A Girl from Yamhill

by Beverly Cleary

  When the script was complete, Mrs. Graham, the biology teacher in charge of the production, said to me, “Beverly, you are just as pretty as the girls who get all the attention around this school. Miss Burns and I want you to play the leading lady.”

  I thought of myself as a plain girl with an unruly permanent wave, no lipstick, and a mouthful of glittering bands and wires, but now—well yes, thank you, Mrs. Graham, I would be delighted to play the leading lady.

  As I walked home with Claudine, I was elated. No one had ever called me pretty before. I suddenly felt pretty. Pretty me! Pretty me!

  This was one day I did not stop at Claudine’s house. I hurried home to tell Mother; I telephoned friends. Mother, as pleased as I, told our next-door neighbor. “Good for you,” everyone said. “It’s time someone other than the same old clique received some attention.”

  Just before supper, the telephone rang. I answered. The call was from a girl prominent in Girls’ League. Maybe some of the girls were becoming less snobbish, I thought. Then she said, “Some of us have been talking it over and have decided you should drop out of the show.”

  I had trouble believing what I was hearing. “How come?” I finally asked, my pleasure turning to bewilderment and then to anger.

  “Because you don’t have the clothes to play the part,” she informed me.

  Bolstered by one of Mother’s maxims from my childhood, “Show your spunk,” I did not agree to withdraw.

  This insulting call infuriated Mother. She began to relate the incident by telephone to her friends, always concluding with, “I don’t know whether to have her go through with it or not.”

  Finally I told Mother I had every intention of going through with the show. But how? Fortunately, others rallied in my behalf. Our next-door neighbor offered a Spanish shawl, fringed and embroidered in silk, for an evening wrap to wear over my own bias-cut white satin formal, my one treasured luxury. Virginia, my most prosperous friend, said, “Bev, you can borrow any of my things.” Her clothes were made by a dressmaker.

  I overheard Mother whisper a surprising statement to Dad: “If she has it in her to go ahead and be somebody, we should back her up.” She never made such statements to me.

  I was doubtful about borrowing clothes, for Mother had taught me never to borrow anything more than a cup of sugar; but for once, Mother relaxed her anti-borrowing rule. “Virginia is such a good-hearted girl,” she said, and I agreed. I selected several dresses, matching, but not quite fitting, shoes, and a coat. Rehearsals, after-school hours of excitement and fun, began. A rumor was started that the boy who was to play the young chemist madly in love with Joan would really kiss me as the curtain descended at the end of the show. We both backed away from this during rehearsals.

  Mother tried to persuade Gerhart to attend the show, but he refused, I was glad.

  The night of the performance, there was a great flurry of being made up (lipstick at last!) by the drama teacher and changing into costumes, everyone busy, important, in a hurry. The house-lights were dimmed by the chief of the stage crew, and on the arm of a portly boy billed as D. S. Clarke, my father and president of the Scappoose Bank, I stepped out before the footlights in front of a full house.

  The pair of detectives appeared and accused my father of smuggling jewels. Not having expected to play a part in the production, I was stuck with lines such as, “But, Father—”

  Bob, the chemist, appeared and cried, “Joan!”

  I cried back, “Bob! You shouldn’t be here! The only reason Father is taking me to Europe is to get me away from you!”

  This drama continued between acts in Germany, France, England, and Italy, where D. S. Clarke and I squatted and scooted across the stage behind a one-dimensional gondola while “Funiculi, Funicula” was played by Grant’s one accordion player.

  The plot hung on D. S. Clarke’s seasickness and some curative pills invented by Bob, which he produced when the president of the First National Bank of Scappoose moaned, “Go away, everybody, and let me die!” After one of Bob’s pills, the bank president made an instant recovery and asked the price of the prescription from Bob.

  Bob: “Nothing, if you will let me marry Joan.”

  D. S. Clarke: “Marry her! Young man, you may take her with my blessing.”

  My last line was “Father!” as I fell into the arms of Bob, who kissed me rather hastily as the curtain was lowered—but that kiss was long enough to let me know that there were better kisses in the world than Gerhart’s.

