A Girl from Yamhill

by Beverly Cleary

  Mother looked stunned. I had often rebelled against her, but this was my first attack. “I’ll put the kibosh on you, young lady,” she informed me. “You can’t talk that way to your betters.” We did not speak until supper, when she said to Dad, “Beverly tells me I have a mouth like a buttonhole.”

  Dad, weary from his day in the basement of the bank, looked at me and said, “Did you say that?”

  “Yes, but she—” I did not finish the sentence. My father slapped my face, hard. I left the table and did not speak to my father for two weeks, during which I ate supper in sullen silence and avoided looking at either parent.

  As I grew up, both parents had slapped or spanked me, usually for being sassy when I was little or, as I grew older, for talking back. This time I felt I had had enough. I was too old to be slapped by my father. Talking back was not always wrong, I felt, and I would not have spoken such unkind words to Mother if she had left my dress alone and had been willing to listen to me explain my feelings.

  I longed to tell my father that I was sorry I had added to the unhappiness in his life, that I understood his irritation and weariness after a day at work; but my generation was never encouraged to talk openly with our parents about feelings. Whenever I tried, I was always judged wrong. This time I did not want to revive a painful episode or involve my father in a silly argument over a bow on the collar of a dress. Neither did I want to be forced to apologize to Mother.

  Finally Mother said, “Daddy wants you to know he’s sorry he slapped you,” and added softly, “You know he loves you more than life itself.” I did know.

  We went on as if nothing had happened, but after that episode I was careful to avoid confrontations with Mother that would involve my father. His life was hard enough.

  I began to spend more and more time at Claudine’s house. Mrs. Klum was almost the exact opposite of my mother. She was plump and pretty, with beautiful prematurely white hair. When Claudine and I went into a fit of giggles, she looked up from the Christian Science lesson she was often studying and said affectionately, “Oh, you silly little girls.” She did not interfere with Claudine’s schoolwork and put no pressure on her to make better grades.

  Mrs. Klum and Claudine had mother-daughter arguments, which they usually laughed about in a few days. Although Mr. Klum’s income was reduced even more than my father’s, Mrs. Klum continued with her bridge club and Eastern Star activities. She and Mr. Klum went dancing at the Masonic Lodge.

  Mother objected to my stopping at Claudine’s house after school and going there evenings. “If I were you, I wouldn’t go to Claudine’s house until she comes here,” she told me.

  “But you and Daddy never go out,” I said. “You’re always here.” Dad spent his evenings smoking his pipe or dozing over the newspaper. Mother read or worked the Journal crossword puzzle and yawned.

  At supper, Mother announced, “Beverly feels we are not welcome in our own home.” She knew very well that what I wanted was a little privacy; but even more, I wanted, desperately, for my mother and father to have some fun, to have friends, to go to movies—anything. They seemed to have given up happiness.

  When Claudine did come to our house, she was made welcome, as were all my friends. Dad sometimes tactfully retired to the breakfast nook with his pipe and newspaper, but Mother dominated. “Do you girls really like jazz?” she asked. “Do you really like Bing Crosby?” We did, of course. Then Mother always said, “Claudine, play something for us.” Claudine graciously sat down, rose to twirl the piano stool to the right height, and sat down again to play some popular songs of the day until she and I could escape to the kitchen to make hot chocolate. We could not go to my room as I had planned when we bought the house. My room was too cold, for Mother kept the bedroom doors shut to conserve heat.

  At Claudine’s house we studied or read together. On a visit to my grandparents, I picked up a book, Chip, of the Flying U, by B. M. Bower, a humorous story of a romance between a ranch owner’s daughter, a tenderfoot from the East, and a cowhand who turned out to be a distinguished artist of the West. I took the book home and passed it on to Claudine, who read it and said, “That was good.” We were both starved for romance.

  We enjoyed that book so much we fell in love with the West, which for us was actually East. Oregon did not count as the West.

