Our senior year in high school, neighbors said to Claudine and me, “Don’t forget, these are the happiest days of your life.” Others hinted at the possibility of a June wedding for Beverly. Mother, who enjoyed keeping neighbors guessing, answered with an arch smile, “We’ll see.” On the surface, our lives must have appeared serene. Mother was careful about that.
But things were not serene in our household. Dad disliked his job in “that hole,” as he called his office by the steel door of the bank vault. He was now in his mid-forties, too old to find another job during the Depression, worried about my education and about putting money away for old age. I felt as if he were serving a sentence, condemned to support Mother and me. I was bitter and felt Dad must be, too, because Gerhart, whose only responsibility was payments on his new V-8, earned the same salary.
Mother was tense and apprehensive. I continued to overhear shreds of anxious conversation about my future.
What future, I wondered, and why couldn’t my parents speak directly to me about it? I wanted to write; writing was expected of me, but what did I, an ordinary girl, have to write about? I could not depend on my pen and imagination for a living. I visualized nothing beyond, perhaps, business school and a dull office job—if I could find one, and I did not want to find one. An office meant one thing: typewriting.
Claudine and I made sardonic jokes about being lovely girls who would someday make good wives, which meant washing on Monday, ironing on Tuesday, and all the rest of our mothers’ routines. I supposed that someday I would become someone’s good wife, but never, never Gerhart’s.
About that time, Gerhart surprised us by announcing he had joined Jehovah’s Witnesses. Any possibility of war or disaster brought him smiling to our door. This might be the beginning of the Battle of Armageddon, when Witnesses would be saved and the rest of us would perish. For once Mother and I were united; we could not accept such a negative philosophy. Mother, who enjoyed a good argument, often challenged Gerhart on the subject of Witnesses while I tried to study in the breakfast nook.
Some of my friends began to give parties in their homes, to which I was invited, and Gerhart, too, even though others were not separated into couples. He was contemptuous of these innocent parties, as he was of all my high school activities; but he always went, even though he disliked dancing and often had deep circles under his eyes from having worked a night shift.
We danced to radio music, telephoning announcers with requests for records to be played: “My Blue Heaven,” “Willow, Weep for Me,” “Pennies from Heaven,” and my favorite, “You’re Going to Lose Your Gal.” A high point of the evening, in addition to supper prepared by a mother, was requesting “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze,” dedicated to someone at the party. If it was actually played, we sang along with the radio, feeling we were having a hilarious time. Boys who were at a loss for conversation said “Wanna buy a duck?”—a phrase picked up from Joe Penner, a radio comedian.
Mother arranged parties for me and planned food, prepared with my assistance. Dad worked hard, too, rolling up the rugs on Saturday afternoon and polishing the Siberian oak floors, and on Sunday, after they had been danced on, repolishing them. My parties were always successful, but somehow I felt that Mother, in spite of the extra work, enjoyed them more than I and that they were really her parties.
That winter, Prohibition ended. Not even Mother’s willpower had been able to prevent it. Our lives went on as usual. Roger asked me to go out; I accepted. We went dancing, or loping, at Jantzen Beach, where the crowd gathered around the bandstand when a musician in a yellow jacket set aside his saxophone to take the microphone and sing
All night long the rain drops tinkle,
Do you think a little drink’ll
Do us any harm?
That the song referred to alcohol did not occur to me because I had never seen anyone drink so much as a beer. I was, however, fascinated with rhyming “tinkle” and “drink’ll.”
Whenever I went to a party, Mother insisted on talking it over the next morning. Feeling guilty because I had not enjoyed myself more, I did the best I could with my account, and sometimes we shared genuine laughter. She then passed it all on to her friends, with embellishments. “Oh my, yes, Beverly had a glorious time and didn’t get home until midnight. She had us worried there for a while.” One day when I came home from school and laid my books on the dining room table, I picked up a composition book that I thought was Mother’s household budget. Instead, it was a diary, not of Mother’s life, but of mine, recorded by Mother.
“Mother!” I said, shocked.
“You mind your own business!” she said, snatching the composition book from me.
I could not answer. My life was my business, I thought—or it should be! I never saw the diary again or mentioned it to Mother. What was the use? Whatever I said would be wrong, but I wondered, since Mother said she wanted to write, why she didn’t write stories instead of her version of my life.
After that I began to keep a diary of my own in an effort to convince myself that everything was as it should be. That diary is a record of little parties, of amusing incidents at school. Frequently I recorded that Gerhart bored me stiff.