  The curtain rose again. Applause. Bows. The eyeglasses of my parents twinkled from the center of the third row. Afterward friends and several boys I barely knew gathered to congratulate me.

  The next week I received a formal note from the league thanking me for my contribution.

  Pooh to you, I thought.

  Employment

  Toward the end of my junior year, on a trip to the orthodontist, I detoured into Meier & Frank’s personnel office for an application for a summer job as a cashier or elevator operator. Proud of my attempt at helping out and eager for a bit of independence, I told my parents what I had done.

  “You are not filling out any application for Meier & Frank,” said Dad.

  “But I want to help,” I protested, near tears.

  “No daughter of ours is going to be seen working in Meier & Frank,” said Mother.

  Everyone was short of money. Mrs. Miles planned to take her girls out to harvest strawberries and raspberries when school was out and invited Claudine and me to go along. Even though I knew the work would be back-breaking, I was eager to go, to earn money, to be with my friends.

  “Certainly not,” said Mother.

  “Mrs. Klum is letting Claudine go,” I persisted.

  “I don’t care what Mrs. Klum is letting Claudine do,” said Mother. “You’re not going.” Then she added, “I don’t see how Mrs. Miles manages with five girls.”

  Just before school was out, Mother telephoned the dean of girls at Grant to ask if someone in the neighborhood wanted a baby-sitter. I was humiliated. If she wanted me to baby-sit for strangers, why couldn’t I ask the dean myself? I received a call from a woman wanting me to stay with her two-year-old son for an afternoon. I did not even know there was a two-year-old in the neighborhood. During the Depression, babies were luxuries few people in our neighborhood could afford. The baby next door, with whom I sat when he was asleep, was the only one I knew. Apprehensively, I went to the woman’s house. She pointed to the kitchen stacked with dirty dishes I was to wash, peas to shell, the vacuum cleaner in the middle of the living room, dusting to be done. About her little boy her parting words were “I hope you can do something with him. I can’t.”

  I spent a terrible afternoon. The child was more than I could handle and still cope with housework. As soon as I put my hands in dishwater, he was out the back door and down the street. I ran after him and carried him, kicking and screaming, home. He refused to take his nap. He threw things. He hit me. Somehow I managed to get through the stack of dishes while trying to keep the child from harm. Late in the afternoon I sat down on the kitchen floor with him and entertained him by getting him to shell peas along with me while I thought longingly of an elevator at Meier & Frank and a real paycheck, even a small one. At six o’clock the mother came home, frowned at the vacuum cleaner still in the middle of the living room, handed me fifty cents, and told me to vacuum the living room before I left.

  I felt incompetent and exploited, and I flatly refused ever again to baby-sit for strangers. This angered Mother. Helping out would not hurt me, she said. I wanted to help, but not by being paid a pittance trying to do two jobs at once in someone’s dirty kitchen.

  My junior year ended. Franklin Roosevelt was running for President. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if he were elected and could turn this country around?” Mother said, not really believing he could.

  Mother’s old friends from her school-teaching days wrote that they were coming to Portland. She replied, “What a
disappointment! We have to be out of town just when you are going to be here.” We did not answer the telephone while they were in town. “Friends,” Mother said, “cost money.”

  My father spent his vacation painting the outside of the house. I heard worried whispers between my parents. How were they ever going to set anything aside for their old age? What were they going to do with Beverly? I wondered, too. I had no idea what I was going to do with myself.

  Once Gerhart, in spite of Mother’s disapproval, took me to see a marathon dance contest. Those pathetic, exhausted couples dragging one another around the dance floor under the supervision of a smarmy master of ceremonies in hopes of winning a few dollars—and what about the losers? They were desperate, too. This was the Depression at its most degrading. I demanded to be taken home, away from those hurting, shuffling feet.

