“Well, well, so you girls are going to be frosh,” a neighbor said to Claudine and me when school was about to start. We exchanged knowing, amused looks. What an old-fashioned word, “frosh”! We were freshmen.
Having grown both up and out, I was now medium-sized, but my clothes were not. Everything I owned, except the sunburst pleated skirt, which Mother had insisted I buy to grow into, was either too short or too tight.
A neighbor gave Mother an old pink woolen dress, which she successfully made over into a jumper for me. She contrived a cream-colored blouse from something found in a trunk in the attic. One of her friends, now married to an eastern Oregon wheat rancher, had a daughter older than I who passed on two nice dresses. In our neighborhood, no girl would dream of entering high school in half socks. I used hoarded nickels and dimes to buy silk stockings. Five dollars from my Arizona uncle bought a raincoat.
Claudine was more fortunate. Mrs. Klum solved her wardrobe problem by buying her three knit dresses, at five dollars apiece. Three new dresses, not hand-me-downs, and all at one time; the Miles girls, passing their clothes to one another, and I were awed by such luxury. We began admiring one another’s clothes by saying, “Is it new, or new to you?”
Then the Depression came to Claudine’s house, for Mr. Klum, a steam fitter, lost his job when construction came to a halt. A family friend offered him a job as a night watchman at a pharmaceutical company at a small salary he was not too proud to accept. My father had no close friends, only acquaintances.
And so, the day after Labor Day, when smoke from forest fires dimmed the atmosphere, the sun was a sullen orange ball, and ash drifted over the city, Claudine and I walked on our silken legs up the steps of Ulysses S. Grant High School, where we both were enrolled in a college preparatory course—with no possibility of college. “Things will get better in four years,” Mother said with her usual determination. “They have to.”
As we entered the building, Claudine and I tried to pretend our insecurity was invisible. Everyone else looked so confident, mature, and sophisticated. Girls wore lipstick. Some even pinned up their long hair. Boys in long, dirty, cream-colored corduroy pants with ink lines doodled between the ridges of the fabric seemed worldly because they had resisted their mothers and washing machines.
The horrible boys from the eighth grade suddenly looked subdued and self-conscious in their new, clean corduroy pants. Some, poor things, still wore knickers and probably suffered as much as girls who wore lisle instead of silk stockings.
Grant High School, Claudine and I soon discovered, was not the friendly, tolerant place that Fernwood had been. Grant was snobbish and full of cliques. Sororities and fraternities with silly initiation rites dominated the social life. Girls were admired for being cute, peppy, and well-to-do, and, most of all, for driving cars. Popularity required energy I lacked. All I wanted was a few good friends. Claudine was occupied with her music.
Grant High School arranged everything possible in alphabetical order. Claudine and I went in different directions to find our registration rooms, which we quickly learned to refer to as our “reg rooms.” I was filed with students whose last names began with A or B, while Claudine took her place with J and K. Since the boy alphabetized in front of me and I were enrolled in many of the same classes, I went through four years of high school staring at the back of his neck, which I came to know very well. It was a slender, sensitive neck that supported an intelligent head of softly curling brown hair. I grew fond of that neck and of the boy it belonged to.
Life was better at school than at home. Grant High had excellent teachers—well-informed, efficient, strict, and caring—although I had some doubts about a couple of coaches who taught history and seemed to have a prejudice against girls. Except for English, I worked just hard enough to keep Mother from nagging; but on the whole, I enjoyed school, but not physical education, taught by a woman who wore blue rompers and long cotton stockings. I never succeeded in learning to climb a rope, and thought volleyball was tiresome. When trapped into playing basketball, I made my own rule: always run away from the ball. No one ever complained, or, as far as I know, noticed.
In freshman English, tiny Miss Hart led us through Treasure Island, which pleased the boys. The book bored me. This was followed by As You Like It and Silas Marner. We also waded into a compact little green book, The Century Handbook of Writing, by Garland Greever and Easley Jones, a valuable book that was to accompany us for four years. Completeness of thought, unity of thought, emphasis, grammar, diction, spelling, “manuscript, etc.,” and punctuation—we went over it all every year.
