A Girl from Yamhill

by Beverly Cleary

  One evening a young man older than the high school boys appeared in the class. He was blond, nice-looking, slender but muscular. Sometime during the evening I found myself plodding through a waltz with him. Neither of us spoke.

  Later, when Mother and I were waiting for the bus, the young man offered us a ride home in his Model A Ford coupe with a rumble seat. Mother accepted for us. I felt strange sitting beside a young man and uncomfortable trying to keep my knees away from the gearshift.

  Mother was delighted.

  First Dates

  The next Friday at Mr. Kofeldt’s ballroom dancing class, the young man I had met the previous week—whom I shall call Gerhart, for that was not his name—headed straight for me. After the obligatory “May I have this dance?” he clutched me with an arm that felt like iron as he maneuvered me, grimly and silently, through Mr. Kofeldt’s steps. Escaping to another partner, no matter how short, was welcome.

  When the class was over, Gerhart offered to take Mother and me home again. Mother accepted graciously.

  On the way home, Gerhart asked if he could come over Saturday evening to practice dancing. We confessed we did not have a radio, or even a phonograph. For a moment I was terrified that Mother might offer to play the piano for us. However, Gerhart said he had a radio he could bring. I do not recall which of us, Mother or I, accepted.

  The next morning, Mother insisted I had to offer Gerhart something to eat after we practiced dancing. She sent me to the store for a can of chocolate cookies, half a pint of whipping cream, and some maraschino cherries. I whipped the cream, flavored it with vanilla (thank goodness!), spread it on the cookies, stacked them so the cream would soften them, and topped each stack with a cherry.

  That evening, Gerhart arrived with his portable radio. The rug was rolled back, my father disappeared into the breakfast nook, and Gerhart led me woodenly through the waltz square and its variations. Mother wandered in and out, playing the part of chaperone and extracting bits of information from him.

  Gerhart was twenty-one. He had come from California, where he had completed two years of college. He had a secure civil service job working irregular shifts in a laboratory at exactly the same salary my father earned. Chemistry and physics, two subjects I intended to avoid, were his favorite studies. He lived in a room in a private home, where the daughter of the family had suggested he go to Kofeldt’s to learn to dance, and ate his meals in restaurants. Mother overlooked, and I was too naive to recognize, the fact that we had nothing in common.

  Mother, feeling I was safe with Gerhart, announced she was going to bed, leaving me to serve a stack of soggy cookies and a cup of hot chocolate waiting in a pan on the stove.

  When Gerhart and I sat down at the breakfast nook table, my stomach tightened into a fist. I could think of nothing to say; I could not eat a bite. Because I couldn’t eat, he wouldn’t. I struggled to think of words to share; Gerhart offered no help. Instead, he laughed at me, which hurt my feelings. Finally, to my relief, he said he guessed he’d better go, and departed, lugging his radio off to his Model A while I returned the soggy cookies to the cooler and, disheartened by the whole experience, went to bed.

  Mother, ignoring the touch of cruelty in Gerhart’s behavior, found the whole incident hilarious and laughed about it over the telephone with her friends.

  I was less amused, but I did brag to Claudine and Lorraine—an older boy, a car, a radio, a good job. They thought I was lucky. Neither of them had ever had a date.

  After that, Gerhart pounced each Friday evening at dancing class, brought his radio to our house so we could practice, and finally left it there so we could practice more often. He took me to movies and for a hamburger afterward—a luxury for me, even though I was so nervous I could only nibble at the hamburger.

  I continued to go out with Gerhart every weekend and relaxed enough to eat a hamburger. Mother protested. “You are seeing too much of Gerhart. You should go out with other boys.”

  “What other boys?” I asked. “Nobody else asks me.” Somehow I did not care, not because Gerhart meant so much to me, but because I felt I wasn’t ready for boys.

  “Well, they should,” said Mother. “I don’t know what’s wrong with you.” She went on to tell me how popular she had been at my age, as if my lack of popularity were a reflection on her.

  I did not refuse Gerhart’s invitations. Movies and evenings away from the tensions of home were too tempting. After about three months, Gerhart kissed me at a stoplight.