  We discovered that our branch library carried the works of B. M. Bower, an Oregon author, a woman, who wrote Western stories from a woman’s point of view. We checked out the books as fast as we could read them: The Flying U’s Last Stand, The Voice at Johnnywater, The Phantom Herd, The Ranch at the Wolverine, and all the rest.

  Saturday evenings, when Claudine’s parents were out, we read and hoarded the power of the radio batteries so there would be enough left for us to listen to the songs of the Arizona Wranglers, whom we pictured as a group of cowboys, all looking exactly like Gary Cooper, whose movies we never missed. Gary Cooper was one actor Mother approved of. “His movies are always clean,” she said, although later she would not let me see him play opposite Marlene Dietrich in Morocco. She had her doubts about Marlene Dietrich.

  When we had read all of B. M. Bower, we started in on Zane Grey, a better writer, but one we found funny. A girl disguised as a man was shot. The hero unbuttoned her shirt, and wow! was he surprised! Claudine and I found this hilarious. In one book, the hero fried an egg on a rock, and as he handed it to the heroine, the text read: “‘Eat,’ he said.” After that, whenever we offered each other something to eat, we quoted in our deepest voices, “‘Eat,’ he said,” and went off into a gale of giggles.

  Mother began to object to our infatuation with the West. I should be reading worthwhile books, Dickens and Thackeray, the books she had read when she was growing up. I pointed out that I had already read David Copperfield. She kept an eye on any book I was reading. When I picked up what seemed a rather boring English novel she was reading, she refused to let me finish it because, she said, it was about a woman “who had no modesty.” I began to read at Claudine’s house the books I was forbidden at home but never understood what it was that Mother did not want me to see.

  Although Mother and I had an uncomfortable relationship, her softer moments revealed her hopes for me that told me she might love me even though she showed no tenderness toward me. At these times she looked sad and said to me, “I hope you won’t have to scrimp and pinch all your life,” or “I hope you will go ahead and be somebody.” She also impressed upon me, “Every woman should have some money of her own,” and, saddest of all, “I do hope you will marry a man who has the world by the tail.”

  These touching remarks pointed to a future I was unable to visualize. Everyone had some kind of future, even though in those Depression days many said they did not.

  I had no dreams of marriage and few thoughts about boys, although the boys I had grown up with had progressed through the awful, terrible, horrible, and shy stages and had turned into reasonable human beings. They were even courteous, sometimes.

  “Wise Fools”

  All of Portland felt blue that year. Businesses failed, banks closed their doors to prevent runs, and more weary gray men selling shoelaces or seeking work, any work, rang our doorbell. Mother managed money very, very carefully, but she did buy a bottle of vanilla extract to give us relief from almond flavoring.

  Mother and I continued to argue. I needed new school shoes and insisted on brogues like those other girls wore. Nobody wore Buster Brown oxfords or galoshes in high school. Mother stiffened my determination by poking fun at any girl wearing brogues who walked past our house. “Beverly, just come and see how silly that girl looks.”

  Finally Mother had to admit that thick soles would wear well and keep my feet dry. I got the brogues, wing-tipped, with soles half an inch thick and a fringed tongue that buckled over the laces. I clumped through the next three years of high school in them. Dad polished them for me every Sunday evening.

  Claudine and I felt very sophisticated in our brogues as we plod
ded off to our sophomore year. Nervous freshmen looked immature as they huddled in groups, the chalk dust of grammar schools seeming to cling to them. Boys our age had grown, and their corduroy pants, guarded from their mothers’ washing machines, were fashionably dirty. Seniors were less forbidding than they had been a year ago. Our teachers reminded us that the word sophomore came from the Greek and meant “wise fool.”

  Mother was exasperated when I signed up for a course in freehand drawing in addition to English, Latin, mathematics, and biology. I took the course over her objections, but I did not learn to draw, even though the teacher gave me an E, perhaps for properly sharpening a set of pencils for drawing. The teacher was keen on pencil drawing.

  Biology showed me with fresh eyes the world of nature around me; and even though we dissected night crawlers with their five pairs of beating hearts, biology was one of my favorite high school subjects. Geometry to me was more interesting than algebra. Mother could not understand my lackluster attitude toward Caesar, his cohorts, and his legions.