Claudine and I, who were inclined to giggle at almost anything, found The Century Handbook entertaining. We often quoted examples. If I said, “Phone me this evening,” she replied, “‘Phone. A contraction not employed in formal writing. Say telephone.’”
After a test, one of us quoted, “‘If I pass (and I may),’ said Hazel, ‘let’s celebrate.’” This, from a rule on the use of quotation marks, was worth a fit of giggles.
Mother insisted on coaching me in Latin, the foundation of the English language, she kept telling me. I liked the sound of Latin and danced around chanting, “Amo, amas, amat,” but Mother could not understand my listless attitude toward declensions and ablative absolutes. Mother loved Latin, truly loved it, and coaching me took her mind off her troubles. She also kept an eye on my algebra and wanted to study along with me. I flatly refused her company. If there is one thing a fourteen-year-old girl does not want, it is her mother studying algebra with her.
We also studied poetry and discovered Carl Sandburg, so different from Kipling and his moralizing “If” and the nineteenth-century poets we had studied in grammar school. No rhymes, and it was still poetry. What a relief! We were required to write a poem, and after reading “Chicago,” the class was inspired to rousers such as
Portland.
Shipper of wheat,
Grower of roses.
Oregon.
Feller of trees,
Catcher of salmon.
We also memorized one hundred lines of poetry of our own choice, a requirement for each year of high school.
For an assignment in original writing, I wrote a little story, “The Diary of a Tree-Sitter,” following Mother’s advice, “Make it funny,” and “Always remember, the best writing is simple writing.” Sitting in trees, on houses, or atop poles to set records was popular at the time. My story was based on an incident in the Journal and had the advantage of not having to be concerned with spelling. When the paper was returned, Miss Hart had written, “E+. This is very funny. I hope it is original. You show talent.” I was ecstatic.
The inspiration for my next story, “The Green Christmas,” was a newspaper account of a boy who fell into a river below a dye works that dumped green dye into the water. In my story, being dyed green saved the boy from playing the part of an angel in a Christmas program at church. To my surprise, Miss Burns, the chairman of the English Department, called me out of class to ask where I got the idea for the story. Puzzled, I explained the source of each part. She told me she had wanted to make sure the story was original. I was a little hurt that she could think it might not be original.
“The Green Christmas” was published in the Grantonian, the school paper, but another girl’s name was given as the author. I did not hesitate to point out, in indignation, the error. A correction appeared in the next issue, but somehow that small boxed paragraph was not the same as seeing my name on my own story, a story which, much altered, became a chapter in my first book.
The recognition I was winning at school helped balance the unhappiness at home. My father still had not found work. Money from the sale of the car was running low. The house was always cold, as wood and coal were fed sparingly into the furnace to try to make it last through the winter.
Then one day, Meier & Frank’s green delivery truck pulled up in front of our house. The driver handed my surprised mother a package with her name on it. “What on earth…” she puzzled as she tore off the wrapping. The package contained a ham sent by my father’s sister Minnie. Mother smiled, it seemed to me, for the first time in days. “Minnie always knows just what to do,” she said, and Aunt Minnie always did know. She was that kind of aunt.
We ate ham baked, fried, ground, made into a loaf with plenty of bread crumbs, scalloped with potatoes; and when we were finally down to split-pea soup made with the bone, Dad came home smiling. In the darkest Depression, he had actually found work managing the safe-deposit vault at the Bank of California. The vault, with its heavy steel door and time lock, was located in the basement. It was a sad place for a man who had spent so much of his life working outdoors in the Willamette Valley. But the job brought home a paycheck, smaller than he had earned before, but one that put food on the table, made mortgage payments, and paid taxes. We were luckier than many. Dad whistled to a livelier beat and ordered a few more sacks of coal.