The Wayward Bus Read Free

as “little girl” and she replies to him in baby talk. As Steinbeck writes, he “had no idea that the world had changed” with the war. Elliott is the “president of a medium-sized corporation”—the reader never learns exactly what his company produces, though he takes credit for winning the war: “I’ve had no vacation since the war started. I’ve been making the implements of war that gave us the victory.” While he may seem little more than a caricatured capitalist—the organization man in the gray flannel suit who has wandered into the novel from leftist agitprop of the 1930s—he serves to make the point, as Steinbeck had written in Cannery Row (1944), that “All of our so-called successful men are sick men, with bad stomachs, and bad souls.” Like Juan’s apprentice Pimples, who borrows most of his ideas from movies and radio, and Louie (aka “meat-face”), whose ideas about women are drawn from advertisements in pulp magazines, Elliott’s notions about the standards of American success are gleaned from self-help manuals. He explains to Ernest how he can patent his idea to sell accessories for men’s suits and then sell the patent to clothing manufacturers who would buy it to keep it off the market. Ernest takes the exact measure of the scheme and refers to it as “very high-class blackmail.” On her part, Bernice spends much of her time on the trip composing imaginary letters to a friend bragging about how much fun she is having. If, as Ralph Waldo Emerson insisted, meretricious travel is a “fool’s paradise,” Bernice Pritchard is the consummate fool.
    The other women characters, however, silhouette the changes in women’s status after the war. The Pritchards’ daughter, Mildred, is a liberated young woman (or what passes for one in 1947), a type of postwar feminist, an iconoclast and an athlete with a no-nonsense attitude toward sex. At the age of twenty-one, she has experienced “two consummated love affairs which gave her great satisfaction and a steady longing for a relationship that would be constant.” Her behavior presages the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Alice, though a slatternly drunk, is not a traditional wife. She manages the lunchroom, just as many American women were employed outside the home during and after the war. To be sure, Juan and Alice maintain “separate spheres”: “Just as Juan usually had a succession of young apprentices to help him in the garage, so Alice hired a succession of girls to help her in the lunchroom.” When Pimples tries to help out in the kitchen, significantly enough, he burns the eggs. This traditional division of labor explains why Alice does not accompany the pilgrims on the bus, but remains in the café. Initially a pathetic figure, Norma fantasizes about Clark Gable and dreams of starring in movies like Curley’s wife in Steinbeck’s short novel Of Mice and Men (1937). Still, she is not utterly self-deluded. She exhibits “dignity” and “courage,” and despite her fantasies she was “not stupid. . . . Her high, long-legged dreams were one thing, but she could take care of herself, too.” She plans to work in restaurants and take leftover food home to save on expenses. As Steinbeck notes, the “greatest and best and most beautiful part of Norma lay behind her eyes, sealed and protected.” She even has an epiphany during the bus trip: “I can only be a waitress, but . . . I could maybe get to be a dental nurse.” In the end, she is ennobled by her ambition and self-knowledge, especially when she fends off Pimples’ advances. She harbors the modest dream of an apartment “with a nice davenport and a radio,” “a stove and an icebox.” Finally, whatever else may be said of her, Camille Oaks is an independent woman. She may suffer the gaze of men, but she does not submit