My Own Two Feet
Authors: Beverly Cleary
My Own Two Feet
A Memoir
The three of us, Mother, Dad, and I, stood on the sidewalk outside the Greyhound bus station in Portland, Oregon, searching for words we could not find or holding back words we could not speak. The sun, bronze from the smoke of September forest fires, cast an illusory light. Nothing seemed real, but it was. I was leaving, actually leaving, for California, the Golden State, land of poppies, big red geraniums, trees heavy with oranges, palm trees beneath cloudless skies, and best of all, no Depression. I had seen it all on postcards and in the movies, and so had the rest of my class at Grant High School. California was the goal of many. John Steinbeck had not yet, in 1934, revised our thinking.
And now I was one of the lucky ones going to this glorious place where people made movies all day and danced the night away. I was escaping the clatter of typewriters in business school and going instead to college. As I stood there in the smoky light in my neat navy blue dress, which Mother had measured a fashionable twelve inches from the floor when I made it, and with a five-dollar bill given to me by my father for emergencies rolled in my stocking, I tried to hide my elation from my parents.
Dad, I know, was sad to see his only child leave home, but the decision had been his. He had thoughtfully smoked his pipe for several evenings, mulling over the unexpected letter from Mother's cousin Verna Clapp inviting me to spend the winter with her family in Ontario in Southern California. I could attend tuition-free Chaffey Junior College, where she was the librarian.
Mother had dismissed the letter, saying, “Isn't that just like Verna, so impractical.” The Depression had made Oregonians relentlessly practical. Dad, however, did not dismiss the letter. Finally, after he rapped his pipe against his ashtray, he said, “Beverly is going.” Dad, a quiet man, had watched tension build between Mother and me as I resisted her struggles to mold me into her
ideal of a perfect daughter. He had also observed my increasing unhappiness over an obsessive young man I shall call Gerhart, six years older than I, whom I had come to dislike but who was unshakable because Mother encouraged him. “Now, you be nice to Gerhart,” Mother often said. “He's a good boy, and he's lonely.” Mother longed to have me popular with boys. Although I liked boys and was friendly with them at school, I was not concerned with popularity. As the months wore on, I wasn't at all nice to Gerhart. I was horrid.
At first Mother thought Dad's pronouncement was preposterousâa young girl traveling all that distance alone, she couldn't think of such a thing. Even though I was eighteen, Mother always referred to me as a young girl. Eventually she relented. She was anxious for me somehow to go to college so I would have a profession to fall back on. “We can't leave you a lot of money,” she often said, “but we want to leave you prepared to take care of yourself and any children you might have. Widows so often have to run boardinghouses.”
Now, beside the Greyhound bus, Mother fretted. Fearful dangers lurked in California: earthquakes, infantile paralysis, evil strangers. Heaven only knew what might happen to a young, inexpe
rienced girl. “If she doesn't have any sense now, she never will have,” my father said.
“Maybe we should have packed your galoshes,” fussed Mother. “It must rain down there sometime.”
Because Dad was present, I did not say, “Oh,
Mother
.” Instead I said, “I might not need them,” and then, to soothe her, “and you can always mail them if I do.” I had no intention of wearing galoshes in California, not ever, no matter how much it rained, if it ever did rain. Postcards did not show rain in California, and the only rain in movies seemed to be raging storms at sea with sails ripping, masts broken, and sailors washed overboard.
What I really wanted at that moment was to tell my father how grateful I was to him for insisting I should leave, but I could not, not in front of Mother, who worked so hard, who made such sacrifices for me. The Greyhound driver, jaunty in his uniform, bounded out of the station and onto the bus. “Well, I guess I'd better get on,” I said. Beneath my hidden elation I was nervous about such a long journey even though Mother had written to former neighbors and arranged for them to meet me and put me up overnight in San Francisco and in Los Angeles.
Dad kissed me. Mother said, “Be a good girl and don't forget to write.”
“I won't,” I promised. None of us noticed that Mother's requests required two different answers, but of course I always had been, mostly, a good girl. A lovely girl, people said, pleasing Mother and annoying me, for I did not feel lovely, not one bit. I felt restless, angry, rebellious, disloyal, and guilty.
In the bus, I looked down at my parents, who suddenly seemed older. I felt as if I had aged them. We exchanged waves and weak smiles, the driver started the motor and shifted gears, and the bus lumbered out of the station, heading south and away from, I hoped, the Depression and all the grief it had brought to my family and to Oregon. I was limp from the emotion of departure, but I was free!
