A Girl from Yamhill

by Beverly Cleary

  “Folks,” announced the drummer, “don’t forget to feed Kitty. He’s mighty hungry tonight.”

  One of the Colvin brothers fumbled in the pocket of his overalls for a quarter to drop into the cat’s mouth. Children gasped. A whole quarter! The drums thumped, the saxophone bleated, and the worn hammers of the piano beat against the strings. “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.” A waltz. Young people were disappointed, their parents and grandparents brightened, and men muttered, “Well, I guess I might as well…” as they took the hands of partners. Children didn’t care about the music. They grabbed one another and pranced around the floor.

  When the piano player plunked out “Shave and a haircut, two bits” to mark the end of a number, the drummer shouted, “Kitty’s hungry!”

  An embarrassing pause followed as everyone hoped someone else would feed Kitty. Finally someone dug a nickel or a dime out of a pocket, Kitty was fed, and music continued: a fox-trot, a schottische, or a polka. Faces grew flushed, skin was cooled by the night air as mist rose from the river. Young people, who considered the dances old-fashioned, drifted over to the store for Cokes bought with nickels they had earned picking beans.

  Dancing ended early. Farmers who had to get up to milk cows needed their rest. City picnickers had the long drive—over twenty miles—into Portland.

  Mrs. Klum led the way back to the cabin with a flashlight, and Claudine and I climbed into bed on the porch, where we were weighed down by the heavy homemade quilts. Her head rested on a red felt canoe pillow with “Stella” in white letters; my head rested on a softer pillow embroidered with a branch of pepper berries and the words “I love you, California.” Overhead, through the fir trees, we could hear the drone of the ten o’clock mail plane from California. When a train whistled, Claudine named the musical notes of the whistle. I fell asleep thinking of those work-worn hands playing “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” for nickels and dimes on a broken-down piano.

  Weekdays at Puddin’ were lazy and peaceful. Mrs. Klum pottered about, transplanting sword ferns to the rotting centers of fir stumps around the cabin.

  Mr. Klum felt that his dog would appreciate an outdoor vacation, so Spud was left behind when he returned to Portland for the week. Claudine and I took Spud for walks around the campground along a wagon road, past a field of dense tepees of green beans and through a woodsy canyon up the hill to the old farmhouse to watch harvesters.

  After lunch I knitted while Claudine read aloud from Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter, and when the necessary wait of an hour had passed, we wiggled, complaining, into our woolen bathing suits damp from the day before and walked down to the river to swim and to wash. We sometimes had to swim after the floating soap as the current carried it downstream. Afterward Claudine and I lay on the raft, where the sun warmed us, pressing us against the weathered silver boards. Portland and Gerhart seemed a long way away.

  The next weekend, Mother sent word by Mr. Klum that I should return with him on Sunday evening. My Great-aunt Elizabeth was coming from California to visit. I was sorry, very sorry, to leave.

  Sunday evening, when Mr. Klum left me at the foot of our driveway, I felt serene, sun-tinged, and happy.

  Mother’s first words were “Beverly! You’ve ruined your complexion!”

  I flopped into the nearest chair. “Mother,” I said, pleading and without anger, “it does seem as if no matter what I do, you make me feel guilty.”

  “Why, that’s ridiculous,” she said.

  Somehow I found the courage to contradict. “No, it isn’t ridiculous. You do make me feel guilty,” I insisted, still without anger. I wanted so much to talk honestly with Mother, to tell her my feelings, to become her friend.

  Mother stiffened, her mouth a straight line. “Well, excuse me for living,” she said.

  For the first time, I understood that I was afraid of Mother for the guilt she made me bear, and that I could never have an honest conversation with her. The woman I wanted for a friend would always be right; I would always be wrong. I have never understood why, for Mother was genuinely kind to others and could be kind to me when I did exactly as she wished.

