Anybody Can Do Anything (18 page)

Mary and Dede and I got our shoes in cheap stores that carried pretty good imitations of Andrew Geller and I. Miller for $1.98 if you could stand the pain and didn’t go out in the rain. The $1.98 Andrew Geller’s and I. Miller’s required a great deal of breaking in, in fact almost complete demolition before you achieved anything approaching comfort, but they looked very nice. I remember a pair of green Lizagator pumps I bought that lasted well, but took over two months of breaking in by the whole family before I could walk across the room in them without fainting from the pain.

We had a little shoemaker in our neighborhood who would do anything to our shoes, short of half or whole soling, for fifteen cents and many’s the morning we waited in our stocking feet in the breakfast nook while Anne or Joan or Alison ran up to Mr. Himmelman’s with our shoes.

“There,” Mr. Himmelman would say, polishing the shoes on his sleeve after he had sewed up the side or put on heel tips. “Just like new, eh?” And Alison or Anne or Joan would bound up the front steps, slam the front door and hand us our shoes saying “Just like new, eh?” no matter what they looked like.

One time I bought myself a pair of brown suede ties which looked very nice but were apparently made of suede-finished scratch paper because the first day I wore them it poured and rained and my feet got soaked and the next morning when I went to tighten the laces of my new shoes the holes came out and hung on the lacings like little gold beads.

“Hurry and take these to Mr. Himmelman,” I told Alison. “Tell him to bore new holes or something.”

But Mr. Himmelman told Alison, “These are not shoes. These are just imitation shoes. Bah, no good. Tell your sis I’m sorry I cannot do a thing.”

Last winter I paid $49.50 for a pair of real alligator pumps and though they are comfortable and have stayed sewed even in snow, I miss those old exciting days when a sudden storm might mean the dissolving of my brand-new pair of brown simu-calf pumps and leave me standing at a busy intersection in my stocking feet.

13: “Now Listen, Mother, It’s Only A Fifteen Minute A Day Program”

During those years when we were all living at home, Mother managed to keep reasonably busy. She took care of my two children, made beds, washed dishes, cut the lawn, gardened, washed, ironed, cooked, marketed, sewed, darned, fed and administered veterinarily to our household pets, which included at one time three dogs, four cats, a canary, two guinea pigs, a white rabbit and a mallard duck, and fed and administered homeopathically to her five children, our house guests who often stayed five years, and an adopted sister.

For recreation Mother listened to dreams, helped with homework, heard long, often dull, stories about jobs and lovers, listened to the radio, made sketches, grew primroses, read all the new books and almost every magazine published, attended family-night movies and entered contests.

For years we all saved wrappers and box tops and Mother wrote twenty-five words or less on Why I Like Ivory, Lux, Camay and Oxydol, and had gentle unselfish dreams of what she would do with the ten thousand dollars or the new cars she would win. But not until the Old Gold contest came along and she accompanied her entry with a letter stating, “I am a little old grandmother who smokes two packages
of Old Golds a day” (and coughs constantly) and won fifty dollars and a flat of Old Golds, did she have any success.

With the fifty dollars, Mother bought a new clock for her bedside table and paid off some of her more insistent “at the doors.” The clock, which had numerals that shone in the dark, immediately began pointing out to Mother how late she was going to bed and how early she was getting up, so she put it in Mary’s and my room, in which location it became a symbol of her cleverness instead of a reminder of her hard lot.

We were very tolerant about Mother’s contests but we were not at all nice about her radio programs. “How can an intelligent woman listen to that drool?” we would yell as we turned off Stella Dallas, who in spite of years spent with the finest families in Boston still said “we was” and “I
seen
it” and called her daughter “Lolly Baby.”

When we turned off Mother’s programs, she would sigh and say, “Oh, well, they’ll be doing the same things tomorrow, anyway.”

“But Mother,” we’d wail, “they’re so corny.”

