When I think of my mother now, I remember her as I so often saw her when I came home from high school. She is lying on the davenport, her legs covered with a blanket, a magazine fallen to the floor beside her. This is another day when Mother feels blue. She worries constantly, unable to recover from the days when Dad was out of work. She seems unable to get warm.
A fly buzzes against the window. Mother throws back the blanket and springs to her feet. “Get that pesky fly!” she cries and seizes the nearest weapon, a newspaper that she rolls up. The chase is on. Thump. Whack. “Beverly, help me get that pesky fly before it spots the windows!” The fly grows angrier, Mother more determined, while I continue to stand, schoolbooks clasped to my chest, fascinated by the drama of Mother versus the fly.
Thwack. “There,” she says, triumphant. “I got him!” The corpse is brushed from the sill and tossed to an ashy grave in the fireplace.
“That’s the end of him,” she says in satisfaction. Her adrenaline is flowing once more. She folds the blanket, picks up the magazine, and sits down on the davenport. “Now tell me about your day at school,” she says. I tell her, making an ordinary school day as amusing as I can. I feel responsible for Mother’s happiness because she sacrifices for me.
Mother and I, relieved of maintaining peace to protect my father during the terrible days when he was out of work, were now free to disagree with each other.
Nothing I did pleased Mother; nothing she did pleased me. I wanted to wear lipstick. She said, “Certainly not. Lipstick on young girls is vulgar.”
“But I wear rouge.”
“That’s different, and you don’t wear much, just enough so you won’t look peaked.”
School had taught me always to fold paper, as well as damask napkins, neatly; she left the newspaper in a crumpled heap on the floor. I wanted to do my homework in the evening; she wanted me to do it immediately after school “to get it out of the way.” I never touched the piano, and after she had sacrificed to give me lessons; I reminded her she no longer touched it herself.
Mother’s requests began, “I am going to have you…” I did not mind cleaning up my room, dusting, making the salad, but I resented her manner of asking me.
When spring came, I wanted to wear bobby socks like the other girls. On a trip to the orthodontist, I detoured from my usual route to buy, with twenty-five cents saved a nickel at a time, a pair of red bobby socks at Woolworth’s. Mother made me return them on my next trip overtown.
Risking Mother’s disapproval of lipstick on young girls, I bought a tube of Tangee lipstick at the dime store and applied it the minute I got home from the orthodontist.
At supper, my parents apparently did not notice the lipstick. No comment was made. Finally I announced, in case they had not noticed, “I am wearing lipstick.”
“So we see,” said Mother, her lips tightening into the straight line I was beginning to dread more than anything in the world. I gave up lipstick. It was not worth Mother’s devastating disapproval, no matter how much I needed to make little decisions of my own.
Mother made me a white dress and a red jacket. The two halves of the collar were tied in a bow, the ends of which hung down over the jacket at the back of my neck. I thought the collar fetching, but Mother said the bow looked too heavy and wanted to cut it off. I protested. One day, when I came home from school, I discovered that Mother had amputated the bow. For once I could not contain my anger. “You had no right to do that,” I stormed. “It is my dress, even if you did make it.”
Adults of Mother’s generation did not believe children should ever cross their parents. Parents were always right. “That dress looked terrible with that bow,” she said, not giving an inch. Again her mouth tightened into the thin, disapproving line.
“You have a mouth like a buttonhole!” I hurled at her.
Mother looked stunned. I had often rebelled against her, but this was my first attack. “I’ll put the kibosh on you, young lady,” she informed me. “You can’t talk that way to your betters.” We did not speak until supper, when she said to Dad, “Beverly tells me I have a mouth like a buttonhole.”
Dad, weary from his day in the basement of the bank, looked at me and said, “Did you say that?”
“Yes, but she—” I did not finish the sentence. My father slapped my face, hard. I left the table and did not speak to my father for two weeks, during which I ate supper in sullen silence and avoided looking at either parent.
As I grew up, both parents had slapped or spanked me, usually for being sassy when I was little or, as I grew older, for talking back. This time I felt I had had enough. I was too old to be slapped by my father. Talking back was not always wrong, I felt, and I would not have spoken such unkind words to Mother if she had left my dress alone and had been willing to listen to me explain my feelings.
I longed to tell my father that I was sorry I had added to the unhappiness in his life, that I understood his irritation and weariness after a day at work; but my generation was never encouraged to talk openly with our parents about feelings. Whenever I tried, I was always judged wrong. This time I did not want to revive a painful episode or involve my father in a silly argument over a bow on the collar of a dress. Neither did I want to be forced to apologize to Mother.
Finally Mother said, “Daddy wants you to know he’s sorry he slapped you,” and added softly, “You know he loves you more than life itself.” I did know.
