Anybody Can Do Anything Read online

  My stomach felt ice cold and my heart seemed to have moved up into my head. ‘Thump, thump, thump’, it was hammering just behind my eyes. Mary had promised me on her word of honour that if I jumped off high enough things often enough, I would be able to fly like the man in the vaudeville show. She had started me jumping off fences, the woodshed roof and our high front porch, and as I jumped more and more I was less scared but I hadn’t noticed that I landed any more gently.

  Mary had said that some day when I jumped from a high enough place it would suddenly be just like a dream and I would float to earth. This was to be the big test, and if this dream came true and I floated, then there was a good chance that my dreams of having jet black curls down to my ankles and an entire Irish lace dress over a bright pink satin petticoat like the night watchman’s little girl, might come true. Anyway it had been Mary’s best selling point.

  “Come on, Betsy, dear”, she was calling. “I’ll count for you and when I get to ten you jump.” I looked down at the upturned admiring faces of the neighbourhood children as Mary began counting in loud ominous tones. “Oneh, two-ah, three-ah.” I took a deep breath, closed my eyes and jumped when she got to ten-ah. I did not fly. I landed hard on the pile of straw and two tines of the hidden rake went through my foot. Mary and Marjorie, truly appalled by their carelessness, carried me all the way home. At least Mary carried me and Marjorie held up the handle of the rake.

  When we got home Mother called the doctor and while we waited for him I soaked my foot in a basin of hot Epsom salts and water and Gammy comforted me by saying, “Cheeldrun are nothing but savages. It won’t surprise me at all if they have to cut off Betsy’s legs.”

  “Not both legs”, Mary said. “Only one.” I had been very brave up to this point but now I began to bawl. “I don’t want to have my leg cut off and only wear one roller skate”, I sobbed.

  Mary said, “Never mind, Betsy, dear, we’ll make a little tiny roller skate for your crutch and in winter I’ll pull you to school on the sled.” Which, to her dismay, only made me bawl louder.

  Then the doctor arrived, examined my foot and gave me a tetanus shot; Daddy came home, examined my foot and gave Mary a spanking with the bristle side of the brush; Mother wiped away my tears, said of course my legs weren’t going to be cut off and called Gammy an old pessimist, which immediately cheered Mary and me because we thought pessimist was a bad word like bastard.

  My next memory of being Mary’s test pilot was the following summer, while visiting friends who lived in a small town in the mountains near an abandoned mine. “Don’t ever go near the mine”, we were cautioned. “There is no place as dangerous for children as a mine. Any mine. Particularly an old one with deep, dark, rotten shafts and rusty unsafe machinery.” “We won’t go near the mine”, we promised and we didn’t.

  We went wading in the creek. We went fishing. We stuck leeches on our legs because Mary believed it purified us. We picked Indian paintbrush and Mariposa lilies. We took our new pocket-knives and made willow whistles. We watched out for rattlesnakes and bulls and we did not go near the mine.

  Then one lovely hot summer’s day, Mary and I decided to go huckleberrying. Dressed in overalls and straw hats and each swinging by its wire handle a little lard pail with a lid, we started off. It was a wonderful day.

  The sun was hot and the air was filled with the delicious smell of hot pine needles and huckleberry juice. We found a big spruce gum tree and prised off mildewed-looking hunks and chewed them. We found the bitter pitchy flavour of the gum mixed well with the tart huckleberries. We also found that we could lie on our backs under the huckleberry bushes and scrape the berries into our buckets. The berries went plink, plink, plunk, and it was as easy as shelling peas. We moved from bush to bush by sliding along on the slick brown pine needles. Chipmunks chattered at us and bright green darning needles darted around our heads. We chewed our big wads of spruce gum and were happy.

  Then Mary saw the flume.

  “What’s that big thing over there?” she said, rolling over on her stomach and pointing below us on the mountainside. It looked like a long grey dragon slithering down the side of the mountain. We decided to investigate. We put the lids on our little lard pails and started down the hill.

  The flume, used to carry water down to the mine, had once been up on high supports, but just at this point a small rock slide had knocked the rotting supports away and the flume had broken in two, and the bottom part now sloped down the mountainside like a giant clothes chute. The inside, stained a cool green (by the water it used to carry) was actually very hot and as slippery as glass with the dry pine needles that had drifted into it.