Then a neighborhood boy, whom I shall call Gene, a Reed College student, took me to several school dances and a school play. He was a nice-looking, intelligent boy, serious, and not particularly interesting to me. However, I liked him because he was not Gerhart and because he had gone to Grant, which gave us a foundation for conversation.
For some reason, my going out with Gene upset my parents, who accused me of running after him. Mother said he asked me to go to the school play in return for an invitation to my party.
As I reread my old diary, both on and between the lines, I am puzzled about why they felt this way.
When Claudine, Lorraine, and Olive, members of Job’s Daughters, suggested I invite a boy to a dance at the Masonic Hall, I asked Gene, who had taken me to a high school dance. He accepted, and I included him in a party at my house. I was too shy with boys to do much pursuing, and in those days telephoning a boy was considered improper. He initiated the friendship, not I, but I did hope he would telephone. My diary records my worries that he might not actually appear to take me to the class play because he had asked me so far ahead; but he did appear, and we enjoyed a pleasant evening. He also invited me to a couple of Reed College dances. He gave me my first corsage and a box of candy.
Real anger, honest anger, burst through on one page of that diary, probably the only completely honest page written that year. I wrote, in the heat of indignation and with a disregard for the rules of punctuation, “Oh, Hades! I don’t want to go to Grant’s party with Gerhart and my parents know it. Of course they had to start out on a dissertation on my liking Gene and Mother had to talk about how badly she felt about Gerhart and all that and said that after my next party she was going to tell him not to come back any more. Well, darn it! I don’t care. I don’t see why she can’t see that I’m positively so sick of him I could scream when I even see him. I think Dad backs me up, too. She says I’m selfish and tactless, but how can she expect me to know how to act whenever anyone calls up she listens to every word and prompts me at regular intervals and when I go anyplace she gives me a lecture on what to do and say and think and eat. When I give a party she has me give a party and it’s the same way with everything.”
Why? Wanting to go out with a different boy seems normal, not selfish. And why did Mother feel that telling Gerhart not to come back was her right, not mine? An only daughter of a possessive mother develops a kind of selfishness in a struggle to preserve something of herself, something that does not belong to her mother, but this is a mother-daughter problem that has little to do with boys. Tactless? Yes, I was tactless, even unkind, to Gerhart because I was beyond caring what he thought. I wanted him to give up and go away forever. To me, Gene was only a relief from Gerhart.
And then one day as I was walking home from school, Gene’s mother, smiling and friendly, called me across the street and said, “Saturday is Gene’s birthday,” and added in the voice of one bestowing an honor, “I am giving a surprise party for him, and you are invited.” Then her smile changed as she lowered her voice, confiding an exciting secret: “Gene has a girl!” Even though I had never thought of myself as Gene’s girl, I was stunned and politely refused the invitation. I was going to be busy Saturday evening, I said.
Mother was furious, when I told her, at this pointed rejection of her daughter. Dad said little, but I knew he was angry, too. I felt even more depressed, for at the time it seemed to me that Gene’s mother must feel that I was a girl who, unlike her son, had no future. In later years I wondered if perhaps she thought my relationship with a young man six years older than I had been more intimate than it actually was and that I might be a bad influence on her son. Mother, who had always said, “A girl’s most valuable possession is her good name,” should have understood.
After that episode, I no longer wanted to go to parties but went, trying to avoid Gerhart by going with one of the girls whose father was driving her. Once when Gerhart had to arrive late because of his working hours, Mother informed me I must let him bring me home. If I did not, she would call off the party she was “having” me give. The guests had been invited, so I complied.
That Sunday after my own party, when Gerhart telephoned, I said, “Please don’t come back. I don’t want to see you again.” I felt heavy and exhausted as I spoke.
Gerhart, calling from the private home where he rented a room, answered in a tight voice, “Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“That is quite all right,” he said. I knew he was having trouble sounding casual, as if nothing were wrong, for the benefit of the family he lived with.
At first I experienced the debilitating fatigue that follows the end of an emotional ordeal. I wanted to sleep or sit staring out the window. This was followed by light-hearted relief. My hurt by Gene’s mother did not cut very deep; her son was not that important to me. I did not care if I never went to another high school party. I did not care if I could not live up to Mother’s expectations of popularity. I did not care what the neighbors thought when they no longer saw cars parked in our driveway.
At first Mother said sadly, “Well, if that’s the way you really feel about him…” Of course it was. I had been trying to tell her for months. She passed on the news to her friends.
