Authors: Beverly Cleary

My Own Two Feet (8 page)

BOOK: My Own Two Feet

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Worrying about living conditions would do no good, so as Mother so often advised, I took one day at a time. Except for Dr. Miller's spoiling Christmas vacation by requiring us to read
Madame Bovary
without a dictionary, the winter days, most of them, were passing happily by, interrupted by another phenomenon, almost as interesting as an earthquake. One night the notorious Santa Ana winds began to blow in from the desert. Pepper trees tossed their tousled heads, and palm fronds danced and rattled. As the winds increased, we closed all our windows and went through our usual bedtime ritual of Norma doing her exercises, putting our hair up on curlers, and listening to the news while Norma worried about her brothers.

Then we climbed into our uneven, uncomfortable bed, but that night we slept very little. The
winds increased. We felt as if we were breathing dust and our skins were drying up. We pulled the sheet over our noses. The grevillea twisted, branches broke off, clattering palm fronds were ripped away, trash cans bounced down the street. We were afraid the windows were going to blow in. Finally, when daylight came and the winds calmed, we dragged ourselves out of bed. Everything was covered with dust, and under the closed kitchen window sand was a quarter of an inch deep. Good housekeepers that we were, we cleaned it all up before we left for school, and I had another subject for a composition.

And then the first semester grades came out. I leafed through the report slips, found more A's than I really expected, even an Aâ in Conversational French, which was kindness on Dr. Miller's part, a Bâ in P.E., but who cared? And then D in Botany, a terrible shock. A D! No one gave me D's, not even P.E. teachers. It simply wasn't done, I felt, because along the path of education several teachers had told their classes that they didn't want to hear any complaints about grades because what went into our heads was more important than a grade. I believed them. I worked hard at subjects that interested me, was satisfied with disgraceless B's in others, and didn't care what I got in P.E. But a D! I would
be drummed out of the honor society. The humiliation was too much to bear.

I accosted Mr. Stanford after class. Why had he given me a D? “Because that is what you earned,” he said. I stopped and thought. There was that exam question that required us to identify samples of wood and tell how they had been sawed. I had been surprised by the question and guessed at the answers. Then there were my struggles with the microscope. I wasn't very good at using it. Mr. Stanford insisted the proper way was to look through the microscope with one eye and use the other eye for drawing what we saw. I usually gave up, looked back and forth with both eyes, and emerged from the lab feeling seasick.

No one else reeled out of the lab pale with nausea. Then I recalled that I was unable to see trees, visible to everyone else, on the mountains, so I wrote home saying I needed glasses. Mother's reply was prompt and definite. Rather than wear glasses, I was to drop out of school and come home. Never! I said no more about my eyesight.

As I stood before Mr. Stanford, I must have looked so humbled that he told me that if I raised my grade the second semester, he would average the two semester grades and give me one grade
for the year. I thanked him, determined I would manage an A.

In pursuit of that A I found a useful pamphlet called
How to Study
that advised spaced repetition and reviewing work at bedtime for subjects requiring memorization. I lugged my botany text around and went over memory work several times a day. At bedtime, while Norma exercised her body, I exercised my mind on botany.

My test grades shot up, but that left my microscope problem. I shared the microscope with a young man, Said Shaheen, who had come from Palestine to study citriculture. As I frowned through the lens, he asked me if I was “stuck up.”

Surprised, I answered, “I hope not.”

“Perhaps I can help,” he offered.

Then I realized he meant “stuck,” not “stuck up.” Together we struggled on, he with his idioms, I with the microscope.

That second semester we were to find and identify a collection of wildflowers. But where was I to find wildflowers? Atlee came to my rescue in his Rickenbacker. We drove out into the desert, where he steered with one hand, and, keeping our eyes out for flowers, we both leaned out open doors. If either of us saw a flower, he stopped while I jumped out and picked it.

Identifying desert flowers was difficult for an
Oregonian. Other students knew what they were aiming for before they started. I struggled, wishing I were studying botany in Oregon, where I was familiar with the trilliums, Johnny-jump-ups, and lady slippers of Oregon woods and pastures, and hoping the little brown book, the key to flowers, would lead me to the right answer. My semester grade was A, the D was expunged from my record, my grade for the year was B+, and I no longer felt I was in disgrace. I had learned a lesson more valuable than botany. The whole experience was humbling.