“I don’t remember asking you for your opinion,” Mother would say. “And I find them very relaxing. It’s like having someone read aloud to me while I do my borish housework.”

The one serial we didn’t object to was “Vic and Sade,” an extremely witty, very original little program that had none of the kidnappings, killings, trials, bawling, poisonings, or dreadful little children that graced the other daily droolers. In fact, was so clever and cheerful it was finally taken off the air.

Then there came the day when Mary switched from direct mail to radio advertising and we were sorry we had ever made Mother turn the radio off and were grateful for every minute she had spent with Ma Perkins, who said, “Upuratah, upuratah” when she wanted to telephone, with Helen Trent, who was trying to find romance, though over thirty-five (by actual count about fifty-two), or “Just plain [dull] Bill.”

As soon as Mary had launched herself in radio she started in on the rest of us. First it was merely a matter of listening. Every afternoon Mary told Seattle housewives about good bargains in half soling, denture cleaner and rat poison and every evening told her family that we were indifferent, uncooperative, unappreciative and unprogressive because we forgot to listen to her. “Did you listen to my program?” she’d ask us at dinner, and we’d all say yes whether we had or not and then she’d check on us. “What was today’s big bargain?” she’d ask and if we didn’t know she’d slam her napkin down beside her plate and say, “How can I expect to reach the ears of a million housewives when I can’t even get my own family to listen to me?” and we’d feel ashamed of ourselves and vow to do better. The one time we all did remember to tune in on Mary she said, “You must come down and see our imported English tin setter sweats,” which fact we joyfully reported to her.

Then through her own program, Mary got some singing spots for Dede, whose voice was so beautiful when she sang “Boy of Mine” in an attempt to get people to come down and buy boys’ underwear on sale for forty-nine cents that we all cried, and Dede, who got seven fan letters, began wearing green eyeshadow in the daytime.

Naturally, after such a start, Mary expected Dede to go right to the top in radio, but though she got her many auditions for regular programs, invariably the sponsors, a most unprogressive lot, would listen to Dede and then choose some wiggly soprano singing “From the Land of the Sky-Blue Water” to advertise their chocolate syrup or flea powder.

In the interim Mary found Dede a job folding horoscopes and stuffing them into envelopes and though the horoscope company was within walking distance of the house and didn’t object to Dede’s singing occasional radio spots, they
only paid her eight dollars a week and they didn’t have a restroom.

“I’ll have to have either a better job or a better bladder,” Dede said finally, and so Mary again began scouting around and at last got her an interview with the head of the continuity department for one of Seattle’s biggest radio stations. Dede, who had spent ten of her seventeen years crouched in front of a radio, displayed, in her initial interview, such an amazing knowledge of all radio programs, especially who played what, how and where, that she was immediately hired and given the full responsibility of writing flowing sentences about biscuit mix and bread dough to be read by throaty-voiced announcers in front of a musical back drop. Because of her vast experience and the high calibre of her work she was paid ninety dollars a month and given an occasional sack of flour.

Mary naturally turned next to her old standby, her most faithful jack of no trades and master of nothing, me. “Canada Dry wants you to write them a terribly funny radio program,” she told me one night at dinner. “Why me?” I said. “I never drink ginger ale.” “Radio,” Mary said, “is the most important discovery of all time. It is the greatest advertising medium of the age and offers the most magnificent opportunities to all talented people. For anybody to sit home and not take advantage of radio is so unbelievably stupid I don’t even wish to contemplate it.”

Dede said, “Anyway look at me. Do I eat biscuits?” I said, “Who shall I talk to in Canada Dry?” Mary said, “Oh, you won’t have to see anybody in Canada Dry because actually they don’t even know about the program yet. The point is that we have a half-hour spot we want to sell them and I told our production manager that I’d get him a program if he’d arrange the audition.”

So I wrote two skits which were probably not very funny
but were certainly not improved nor abetted by the services of the two no-sense-of-humor “drahma” students imported for the audition.

