America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction by John Steinbeck, Susan Shillinglaw Read Free Book Online Page B

insane and enclose money in a letter—two dollars, and once or twice, God help me, five. Then word would fly through the neighborhood. Desperate need would be taken care of first, but after that we felt desperate need for a party. Since our clothing was increasingly ratty, it was usually a costume party. The girls wanted to look pretty, and they didn’t have the clothes for it. A costume party made all manner of drapes and curtains and tablecloths available.
    Hamburger was three pounds for a quarter. One third of that weight was water. I don’t know how the chain stores got so much water in the meat. Of course it cooked out, but only a fool would throw the juice away. Browned flour added to it and we had delicious gravy, particularly with fresh-gathered mushrooms or the big black ones we had gathered and dried. The girls shampooed their hair with soap root, an onion-shaped plant that grew wild; it works too. We rarely had whisky or gin. That would have ruined the budget. There was local wine—and pretty good too; at least it didn’t kill us. It was twenty cents a gallon—take your own jug. Sometimes we made it ourselves with grapes the vineyardists let us pick. And there you had a party. Often we made them quite formal, a kind of travesty on the kind of party we thought the rich gave. A wind-up phonograph furnished the music and the records were so worn down that it could be called Lo-Fi, but it was loud.
    I remember one great meat loaf carried in shoulder high like a medieval boar’s head at a feast. It was garnished with strips of crisp bacon cut from an advertisement in The Saturday Evening Post. One day in a pile of rubbish behind Holman’s store I found a papier-mâché roast turkey, the kind they put in window displays around Thanksgiving. I took it home and repaired it and gave it a new coat of paint. We used it often, served on a platter surrounded with dandelions. Under the hollow turkey was a pile of hamburgers.
    It wasn’t all fun and parties. When my Airedale got sick, the veterinary said she could be cured and it would cost twenty-five dollars. We just couldn’t raise it, and Tillie took about two weeks to die. If people sitting up with her and holding her head could have saved her, she would have got well. Things like that made us feel angry and helpless. But mostly we made the best of what we had because despondency, not prosperity, was just around the corner. We were more afraid of that than anything. That’s why we played so hard.
    It’s not easy to go on writing constantly with little hope that anything will come of it. But I do remember it as a time of warmth and mutual caring. If one of us got hurt or ill or in trouble, the others rallied with what they had. Everyone shared bad fortune as well as good.
    Relief came along and was welcomed. We got some food—blocks of cheese and canned Government beef. I remember the beef well. It tasted like boiled laundry and had about as much food value. Private enterprise processed it from Government-bought cattle. They processed the hell out of it and at that time a rich beef essence went on sale. We ate the boiled laundry from which it probably came.
    When WPA came, we were delighted because it offered work. There were even writers’ projects. I couldn’t get on one, but a lot of very fine people did. I was given the project of taking a census of all the dogs on the Monterey Peninsula, their breeds, weight and characters. I did it very thoroughly and, since I knew my reports were not likely to get to the hands of the mighty, I wrote some pretty searching character studies of poodles and beagles and hounds. If such records were kept, somewhere in Washington there will be a complete dog record of the Monterey Peninsula in the early Thirties.
    All over the country the WPA was working. They built many of the airports we still use, hundreds of schools, post offices, stadia, together with great and permanent