  Side by side, Mary and I knelt down and peered into the flume. I could taste the salty perspiration on my upper lip as I chewed my spruce gum and wondered if the flume was endless. From where we were it seemed to go on for ever, growing smaller and smaller until it was just a tiny black square in the distance. Mary shouted into it and her voice came back to us with a hollow roar. ‘Ahhhhh,ooooo.’ Then Mary said, her voice tight with excitement, “What a wonderful place to slide. Just like a giant chute the chutes!”

  I said nothing but my stomach had a funny feeling. I backed out of the mouth of the flume and sat down on the rock slide in the hot sun. Little rocks, loosed by my feet, went clittering off down the mountain. Far overhead in the bright blue sky an eagle circled in big lazy circles. Then Mary, still kneeling, pulled herself into the mouth of the flume but holding on tight to each side. “You’d have to go belly buster”, she said speculatively as she measured herself with the opening.

  “What do you mean you?” I said.

  Mary didn’t answer.

  “Daddy said flumes are dangerous”, I said edging still further away from it.

  Mary said, “He didn’t mean this flume, Betsy dear, he meant flumes that go into dams or end up in waterfalls. Of course, those flumes are very, very dangerous, but this old thing,” she patted the flume like an old dog, “is perfectly safe, just look at it, Betsy.”

  Cautiously I again knelt and peered down into the long green tunnel and it did seem much safer. At least it was perfectly quiet and I couldn’t hear the roar of any waterfalls.

  “Let’s just slide a little way in it and then crawl out again”, Mary suggested.

  “You go first”, I said.

  “Now, Betsy, dear”, Mary always called me ‘Betsy, dear’ when she was going to will me to do some ghastly thing. “I’m the biggest and strongest so I’d better stay outside and hold your feet and help you.”

  “You go first”, I repeated stubbornly.

  Mary said, “This is going to be more fun than anything we’ve ever done. We’ll slide down just like a train in a tunnel. Zip and we’ll be at the bottom. Criss-cross your heart you’ll never tell anyone about our secret chute.”

  As I criss-crossed my thumping heart, I had a sudden fleeting feeling that all this had happened before. Mary’s eyes sparkled. She said, “We’ll bring Cleve and Gammy up here and when they aren’t looking we’ll jump into our chute and when they try to find us we’ll be at the bottom of the mountain.” We both peered into the flume again. Referring to it as ‘our chute’ seemed to make it less dangerous and it didn’t seem quite so bottomless and scary now. Mary said, “If a bear or anything should chase us we could jump right in this chute and it’d never catch us.”

  I said, “But where does it come out?”

  Mary said, “Oh, probably in a big pile of sand.” One summer when we were camping in the mountains we had played on an old ore chute that ended in a pile of sand, but I didn’t think of that at the time, and thought that maybe Mary really knew where this chute ended.

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  She changed the subject by looking up into a tall pine tree close at hand. “I wonder if we could fix some kind of a rope that would pull us back up the hill?” she said. I said, “We could fix one of those pulleys like we fixed to send notes on.”

  Mary
said, “Oh, Betsy, you’re so smart! That’s just what we could fix and then we’d slide down, pull ourselves up, slide down, pull ourselves up. Up, down, up, down. Why we could even charge like the merry-go-round at Columbia Gardens”, she added as a final persuasion. Why didn’t all that up-down stuff make me remember the experiment in perpetual motion? How could I have been such a dupe and a dope?

  Mary said, “Come on, Betty, hurry and get in before Gammy and Cleve get here. You know Gammy said she’d walk up this way before supper.”

  I climbed in headfirst. “Grab my feet”, I yelled at Mary. But it was too late. The hot dry pine needles were very slick. In a second I had slithered out of reach. Down I went into the long, endless green tunnel. “Help, help, Mary, help!” I shouted and the words came roaring back at me, ‘Hulp, hulp!’ as though I were shouting into a giant megaphone. The flume grew steeper and steeper and I gained momentum until I was whizzing along, my lard pail bumping the side, my straw hat over one eye. “Help, help, help!” I called again and again to Mary but there was no answer.