“Hahnd me that cahn of peppah, Chollie,” intoned the female drahma student speaking from her diaphragm and tossing her lips back from her clenched teeth. “Wheech cahn, deah?” replied her cohort, raising one eyebrow and stroking his pimply chin. If the Canada Dry people were there they were certainly nice about it and left quietly without any fuss at all.

Then one day Mary sold a large department store on the idea of a daily radio serial, to be cast from their employees, directed by Mary, and written by er . . . uh . . . er . . . Mother—Mary decided on the spur of the moment as she sold the program.

When the advertising manager asked to see the script, Mary said, “I left it at the office, but we’ll start auditioning tomorrow morning and you can read it then.”

He said, “Fine, fine,” and Mary rushed to the nearest phone and called Mother, who was out raking leaves, watching the children and exercising the mallard duck, which someone obviously not familiar with the family had given us alive and expected us to kill and eat.

Mary said, “Mother, could you write a fifteen minute a day radio serial?”

Mother said, “Why, I don’t know. I’ve never given it much thought.”

Mary said, “Well, dear, I’ve just sold the program and I have to have a script tomorrow. It’s for a department store and you can have as many characters as you want because we’re going to cast from the employees. The program should have suspense and it should be funny. The girl who is the lead at the Playhouse works in the book department, which is a help. Will you do it, Mother?”

Mother said, “How much is fifteen minutes’ continuity?”

Mary said, “Gosh, I don’t know. You’re the one who listens to the ‘daily droolers.’ Anyway, there should be only about twelve minutes of continuity—the rest of the time is for introduction, advertising, etc.”

Mother said, “Well, it would certainly be easier if you could give me an idea about how many pages I’ll have to write. I can’t tell much from the ‘droolers’ because they can drag a choking spell out for two weeks.”

Mary said, “Well, write the first episode and we’ll all read and time it tonight. We can add or subtract what we need.”

Mother said, “I wish we could afford to have the lawn-mower sharpened. It just chews the grass off.”

Mary said, “You write this program for me and you can afford to have it sharpened every day if you want to.”

“Oh, am I to be paid?” Mother asked, cheering up considerably.

“Naturally,” Mary said. “You’ll get twenty-five dollars a week.”

“My,” said Mother, “it’s just like winning one of those one-hundred-dollars-a-month-for-life contests.”

“I always knew that some day I’d find a job for you, Sydney,” Mary said, laughing.

So Mother laid aside her rake, put the duck in the basement, fed the children, put them down for their naps and then sat down in the breakfast nook and wrote the first episode of “Schuyler Square.”

It was charming, it was funny and it had suspense. After dinner that night we read, Mary timed and Mother made the necessary changes.

The next day the advertising manager signed the contract and for the next year, five nights a week, about ten or eleven or one or two o’clock, Mother would slide into the breakfast nook to drink coffee, to smoke millions of cigarettes, to cough and to write, in her absolutely unreadable handwriting, her twenty pages on both sides of radio continuity. We never had meatloaf again.

14: “Let Nothing You Dismay”

Our family are great ones for Christmas and even during the depths of the depression we managed to indulge in our annual Christmas-tree-getting excursion and accompanying fight, carol-singing and oyster stew on Christmas Eve, and a Christmas morning with a nice little pile of presents (usually ninety-nine per cent made-it-myselfs and often still warm from the hands of the maker) under the tree for each member.

Every year we talked about starting our Christmas shopping or present-making in August, but inevitably two or three o’clock Christmas morning would find some of us, aided by Mother, putting the finishing touches on a doll dress or a blouse or an apron, knitting a pair of mittens or wrapping up a little rock-hard fruit cake, the biggest surprise about which when opened was that though it felt and cut like it, it hadn’t been wrapped in the pan after all.

