Anybody Can Do Anything
Mrs Johnson told me immediately that her ankles swelled and everything she ate talked back to her but she was going ‘up the Sound’ to get recruits for Jesus. I told her that I was going to Seattle to work in an office.
She said, “The city is a wicked place full of the works of the Devil. Stay on the farm. Jesus is on the farm.” I said that I had heard that He was everywhere but I hadn’t noticed Him on our farm. Mrs Johnson, who was busily fishing the lettuce out of her hamburger and putting it on a napkin beside her plate, said, “Praise His name! Praise His name! You can always count me out when it comes to greens. Just like ground glass in my intestynes.”
I said, “I’m going to live with my family.” She gestured with her fork and one eye toward Anne and Joan, who were quietly eating scrambled eggs, and said, “The Devil is in the city. Have those poor little tykes been babtyzed?” I said no and she said, “Throw them in. Throw them in! Wash their sins away. Praise His name.”
Just then the waitress brought her apple pie à la mode and my coffee. Tapping on my cup with her spoon she said, “I like coffee but it don’t like me. Binds me up tighter’n a drum. Without it I keep regular as clockwork, but let me drink one cup and I’m threw off for a week.” She fixed her great big good eye on me and waited and I was not sure whether she expected me to say, “Praise His name, praise His name”, or to retaliate with a list of foods that bound me up, so I said, “Wasn’t it funny on the bus when the Indian fell in the aisle?”
Mrs Johnson swelled her nostrils until they were like twin smudge pots and said, “I am going to report that driver to headquarters. He took the name of the Lord Jesus our God in Heaven in vain.” I said, “Well, he has a boil on his neck.” She said, “Poison coming out of his system. Blasphemy is a stench in the nostrils of God and I’m going to report that driver.”
I was pleased to note, when the ferry docked an hour or so later and we all climbed aboard the bus, that the only seat left for Mrs Johnson, who was late, was way at the back with the Indians, by then much drunker and much noisier and destined to be a stench in the nostrils of both Mrs Johnson and God before we reached Seattle.
It was dark and still raining when we landed. The water was grey and rough and the ferry banged into the dolphins and backed up several times before it was able to edge into the slip and the deckhands could let down the flimsy chain that had presumably kept the bus from plunging off the deck into the water.
As we rumbled on to the dock a train, bleating mournfully, and with the beam from its terrible fiery eye swinging across the water, came hurtling along the shore. The children, who had never seen a train before, were terrified. “What is it? What is it?” wailed Anne, as it streaked past, clackety, clackety, clackety, woooooo, woooooo, its lighted windows a ribbon of light in the rainy evening. “It’s a train, darling. A nice choo-choo train”, I told her comfortingly. She said, “It is not. It’s a Mickaboo full of Bojanes.”
To Anne all frightening things were Bojanes and Bojanes lived in Mickaboos, which were nailholes or tiny cracks in the floor. Now apparently Bojanes flew through the night inside fiery dragons. Anne wailed, ‘Take it away, Betty, take it away.” And I did. I shooed it around another curve and it went wooo-wooing off into the night, jerking its red tail lights along behind it. When the red warning light by the tracks stopped blinking and the gates were raised, the bus gave a lurch and we were off.
‘Going home, going home.’ I hummed to myself as the bus nosed its way along in the thin early evening traffic, its tyres saying shhhhh, shhh to the nervous wet highway, its lights making deep hollows and sudden mounds out of shadows on the smooth pavement. We went slowly and carefully through the little town by the ferry landing, then for miles and miles the road was dark with only an occasional lonely little house peering out of the night, and we sailed swiftly along.
When we hit the main highway, small boxy houses with petrol stations attached flashed by and showed cheerful glimpses of family life—mother, father and children eating supper in the breakfast nook—father reading the paper in the parlour—a baby silhouetted at the window watching the cars go by in the rain. On the highway small tacky grocery stores and vegetable stands, open late to catch an extra dribble of trade, littered the spaces between the petrol stations. Every few hundred yards or so a palely-lighted sign pleaded ‘Bud’s Good Eats’ or ‘Ma’s Home Cooking’ or ‘Mert and Bet’s Place.’
Some of the petrol stations also cosily announced ‘Wood and Coal’, and I could just make out the untidy, uncosy outlines of wet slab wood and soggy sacks of coal stacked near the petrol pumps. When the houses began to be closer together and neater and whiter, the dreary petrol pumps became lighted petrol stations, and finally once in a while the bus would stop and pant at an intersection while a traffic light, geared for a busier time of day, stopped the hurrying impatient north and south traffic and kept it teetering for a full minute at the edge of an empty highway.
At each such stop the Indians’ pushing and shoving and giggling became audible but the bus driver, though he muttered angrily, kept the bus moving back and forth like a runner making false starts before a race and, to my intense relief, didn’t take the name of Lord Jesus our God in Heaven in vain, at least not so Mrs Johnson could hear.
