Time was running out like the popcorn at a Clark Gable picture. Her father had been dropping a lot of ‘hints’ lately about her being out of high school for three years and perhaps it was time for her to think about doing something with her life.

He was not the local manager of Penney’s for nothing. Recently, actually about a year ago, he had become tired of watching his daughter sit around the house all the time reading movie magazines with her eyes wide as saucers. He had begun to think of her as a bump on a log.

Her father’s hints happened to coincide with the young Ford salesman’s fourth proposal of marriage. She had turned down the other three saying that she needed time to think it over which really meant that she was trying to build up enough courage to go down to the bus station and find out what the fare to Hollywood cost.

At last the pressure of her own longings and her father’s ‘hints’ made her leave the house early one warm twilight, after getting out of doing the dinner dishes, and walk slowly down to the bus station. From 10 March 1938 until the evening of 2 September 1938 she had been wondering what a bus ticket to Hollywood cost.

The bus station was stark, unromantic and very distant from the silver screen. Two old people were sitting there on a bench waiting for a bus. The old people were tired. They wanted to be now at wherever they were going. Their suitcase was like a burned-out light bulb.

The man who sold the tickets looked as if he could have sold anything. He could just as well be selling washing machines or lawn furniture as tickets to other places.

She was red-faced and nervous. Her heart felt out of place in the bus station. She tried to act as if she were waiting for somebody to come in on the next bus, an aunt, as she worked desperately to build up enough courage to go ask how much it cost to go to Hollywood but it didn’t make any difference to anybody else what games she pretended.

Nobody looked at her, though she could have rented herself out as an earthquake beet. They simply didn’t care. It was a stupid night in September and she just didn’t have enough nerve to find out how much the fare to Hollywood cost.

She cried all the way home through the warm gentle Oregon night, wanting to die every time her feet touched the ground. There was no wind and all the shadows were comforting. They were like cousins to her, so she married the young Ford salesman and drove a new car every year except for the Second World War.