  Being kissed by Gerhart was disappointing. I had expected a kiss to feel more like the time in Yamhill when I stuck my finger in the electric socket, only nice. Still, being kissed was a novelty. I went along with Gerhart’s occasional kisses, hoping they would get better. I persuaded myself I was having a good time. Didn’t Mother tell her friends what fun I was having? Didn’t movies, and stories in The Ladies’ Home Journal, say girls met boys, kissed, and were happy? Of course I was happy, I insisted to myself, but I did wish Gerhart would not poke fun at activities I enjoyed. He thought English boring, my interest in the literary club silly.

  Gerhart also disliked Oregon. He ridiculed the custom of farm housewives drying their washing on porches. I was familiar with old farmhouses without basements, where the porch was the only place to dry clothes in rainy weather. I told him about a time in Yamhill when, waiting days for sun, Mother did a huge washing on the back porch in the electric Maytag washing machine with a wooden tub, her only laborsaving device. She heated water on the kitchen stove and carried it outside, a bucket at a time. When she finished, she hung sheets, towels, and work clothes in the sun on lines in the barnyard. After the last clothespin was in place, the lines broke, and her morning’s work fell to the mud. Gerhart thought the story funny. I remembered Mother’s tears of despair.

  Gerhart also laughed at Oregonians’ custom of ordering slab wood by the cord and having it Stacked on the strip of grass between the street and the sidewalk. A truck with a gasoline saw cut the wood into furnace lengths, which the man of the house, or boys eager to earn a little money, stacked in the basement beside the coal. Californians could heat their houses with gas, but no one I knew had a gas furnace in Portland. I deeply resented Gerhart’s lack of compassion for a life I understood.

  Summer came. Mother surprised me by buying me white shoes. I had expected to wear brown oxfords in summer. “White shoes look nice with light dresses,” she said, and I agreed.

  Claudine went out to Puddin’, and Gerhart came to our house whenever work permitted. We passed the time playing two-handed bridge, but he sulked when he lost. I began to let him win to avoid unpleasantness.

  Once, when one of us was shuffling cards, Mother asked, “Gerhart, what does your father do?”

  Gerhart’s face turned hard. He looked straight ahead and said, “He was a house painter who committed suicide.”

  Mother and I were shocked and sorry. Later she said, “Well, that explains a lot about him.” The matter was never mentioned again.

  Sometimes Gerhart took me swimming in one of the nearby lakes or rivers. If I returned home with the least touch of sunburn, Mother greeted me angrily with, “You have ruined your complexion.” I began to dread coming home from these outings.

  One evening, when Mother and I were washing and wiping the supper dishes, she said, “You know, you are the type that will fade quickly.”

  What on earth did she mean? This was not a remark of a woman who loved a daughter who had barely begun to bloom. I was too hurt to answer, but after mulling over the remark for several days, I said, “Mother, I don’t think it was very nice of you to tell me I would fade quickly. Why did you say a thing like that?”

  Mother shrugged. “Well, I said it, didn’t I?”

  “Well, you shouldn’t have!” I snapped.

  Mother did not tolerate contradiction. “You should show more respect for your parents,” she informed me.

  I answered, “Gerhart says one of the reasons he likes me is I am nice to my par
ents. He says I am not like some girls.”

  Mother looked surprised and for once had nothing more to say. I was still puzzled and hurt and have often wondered why, when she was so anxious to protect her own youthful appearance, she would direct such a remark to me. Perhaps she envied me my youth. I do not know.

  I began to see Gerhart more and more as a way of getting away from Mother. On warm summer evenings we drove to the airport on Swan Island in the Willamette River, which Charles Lindbergh had inspected and pronounced a poor location for an airport. It was a popular spot for waiting to see the ten o’clock mail plane arrive from California. We searched the stars for its lights and, when we found them, followed their descent to the runway and watched the small brave plane that had flown all the way from California taxi to the little terminal. Then Gerhart drove me home.

