← catalogue

Four and Twenty Beds

by Nancy Casteel Vogel · English · Gutenberg #35703 · 508,069 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Four and Twenty Beds
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Four and Twenty Beds

Author: Nancy Casteel Vogel


        
Release date: March 28, 2011 [eBook #35703]
                Most recently updated: January 7, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/35703

Credits: Produced by Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FOUR AND TWENTY BEDS ***




Produced by Al Haines








FOUR AND TWENTY BEDS

By

Nancy Vogel



New York: The Beechhurst Press



Copyright 1950, by Mrs. Nancy Vogel




CHAPTER ONE


ANYONE CAN MANAGE a motel successfully--anyone who can subsist on meals
snatched a mouthful at a time, and requires no sleep; anyone who is a
mechanic, gardener, publicity agent, handyman, psychologist, carpenter,
and midwife combined; anyone who can cheerfully greet as "Mrs.
Beaulabottom" each of the various women who accompanies salesman Mr.
Beulabottom on his frequent trips; anyone who is gregarious to the
point of welcoming the strangers who will witness, interrupt, and
discuss the intimate details of his life.

I'm shy, poor at dealing with people, helpless, lazy, and definitely
the clinging vine type. The extra-curricular activities of the average
husband shock me. I like to eat leisurely meals, and to sleep nine or
ten hours a night; and the prime requirement of my soul is privacy.

I love the motel business.

My husband, Grant, is the one who possesses the qualifications that
make our partnership in this business a success. He is efficient,
patient (if there is money in it) and ingenious--and buying a motel was
his idea in the first place.

It was all very sudden.

For a month Los Angeles had been having the kind of weather the Chamber
of Commerce members mention only in whispers. Grant and I and our two
children had colds, already a month old, which the fog and dampness
were cherishing lovingly. Memorial Day and a weekend had been courteous
enough to get together and arrange a three-day holiday; and so we
decided to take a trip to the desert.

We stopped in Banning, a little town on the edge of the Mojave desert
which boasts both altitude (2350 feet) and dryness, and which is
popular with sufferers from all kinds of bronchial and respiratory
troubles. Banning is about ninety miles from Los Angeles, and has a
population of under eight thousand. It has a lot of motels, and of
these we selected the one we considered the most attractive, and
engaged a cabin for the next three nights.

The Moonrise Motel was a big, new, sparkling-white, green-shuttered
structure, shaped a little like a horseshoe with its open end toward
the highway. Wide graveled driveways curved in front of the cabins and
around three central islands of grass. The interior of our
cabin--artistically plastered, carpeted, well-furnished, and with
superlatively rich details--was in keeping with the exterior. From the
beginning I was awed by the beauty and the size of the motel, but no
premonitory tickle hinted to me the incredible fact that within two
months it would be ours. After unloading the car, we put David and
Donna into the back seat again and drove around idly exploring Banning.
Trees and flowers flourished everywhere, and high, rocky, beautiful
mountains towered close toward the north and south and more distantly
in the east.

"Let's move to Banning," I said. "Perfect scenery, perfect
climate--what more could we want?"

Grant looked at me. He has a habit of simply looking at me on the
occasions when he thinks I am more stupid than usual--a look that any
fair-minded judge would consider ample grounds for divorce. Fortunately
his endearing qualities so far outweigh his annoying ones that I have
never considered testing any judge's fair-mindedness. The last time
Grant gave me that look was when I came home from an antique shop with
five perfectly matched silver deer bookends. The deer were bent forward
in attitudes of straining, so that when their antlered heads were
placed against a row of books they appeared to be holding them up by
sheer force of muscle.

"But why five bookends?" Grant had asked, exasperated.

He is very unimaginative and practical. There's no use in trying to
explain to a person of his type what effect the contents of an antique
shop can have on a susceptible browser. Besides, I always get too mad
to say anything at all when he looks at me like that.

And now he was giving me that same look.

"I'll speak to the manager of General Motors about moving the Los
Angeles factory to Banning," he said.

It was hot, but there was a cooling wind all afternoon, and when we
went to bed it was so chilly that it felt good to snuggle under the
blankets. The children were asleep in their bed, and we lay there and
talked--or, rather, I did.

"How much do you suppose a motel like this is worth?"

"Uh . . . uh . . . mm h'm."

"Let's see, they have fourteen cabins," I went on. "I counted them. The
owners live in one, so that leaves thirteen to rent. There are eight
other cabins that seem to be as big as this one, with two rooms, and
they must get six and a half dollars a night for them, like they do for
this one. And then those four cabins in the back; they seem to be
smaller, just one room and one bed, probably, but they must bring in at
least three or four dollars a night. Why, this place must earn about
seventy dollars a night! Why, that's over two thousand a month!"

"Uh."

"And what wouldn't I do with two thousand dollars a month," I went on
reverently.

Grant, it seemed was more than half awake, after all. "I don't know
what you wouldn't do," he said, "but I know what you would do. You'd
quick go to some junk shop and buy three earrings. You'd come home with
half a pair of scissors, or one giant size bronze shoe tree."

"Seriously, though," I said, "Why don't we buy a motel--this very one,
maybe? It would pay for itself in a few years, and then--"

"Uh. Mm h'm."

While he slept, I lay there and thought about going into the motel
business. Grant could quit his job at General Motors, and together we
could keep the cabins clean and the place looking its best. The more I
thought about it, the more excited I became.

In the morning we drove into the business district of Banning, about a
mile from the Moonrise Motel, and went into Pillyer's cafe, for
breakfast. Pillyer was a thin, stooped old man with an embittered
expression and a few lonely hairs on a broad expanse of skull.

"What's he mad about, Mama?" David whispered, when Pillyer had taken
our orders and disappeared into the dim regions beyond the counter.

"Probably because everyone calls him Pill," I ventured.

Grant shifted Donna onto his other knee, feeling her diaper gingerly.
He took a sip of water, and drummed his lean fingers on the counter.

"How would you like to go into the motel business?" he asked me.

I gasped for air.

"I've been figuring," he said. "Why, I'll bet a horned toad the
Moonrise takes in two thousand a month. Say they want fifty thousand
for the place, it would just about pay itself off, interest and
expenses and all, in three years. It sounds pretty good to me. What do
you think--shall we look into it?"

As I said, our going into the motel business was all Grant's idea.

While Donna took her nap that afternoon, and David alternately dug in
the gravel and drew out from his mouth for inspection a long string of
gum, we lay in the sunshine on one of the green islands and talked
feverishly. Grant had been wanting to get away from factory work; for a
year he had been looking around in his spare time for a profitable
business. He had wanted an automobile agency or a farm implement
agency, but now he was willing to give up those plans in favor of
getting a motel. Ever since our marriage six years ago we had saved our
money; aside from our house and furniture, our only big expenses had
been David, born five years ago, and Donna, born one year ago. We hoped
that what we had saved--five thousand dollars--would be enough for a
down payment on a motel.

When I saw the manager of the motel digging weeds out of the gravel I
sauntered up to him and engaged him in a long conversation that dealt
with everything from black widow spiders to the cost of living, and
worked itself slowly to the subject of motels.

I told him frankly that we were thinking of going into the motel
business, and asked if the Moonrise happened to be for sale.

He was a handsome, stocky man whose face dripped water continually.
Sweat rolled in oily beads from his eyebrows, from his chin, and from
the end of his nose, and it ran in a rivulet down the vertical wrinkle
above his nose.

"Yes," he said, wiping the perspiration from his forehead with the back
of his hand. "We've just decided to put it up for sale. The income
varies from fifteen hundred to over two thousand, depending on the
season. Wonderful climate, here in the San Gorgonio Pass, even if it is
a little windy sometimes. It's a new motel, six months old; all the
furniture is maple, everything brand new. Sixty-seven thousand."

I gulped. "And--how much down?" I asked timidly.

"Thirty thousand."

It was my turn to wipe away perspiration.

We spent the remaining days of our vacation haunting real estate
offices and discovering that there was nothing new and nice for less
than thirty thousand down.

We went back to Los Angeles, but we hadn't given up the idea of getting
a motel. Every day for nearly a month, while Grant was working, I
studied the classified sections of the papers and called real estate
brokers. We even went to look at a few motels that were within our
means, but they didn't seem to be worth the money--and, after the
Moonrise, everything looked cheap and shabby and old.

It was exactly a month after we had first seen the Moonrise that we
left the children with Grandma and took another trip to Banning.
Perhaps somewhere in that lovely little city, we thought, we might find
another motel that would satisfy us--and that we could afford.

But first, before driving around, we had to see the Moonrise again.
Grant drove slowly as the Moonrise Motel came into view, and I looked
wistfully out the window. The sun gleamed on the white stucco, and the
bright green shutters were magnets to the eye.

"Isn't it beautiful?" I asked sadly.

"Look!" Grant exclaimed. "There's the manager, out digging weeds! Let's
stop once and talk to him."

Grant is of Holland Dutch ancestry, a fact which shows itself
principally in his tendency to insert a "once" or a "quick" into as
many of his sentences as possible. He doesn't fall back on the
superfluous "yet's" and "already's" that sprinkle the speech of his
relatives, but his method of expressing himself is rather quaint.

(It was in a very quaint way, in fact, that he proposed to me. "Let's
get married once," he said. I was so intrigued by his way of putting it
that I agreed.)

The manager of the motel took out a large, clean handkerchief and
mopped his face and neck when we drove in.

"You folks bought a motel yet?" he wanted to know.

"Nope," Grant said. "We've been looking around, but we can't find
anything we like as well as this."

The stocky man wiped his face again, and I noticed that under the
moisture of his skin there was a yellowish pallor.

"Got to sell now," he said. "I'm sick; going to a sanitarium the minute
I get this place off my hands. You can have it for sixty-three
thousand, five hundred."

"But the down payment ..." I said.

"You got fifteen thousand?"

Grant and I looked at each other. During the last month we had asked a
real estate broker what we could get for our home, if we wanted to
raise some money in a hurry. Eight thousand, he had told us.

That, with the five we had saved, would make thirteen thousand. Our
furniture should bring close to a thousand, and we could borrow the
rest from Grandma.

After six years, we were able to read each other's thoughts pretty well.

"Yep, we could raise fifteen thousand," Grant told the motel manager.

And that was the beginning.

When the deal was in escrow we advertised in the local newspaper that
we had furniture for sale. The manager's apartment at the motel was
completely furnished, and we intended to keep only our washing machine,
our book-case, and the children's beds.

It was to be a thirty day escrow, but we wanted to begin selling our
furniture immediately. Last minute sales usually bring low prices,
Grant pointed out, and we needed every penny we could get. We could
only hope that non-essential furniture, like rugs, end tables, and
lamps, would be the first to go.

When I was a child--a typically selfish and demanding one--Grandma used
to remind me "it ain't what you want that makes you fat, by gorry, it's
what you get."

What we got, immediately after our ad was printed, was a fat, heavily
perfumed woman who bought our dining room set and our kitchen
table--items which we had hoped to keep until the last week before we
left. Her husband, she said, would bring a trailer and get the tables
later in the afternoon.

I stood in the doorway a while after she had gone, looking at the quiet
little street where we had lived for six years. Palm trees rose
majestically from the parkways, one in front of every house. The houses
were neat, stucco squares set close together behind green lawns, and a
brooding afternoon quiet hung over the neighborhood.

Our own house, too, was white stucco set behind a green lawn. The white
stucco was trimmed with violet where Donna had rubbed it with a crayon,
and there were patches of dirt in the grass where David and his friends
had staged a "rasslin match." But it was home; I had come here as a
bride, and my babies had been born here. Life at the motel would never
be as smooth and peaceful as life here had been.

A wail from the bedroom announced that Donna was awake. It was time for
David to come crashing home from kindergarten. I was busy with the
children for about an hour, and then I heard heavy footsteps on the
porch.

A round little man was standing there. "I come for the tables," he
explained, taking the cap off his small basketball of a head.

"Oh, yes--come in."

He clumped into the house and began loading the two tables and the
chairs onto a trailer. When he had gone Donna pointed to the spot where
the kitchen table had stood.

"All gone," she mourned.

"All gone is right," I said grimly. "But at least we still have your
high chair." I lifted her into it and tied a diaper around her fat
middle, pulling it around the bars of her chair so that she couldn't
climb out.

The doorbell rang.

"Hawve you a bedroom set for sale?" asked the tall, thin woman who
stood at the door.

I showed her the bedroom set. She examined it through a lorgnette,
thumped the mattress with a long, bony hand, and demanded to know how
much I was "awsking" for it.

I told her.

She bought it.

"The moving vawn will be along in an hour," she informed me briskly,
and she was gone.

I addressed the kitchen sink bitterly. "Is there any particular
reason," I inquired of it, "why they have to buy our most necessary
possessions first? Somewhere in this city are the people who are going
to buy our lamps and end tables; what are they waiting for? I suppose
they're going to be sweet about it and let us have the use of them
until the day before we leave."

I was in a bad mood when Grant got home from work. He started to put
his lunch bucket where the kitchen table should have been. He put it on
the sink instead and asked me why I looked so unhappy.

"They bought our kitchen table and our dining room set and the bedroom
set," I wailed.

"For the price we wanted?"

I nodded miserably.

"Wonderful!" He seized me in his grease-stained hands and swung me
above his head.

"You won't think it's so wonderful after you've slept on the floor a
few nights," I prophesied grimly.

The doorbell rang. "Ah," I said, "it must be the moving vawn."

While two muscular men dismantled the bedroom set and carried it out, I
prepared dinner. I had no idea how or where we were going to eat it,
but I decided not to face that problem until it came.

It came soon enough. The moving van had gone, taking with it all hope
for the next month's nocturnal comfort, and the potatoes were done. The
pork chops were brown and sizzling, and the peas were steaming.

I pondered.

Should we put the plates on the kitchen floor and squat around them?

That wouldn't be very comfortable.

I could put the breadboard over the bathroom sink, making a small table
out of it. David and I could sit on the edge of the bathtub, and Grant
could sit on the--

No, that wouldn't do.

I settled it by filling our plates and carrying them into the living
room. Grant's and David's plates I set on each arm of the davenport. I
put my own plate on an arm of the overstuffed chair. The salt, pepper,
bread and butter were in the middle of the living room floor.

"Are you still glad we sold our tables?" I asked Grant, when we had
started eating.

He's always willing to put up with a little inconvenience if there's
profit in it.

"Yep," he said. "If we hadn't quick sold them the first day, it might
have turned out that no one would want them at all, and we'd have to
come way down in the price. Please pass the bread."

"Just the same," I said, getting down on my hands and knees to get him
a piece of bread, "I'm going to add twenty dollars to what we planned
on asking for the living room set. If anyone wants it tomorrow they're
going to have to really pay for it!"

"You split your infilitive, Mama," David said.

There's one thing that must be said for David. Maybe he does usually
sound more like a herd of elephants than like one small, agreeable
little boy, and maybe he does create a very reasonable facsimile of
chaos when he gets hold of a piece of gum--but he recognizes a split
infinitive when he hears it. My friends all think he's an infant
prodigy--in that one respect, anyway. But sometimes I wish I'd never
taught him anything about grammar. I didn't know what a split
infinitive was until I was in high school, and I got along just as well
without knowing. I never made Grandma want to swing me by the heels and
smack my head against a wall, either.

"I'm very sorry I split an infinitive," I told David. "I'll try to be
more careful in the future. But just the same," I went on, turning back
to Grant, "whoever buys that living room set is going to really pay for
it!"

"Fine," Grant said, getting up and going into the kitchen; "the more
money we can raise, the better." He came back carrying a jar of
horseradish; he sat down and put some horseradish on his plate, and
proceeded to mix it thoroughly with his peas.

One of the strangest things about Grant, hardly compatible with the
efficiency and practicality of his nature, is his passion for weird
combinations of food. I have learned to look the other way while he
improves upon what I have prepared; if I were to watch while he mixes
and eats his little gastronomical horrors, I doubt if I'd be able to do
much eating myself.

I slept--or, rather, spent the night--on the davenport, and Grant slept
in David's twin-size bed with David. In the middle of the night I sat
up and felt the welts across my back that the ridges in the davenport
cushions had made. I went through the empty bedroom where our lovely,
comfortable bed used to be, into the children's bedroom.

Grant was lying slantwise across David's bed, with David draped across
him. The baby was sleeping peacefully on her stomach in her crib. I
considered crawling in with her, but I was afraid the crib wouldn't
hold an additional hundred and twelve pounds.

I went back into the living room, put another blanket over the
davenport cushions to cover the ridges more thoroughly, and lay down
again.

After breakfast I felt more kindly toward the davenport, though. In our
hour of need it was serving as table, chairs, and bed. What were a few
welts in the face of all that?

Just then the doorbell rang. It was a short, dark, bristling man who
actually tinkled whenever he moved. I was so fascinated by this
discovery that he was inside the house punching at the davenport before
I realized that he wanted my precious living room set.

"How much?" he shot at me suddenly.

I told him, adding twenty dollars to the price we had originally
planned to ask for the set.

"Fine! Sold!" he barked, tinkling as he peeled off crisp green bills
into my hands.

"What are you staring at?" he cried.

I backed away timidly. "It's just that--that noise you make," I said.
"I was just wondering--"

He put a thumb under the watch chain that was draped against his vest
and thrust it out where I could see it. There was a tiny golden bell
attached to the chain.

He let go of the chain suddenly and strode to the overstuffed chair,
picking it up as though it had been a child's chair.

"Open the door, please."

He loaded the chair and davenport onto his pickup truck and drove away.

I sat down in the middle of the living room floor, my hands full of the
crisp green bills, and burst into tears.

The rest of that month crawled by. I visualized the angel in charge of
time chortling and slowing down the time machine so that he'd have
longer to watch us sitting on boxes and eating from boxes, and to watch
me sleeping on the floor--which I chose in preference to sleeping with
David and being kicked all night.

The general inconvenience, and living in such a state of upset and
excitement, didn't seem to bother Grant very much. What annoyed him
most about the whole proceeding, I think, was the fact that since a
part of our savings was in small government bonds that had to be
cashed, he'd had to sign his name and address seventy-five times. He
learned from experience what the term "writer's cramp" means.

We had sold our home, of course, getting all cash for it and retaining
possession of it until the day we were to take over the motel. Actually
it was the real estate broker whose advice we had asked about its
value, who bought it. The rise in prices that followed the war had made
it worth a lot more than we paid for it, and we knew that the realtor
too would make a profit on it. But we needed the cash in a hurry, so we
were glad to sell it to him.

Grandma had lent us two thousand dollars. Grandma is a short, sturdy
widow without a lazy bone in her body or a wrinkle in her face. Her
eighty-year-old "boyfriend," Hellwig, had offered us five hundred
dollars more, but we thought we'd be able to get along without the
bachelor's mite.

That made our fifteen thousand. What we got for the furniture, and
Grant's weekly paychecks from General Motors, would have to see us
through the moving and whatever extra expenses might come up.

Our furniture kept selling steadily, and I put a lot of our
accumulated, surplus household goods on display, too. We wouldn't have
room for it in the new place; I was resolved to get rid of as much of
it as I possibly could.

The woman who bought our lamps and rugs, a Mrs. Alexander, kept coming
back to see what else I'd brought out from closets and drawers in the
way of household goods. Every time she came, she bought several
armloads of things. Toward the end of the month, when nearly everything
was gone, she even bought our half-empty cans and jars of spices and
cereals, and on her next trip she bought Grant's rusty tools and
half-used cans of paint. She bought at least twenty dollars worth of
junk that we would otherwise have thrown away. I couldn't help
wondering what her house must look like. She had probably been
acquiring things as avidly as this ever since she got married. I even
sold her the five silver deer bookends!

We were all getting very tired of eating and sitting on boxes.

"I never want to see another box, once we get away from here," I said.
"Just think, some day all of this will be only a memory. Some day I'll
sleep on a bed again, and we'll have chairs to sit on, and a real table
to eat from. Someday, this will all be over."