I was so sentimental about Christmas that I used to feel my heart swelling and filling my whole chest when at last it was Christmas Eve, the Christmas tree was dragged into the living room and the wonderful woodsy fragrance from its bruised branches mingled and eventually displaced the regular family smell, or one of the children excitedly announced carolers and we all rushed out and stood shivering
on the front porch while high eager distant voices sang “Silent Night” and “Joy to the World.”

My skin drew tight and I would get a gulpy feeling in my throat as Mother read the first words of “ ‘Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house . . .” and even now with just a little thought I can taste that peculiar flavor somewhere between wintergreen and hair oil (so aptly described by Gammy as “assabass”) that distinguishes those log-shaped hard candies with a flower stamped in the middle found only in the little mesh bags distributed at church, school or community Christmas parties.

All my memories of Christmas are happy ones except for the one in 1933, just after I had begun to work for the Government.

It was in October that Mary came bursting through the front door and announced, “This is the biggest thing that has ever happened to any of us. Western Trucking has given me carte blanche to put on the most enormous Christmas party I can think up. I’m going to have a Christmas tree that will reach to the ceiling of the Civic Auditorium; I’m going to have door prizes of cars, washing machines, radios, bicycles, dolls, sets of dishes and wrist watches; I’m going to have all the Betty Jeans and Charma Lous in the state on the stage singing, dancing, reciting or playing their a-cordeens; I’m going to have the A Cappella Choir singing Christmas carols; I’m going to send calliopes and sound trucks tootling all over the state; I’m going to put spot announcements on every radio station; I’m going to invite everybody; I’m going to provide transportation for all shut-ins; and
every single person in this family is going to help.”

“My tap shoes are rusty and Mother gave away my violin but I’ll do my best,” Alison said.

“Just hand me a microphone and ask me,” Dede said, clearing her throat.

“We can sing ‘Silent Night’ in German and we know all the verses of ‘Away in a Manger,’ “ Anne and Joan said.

Cleve said, “Betty’ll be glad to cut your Christmas tree when she gets ours. What did you have in mind, something with a trunk about four feet in diameter or do you want one as big as ours?” (I have a weakness for large Christmas trees and a loathing for either table trees or the one-stalk-one-picker kind sold in most lots—Cleve’s bitterness stemmed from his usually having to yard my trees out of the woods.)

I said, “I’d love to help, but when? What about my job?”

Mary said, “We’ll do the whole thing after work and on weekends.”

“Will we have a chance to win any of the cars or wrist-watches?” Mother asked.

“I’m afraid not,” Mary said. “Members of families are always excluded. However, I’ll get twenty-five dollars a week extra while I’m working on this and a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar bonus when the party’s over, which will come in very, very handy for Christmas.”

“Then can I have ice skates?” Alison asked.

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Mary said. “In fact I think this year we’ll all have quite a few ‘boughten’ presents.” My but we were excited and eager to help.

So, one rainy Saturday afternoon in November Mary escorted me to a large empty warehouse owned by Western Trucking and located on the waterfront, rolled aside one of the huge front doors, took me into the murky interior, switched on a feeble light, showed me a mountainous stack of announcements of the Christmas party and said, “You can start folding these announcements and putting them in these envelopes.” She indicated boxes holding several hundred thousand envelopes. “I’m going out to round up some calliopes.”

“Ugh, what a depressing place to work,” I said, looking at
the eleven-watt globe suspended from the dim distant ceiling and the enormous cavernous interior of the warehouse.

“It’s the best I could do,” Mary said. “Western didn’t want a lot of strange people tramping around in their offices over the weekends, so they offered me this.”

“Didn’t they have something just a little larger?” I said looking down the five-hundred-foot vista of emptiness and gloom. “This seems so cramped.”

Mary said, “Usually this building is jammed with stuff but this month they’ve nothing in it but apples and rats, the watchman told me. Which, of course, is why I’m putting on the Christmas party. I’ll bring them so much business they won’t be able to handle it all.”

