The Depression grew worse. More men lost their jobs. Almost every day, at least one defeated man came to the door trying to sell shoelaces or pencils to earn a few cents. At first Mother bought from them because we were lucky. My father had a job. But finally so many came to the door she could no longer face the sad, gray men. We hid when we saw them coming. Mother always grieved when we did this. “You see what heroes men are,” she said.
All around us, people were having a hard time. A neighbor took in her nephew, a child about five years old. Anger spilled out of her house, and sometimes, after dark, she would lock the little boy outside as a punishment. He ran from the back door to the front door and back again, pounding with his fists and sobbing, “Let me in! Let me in!”
When I went to bed, I hid my head under the pillow to shut out the sound of the child’s sobs until his aunt relented and unlocked the door for him.
Summer was lonely. Claudine went to Puddin’. The Miles girls, those near my age, went out to the homestead their parents had claimed from land returned to the government by the railroad. There they raised and canned food and cut wood for life in the city.
I combined trips to the orthodontist with knitting lessons at Meier & Frank and trips to the main library to stretch twenty cents’ carfare as far as possible and keep me away from home for an afternoon.
Halfway through the summer, Uncle Guy, Mother’s older brother, and Aunt Ida arrived by automobile all the way from Arizona, bringing presents—a turquoise and silver Indian bracelet for me and chunks of turquoise from my uncle’s mine for Mother. Uncle Guy, tanned and fit, seemed untouched by the Depression, and during his visit, Mother became her old vivacious self. When my aunt and uncle drove out to Banks to visit my grandparents and Uncle Henry for a few days, I went along. Grandpa Atlee had built a post office for Banks so Uncle Henry could have a job as postmaster.
My grandfather’s store, which never seemed to change, was a two-story wooden building with “W. S. Atlee General Merchandise” painted across its false front. Living quarters and Grandma Atlee’s little millinery shop were above the store. My grandparents’ day began with someone pounding on the front door, demanding, “Open up!”
“All right, all right, I’m coming. Hold your horses!” Grandpa shouted as he pulled up his suspenders and hurried down the stairs.
From the time the door was unlocked, old men gathered in the store to discuss politics and spit tobacco juice (“eatin’ tobaccy,” they called it) into the stove while they waited for the train to arrive and for Uncle Henry to sort the mail so they could read their newspapers. Their sentences often began with “I see by the paper…” or “Will Rogers says…” That summer there was talk of loggers out of work, lumber mills that had shut down, and the possibility of a chain store opening in Forest Grove. Grandpa worried about competition from one of the new chain stores. Men asked Uncle Guy, “How are things going down there in Arizona?”
Drummers, as traveling salesmen were called, arrived. My grandmother, wearing a black sateen apron over her blue housedress, hurried downstairs to order dry goods—notions, stockings, underwear, and yard goods—for her side of the store, while Grandpa placed his orders for coffee, tea, rice, crackers, chewing tobacco, and all the items carried on his side. He bought orange wheels of Tillamook cheese and, from farmers, eggs, which he let me candle to test for freshness by holding each over a hole in a wooden box that contained an electric light. If the egg appeared translucent, it was fresh. At the back of the store, coal oil for kerosene lamps was kept in a drum with a spigot, from which customers’ coal oil cans were filled, and a half a potato was jammed on the spout to prevent spillage.
Customers came in for spools of thread, overalls (pronounced “overhauls”), coffee, which Grandpa ground in a red coffee mill, tea, and crackers sold in bulk from red metal bins. The cash register rang, but some customers, shamefaced, asked that their meager purchases be “put on the books.” My grandfather obligingly charged the items, often knowing he would never be paid. He said, “I can’t see little young ’uns go without.” He had only contempt for people who bought tinned vegetables when they could grow their own. At noon my grandparents took turns going upstairs for a hasty lunch—usually canned Vienna sausage, bread and cheese, and coffee, which Grandpa “saucered and blowed” in his private deep saucer. He did not have time to let his coffee cool in a cup.
