My Own Two Feet by Beverly Cleary Page A

loaded them into the antique dishwasher. We worked as fast as we could, entertaining ourselves with knock-knock jokes, and left the kitchen damp with perspiration and with hands that looked likewet pink corduroy. The luxury of rubber gloves did not enter our frugal minds.
    After my first day of glass washing, I ran upstairs to consult my copy of the General Catalogue and read in the English section, “The Comprehensive Final Examination must be taken at the end of the senior year. It will consist of two three-hour papers, the second of which will take the form of an essay. The examination will cover English literature from 1350 to 1900.” There goes Beowulf, I thought. He would be no help at all. Neither would the modern American poetry, biography, or essays I had enjoyed at Chaffey. Mrs. Kegley’s course in drama, although called English, had been mostly about playwrights of other countries. I consulted the lower-division courses taught at Cal, which included Survey of English Literature, which I had not had, at least not as described in the catalog. Somehow I would have to manage.
    I soon put the Comprehensive out of my mind because of the struggle going on at Stebbins Hall. Almost as soon as the semester began, girls began to mutter with dissatisfaction over the food. Menus were planned by the housemother, who sat erect at the head table with her mouth set in a straight line. Plainly, she expected us to eat without complaint the meals set before us. Since food had never particularly interested me,I was not much concerned until the day stewed rabbit was served. The rabbit had been shot. We knew this because we found shot in the meat. And then there was a lunch of inedible, lightly scorched oyster soup with cantaloupe for dessert. Hungry girls who burned energy climbing hills and stairs pushed their dishes away while the housemother sat erect, eating her scorched soup as if she savored it. Madeline, the student manager, a young woman of intelligence and character, rose from the table and headed for the office of the Dean of Women while the rest of us faced a hungry afternoon.
    The housemother was soon replaced. Although I was not sorry to see her go, I always suspected she had moved me ahead on the waiting list because I had requested a roommate who was a good student and who did not smoke. Such virtue would have appealed to her.
    A new housemother arrived, Mrs. Ruth Cochran. She was young, sympathetic, and understanding of the times in which we lived. She also understood that we lived in a cooperative house run by students and not by the housemother. She did oversee menus, which the cook prepared with food purchased cooperatively with the two men’s houses and adapted to the appetites of active young women. Unlike students who lived inboardinghouses, we enjoyed the luxury of an egg for Sunday breakfast.
    The second semester, I felt I had had my share of corduroy hands and managed to get transferred to the switchboard. This work shift required an hour a day because theoretically operators could study while on duty. In practice, study was almost impossible because of interruptions: plugging in the lines for incoming calls, pulling levers to ring bells, looking over young men as I rang their dates’ rooms to announce them. If the man was a blind date, the girl would usually whisper, “How does he look?” If the man had gone into the living room to wait, I could whisper, “Nice,” “So-so,” “Tall,” “Short,” or whatever word I could find to help the girl meet her evening’s fate.
    Calls for baby-sitters were passed on to any girl I knew who was in real need of money. One call I kept for myself, for as much as I enjoyed my noisy life at Stebbins, a quiet evening in an unusual house in the hills was a treat. This house was built around a circular staircase, and every room was on a different level. The well-behaved little girl, Donna, went to bed early but