“Wharf rats carry bubonic plague,” I said, settling myself sadly on the high stool placed in front of an empty wooden packing box which was to be my office.

Mary said, “Rats don’t come near light.”

“In which case,” I said, “would you mind if I lighted matches to supplement that flashlight bulb up there?”

Mary laughed, picked up her gloves and said, “I’ll hurry as fast as I can. If you hear someone walking around don’t be nervous, it’s the watchman.”

She left and I set to work. The announcements were pale green and on paper of a blottery texture which harbored no errors in folding. However, by crumpling three I learned just where to fold and crease to make each announcement fit exactly into its envelope and come out announcing. The light was very bad, the small single suspended globe only lighting, or rather making barely visible, an area about four feet in diameter. The warehouse was unheated and so draughty my hands soon grew woodeny and unskillful, my feet icy lumps at the bottom of my legs. All around me there was an intermittent tapping noise which could have been either rain on the roof or rats. Over all hung the thick, sweet, sickish smell of rotting apples.

As with all monotonous jobs the work seemed to go with incredible slowness, so I invented little ways to spur myself on. I timed myself. I counted the announcements. I folded in time to music I hummed, and finally I said, “Now I’m going to put little markers about six inches apart on this stack and I’ll see if I can get to the tenth marker before Mary comes back.”

I was on the twentieth marker and it was after five o’clock when, at last, with a low rumbling one of the huge doors was pulled back and I made out the outline of a female figure slipping through the opening. In great relief I called across the darkness. “Mary, is that you? Where have you been?” My words swooshed around in the empty building like dry leaves in a barrel. There was no answer. I could hear the click of high heels and could make out a dim approaching shape but though I called again, “Mary, is that you?” there was no response.

It was not far from the doorway to where I sat under my suspended firefly of light but I strained my eyes in the gloom and waited long minutes for my mute visitor to identify herself. She certainly wasn’t hurrying. Was in fact almost sauntering, which seemed somehow sinister.

When at last she came into my small circle of light she revealed herself to be a total stranger in a leopard coat and looking unpleasantly like a seagull. The same grayish white skin, close-set pale gray eyes, thin curved nose, slit mouth and no chin. To further the illusion she had covered her small narrow head with a white woolen knitted scarf pulled tight and knotted under the chin and was wearing white string gloves. Emerging from the scarf and clinging wetly to her forehead was a fringe of lustreless jet-black hair. I waited for her to speak but for a minute or two she just stood and looked at me with her pale gull’s eyes.

Finally desperately I said, “Who are you? What do you want?”

She said, “Who are you?”

I said, “I’m Betty Bard.”

She said, “What are you doing here?”

I said, “I’m mailing out announcements for the Western Trucking Company’s Christmas party.”

She said, “Oh.”

I said, “Who are you?”

She said, “I’m Dorita Hess. I work for Western Trucking. How much do you weigh?”

I thought she must be joking, but her voice was as monotonous, as devoid of inflection as a taxi meter, so I couldn’t tell.

“Why do you want to know how much I weigh?” I asked.

“I like to know about people,” she said. “I always ask questions.”

“I weigh one hundred and twenty-three,” I said, laughing. “I wear a seven shoe and I don’t like meatloaf.”

Dorita didn’t smile. She said, “Is there another stool? I’m supposed to help you.”

I said, “I’ll look around.” I stood up, stretched to get some of the stiffness out of my back and clumped off into the darkness on my icy feet. After a bit my eyes became accustomed to the gloom and I could see a little but I walked slowly and gingerly, listening for rats. At the back, along one side, I found a few wooden boxes but they were filled with trash and I was afraid to touch them for fear they also held rats. Once I thought I had found an empty box and I turned to call to Dorita. She was sitting on my stool fumbling for something in her purse.