As the bus rolled along the two-lane highway, I pressed my face against the window and tried to memorize all the scenes that meant so much to me: the falls at Oregon City, where my great-grandfather had built the first mill in Oregon; the little white church squeezed between two poplars that had grown so large they seemed about to lift the building from its foundations, the church where my best friend, Claudine, planned to be married someday; the water tower at Canby that marked the turnoff for Claudine's family cabin on the Pudding River where I had spent many
relaxed summer days. On, on we rode, with farms and woods fading in dusk and smoke.
The bus stopped at Salem, which brought back a memory that made me smile. My parents had once taken me to Salem because Mother felt visiting the state capital was every citizen's duty and because she wanted me to see the State Home for Girls so I would know what happened to girls who “went bad.” Although I was a conscientious girl, a good student more interested in the high school paper, the literary club, and sewing than in boys, Mother worried about my “going bad,” as if I were an apple.
The state home had seemed to me a beautiful place where the girls' rooms, looking out on lawns and old trees, were neat, practical, and attractive, quite different from my own room, where I slept in my great-grandfather's creaky four-poster bed, which Mother had festooned with a ruffled pink voile bedspread to make it look feminine. She had also draped an old dresser with more pink voile. My wallpaper was a pretty melding of pastel flowers, but the windows looked out on the neighbors' tan Stone-tone stucco house. Mother's Salem lesson in morality had been lost on me. A room in the state home had seemed so pleasant and so convenient it was almost worth going bad for, not
that I ever expected to have a chance. I was such a lovely girl.
As the bus rolled out of the capital into darkness, elation faded to sadness and then to grief. Mother, Dad, and the Depression. Joy seemed to have drained out of Mother, who would have been happy teaching but whose credential had not been valid for years, and in those days, work went only to men, single women, or married women whose husbands were disabled. Dad had grown quiet after he had given in and sold the farm that had been in the family for three generations. His abundant harvests had not brought fair prices in the 1920s, and farm life was too strenuous for my small, intense mother. Dad was never comfortable with city life and was lucky, in those grim days, to have a job at all, a job managing the safe-deposit vault in the basement of a bank, a job he disliked. Now I was the focus of my parents' hopes; I must be educated no matter what sacrifices had to be made. I longed to have my parents happy, to share, not sacrifice. The burden of guilt was heavy.
Curled up on two seats, I slept lightly, aware that the bus was laboring over the Siskiyou Mountains. As the sun rose, we pulled into an Agricultural Station shed in a place my bus timetable said was Hornbrook. I was actually in Cali
fornia! The driver ordered sleepy, muttering passengers off the bus with their hand luggage, which we were required to open for inspectors looking for wicked Oregon insects that might destroy California's rich crops. Passengers grumbled. Couldn't inspectors see that insects could fly across the border? I helped eat some of the fruit passengers would not allow to be confiscated, including oranges imported from California that were refused re-admittance.
Back on the bus. A greasy breakfast in Weed, a lumber town fragrant with the resinous smell of sawdust. Mount Shasta, a dumpy mountain when compared with beautiful Mount Hood and the perfect cone of Mount St. Helens, Portland's backdrops. The bus rolled on down the mountains to flat, khaki-colored land where something must have grown because every few miles we passed corrugated metal warehouses with
DEPEW
painted on the roofs. Dirt-colored hills in the distance did not help. The landscape was all so barren and ugly, so different from my postcard dreams, and the worst part was there was
no water in the rivers
. Never in my life had I seen a dry riverbed. At rest stops I felt as if I were wading through the shimmering heat. After a noontime tuna-fish sandwich and glass of milk, I closed my eyes to shut out the barren land of
DEPEW
. This was not
the California I expected. I felt too dejected to attempt conversation with seatmates.
In late afternoon a hint of cool air drifted through open windows. Passengers sat up, tried to smooth clothes and pat hair into place. Where there was a breeze there was hope. We crossed the Sacramento River and were revived by the sight of water, passed through the stench of oil refineries, saw San Francisco Bay. Farther, on the left, brown hills were punctuated by a white tower. “What is that?” I asked the woman who had taken the seat next to me.
“That's the Campanile on the University of California campus,” she said.
Campanile
. What a beautiful word. “And over there,” she said, pointing to an island in the bay, “is Alcatraz.”