  When Gerhart said he wanted to buy one of the new Ford V-8s, Mother said, “Now, Gerhart, don’t you do it. You save your money. You’ll need it someday.” As he drove up the driveway in a new V-8, I had an irrational feeling of surprise that he had defied Mother, and a taste of bitterness because he could afford a new car when Dad had been forced to sell ours.

  Then Claudine and her mother left for Puddin’, and Gerhart drove off to California to spend his two weeks’ vacation visiting his family. I was glad to see him go, so very glad I went limp with relief and faced at last how much I had come to dislike him.

  When the Fourth of July came, Mother said, “You should have an invitation to a picnic. When I was your age, boys always invited me to Fourth of July picnics, and we always had a glorious time.”

  Even though I felt guilty, a social failure and disappointment to my mother, I did not want to go to a Fourth of July picnic. I wanted a real job, or I wanted to be left alone to lie on my bed in my room and read Willa Cather.

  My reading, secluded in my room with the door shut, annoyed Mother. She constantly talked to me through the door and accused me of being snooty. I was not snooty. I was confused and unhappy, and wanted time to think without Mother telling me what to think.

  One afternoon, when Gerhart had been gone about a week, I was lying on my bed watching butterflies sip from purple panicles of sun-warmed blossoms on the bush outside my window, and wondering what was to become of me, when Mother called from the dining room, “Beverly, come here a minute.”

  As I stepped from the hall door into the living room, a hand reached out and stroked my hair. It was Gerhart, who had flattened himself against the wall so I would not see him until I was in the room. I was startled and angry, cheated out of another week without him.

  “Come on. Let’s go for a ride,” he said, or ordered, for Mother was sure to say, “Go on, Beverly. You’ve been cooped up all day.”

  We drove around awhile, ending in the usual place, the Swan Island airport, where Gerhart turned to me and said, “Will you marry me?”

  Marry him? Marriage to anyone, especially Gerhart, was of no interest to me when my life had not really begun. Embarrassed and bewildered, I made my refusal as tactful as I could manage. A proposal of marriage was, after all, supposed to be the greatest compliment a man could pay. Gerhart’s jaw clenched. He shoved his V-8 into gear and, without a word, drove me home and left. Mother gave me a sharp look, but I said nothing.

  Gerhart did not stay away. I resented his touching me and shrugged away from him. Once, when his grasp was insistent, I startled him by ordering, “Unhand me, greybeard loon!” He obeyed, but must have been mystified by the words from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” He had not been required to memorize hundreds of lines of poetry.

  One evening, when my father and I were alone in the living room, Dad said quietly, “You know, you don’t have to go out with Gerhart if you don’t want to.” I don’t remember my answer, but I do remember how his gentle words soothed my troubled heart. I knew I had an ally in what had become an intolerable situation, one that was abetted by Mother. Why, when she was so quick to point out Gerhart’s flaws to me? I can only guess that my life made her life more interesting, she was trying to relive her youth through me, and she enjoyed her duties as self-appointed chaperone on picnics and trips to the beach.

  It was Claudine who unknowingly rescued me. She wrote from Puddin’ inviting me to come out for a while.

  I was packed and was waiting when Mr. Klum picked me up in his gray Model T sedan, to which he was fiercely loyal because “it gets me where I want to go.” With Spud, a dog he had rescued from the pound for company when he worked nights, we drove out of Portland through Oregon City, turned off the highway at a water tank, wound past meadows of grazing cows, drove through a covered bridge, and on until we came to the Colvins’ Pudding River Camp Ground and Picnic Resort and the Klums’ cabin, which Mr. Klum called “the shack” in the same affectionate way he called Spud his “pooch.”

  Puddin’

  The Colvin family’s campground was located on the lower part of a farm that had been in the Colvin family for several generations. Cows grazed beside the Pudding River, and in the center of the meadow was a roofed dance floor open at the sides and lined with built-in benches. Three families had built simple one-room cabins in a grove of Douglas fir trees, while others pitched tents, some for pleasure, others for shelter, while they earned money picking beans that grew on a plot of land at the bottom of the hill. At the top of the hill were fields of grain and the original farmhouse, probably as old as the house we had once owned in Yamhill.