And then, suddenly, it was. Suddenly it was the day before we were to
leave, and there was a flurry of last minute packing to do, and a last
night of sleeping on the hard floor, and then it was the Saturday we
were to take possession of the motel.

Grant hadn't given up his job. Our monthly payments on the first and
second trust deeds were to be three hundred dollars each (one of them
would be four hundred after the first of the year) and he didn't dare
to quit his job until we had a little money saved. We'd get settled
this first weekend, and after that I'd have to manage the place alone,
while he came back to Los Angeles to work. He would live with Grandma,
in her apartment.

I had been so busy selling things and packing, all month, that I hadn't
had time to become frightened at the prospect, but now, putting the
last of our things in the two-wheeled trailer Grant had borrowed from a
friend, I found myself dwelling upon it more and more, and feeling more
and more certain that I'd never be able to do it. Even the average
woman might not succeed at a new job of such proportions, and anyway,
the resemblance between me and the average woman is purely superficial.
I am the type who would call in a plumber to put a new washer in a
faucet. I remember that on one occasion when, with unusual brilliance
and energy, I tightened a screw with a knife, it was weeks before I
finished telling people about my exploit.

When everything was packed on the trailer and squeezed into the back
seat of the car, I took the camera out of the glove compartment. I
handed it to Grandma and told her to take a picture of us, with the
loaded trailer as background.

Grant is inclined to be a little impatient when he has a big job ahead.
"Come on, come on, we haven't got time to be fooling with pictures," he
said.

"Oh, yes we have," I said firmly. "This is a historic occasion, and we
must have a picture of it."

Grumbling, he came to stand beside me. I held Donna in my arms, and
David stood beside Grant. Grandma focused the camera and took our
picture.

I put the camera back into the glove compartment, and kissed a weeping
Grandma goodbye.

"They wun't nothing seem right, with you folks gone!" she exclaimed.

I told her to say goodbye to Hellwig for us, and I climbed into the
front seat with the children. I took a last look at our prim white
house, gleaming in the morning sunlight, and at all the other prim
houses on the palm-lined street.

Then Grant started the car, and we were off!




CHAPTER TWO


IT WAS A long, hot, uncomfortable ride. The children, who ordinarily
ride in the back seat, had to ride in front because the back seat was
piled to the ceiling with clothes, pans, boxes and suitcases.

Grant had fastened an old blanket over the trailer to protect its
contents from dirt and wind. It wouldn't stay fastened, though, and
when we were on the highway headed toward Banning he had to stop the
car and get out about every ten minutes to adjust it and to see how the
things in the trailer were riding. The ironing board was slowly working
its way loose from the ropes with which he had tied it to David's bed.
Several books had slid forward from the crevice where I had tucked
them, and their pages were fluttering and waving as though, I thought
sentimentally, in farewell to the life we had known.

"Those mmm things," Grant mumbled.

I had put a lot of the odds and ends we hadn't been able to sell, and
that Grant wouldn't let me throw away, into some small cardboard boxes.
I had packed these onto the rear of the trailer with my own little
lily-white hands, giving Grant another occasion for disgust at my
inefficiency. For now, one by one, they were freeing themselves and
plopping onto the road. After a few stops, to pick up the boxes and try
to repack them in a trailer that was so loaded there was no room for
them, Grant gave up the time-wasting game. When one of the cardboard
boxes dropped off, slapping itself against the highway, he'd just let
it go, and keep on driving.

I was very happy over the situation. I hadn't wanted to take all those
unnecessary articles along with us to our new tiny living quarters
anyway. Every time a box fell off, I looked back to be sure it wasn't
something else--something we'd have to stop for. "This is just like
Hansel and Gretel," I told Grant cheerfully.

The baby got tired of being so crowded, and she began to cry. David was
restless, and Grant was getting more and more provoked with the way the
things on the trailer were unpacking themselves. We were driving
through beautiful scenery--orange groves and tall palm trees with their
dead branches drooping like old-fashioned pantalettes, and mountains in
the background--but none of us paid much attention to it. We were too
anxious to get the trip over with.

When we got to the Moonrise Motel, after a three-hour drive, the
manager and his wife were ready to leave. They gave us the keys, and
showed us briefly how they registered guests and how they kept track of
the laundry; and, assuring us that people wouldn't start coming for
cabins until evening, they got into their car and left. A lost, scared
feeling spread from my chest to my stomach as I realized that from now
on, what ever might happen, we ourselves would have to handle it.

A hot, hot wind was blowing from the east, across the desert.
Perspiration dribbled down our faces and necks as we got to work.

When we had unpacked the trailer and had lunch, Grant set up the baby's
crib and I put her to bed for her nap. Then I went outside to see if
the place looked any different, now that it was actually ours.

The motel is built in three sections, which are arranged in the shape
of a square-cornered U, with the open end toward the highway. The
angles of the U are disconnected; the three sections are separate
buildings. The back section, parallel to the highway, consists of four
single, externally joined cabins without garages.

The other two sections of the motel, facing each other across the wide
driveways and the islands of cool-looking grass between them, are
identical. Each consists of five double cabins with garages between.
There is no cabin number 13, and for some strange reason, no number 5;
so our fourteen cabins are numbered up to 16. Cabin 16 is the one
directly opposite the one we live in, which is number 1. Cabins 16 and
1 are the closest to the highway, only sixty feet from that roaring,
screaming wide ribbon that is flung across the burning desert and
stretches clear through to the coast.

The three islands of grass are surrounded by white cement curbs, and
the graveled driveways curve around and between the islands as well as
in a direct path in front of every cabin. Each island of lawn has three
small Chinese elm trees, and the nine trees form a prim, straight row.

In front of the motel is a big green and red neon sign which says
"Moonrise Motel." Directly beneath that is a smaller sign saying "no
vacancy," or, if the metal cover is over the "no," saying "vacancy."
The sign is double; each "no" has a cover.

Behind the four rear cabins which face the highway is half an acre of
rocky, desert ground, with a bumpy private road on one side leading
from our driveways back through one of the open angles of the U to the
dirt road, Williams street, at the end of our property line, which runs
parallel with the highway and leads into town.

I wandered out behind the rear cabins and looked at our big back yard.
After six years of living in the crowded outskirts of a big city, that
barren half-acre looked like a little chunk of heaven. It was a safety
valve as far as the busy highway was concerned. We would fix it up so
that the children could play out here happily and safely. We could
plant an orchard. We could even build a little house out here for
Grandma. The opportunities presented by that half acre of ground were
limitless. But that would all come in the future. Right now, there was
the present to consider.

I stood at the edge of the highway and looked in each direction. We are
nearly a mile from the business district of Banning, and that mile is
thick with motels. Directly west of us is a new restaurant, and east,
toward the desert, there are only a few motels between us and the
Mojave. Across the highway are a cocktail lounge, several small motels
and two service-station markets. Beyond those, I saw the beautiful
ranges of mountains, with the afternoon sun forming little cups of
shadow, like dark dimples, on their steep sides--Mt. San Gorgonio
towering on the north, and Mt. San Jacinto rearing its lovely head on
the south.

I breathed deeply. Banning had a scent all its own, one I had noticed
before--a scent compounded of freshness and clear skies and blossoms,
and the essence of the mountains. My tour of inspection completed, I
went back into our cabin. It was small, but so attractive and so new
that living in it, I thought, should be more pleasant than in our old
home in Los Angeles. There was a large living room, which contained,
besides the usual amount of living room furniture, the bed we would
sleep on; a small kitchen, and a bathroom and closet; and the adjoining
garage at the time was half converted into a bedroom--that is, two
windows and a cement floor had been put in it, and a door connected it
with the living room. Unfinished as that bedroom was, the children
would have to sleep in it.

The office was actually the partitioned-off front part of the
children's bedroom. It was completed, and plastered to match the rest
of the interior, with dull red broadfelt carpeting like that in all the
cabins. There was a large built-in desk in the office--chest high, to
be stood at rather than sat at--with registration cards and a desk set
on top of it.

We finished unpacking and storing our belongings in the few inadequate
drawers and shelves. Donna was still asleep in her crib, and David was
out exploring.

Grant and I sat down and looked at each other.

Grant has blue eyes and coarse brown hair, just as I do. Our children
never had a chance to have different coloring; they, too, have brown
hair and blue eyes. David has long black curly lashes, and thick hair,
while Donna's hair is so fine it won't even hold a bobby pin or a
ribbon. It grows straight forward on her head, and usually hangs down
over her face. We call her "Little Chief Hair-in-the-Face." I have
consistently refused to have her hair cut into bangs, in spite of the
arguments of Grant and Grandma. "It'll grow long enough to curl or
braid one of these days," I always tell them.

"Well," Grant said, "it's five o'clock--about time we were getting our
first customer."

He is tall and slenderly built, and so wonderfully competent--even if
he isn't very systematic--that I always feel awkward by contrast. But I
never in my life felt so helpless as when, just as he finished
speaking, we heard the scrunch of tires on the graveled driveway
outside.

"Oh, someone's coming," I said nervously. "You go see who it is. You
go."

I sat in a corner of the living room where I could hear and not be seen
from the office. I alternately twisted my hands and bit my nails as
Grant opened the office door and stepped out to meet the driver of the
car. This was a momentous occasion. I strained to hear as the men began
to speak.

"This motel's just changed hands, hasn't it?"

"Yep, that's right."

"Well, I've got something here that I know will interest you, as the
new owner. A revolutionary kind of vacuum cleaner ... cuts your work
and your cleaning bill in half ... no motel owner should be without
one."

I sighed and relaxed.

If the rule is true that women are the worst gossips, Grant must be the
exception that proves that rule. He can outtalk any woman; he has more
endurance, more lung power, and far more enthusiasm, when it comes to a
prolonged conversation on any subject, than any avid old lady, or any
young girl draped about a telephone. This habit of his annoys me,
partly because he usually indulges it just when I have some work for
him to do, and partly because I am jealous of his ability to get along
well with everyone. I have such a shy nature that I am seldom able to
get past the polite amenities with anyone whom I have known less than
three years ... a great disadvantage for anyone as extremely
inquisitive and curious as I.

Being so talkative, and so unable to end a conversation, Grant is easy
prey for salesmen. That is, although he seldom buys what they are
trying to sell, he lets them waste hours of his time.

When Grant finally got rid of the vacuum cleaner salesman, I went in to
get the baby. The conversation about vacuum cleaners had awakened her.
It wasn't, I realized, the last time that noises from the office, so
close to her bed, would awaken her.

I fixed dinner, clumsy in a new, differently arranged kitchen. While I
washed dishes, Grant dried them, and there followed an uneasy evening
during which we both pretended to read, but actually sat straining to
hear above the children's voices the sound of a car driving into our
driveway.

The sun was sinking, and the mountains were clothed in soft shadows. I
stood looking out the kitchen window, which faced the darkened east,
and I saw the neon sign of the second motel from us turned on. It was a
big, impressive sign, with the name of the motel--the Peacock--in
bright red letters, and a green "vacancy" sign above it. There was the
likeness of a huge, stately, graceful peacock above the name of the
motel, blazoned in bright blue and red neon.

"Our sign!" I exclaimed suddenly. "It's time to turn it on!"

Grant had thought of it the same instant I had, and, like greedy
children with a new toy, we rushed to the dark office. The light
switches--five of them--were side by side in a neat and very confusing
little row on the wall behind the desk.

I yanked Grant's outstretched hand aside. "I want to do it!"

He offered a compromise. "We'll take turns once."

"All right. Me first!"

I hovered over the switches with loving indecision. Finally I pushed up
the one on the extreme right.

The office light beamed suddenly on us from the ceiling. "Oh, that
isn't fair!" I cried. "I didn't know that was the office light--I
didn't--"

"You had your turn," Grant said firmly. He reached out one thin brown
finger and flipped up the switch that was second from the left. I
looked out the window woefully. Sure enough, he had lit up the
"Moonrise Motel" part of the sign.

"You've been experimenting," I accused him. "You knew that was the
right switch."

I should have realized he'd know all about the switches. He always
investigates everything, and if there is something he doesn't know how
to do, he learns how. He's a jack of all trades--and a master of all of
them, too! Usually that makes me very proud of him, but right now I was
just exasperated. "Now I'm going to turn on the 'vacancy' sign," I
said, jabbing grimly at another switch.

Grant laughed. "You turned on the porch light outside the office door."
He put his finger on a switch. "Now look out the window."

I looked out, and saw the green "vacancy" spring into brilliant being.

Furiously I flipped up the other switch. That, it developed, lit up the
red "office" sign outside and above the office door.

It was a beautiful evening. After the hot day the breeze was cooling
and refreshing. The branches of the slender little Chinese elms waved
gently.

When I had put the children to bed Grant said, "It's too nice to be
inside. Let's go outside once." We sat on the curb of the front island
of grass and watched our sign proudly. The island in which the sign
stood was planted in myrtle and bright Martha Washington geraniums, and
now, with the reflection of the soft neon light on them, they were a
mass of color.

Cars were thick in front of the cocktail lounge across the street.
Every once in a while a car, leaving, would make a turn in the highway
preparatory to going back to the business district, and we'd catch our
breaths.

"I thought sure that one was coming in," Grant remarked, at intervals,
about five times while we sat there. And then suddenly the neon lights
flickered and went out, leaving a complete and utter blackness.

We sat there, horrified. Without a neon sign, there wasn't the
slightest possibility that any of the cars on the highway would stop at
our motel . . . indeed, their drivers couldn't possibly realize that
there was a motel here at all.

By the light of a match. Grant called up the electricity company. No
doubt twenty other people were calling them, too, but he wanted to be
sure they'd have the lines repaired at once. I happened to remember
that I had put some candles on one of the shelves under the kitchen
sink. We lighted two candles, setting one in a saucer on the desk in
the office, and the other in the living room.

The electricity was off until after eleven-thirty. It wasn't the whole
city of Banning that was affected; just an area of about two blocks,
starting with us and extending west, toward the business district. The
Peacock's sign was blazing twice as brightly beside all that darkness,
and every once in a while a car left the surge of traffic and slipped
into the Peacock's driveway.

And then, at nearly midnight, our sign flashed on again. Of course all
the other signs did too, but ours was the only one we saw, even though
its modest, steady colors were put to shame by the flashing red, white
and blue eye of the Winking Eye, the second motel to the west of us.
The lights hadn't been on ten minutes when a sleek black sedan nosed
into our driveway.

"A customer!" Grant exclaimed.

"You go, you go," I chattered, wondering how on earth I'd manage when
he went back to Los Angeles and I'd have to overcome my shyness and
talk to our customers myself.

But Grant was already approaching the driver.

I was sitting on the curb of the island, and I couldn't quite hear
their voices. But after a few seconds of conversation the man got out
of the car and followed Grant into one of the cabins. Then he went back
with Grant into the office. "He's registering!" I thought with awe.

Presently the man came out of the office, got back into his car and
drove into the garage adjoining the cabin he had looked at. I could see
now that there were two people in the back seat.

I hurried into the office, where Grant, with a dazed expression, stood
looking at a five dollar bill and a fifty-cent piece.

"Our first money from the motel," he said. "Shall we frame it?"

There was no door between the office and our living room. The whole
interior of the cabin was lighted up by our neon sign. When we lay in
bed we could see the desk in the office; and, conversely, people
standing in the office would be able to see us.

Grant hung a filmy curtain over the doorway, fastening it at the top
with thumb tacks. When the office light was on and the living room
light was off, we discovered by experimentaion, it was possible to see
from the living room into the office, but not the reverse.

That, I reflected as I lay in bed, would be very cozy. I'd be able to
lie in bed and watch while people filled out registration cards (which
would be a soothing agent to my rather abnormal curiosity)--but they
wouldn't be able to see me. This seemed like the ultimate in privacy.
And to have a real bed, a soft comfortable bed again, seemed the
ultimate in luxury.

After we went to bed people began driving in, thick and fast. Grant had
to hop out of bed so many times that finally he decided to stay up. He
put on his robe and slippers and sat in a chair in the office doorway.
I watched avidly as he rented cabins, admiring again the ease and
sureness with which he did something he had never done before.

I had dozed off, in spite of the lumbering of trucks and the zipping of
traffic along the highway. I felt someone shaking me. "Come and look
once," Grant said.

I followed him sleepily and looked out the window where he pointed.

Our sign proclaimed, "No vacancy!"

"You mean they're all rented?" I cried.

"Every one. It's three o'clock; we rented them all in a little over
three hours."

"How much did we take in?" I asked.

"Over sixty-five dollars," he said smugly. "I guess it's a good omen,
the cabins being full the first night."

He got into bed and, with his customary annoying suddenness, fell
asleep.

I was too excited to sleep. I padded happily around the room in my bare
feet. I went into the children's bedroom to see if they were covered.
The light from the highway, and the glow from neon signs, made the room
so light that I could see them clearly.

David, as sound a sleeper as his daddy, was asleep and covered with a
thin blanket. Donna was wide awake, motionless, her big blue eyes
watching me fixedly behind the screen of hair that hung over her
forehead, as I approached her crib. The traffic, the lack of her
accustomed bedtime darkness, and the voices of people in the office,
had apparently kept her awake ever since I put her to bed.

I patted her head, pulled the thin blanket snugly around her plump
neck, and went back to bed. At five, awakened by the rumble of an
unusually noisy truck, I went in again and looked at her. She was still
gravely awake. I'm sure she didn't sleep at all that first night.

That ended her tendency to be a light sleeper, though. Since that first
night she has slept as well as David.

Sunday is supposed to be a day of rest, but the next day was one Sunday
when rest was the most remote possibility in the world for us. The
people in our cabins were checking out one after the other, leaving
their keys in the doors of the cabins or coming into the office and
tossing them on the desk. (One man, leaving early, had got Grant out of
bed at five-thirty just to hand him a key!)

Now, after a happy, exciting night of renting cabins, we were faced
with the result--thirteen dirty cabins to be cleaned.

We had contacted Mrs. Clark, the strongly-built, dark-haired cleaning
woman who did the work for the former owners, but she wasn't coming
until Monday. She would work for us only every other day, because we
were too low on funds to dare spend any on having work done that we
could do ourselves.

I put the baby in her playpen, reminded David again not to play near
the highway, and Grant and I set to work on the cabins. We were tired
anyway after a day of moving and a night of very little sleep, and
whenever I happened to catch a glimpse of myself in one of the little
round mirrors that hung on the wall of each cabin as I worked, I was
shocked. My thick, long hair was tangled and untidy, because of
Banning's cooling but too incessant wind. My eyes looked sunken, and my
face pale. (With so much work before me, I hadn't taken time to put on
any makeup.) I tried to avoid looking in mirrors, because it made me
feel twice as bad to realize how tired and bedraggled I looked.

Grant cleaned the bathrooms, scouring until every fixture shone, while
I stripped the cabins of their dirty towels and sheets, brought clean
ones, and made the beds. I emptied ash trays and wastebaskets and
dusted while Grant vacuumed the floors. That may sound simple, but,
multiplied by thirteen, it becomes drudgery. We plodded along, almost
without hope that we would ever finish. Emptying and polishing the
twentieth ashtray, I cursed the day that cigarettes had been invented.
My hands grew rough and sore from tucking in so many sheets and
blankets, slipping so many pillows into clean cases, and adjusting and
smoothing so many spreads. My back ached. I began to wish I was in Los
Angeles again. I wondered dully how I could ever have considered it
work to clean up just one five-room house, with only two beds in it to
be made.

Every once in a while I had to stop and see that the baby was all
right. David helped by playing in our cabin near her playpen, so that
she wouldn't get lonesome and begin to cry.

At lunchtime there was just one cabin left to clean. Grant said he'd
clean that one, while I fixed lunch. I carried in clean sheets and
pillowslips, hand towels, bath towels, wash cloths, and a bath mat, and
went in to prepare lunch.

I was too tired to do anything but open a can of soup; we were both too
tired to appreciate anything more elaborate, anyway.