Alcatraz! I was actually seeing the notorious prison. Al Capone, gangsters, machine guns, bodies lying in the streets, just like the movies. Wait till I told my friends in Portland I had actually seen Alcatraz. To the left of Alcatraz, San Francisco was silhouetted against the setting sun. I perked up. The land of
DEPEW
was behind; excitement lay ahead.
The ferry ride across the bay made me feel like a world traveler. Overnight case in hand, I walked off the ferry into the grim, gray ferry building, whereâwhat a reliefâI was met by for
mer Portland neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Reeves and their daughter, Evelyn, two years older than I, who, when we were in grammar school, had rippled through “Rustle of Spring” on the piano while I plunked miserably through “The Happy Farmer.” Even though the Reeveses had not seen me for several years, and nearly twenty-four hours on a bus had left me rumpled and unwashed, they welcomed me so warmly and seemed so dear and so familiar that I forgave Evelyn her efficient rippling and rustling on the piano.
San Francisco! Mother had told me of seeing rubble from the 1906 earthquake when she and her two cousins Verna and Lora had come out west to teach school and to seek adventure, but neither her description nor postcards had prepared me for such a city. Buildings taller than any in Portland, stucco houses shoulder to shoulder, up and down hills, sitting on top of their own garages with aprons of lawn so tiny they could be cut with scissors.
The Reeveses drove to their apartment, which had rooms as large as those in a house. In Portland, Mother discouraged me from associating with friends who lived in apartments because, according to Mother, apartment dwellers were not “substantial.” Substantial people, by Mother's
definition, lived in houses, mowed lawns, pruned roses.
And here in San Francisco, the Reeveses, substantial as all get-out, lived respectably in an apartment furnished with the familiar fringed lamp shades and overstuffed mohair furniture seen in so many Portland houses. Mrs. Reeves served lamb chops for dinner. I had never tasted lamb because Dad, as a boy on the farm, had eaten so much mutton he vowed never to eat any part of a sheep again. The chops were delicious. Dessert,
fresh
figs with cream, soft sweet circles, cream-colored, with pink spoke-like centers, delectable as well as beautiful. In Portland figs were tan, dried, stewed, and “good for what ails you.”
During dinner, when Mr. Reeves told me the city hall was trimmed with real gold, I believed him. Conversation bloomed with colorful words: Marina, Presidio, Hetch Hetchy, Embarcadero, commuter. “What's a commuter?” I asked, never having heard the word. Evelyn explained that to commute was to travel regularly back and forth between two places. She commuted from home by streetcar, ferry, and train to the University of California. In Portland people did not commute. They walked a block or two to a bus or streetcar line, or if they had a car and could afford gas, they drove.
The next morning the Reeveses put me on a bus to Los Angeles. Courage intact, I settled myself, prepared to enjoy the rest of my journey. Two drunken sailors who had taken the backseat sang until they fell asleep. As we drove through San Jose, feathery fronds of pepper trees stroked the top of the bus. My seat partner, a man old enough to be my father, wanted to talk. Mother had warned me about talking to strangers, but she had not told me I should not listen, so I listened. The man said he was supposed to be in Nevada for six weeks to establish residence so he could divorce his wife. He had slipped away to find his daughter, who had run off with a gangster. Divorce was almost unheard of in my neighborhood in Portland in the 1930s. As for gangsters, they existed in Chicago, on Alcatraz, but mostly in the movies. I couldn't wait to write to Claudine.
We rolled down the two-lane highway past orchards and acres of lettuce, and, amazing to me, high school boys, unlike Oregon boys, practicing football in shorts. A brief stop in San Luis Obispo, another tuna-fish sandwich, another glass of milk, and, with a nervous eye on the bus, a short walk along a street of white stucco cottages with hedges of lusty red geraniums, real California geraniums growing in the ground in
stead of in pots. Once back on the bus, the man beside me, unburdened of his troubles, fell asleep. Arroyo Grande, Santa Maria, Los Alamos, Spanish place-names that seemed beautiful to me. So many small towns in Oregon were named after early settlers: Barlow, Heppner, Boring. Some were named after settlers' wives: Beulah, Ada. Others reflected pioneer feelings: Sweet Home, Remote, Sublimity. Still others had Indian names: Owyhee, Yoncalla, Umatilla. I had always found Oregon place-names interesting because they revealed so much about the past, but somehow, as I consulted my timetable, I felt they lacked the musical sounds of Los Olivos, Santa Ynez, Goleta along Highway 101. After a rest stop in Santa Barbara, I must have fallen asleep, for my next recollection is of darkness and of the bus pulling into the Los Angeles Greyhound station.