Afternoons, women came in for their small purchases. If they were buying percale for house-dresses, Grandma, with kindly patience, laid their patterns out on the inexpensive fabric, arranging and rearranging the tissue-paper pieces to save every inch of material for women who were so pinched for money. They could no longer afford to retrim their hats each season, so Grandma’s boxes of ostrich plumes, now out of fashion, grew dusty along with the ribbons, bolts of veiling, artificial flowers, and cherries that had delighted me when I was younger.
Evenings, people in Banks dropped into the store to chat and enjoy a bit of company, to discuss politics and harvest, and to exchange gossip. Women, except during berry harvest, led lonely lives. When the berries were ripe, the town came alive.
Strawberries were picked by Filipinos and taken to a warehouse with an open side where women hulled berries and packed them in barrels between layers of sugar for shipment by train to New York. All of Banks was perfumed by crushed ripe strawberries, and that summer, in the evenings after a field had been stripped of berries, I went with my two uncles into the fields and ate dark, ripe berries, rich with juice, that had been overlooked. Uncle Guy said there was nothing like the fields of Oregon berries in Arizona.
When the last customer drifted away and my grandfather locked the store, we climbed the stairs to the living quarters, where Grandpa snapped on his radio to listen to the Alka-Seltzer news at ten o’clock. He turned his radio on a few minutes before ten in case the news came on early, and when the program began with the fizz of an Alka-Seltzer tablet dropped into water, he always said, “Yep, there she goes!” After the news, bed, and in the morning, another pounding on the door.
My grandparents’ whole lives were lived in that old tinder-dry building with its one staircase leading past the drum of kerosene. Grandma cooked on a wood range and often gave the fire a fast start with a splash of coal oil from a can beside the stove. Somehow the store, the center of community life in Banks, never caught fire.
When Uncle Guy and Aunt Ida took me back to Portland and were saying goodbye, Uncle Guy ran his hand over my head and said, “She’d be a good-looking chick if she had a permanent wave.”
Mother smiled and said, “She’s a little young. She has plenty of time for that.” I was inclined to agree. A permanent wave was something else that somehow belonged in the mysterious future. When Uncle Guy left, Mother wept.
My uncle’s remark made me look at myself in the mirror and fiddle with my hair. What was the use? I would never look nice with my mouth full of metal and wire. Mother began to look thoughtfully at me. The week before school started, she said, “Why don’t you spend the five dollars your uncle gave you on a permanent wave?”
Well! A bit of the future had appeared through the mist.
Mother sent me to a neighborhood hairdresser, an experience fraught with suspense. The woman, widowed or divorced, who had sons to support, could afford neither a license nor a proper shop. She operated her business illegally in her dining room and lived in fear of a city inspector finding out about it. If someone rang the doorbell, customers were instructed to run and hide in the bathroom while she hid evidence of her business.
The woman shampooed my hair while I bent forward over the bathroom washbasin. Then, in the dining room, she pulled strands through slits in felt pads and wound them so tightly around metal rods I felt as if my eyebrows were raised. Next she soaked my hair with evil-smelling liquid and fastened to each roller clamps that dangled from a heavy electric machine. The electricity was turned on. What if the inspector rang the doorbell? How could I run and hide when I was fastened to this hot, heavy contraption? Would the hairdresser leave me? Would my hair burn off? Would she be fined, even arrested? Then how would she earn her living? A permanent wave gave me plenty to worry about.
The machine heated and turned into an instrument of torture. I was silent as long as I could bear the heat. Then a small “Ooh!” escaped.
“Where does it burn?” the hairdresser asked. I pointed. She aimed a blower at the spot. My whole head seemed to be burning. I pointed; she blew. “It won’t be long now,” she said over and over. The ordeal seemed to take forever. Somehow I got through it all without the inspector calling and without my hair being burned off. When the clamps were removed and my hair unwound in a Medusa-like tangle, it was neutralized, shampooed again, set, and dried. I looked in the mirror. This rite of passage, this trial by permanent wave, left me feeling better about myself, and the hairdresser still had her illegal business, which helped her survive the Depression.