  One day, Mother said, smiling, “You know, Daddy doesn’t like Gerhart. I think he’s jealous.” That my father should be jealous of Gerhart seemed so ridiculous I paid no attention. Mother must be imagining things. However, when Dad bought a radio of our own so Gerhart could take his away, I wondered if he hoped Gerhart would have one less excuse for spending so much time at our house. Perhaps Dad wanted more privacy, I thought.

  One day, Gerhart suggested a picnic at the beach. Mother agreed I could go, provided she went along as a chaperone.

  “What for?” I asked impatiently. “We don’t need to be chaperoned.” Hand-holding, a few kisses, mild embraces—that was as far as I ever intended to go. That was the way it was in the movies, and I had no knowledge of what might come later.

  Mother ignored me. She set about making a huge bowl of potato salad and suit box full of sandwiches. “People get hungry at the beach,” she said.

  We set off for a day, with Mother and myself beside Gerhart, and in the rumble seat a wind-tousled, sunburned couple, friends of Gerhart. We often took his friends on outings; my friends were never included.

  When Gerhart parked his car among the salal bushes and we carried blankets and the picnic lunch down to the sand and were racing around on the beach, Mother called me back and gave me the only advice or information on sex she ever gave me. “Never play leapfrog with boys,” she said. “They might look up.”

  The Girls’ League Show

  When my junior year in high school began, I wanted to continue with ballroom dancing because we were about to learn the tango. I pictured myself slinking along like one of Rudolph Valentino’s movie partners, a most unrealistic dream because none of the boys in the class would be good slinkers. Gerhart said he had had enough. Mother said I did not need to tango.

  I lost the annual lipstick set-to, but I won the debate over my course of study in a year in which we were now given more choice. United States history and English were required, but Mother could not understand why I preferred journalism to solid geometry, though she conceded that it might be of use to a writer. Why I wanted to study French instead of plunging ahead into the pleasures of Cicero and Virgil in Latin was beyond her. “French!” she said. “What on earth is the use of studying French?”

  I did not know why I wanted to study French. Perhaps I recalled Mrs. Williams from Halsey Street with her interesting accent and tales of Paris, or perhaps I was thinking of Miss Crawford’s telling of Les Misérables. No one in our neighborhood expected to actually go to France, and courses were aimed at acquiring a reading, not a speaking, knowledge. I took French.

  I also enrolled in a class called “Clothing,” an act of self-defense. I had begun to make my own clothes because Mother’s sewing was so careless she did not bother to pull out basting threads. School was interesting, more interesting than Gerhart.

  Miss Anderson, our journalism teacher, chanted “Who, what, where, when, and why” and “Accuracy, accuracy, accuracy” in a class less structured than any class I had known. Even though I still had trouble with outlines, journalism taught me to set words on paper faster and with better organization than I had been able to do before. Writing “30” at the end of our copy made us all feel very professional.

  Junior English, in addition to The Century Handbook of Writing, began with mock meetings held in accordance with Roberts’ Rules of Order, followed by a sentence-by-sentence dissection of Edmund Burke’s Speech on Conciliation with America.

  Debates followed. I do not recall the exact title of my assignment, but it was something like, “Resolved: Chain stores are a menace to society.” Inspired by Grandpa Atlee’s dread of chain stores, I researched and delivered a stirring speech denouncing chain stores as evil and calling their employees “human automatons.” (I smile at this memory whenever a chain store employee notices my name on my check and tells me how much he or she enjoyed my books when growing up.) My partner and I lost the debate, but I was voted best speaker. Grandpa would have called his only granddaughter a humdinger.

  And then there was Gerhart, still Gerhart.

  I enjoyed high school football games with the rest of the mob, returning home late for supper and hoarse from cheering. I was pleased with my journalism beat—the school cafeteria and the Biology Department—and proud of my first published stories: an interview with the cafeteria manager and a story on the comparative chest expansions of the football team. Gerhart poked fun at both of these articles.

  Because he often worked nights, he had free time during the day. He began to pick me up at school at the beginning of the lunch hour, driving me home for what Mother called “a good hot lunch,” which was usually eggs à la goldenrod, and delivering me back to school in time for class. At first this seemed convenient. Then I understood that Gerhart’s real motive was not my hot lunch but showing boys at school that I was his property.