  The second semester, I decided to take typewriting, which Mother did not consider frivolous because I was going to be a writer. Before the class was allowed to touch typewriters, we memorized the keyboard letters by pounding away on their arrangement printed on heavy paper. When we finally got to real typewriters, which had blank keys, the room was so noisy I understood why the class was hidden away in a corner of the basement. Speed and accuracy were the goals, but for me all the nervous clattering of typewriters and pressure to hit the right keys faster was so exhausting I just managed to squeak through the semester with a grade of G for Good. I could not face the second semester, so I still have to peek to type numbers. Today, when I am asked the most difficult part of writing, I answer “typing,” which is taken as a joke. It is not. There is nothing funny about typewriting.

  Claudine and I studied The Century Handbook of Writing, giggling all the way. Examples seemed even funnier. When we came to Rule 68, “Avoid faulty diction,” we studied the examples: “Nowhere near. Vulgar for not nearly.” “This here. Do not use for this.” “Suspicion. A noun. Never to be used as a verb.” Our conversation became sprinkled with gleeful vulgarisms we had never used before. When I announced my presence by noisily tap-dancing on the Klums’ wooden porch and probably annoying all the neighbors on the block, Claudine said she was nowhere near ready for school.

  “I suspicioned you weren’t.”

  Claudine’s reply was something like, “This here shoe-lace broke.”

  We thought our dialogue hilarious. Mrs. Klum sighed as she looked up from Science and Health and said with a smile, “Oh, you silly little girls.”

  The best part of English that year was the study of the short story, but when the time came to actually write a story, my mind was a blank. The hardest part was having to hand in an outline of a story first. “Make it funny,” advised Mother as usual.

  I sighed, bit my hangnails, crumpled paper, and when the final day came, turned in an outline of a feeble tale of mistaken identity involving cats instead of people. The outline was returned marked F for Fair, a grade I was unused to receiving. Still, I could not think of anything better. In despair, I wrote the silly story. It was returned with an E-, which I did not think it deserved.

  My standards were higher than those of the teacher.

  To this day, I cannot outline fiction. I find that an outline limits the flights of imagination which are the joy of writing. I write and then rewrite, bringing order to the second draft.

  In my sophomore year, students with G averages were permitted to join clubs. Claudine, who had escaped Latin because her mother did not care which language she studied, joined the Spanish Club, the Dondelenguas. I chose the Masque and Dagger, a dramatic club that put on a silly play in which I was cast in the role of a debutante. I also joined the Migwan, a literary club whose name we were told was a Dakota Indian word meaning “written thought.” I had trouble producing any extracurricular written thought for the meetings, at which we were expected to criticize one another’s work. Criticism usually degenerated into an awkward pause until someone ventured, “I think it is very good.” I cannot recall a single thing I wrote for Migwan meetings, even though I was a member for three years and served as secretary and president.

  Clubs were not our only fun. Claudine and I went by chartered streetcar to high school football games in the Multnomah Stadium, where we yelled for Grant’s team as it slithered around in the rain and mud. We walked to the high school gym to cheer the basketball team. We continued to read, study, and listen to the radio, especially “One Man’s Family” on Sunday evenings. Claudine, when her parents were out, practiced Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” which she borrowed from the library, instead of “Marche Slav,” by Tchaikovsky.

  Mother’s objections to my spending so much time at Claudine’s house grew bitter. “All you girls do is get together and criticize your parents,” she complained unfairly. Claudine wasn’t critical of her parents. And I was too thoroughly schooled in keeping up a front for the benefit of neighbors to admit any unhappiness at home, even to my closest friend. We had begun to talk about boys—what a boy had said to us by our locker, which was the handsomest, who were the biggest twerps—even though we did not really expect to get to know them outside of school.

  One rainy night during Christmas vacation, Claudine and I went with her mother to help deliver Christmas decorations to the Masonic Lodge. Music from a Demolay dance floated down the staircase. While Mrs. Klum arranged her fir boughs downstairs, Claudine and I slipped upstairs into the hall to watch the college-age dancers, like little girls watching a party.

