Free My Own Two Feet by Beverly Cleary Page B

the new women’s gym, where the subject of scandalized talk was communal showers in one large room with showerheads along two sides. There was no privacy , people said. Like most gossip, this was not entirely true. There were several stall showers for modest maidens, but many girls adjusted the showerheads so that opposing streams of water met in the center of the room, sending spray in all directions. Then they raced up and down, spluttering and splashing, dancing and leaping like nymphs. I rarely used these showers because I didn’t want to get my hair soaked.
    My metatarsal arches must have improved because I was no longer required to pick up marbles with my toes. Instead, I was assigned to a folk dancing class, which I enjoyed. To this day, whenever I hear “La Cucaracha,” I feel an urgeto spring to my feet and, with my hands on my hips, stamp out imaginary cockroaches.
    Of my courses, although I really did not count P.E., English Composition was the most absorbing. Mr. Palmer assigned us a daily three-hundred-word paper on any subject, to be poked through a slot in the locker nearest his office by three o’clock every school day. We were to do this until someone in the class earned an A. At first it was easy. I described the view from our kitchen window, the scene inside a shoe repair shop, my grandfather’s store in Oregon, the sound of palm trees at night, but as the days went by, I began to feel as if I had written everything in the world there was to write about. Still Mr. Palmer hoarded his A’s. I also began to think, but did not write, about myself in the third person: Her saddle shoes crushed pepper berries into the lawn as she walked under the feathery trees. She joined friends on the school steps, tore open her lunch bag, and bit into a peanut-butter sandwich. Bending over, she tightened the laces of her gym shoes and tied them in a neat bow before she…
    Because I was also studying psychology, I began to wonder if I might lose my mind if this went on. Finally, finally , after what seemed like weeks, Mr. Palmer announced that an A paper had been turned in. It was mine, a description ofa shabby old man shuffling through a restaurant trying to sell violets, a sad Depression scene I had witnessed when a young man named Bob had taken me to a Portland restaurant for a hamburger. People had money for hamburgers, but no one had money for violets. When Mr. Palmer read my melancholy description aloud, the class was grateful to me for commuting our sentence of a daily three hundred words.
    One day, when five dollars arrived from my grandfather, I went into a shop to buy yarn to knit Norma a pair of bed socks for Christmas because the cushions balanced on her feet often fell off, exposing her toes to the chilly night air. Knitting was popular at Chaffey. When the shop owner learned that I could knit lace patterns, she asked me to take on the difficult parts of other customers’ knitting. To be paid for something I enjoyed! I was delighted and knit lace yokes, for which I was paid seventy-five cents an ounce. Norma and I then decided to knit ourselves dresses out of raw silk yarn, but because we could not afford to buy all the yarn at once, the shop owner kept the skeins and allowed us to pay for them as needed. I knit along with other girls in classes, at YWCA meetings, and at tea at Dr. Miller’s home, where we rummagedaround in our minds for easy verbs to use in the required French conversation.
    Then one day the Dean of Women called me in and asked if I had ever studied Latin. I had, for two years at Mother’s insistence, “because Latin was the foundation of language.” The dean offered me the task of correcting high school Latin papers. I was paid out of National Youth Administration funds for the boring work, which paid for the rest of my silk yarn.
    My finances continued to improve. Alberta Schaeffer, the Ontario librarian, knocked on our door. “Mrs. Clapp