  Claudine and I carried water in a five-gallon can from the little store near the dance floor. The water sloshed and splashed, catching the sunlight and tossing it back like the reflection from a crazy mirror. We split kindling for the wood stove, or more often, when we saw a boy approach, Claudine picked up the hatchet and chopped inefficiently. The boy always stopped to help. We walked to public rest rooms near the dressing rooms, in a building made entirely of old doors.

  We ate our meals out under the firs on a table that was Mr. Klum’s pride, a table made of a cross section of a fir tree set on a stump. This tree had been between four and five hundred years old when it was felled. Claudine and I never finished counting the rings, but we did mark a few important years—the year we were born, the years of the World War.

  While we ate, Spud chased chipmunks. Once Claudine remarked, “Spud is a chippy chaser.” Mr. Klum laughed.

  “Why, Claudine,” said her mother, “don’t ever let me hear you use that word again.”

  “What word?” asked Claudine, surprised.

  “That word you just said,” said Mrs. Klum. “Just don’t say it again.”

  Claudine and I, baffled and amused, called chipmunks chippies whenever her mother was out of earshot. We learned the meaning later when I asked Mother, who answered primly, “a chippy is a woman who sells her body.” How does she do that? I wondered but did not ask. Something about Mother’s manner prevented me.

  Early Sunday morning, picnickers, a good cash crop for the Colvins, began to arrive, paying twenty-five cents a car, eager to establish with boxes and baskets territorial rights to the best tables and outdoor stoves. Puddin’ was a place of picnics: family picnics, church picnics, club picnics, lodge picnics. Children yelled and raced, babies cried, dogs barked and sometimes fought, women talked as they laid tables and set out food. From the river came the thwump of the diving board, shouts and splashes. The clang of metal against metal rang in our ears as men pitched horseshoes. Children played chopsticks on the out-of-tune piano on the dance floor, bats thwacked against softballs, picnickers cheered. Woodsmoke wafted through the trees. “Smoke follows beauty” was said to any girl who fanned it away from her face.

  The farm food! Fried chicken, baked ham, potato salad, meat loaf and scalloped potatoes, green beans simmered with bacon, freshly picked corn, homemade chowchow and piccalilli, fruit salad with whipped cream dressing, coleslaw made with real sour cream, cucumbers floating in vinegar, sliced tomatoes that had ripened on the vine, pies, cakes and cookies, freezers o
f homemade ice cream made with thick farm cream, watermelons that sounded hollow when thumped and were carried to the river to cool.

  An hour, a very long hour after eating—swimming, splashing, pushing one another off the float, lying in the sun on wood bleached by weather while children raced and sometimes shouted, “Look! I’m leaving footprints in the sands of time!” Then a meal of leftovers before gathering at the dance floor, where the crowd sat on the benches along the sides. Older boys, if they could spare a nickel, hung around under the trees drinking Orange Crush or Green River out of the bottles. One of the Colvins grated paraffin on the floor to smooth it for dancing. Little boys ran and skidded.

  “Come on, Claudine, play something,” someone called out.

  Claudine obligingly went to the piano and played whatever popular tune came into her head: “Goofus,” “Bye Bye Blackbird,” “Me and My Shadow.” A few young people got up to dance. Children tried to dance, giggled, tripped, and ran off. Extra girls sat on the sidelines trying not to look wistful, gave up, and danced with one another. We all hoped to dance with Bobby Colvin, tan and muscular from farm work and filled with exuberance lacking in city boys during the Depression.

  Finally a weary old sedan pulled up beside the dance floor. “Now we can begin!” someone shouted as a woman and two men climbed out. Claudine tactfully left the piano.

  One man carried a saxophone; the other lugged a set of drums up the steps and set it beside the piano. The woman carried a box, which she set in front of the drums. On the front of the box was a crudely painted face of a cat with a hole for its open mouth. The woman smoothed her freshly washed percale dress beneath her and, with knobby work-reddened hands, struck a chord to capture attention.