Just one task remained for Grant before his return to Los Angeles--to
put up David's tent, in the back yard. I hated to insist on his putting
up the tent when he was so tired, but I knew that having the tent up
back there would be the only thing that would keep David away from the
front of the motel, occupied, and out of mischief. We had agreed to
keep the children as invisible from the front of the motel as possible;
the sight of children is too likely to suggest to travelers that here
is a place where their cars and belongings might be tampered with, and
where there will be so much noise that sleeping will be difficult.

About nine o'clock that night Grant went back to Los Angeles. He rented
three of the cabins before he left, and we agreed on a method of
keeping books.

Grant would come back each weekend and possibly once during each week,
although to drive ninety miles each way just to be here for a few hours
would hardly be worthwhile. He wouldn't quit his job until our income
from the motel was consistently so good that we knew we'd be able to
make our payments and repay Grandma.

I'd have all the renting to do, I'd have to supervise and help the
cleaning woman, on alternate days I'd have to do all the cleaning; I'd
have the two children to take care of, I'd be completely responsible
for anything that might go wrong with the motel. The lights might all
go off again, or the plumbing might get stopped up. I had visions of
careless customers tossing towels and hairbrushes blithely down the
toilets.

Many authors mention, when they want to portray intense feeling, that
their heroine views a certain happening with "mixed emotions." Well, my
emotions as I watched Grant drive off the gravel onto the highway
weren't mixed in the least. They were all the same. I was scared to
death.




CHAPTER THREE


FORTUNATELY I HAD the children in bed, where I didn't have to worry
about them, when the next customer drove in. He was a brisk-looking,
gray-haired man in a new coupe.

Often during my life I had heard people speak of "buck fever." It had
seemed strange to me that any hunter should, at his first sight of a
deer, tremble and shiver and find his fingers too numb and unresponsive
to pull the trigger.

Now, though, I understood. With no capable, confident husband to talk
to the man, I would have to do it myself. My fingers were icy as I
opened the door, and I forced my lips apart in what I hoped looked like
a pleasant smile of greeting.

My knees were quivering (visibly, no doubt) and my voice, when I
squeaked "hello" to the man, was so like the sound of a rusty hinge
that I glanced around in surprise.

The tall, gray-haired man looked at me strangely and asked if I had a
vacancy.

I throttled the moronic impulse to gibber "I feel like there's a great
big one in my head!" and carefully mouthed the words I had rehearsed
for such an emergency as this.

"Yes, I have," I chirped. "Would you care to see it?"

"Please," he replied, with a pained expression that seemed to say,
"Well, what in hell do you think I'm here for?"

I led the way to one of the single cabins in the rear. He followed
close behind me. It was about three hundred feet from the office to the
single cabins--much too far for two people to walk together without
saying a word. Coyotes were howling in the blackness of the hills, and
I felt like howling with them.

I was hot with embarrassment as his footsteps padded along behind me. I
cast about frantically in my mind for a topic of conversation. If only
I had noticed the state on his car license I could ask him how the
weather was where he came from. But I couldn't risk saying merely,
"How's the weather where you came from?" He might sneer, "Same as it is
here. I just came from the other side of town."

He tramped along close behind me, without saying a word. We still had
more than half the distance to go to get to the cabin. Suddenly I had
an idea. Maybe something in his costume, or an emblem or pin he might
be wearing, would give me a topic for conversation. I turned and looked
back at him, searching for pins or ornaments in his lapel and working
slowly up to his face, which was ten or twelve inches higher than my
own. The yard lights, bright lights on a pole on one of the grass
islands, made the details of his clothing visible. Just as I got up to
his eyes I was struck by his expression. He didn't say it, but I could
literally feel him thinking it: "Well, what the hell are you staring
at?"

We went the rest of the way in silence--still more of it. I sighed with
relief as we reached the door of the single cabin--at last the ordeal
was over.

And then I realized I had forgotten to bring the key!

His eyes were on me, impatient, obviously bored with my stupidity and
slowness.

"I--I forgot the key. I'm very sorry. I'll go get it," I stammered.

Throwing dignity to the Banning breezes, I broke into a run as I headed
back toward the office. Not only was I in a hurry to get away from the
pitying contempt in his expression, but I was afraid that if he didn't
get a little satisfaction soon he'd just get into his car and drive
away. It would be terrible if I lost my first customer, especially
after such a bad start. I'd never have the courage to tackle one again.

Seizing the master key out of the desk drawer, I rushed back and opened
the door, snapping on the light and motioning him into the cabin.

His eyes flicked over the maple furniture, the red carpet, the Venetian
blinds, and back to me.

"Well, the cabin's okay," he said.

We embarked on the trip back to the office, while I pondered over the
inflection of his words.

He filled out the registration card, paid me four dollars, accepted the
key from my frigid hand, and turned to give me one last contemptuous
glance before he stepped out of the office.

I sank onto the davenport, weak with relief that my initiation into the
horrors of cabin-renting was over.

I suppose the affliction from which I suffered would be called
customerphobia. Such a word, if it existed, would be defined in the
dictionary as "a morbid fear of customers." No doubt in extreme cases
the victim would run shrieking at the sight of a customer. (As a matter
of fact, I had had to exert a lot of self-control to keep from doing
that very thing!) I grace the ailment by the coining of a name only
because I discovered others can suffer from it too. Grandma, later, was
to go through a violent attack of it, with much more disastrous results.

The next car that drove in that night disgorged a dark, trim looking
man with big ears who demanded, "How mocha get two people?"

"Four dollars," I said.

"How mocha get three people, four people?"

"Five dollars and a half; six-fifty for four people," I said. "I wanna
to buy it," the man declared.

"All right," I said indulgently. "Just fill out this registration card."

"No, no--no, no no!" he cried, shoving the registration card away in
horror. "I means, I wanna to buy it, I wanna to buy it to belong to me.
I got thirty thousand dollars down pay. You wanna to sell your motel?"

"Well," I hedged, "we hadn't really thought of selling. How much did
you want to pay?"

He fingered one huge ear, and I saw the glitter of a diamond on his
finger. "Let's let me look at it, first. Then I make you offer."

I showed some of the empty cabins to him and his wife, a meek little
woman who clambered out of their car and trailed along after us. I led
them out to the land behind the back row of courts. It was just a
gigantic splotch of blackness at this time of night, but I described it
to them. They were very much impressed.

When we were back in the office Mr. Gorvane--for he had introduced
himself by now--said, "I been looking around, this is nicest court in
Banning. I wanna it to belong to me. I offer you seventy-five thousand."

I gasped. By selling, we would make eleven and a half thousand dollars
profit. That was a lot of money, especially considering the short
length of time involved.

I promised him I would talk it over with my husband the following
weekend. I took his address--he lived in Los Angeles--and told him that
Grant would stop in to see him in a little over a week.

Every once in a while during the rest of that evening, I caught myself
almost on the verge of tears. I tried to figure out what was the matter
with me, and I realized that I was unhappy because I was afraid Grant
would insist on selling the motel. I wanted to keep it, no matter how
much we might be offered for it.

Still, I was glad Mr. Gorvane had made the offer. My relatives and the
few of our closer friends to whom we had told the price we were paying
for the motel had insisted that we were being fools, that the motel
couldn't possibly be worth it; that the business about the owner being
sick and having to sell was an old, old gag, that we'd lose every
penny. I had never really doubted the wisdom of our course, but it was
nice to have my faith in the value of our motel upheld. And if some one
offered to buy it for seventy-five thousand the day after we took
possession, probably in a couple of months, with the beginning of the
season at Palm Springs, (a popular winter resort twenty miles from us)
and the influx of winter tourists into California, we'd be offered even
more.

After those two encounters, the edge wore off my customerphobia. I
rented two more cabins before I went to bed. I checked carefully to be
sure that all the neon lights were on. Then I locked the office door
and the door that led outside from the living room, and lay down on the
bed with my clothes on.

The scrunch of wheels on gravel brought me off the bed several times,
but it turned out to be cars going into the restaurant next door. The
beam of the headlights of cars turning around in the restaurant parking
lot shone between the cracks of our Venetian blinds, casting stripes of
light against the wall, and made me think cars were coming into our
driveway.

There was no doubt, though, that the next car I heard was in our
driveway. Besides the agitation of the gravel, there was a thud, and
then loud, excited male voices.

I hurried to the door and looked out. A battered roadster, which had
apparently come from Williams street along our private road and entered
the graveled driveway from the rear, had banged up against the curb of
one of the grass islands. Two young men in the roadster were arguing in
a heated and highly alcoholic manner.

The idea of approaching two angry, unpredictable drunks didn't appeal
to me, but I knew I couldn't let them stay there, making a disturbance
that would be sure to annoy our customers. "Thish ish too the highway!"
one of the men roared.

"No, it ish not! Thash the highway over there, where the lightsh are!
You better let me drive, you're drunk, don't even know where the
highway ish."

They struggled for a moment over possession of the steering wheel.
Finally the one who had been driving said, "You're drunk yourshelf.
Here, you better drive."

They traded seats, with painstaking clumsiness. Then they sat quietly
for a moment, apparently about to go to sleep.

I was trying to coax my reluctant legs to carry me fiercely toward them
when, to my relief, the new driver started the car and pulled out onto
the highway. I hoped they would get safely wherever they were going.

At last I relaxed and went to sleep. Anyone who drove up wanting a
cabin would ring the bell by the office door, anyway.

I couldn't have been asleep more than five minutes when the bell rang
for the first time. I rented four more cabins during the night, each
about an hour after the other. Nervousness and excitement kept me awake
about half an hour after I rented each cabin, and I'd just be drifting
into the sounder stages of sleep when the bell would ring again.

It wasn't a very restful night.

In the morning Mrs. Clark, the husky maid, came to work in the cabins.
She was, in a bristling way, proud of her dark complexion and her
Irish-Italian ancestry, and contemptuous of "them funny-lookin'
foreigners that's always stayin' in your cabins," but she seemed to
enjoy the work of cleaning the cabins, and did it with a zest and speed
I could never have equaled. When I got the children fed and dressed and
the baby in her playpen, I decided to tackle the mountainous heap of
laundry. The laundry truck was due in a couple of hours; and I felt
sure that, on the first day at least, it would take me almost as long
to sort and count and list the dirty things as it would have to
actually wash and iron them myself.

In the garages between cabins number 2 and 3 there were several strips
of leftover linoleum standing against the back wall. I rolled these
flat on the floor and brought armfuls of dirty linens from a
compartment in the linen closet, putting them on one side. Then I
sorted the things into six different piles--sheets, slips, hand towels,
bath mats, wash cloths, bath towels. My arms began to ache from lifting
each sheet and shaking it to be sure no smaller articles were wrapped
up in it. Then I stuffed the sheets into a laundry bag, counting them
carefully. There were sixty sheets, and I had to get a second laundry
bag out of the linen closet.

The linen closet was a huge, roomy affair built against the back of the
garage adjoining cabin 2, and it left plenty of room for a car in the
garage. There were three gigantic shelves in it. On the bottom shelf
were extra blankets and bedspreads, cleaning equipment of all kinds,
and supplies such as soap, toilet paper, small boxes of matches, and
water pitchers. On the middle shelf were stacks of clean linens--about
two hundred of each item. On the top shelf we had stored as many of our
personal belongings as we could get along without temporarily, since
there was no room for them in our cabin.

I was exhausted by the time I had counted all the laundry, stuffed it
into bags, and listed it in the laundry book. Just as I finished, the
laundry truck roared into the driveway and stopped suddenly in front of
the garage where I stood, gravel flying in all directions. The driver
got out. He was a likeable, lanky, red-haired youth with a very few
tiny patches of white skin showing between his freckles.

"How d'you like the motel business by now?" he asked me, as he lifted
the heavy bags into the back of the truck.

"It's fun," I said, "all except cleaning cabins, and sorting laundry,
and keeping books, and getting up in the night to rent cabins!"

He laughed, and rubbed his brown-speckled nose. "You'll get used to
it," he said.

That night wasn't as bad as my first night alone had been. I rented
five cabins before I went to bed, and I did it with so much nonchalance
that I was proud of myself.

Once I got into bed, though, reaction from two days of worry and hard
work and a night of very little sleep set in. I slept deeply,
dreamlessly, without moving, until the shriek of the office bell
shattered my sleep.

Dazedly I went into the office, snapped on the light, and unlocked the
door. Two young men came in. "We want a cabin with two double beds,"
the taller man said.

He filled out the registration card which I shoved sleepily toward him.
"How much?" he asked.

"Five-fifty," I replied. Our rate for a double cabin with two double
beds was five and a half or six and a half dollars, depending on the
number of people that were to occupy it. We had decided to charge that
much or less, depending on the demand for cabins and the number of
"vacancy" signs along the highway, following the custom of the former
owners.

Each of the young men laid a five dollar bill on the counter. I looked
at the bills groggily. I was still half asleep.

"Just one of those will do, with fifty cents beside," I said.

"We want to pay separately," said the shorter man. "Give us each
change, please."

I missed Grant, with his quick mind and his easy competence, more
intensely at that moment than I missed him yet. I smothered a yawn and
tried to concentrate on the difficult task before me. My reasoning, if
you could call it that, was hazy and confused.

"Well," I thought, opening the cash drawer and looking at the array of
five and one dollar bills, and fifty cent pieces and quarters, "they're
each paying half of five and a half. How much is half of five and a
half, anyway? Half of five would be two and a half, so half of five and
a half would be a little more than that. How much more? Well..." At
that point I lost the thread of the whole thing and had to begin over.
"Suppose," I thought, starting on a new tack, "I would give each of
them a dollar. That would mean they each had paid four dollars, which
would be too much. Well, then, suppose I gave them each three dollars.
That would mean they had each paid me two dollars, which wouldn't be
quite enough. But how much would it lack of being enough?"

Arithmetic had always stirred up a swirling fog inside my head. My
eyelids were drooping more and more, and yet I was beginning to feel
beneath my drowsiness a desperate panic. The men were growing impatient.

I frowned and stared more sternly at the money in the cash drawer. I
summoned all my powers of concentration. I handled the money in the
drawer ostentatiously, as a bluff, so that they would think I was
beginning to go into action.

I still don't remember how I did it--unless maybe it was by doling out
the money slowly and watching their faces until their expressions
suggested they had received the full amount--but somehow the awful
situation ended and the men went to their cabin.

The following morning when I did the day's bookkeeping I found that
there was fifty cents too much in the cash drawer. Still, I didn't feel
that the system I had used the previous night had much to recommend it,
and I resolved not to try it again.

Traffic noises along the highway were loud and almost ceaseless--they
quieted down a little just often enough to give the next crescendo the
greatest possible impact. Planes roared up and down from the airport
which was about a block to the southeast; trains whistled and roared
along the track that was a block to the south; cars and trucks and
busses roared along the highway. The whole highway, in fact, was one
big, solid roar.

After the first few days, though, the noise faded to the back of my
consciousness. The peal of the office bell would rouse me instantly,
even if I were working in a cabin several doors away, but the
sky-shattering whine of jet-propelled planes made no impression on me
at all.

Travelers and newcomers to the vicinity nearly always commented on the
noise. Often they'd have to raise their voices to be heard above it. I
got so used to the noise that when someone would yell above the din,
"What an awful racket that train makes'." I'd shriek back, "What train?"

I was beginning to become acquainted with some of our neighbors. Moe,
the bald, thick-set, beak-nosed man who owned the restaurant next door,
had a son, Moejy (no doubt a corruption of Moe, Jr.) who was about a
year older than David. The first moment I laid eyes on Moejy I had a
premonition that he would turn out to be the most obnoxious child I had
ever encountered--a premonition which, as later events were to prove,
was correct.

He was a wiry boy with a small head, close set ears, and eyes that
darted about continually in search of insects to be dismembered or
walls to be scribbled on. He was about a head taller than David, and in
the second grade. For the first few days after we took possession of
the motel, he and David were inseparable.

Directly to the east of us, between us and the imposing Peacock, was a
four-unit motel that was unfinished and had no neon sign. The owner of
the place was a tall, gaunt black-haired old man with a curiously pink
chin. His name, I had learned, was Featherbrain; and I reflected that
he must posses more sterling and endearing qualities than were
immediately visible, to have inspired in the woman who married him such
affection that she was willing to accept him, name and all.

He worked each day on his little motel, painting and hammering, while
his wife, always with a cigarette in one hand, planted shrubs, lined
the driveways with big rocks which she painted white, and did the
watering--an important job in this part of the country. Our own shrubs,
the islands of grass and the geraniums beneath our sign needed a
thorough watering every day. We discovered that watering every other
day was not enough; the grass would turn brown and die in spots unless
it received a daily watering.

There were advantages to the heat and dryness, though. Besides being
contributing factors to what must be one of the most healthful climates
in the world, they made it possible for one to hang clothes up on a
line, stand and wait a few seconds while the things were whipped by the
wind, and take them down, completely dry.

I never had to worry about not having enough clothesline space, even
though there were only three short lines between the posts Grant put up
behind the rear cabins a few weeks after we took over the motel. When
the three lines were full, the first line of clothes was ready to be
taken down, making room for the rest of the wet things.

Donna, even though I had less time to be with her, and she had to
remain in the safety of her playpen for the greater part of the day,
was growing and developing rapidly. She was becoming more agile, and
she could climb on and off the furniture--something she hadn't yet been
able to do when we left Los Angeles. It was a problem what to do with
her when a customer came while she was out of her playpen. I never
dared leave her alone in the house on such occasions, for fear she
might somehow get outside and onto the highway. If I chucked her
suddenly into her playpen, though, and went to talk to the customer,
she would howl with indignation. Since her playpen was in the
unfinished bedroom right behind the office, where her howls would be
plainly audible, that had to be prevented. So I put a bag of cookies on
the bookcase, and whenever I had to rush her to the playpen suddenly, I
gave her a cookie in each hand. She became too absorbed with enjoying
her feast to protest over where she had it.

I bathed her sometimes in the kitchen sink, sometimes in the dishpan.
Our cabin, like the other thirteen, had a lovely tile shower, but no
bathtub. One morning I had just set her in the dishpan of warm water on
the kitchen table when the office bell rang. It must be a salesman, I
reasoned; we very seldom had customers this early in the morning. I'd
get rid of him in short order. I picked up the baby's celluloid duck,
which was on a chair beside the table, and gave it to her to keep her
entertained. Then I hurried into the office.

Three very distinguished looking men stood there. They introduced
themselves; they were representatives of some motel and apartment house
association, which they wanted us to join.

They launched into an exposition of the various benefits connected with
belonging to their organization, and described the exalted position of
the member. The principal spokesman of the group, a dignified creature
with a glistening bald head, was waxing very eloquent indeed when
suddenly he stopped, coughed, and delicately adjusted the white
handkerchief in his pocket. Obviously he was rattled about something,
and behind his close, even shave a faint red was rising. The other two
men laughed uncomfortably, and I realized they were looking at a point
behind me. I turned, to see what they were looking at.

There, with her celluloid duck in one hand, stood Donna, as naked as
the spokesman's head, beaming graciously and impartially upon the three
men.

It was so hard to handle the baby and the motel, doing half of the work
of cleaning cabins, taking care of the laundry, answering customer's
questions and listening to their views on life when there were a dozen
other things I should be doing, that I persuaded Grant to quit his job.
Business was good, even better than we had hoped it would be, and every
night our garages were filled with sleek, shiny automobiles from every
part of the country. The income from the motel was almost as much in
one night as Grant was earning in a week. Unless something went
terribly wrong, there was no reason why we wouldn't make a financial
success.

So Grant left Southgate (the suburb of Los Angeles in which the General
Motors plant was located) and came to Banning, bag and baggage; and I
shucked my new capability, that had been born of necessity, and
reverted to being my old helpless self, which was more natural--and a
lot more fun.

Grant and I had discussed Mr. Gorvane's offer to buy the place, and had
decided that we wanted the motel more than we wanted the quick, easy
profit.