  I began to take my lunch to school once more and to make excuses to prevent Gerhart’s coming over in the evening: a paper to write, a French test the next day, poetry to memorize. He came, but he did not come into the house. Mother reported that he often sat in his car parked across the street, watching to see if I stayed home. Mother found his possessiveness both amusing and flattering.

  Mother, who once told me I was seeing too much of Gerhart, began to say, “Now, you be nice to Gerhart. He’s lonely, and he’s been good to you.”

  Had he been good to me? As Mother pointed out, we saw only movies he wanted to see, never those I wanted to see, not even Katharine Hepburn in Little Women. And what about his sulking at losing at two-handed bridge and his continual ridicule of activities I enjoyed? More and more, I did not want to be nice to Gerhart. I edged away from him, sitting as far away from him as I could whenever I went out in his car. Other boys my age began to appear more interesting.

  At school, I had casual, joking friendships with boys, but these were not the boys who asked me to go to school dances or to the movies. Three boys from school did take me out, but they were shy, serious, and awkward. The boys were disappointed in me, too. Away from school, I was shy, serious, and awkward. Inviting them into the house for something to eat did not occur to me, probably because Mother did not suggest it.

  A Reed College freshman I shall call Roger, who was introduced to me by a classmate, invited me to a dance held in the Reed College Commons. Roger turned out to be more interesting than high school boys, even though his dancing was worse than mine. He loped to some mysterious rhythm all his own, with great enthusiasm and sweat on his brow.

  When he brought me home, he parked his grandmother’s Franklin in our driveway and sat with his hands resting on the steering wheel. Finally I asked, “Aren’t you going to get out and open the door for me?”

  He grinned and said, “That bit of chivalry is outmoded. Women are capable of opening car doors for themselves.”

  Secretly I agreed, but, having taken a stand, I felt I could not back down. “I won’t get out till you open the door,” I informed him.

  “And I am not going to open it for you,” he said.

  I sat and he sat.

  Mother, I was sure, would be waiting to lecture me, “What will th
e neighbors think with you parked in the driveway with a boy until all hours?” I had to find a way out of this impasse, and fast. I finally rolled down the car window and climbed out without opening the door. Roger then got out of the car and walked me up the steps.

  For the next couple of years, Roger occasionally took me loping around the floor of the Reed College Commons or the dance floor at Jantzen Beach, an amusement park popular with the high school and college crowd. We never argued about his opening the door again; I opened it myself. Instead, we argued about kissing.

  One evening, when Roger brought me home, he asked, “May I kiss you?”

  “Of course not,” I said. Girls did not kiss boys quite so readily. Besides, I was self-conscious about my mouthful of wire.

  “You’re overcompensating,” Roger said. “You want to kiss me so much you are afraid to.”

  “That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard,” I told him in indignation.

  If he had kissed me without asking, I doubt that I would have minded. As it was, we never kissed. We argued. Roger made me realize there were men who were much more interesting to talk to than Gerhart.

  Unexpectedly, something happened to take my mind temporarily off boys. Miss Burns, the chairman of the English Department, called me into her office and asked me, as president of the Migwan Club, to take charge of writing the script for the Girls’ League Show, which was to raise money for a scholarship. All girls in school automatically belonged to the league. She suggested Jane Welday, a bright girl with a sense of humor, as another writer. The show was to involve as many school clubs as we could work in.

  Jane and I concocted a script called They Had to See Europe. We worked hard and fast, taking turns writing episodes that involved stereotypical characters: Joan, a debutante, seeing Europe with her father, D. Saunders Clarke, “president of the First National Bank of Scappoose”; Bob, a handsome young chemist in love with Joan; a mother with a spoiled little girl; two comic spinsters; a stowaway poet; and a pair of comic detectives, Oscar MacSnarf and Homer J. Butterbottom. This drama, which involved love and stolen jewels, took place on the deck of a ship represented by a railing with a life preserver in front of the curtain. At the end of each scene, the auditorium would be darkened, the ship’s railing hoisted out of sight by the stage crew, and the curtains opened to reveal the travelers in a different country.