A Girl from Yamhill

by Beverly Cleary

  Mrs. Grow was full of ideas. She gave us a course in first aid and taught us how to bind a book. She drove a big old Franklin sedan that could hold the whole group, and sometimes, in good weather, she drove us out to Canyon Road to cook our supper over a bonfire in a clearing. We charred kabobs, baked bread-on-a-stick (biscuit dough wound around a stick that always, because of our impatience, turned out slightly raw in the middle), and ate vegetables wrapped in cabbage leaves for salad. We enjoyed the meal, which we topped off by toasting or charring marshmallows. Mrs. Grow was a woman of courage who did not fuss about details.

  When Mrs. Grow told us the administration of Camp Fire Girls was offering a five-dollar prize for the best linoleum-block print cover for their bulletin, she suggested we try. I attacked a square of battleship linoleum with my father’s jackknife and produced a cover of sorts. Once again I won a prize, not because my cover had any artistic merit, but because no one else entered the contest. I saved my five dollars for a bathing suit.

  Mrs. Grow was concerned about the Pukwudjies she was shepherding through the Depression. When Camp Fire headquarters announced a contest with a prize of a free week at Camp Namanu the next summer for the group that earned the most points, Mrs. Grow said, “There is no reason why you girls shouldn’t win.” She organized us.

  Points were given for visiting factories. Mrs. Grow packed us into her Franklin, and we took off to surprise owners of small factories by our sudden interest in their products. In one afternoon we whipped through a pencil factory, a spaghetti factory, a candy shop where chocolates were dipped (free samples!), and, of course, the Jantzen Knitting Mills, that haven for any adult stuck with providing an educational experience for a group of the young in Portland. I was fascinated by a woman who stretched knit fabric over a lighted glass panel and circled flaws with chalk and by the razor-sharp, whizzing machine that cut out stacks of bathing suits at one time.

  Another method of earning points was writing a letter to a Camp Fire Girl in another city. Mrs. Grow gathered us around Claudine’s dining room table (brownies for refreshments), where we combined our efforts to compose a joint letter, which Claudine’s aunt, who worked in an office, mimeographed for us. The next week, on someone else’s dining room table, we shared and signed a ream of letters which Mrs. Grow shipped off to Camp Fire headquarters in other cities, to be passed around to other groups. We earned a lot of points that way and did not break any rules. We also received credit for answers. I heard from a girl in Minnesota and from another in England.

  Camp Fire headquarters was upset when our group turned in the most points. Another group was expected to win. We were accused of violating, if not the rules, the spirit of Camp Fire. “Nonsense!” said Mrs. Grow, who had once handed a traffic officer a nickel and told him to go buy himself an ice cream cone, and was not easily intimidated. The discussion grew more heated, with Mrs. Grow defending her girls, who needed that week at camp. There was no rule against mimeographed letters, no rule against visiting more than one factory in one day.

  Mrs. Grow was so feisty that headquarters had to relent and award us the prize. The other group was also given a free week because they were true, in winning their points, to the spirit of Camp Fire—something as vague as the requirements for the Namanu Honor I had failed to earn on my first trip to camp. We Pukwudjies did not mind sharing the glory of the prize, even though we caused hard feelings at headquarters. We would have our week, free of the Depression, and camp with friends would be fun. Those of us who could not find hand-me-down blue middies went to work making our own out of the cheapest blue cotton we could find.

  The Pukwudjies, in our homemade middies and black gym bloomers, enjoyed our week at Camp Namanu, where Mrs. Grow came to visit and once more found a loophole in a rule. Eating between meals was strictly forbidden in our cabins, so she invited us all to the counselors’ lodge, where she gave us each a candy bar. We were shocked at this violation of rules. “Eating between meals is not forbidden counselors,” she said. “Why should it be forbidden you girls?” We ate with wicked pleasure, not at all in the spirit of Camp Fire.