That is, Grant decided that--I had known all along that that was how I
felt about it.




CHAPTER FOUR


THERE'S A LOT of work to running a motel, and no matter how many people
there are to do the work, there's never a moment when they are
completely caught up. Always there are the big jobs awaiting any rare
moments of leisure--digging out the insidious weeds that thrust their
way through the gravel, planting flowers and improving the external
appearance of the place, utilizing the extra land, and repairing the
inevitable damage done by careless customers.

Mr. Featherbrain, the old man next door--whose black hair, I suspected,
was dyed--finally got his motel finished to the point where it was
ready to operate; and one day some men came and installed a big neon
sign (Palace Motel--Vacancy) in front of his place. It was a great day
for him. He came over to talk to us about it. He leaned his tall form
against our office door, stroked his rosy chin, and said, "Well sir,
I'm a goin to have muh 'no vacancy' up tonight afore anybody else. Yep,
two hours after dark, and we'll be full."

"Good for you," I said. "With only three cabins to rent, you should be
able to do it, too!"

"Durned old fellers that put up the sign," he grumbled, "they went'n
knocked all muh white rocks out of line with theit truck. I shoulda
busted evvy bone in their head."

A customer drove into our driveway, and the irascible old man went
home. A middle-aged woman in a mouse-colored dress got out of the car,
and just as she began to speak another car, a green coupe, whirled up
on to the gravel. A well built, fiftyish man with his dark hat at a
rakish angle stepped out of the car and said, "Do you rent any of your
cabins by the week, madame? I've got some work to do in Palm
Springs--I'm a contractor, don't know just how long I'll want to stay,
but--" Realizing suddenly that he had interrupted the middle-aged
woman, he swept off his hat and bowed before her.

"I apologize deeply, madame," he said. "It was unforgivable. Pray go
ahead and do your business with this young lady, while I wait my turn."

The woman smiled timidly, first at him and then at me. She was a
dainty, plump, small-boned creature with white, slightly rouged skin
and tiny white hands. Her blue eyes, underlined with a criss-cross of
faint wrinkles, sparkled behind rimless glasses.

"Bon jour," she said. "I'm Miss Nestleburt. I, too, was wondering if
you rent cabins by the week or month. I have to live in this climate
for my health for a few weeks ... the doctor says I'm just on the verge
of asthma, and a few months of desert air should prevent it from
developing."

"We usually rent our cabins on an overnight basis," I said, "but
there's no reason why we couldn't rent them by the week."

"Of course I know it will be simply terribly expensive," she said, "but
I want a nice place like these you have here, and I'm willing to pay
for it." She took a deep, rattling breath.

"Come on, I'll show you what we have," I said, my smile including the
man with the dark hat. His eyes, I noticed, were sparkling with love of
life and a private amusement.

Miss Nestleburt and the man, whose name turned out to be Hawkins, were
both pleased with the newness and the cleanness of the cabins. I gave
them cabins 7 and 8, and as they left the office after filling out
registration cards he set his hat back on his head in order,
apparently, to be able to lift it gallantly.

"May I call upon you tonight?" I heard him ask. A truck thundered past
and I couldn't hear her reply, but I watched them as they walked
together toward their cars. Her birdlike head was fluttering in
agreement with the remarks he was making, and his steps were jaunty.

I turned my attention to the desk, to put the date and the cabin number
on each of the two registration cards. About to pick up a pencil,
suddenly I gasped and jumped backward. There, leering at me with
strangely human eyes, was an enormous black spider, motionless on one
of the registration cards.

I would have called Grant, but I knew he was behind the rear cabins,
cleaning out the incinerator. I was on my own.

I picked up a newspaper that was on one edge of the desk, moving
quietly and carefully, and folded it until it was narrow and stiff.

I hated to think of having squashed spider all over the top of the
desk, but I hated even more to think of letting the huge, loathsome
creature escape. I raised the folded newspaper, with grim slowness, and
then I brought it crashing down on the registration card.

I sighed with relief. There, that would fix him! I lifted the paper,
preparing to clean up the mess.

There, still watching me mockingly, sat the spider, still
motionless--and completely unharmed!

About that time it began to dawn on me that this was a very strange
spider, indeed. I had seen every imaginable sort of insect since we
came to Banning, including black widows, but I had never in all my life
seen anything resembling this.

I moved a little closer and, bending down, looked the spider over
carefully. Then I laughed and picked him up in my hand. He was made of
rubber. Either Miss Nestleburt or Mr. Hawkins must have left him there,
since he was on top of the registration cards.

I put him in the cash drawer, where he would give Grant a shock.

I went back into our cabin and set to work on a "Vacancy" sign I was
making, to hang up just outside the office door under the neon sign
that said "Office."

We had been thinking of getting a neon "vacancy" sign, but we were
afraid it would be too expensive. One night the "Moonrise Motel" sign
had begun to flicker on and off, so we telephoned Oian Rosco, the only
neon expert within fifty miles. Grant was disgusted at the idea of
having to hire anyone to fix something for him, but neon signs are one
thing--probably about the only thing--he doesn't know how to fix.

While Rosco, a small man with an innocent-looking round face, was
fixing our sign, we asked him how much a neon "vacancy" sign would
cost. He told us he'd figure it out and let us know when he brought
back the parts for our broken sign.

When he returned with the parts, he not only gave us an estimate of the
cost, but brought along a penciled sketch of the sign as he planned it,
in its full size.

It was very attractive, and he could make it for us in a very short
time, but it would cost a little more than we wanted to spend, with
what neighboring motel owners called the "late summer slump" due at
almost any time. We'd think it over, though, we told him.

He left the penciled sketch for us to consider, assuring us, his round
eyes guileless, that he had no use for it.

We decided that, even though we didn't feel that we could afford a neon
sign, we should have a "vacancy" sign of some kind to hang under the
"office" sign. It would catch the eyes of the minority of people who
look toward the office, instead of at the big sign in front of a motel,
to determine whether or not accommodations are available.

"I'll get a board the size of the 'office' sign," Grant, the ever
resourceful, said: "I'll paint it white, and you can put the letters on
carefully with pencil. Then we'll paint the letters black."

"A good idea," I agreed, glancing at the paper Rosco had left, and at
the beautiful, perfect lettering on it.

When Grant put the dry, white-painted board before me a few days later,
I had a battle with my conscience. Should I take a ruler and
painstakingly create my own letters, or should I cut out Rosco's
letters and trace them onto the board?

The latter course seemed the most practical. Still, a stern inner voice
told me, Rosco had put his time and work into that sample sign with the
hope of selling us its counterpart in neon, not so that we might make
use of his labor by tracing his letters and making a sign ourselves,
thereby pushing ourselves still further out of the market for the neon
sign he might have sold us.

I finally decided that the only honorable thing to do would be to start
from scratch. Pushing his sign aside, I set laboriously to work making
new letters. If I cast an occasional glance at the formation of his
lettering as I worked, it was accidental.

I was intently studying the proportions of his "Y" when the office bell
rang. I put aside my work guiltily and hurried to the door.

It was Miss Nesdeburt. She gave me a timid smile.

"My cabin is just lovely," she said, her tiny white hands fluttering up
to her glasses. She took them off, as though she could see me better
without a barrier of glass between us; "it's really lovely," she
continued. "I was wondering if I could borrow a pencil? I'd like to
write some postcards and tell every one I've found a cabin, and I seem
to have forgotten to bring a pen or pencil."

"Certainly. We've got dozens of them," I said lightly. I opened the
cash drawer and put my hand into it.

Then I shrieked and leaped backward. There, in the drawer, sat a huge
black spider!

Then I remembered, and I could feel the color flooding into my face. I
had been taken in by my own trick--and before an audience, too!

"It's just--just an artificial spider, made of rubber. I forgot, for a
minute, that I'd put him in there. I was going to play a little joke on
my husband, you know. But I guess the joke was on me." I produced a
laugh that was meant to be hearty, but which actually was sickly and
aggrieved.

Miss Nestleburt's sparkling blue eyes had never left my face. Her
expression was sad and horrified. "Et tu, Brute?" she asked, with more
pathos than Caesar could possibly have squeezed into the three words.

"What do you mean?" I asked uneasily.

"Why, what kind of a den of practical jokers have I gotten myself
into?" she wanted to know. "First Mr. Hawkins, now you."

"Oh, but I'm not really a practical joker," I assured her hastily. "In
fact, it must have been Mr. Hawkins who left this spider to scare me,
and I just thought as long as I had it anyway I'd scare my husband. I'm
not in the habit of doing things like that. Did Mr. Hawkins scare you
with a spider too?"

She shuddered daintily. "Mais non! It was worse than that."

I leaned across the desk eagerly.

"I'll--I'll tell you when I know you better," she said in confusion.
"Really, it was quite a dreadful thing. Maybe I shouldn't let him come
to call tonight after all."

She took the pencil I handed her, smiled her thanks, and went
thoughtfully out the office door.

We hadn't been in the motel business long before we discovered that the
proper name for customers is "clients" or "guests"--not the common,
vulgar "customers" that came so naturally to our lips. In spite of the
good example set by practically all the other motel owners we knew, who
were careful not to use the uncouth word, we continued calling our
customers what they were--customers.

Grant, falling as easily and competently into the role of motel owner
as he had into his many former roles, must have convinced our customers
from his very first day that he was a veteran of the motel business.
His every action, his every remark led people to believe he had been in
this part of the country, at this work, for years. He freely employed
such words and phrases as "usually," "generally in the summer here,"
and "every winter." If a customer were to ask him, "Isn't it warmer
than usual here?" he'd reply something like, "Nope, it always gets
pretty hot here, this time of year. In a month or so it'll get cool,
though; there'll even be snow on those mountains."

The sweating customer, glancing at the close, towering mountains to the
north and south, would mention that it didn't seem possible, and Grant
would say, "Yep, it's a surprise, every winter, when the desert heat
turns into snow and cold wind. It happens, though." Of course it does
happen, too, but at the time he had only our neighbor's word for it.
Snow near Banning was something as incredible to us as it was to any
traveler across the hot desert.

When I was still in the last stages of customerphobia, Grant was
dealing with the people who stayed in our cabins, and their often
outlandish requests, with ease and confidence. He had at his fingertips
the answers to the amazing array of questions customers put to him, and
the distances between most of the fairly well known cities in the
country. If anyone who had rented a cabin wanted to know the distance
to Los Angeles, Grant told him: eighty-nine miles. But if someone who
hadn't yet registered wanted the same information, Grant would tell him
that it was "almost a hundred miles" (merely another way of putting it)
and the prospective customer would usually decide, since it was so far,
he might as well stay for the night instead of driving on in.

Grant could describe the location of the nearest (or best-in-Banning)
bar, restaurant, skating rink or lumber yard. He could get rid of the
west-bound, cross-country truck drivers who, preparatory to going to
the bar across the highway for a quick beer, parked their long,
two-sectioned trucks so that the rear section blocked one of our two
driveways. We had one driveway on each side of our sign; they led from
the highway and were the initial source of all our income.

Getting rid of truck drivers was one thing I could never do; and there
had been many occasions during the time Grant was still working at
General Motors, and later, when he was away during the day on business,
that it had been necessary for me to try. I had two approaches, one
stern, the other sweet, which I varied. Actually, I guess I alternated
them, on the theory that last time one hadn't worked, so this time I'd
try the other! My stern approach called forth two general reactions on
the part of the drivers, who were always about to descend from their
puffing, steaming contraptions as I ran up. My tough expression and
sharp, short order to the driver to get his truck away at once!--would
bring forth (a) an amused "Look who's talkin'" smile, and a significant
glance from the lofty perch of the truck seat, at my slender height of
slightly over five feet; or (b) it would kindle an equally warm
response, and I'd find myself showered by abuse, epithets, and threats
from a mouth twisted frighteningly sidewise, full of tobacco juice, and
topping off a frame composed of so much bulging muscle that I'd start
back to the cabin without arguing.

My "sweet" approach was just as unsatisfying. There were two reactions
to it, too, and neither resulted in the removal of the truck.

"I know you don't realize it," I'd say, my voice dripping saccharin,
"but your truck is blocking our driveway. I wonder if you'd mind moving
it?" And I'd smile and flutter my eyelashes.

Either the truck driver would exclaim something like, "Well, hi there,
honey! You just forget about the truck and think about who's drivin'
it. How about givin' me your phone number, honey, so's next time I come
through here--"

Or else he'd reply in a falsetto imitation of my too-sweet voice, "Oh,
dearie me, is that dreat big bad truck really block ing your itsy bitsy
driveway? 'oo just stand there and pout at it while I go get me a itsy
bitsy glass of beer."

Both these types of reply were quite beside the point. Truck drivers
are one breed of men with whom I can't commune.

Grant, of course, never has any trouble with them. Whenever possible, I
watch out the window as he runs up to whatever truck is the offender at
the moment and speaks with the driver a few moments. He smiles, the
driver waves a hand good naturedly, and the truck moves off. I have
never been able to understand how he does it.

Grant is so irritatingly competent, in fact, that I can't help being
secretly overjoyed about his one weak point. He has no sense of system
or organization, and he can seldom make the money in the cash drawer,
when he takes out the day's profits, add up to exactly the amount our
penciled list, filled in customer by customer, says it should. When I
was running the place alone it always balanced out to the penny, with
the exception of that one morning when I found fifty cents too much.
When Grant left General Motors and came to Banning, he began adding
money to the cash drawer if there weren't enough small bills, taking
money out of the drawer on any pretext, and in general getting things
so confused that I wiped my hands of the whole affair.

"You handle the money," I said. "I'm tired of trying to keep it
straight, with you dipping into it and adding to it all the time. From
now on it's your job to make it come out right."

And from that day on I have never worried about the amount of money in
the drawer.

Grant's lack of system concerning book-keeping and handling money is
characteristic of his general lack of system in regard to everything;
with so little sense of order and preciseness, it amazes me that he can
always get so much accomplished, and so well. He's always starting
something that he knows perfectly well he won't, due to other
obligations, be able to finish. And then, of course, so that his
initial effort wont be wasted, I have to stop whatever I'm doing and
finish what he started. Perhaps, on second thought, I do understand how
he gets so much accomplished.

When the broadfelt carpet in one of the rear single cabins--number
9--began to wear out, we bought a new one, a gorgeous thing with a
swirling dark red pattern. We would have liked to add a final note of
luxuriousness to the cabins by substituting lovely new carpeting for
the plain red broadfelt in each--but that would have cost a penny that
would be not only pretty, but downright beautiful.

When Grant tried to get the old carpeting up, he made the discovery
that it had been glued to the cement floor. He would have left it there
to serve as a pad for the new rug, but he wanted to keep the good
portions of it to substitute for parts of the other carpets that were
on the verge of looking too shabby to be in keeping with the rest of
the furnishings.

The glue with which the old carpet had been secured to the floor must
have been the strongest in the world. Or perhaps, as Grant suggested,
the builders of the place had laid the carpet before the cement of the
floor had dried, and the cement had hardened with a firm grip on the
fabric of the rug.

Anyway, it took us, working together, about an hour to get each square
of the old carpet up. Grant chopping at it from underneath with a
sharp, knife-like tool while I pulled as hard as I could on the part
that was loose, so that the free parts would be lifted out of the way
and he could see in just what spots the rug was still attached to the
floor.

My hands ached before I had been on the job long. "I wasn't raised to
be a carpet yanker," I remarked at frequent intervals; but Grant,
steaming and clenching his teeth, his brown hair hanging over his
forehead like Donna's, wouldn't let me escape. "I'll never get the mmm
thing finished," he grunted, "if you don't help me."

I tried standing while I pulled, and then sitting in various positions
to relieve the strain on various parts of my body. I tried leaning
backward and pulling with all my might, relaxing all the other muscles
of my body and depending on the rug to hold me up. Of course the
inevitable happened; Grant struck an area where the rug wasn't attached
so firmly to the floor, the part I was holding yielded suddenly to my
pulling, and I sprawled backward with my legs in the air.

When Grant was through laughing we began again. My thumbs were getting
sore, and my whole hands ached. I glared out the open door of the cabin
at a fat couple sunning themselves indolently on one of the grass
islands. That's what's wrong with this country, I thought darkly--too
many loafers.

When at last the rug was completely pried and hacked loose, Grant began
cutting the new rug to fit the room, while I went up front and
administered poison verbally to Moejy, who had brought an armful of
glass jars from his father's restaurant next door and was breaking them
on our sidewalk. Moejy, in my opinion, had only one redeeming feature:
a tendency to spend most of his time at the Auto Haven Motel half a
mile west of us. The Bradleys, who owned the court, must certainly be
lovers of childhood in general--and in the raw--to be able to endure
him.

Miss Nesdeburt fluttered into the office the next morning before I was
through bathing the baby. Grant had started cleaning cabins.

I could tell she was in a talkative mood, so I invited her to sit in
the kitchen while I scrubbed Donna.

"I had the nicest dream last night," Miss Nesdeburt began. "And I
believe people should share their dreams, don't you? I dream nearly
every night, and I have a little book I write the dreams in. I do it
the first thing when I wake up, because you know how dreams slip out of
a person's mind. And if I forgot them I wouldn't be able to share them
with other people." I smiled vaguely.

"Dreams are important, you know," she said, lowering her voice
mysteriously. "Much more important than most people realize. Anyone who
can interpret them correctly can forecast coming events. I'm learning
to interpret them."

"Oh, you read those dream books?" I asked, rinsing the soap off Donna's
plump, firm little body and brushing the hair away from her eyes.

"Oh, no!" Miss Nesdeburt cried. "I was studying under Eimo, who is
known as the famous somnologist, until I started getting this asthma.
His method is entirely new. Why, he--"

"Tell me about your dream," I interposed hastily.

She clasped her little white hands. "Well, it was like most of my
dreams. I was alone, walking through a big empty place, and then all of
a sudden there were a lot of other people, couples, all around me, but
they stayed just beyond me, and I couldn't reach them, no matter how I
tried. Now, I'll interpret that for you, according to Elmo's teaching.
It means that I'm going to make a trip soon and go where there'll be
crowds of people!"

I don't pretend to be a dream interpreter, but her dream sounded to me
more like the dream of a frustrated, man-starved old maid than anything
else I could think of.

That line of thought prompted me to ask whether Mr. Hawkins had called
on her the previous night.

Her blue eyes brightened, and she took off her glasses. She smiled, and
her smile had lost its first timidity.

"Yes, he did," she confessed. "He's a very nice man, really, even
if--well, he does have a strange sense of humor." She flushed a little,
apparently remembering whatever it was he had done soon after they met,
and I ruefully remembered the black spider. (I had left it in the cash
drawer, but it didn't draw even a gasp from Grant. Reaching into the
drawer for some money, he had said, "Well, look here once! Someone's
left a fake spider in the drawer! Lucky I found it instead of you.
You'd have been running yet.")

"I hope Mr. Hawkins was more gentlemanly last night," I said. I am, I
must admit in all modesty, an expert at drawing forth information
without appearing to pry. Actually, I employ this gift principally
because a writer needs to know as much as possible of the thoughts and
actions and experiences of other people. What many of my friends and
relatives call my accursed curiosity has dug out for me plots which
eventually, garnished a little, appear in magazines. I suppose I should
confess that my curiosity isn't completely scientific, though; a
fraction of it--(about nine-tenths) is just the plain old garden
variety.

"Last night . . ." Miss Nestleburt began reminiscently, wheezing a
little. "Well, I don't know whether you'd say he was gentlemanly or
not. He--he brought me a large bag of tomatoes, which I thanked him for
and put on the bed. Then, just as I was sitting down on a chair, he
grabbed the bag and shoved it under me, like lightning. I couldn't help
sitting on it and squashing the tomatoes."

