That summer, the children of the neighborhood skated once more. We skinned our knees tumbling off tin can stilts and played Lotto and Old Maid. Bobby’s mother reclaimed her sad little boy, and Mother was mine again. Father began to work days instead of nights at the Federal Reserve Bank. I was now confident that I would live through the night, that no earthquake would turn our house into rubble, and no Thing lurked under my bed, ready to pounce if I moved. I forgot the ominous words “on trial,” and entered the second grade refreshed.
Miss Tessie Marius, our second-grade teacher, was plump and blond, with a pink and white complexion. She was pretty, calm, gentle, kind and, in my memory, never wore navy blue. Miss Marius, aware of my shameful record, asked me to come to her desk with my book, The Beacon Second Reader. She had me stand beside her, and there she quickly taught me to read—or perhaps I had already learned but had been frozen by fear.
The second reader was an improvement over my primer. There were no silly accounts of Ruth and John, Rover and Kitty, or stories of Tom and May going to the seashore. Seashore! No one in Oregon went to the “seashore.” Oregonians went to the beach or “over to the coast.” Everything in that primer had been pretty—brooks, books, dolls, doves, robins, ponies—and everyone happy—kissing papa, spinning tops, swinging high, and riding their stupid pretty ponies. The Beacon Second Reader had stories already familiar from Mother’s library in Yamhill: “The Shoemaker and the Elves,” “The Wolf and the Seven kids,” “Rumpelstiltskin”—all stories worth reading again.
Thanks to Miss Marius, I could read, but I refused to read outside of school.
“Everyone in our family has always loved to read,” said my puzzled mother. “I can’t understand why you won’t.”
Neither could I, but I felt reading should be confined to school, and only when required.
Miss Marius taught us a rousing song about a peanut that sat on a railroad track with the train coming “a-chunk, a-chunk.” When, in that last line, the train ran over the peanut, we all sang with glee at the top of our voices, “Toot-toot! Peanut butter!” Miss Marius also let us sing the popular songs of the day, “Last Night on the Back Porch” and a song about “Barney Google with his goo-goo-googley eyes.” On Friday afternoons, before the last bell, we told jokes and riddles.
For exercise, we stood in the aisles, one hand on a desk, the other on the back of our seat, and recited, “Jack, be nimble. Jack, be quick.” On “Jack jumped over the candlestick,” we jumped over our seats.
In December, Miss Marius told us we could bring cake or cookies from home for a party the day before Christmas vacation.
Mother, however, was not to be persuaded. “My land, forty children, all with cakes and cookies!” she said. “Poor Miss Marius. You’ll all get sick.”
“But Miss Marius wants me to bring something,” I insisted, for I knew a teacher’s word was law to parents.
We reached a compromise. I took forty sticks of gum to pass out to the class, which turned out better than I had expected. The classroom was a mess, a glorious mess of crumbs, frosting, smeared faces, and sticky fingers. I walked up and down the aisles passing out welcome sticks of spearmint gum, which may have helped settle a few stomachs. No one threw up, at least not in the classroom.
Although the excesses of the party probably had nothing to do with it, I became ill with a sore throat and a high fever. Mother was frightened. She put me to bed on a couch in the dining room, where she could keep an eye on me. She piled on blankets, which I pushed back; she pulled them up again, saying, “You must stay covered up. You might get pneumonia.” Mother was always afraid of my catching pneumonia or tuberculosis.
She consulted the Frenchwoman next door, who was a practical nurse. Mrs. Williams brought over a fever thermometer, which registered one hundred and six. She pulled off some of the blankets and advised Mother to call a doctor. He came two days later to say I had tonsillitis.
All I remember is a strange sinking sensation, as if I were going through a white tunnel toward a light at the end, with the sound of the telegraph wires of Yamhill humming in my ears.
I recovered to find my reader, delivered by a neighbor child, probably that Bluebird, on the couch beside me. At Mother’s urging, but without enthusiasm, I picked up the book and read a story about American Indians. I felt a languid interest in the discovery that a reader could tell me something I did not already know. Then I laid the book aside.
The happy calm of the second grade was interrupted one day when Miss Marius asked us to stand and march into the third-grade classroom, where each of us had to share a seat with a third-grader. We discovered, propped up in the front of the room, a large black circle with numbers and letters painted on small white circles. Over this was another black circle, this one with round holes that revealed the letters and numbers underneath. We stopped whispering, giggling, and pushing to stare.
The third-grade teacher introduced a man from the telephone company, who explained that Portland was going to use the dial system. “All telephones must have dials,” he said, pointing to the mysterious object in front of the room. The man explained the system of numbers and letters, moving the big black circle to show us how it worked. The top circle always returned to its original position after he moved it. The whole demonstration seemed so mysterious I did not understand it at all. His final words were “If you do not learn to use the dial system, you cannot use the telephone.”
I had never used a telephone in my life. In Yamhill I could not reach the wall telephone that Mother cranked; in Portland there was a general understanding that telephones were for the use of adults. Children who wanted to communicate with their friends stood on the front porch and yelled their names until they came out. But now—where would we get one of those big black circles, where would we put it, and what if my mother and father did not know how to spin it to make it work? What if they didn’t understand it any more than I did? They could never telephone Aunt Minnie or Grandmother Bunn. Father could never telephone home from work.
I ran home from school. “Mamma, Mamma,” I cried, panting. “You can’t use our telephone anymore! You won’t know how. A man came to school and told us.”
Mother laughed. “Oh, you’re talking about the dial system,” she said, and showed me the small dial on a new telephone and how it worked, remarking, “I do miss Mrs. McKern. She was always up on all the news in Yamhill.” How easy! I wondered why the telephone man had made something simple seem so mysterious and difficult.
By the end of second grade I could read, although outside of school I flatly refused to open a book.
“Really, Beverly,” Mother protested. “I simply cannot understand what gets into you. You used to want to learn to read.”
Neither did I understand what got into me, and I did not care. If Miss Marius was not around, nobody was going to catch me reading. I would do anything for Miss Marius. In her classroom, even in Oregon, the sun seemed always to shine.
The best day of all, that year in the second grade, was the day Miss Marius let me wash her little teapot after lunch. Then I knew for sure she loved me.