  Once I slowed down and got stuck in a flat place where there were no pine needles. With swimming motions I tried to get started again but only succeeded in getting a large sliver in my thigh. I pulled my legs up under me and tried crawling. It was slow and I banged my head quite often but as my only alternative was spending the rest of my life in the flume, I kept on. Then suddenly the flume took a sharp plunge downward and I flattened out again, took the hill belly buster, rolled out (the flume was broken at the bottom) and stuck in the crack between the two parts. Slowly and shakily I got to my feet. Directly below me was the dangerous old mine. From high up the mountain I could hear Mary calling, “Betsy, Betsy, are you hurt?” as she ran toward me down the OUTSIDE of the flume.

  I grabbed my bucket and started toward her voice, determined that she was going to slide down that flume if I had to kill her first. Then from down in the valley I heard Mother calling us. “Coming”, I yelled and from up the mountain Mary answered, “Coming.”

  The sliver in my thigh was about three inches long and as thick as a darning needle and by a series of clever questions Daddy finally found out how I had got it, and sternly forbade our ever going near the flume again.

  From then on, as I remember, my life was reasonably safe except for a few minor things, such as the time Mary convinced Cleve and me that she had learned witchcraft and drew large quantities of blood from our veins and fed us smashed-up worms mixed with toenail parings.

  And the time after we had moved to Seattle that Mary and I, then ten and twelve, were dressing after swimming and she suggested that I stand naked in the window of our bedroom and wave to the President of the Milwaukee Railroad, who with his wife was being shown the garden by Mother and Daddy. When I seemed a little reluctant to extend this evidence of Western hospitality, Mary tried to convince me and somehow in the course of the convincing she pushed her head and shoulders through the window pane and we both rolled out on the roof into the heap of broken glass, stark naked and yelping like wounded dogs.

  The President of the Milwaukee Railroad and his wife, who didn’t have any children, believed our story about my catching my foot in my bathing suit and falling against Mary and forcing us both through the window, and were very sympathetic to us when we appeared for tea, swathed in bandages. Daddy, however, waited until his guests had left, then assigned us each a quota of five thousand stones to be removed from the orchard and dumped into the old well back of the barn.

  We had just dumped our five hundred and seventy-second stone into the wheelbarrow and were morosely trying to subtract 572 from 10,000 when Mary had her idea. “I’ll get all the kids in the neighbourhood in the summerhouse, you tell them Nancy and Plum (a continued story about two little orphans I’d been telling Mary in bed at night for years and years) and when you get to the most exciting place you stop and I’ll tell them you won’t go on until they each pick up a hundred stones and put them in the well.” It worked too. That afternoon we got 1,100 stones dumped in the well. The next day the smarter children didn’t show up but, by stopping twice in the story, we got the six that did come to gather two hundred stones each so we actually fared even better than the day before. By the end of the week, over six thousand stones had been dumped in the well, Nancy and Plum, who had made a harrowing escape from the orphanage, had been captured by gipsies, kidnapped by bank robbers, lost in an abandoned mine, weathered a terrible storm in a haunted house, adopted a baby who turned out to be a prince, stowed away on a boat to China and finally come to rest with a dear old farmer and his wife who had an attic full of toys, and I felt like my bath sponge when I squeezed it dry.

  Daddy’s cultural programme with lessons in piano playing, singing, folk dancing, French and ballet, added further proof to Mary’s theory that anybody can do anything and, in her case, without practising.

  Our favourite piano teacher among many, and the one we clung to longest, was a Miss Welcome, a very temperamental European who calamined her arms dead white up to within an inch of her short sleeves, dressed entirely in fuchsia colour, wore turbans with flowing veils when she taught, always had fish breath, counted on our backs with her strong fingers digging into the flesh, “Bun and boo and bree and bour”, screamed, “Feel, f-e-e-1, FEEL IT!” as she paced around the room her veils flying, her calamined arms beating out the rhythm like big plaster casts, often produced real tears (to our delight) when we made mistakes. “Oh, dear God, no, not B flat!” she’d moan, covering her face with her hands and sobbing brokenly.