Miss Nestleburt sighed and replaced her glasses. "He laughed and
laughed, and then he said in that gallant way of his, 'I apologize
deeply, madame! I had no idea you were going to sit in that particular
chair! It was a most unfortunate coincidence!' And then, while I stood
there dripping tomato juice, he started laughing again, and he laughed
until the tears rolled down his face." The fine lines under Miss
Nesdeburt's eyes crinkled with reluctant amusement.

I finished drying Donna and began pulling her tiny gingham dress over
her head. Miss Nestleburt rose.

"Well, I must go lie in the sun for a while," she said. "It's such a
fine, bright day, n'est-ce pas? Be sure to remember your dreams from
now on, and I'll interpret them for you."

I assured her that I would, although I seldom had a chance to get more
than a third of the way into a dream before some cabin-hunter rang our
bell.

I went out to help Grant clean cabins. He was working in the rear
group, in number 9, at the moment. Donna pulled newspapers out of the
wastebasket while I set to work making the bed for which Grant had just
brought clean sheets. We "bolster" the pillows by smacking an arm down
the middle of each pillow when the clean slip is on it, folding it back
over the arm. This gives a stiff, smart appearance to the bed when the
spread is drawn taut around the pillows. There's all the difference
between pillows au naturel and pillows bolstered, that there is between
a slovenly woman without a brassiere, and a sprightly one who is
wearing the latest style uplift.

Although I bolstered the pillows faithfully, I never put the sheets on
the beds in accordance with the rules. I never bothered with "square
corners," but simply tucked the sheets in all around in my own
speedier, although slightly less neat, way.

Grant was just finishing the bathroom when I saw, through the slats of
the Venetian blind, that a car had pulled up in front of the office.

"You go," I said. "I'm tired of galloping way up there just to tell
people we don't have any cabins with kitchens."

Grant set down his bucket of soapy water, and through the slats I
watched his tall figure hurrying toward the car. He talked a few
seconds to the man and woman who were standing by the car; then,
preparatory to leading them to a cabin, he turned and started away from
them. But he had been standing just off the sidewalk, which jutted up
an inch above the gravel. He caught his toe on the sidewalk and thrust
his other foot forward quickly to regain his balance. He half ran, half
staggered, in a crouching position, for several grotesque, humiliating
steps, until at last he recovered his equilibrium and was able to stand
upright.

I howled with laughter. If I had been closer to him I would have
pretended not to notice his lack of dignity, but I was so far
away--completely out of earshot--that I knew I could enjoy myself
without causing him further embarrassment. I bent double, clutching my
aching sides. I took a step backward, and stepped against Grant's
bucket of soapy water.

In my struggle to extricate myself from the unexpected situation I
flailed the air wildly with my arms, and concluded the performance by
falling flat on the floor, tipping the bucket so that its contents
surged all over the brand new rug.

Donna looked up from the newspapers she was taking out of the
wastebasket. "Mama down," she stated, a little superfluously.




CHAPTER FIVE


GRANDMA COMES OUT from Los Angeles to see us every other Friday, and
returns the following Monday morning to her job as fancy presser in a
cleaning plant, and to her small apartment, which is a ten-minute
streetcar ride from Hellwig's apartment. She is a creature of such
infallibly regular habits that I sometimes wonder if there isn't a
small, precise clock or calendar, or some mechanism for keeping track
of time, tucked away inside her.

She works hard whenever she comes. If there's work at hand to be done,
she plunges into it. If there isn't any, she creates some, or snoops
around the various cabins and garages and the grounds until she finds
something we have neglected.

It was she who made Donna's little play yard habitable, after Grant had
put up a white picket fence around a patch of ground at the end of one
row of cabins. "The little stinkpot has to have a place to play!" she
exclaimed. She painstakingly cleared the stony ground of Russian
thistles, embryo tumbleweeds, stickers, and rocks. She hosed the
ground, spaded it, and planted devil grass seeds. In a few weeks Donna
had a lawn to play on; during the time before it grew, she dug in the
loose dirt with a spoon, and required three complete baths every day.
(A big disadvantage to the yard, though, was that it was so
inaccessible; it was a nuisance to take her all the way out there, and
to go out to check up on her every once in a while. Knowing that she
couldn't get back into the house until I came for her, and knowing how
far from it her yard was, Donna began to develop symptoms of loneliness
which became more and more acute, and gradually I gave up taking her
out to the yard at all.)

"My land, you know what a woman that's staying in one of your cabins
told me?" Grandma asked, looking up from a lapful of mending the day
after she met Miss Nestleburt. "She told me that a dream I had last
week, about a fire, meant I would soon be injured." Grandma held up one
finger, on the end of which glistened a tiny pinpoint of blood. "And
I'll be swear'n if I didn't prick myself just now, on this needle!
Ain't she good? Maybe she'll be able to tell me if I'm ever gonna marry
Hellwig! Ayah, she's just like a fortune teller--a sight better than
one, even! I never see anything like it!"

Something else Grandma "never see anything like" was the number and
variety of articles left behind in their cabins by our customers.
Nearly every morning we find something. We have a big box in which we
put them all, and there they stay until they are called for--which is
almost always never--or until their owners write, giving an address to
which to send the objects, and requesting that they be mailed. Usually
such requests are accompanied by a dollar for our trouble and for
postage. If every article left behind would cause one letter with a
dollar in it to be sent to us, we'd have a very nice little business on
the side, wrapping and mailing packages. Most of the things, though,
lie quietly forgotten, and accumulate. After about six months we paw
through the pajama tops, bottles of shaving lotion, slippers, garter
belts, cosmetic jars and hair nets, and salvage whatever we think we
can use. The rest we give to Mrs. Clark, who bears it triumphantly home
in the manner of a hunter returning with an elusive and long-sought
deer. What she ever manages to do with it all, I have never asked her.

To Grandma, the conglomeration of left-behind articles is "one H. of a
mess," and I am inclined to share her view.

Mr. Featherbrain's little motel, next door, didn't do very well for a
couple of months after it opened. It was in a bad spot, between us and
the Peacock. Whenever I went to the store across the street and looked
at it from that vantage point, I couldn't help thinking of a tiny,
pale, bashful man squeezed to insignificance between two fat, husky,
rouged and mascara-ed women. One day while I was waiting for Mr.
Bertram, the plump grocer, to finish making a sale to someone else, I
leaned back against the counter and gazed dreamily across the highway,
at our motel. (I never got over the thrill of pride I felt every time I
reminded myself that those beautiful buildings were ours--or would be,
when we had paid about fifty thousand dollars more on them!) The high,
mistily blue mountains rose behind the motel, reaching into the dimmer
blue of the sky.

And then I looked at Featherbrain's small place, which--new and nice
though it was--appeared to have a wistful, bewildered air about it. I
smiled, and the thought about the little man between two huge gaudy
women must have been written on my face, for the customer on whom the
grocer had been waiting snarled suddenly, "Just wait'll the summer
slump comes. You're a goin' to have your "vacancy" sign on all night,
every night, and it ain't a goin' to do you no good, neither. Durned
old cars won't stop, any more'n they're a stoppin' at my place now."

It was Mr. Featherbrain, his chin pinker than ever now with
indignation. I flushed guiltily, and tossed him an airy, "Oh, I wasn't
thinking what you thought I was thinking!" smile. I turned to the
grocer, whose jaws were clamping spasmodically upon a wad of something
in his mouth, as the gaunt old man stamped out of the store.

At least once every day since we have been in Banning, a dark-skinned
man or woman with straight black hair has strolled through the grounds
of our motel. Sometimes they come in groups of three or four, coming
from the little country road--Williams street--to which the back
portion of our land extends, and ambling on out to the highway. These,
I learned, are Indians. There is an Indian reservation a mile or so
north of us, in the first hills that comprise the sloping upward into
the mountains. Jed, our freckled laundry truck driver, told me as much
as he knew about them, one day after he had finished lifting our heavy
sheet-filled laundry bags into his truck. They still hold their tribal
ceremonies at regular intervals far back in the hills and, according to
legend, no white man has ever witnessed any of these ceremonies.

The principal pastime of these Indians, according to Jed, is to
maintain and increase their fearsomeness and mystery. They give special
attention to fostering awe of themselves in those people, most of them
from the Eastern parts of the country, who believe that Indians still
go on the warpath and scalp people--or that, if they haven't actually
done either of those things recently, they are quite capable of doing
either at any moment.

"Far as I'm concerned, they're just a bunch of showoffs," Jed said,
rubbing his nose. "D'you know what they did? They even put a curse on
Banning in 1935. You'd be surprised how many people were terrified, and
left."

"Why did they put a curse on the city?" I wanted to know.

"They were mad because so many curious white people kept coming out and
snooping around their reservation."

"H'm." It would be interesting to look an Indian reservation over,
especially if the inhabitants--or inmates--or whatever you'd call
them--were the curse-putting kind. My own curiosity, seldom dormant,
was definitely aroused, and I promised myself that the Indians would
have one more white person to be angry at, as soon as I could possibly
arrange it.

The ubiquity of the Smiths never became a personal thing to me until we
moved to Banning. Never a week goes by that a car doesn't drive up in a
flurry of gravel and belch forth a person who rings the bell and
inquires, "Have you a party staying here by the name of Smith?" The
only variation in this routine is the wording. Sometimes it's "Is dere
a guy, name a' Smith, stayin' here?"

It happens so often that, if there weren't so many different people
involved, I'd think it was some kind of a gag. As it is, whenever a
Smith actually registers to spend a night with us, I can hardly resist
telling him, in a coy and enigmatic manner, that someone has been
looking for him.

With two children playing noisily and constantly, and customers ringing
the office bell blithely at the most inconvenient moments, and Grant
coming into our cabin every now and then to ask me where's that mmm
screwdriver, it was impossible for me to be able to concentrate enough
to do any writing. Therefore, each day while the baby took her nap,
when the cabins were cleaned up, the laundry sent out, and everything
as nearly under control as possible, I loaded up with paper, pen, a
reference book or two, and the partially done article or story I had
been working on, and went to cabin number 15, which is almost directly
across from the cabin in which we live. There, in glorious solitude, I
wrote, interrupted only by the occasional intriguing sight of customers
driving up to the office, ringing the bell, and being confronted by
Grant. Whenever such an event occurred, I had to stop my work, go to
the window, and peek breathlessly between the slats of the Venetian
blind at all that went on. This is always an unnecessary distraction
from my work, and I know I should have more will power and self
control; but there is something in me ('your damn curiosity!' I've
heard it called by irritated objects of it) that won't allow me to sit
by, quietly absorbed in something that can wait, when things are
happening which I might just as well be investigating.

I did my writing in longhand, although I had always used the typewriter
before we came to Banning. I wrote longhand now because, with all my
other paraphernalia, I didn't want to haul the typewriter back and
forth all the time. To relieve the boredom which frequently attacked
me, while I was writing, I used different colored ink on different
days. My original manuscripts were gorgeous things of purple, green,
red and blue. I couldn't leave my writing equipment in any cabin
overnight, naturally, because we hoped to rent every cabin every
night--although we weren't at all sure of filling up, except on
Saturday nights.

That's why, also, when Grandma comes to visit us every other week, we
don't give her one of the cabins. She can sleep in our cabin, even if
it is a little crowded; but, obviously, the customers can't. She sleeps
on David's bed, and David sleeps on the floor, using Donna's playpen
pad for a mattress; and everyone is happy--except, possibly, David.

Grandma suffers from customerphobia far more acutely than I ever did.
The trembling and quivering I suffered were mild compared to the
tremors, amounting practically to convulsions, she goes through at even
the mere thought of waiting on a customer. I know better now than to
attempt to break her in to the gentle art of renting cabins, but there
was a time when I was not so wise. That was on one of her first visits,
when I thought I'd teach her to be a substitute motel manager, in much
the same manner of the man who teaches his little boy to swim by
throwing him shrieking into six feet of cold water.

Grant had tossed David and Donna into the back seat of the car and
taken them along for the ride on a trip to the drug store. They were
going to buy a jar of salve for David's nose, which sunburns, peels,
and sunburns all over again, with painful persistence. Grandma and I
were alone. I hoped that a customer would come during the brief time
that Grant would be gone, for I had mapped out a campaign for ridding
Grandma of her fear of customers for once and for all.

I was sitting in the kitchen reading, wearing a dress that had a zipper
all the way down the front. Grandma, unsuspecting and happy, was
bustling about the living room with a dustdoth, searching for dust.

It wasn't long before I heard the sound I had been hoping for--the
scrunch of tires on the gravel, and a squeak of brakes. Faster than I
had ever done it before, I stood up, zipped down my dress, took it off
and tossed it under the table.

About that time Grandma noticed that there was a car outside, and that
a fat, middle-aged couple were getting out of it. She came rushing into
the kitchen with that near panic that always overcomes her when
customers approach, even when she knows perfectly well she won't have
to talk to them.

"My land, here's a customer! Come on, come on!" She hurried into the
kitchen, her black eyes sparkling with excitement in her unwrinkled
face.

I gasped with what I hoped sounded like dismay. "A customer? Oh, dear,
and I was just getting ready to take a shower! See, I'm in my slip. I
can't possibly wait on them like this. You'll have to do it, I'm
afraid."

"Good Godfrey Mighty," Grandma breathed. "I can't--"

The doorbell pealed a strident summons.

"My God!" exclaimed Grandma. "What am I gonna do?" Grandma, to my great
regret and mortification, swears. She insists that she doesn't, and
that she hasn't uttered a single word that would be inappropriate at a
Ladies' Aid meeting, since two years ago when she made a New Year's
resolution to stop swearing. Actually, that resolution proved to be
only the mildest sort of damper on her powers of expression; but she
maintains that she no longer swears. The only time she'll admit it is
when she's caught in the act, and confronted with the echo of what she
has said. And even at such times, she tries to persuade me that, with
the exception of that one time ...

The doorbell rang again, more insistently. Grandma's black eyes darted
around with lightning speed. Whether she was looking for my dress, or
for a means of escape, I didn't know.

"Go ahead," I prodded. "I've explained to you how to do it. You know
where the keys are, and what we charge for each cabin."

Grandma gave a low moan and started for the office. I sat down again,
still in my slip, and chuckled. I glanced at the book I had been
reading, but I strained to hear what was going on in the office. I
could hear only a low rumble of voices.

Well, she could tell me all about it afterward. I tucked one leg under
me on the kitchen chair, fingered the satiny material of my slip, and
began reading my book again.

I was absorbed in a faintly lavender passage in the book when suddenly
I realized that I was not alone. There, in the doorway of the kitchen,
stood a middle-aged couple, their eyes busily engaged in examining my
slip and the broad expanses of skin above and below it.

"There she is," Grandma, behind them, was saying weakly. "I'm new
here--she knows how to rent cabins--she's the owner--I ain't--Godfrey,
I don't know how--" Her voice tapered off. She gave a despairing little
bleat, and disappeared.

I clutched the book to my bosom, and began moving my feet under the
table, hoping perhaps I could hook my dress on one of them.

"Er--uh--you wanted to rent a cabin?" I asked, with as much poise as I
could muster under the circumstances.

"Well, I must say!" exclaimed the middle-aged woman, finding her voice
at last. "Well, I never. Indeed, no, we do not wish to rent a cabin.
Come, Horace."

And she swirled out the door, Horace behind her.

Grandma was abject. We had quite a discussion while I put my dress back
on.

"You wouldn't come," she kept protesting, rather feebly. She rubbed the
burn scars on her arms--scars that, in spite of her years of experience
with irons and mangles and press machines, she reinforces frequently
with fresh burns. "I see you wasn't coming, so--"

"Something on the order of 'Mohammed won't go to the mountain, so the
mountain must come to Mohammed'?" I asked bitterly.

But I couldn't be too harsh with her. After all, it was due to my own
scheming that she had found herself in a position so terrifying that
she had put me in a worse one. However, as I zipped up my dress, I made
a little promise to myself that I would never again try to make Grandma
do anything she didn't want to do.

One thing she never minded doing was taking care of the children
whenever I wanted to go anywhere. Or, when all the cabins were filled
and our "no vacancy" sign was on, Grant and I could go away for one of
our rare respites from the motel business.

Unless the cabins were full, and Grant could leave also, it didn't do
me much good that there was someone to take care of the children,
unless I felt like walking in the hot sun three quarters of a mile to
town. I didn't know how to drive the car. There was no reason why I
shouldn't learn, though, I decided. Now we were out of Los Angeles with
its traffic and its careless drivers; there was a little, seldom-used
country road--Williams street--way out behind our cabins, at the end of
our land, which had probably been designed specifically for beginners
to practice driving upon.

Grant explained the rudiments of driving to me. I learned to tell the
gear shift lever, the clutch and the brake apart. All this, and my
first experiments with making the car go, had to be done in the
driveways leading to our various cabins, since a customer might arrive
at any moment--and Grandma, as I well knew, would not be able to cope
with such a situation. Obviously, my opportunities for practicing
there, with Grant beside me to instruct and to point out my errors,
were limited. When I thought I had the idea pretty well, I drove alone
out our rocky driveway that extended along the side of our land behind
the cabins, onto Williams street.

It was my first solo flight, and I was full of pride as the car bounced
over the rocks. A glimpse into the mirror showed me that Grant and
Grandma and David were standing in front of our cabin, watching me,
their eyes shaded from the hot sunlight by their hands. Their faces, I
assured myself smugly, were alight with admiration--although of course
I couldn't see their expressions that far away.

At the end of our little private road there was a small ditch, and just
beyond it was a sudden steep rise. I'd have to get out here and do some
hoeing, I reflected, clinging desperately to the steering wheel as the
car forged ahead over the obstacles.

And then I was on the road. I turned the car to the left, waved airily
so that my tiny, faraway audience could see how well I was doing, and
stepped harder on the gas until I was racing along at eighteen miles an
hour.

Well, so far so good. But I recalled what I had said to Grant just
before taking off--"In order to really learn to handle the car, what
should I do besides just driving down the road?"

"You split an infilitive, Mama," David said reproachfully.

"Back it up, turn around in the road, pretend you're parking between
two cars," Grant said.

I considered his three suggestions now. I could have done any of them
to an airplane or to a steamship as easily as to our suddenly
formidable automobile. I knew that shifting into reverse would make the
car go backward, but I had no idea how to steer or control it under
such circumstances. Well, all that was rather advanced anyway, I
comforted myself; for this first time, just driving around the road,
going around a few blocks and coming home would be enough.

I looked ahead on the road, trying to figure out where the first cross
street was. All I saw was a huge house at the far end of the road. I
hadn't realized the road ended there, but there was a house, so it must.

I drove on. The house was growing larger rapidly, much faster than it
should, considering the rate of speed at which I was creeping.

Maybe the house was moving toward me, while I was moving toward it! I
laughed gaily at my own whimsy, but I began to watch the house more
sharply.

I wondered if the excitement and nervous strain of driving had made me
suddenly delirious. That house was coming toward me.

Sweat broke out in drops on my forehead, and my palms were clammy on
the steering wheel. Was this a nightmare? There was no doubt whatever
now that the house was approaching me rapidly. And did I imagine it, or
was there a malevolent gleam in its windows?

When it was only a couple of blocks away I realized suddenly that there
was a truck under it. Obviously the house was simply being moved to
another location. But in spite of the renewed faith in my sanity this
discovery brought me, I kept right on perspiring. There was no side
road into which I could turn off, and there probably would be none
before I met the truck. Since it is, naturally, easier for a car to
turn around and go back the way it came than it is for a house-laden
truck to do so, the driver of the truck was undoubtedly entertaining
the foolish notion that I would turn my car around.

We drew closer and closer together. There was no possibility of my
squeezing by; the house stuck far out, even over the edges of the road,
on each side of the truck.

I was in despair. Why had this happened to me on my first time out
alone with the car?

But I didn't have much time for dramatic, rhetorical questions. Hoping
for a miracle, I had continued slowly along the road, until now the
truck and I were face to face. We both stopped. I sat there and
pondered, my face growing hot with embarrassment. The driver of the
truck honked, and the unshaven man beside him yelled, "Turn it around!
Get it out of here, sister!"

