheik.

  In a negative way, this experience influenced my writing. For years I avoided writing description, and children told me they liked my books “because there isn’t any description in them.”

  Toward spring, Mother began to tell the neighbors, “Beverly has finally begun to perk up,” and a good thing, too, for Miss Helliwell had us hang up our Indian clubs and begin to rehearse calisthenics, identical to those taught in gymnasiums all over Portland, until the important day when girls dressed in white middies and black gym bloomers and boys in white gym suits marched to the Grant High School Bowl. There we joined hundreds of pupils from all over the city and performed, under the leadership of the tan, muscular superintendent of physical education, the calisthenics in which we had been drilled. In a yellowing newspaper photograph, we look more like the youth of Germany than of Oregon.

  About this time I wore Mother down and was allowed to shed forever my woolen underwear, and in the nick of time, because I had to try on the dress I was making in domestic science so Miss Campbell could mark the hem. Now my underwear would not show.

  Our eighth-grade graduation took place in our classroom without parents present. From my seat by the window I could see Mount Hood, which was out on that sunny June day. (In Portland we spoke of Mount Hood as being “out” on clear days, as if it had popped out of the ground like a gopher.) The class waited, excited and expectant, for Mr. Dorman, who finally arrived, carrying a handful of paper diplomas, to make a short, friendly speech. Fernwood had prepared us to be good citizens, he told us.

  With forty and sometimes more pupils in a class, our teachers had taught us the fundamentals of survival in society. Every one of us could read. We had learned to speak distinctly and correctly and to cope with the arithmetic necessary for daily life. Girls were capable of making their own clothing—not that many wanted to—and to prepare simple, nutritious meals. Boys had learned basic carpentry, and some had even built tables with hand-rubbed finishes, which we all admired as they proudly bore them home on the last day of manual training.

  School was a businesslike place. Teachers and parents expected us to learn but not to think for ourselves; we expected to be taught. Our textbooks were practical-looking and of a size comfortable for the hands of children in the grades in which they were used. No one, not even ourselves, expected school to amuse us, to be fun, or to be responsible for personal problems. The appreciation of music and art would have been considered expensive and unnecessary by parents.

  Of the sixteen teachers who taught us in eight years, most were pleasant, firm, and impersonal, which was the attitude we expected of teachers. The Gregory Heights director of the PTA program was never my teacher, only a painful childhood memory. She and Miss Falb, who switched my hands with her bamboo pointer, were the only teachers who ever touched me, but I probably leaned against Miss Marius because I loved her so much.

  As I listened to Mr. Dorman and walked to the front of the room to accept my diploma, I was already imagining myself in the long corridors of the Ulysses S. Grant High School.

  With our diplomas, Mr. Dorman handed each of us a small buff card, our first adult library card, a symbol marking the end of childhood.

  Photographic Insert II

  At the age of six I dislike this yellow organdy dress because it is scratchy. Mother is ashamed of my socks. We move to Portland shortly after this picture is taken.

  Two Halsey Street sisters stand to my left on the day I enter the first grade. I am anxious because one girl is prepared with flowers for the teacher and I am not. Will the teacher like me?

  At age seven my Yamhill smile begins to fade. Mother is disappointed because my socks show in this picture, paid for with a free coupon.

  In the fourth grade Evelyn, the older girl who played “Rustle of Spring,” and I are outfitted as tin soldiers for the operetta. Our puttees slip and have to be rewound, but we make it through the performance.

  Grandpa and Grandma Atlee stand apart in their general merchandise store. I peek into the right of the picture. Mother, who destroyed almost all pictures of herself, removed herself from this one with scissors.

  Mother’s determination holds our lives together in this house on Thirty-seventh Street.

  When I am in the eighth grade, a friend’s mother suggests taking this picture of me for a Christmas present to Mother, who, instead of being pleased, is angry. She has told me to avoid this friend, whom she considers “common.”