Both children were now asleep, their bodies warm and soft like dough against me, and I must have dozed too, for suddenly we were in down-town Seattle and lights were exploding around me like skyrockets on the Fourth of July. Red lights, blue lights, yellow lights, green, purple, white, orange, punctured the night in a million places and tore the black satin pavement to shreds. I hadn’t seen neon lights before. They had been invented, or at least put in common use, while I was up in the mountains and in that short time the whole aspect of the world had changed. In place of dumpy little bulbs sputteringly spelling out Café or Theatre, there were long swooping spirals of pure brilliant colour.
A waiter outlined in bright red with a blazing white napkin over his arm flashed on and off over a large Café. Puget Sound Power and Light Company cut through the rain and darkness, bright blue and cheery. Cafês, theatres, cigar stores, stationery stores, real estate offices with their names spelled out in molten colour, welcomed me to the city. The bus terminal was ringed in light. Portland, New York, San Francisco, Bellingham, Walla Walla, it boasted in bright red. How gay and cheerful and prosperous and alive everything looked. What a wonderful contrast to the bleak, snag-ridden, dark, rainy, lonely vista framed for four long years by the farm windows.
The children had awakened and their glazed, sleepy eyes reflected the lights as they flashed by. Then the faces of Mary and Dede appeared right outside our windows and that was the brightest rocket of all, the piêce de résistance of the entire show.
According to real estate standards Mother’s eight-room, brown-shingled house in the University district was just a modest dwelling in a respectable neighbourhood, near good schools and adequate for an ordinary family. To me that night, and always, that shabby house with its broad welcoming porch, dark woodwork, cluttered dining-room plate rail, large fragrant kitchen, easy book-filled firelit living-room, four elastic bedrooms—one of them always ice cold—roomy old-fashioned bathrooms and huge cluttered basement, represents the ultimate in charm, warmth and luxury. It’s something about Mother, who with one folding chair and a plumber’s candle, could make the North Pole homey, and it’s something about the warmth and loyalty and laughter of a big family.
It’s a wonderful thing to know that you can come home any time from anywhere and just open the door and belong. That everybody will shift until you fit and that from that day on it’s a matter of sharing everything. When you share your money, your clothes and your food with a mother, a brother and three sisters, your portion may be meagre, but by the same token when you share unhappiness, loneliness and anxiety about the future with a mother, a brother and three sisters, there isn’t much left for you.
Two things I noticed immediately. Mother still smelled like violets an
d Mary still believed that accomplishment was merely a matter of will power.
“I hear that we are sliding into a depression and that jobs are very hard to find”, I told Mary about three o’clock the next morning as she and Mother and I sat in the breakfast nook eating hot cinnamon toast and drinking coffee.
Mary said, “There are plenty of jobs but the trouble with most people, and I know because I’m always getting jobs for my friends, is that they stay home with their covers pulled up over their heads waiting for some employer to come creeping in looking for them. Anyway, what are you worrying about, you’ve got a job as private secretary to a mining engineer.”
I said, “But, Mary, I don’t know shorthand and I can only type about twenty words a minute.” Mary clunked her coffee cup into her saucer and looked directly at me with flashing amber eyes. “Leave the ninety words on the typewriter and the one hundred fifty words a minute in shorthand to the grubs who like that kind of work”, she said. “You’re lucky. You have a brain. Use it! Act like an executive and you get treated like an executive!” (And usually fired, she neglected to add.)
It was very reassuring, in spite of a sneaking suspicion I had that if put to a test I would always prove to be the grub type, not the executive, and that only by becoming so proficient in shorthand that I could take down thoughts, would I be able to hold down even a very ordinary job.
“I have been planning to go to night school”, I told Mary.
“Not necessary at all”, she said. “Experience and self-confidence are what you need and you’ll never find them at night school. Have you ever taken a look at what goes to night school? No? Well, they aren’t executives, I’ll tell you that. Now go to bed and forget about shorthand. I’ll always be able to find us jobs doing something and whatever it is I’ll show you how to do it.”
That was Mary’s slogan at home. Down town it was, ‘Just show me the job and I’ll produce a sister to do it.’ And for some years until Dede and Alison were old enough to work and she had figured how to fit Mother into her programme, I was it. That night I dreamed I was going to play in one of Miss Welcome’s recitals and I hadn’t practised and didn’t know my piece.
From two o’clock Saturday afternoon until two o’clock Monday morning, the house was filled with people. Mary, who was very popular, was being intellectual so her friends were mostly musicians, composers, writers, painters, readers of hard dull books and pansies. They took the front off the piano and played on the strings, they sat on the floor and read aloud the poems of Baudelaire, John Donne and Rupert Brooke, they put loud symphonies on