  Campers at Namanu had a custom, whenever a girl was late for a meal, of singing at the top of our voices, “You’re always behind like an old cow’s tail.” One member of our group, a girl who was always neat, punctual, and efficient, discovered one day she was going to be late for dinner. Rather than face what she felt was the humiliation of being sung to, she skipped the meal—one of Namanu’s greater crimes—and hid. No counselor missed her. At the final evening camp fire, when she was awarded Namanu’s highest honor, the Namanu Girl Honor, some of our group were bitter about this injustice, but I was already hardened, from my early experience, to Namanu’s honor system.

  What mattered to me was the carefree feeling I enjoyed that week. This time, Mother had not sacrificed to send me to camp. I had come to dread Mother’s sacrifices for me because they made me feel so guilty.

  Depression Summer

  The Depression grew worse. More men lost their jobs. Almost every day, at least one defeated man came to the door trying to sell shoelaces or pencils to earn a few cents. At first Mother bought from them because we were lucky. My father had a job. But finally so many came to the door she could no longer face the sad, gray men. We hid when we saw them coming. Mother always grieved when we did this. “You see what heroes men are,” she said.

  All around us, people were having a hard time. A neighbor took in her nephew, a child about five years old. Anger spilled out of her house, and sometimes, after dark, she would lock the little boy outside as a punishment. He ran from the back door to the front door and back again, pounding with his fists and sobbing, “Let me in! Let me in!”

  When I went to bed, I hid my head under the pillow to shut out the sound of the child’s sobs until his aunt relented and unlocked the door for him.

  Summer was lonely. Claudine went to Puddin’. The Miles girls, those near my age, went out to the homestead their parents had claimed from land returned to the government by the railroad. There they raised and canned food and cut wood for life in the city.

  I combined trips to the orthodontist with knitting lessons at Meier & Frank and trips to the main library to stretch twenty cents’ carfare as far as possible and keep me away from home for an afternoon.

  Halfway through the summer, Uncle Guy, Mother’s older brother, and Aunt Ida arrived by automobile all the way from Arizona, bringing presents—a turquoise and silver Indian bracelet for me and chunks of turquoise from my uncle’s mine for Mother. Uncle Guy, tanned and fit, seemed untouched by the Depression, and during his visit, Mother became her old vivacious self. When my aunt and uncle drove out to Banks to visit my grandparents and Uncle Henry for a few days, I went along. Grandpa Atlee had built a post office for Banks so Uncle Henry could have a job as postmaster.

  My grandfather’s store, which never seemed to change, was a two-story wooden building with “W. S. Atlee General Merchandise” painted across its false front. Living quarters and Grandma Atlee’s little millinery shop were above the store. My grandparents’ day began with someone pounding on the front door, demanding, “Open up!”

  “All right, all right, I’m coming. Hold your horses!” Grandpa shouted as he pulled up his suspenders and hurried down the stairs.

  From the time the door was unlocked, old men gathered in the store to discuss politics and spit tobacco juice (“eatin’ tobaccy,” they called it) into the stove while they waited for the train to arrive and for Uncle Henry to sort the mail so they could read their newspapers. Their sentences often began with “I see by the paper…” or “Will Rogers says…” That summer there was talk of loggers out of work, lumber mills that had shut down, and the possibility of a chain store opening in Forest Grove. Grandpa worried about competition from one of the new chain stores. Men asked Uncle Guy, “How are things going down there in Arizona?”

  Drummers, as traveling salesmen were called, arrived. My grandmother, wearing a black sateen ap
ron over her blue housedress, hurried downstairs to order dry goods—notions, stockings, underwear, and yard goods—for her side of the store, while Grandpa placed his orders for coffee, tea, rice, crackers, chewing tobacco, and all the items carried on his side. He bought orange wheels of Tillamook cheese and, from farmers, eggs, which he let me candle to test for freshness by holding each over a hole in a wooden box that contained an electric light. If the egg appeared translucent, it was fresh. At the back of the store, coal oil for kerosene lamps was kept in a drum with a spigot, from which customers’ coal oil cans were filled, and a half a potato was jammed on the spout to prevent spillage.