  Miss Welcome never bored us with scales or exercises or any of those stupid little Pixie-in-the-Glen or Lullaby-for-Tiny-Hands type of thing. Everybody studying with her started off the very first day on some great big hard well-known piece by some great big hard well-known composer. If, by our third lesson, we couldn’t manage the full chords or the fast parts in say, Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C Sharp Minor, Miss Welcome cut them out. She cut the bottoms off octaves and the tops off grace notes without turning a hair. “Now try it”, she’d say and if we still couldn’t play it she’d take out her ever-ready pencil and x out the whole hard part. “Now,” she’d say, “let’s hear some feeeeeeeling!” and with the fervour of relief we’d bear down and pound feeling into what was left.

  Because I had long, thin hands and was so scared of Miss Welcome, I bawled at every lesson, she told me I was very, very sensitive and gave me long sad selections with enormous chords and huge reaches. “Bun and boo and bree and bour, now come on Betsy, play, play, PLAY!” she’d yell at me and I’d begin to cry. “I can’t reach the notes”, I’d sob, my long, unyielding hands trying to reach the two keys over an octave so unreasonably demanded by Schumann. “You must reach it. You CAN AND YOU MUST!” Miss Welcome would hiss spittily into my tear-stained face. I tried and tried. I practised one and two hours every day on my sad, great pieces, but my heart wasn’t in it. I didn’t want to play slow, sad things with huge chords that gave me bearing-down pains. I wanted to be like Mary, who talked back to Miss Welcome, hardly ever practised, played entirely by ear (she didn’t learn to read music until after she was married), chose her own loud, showy pieces and whose small freckled supple hands flew over the keys like lightning. Now that I think about it my sister Mary was really one of the pioneers in the field of the medley.

  When Daddy and Mother had company we children usually performed. First Dede, who had perfect pitch even at two, sang My Country ’Tis of Thee, then Cleve, until his clarinet playing had progressed to solos, recited, then Mary and I played the piano.

  I would give a sweaty-fingered uninspired performance of my latest piece exactly as it was written and exactly as Miss Welcome had taught me even to the lowered wrists, high knuckles and leaning forward and pressing heavily on the keys for depth of tone. I always knew my pieces and never made a mistake but nobody cared, I could tell from the bored rattle of newspapers, nervous scraping of chairs, even snores, so audible during the long, long, waits between notes r
equired by the dramatic Miss Welcome. “That’s very nice, Betsy”, Mother would say when at last I finished one of those interminable D.C.L. Fine Pieces where you keep playing the same thing over and over with a different ending.

  Then it was Mary’s turn. Up she would flounce to the piano and effortlessly dash off Grieg’s Carnival, Danse Nêgre, Anitra’s Dance, Le Papillon, Solfeggietto or Rustle of Spring, and everyone would say, ‘Isn’t she talented?’ and only I, in my envy, noticed that each was seasoned with the other and they all reflected strongly the influence of composer Mary Bard. Miss Welcome openly adored Mary even when Mary was talking aloud and trying to force her to believe that Grieg had written in that Chopin passage in Beethoven’s Sonata Pathétique, and she always eventually gave in to her.

  When Mother and Daddy took us to hear De Pachmann, Mary and I were so entranced with his playing of Chopin’s Third Ballade that Mary decided that she would play it in the spring recital, which was only about a month away. Miss Welcome said, “Mary, darling, you are terribly, terribly talented but the Third Ballade is too difficult and there is not enough time.” Mary said, “I’ll practise four hours a day.” Miss Welcome said, “Not enough.” Mary said, “I’ll practise eight hours a day, twelve, sixteen . . .” and finally Miss Welcome gave in and with only slight encouragement sat down at the piano and played the Third Ballade for us.

  She couldn’t hold a candle to De Pachmann in technique but she had it all over him in dramatics. For the soft parts she stroked the keys as though they were tiny dogs, and when she came to the dut-dah - dut-dah - dut-dah, dah, dada, dah, dah . . . she lifted her hands off the keys about four feet and came down on the wrong notes but the effect was very brrrright and certainly staccato. For the loud passages she used full strength and full pedal, topped off with grunting and heavy breathing. While she played, Mary and I, to keep from hurting her feelings, stifled our laughter in her purple velvet portières that smelled of mildew.