I sighed. There was no other way out of the mess, I realized. It might
take me all afternoon, but I'd turn the car around--if it killed all of
us!

Knowing that they were waiting impatiently didn't add anything to the
grace and sureness of my movements. I yanked alternately at the choke
and the throttle, between bouts with the gear shift lever and the gas.
In my confusion, I forgot which of the various gadgets was which, and
it was by a process of wild experimentation that I finally got the car
to back up. I turned the steering wheel all the way to one side, and
found myself careening backward in a violent arc. I stepped on the
brake abruptly, assaulted the choke once more while I tried to remember
just how to start the car, and finally I got it going forward again.
Just as I got the back of the car turned squarely on the truck, and
heaved a sob of relief, I realized that the car had ceased to respond
to my pushing on the gas.

Finally one of the men in the truck, the one who was sitting beside the
driver, clambered out of the truck and came over to me.

"What's a matter, sister?" he demanded.

"My house won't go," I explained. "I mean, my truck won't go."

"You mean your car won't go?"

"Yes, yes," I said feverishly. "That's it. My car won't go. I must be
out of gas."

"Lemme in."

I was too far gone to question the propriety or the safety of letting a
strange, unshaven man get into the car with me. I moved meekly aside,
and he sat behind the wheel and tried to start the car.

"You flooded it," he stated.

I tried to look as though I knew what he was talking about.

"You just learnin' to drive sister?" he wanted to know. I nodded
unhappily.

He must have pitied me in my obvious misery. He smiled, patted one of
my cold hands, and climbed out of the car. "Don't you worry none," he
advised. "We'll give you a push."

He climbed back into the truck, and pretty soon I felt the car being
shoved firmly forward. The entire mass of gadgets, pedals and levers
before me were by this time as incomprehensible to me as a Hebrew essay
on the fourth dimension. I knew that the men in the truck expected me
to get the car going under its own power soon, but I didn't even try.
When we approached our private road behind the cabins I signaled (that
much, at least, I knew how to do) that I was about to make a right
turn. I turned onto our road; the momentum and the slight downgrade
combined to let the car slide ahead along the road, onto the driveway
that led around to the cabins, and to the front of our own cabin. I
emerged from the haze long enough to identify and apply the brake. Then
I lay back in the seat like a dead woman until Grant and David, who
were still outside, came running up.

"How come you pullled a house almost all the way home?" David demanded,
moving his loose lower teeth back and forth with grimy, gum-stuck
fingers.

"Was I dreaming," Grant asked, "or--"

I waved my hand at them by way of answer, staggered out of the car and
into our cabin, where I flung myself upon the bed.




CHAPTER SIX


EVERY NIGHT WHEN Grant goes to bed he lays out his clothes in exactly
the places and positions where they will be easiest to get into in a
hurry. (Except on the nights when all the cabins are full by bedtime;
then, knowing he won't have to get up to answer the doorbell, he
reverts to type and tosses all his things in a heap on the floor!)

But on the nights when our "vacancy" sign is on, he likes to be
prepared for the inevitable summons. He wears his underclothes to bed.
His trousers hang over a chair beside the bed, and are the first
garment he grabs when the bell rings. He thrusts his legs into them
quickly, hobbling across the room toward the office at the same time.
In the middle of the room is his shirt, hanging on another chair which
has been carefully placed halfway between the bed and the doorway to
the office. Halting his clumsy gait long enough to seize the shirt, he
puts it on and tries to button it with one hand while he zips his
trousers with the other. By this time he has reached the doorway which
separates the office from the living room; and there wait his slippers.
He steps into them hastily, hurries to the outer office door, and opens
it--to face a customer who is on the verge of giving up and leaving.

I've often tried to talk him into going to the door in his robe, which
wouldn't take a tenth as long to slip into. But he insists that that
would look sloppy.

"Any sloppier than going with your pants half zipped, and your shirt
buttoned into the wrong buttonholes?" I ask. I don't complain or make
suggestions too much, though, because I realize how lucky I am that he
takes it for granted it is his job to wait on the customers who come
during the night.

Mr. Featherbrain probably never had to untangle his tall frame from the
bedclothes to wait on nocturnal customers for the first couple of
months after he opened his place. The people who were attracted by his
little place were very few and far between. One morning, though, Mrs.
Featherbrain called me over, and I sat with them in their nicely
furnished living room. It was the day after a highly advertised
celebration had been held in the desert northeast of Banning, to which
movie stars and humbler creatures had flocked to watch the laying of
the cornerstone of what was to be Pioneertown, the future setting of
the cream of Hollywood's horse opera crop. Every motel in town had been
full.

"We wented four cabins last night!" Mrs. Featherbrain told me
ecstatically, waving one of her ever-present cigarettes. She is a
plump, dark woman with a very mobile face. She smiles, frowns, raises
and lowers her eyebrows, and blinks rapidly while she talks. She is
probably twenty years younger than Mr. Featherbrain.

"That's wonderful!" I said warmly. And then I realized what she had
said. "Four?" I repeated. "Why, you only have three units to rent."

"Of course, but one couple left about eleven last night, and we wented
their cabin over again."

"Really? What time had they come?"

"About ten."

"You mean they left the key, and took all their stuff, and really
checked out?"

"That's wight," Mrs. Featherbrain replied, the wrinkles in her forehead
appearing and disappearing.

"Did they ask for part of their money back?" I persisted.

"No."

"Well--that's odd," I said.

"Why, that must have happened at your court lots of times!" she
protested, a cloud of smoke pouring out from her fluttering nostrils.
"Hasn't it? Do you ever go out and look, about midnight, to see if some
of the cars haven't pulled out?"

"Why--why, no," I said. "I can't imagine why they would leave. After
all, they've paid their money, and if they didn't want to spend the
night before traveling on, why would they--"

Mr. and Mrs. Featherbrain exchanged glances. "Have you ever seen any of
the motels on Ventura Boulevard, in Los Angeles?" Mrs. Featherbrain
asked.

"Mmm--yes, I think so," I said. "There are quite a few of them, aren't
there? I remember wondering, in fact, how they could possibly get
enough tourists to keep them filled up, right in a big city like that."

My hostess shot a look at her husband, and blinked rapidly several
times.

"Well, sir," Mr. Featherbrain began, speaking with apparent difficulty,
"Yuh know, not ewybody that stays in motels is tourists."

I looked at him blankly.

His chin was growing red.

Mrs. Featherbrain's features were moving violently, and all at the same
time.

"You never were in the motel business before, were you?" she asked.

I shook my head.

She sighed. "Well, you see," she explained, "sometimes young couples
that are out together--well, they don't have any place to go, and
so--of course it isn't wight, and the sort of people we know don't do
it, but--and of course the motel owner isn't to blame if some people,
instead of using the cabins to spend the night and sleep in, use them
to ..." Her eyebrows were leaping wildly, and she turned to Mr.
Featherbrain. "You tell her, dear," she begged him.

But at last I understood. I got up, embarrassed partly at the
conversation and partly at my own display of stupidity, and went home.

This was an aspect of the motel business which was new to me, and I
resolved to find out whether such use of motels on the highway was
common. I had developed a library-born friendship with Mrs. Barkin, the
owner of the rather shabby Sylvan Motel toward town, and I planned to
bring up the subject at our next meeting.

I didn't let my unhappy experience with the house movers prevent me
from learning to drive. "Twice in a lifetime it couldn't happen!" I
told Grant; and I took the car out on Williams street day after day,
sometimes staying out only ten minutes, and other times staying half an
hour or more; and finally I was so adept at handling the car that I
went to the Banning police department on a day when driving tests were
being given, took the test, passed it, and received my driver's license.

I clutched the slip of paper proudly to my bosom. This, I knew, rated a
special little trip. I must try my wings--or my wheels,
rather--somewhere besides on Williams street and the downtown block
around which the driving examiner had just accompanied me.

Grant was taking care of the motel; Grandma was taking care of the
children; everything had been arranged so that I'd be sure to have
enough free time to take both my written and my driving tests, and to
get my license. Duty wasn't calling me back to the motel; now that I
was a licensed driver our insurance would fully cover any accident I
might have. (Not that I contemplated having any; but visions of
liability suits had danced through my head every time I had been
inspired, by my growing aptitude at driving, to take a little spin away
from the dull safety of Williams street.)

So now I had some free time and a driver's license. And there was no
place better to explore, I decided, than--the Indian reservation.

"I hope they don't put a curse on me," I thought, zipping along the
highway to, and past, our motel at twenty-five miles an hour. I turned
left on Hathaway, the cross street east of our motel; Mrs. Clark had
told me Hathaway led back into the hills where the reservation was.

Less than a mile from the highway, Hathaway rose to a small peak on top
of which was a cow guard, with metal grillwork extending across the
road, the bars--between which cows would catch their hooves if they
tried to cross--at right angles to it. A fence divided all the land
past the cow guard from that on the side I was coming from; except for
the open gateway at the road, there was no entrance to the land which a
formidable-looking sign declared to be the Indian reservation.

The sign thrust its large white face forward pugnaciously as it stated:


  WARNING!

  INDIAN RESERVATION

  The introduction of

  INTOXICATING LIQUOR

  into or its possession within this reservation,

  or its sale to Indians, is

  FORBIDDEN BY LAW

  under a penalty of fine and imprisonment

  NO TRESSPASSING OR HUNTING


The fact that "tresspassing" was misspelled made the sign a trifle less
awesome and pompous than it had seemed at first glance, but I brought
the car to a complete stop and pondered for a while.

Well, I wasn't "introducing" any liquor (from what I'd heard, most
Indians didn't need an introduction) but to go into the reservation
would be trespassing, I guessed. Still, the gateway was open and white
people, I knew, drove through it frequently. Maybe by "tresspassing" in
this case, they simply meant getting out of the car and going off the
road.

Anyway, I had looked forward to this a long time, and, having come this
far, I wasn't going to let a misspelled sign stop me.

I drove over the cow guard, my heart bumping as hard as the car.
Strangely enough, the character of the land inside the reservation
didn't change; it was the same as it was everywhere else, dry, flat
until it began to roll up toward the mountains, covered with bristly
bushes and a few stunted trees.

A peculiar lump beside the road far ahead turned out to be a fat brown
woman sitting huddled inside a soiled shawl. An Indian! In her native
habitat! I put on the brake, rolled down the window and called, "Want a
ride?"

My temerity amazed me. This would be something interesting to tell
people about, though. I was glad I had followed my impulse to stop,
because if I had taken time to think it over I would probably never
have done it.

The woman's bright dark eyes slid over me and the car in amazement.
Afraid that this exotic prize would escape me, I pushed open the car
door on her side and smiled invitingly.

After a moment of contemplation, she wrapped the dingy shawl about her
broad shoulders more tightly against the wind, struggled to her feet
and lumbered toward the car. She sat beside me, her thighs under the
cheap cotton dress spreading so that the car seat between me and the
right hand door was completely smothered in soft fat flesh. I lowered
the window on my side before I started the car.

I glanced at the Indian woman as I pressed on the starter. Her face was
round and greasy. Her eyes were like shiny black buttons, and her
straight black hair was stringy. Her full, untinted lips did not move
in response to my smile.

The road, which deteriorated rapidly from pavement to dirt once I was
inside the reservation, led past occasional brown shacks that seemed
made of weary old boards leaning against each other for support. A few
of the houses, though, were made of stone, and fairly attractive. No
doubt the chief and his relatives lived in these ... if the Indians
still had chiefs. I recalled what the laundry truck driver had said
about the Indians--that those who wanted to collect money from the
government had to live on the reservation in order to be entitled to
it, and that those who were willing to forfeit their right to the money
could live away from the reservation and engage in any type of work
they chose.

Livestock of various kinds and sizes meandered about most of the
dwelling places. Some of the horses were beautiful, graceful brown
creatures with jet black manes and tails that tossed in the wind. There
were squat, heavy set cattle with broad heads and broad bodies. Except
for the fact that they each displayed a few unmistakable signs of
femininity, I would have sworn that they were all bulls.

"You live around here?" I asked, with a circling sweep of my hand,
turning toward my obese passenger.

The black button eyes stared at me, not with hostility, but obviously
without any particular liking for me.

The dirt road curved slowly back toward the highway. There were
innumerable bumpy little roads leading off the dirt road toward
primitive looking parts of the lower mountains, but I was afraid to
follow them. I didn't want to get too completely into Indian territory!

When we came to a fence broken only by an open gateway across the road,
I stopped the car and leaned across the Indian woman, opening the door.

"You'd better get out here," I said.

She didn't move.

"Listen, I don't dare to take you out of the reservation. It might be a
violation of the Mann act, or something. Goodbye," I said suggestively.

The fat squaw rolled out of the car, and stood staring at me, her
glittering eyes speculative as I started the car.

I bumped across the cow guard, which was a twin to the one I had
crossed when I entered the reservation, and glanced into the mirror to
see what she was doing. As the dust from the tires settled I saw her
squatting beside the road, adjusting her filthy shawl as it whipped in
the wind, and settling herself comfortably.

I drove along the stretch of pavement that led to the highway with a
vague sense of disappointment.

I hadn't expected to find a bunch of Indians in full war dress, yelling
and whooping; I hadn't expected to see any venerable,
feather-headdressed chiefs smoking long pipes of peace; and I certainly
hadn't expected to be scalped. And yet I left the reservation with a
vague sense of disappointment.

I have always worn my hair, which is quite thick, at shoulder-length,
curly and with a bunch of little curls at the top. It used to be a
fairly attractive and flattering style, but Banning's whirling wind has
played havoc with it. I can spend half an hour combing it, smoothing it
and adjusting the brown curls; then, after walking across the driveways
to one of the cabins, I look as though I not only hadn't combed it for
several days, but had lost a piece of thread in it and had allowed the
children to search thoroughly for it for several hours. My hair style
became what a fashion magazine might charitably christen a "windblown
long bob." Whenever I brave the blasts that sweep across the open
fields behind the motel, where I hang up clothes on washday, I wear a
snugly tied bandana--but I can seldom get it tied so securely that the
wind doesn't whip it off several times.

Strangely enough, other Banning women have neat, precisely waved hair
which is seldom untidy or out of place. That is something I have never
been able to figure out.

In the wintertime, it's people who swarm over Banning and the
surrounding vicinities; in the summer, it's bugs. Every imaginable kind
of bug spends the summer in Banning; bugs with wings, without wings,
with and without antennae, and some with strange appendages whose uses,
if any, seem hazy to the bugs themselves. Besides the common black
widows, which are so plentiful that people simply ignore them, there
are peculiar worms with large, mischievous eyes; there are beetles
equipped with hard shiny hoods and galoshes, in case of rain; there are
grasshoppers whose heads, instead of being in the place customary for
grasshoppers' heads, pivot at the end of long, sticklike necks.

Before we came to Banning, and for a short time after our arrival, I
wore open-toed sandals. But an uneasy knowledge of the desert's strange
fauna, coupled with the loose gravel, the stickers rampant in the
weeds, and the huge flesh-hungry black ants, to whom the presence of
stockings were merely a snickerprovoking challenge, soon converted me
to oxfords--and, if I hadn't been afraid of seeming too eccentric, I
would have worn hip-length boots.

Banning has such hot summers, and such a dry, hot wind blowing
continually off the desert, that I, like practically every other woman
under seventy who weighs less than three hundred pounds, wear shorts.
To this, Grant sometimes pretends to attribute our success.

"Yep, half of our customers just come in here because they see you
running around in shorts," he says.

He can be very sweet at times, particularly when he has to go downtown
and wants me to sort and count the laundry, or when he is hungry for a
home made apple pie. One day--I believe it was a helping hand with some
weed-pulling that he wanted--he had complimented me until I was
beginning to believe I was rather a femme fatale in shorts. He had gone
into the house to make a phone call, and I continued pulling weeds from
around the geraniums in the little island under our big neon sign.

Suddenly I noticed a shiny car going past on the highway very slowly.
It was full of well-dressed, distinguished looking men who were staring
in my direction with absorbed interest. I pretended not to notice, and
went on with my weed-pulling. But I was pleased. Maybe I wasn't so bad
after all!

The car turned around in the highway, about fifty feet past our place,
and cruised slowly by again. I was careful to stoop as gracefully as
possible when I lunged for the weeds, and I tucked a geranium, that I
had broken off by mistake, into my hair.

The car went more and more slowly, and finally it stopped right in
front of the island. I stood up and went closer to the car, smiling
graciously. I pretended to think the men wanted to rent a cabin.

The man in the front seat nearest the window cleared his throat,
grinned sheepishly, and said:

"Say, ma'am, I wonder if you could tell us what kind of trees those
are, in that row down the middle of your place? We've been having a
little argument about it."

My smile faded. I was furious. "They're Chinese elms!" I snapped, and I
stomped away.

It was that same night that Grant, leaving for the postoffice, told me
to be sure to get at least three customers while he was gone.

"Don't worry," I said sarcastically, "I'll just sit out here on the
curb around the lawn where they can see me. I'm so beautiful they won't
be able to resist driving in. If they try to escape I'll lure them
right in."

I was standing idly at the office door about twenty minutes later when
I saw our car, a blue sedan, slow down as Grant waited for traffic to
clear so that he could make the left hand turn into our place. I smiled
suddenly. I'd show him what I meant by luring them right in.

Pretending to assume that he was a prospective customer, I stepped out
in full view and made elaborate motions of adjusting my hair, rolling
my eyes, and making come-hither gestures with my head. I thrust out one
leg and ran my hands over it as though I were pulling up a sheer
stocking; I smiled in an over-exaggerated way that would have, I felt,
put to shame any of the old time movie vamps. My legs were in a coy
Betty Grable pose, and as Grant pulled into the driveway I repeated my
gestures of eye-rolling and of motioning seductively with tosses of my
head.

"You got a cabin for four people?" asked a woman sitting in the front
seat. Why, who--(I would have thought whom, but I was too excited)--had
Grant brought home with him? I looked at the man behind the steering
wheel questioningly. It wasn't Grant.

The car--well, obviously, ours wasn't the only blue sedan of that
particular make and age.

"A--a cabin?" I asked finally. "Sure, of course. Would you--uh--like to
look at it?"

Two half-grown boys, in the back seat, were staring at me pop-eyed,
their mouths half open.

I'll never forget their expressions, or my own humiliation.

My friend from the Sylvan motel, Mrs. Barkin, stopped in a few days
later to give me a library book she wanted me to read, and she laughed
heartily when I told her about my experience. She had managed a motel
in Riverside, I knew, before she came to Banning after the death of her
husband, and when she was through laughing I brought up the subject of
motel cabins being rented by the hour instead of by the night.

"Short stops?" she said. "Oh, yeah, we used to get lots of 'em, when we
were in Riverside. You get that in any big city, yeah. Lots of money in
it too if you have a good location for it--you can rent each cabin
several times a night. Only thing is you have to do a lot of work
cleaning cabins in the night then, yeah, that is if you're gonna rent
'em again."

Mrs. Barkin was a very short, squat woman with broad hips and enormous
arms. Her fat legs, which she had managed to cross, looked
uncomfortable. There was a faintly shabby air about her wilted blue
organdy dress.

"Ten minute quickies, my hubby called 'em," she giggled. "Yeah, we got
lots of 'em. Yeah, the good old days. We don't get many of 'em here. I
remember one fella used to come there--it was during the war, and he
worked swing shift--every night after work, right after midnight, yeah,
he'd come. Five nights a week. Every night he had a different girl with
him, too. You know, he--" Mrs. Barkin went off into spasms of
laughter--"he came to my hubby one time and says, 'Say, don't I get a
weekly rate here?' Yeah, he came so often he wanted a weekly rate!"

I laughed with her.