  Customers came in for spools of thread, overalls (pronounced “overhauls”), coffee, which Grandpa ground in a red coffee mill, tea, and crackers sold in bulk from red metal bins. The cash register rang, but some customers, shamefaced, asked that their meager purchases be “put on the books.” My grandfather obligingly charged the items, often knowing he would never be paid. He said, “I can’t see little young ’uns go without.” He had only contempt for people who bought tinned vegetables when they could grow their own. At noon my grandparents took turns going upstairs for a hasty lunch—usually canned Vienna sausage, bread and cheese, and coffee, which Grandpa “saucered and blowed” in his private deep saucer. He did not have time to let his coffee cool in a cup.

  Afternoons, women came in for their small purchases. If they were buying percale for house-dresses, Grandma, with kindly patience, laid their patterns out on the inexpensive fabric, arranging and rearranging the tissue-paper pieces to save every inch of material for women who were so pinched for money. They could no longer afford to retrim their hats each season, so Grandma’s boxes of ostrich plumes, now out of fashion, grew dusty along with the ribbons, bolts of veiling, artificial flowers, and cherries that had delighted me when I was younger.

  Evenings, people in Banks dropped into the store to chat and enjoy a bit of company, to discuss politics and harvest, and to exchange gossip. Women, except during berry harvest, led lonely lives. When the berries were ripe, the town came alive.

  Strawberries were picked by Filipinos and taken to a warehouse with an open side where women hulled berries and packed them in barrels between layers of sugar for shipment by train to New York. All of Banks was perfumed by crushed ripe strawberries, and that summer, in the evenings after a field had been stripped of berries, I went with my two uncles into the fields and ate dark, ripe berries, rich with juice, that had been overlooked. Uncle Guy said there was nothing like the fields of Oregon berries in Arizona.

  When the last customer drifted away and my grandfather locked the store, we climbed the stairs to the living quarters, where Grandpa snapped on his radio to listen to the Alka-Seltzer news at ten o’clock. He turned his radio on a few minutes before ten in case the news came on early, and when the program began with the fizz of an Alka-Seltzer tablet dropped into water, he always said, “Yep, there she goes!” After the news, bed, and in the morning, another pounding on the door.

  My grandparents’ whole lives were lived in that old tinder-dry building with its one staircase leading past the drum of kerosene. Grandma cooked on a wood range and often gave the fire a fast start with a splash of coal oil from a can beside the stove. Somehow the store, the center of community life in Banks, never caught fire.

  When Uncle Guy and Aunt Ida took me back to Portland and were saying goodbye, Uncle Guy ran his hand over my head and said, “She’d be a good-looking chick if she had a permanent wave.”

  Mother smiled and said, “She’s a little young. She has plenty of time for that.” I was inclined to agree. A permanent wave was something else that somehow belonged in the mysterious future. When Uncle Guy left, Mother wept.

  My uncle’s remark made me look at myself in the mirror and fiddle with my hair. What was the use? I would never look nice with my mouth full of metal and wire. Mother began to look thoughtfully at me. The week before school started, she said, “Why don’t you spend the five dollars your uncle gave you on a permanent wave?”

  Well! A bit of the future had appeared through the mist.

  Mother sent me to a neighborhood hairdresser, an experience fraught with suspense. The woman, widowed or divorced, who had sons to support, could afford neither a license nor a proper shop. She operated her business illegally in her dining room and lived in fear of a city inspector finding out about it. If someone rang the doorbell, customers were instructed to run and hide in the bathroom while she hid evidence of her business.

  The woman shampooed my hair while I bent forward over the bathroom washbasin. Then, in the dining room, she pulled strands through slits in felt pads and wound them so tightly around metal rods I felt as if my eyebrows were raised. Next she soaked my hair with evil-smelling liquid and fastened to each roller clamps that dangled from a heavy electric machine. The electricity was turned on. What if the inspector rang the doorbell? How could I run and hide when I was fastened to this hot, heavy contraption? Would the hairdresser leave me? Would my hair burn off? Would she be fined, even arrested? Then how would she earn her living? A permanent wave gave me plenty to worry about.

  The machine heated and turned into an instrument of torture. I was silent as long as I could bear the heat. Then a small “Ooh!” escaped.