  As we sat whispering, a young man in a tuxedo appeared before me, bowed, and asked, “May I have this dance?”

  Me? A girl in a woolen school dress and brogues? Claudine poked me. Hypnotized, I rose as the music began and stepped into his arms, terrified. I had never been so close to a boy before. I did not know how to dance. My tongue seemed to fill all the space in my mouth not taken up by bands and wires. As we circled past Claudine, I dared not look at her. I longed for the music to stop, to let me out of this young man’s arms, to let me take my icy, sweating hands from his, and let me escape. A boy who smelled so nice did not deserve to have his shoes wrecked.

  The music did stop, finally. I gave my partner what was meant to be a smile and left him in the middle of the floor. I grabbed Claudine by the hand and fled the hall. She whispered, “What was it like?”

  “Terrible,” I said, “but he smelled awfully nice.” I was struck by a revelation. “He shaves.” Claudine and I went into fits of giggles.

  “Oh, you silly little girls,” remarked Mrs. Klum.

  When I returned home, still laughing, I described my evening to my parents. Mother laughed, too, and Dad chuckled. He rarely laughed, but he had a delightful chuckle.

  After that, Mother found the money to enroll me in Mr. Kofeldt’s ballroom dancing class at the Irvington Club. She took me overtown to buy me some black pumps with heels and, being a practical woman, made me a red dress sure to be noticed in a crowd. No daughter of hers was going to be a wallflower.

  I teetered around the living room in high heels, and on Friday evening I put on my new red dress. Mother and I took the bus to the Irvington Club, where she sat on a bench with another mother or two to watch the class.

  The boys, a glum bunch, were neatly dressed in dark suits. They all wore white cotton gloves to prevent their sweaty hands from soiling the girls’ dresses. The girls, most of them in dark dresses and praying for tall partners, stood on one side of the room while the boys, praying for short girls, advanced in a horde and made their selections.

  Mr. Kofeldt explained the waltz square, which was then demonstrated by his assistants, Mr. Muckler and Miss—(what girl can remember the name of a female dancing assistant, no matter how graceful?). The pianist played “Whispering.” Whenever I hear that old tune, I have an almost irresistible urge to rise and go through the waltz s
quare.

  If a couple stumbled through the steps or could not keep time to “Whispering,” Mr. Kofeldt was beside them, clicking his castanets and telling them not to watch their feet. I learned that the best way to spare the unhappy, dogged boys misery and Mr. Kofeldt’s castanets was to lead them from my position. For years afterward, dancing partners embarrassed me by asking, “Who’s leading, anyway?”

  Because 1932 was leap year, Grant High School was giving a leap year dance in the gym. Girls were expected to invite boys, something I had no thought of doing. Although I was being taught, more or less, to dance, the idea of actually going to a dance was so daunting it was not to be considered. School dances were for other people.

  Then one day the boy with the sensitive neck turned around to face me. “Why don’t you ask me to go to the dance?” he said.

  He must be joking. Why else would he say such a thing to me?

  He continued to look expectant. I very much wanted to ask him, but I could think of more reasons for not inviting him. How would I get him there? We had no car. I would stumble all over his toes and take over the leading. He wouldn’t have a good time, and I would still have to sit behind him while he was thinking of the terrible time he had had at the leap year dance.

  I did not know how to answer, so I simply smiled, shook my head, and pretended to be looking for something in my notebook. He turned around, leaving me bemused. Was he teasing? Was he trying to be funny? Could he possibly have meant what he said?

  As Friday nights at the Irvington Club passed, I began to resent the presence of mothers on the sidelines, smiling and whispering behind their hands. Why couldn’t I go alone? Because I could not go out alone at night and travel by bus. On the ride home, Mother enjoyed talking over the evening—which boy danced with which girl, who was disappointed, how girls had learned to run past short boys when partners were chosen by the grand-right-and-left, which girl needed a more becoming dress or something done about her hair.