Winter Wheat by Mildred Walker Read Free Book Online Page A

whole long day with Dad sitting miserable and silent by the stove.
    We went to the Beanpot because that’s the most popular place near the campus. It has a big fat beanpot out over the door and they serve a full dinner for 65 cents, which is 20 cents more than you’d have to pay at the cafeteria. It was nice to sit down at a table and order, but to save my life I couldn’t help noticing each plate that went by to see the size of the helpings. That’s what working at the cafeteria does for you. The food did taste different. The steam table does things to food in spite of how clean and shiny the metal dishes are. We ended with a serving of chocolate pie topped with whipped cream and Vera smoked afterward while I had a third cup of hot black coffee.
    Then I remembered Mr. Echols this afternoon.
    “Vera, what do you want to do after college?”
    “Get rich,” Vera answered, so fast it took my breath away. “I’d like to be a dress-designer in Hollywood and make pots of money.” Her face didn’t look so thin. “I’d have a penthouse apartment that was really beautiful with a bedroom in gray and dusty pink and a bathroom opening out of it in Dubonnet with a square gray bathtub.”
    I thought of the messy bedroom she had at 1112 and the bathroom down the hall that was always draped with washing and the washbasin littered with bobby pins and broken pieces of soap.
    “What do you want to do?” Vera asked.
    “I want to be able to talk different languages and go and live in foreign countries for a while. Last year when I took Spanish I knew I wanted to do something with languages.” I couldn’t explain to Vera that I’d always wanted to talk Mom’s language. There are English words that don’t quite fit the Russian ones. Mom says something in English and doesn’t look satisfied sometimes, as though the English words didn’t really say it, like my name that she calls Yeléna. The Bardich girls won’t let their mother and father talk Yugoslav together; they want them to be American, but I don’t feel that way. Mom’s Russian is something precious of her own that she brought from Russia when she came, like her icon.
    “How would you make a living doing that?”
    “Oh, I’d translate and interpret for people or be a correspondent.” But I wasn’t very sure about it.
    “You don’t want to go back to Montana, do you? I’m never going back to Iowa if I can help it.”
    “I wouldn’t mind going back for a while. I may teach a year or so after college. I’m taking enough education this year so I’ll have my certificate.”
    “For heaven’s sake! My folks want me to teach school back home, but I’d starve to death rather than go back to that dump and teach kids.”
    We walked up Third. Two boys on the porch of a fraternity house whistled at us.
    “Do you know any boys in school?” Vera asked.
    “Nope, not one,” I said, though the boy in history class had asked me to go to a movie Friday night.
    “All the nice ones go for girls in sororities.”
    “You can get in next year, maybe,” I said, thinking if we had a bumper crop maybe I could, too.
    “If I’m asked, you mean,” Vera said.
    And then we cut across the campus and there was room to smell the rotting leaves and the night air. I forgot Vera. My spirits rose like a partridge startled out of the brush. I had never been inside so much in all my life as this last month and a half. I hadn’t known how cooped-up I had been.
    When we came to the door of the rooming house and climbed the three flights of stairs, the narrow hall crowded in on me. I thought of the feeling of space on top of the rimrock back of our house at home and the wind in the aspens in the creek bed. I undressed in the dark and lay in bed with my face turned toward the open window, but the lighted windows of the house next door blocked my view, and there was no wind stirring.

5
    I HAVE reason to remember the library. Now of all the buildings on campus it is the clearest in my