  “Where does it burn?” the hairdresser asked. I pointed. She aimed a blower at the spot. My whole head seemed to be burning. I pointed; she blew. “It won’t be long now,” she said over and over. The ordeal seemed to take forever. Somehow I got through it all without the inspector calling and without my hair being burned off. When the clamps were removed and my hair unwound in a Medusa-like tangle, it was neutralized, shampooed again, set, and dried. I looked in the mirror. This rite of passage, this trial by permanent wave, left me feeling better about myself, and the hairdresser still had her illegal business, which helped her survive the Depression.

  Mothers and Daughters

  When I think of my mother now, I remember her as I so often saw her when I came home from high school. She is lying on the davenport, her legs covered with a blanket, a magazine fallen to the floor beside her. This is another day when Mother feels blue. She worries constantly, unable to recover from the days when Dad was out of work. She seems unable to get warm.

  A fly buzzes against the window. Mother throws back the blanket and springs to her feet. “Get that pesky fly!” she cries and seizes the nearest weapon, a newspaper that she rolls up. The chase is on. Thump. Whack. “Beverly, help me get that pesky fly before it spots the windows!” The fly grows angrier, Mother more determined, while I continue to stand, schoolbooks clasped to my chest, fascinated by the drama of Mother versus the fly.

  Thwack. “There,” she says, triumphant. “I got him!” The corpse is brushed from the sill and tossed to an ashy grave in the fireplace.

  “That’s the end of him,” she says in satisfaction. Her adrenaline is flowing once more. She folds the blanket, picks up the magazine, and sits down on the davenport. “Now tell me about your day at school,” she says. I tell her, making an ordinary school day as amusing as I can. I feel responsible for Mother’s happiness because she sacrifices for me.

  Mother and I, relieved of maintaining peace to protect my father during the terrible days when he was out of work, were now free to disagree with each other.

  Nothing I did pleased Mother; nothing she did pleased me. I wanted to wear lipstick. She said, “Certainly not. Lipstick on young girls is vulgar.”

  “But I wear rouge.”

  “That’s different, and you don’t wear much, just enough so you won’t look peaked.”

  School had taught me always to fold paper, as well as damask napkins, neatly; she left the newspaper in a crumpled heap on the floor. I wanted to do my homework in the evening; she wanted me to do it immediately after school “to get it out of the way.” I never touched the piano, and after she had sacrificed to give me lessons; I reminded her she no longer touched it herself.

  Mothe
r’s requests began, “I am going to have you…” I did not mind cleaning up my room, dusting, making the salad, but I resented her manner of asking me.

  When spring came, I wanted to wear bobby socks like the other girls. On a trip to the orthodontist, I detoured from my usual route to buy, with twenty-five cents saved a nickel at a time, a pair of red bobby socks at Woolworth’s. Mother made me return them on my next trip overtown.

  Risking Mother’s disapproval of lipstick on young girls, I bought a tube of Tangee lipstick at the dime store and applied it the minute I got home from the orthodontist.

  At supper, my parents apparently did not notice the lipstick. No comment was made. Finally I announced, in case they had not noticed, “I am wearing lipstick.”

  “So we see,” said Mother, her lips tightening into the straight line I was beginning to dread more than anything in the world. I gave up lipstick. It was not worth Mother’s devastating disapproval, no matter how much I needed to make little decisions of my own.

  Mother made me a white dress and a red jacket. The two halves of the collar were tied in a bow, the ends of which hung down over the jacket at the back of my neck. I thought the collar fetching, but Mother said the bow looked too heavy and wanted to cut it off. I protested. One day, when I came home from school, I discovered that Mother had amputated the bow. For once I could not contain my anger. “You had no right to do that,” I stormed. “It is my dress, even if you did make it.”

  Adults of Mother’s generation did not believe children should ever cross their parents. Parents were always right. “That dress looked terrible with that bow,” she said, not giving an inch. Again her mouth tightened into the thin, disapproving line.

  “You have a mouth like a buttonhole!” I hurled at her.