  Then Great-aunt Elizabeth, the mother of the two young teachers Mother had accompanied out West in her youth, came to visit from Southern California, where she lived in turn with her daughters. She was tiny, vivacious, and talkative, loved pretty clothes, and had about her an aura of lightheartedness. She seemed unaware of the Depression, and in her company Mother became the person I remembered from childhood.

  Great-aunt Elizabeth seemed to confirm what most of my high school class believed: that everything good in life existed in California. We had learned from the radio and from postcards that in California the sun shone all year round on trees, in groves instead of orchards, heavy with oranges. Highways were lined with wildflowers more vivid than Oregon’s wildflowers. Instead of farming and logging in the rain, Californians made movies in the sunshine. Life in California was one long, happy fiesta with everyone dancin’ with Anson at the Mark Hopkins, dancing at the Avalon Ballroom on Catalina Island, and dining in a restaurant shaped like a derby. We knew all this was fantasy, but still—somehow, someplace, life had to be better than Portland, Oregon, in the 1930s.

  My great-aunt, with her lively chatter and frivolous ways, brightened our lives for a few days. When we saw her off on a Princess ship for California, I was sorry to see her go.

  The Happiest Days

  Our senior year in high school, neighbors said to Claudine and me, “Don’t forget, these are the happiest days of your life.” Others hinted at the possibility of a June wedding for Beverly. Mother, who enjoyed keeping neighbors guessing, answered with an arch smile, “We’ll see.” On the surface, our lives must have appeared serene. Mother was careful about that.

  But things were not serene in our household. Dad disliked his job in “that hole,” as he called his office by the steel door of the bank vault. He was now in his mid-forties, too old to find another job during the Depression, worried about my education and about putting money away for old age. I felt as if he were serving a sentence, condemned to support Mother and me. I was bitter and felt Dad must be, too, because Gerhart, whose only responsibility was payments on his new V-8, earned the same salary.

  Mother was tense and apprehensive. I continued to overhear shreds of anxious conversation about my future.

  What future, I wondered, and why couldn’t my parents speak directly to me about it? I wanted to write; writing was expected of me, but what did I, an ordinary girl, have to write about? I could not depend on my pen and imagination for a living. I visualized nothing beyond, perhaps, business school and a dull office job—if I could find one, and I did not want to find one. An office meant one thing: typewriting.

  Claudine and I made sardonic jokes about being lovely girls who would someday make good wives, which meant washing on Monday, ironing on Tuesday, and all the rest of our mothers’ routines. I supposed that someday I would become someone’s good wife, but never, never Gerhart’s.

  About that time, Gerhart surprised us by announcing he had joined Jehovah’s Witnesses. Any possibility of war or disaster brought him smiling to our door. This might be the beginning of the Battle of Armageddon, when Witnesses would be saved and the rest of us would perish. For once Mother and I were united; we could not accept such a negative philosophy. Mother, who enjoyed a good argument, often challenged Gerhart on the subject of Witnesses while I tried to study in the breakfast nook.

  Some of my friends began to give parties in their homes, to which I was invited, and Gerhart, too, even though others were not separated into couples. He was contemptuous of these innocent parties, as he was of all my high school activities; but he always went, even though he disliked dancing and often had deep circles under his eyes from having worked a night shift.

  We danced to radio music, telephoning announcers with requests for records to be played: “My Blue Heaven,” “Willow, Weep for Me,” “Pennies from Heaven,” and my f
avorite, “You’re Going to Lose Your Gal.” A high point of the evening, in addition to supper prepared by a mother, was requesting “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze,” dedicated to someone at the party. If it was actually played, we sang along with the radio, feeling we were having a hilarious time. Boys who were at a loss for conversation said “Wanna buy a duck?”—a phrase picked up from Joe Penner, a radio comedian.

  Mother arranged parties for me and planned food, prepared with my assistance. Dad worked hard, too, rolling up the rugs on Saturday afternoon and polishing the Siberian oak floors, and on Sunday, after they had been danced on, repolishing them. My parties were always successful, but somehow I felt that Mother, in spite of the extra work, enjoyed them more than I and that they were really her parties.