I had such trouble concentrating on my studies that in addition to keeping a diary, I began to write to pen pals I had acquired through Camp Fire Girls, an organization I had dropped. I wrote to the girl in Minnesota and to the English girl, who passed my name on to a boy in Accra on the Gold Coast (now Ghana) of Africa. Through my French class, I began to write in laborious French, with the copious use of n’est-ce pas, to a girl in Paris.
These pen pals made Mother nervous. “Never write in a letter anything you aren’t willing to see on the front page of a newspaper,” she advised. She also worried, “What if these people come to Portland and expect us to put them up?” In Oregon, fruits, vegetables, and out-of-town people were “put up.”
I wrote on and on. The girl in Minnesota, with her tales of parties, tap-dancing, and canoeing, was probably trying to create the same happy-American-girl stereotype I was striving for in silly letters I was writing her.
When the boy in Africa sent me half the skin of a small animal with long, glossy black hair, which Dad thought must be a monkey skin, Mother was horrified. “It might attract moths,” she said.
I refused to throw the skin away, wrapped it in tissue paper, and hid it in a drawer. In writing to my pen pals, I was trying to reach out to a wider world beyond northeast Portland, Oregon, where, in those Depression days, travel was a trip to the coast or, for the prosperous, a trip to California. That furred skin somehow was proof that, as geography books said, the world was large and full of many different people.
Then Mother began to say she missed Gerhart. She wished he would come over to see her. He did come, I suspect because she invited him. Grimly I cloistered myself in the breakfast nook with diary, notepaper, and a pile of books and refused to come out. Gerhart invented excuses for coming over—he needed to use my typewriter; he wanted to bring Mother a magazine. I refused to see him.
Finally Mother, over my objections, invited him to Christmas dinner. “Poor Gerhart,” she said. “I don’t like to think of him eating Christmas dinner alone in a restaurant.”
When Gerhart arrived, Mother, busy in the kitchen, sent me to open the door for him. He had brought a sprig of mistletoe, which he held over my head. “I get a kiss!” he said.
I backed away. “No you don’t!”
He grabbed me hard with one arm while holding the mistletoe over my head with his other hand. I fought, and fought with all my strength. I wanted to cry out to my father, sitting in the corner of the dining room, but I was afraid to. My father was a strong man with heavy fists, who, although he did not say so to me, disliked Gerhart. Gerhart dropped the mistletoe and, with the strength of both his arms, forced his kiss on me. I no longer disliked him. I despised him.
Dinner was miserable for all of us. Gerhart sat in sullen silence and, when he did speak, talked of Jehovah’s Witnesses. I was too angry to talk. Afterward Mother complained that Gerhart had ruined her day, and after she had worked so hard to prepare a nice dinner, too.
I spent the rest of Christmas vacation on a required essay to be entered in the Gorgas Memorial Essay Contest. The subject was “The Past Benefits and Future Importance to Man of the Control of Disease-bearing Mosquitoes.” I resented every word of it.
Still Gerhart persisted in coming to our house. I remained in the breakfast nook, toiling over Practice Leaves in English, the only workbook we used in twelve years in the public schools. Because senior English was the year of the essay, I labored over such topics as “Macbeth’s Worst Enemy” and “Could Beowulf Make the Team?”
Teachers were concerned about me. One of my former biology teachers hired me to grade papers and, when she paid me, always said, “This is for your college fund.” My sociology teacher, after I handed in an interview with Virginia’s father (who worked for a lumber company) on communism, labor problems, and company unions in the lumber industry, told me I must go to college. Mr. Bittner, the principal, sent me with a group of students “representative of Grant” to spend a day at Oregon State College.
The afternoon I came home from school and discovered my monkey skin was missing from my drawer, I exploded into a confrontation with Mother. “Where is it?” I demanded. “What did you do with my monkey skin?”
Mother remained calm and righteous. “I threw it in the garbage,” she said. “I didn’t want it in the house.”
“It was beautiful, and it was my monkey skin!” I stormed. “You had no right to throw it away. You had no right to go through my drawers!”
“I didn’t want it in my house,” repeated Mother, undismayed by my anger, “and you needn’t look at me like that!”
Her house. Why didn’t she say “our house”? Years of pent-up anger roiled within me, but as always I felt hopeless. I said no more about the monkey skin.
For the first time, my grades dropped to straight G’s instead of the usual mixture of E’s and G’s. “Mother and Dad aren’t going to like this,” I said, showing my report card to Claudine. Lucky Claudine. Her parents felt her grades were her business, not theirs.
“Tell them now,” advised Claudine. “Maybe they will forget by the weekend.”
Mother would not forget, I knew, until I brought my grades up during the next quarter.