"You're shocked, yeah, I can see that. Well, you're young yet, you'll
learn. It shocked me too when we first got that place in Riverside and
I saw what was going on. I used to watch the people come in, and I'd
try to pick those kind from the ones who really wanted a place for the
night. I'd pick out a nice, respectable looking couple, middle-aged,
and say to my husband, 'Now, there's a couple that's married, that's
been married a long time, and that's on the square.' And then, maybe an
hour later, we'd see them come out of their cabin and drive off,
leaving the key sticking in their door for us to pick up. Why, you just
can't tell who'll do it. In this business you have to keep your mouth
shut, yeah--but you can keep your eyes open if you want to. You'll see
more'n you'd believe. Why, I got so I wouldn't have trusted my own
grandmother not to rent a room with some fella for an hour!"

She uncrossed her legs with difficulty. "You'll see. One of these days
even your Miss Nestleburt you were telling me about, and her boyfriend,
yeah, the one that's always playing practical jokes--they'll be
doubling up, and you'll have an extra cabin to rent!"

Miss Nestleburt and Mr. Hawkins were getting very friendly, all right.
(But not that friendly!) Every afternoon she waited until he came back
from his work in Palm Springs, and then they strolled together next
door to Moe's cafe for dinner. On Saturdays and Sundays they went for
long drives together in his car. Her incipient asthma seemed to have
disappeared--she told me herself that the desert air had cured her
completely--but she stayed on.

I was beginning to think that the desert air had even more marvelous
properties than those that had been claimed for it: Mr. Hawkins hadn't
played a practical joke in weeks, not since the time he poured a bottle
of ink into Grant's bucket of soapy cleaning water. Whether it was the
desert air, or the influence of his dainty companion, I didn't know.

One Saturday morning while Mr. Hawkins was getting his car filled with
gas at the service station across the street, Miss Nesdeburt waited in
the office. She was wearing a dull, inconspicuous dress. She watched
Grant, who was putting a door between the office and the living
room--to take the place of the filmy curtain that had been there. We
had had very little privacy, with only a thin bit of drapery separating
our living room from the office. We still wouldn't have complete
privacy, since there was a window in the top half of the new door--but
as soon as I made little curtains for the window, no one would be able
to look into our living room.

When Grant laid down his tools and went out to the garage, Miss
Nesdeburt smiled at me, and two delicate fans of wrinkles appeared
about her eyes.

"I had a dream," she told me, "and I think people should share their
dreams, don't you, ma cherie?"

"Absolutely," I agreed. I was at the desk in the office, catching up on
the previous day's bookkeeping.

"I dreamed I was a beautiful young girl," she said, taking her glasses
off with one tiny hand, and holding the other hand up, letting it droop
gracefully at the wrist. "My hair was fiery red, simply terribly red,
and so were my lips. I was built like a goddess. My bosom was high and
proud, my waist was just the right size for a strong man's hands to
encircle." She stopped, and stood there in ecstatic reverie.

"And then?" I prodded.

"Ah, and then. There was a prince--a gallant, polite prince with the
most wonderful sense of humor. He wore a suit of armor and rode a white
charger and went out to do battle for me--"

"Wasn't he a knight?" I interrupted.

"No, no, a prince; or at least, he said he was. And I see no reason to
think he wasn't being truthful about it.... Anyway, he loved me more
than anything else in the world, and he wanted me to marry him."

I finished adding a column of figures. "And did you do it?" I asked,
writing down the total.

"No." Miss Nesdeburt's blue eyes were sad, and she replaced her
glasses. "I got all dressed up in my hoop skirt and leg o' mutton
sleeves, but when it was time for the ceremony it turned out he had
worn just red flannel underwear to the church as a joke. He had such a
sense of humor, you know."

"Mm hmm. And how do you interpret the dream?"

"Oh, I've figured it all out very carefully, according to Elmo's
teaching, and there's only one possible meaning. I'm either going to
inherit a large sum of money soon, or else it means a close relative of
mine will inherit some."

I laughed as she went out to get into Mr. Hawkins' coupe, which had
just driven up onto the gravel. The idea of Mr. Hawkins as a prince or
as a knight amused me, and I was still smiling about her obvious little
dream when the telephone rang, about half an hour later.

It was a gentleman who, in short, clipped phrases, wanted to reserve
three cabins that evening, for a large party of people who were going
to spend a few days in the desert.

I had hardly finished writing the name in which he made the
reservations after the numbers of the three cabins on that day's list,
when the telephone rang again. This time it was a clerk from a Banning
hotel, who said that the hotel was full already. Could we accommodate
three ladies who wanted separate beds?

We could, and I took the reservation. Then I surveyed the list happily.
A few of our customers were staying over from the day before, and with
all these reservations, we had only four vacancies left. At that rate
we'd be full tonight--and early enough so that we could have one of our
rare evenings away from the place.

I started joyously outside to tell Grant, who was cleaning cabins. Just
as I shut the door, though, the telephone rang. It was the owner of the
Crawley Motel, on the west edge of Banning, calling for "some clients
he couldn't take care of"; did we have a cabin that would accommodate
five?

No, but we could give them two separate cabins.

That would be fine; they'd be over within half an hour.

That left two vacancies, and it wasn't even noon yet! There must be a
rodeo or celebration around, or the season for hunting some kind of
animal which lived around here must have just opened; or else it was a
holiday that had escaped my notice. According to the calendar, though,
neither that day nor the next was a holiday; I couldn't quite figure
out the rush for cabins.

I wasn't much surprised, though, when the telephone rang twice more in
the next hour. I took the two reservations and went out to uncover the
"no" of our sign.

"No Vacancy," our sign proclaimed; and the owner of the Blue Bonnet
Motel directly across the highway hollered across wonderingly, "We
haven't got a one! How'd ja do it?"

"Oh, you just have to know how," I laughed. Then I went inside, picked
Donna up out of her playpen, and hurried out to help Grant finish
cleaning the cabins.

All afternoon occasional cars slowed down by our motel, until their
drivers noticed the "no vacancy" sign hanging there grandly. Then they
picked up speed and drove on down the highway, turning into the
driveway of one of the other motels.

By late afternoon I was beginning to get uneasy. Not one of the people
for whom the cabins had been reserved had shown up. It was conceivable
that one, or even two, might be late or might disappoint us altogether;
but for all of them to do it--! I didn't dare, though, to cover the
"no" again and start renting cabins. I'd be in a terrible spot then if--

Suddenly a brown roadster swung out of the lane of cars and drove up to
the office. At last! I thought, they had started coming. If the rest of
them would only hurry, maybe Grant and I and the children could still
go out--at least for a little drive.

But the women in the car didn't have a reservation. They didn't even
want a cabin. All they wanted to know was, did we have a man named
Smith staying here?

"We don't have hardly anybody staying here," I told them savagely, if
not very grammatically.

One of them laughed, and indicated our sign.

"Then why do you have your 'no vacancy' sign on?" she asked.

"I'm beginning to wonder about that, myself," I replied.

Mr. Hawkins and Miss Nestleburt drove in about seven-thirty. I was
standing in the office doorway.

"Not very busy tonight, are you?" Mr. Hawkins called, his car slowing
down. I had the familiar, uncomfortable feeling that he was secretly
laughing at me.

"We're full already," I said, motioning unhappily toward our sign.

They drove on back toward their own cabins.

I stood thoughtfully in the doorway for a while. There had been
something in that man's expression . . .

I walked furiously toward the "no vacancy" sign, and put the cover back
over the "no." It would be Mr. Hawkin's idea of a good joke, I knew, to
disguise his voice and call up several times for reservations. I was
positive now that it had been he who had made all those phone calls.

Because of our late start, all the motels in our end of town filled up
before we did. It wasn't until four-thirty the next morning that Grant
could uncover the "no" again.




CHAPTER SEVEN


IN THE MIDDLE of September school started, and David, who was a little
over five and a half years old, entered the first grade of the Banning
grammar school. And with the start of school came the "summer slump"
that our irritable neighbor, Mr. Featherbrain, had been forecasting.

Business was terrible. The highway was almost deserted, and of the few
cars that did appear, most of them plowed right on toward their
destinations. The occasional customer who rang our bell professed to be
shocked at our rates, and it was only by lowering our rates that we
were able to rent any cabins at all. There were many nights during that
period that only two or three of our cabins were occupied; and I
remember one night when we had only one customer, a young man who slept
in his single cabin in solitary splendor all night.

Obviously, the income from the place wasn't enough to meet the payments
and the expenses. We were beginning to think Grant had been premature
in leaving General Motors, and to wish that he were still collecting
his weekly check from them. Like a stone over our heads hung the
realization that there was a possibility we might lose the motel--and
all the money we had put into it.

Jed didn't come every day for our laundry now; he came only once or
twice a week. I asked him if the motels all over town were doing as
badly as we were, or whether it was just us.

"The motels that have kitchens are still doing all right," he said,
smoothing his fingers over his nose as though trying to find a spot
where there were no freckles. "One whole side of the Peacock, eight of
its cabins, have kitchens, and I still get two big sacks of laundry
every day from there."

"I guess we need kitchens," I said. I had known that all along, of
course. When we first came here, when business was still good, we had
turned away four or five would-be customers every day because they had
wanted kitchens. Even now, with business so poor, hardly a day went by
that one or two groups of people didn't ask us if we had kitchens. And
most of those who required kitchens planned on staying anywhere from a
week to three months--and were willing to pay the standard rate for
cabins with kitchens: twenty-five dollars a week.

Yes, six or eight kitchens would fix us up. Those would be rented all
the time, and even in'the summer slump each year there'd be at least
two or three new customers for the other cabins. And a year or two of
being in business would begin to bring us an increased amount of repeat
trade, so that we could look forward safely to a profitable
business--if we could just hang onto the motel right now!

We didn't have enough money to put in kitchens; each kitchen, we
figured, even if Grant did all the labor himself, would cost four
hundred dollars. They would have to be nice kitchens, to be in keeping
with the cabins; ranges and refrigerators and steel cabinet sinks were
expensive. Since it would be the second bedrooms in the double cabins
that we would convert to kitchens, the carpeting would have to be
replaced by linoleum, and the plastered walls redone, so that they
would have a smooth, painted surface. Pipes would have to be connected.

It would be a lot of work and a lot of expense, and we resolved not to
consider beginning until early the following summer, before the next
slump.

In the meantime, something must be done. We had very little money in
the bank; we owed nearly fifty thousand dollars on the motel, and two
thousand to Grandma. Our income had become insignificant.

Grant got a job digging ditches.

That job was symbolic, I suppose, of the depths to which we had sunk.
But it wasn't a regular ditch-digging job; he was working for a
contractor, and the ditches were preparatory for construction work, on
which Grant would be employed when it was begun.

Those were hard days. Grant worked ten hours every day, and after work
he came home and helped me finish whatever part of the motel work I had
been unable to complete. We didn't dare to hire Mrs. Clark even
occasionally, with business so poor. We did all the work ourselves, so
that we wouldn't be spending an unnecessary penny. Not only were we
working hard, but we weren't getting much sleep--we had to get up
nights to rent cabins, and often a customer would request to be called
at four or five or six the next morning, which meant setting the alarm
for whatever hour he specified, crawling out of bed and plodding over
to his cabin to knock on his door. We couldn't simply lend him the
alarm clock, because we didn't dare be without it--there was always the
possibility that another customer might want to be called.

Grant's salary, plus the low income from the motel, wasn't enough to
make our payments and to take care of our laundry and utility bills. We
had to draw on our tiny, dwindling reserve in the bank. We hoped that
we would be able to hold out until Palm Springs opened, and the winter
season got under way.

Winter always brought travelers to the southern route, we knew, where
they hoped to avoid the greater cold encountered along the northern
route. The slackening off of the good season, in the early summer, is
due to the understandable desire of many tourists to avoid the desert
heat. And the "summer slump" that Featherbrain had forecast, with a
knowledge born of previous summer visits to Banning, was due also to
the fact that school and business vacations were over, and travelers
were getting back to their offices and factories, and sending their
children back to school.

The few customers who did stay at our motel during this slump came
usually very late at night--or, rather, early in the morning. Two,
three, and four were common hours for our office bell to startle us out
of sleep. Now that Grant was working, I shared with him the unpleasant
duty of getting up in the night to go to the door. The circles under
our eyes were a little darker every morning. Just getting up out of a
sound sleep to rent a cabin was bad enough, but often we'd have a
customer inconsiderate enough to mention that he'd be back "in ten
minutes, soon as he'd washed his face", to use the telephone. So
whichever of us had gotten up to rent him a cabin would have to stay
up, since it wouldn't be worthwhile to go back to bed for only ten
minutes. More often than not, too, the ten minutes would stretch into
half an hour or more, or the customer would forget about the phone call
and not come back at all. If the one of us who was up went back to bed,
though, after half an hour or so of fruitless waiting, the jangle of
the bell almost invariably dragged us up again out of the just-attained
depths of sleep, and the customer, "so sorry he had kept us up," came
in to make his phone call.

The majority of customers, of course, are very considerate, however. In
fact, so many of those who came late at night or toward morning were
profuse in their apologies for waking us, that Grant began to ponder.

"If the ones who do come late hate it so much to wake us up, then there
must be a lot who quick pass us by because they don't want to wake us."

We were sitting at the kitchen table, having a council of war. The
children were in bed.

Grant spread mustard thoughtfully on a cracker, and sprinkled sugar
over the top. "If we had the light on inside the office, and people
could see that someone was up, then they wouldn't have to worry that
they'd be getting anyone out of bed, and they wouldn't be afraid to
come in."

He crunched his cracker, while I watched with the horrified fascination
his strange tastes still inspired in me, even after six years.

"I'm going to stay up tonight," he announced. "I'll sit in the doorway
or walk around just outside the office door where they can't help
seeing me, and I'll bet a horned toad I can bring us in three or four
extra customers!"

And he did. His theory had been correct; people who hesitated about
selecting a motel after midnight, who hated to rouse anyone from bed,
came to our motel like flies to a dish of honey when they saw that our
inside lights were on and there was someone up and moving about.

Grant kept that up for three nights, sleeping from dawn until it was
time to go to work, and sleeping again from the time he got home until
about ten o'clock. And for those three nights we averaged fifteen
dollars more per night than our average for the previous nights had
been. Our motel was catching at least ninety per cent of the late
travelers who stopped on the east side of the business district.
(During his night vigils, Grant saw what a small percentage of them
went into any of the other motels around us.)

Of course, Grant couldn't keep that up, though. He was earning less
than fifteen dollars a day digging trenches for the contractor;
obviously, then, since he could do only one, the most sensible course
would be for him to quit his job, sleep days, and spend the night
pulling customers in off the highway.

So he quit his job, and began to stay up every night, sleeping seven or
eight hours during the day. That left him time to help me clean the
cabins, and to do the watering. Business continued substantially
better, and life began to look brighter. We were afraid that
neighboring motel owners, suffering from the slump as we had done,
would imitate our methods and so distribute the customers more evenly
and more thinly. But perhaps they never realized what we were doing;
the weeks slipped past, and still Grant was the only one up during the
tiny hours; and our motel continued to get more night business than all
the others put together.

Grant was still as full as ever of good ideas. The walls of the showers
in two of the cabins were beginning to get moldy, and even after he had
scraped off the mold and painted them with a special damp-resistant
paint, there was a faintly musty smell lingering in those cabins.

He took a bottle of my perfume and put a little on the back of each
chair and on the drapes. Although the perfume didn't obliterate the
musty odor, it blended with it--as Grant had hoped it would--so that
the result was far from unpleasant. We tested the scent by going out of
the cabins and coming back into them from the fresh air outside after a
few minutes. The cabins had a faint, warmly sweet fragrance. Grant
touched them up with additional drops of perfume for a few days until
the musty odor wore off.

Most customers didn't notice the perfume, or at least didn't comment
upon it. But to the few who remarked with pleasure about it. Grant
said, "Yep, I guess there were some pretty sweet girls staying here
last night"; and to those who didn't seem to like the odor, he said, "I
guess the people that stayed here last night must have spilled some
perfume."

Although, with my help, Grant was getting a lot of work accomplished
these days, he was getting a lot of talking done too. Every time he
"stopped in to see" another motel owner, I knew he'd be embroiled in
conversation for at least two hours; and he was still as helpless as
ever in the hands of a salesman.

One late afternoon right after dinner a salesman came into the office
laden with descriptive literature about a well-known set of books--a
set we already had, as it happened. I went into the kitchen to wash the
dishes, thinking that here at last was a salesman Grant would be able
to get rid of, since we possessed the product he was selling.

The rumble of voices in the office continued, and I began to get
provoked. I wanted Grant to dry the dishes. I went into the living room
and stood by the closed office door, listening.

"It's a great bargain, really a great bargain," the salesman was
saying. So--evidently Grant, in his love of conversation and his
inability to end one, hadn't yet broken the news to the salesman that
we already had a set of the books. Well, I'd take care of that.

I opened the bookcase, took two of the books from the set and went into
the office, laying them on the desk where the salesman could see them.

Then I went back and finished washing dishes. And in about two minutes
Grant was beside me drying them, a sheepish expression on his face.

Winter came to Banning with grace and beauty. First the most distant,
highest ranges of mountains were covered with snow. The majestic San
Gorgonio range, to the north of us, looked gigantic and pure under its
spotless woolly white blanket. Later in the season the closer mountains
were sprinkled with snow, until all the mountains pressing in on the
north and the south were white. The wind that still blew continually
was crisp, and bright, and cold; and the heat from our little gas
wall-heater was a welcome luxury after working outside.

Miss Nesdeburt stopped in one cold morning to pay her rent.

Her blue eyes were sparkling, and I knew she was eager to tell me
something. She was humming beneath her breath as she started to write a
check.

She hesitated, and pulled off her glasses. "Sometimes I can't see so
well through these things!" she confessed. She signed her name on the
check, blotted it, and replaced her glasses.

I took the check, thanked her, and gave her the opening she was
obviously hoping for by saying, "Well, what did you dream about last
night?"

"Oh, I dreamed I was peeling potatoes, wearing an apron, and there was
a baby crying."

"And what do you think that dream signifies?" I asked, wondering if she
could still be blind to the meaning of her dreams.

"According to Eimo, it means I must beware of a train accident," she
said absently. "But that isn't what--I mean--"

"Something has happened," I broke into her confusion. "Tell me about
it."

"Well . . ." Miss Nestleburt looked around to be sure there were no
eavesdroppers. She leaned her plump little body partially across the
desk. "Mr. Hawkins has proposed!"

She clasped her tiny white hands in joyous anticipation of my reaction.

"No!" I exclaimed. "When? How did he lead up to it? Are you going to
accept him?"

"Je ne sais pas! It was last night. I--I really don't know if I will or
not. Do you think I should?"

"Why, of course! That is, if you love him. And," I added, remembering
the transparent dreams to which she had applied such painstakingly
roundabout interpretations, "I'm sure you do."

"Yes, I'm sure, too," she admitted. "It's just--"

"Just what?"

Her laughter tinkled uneasily through the office. "Well, it would look
so funny, wouldn't it, if he should come to the wedding wearing just
red flannel underwear?"

The word "sudden" must have been coined to describe Banning's rainfall.
One moment, it isn't raining; the next moment, the ocean itself seems
to be streaming down from a sky that's not only weeping, as the poets
have it, but actually howling with despair. Lightning etches a crazy
brilliant pattern across the path of the rain, and thunder rumbles
through San Gorgonio Pass.

It's awe-inspiring and very beautiful--except for the fact that when it
rains, the wind-driven water is beaten through the cracks under the
doors of the cabins, making a big puddle on each carpet, and unless the
windows happened to be shut when the onslought began, the beds and
bathrooms are soaked within three minutes.

Before I understood the character of these abrupt downpours, I stood
about on one occasion enjoying idly the few drops that spattered down
in warning. It was early in the day; most of the cabins were
unoccupied, and I had left all the windows of those cabins wide open
that morning to give the cabins an extra-special airing out.