  That winter, Prohibition ended. Not even Mother’s willpower had been able to prevent it. Our lives went on as usual. Roger asked me to go out; I accepted. We went dancing, or loping, at Jantzen Beach, where the crowd gathered around the bandstand when a musician in a yellow jacket set aside his saxophone to take the microphone and sing

  All night long the rain drops tinkle,

  Do you think a little drink’ll

  Do us any harm?

  That the song referred to alcohol did not occur to me because I had never seen anyone drink so much as a beer. I was, however, fascinated with rhyming “tinkle” and “drink’ll.”

  Whenever I went to a party, Mother insisted on talking it over the next morning. Feeling guilty because I had not enjoyed myself more, I did the best I could with my account, and sometimes we shared genuine laughter. She then passed it all on to her friends, with embellishments. “Oh my, yes, Beverly had a glorious time and didn’t get home until midnight. She had us worried there for a while.” One day when I came home from school and laid my books on the dining room table, I picked up a composition book that I thought was Mother’s household budget. Instead, it was a diary, not of Mother’s life, but of mine, recorded by Mother.

  “Mother!” I said, shocked.

  “You mind your own business!” she said, snatching the composition book from me.

  I could not answer. My life was my business, I thought—or it should be! I never saw the diary again or mentioned it to Mother. What was the use? Whatever I said would be wrong, but I wondered, since Mother said she wanted to write, why she didn’t write stories instead of her version of my life.

  After that I began to keep a diary of my own in an effort to convince myself that everything was as it should be. That diary is a record of little parties, of amusing incidents at school. Frequently I recorded that Gerhart bored me stiff.

  Then a neighborhood boy, whom I shall call Gene, a Reed College student, took me to several school dances and a school play. He was a nice-looking, intelligent boy, serious, and not particularly interesting to me. However, I liked him because he was not Gerhart and because he had gone to Grant, which gave us a foundation for conversation.

  For some reason, my going out with Gene upset my parents, who accused me of running after him. Mother said he asked me to go to the school play in return for an invitation to my party.

  As I reread my old diary, both on and between the lines, I am puzzled about why they felt this way.

  When Claudine, Lorraine, and Olive, members of Job’s Daughters, suggested I invite a boy to a dance at the Masonic Hall, I asked Gene, who had taken me to a high school dance. He accepted, and I included him in a party at my house. I was too shy with boys to do much pursuing, and in those days telephoning a boy was considered improper. He initiated the friendship, not I, but I did hope he would telephone. My diary records my worries that he might not actually appear to take me to the class play because he had asked me so far ahead; but he did appear, and we enjoyed a pleasant evening. He also invited me to a couple of Reed College dances. He gave me my first corsage and a box of candy.

  Real anger, honest anger, burst through on one page of that diary, probably the only completely honest page written that year. I wrote, in the heat of indignation and with a disregard for the rules of punctuation, “Oh, Hades! I don’t want to go to Grant’s party with Gerhart and my parents know it. Of course they had to start out on a dissertation on my liking Gene and Mother had to talk about how badly she felt about Gerhart and all that and said that after my next party she was going to tell him not to come back any more. Well, darn it! I don’t care. I don’t see why she can’t see that I’m positively so sick of him I could scream when I even see him. I think Dad backs me up, too. She says I’m selfish and tactless, but how can she expect me to know how to act whenever anyone calls up she listens to every word and prompts me at regular intervals and when I go anyplace she gives me a lecture on what to do and say and think and eat. When I give a party she has me give a party and it’s the same way with everything.”

  Why? Wanting to go out with a different boy seems normal, not selfish. And why did Mother feel that telling Gerhart not to come back was her right, not mine? An only daughter of a possessive mother develops a kind of selfishness in a struggle to preserve something of herself, something that does not belong to her mother, but this is a mother-daughter problem that has little to do with boys. Tactless? Yes, I was tactless, even unkind, to Gerhart because I was beyond caring what he thought. I wanted him to give up and go away forever. To me, Gene was only a relief from Gerhart.