“I think I’ve found an empty box,” I called loudly. At the sound of my voice Dorita jumped up, dropped her purse, grabbed up one of the announcements and began studying it. I kicked at the empty box and something dark leaped smoothly, fluidly over the side and melted into the darkness. That was enough. I ran back to the light and
said to Dorita, “I’m afraid to look any more. A rat jumped out of that last box.” Dorita laughed. It was a gulping mirthless sound more like sobbing than laughing.

“Here,” I said. “You take the stool and I’ll sit on some of these envelope boxes.”

“Okay,” said Dorita, sitting down on the stool and not offering to help me move the envelope boxes.

By shifting and moving things I fixed us each a place to work. Then I showed Dorita how to crease the announcements. “Make the first fold on the word ‘welcome’ and the second on ‘Come all,’ “ I said. “That way it will just fit the envelope.” Dorita was humming tunelessly and looking over my left shoulder.

I said, “Do you see what I mean?”

She said, “Millions of rats. I can hear them everywhere.”

“That’s rain on the roof,” I said not very convincingly.

“It is not,” she said. “It’s the rats. I see their eyes shining in the dark.”

“Where,” I said nervously.

“There,” she said. “Behind you.”

As I turned to look I saw out of the corner of my eye one of her white-gloved hands flash out as quick as a snake’s tongue and knock my stack of announcements off the packing box. But Dorita said, “Oops, look what you did.”

The announcements slapped to the floor and fanned out into the darkness. I didn’t relish the thought of kneeling down and feeling around on that dark floor with my bare hands for them. I put on my gloves and seeing that Dorita still had on hers I asked her to help me. She laughed the gulping ugly laugh and said, “You spilled them. You pick them up.”

I said, “I saw you knock them off the table, Dorita.”

She said, “You did not. You never did.” Her voice held no conviction—in fact no inflection of any kind. She might have been saying, “Hand me the ink.”

I said, “Dorita, I saw you spill those announcements. What was the idea?”

She said, “I did it for a joke,” then made the funny gulping noise which from the floor where I was kneeling sounded so much like something stemming from grief that I looked up at her sharply. There was no joy in her face but her eyes blazed and her gloved hand covered her mouth. She was laughing all right.

I said, “I don’t think it’s funny. I’m tired.”

She said, “I’ve got ten fur coats. You can borrow them any time.”

I said, “No thanks.”

She said, “Here, put on this leopard.” She yanked off her coat and dropped it down on my shoulders. I tried to shrug it off but she leaned over, grabbed the two lapels and began pulling the coat tight around my neck. I could feel the warmth from her body still in the coat. I could smell her oily body smell; I could feel her breath in my face not unpleasant but sweetish and warm like a dentist’s assistant’s. I stood up, jerked the coat off and threw it at her, just as Mary called out from the front door, “Hi, Bets, I’m sorry I’m so late.”

Like a flash Dorita slipped into her coat, buttoned it and was demurely folding announcements when Mary got to our lighted spot. Mary said, “Oh, Dorita, I didn’t know you were coming down here.”

Dorita said, “Mr. Ajax asked me to help.”

Mary said, “That’s wonderful, it’s awfully lonely for Betty down here.”

Dorita said, “Betty doesn’t like me. She doesn’t want me to help her.”

I said, “That’s not true. I just don’t like your knocking my announcements off on the floor.”

Dorita said, “I didn’t knock them off. You knocked them with your sleeve.”

Mary looked puzzled. She said, “You two aren’t quarreling are you?”

“Heavens, no,” I said.

Dorita said, “Let’s all go and get a cup of coffee. I know a little place just a block from here.”

I said, “Wait until I pick up these announcements.”

Mary said, “Here, I’ll hold a match. Oh, darn, I’ve only got one. Have you got any, Dorita?”

Dorita said, “No, I didn’t bring a purse.”

I was fumbling in my purse for matches when it suddenly dawned on me that if Dorita didn’t have a purse, then it must have been my purse she was looking in while I was back in the warehouse trying to find her something to sit on.