The second pitfall on the path to higher learning was the second semester of P.E. While Norma cavorted in the sunshine with hockey stick or badminton racquet, I was assigned to a tap-dancing class with other girls who would never leave their mark on the world on the playing fields of Chaffey. To borrow words from Ruth Tremaine Kegley's freshman drama class, I “hated, detested, abominated, and despised” tap dancing. At the end of the semester Mrs. Quackenbush announced that each of us was required to compose an original tap dance for our final examination.

A final in P.E., how ridiculous, I thought as rebellion rose within me. After class I approached Mrs. Quackenbush and asked, “What will happen if I don't compose a tap dance?”

She promptly squashed my small rebellion. “Then you won't graduate,” she said.

I fumed. When no one was looking, I tried to compose a tap dance, but I was no Ginger Rogers. Neither was I Shirley Temple tapping down the stairs with Bill Robinson. I was plain old me with feet heavy with resistance. On what I thought of as execution day, still not knowing how I was going to come up with an original tap dance, I borrowed a pair of tap shoes that made a reassuring clackety-clack as I walked across the gym floor. Grimly I waited my turn while other girls went through their neat composed routines. My name was called, I asked the pianist to play “A Little Bit Independent,” took a deep breath, gritted my teeth, sacrificed my integrity, and hopped, stepped, brushed, and slapped down in no particular pattern. Finally the pianist stopped. “Good,” said Mrs. Quackenbush, but I didn't believe she was referring to my dancing. Oh well. At least I passed P.E. with a semester grade of Bâ.

Years later I met a tall, somewhat awkward woman who had been given the same assignment at another junior college and refused to go through with it. She did not graduate and never finished college.

While I dragged my feet in P.E., I was eager to attempt the last assignment in English Com
position, a short story. My trouble was I couldn't think of a plot, and in those days a short story was supposed to have a plot. I thought and thought. I had lived in several settings, known a variety of people, and had a good memory for dialogue, but I could not hatch a plot.

Finally I sat down in the rocking chair, placed my feet on the gas heater, and commanded myself: Write! The first thing that came to mind was my wretched experience in the first grade when I was learning to read. I turned myself into a third-person child, miserable and frightened in the reading circle, who in desperation mispronounced
city
, calling it
kitty
even though she knew it was wrong. I wrote of the snickers of the class, the harshness of the teacher. But where was my plot? I finally fabricated an ending having the teacher ask if anyone could tell a story, something my own teacher would not have done. My timid alter ego volunteered, stood before the class, and told a folktale her mother had read to her many times. The class listened, the teacher praised her, and my story had a happy ending. Mr. Palmer gave me an unqualified A, read my story to the class, and said, “This story is nothing to be ashamed of,” lighting me with joy with this, for him, lavish praise. Without knowing it, I had begun to write the story of my life.

The semester was ending. Yearbooks were exchanged. Norma wrote a word or two beside every picture of herself. “Nut!” under the class picture, and beside others, “Roomy,” “Athlete!” “What again!” “Yes me!” Norma was no sentimentalist.

Connie wrote an honest, tender letter telling me I had been sweet to her when she didn't deserve it. She hoped I was her friend for life (I was) and that I would be “one true friend, who would sympathize and understand.”

Frank wrote a somewhat pompous message telling me I was “too perfect” and that I “would be a wonderful wife for a politician. You have every charm and quality that such a woman needs. This is not a proposalâjust an explanation.” He closed his message with “Love” and a footnote: “LoveâStrong likeing
(sic)
. The state of feeling kindly toward others.” Such caution was quite unnecessary.

As the semester drew to a close, days passed much too fast. Norma's parents drove down from Washington to see us, in our gray caps and gowns, receive our Associate of Arts diplomas.

The next morning Norma and I climbed into the backseat of her parents' car. We were both sad to leave Ontario, but this time I did not shed
tears. I was going, as Mother would say, “by hook or by crook” to Cal even if I had to live under a bush, but I wanted to remember every geranium and pepper tree, the brown mountains, and Chaffey's tower against the blue sky.

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