  A Summer of Change

  The summer of 1930 began happily. Claudine and I, after my family moved to Thirty-seventh Street, became friends. I learned that she was a talented pianist and plump from lack of exercise because her kneecaps sometimes slipped out of place, causing her to fall.

  The first thing we decided to do, on a warm summer day when the air of Portland was rich with the rotten-cabbage smell of paper mills, was use our new adult library cards.

  We timidly approached the adult half of the book collection, choosing almost at random before we slipped back to the children’s side of the room for old favorites.

  After the library, Claudine and I went to the drugstore for Cokes before we walked back to her house, where we settled ourselves on her taupe mohair davenport to read in companionable silence.

  But then, in a week or so, Claudine and her mother went out to the Pudding River, which they referred to as Puddin’, where the Klums had a cabin. The Miles girls all seemed busy and did not invite me to their house. I was lonely but not discontented. The library supplied me with books. High school lay ahead.

  One evening, when Mother and Dad were drinking their tea and I was reading the newspaper in the living room, I sensed a terrible icy silence settle over our house, a silence that chilled me with fear. Something was wrong, terribly wrong.

  Mother broke the silence with one syllable of despair. “Oh!” I heard Dad push back his chair, go into the bedroom, quietly shut the door, and throw himself on the bed. Why? I was terrified.

  Mother came into the living room. “Daddy has lost his job,” she said softly. “The bank is dismissing the employees it took over from the West Coast National and has given them two weeks’ notice.”

  The Depression had come to us. Mother cleared the table and washed the dishes alone. I sensed she preferred solitude to help. I sat filled with anguish, unable to read, unable to do anything. When Dad finally emerged from the bedroom, I felt so awkward I did not know what to say or even how to look at him. To pretend nothing had happened seemed wrong, but seeing him so defeated and ashamed of defeat, even though he was not to blame, was so painful that I could not speak. How could anyone do such a thing to my father, who was so
good, kind, reliable, and honest?

  That summer of 1930 was terrible for all three of us. My father wrote letters of application, applied for jobs in person, called on businessmen who had been friendly to him in the bank lobby, and asked if they had an opening or knew of one. Nothing. A man whose life had been farming had little to offer in the city but willingness to work, loyalty, a dignified appearance, and a gracious manner. “Mr. Bunn is a real gentleman” was often said of my father. In Portland his intelligence had been wasted.

  Every workday morning he left the house. Late in the afternoon he came home with his shoulders sagging, his footsteps heavy.

  Mother searched his face. “Well?” she always questioned.

  “Nothing” was his answer. Everywhere men were being laid off, not hired.

  The money in our bank account and the last paycheck must be stretched as far as they would stretch, for every penny counted. Mother fidgeted, figuring on the backs of envelopes: so much to be set aside for property taxes, so much for my carfare to the orthodontist, and when she calculated that bus and streetcar fare cost less than the expenses of driving the car, so much for carfare for my father to look for work.

  Mother took inventory of the cupboards, planned Spartan meals—macaroni and cheese, Spanish rice, creamed chipped beef on toast. Because our kitchen had bins for sugar and flour, we had bought these staples in hundred-pound sacks. Fortunately, the bins were full. Mother began to bake our own bread and, for her insatiable sweet tooth, cake, following recipes calling for one egg and the least amount of shortening. She ran out of vanilla and started to use a bottle of almond flavoring—a large bottle. We ate almond-flavored cake; almond-flavored cornstarch, tapioca, and bread puddings; almond-flavored cookies and custard. Mother even made almond-flavored fudge, until she used up all the chocolate. Then, as long as the brown sugar lasted, she made almond-flavored penuche. The Depression, for me, took on the flavor of almond, and to this day I dislike any almond-flavored dessert. When we ran out of tea, my parents drank hot water with supper. We brushed our teeth with baking soda to save the cost of toothpaste. Someone told my father how to sharpen the blade of a safety razor on the inside of a straight-sided drinking glass. Making one blade last became a challenge. We stopped spending the weekly nickel on The Saturday Evening Post, to the disappointment of the boy who earned a few cents delivering it.