We went on as if nothing had happened, but after that episode I was careful to avoid confrontations with Mother that would involve my father. His life was hard enough.
I began to spend more and more time at Claudine’s house. Mrs. Klum was almost the exact opposite of my mother. She was plump and pretty, with beautiful prematurely white hair. When Claudine and I went into a fit of giggles, she looked up from the Christian Science lesson she was often studying and said affectionately, “Oh, you silly little girls.” She did not interfere with Claudine’s schoolwork and put no pressure on her to make better grades.
Mrs. Klum and Claudine had mother-daughter arguments, which they usually laughed about in a few days. Although Mr. Klum’s income was reduced even more than my father’s, Mrs. Klum continued with her bridge club and Eastern Star activities. She and Mr. Klum went dancing at the Masonic Lodge.
Mother objected to my stopping at Claudine’s house after school and going there evenings. “If I were you, I wouldn’t go to Claudine’s house until she comes here,” she told me.
“But you and Daddy never go out,” I said. “You’re always here.” Dad spent his evenings smoking his pipe or dozing over the newspaper. Mother read or worked the Journal crossword puzzle and yawned.
At supper, Mother announced, “Beverly feels we are not welcome in our own home.” She knew very well that what I wanted was a little privacy; but even more, I wanted, desperately, for my mother and father to have some fun, to have friends, to go to movies—anything. They seemed to have given up happiness.
When Claudine did come to our house, she was made welcome, as were all my friends. Dad sometimes tactfully retired to the breakfast nook with his pipe and newspaper, but Mother dominated. “Do you girls really like jazz?” she asked. “Do you really like Bing Crosby?” We did, of course. Then Mother always said, “Claudine, play something for us.” Claudine graciously sat down, rose to twirl the piano stool to the right height, and sat down again to play some popular songs of the day until she and I could escape to the kitchen to make hot chocolate. We could not go to my room as I had planned when we bought the house. My room was too cold, for Mother kept the bedroom doors shut to conserve heat.
At Claudine’s house we studied or read together. On a visit to my grandparents, I picked up a book, Chip, of the Flying U, by B. M. Bower, a humorous story of a romance between a ranch owner’s daughter, a tenderfoot from the East, and a cowhand who turned out to be a distinguished artist of the West. I took the book home and passed it on to Claudine, who read it and said, “That was good.” We were both starved for romance.
We enjoyed that book so much we fell in love with the West, which for us was actually East. Oregon did not count as the West.
We discovered that our branch library carried the works of B. M. Bower, an Oregon author, a woman, who wrote Western stories from a woman’s point of view. We checked out the books as fast as we could read them: The Flying U’s Last Stand, The Voice at Johnnywater, The Phantom Herd, The Ranch at the Wolverine, and all the rest.
Saturday evenings, when Claudine’s parents were out, we read and hoarded the power of the radio batteries so there would be enough left for us to listen to the songs of the Arizona Wranglers, whom we pictured as a group of cowboys, all looking exactly like Gary Cooper, whose movies we never missed. Gary Cooper was one actor Mother approved of. “His movies are always clean,” she said, although later she would not let me see him play opposite Marlene Dietrich in Morocco. She had her doubts about Marlene Dietrich.
When we had read all of B. M. Bower, we started in on Zane Grey, a better writer, but one we found funny. A girl disguised as a man was shot. The hero unbuttoned her shirt, and wow! was he surprised! Claudine and I found this hilarious. In one book, the hero fried an egg on a rock, and as he handed it to the heroine, the text read: “‘Eat,’ he said.” After that, whenever we offered each other something to eat, we quoted in our deepest voices, “‘Eat,’ he said,” and went off into a gale of giggles.
Mother began to object to our infatuation with the West. I should be reading worthwhile books, Dickens and Thackeray, the books she had read when she was growing up. I pointed out that I had already read David Copperfield. She kept an eye on any book I was reading. When I picked up what seemed a rather boring English novel she was reading, she refused to let me finish it because, she said, it was about a woman “who had no modesty.” I began to read at Claudine’s house the books I was forbidden at home but never understood what it was that Mother did not want me to see.
Although Mother and I had an uncomfortable relationship, her softer moments revealed her hopes for me that told me she might love me even though she showed no tenderness toward me. At these times she looked sad and said to me, “I hope you won’t have to scrimp and pinch all your life,” or “I hope you will go ahead and be somebody.” She also impressed upon me, “Every woman should have some money of her own,” and, saddest of all, “I do hope you will marry a man who has the world by the tail.”
These touching remarks pointed to a future I was unable to visualize. Everyone had some kind of future, even though in those Depression days many said they did not.
I had no dreams of marriage and few thoughts about boys, although the boys I had grown up with had progressed through the awful, terrible, horrible, and shy stages and had turned into reasonable human beings. They were even courteous, sometimes.