  And then one day as I was walking home from school, Gene’s mother, smiling and friendly, called me across the street and said, “Saturday is Gene’s birthday,” and added in the voice of one bestowing an honor, “I am giving a surprise party for him, and you are invited.” Then her smile changed as she lowered her voice, confiding an exciting secret: “Gene has a girl!” Even though I had never thought of myself as Gene’s girl, I was stunned and politely refused the invitation. I was going to be busy Saturday evening, I said.

  Mother was furious, when I told her, at this pointed rejection of her daughter. Dad said little, but I knew he was angry, too. I felt even more depressed, for at the time it seemed to me that Gene’s mother must feel that I was a girl who, unlike her son, had no future. In later years I wondered if perhaps she thought my relationship with a young man six years older than I had been more intimate than it actually was and that I might be a bad influence on her son. Mother, who had always said, “A girl’s most valuable possession is her good name,” should have understood.

  After that episode, I no longer wanted to go to parties but went, trying to avoid Gerhart by going with one of the girls whose father was driving her. Once when Gerhart had to arrive late because of his working hours, Mother informed me I must let him bring me home. If I did not, she would call off the party she was “having” me give. The guests had been invited, so I complied.

  That Sunday after my own party, when Gerhart telephoned, I said, “Please don’t come back. I don’t want to see you again.” I felt heavy and exhausted as I spoke.

  Gerhart, calling from the private home where he rented a room, answered in a tight voice, “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “That is quite all right,” he said. I knew he was having trouble sounding casual, as if nothing were wrong, for the benefit of the family he lived with.

  At first I experienced the debilitating fatigue that follows the end of an emotional ordeal. I wanted to sleep or sit staring out the window. This was followed by light-hearted relief. My hurt by Gene’s mother did not cut very deep; her son was not that important to me. I did not care if I never went to another high school party. I did not care if I could not live up to Mother’s expectations of popularity. I did not care what the neighbors thought when they no longer saw cars parked in our driveway.

  At first Mother said sadly, “Well, if that’s the way you really feel about him…” Of course it was. I had been trying to tell her for months. She passed on the news to her friends.

  I had such trouble concentrating on my studies that in addition to keeping a diary, I began to write to pen pals I had ac
quired through Camp Fire Girls, an organization I had dropped. I wrote to the girl in Minnesota and to the English girl, who passed my name on to a boy in Accra on the Gold Coast (now Ghana) of Africa. Through my French class, I began to write in laborious French, with the copious use of n’est-ce pas, to a girl in Paris.

  These pen pals made Mother nervous. “Never write in a letter anything you aren’t willing to see on the front page of a newspaper,” she advised. She also worried, “What if these people come to Portland and expect us to put them up?” In Oregon, fruits, vegetables, and out-of-town people were “put up.”

  I wrote on and on. The girl in Minnesota, with her tales of parties, tap-dancing, and canoeing, was probably trying to create the same happy-American-girl stereotype I was striving for in silly letters I was writing her.

  When the boy in Africa sent me half the skin of a small animal with long, glossy black hair, which Dad thought must be a monkey skin, Mother was horrified. “It might attract moths,” she said.

  I refused to throw the skin away, wrapped it in tissue paper, and hid it in a drawer. In writing to my pen pals, I was trying to reach out to a wider world beyond northeast Portland, Oregon, where, in those Depression days, travel was a trip to the coast or, for the prosperous, a trip to California. That furred skin somehow was proof that, as geography books said, the world was large and full of many different people.

  Then Mother began to say she missed Gerhart. She wished he would come over to see her. He did come, I suspect because she invited him. Grimly I cloistered myself in the breakfast nook with diary, notepaper, and a pile of books and refused to come out. Gerhart invented excuses for coming over—he needed to use my typewriter; he wanted to bring Mother a magazine. I refused to see him.