An extra-special watering out was what they got, though. About the time
it dawned upon me that it was really going to rain hard, it did. I
grabbed my pass key out of the office drawer, not awakening Grant, who
was sleeping soundly after a long night of pulling customers in. I
dashed out into the downpour and hurried along the slippery walk to
cabin 2, next to ours, where I yanked the windows shut. The bed in the
second bedroom of that cabin was a little damp already.

I took the other cabins, except for the back row of singles, which were
occupied, in rotation. I rushed around frantically, the rain beating my
face and whipping my hair into my eyes as though it had a personal
grudge against me. I was beginning to wish I had awakened Grant so that
he could help me close windows, for the beds in several of the cabins
were soaked clear through to the mattress pads. I knew, though, that I
could finish them now myself sooner than I could go and get him. So I
swam grimly to the remaining cabins, closed windows, snatched bath mats
from bathrooms and tucked them around the bottoms of the front doors.

At last my battle with Nature was over. I was far from being the
victor, but I had done all that I could do for now. I had stripped the
more thoroughly soaked beds of their spreads and blankets, and in some
cases even of their sheets and mattress pads, to keep the mattresses
dry. As I dashed through the pelting water back to our cabin I knew I
looked as though someone had taken me by the heels, dipped me into a
deep well full of water, squished me about for several minutes, and
pulled me out.

I had just gotten inside our cabin, in the blessed dryness and quiet,
and was beginning to rip off my wet things, when I realized David
wasn't inside. He had been out in the field behind the rear cabins,
playing in his tent.

Grant, incredibly, was still sleeping. I felt an overpowering feminine
urge to be protected, to stay where it was warm and calm and let him go
chasing around out in the storm. But my common sense came to his
rescue. After all, I was already dripping; a little more water, and a
little more being beaten around, wouldn't make much difference.

I plunged out into the swirling water again. It was hailing now, and
little chunks of ice were plopping onto the walk and bouncing up again,
and then being rushed away in the streams that swept toward the highway.

I bent my head as I ran along the sidewalk, so that I could breathe
what little air there was. If I walked upright, or dared to look toward
the furious sky, I was afraid I would drown. Before I got to the end of
the sidewalk I collided with David, and I turned around and we both
shot toward our cabin.

"It was raining so hard, I couldn't see!" David cried, when we were
inside. Water was dripping from the end of his sunburned nose and from
his thick black eyelashes. "And big things kept falling out of the sky
and hitting me. I didn't think I'd ever get home again."

"You should have stayed in your tent once," observed Grant, who was
awake by this time.

Just then the office bell rang. We saw two cars waiting outside the
office; the storm had driven the people off the highway, and they
wanted cabins.

Grant took pity on me. While I answered the door and let the man who
was ringing the bell into the office, Grant put on his raincoat.

"You're wet enough," he remarked to me, as he started out to show the
people to their cabins. "I'll take over now."

Fortunately, rains like that didn't come very often. If they had, one
of Grant's most effective methods of pulling in customers during the
night would have been very uncomfortable.

This method was one that he evolved after the first few nights of
staying up. Almost all of our customers came from the East, since the
coast was so close to the west of us that people coming from the coast
weren't yet ready to stop for the night when they reached Banning. Not
until the Palm Springs season opened, when there would be a lot of
travel to that resort and to adjacent cities from Los Angeles and
Hollywood, would we get any appreciable trade from the west.

A few nights' experience had taught Grant that the cars which were
going fast were those whose drivers had no intention of stopping for
the night in the vicinity. Therefore, he reasoned, all he had to do was
to watch the East for cars that were moving at a moderate or slow rate
of speed. Whenever he saw one he went outside quickly, so that he could
be strolling back into the office, without seeming to notice them,
about the time they reached the motel. That method of getting them in
was far more successful than just sitting in the office where they
could see him. Besides, the door of the office faced west, and tourists
from the east were nearly past before they caught a glimpse of him.

There seemed to be something about the sight of him walking into the
office that affected everyone who had any idea of stopping for the
night, about the way a kitten is affected by the sight of a piece of
string being dragged along in front of it. They couldn't resist coming
into the driveway, getting out, and following him right into the office.

Grant's technique developed until it was practically perfect. He never
looked directly toward the car he was trying to pull in; that would be
too apt to scare the occupants away. For some reason, people don't like
to be watched when they are considering stopping at a motel. If they
are watched, or even glanced at, they're just as likely as not to drive
on to the next motel.

Timing was important. He had to get outside before they saw him, and
stroll back into the office so that they could see him in time to turn
into the driveway.

His methods were effective only after dark. While it was daylight, the
sight of anyone hanging around the office actually seemed to discourage
people from coming in. We never could figure that out. Unless, I
thought whimsically, daylight afflicts travelers with bashfulness.
Whenever a car would slow down during the day, as though it might come
in, when I was in or near the office--if I'd glance up at it, it would
quicken its speed; and I could almost hear the driver saying, "Oh,
horrors, they've noticed us! Come on, let's get going!" Sort of a
customerphobia in reverse, I mused.

Our kitchen window faces east, and Grant usually stayed in the kitchen
nights, standing by the window watching the highway and passing time by
eating various strange concoctions that would be enough to gag a normal
person. Whenever he saw a car that looked like a prospect, he hurried
outside and went into his act.

I usually began the nightly watch at the kitchen window, being "on
duty" from about nine to ten while Grant relaxed and read the paper, or
took a little rest in preparation for his long vigil.

Standing at the kitchen window looking at the blackness, broken only by
the lights of the service stations, the beacon of the airport, and two
motel signs, grew tiresome; and I didn't care to copy Grant's method of
entertaining himself by indulging in gustatory nightmares and inviting
actual ones. For the first night or two, I contented myself with
studying the Peacock's beautiful neon sign--a huge stately blue and
red, haughty peacock. That began to pall, though, and my legs got
tired. I felt sorry for Grant, who put in hours of this each night
after I was in bed. I also felt sorry for myself.

Sitting in a chair, while it would have been far more comfortable than
standing, was impossible because of the height of the window. When I
sat down, no matter at what distance from the window or at what angle
to it, all I could see was a sparkling array of stars. We had no books
large enough to build the seat of a chair appreciably higher; and to
sit on our thick medical book and a stack of smaller ones would be to
ask for a couple of broken ribs.

The typewriter seemed to be the perfect solution. It's a portable, and,
enclosed in its case, makes a solid seat. I put it on the chair in the
kitchen, sat on top of it, and found that I could see the highway.
Whenever I saw headlights of a car coming slowly I told Grant, and he
put down his paper to go out after it. During the average early
evening--the part that was my shift--there weren't, usually, more than
two or three coming slowly enough to rate any attention, so Grant's
reading or resting wasn't much disturbed. Of the two or three, he
usually managed to get one, so I couldn't use the excuse that it didn't
pay, to resign from my boring job.

Even though I was more comfortable, now that I could sit down, I was
still bored. I decided to try to read. The impracticality of such
frivolity became apparent at once. If I let the book rest on my lap, I
had to look downward at it in order to read it. And if I looked
downward, I couldn't see the flash of headlights on the highway. The
only way I could keep watch on the highway as I read was to hold the
book up in front of me, so high that the light of headlights would be
visible beneath it, or, for variety, a little lower, so that the
headlights would appear above it.

My arms began to ache before I had done that very long. Finally I put
my feet on the typewriter case and rested the book on my knees. Except
for the fact that I had no backrest, since the typewriter case came
most of the way up the back of the chair, I was quite comfortable in
this position. The only flaw in the arrangement was that every few
seconds I'd catch a glimpse of lights down the highway, and I'd have to
stop reading and gauge the speed of the car.

If it was a fast one, I could return to my reading; if it was a slow
one, I yelled, "Eep!" at Grant, and he'd go into action. At first I had
said to him, when I saw a slow car, "Better go outside, dear. Here
comes one that looks like it might stop."--or, "Hurry out there! Here
comes a slow one!" But I reasoned that all that was a tremendous waste
of energy. After all, he knew perfectly well I wasn't sitting in front
of the kitchen window in such an uncomfortable position because I
thought it would improve my complexion. He knew why I was sitting
there, and there was no need for me to launch into detailed
explanations whenever I saw a slow car. So I saved time and energy by
simply remarking "Eep"; and he always knew exactly what I meant.

Cars came dribbling along the highway every few seconds, and although
the actual prospects were few, the interruptions to my reading were
many. I seldom was able to finish two consecutive sentences before the
twinkle of headlights dragged me away from the printed words.

Sometimes I thought it might be easier just to give up the idea of
reading.

It was difficult, too, to keep up with my writing. If I tried to write
in our own cabin, the proximity of Grant and the children, and their
noise, made it impossible for me to concentrate. And Grant didn't like
having me go to cabin 15 for a few hours at a time, since that left him
with a lot to handle. For a time I kept my writing to a minimum,
neglecting every phase of it except a monthly feature I was doing
regularly for a women's digest magazine. I grew very dissatisfied with
the unproductiveness of my daily routine, though, and told Grant I must
start writing again. He agreed to take over the entire responsibility
of the place and the children during the baby's afternoon nap if I'd be
gone only an hour; at any time after an hour, the baby might wake up
and it was difficult for him to manage her and wait on customers at the
same time.

The children were both in bed by seven-thirty every night, and each
night at seven-thirty-five I went back to cabin 15, with my writing
paraphernalia and my watch and a match to light the heater, to stay
until nine, when I'd go back to look out the kitchen window for slow
cars. (On the nights when we didn't have many vacancies left at that
time, and it looked as though number 15 might be rented soon, I went
into our kitchen to write, after first extracting a solemn promise--a
new one each night--from Grant that he would keep out.)

Sometimes after I'd get across the driveways and the grass islands into
number 15, it would start to rain. There was something wonderful about
that, and yet it gave me a lost feeling too, knowing that my family was
snug in a cabin across the chasm of downpour, while I was here alone.
When it rained I usually spent as much time watching it as I did
writing. I opened the door to a blast of cold air, and the sight of a
lead-colored, darkening sky. Or I looked through the slats of the
Venetian blind. I could see the sparkle-spattered highway shimmering
like a smooth sheet of glass, glittering with the reflection of lights
from the service stations, and rippled by the gusts of cold wind that
danced continually across it. There were pools of black water in the
gravel of our driveways, and the Chinese elms waved their wet, lacy
branches mournfully. The neon signs glowed through the rain, and water
trickled off the curbs of the islands of grass and the island of
geraniums beneath our sign. Thunder shook all of San Gorgonio Pass
intermittently, and lightning flashed the trees to a wet, brilliant
green. The fury of it, and my own solitude, filled me with a kind of
exultation.

Rainy weather never interfered much with David's school. We always
drove him to the school, which was about a mile away, and got him after
school. I usually drove him to school in the morning with Donna sitting
primly in the back seat; by afternoon Grant was awake, and he picked
him up after school.

David was experiencing the usual juvenile difficulties in learning to
spell "cat" and "dog" and in mastering the shape and sounds of the
multitude of confusing squiggles that made up the alphabet. During the
first few weeks of school his class learned the first half of the
alphabet.

One day David came home and told me happily that he was getting ahead
of his class. Moejy, who was in the last half of the second grade, was
helping him, he explained.

He exhibited a sheet of hieroglyphics, and said proudly, "I've
memmerized every one of them! Moejy told me how each one sounds. This
one, like a 'S' with a tail, is a 'doo'. And this one here's a 'sof'."

The marks on the paper were meaningless lines and curlicues; yet, to
the untrained eye of a child they might look as much like letters as
real letters do, I realized.

"I'm afraid Moejy has been fooling you," I said gently. "Those aren't
real letters. They're just scribbling. They aren't anything at all."

David was furious. He pulled a long string of gum from his mouth,
drawing it out so far that it broke. "All that memmerizing for
nothing!" he wailed, picking the sticky gum from his chin. "Just
wait'll I get my hands on that Moejy! I'll--"

"You'll what?"

He must have remembered then that Moejy was quite a bit bigger than he
was.

"Oh--nothing, I guess," he said, nibbling gum from his dirty fingers.

But I knew exactly how he felt about Moejy. I felt the same way, myself.




CHAPTER EIGHT


"MADAME, I WONDER if you would be so gracious as to do me a favor?" Mr.
Hawkins, coming through the office door, put his dark hat on quickly so
that he could remove it in a sweeping, deferential gesture.

"Of course," I said automatically, looking up from my morning's
bookkeeping. "That is, maybe," I added warily.

His brown eyes, as usual, were sparkling with a private amusement. He
always gave the impression that he loved people, but couldn't resist a
few chuckles at their expense.

"I fear the matter of the black rubber spider has caused you to
mistrust me," he said. "Ah, madame, I apologize deeply if my little
joke frightened you. Pray have the kindness to forget it long enough to
do for me something for which both my fiancee and I will be grateful."

"Your fiancee!" I exclaimed. "You mean Miss Nestleburt has--you're
going to be--"

"Yes, she has done me the great honor of consenting to become my wife.
Our nuptials will take place a week from today, when my work in Palm
Springs will be done. And today, if your husband can spare you, I would
be most happy if you would come with me and help me select a small gift
for my bride-to-be."

Grant was just finishing a late and solitary breakfast. (A fried egg,
smothered in applesauce.) He could manage, he told me sleepily. David
was in school and the baby was playing quietly in her playpen; and not
many customers come in the morning as a rule. I got my coat and purse
while Mr. Hawkins waited, and then he helped me gallantly into his
green coupe.

We stopped at a drugstore on the corner of San Gorgonio Avenue, in the
heart of Banning. A sweet smell, compounded of fragrant cosmetics and
candy and soda fountain concoctions, met us as we went in.

The drugstore was crowded. Children and a few men were clustered around
the comic books at the magazine stand; the seats in front of the soda
fountain were full of workers having a morning coke or cup of coffee.
Matrons and business men thronged the store, and the clerks were
rushing about busily.

We strolled farther into the drugstore, Mr. Hawkins' broad shoulders
clearing a path for us, and finally he touched my arm respectfully. He
had stopped at a table laden with merchandise. The table held
everything from toothbrushes to expensive cosmetic sets. Probably, I
thought, he wanted my opinion on whether one of the cosmetic sets would
be an appropriate gift.

I was standing there in the crowd, smiling amiably, when suddenly he
picked up a toothbrush, waved it in the air, and bellowed,

"What--you mean to say you actually haven't brushed your teeth for
three years? Well, COME ON, I'm going to buy you a toothbrush!" And he
took me by the elbow and herded me ostentatiously through a staring,
shocked, and slightly revolted crowd, to the nearest clerk.

He put some coins into her hand and said loudly, "Don't bother to wrap
it up, I'm going to get her home and make her use this toothbrush right
away. Did you ever hear of anyone going three years without brushing
their teeth? Why, the Board of Health ought to get after people like
that!"

I was scarlet with rage and mortification. I summoned up a sickly smile
for the benefit of the curious eyes that were around me. But then those
eyes all darted down toward my mouth, eager for a glimpse of my teeth.
I pressed my lips tightly together--a move which, I realized later,
must have convinced everyone that my teeth were covered with enough
film to shoot another Gone With the Wind.

I stalked out of the drugstore, and Mr. Hawkins, the toothbrush in one
hand, followed, shrieking with laughter.

I got into the car silently and grimly. When he had controlled his
mirth enough to start the car I said with venom, "Now don't give me any
of that 'I apologize deeply, madame!' stuff."

I glanced sidewise at him. His cheeks were still quivering, and wet
with tears.

Chuckling intermittently, he drove the car to a candy store a few
blocks away.

He got out and made a flourish as though to help me out of the car. I
sat there and stared at him stonily.

"I'm not going into another store with you," I stated. "If you really
want my advice on a gift, just bring it out here to the car and I'll
tell you what I think about it. I'd even tell you what I think about
you, if I weren't a lady."

"Madame, I assure you--" he protested. Then, his words apparently
evoking the memory of my expression in the drug store, he turned away
quickly. His shoulders were shaking as he went through the doorway of
the candy store.

Presently, followed by an anxious salesgirl, he came out, carrying
several attractive, cellophane-wrapped boxes. With a regal disdain that
must have puzzled the salesgirl, I indicated that a box of chocolate
covered dates was the choicest delicacy of the lot.

I was still in a bad mood that evening when I came back from cabin 15
and climbed up on the typewriter case on the kitchen chair, after
sprinkling a clothesbasket full of clean clothes and getting them ready
to iron. The difficulty of reading, and the headlights which clamored
for my attention and turned out to belong to cars which were going so
fast that it was obvious they weren't likely to stop, began to irritate
me more than they ever had before.

Finally, after I had made three unsuccessful attempts to read one
sentence through to the end, I snapped my book shut, sighed loudly for
the benefit of Grant, who was reading on the davenport--and leaned
hard, with violent disgust, against the back of the chair.

My disgust was much more violent when I found myself sprawling
helplessly in the clothesbasket, like a huge turtle on its back. I had
forgotten that the height of the typewriter case was enough to make the
chair back--short enough to start with--practically nonexistent.

Grant came running to help me out of the clothesbasket. I looked at him
sharply. Yes, he was smiling a little.

That settled it! The idea, him sitting and reading, and then laughing
at me when I injured myself after working about fourteen hours in one
stretch!

I'd fix him. I thanked him graciously for his help, smoothed the
clothes in the basket, replaced the typewriter, and resumed my watch.

I glanced around at Grant, after a few minutes. He was immersed in his
newspaper once more, and looked very comfortable.

I smiled diabolically. "Eep," I said.

Startled, he leaped up and dashed for the door. I chuckled as he
hurried out to put on his act for a car that was going at least sixty
miles an hour.

As soon as he returned, acknowledging defeat, and grew absorbed in his
paper once more, I cried "Eep!" again. I kept that up until at last he
came back wearily into the house and said,

"None of those cars were going slow! Are you getting so you can't tell
a slow one from a fast one?"

"It's funny," I said, "but I've been noticing that they all begin to
speed up just about the time you start out there."

He looked at me suspiciously and resumed his reading without saying
anything. I was jubilant. It was illogical, of course, but somehow this
was making up for what Mr. Hawkins had done to me.

Suddenly I noticed two cars creeping along the highway, one behind the
other. They were past the Peacock and almost in front of Featherbrain's
little motel.

This was too good to miss. Surely one of the two, at least, could be
led in here.

"Eep! Two slow ones! Get out there!" I called excitedly to Grant.

For a moment he didn't move, and I was afraid I had cried "wolf!"
(pronounced "eep!") too often. But he finally decided I was telling the
truth, and hurried outside.

I had followed, to stand in the doorway between the living room and the
office to watch. Those cars were going so slowly that they must be
going to stop--either at Moe's restaurant or at whatever motel they
might select.

Grant was outside, walking back toward the office, rustling his
newspaper so the occupants of the cars would be sure to see him. The
light of the neon "office" sign shown full on him. The first car turned
into our driveway, its headlights silhouetting Grant's tall slender
form. The car behind it had turned into Featherbrain's driveway.

I went into the kitchen and looked out the window. The car that had
gone into Featherbrain's driveway, I saw now, was Featherbrain's own
car. Mr. Featherbrain had stopped his car in his driveway and was
getting out.

As soon as I realized he was heading for our place, I went back toward
the office. Grant had finished renting a cabin to the driver of the car
which had just come in, a man alone who hadn't cared to inspect the
cabin before accepting it. The man had left, taking the key of his
cabin, when Mr. Featherbrain came charging into the office. His ruddy
chin was quivering with indignation above his long, skinny neck.

"That car oughta been mine!" he snarled. "If it hadn't a been for you
and your durned old newspaper that anyone could see a mile away, they'd
a come in my driveway! You allus been doin' that way, ewy evenin', I
bet. No wonder I ain't been gettin' anybody. I oughta bust evvy bone in
yer head!"

Grant pointed out logically that a man had a perfect right to stroll
about on his own property, with or without a newspaper. He added that
if, at any time, Mr. Featherbrain had an inclination to do likewise, he
would have no objection whatever.

The old man stormed away without saying another word. And it was to be
a long time before he would speak to either of us again.

After that, I felt a little guilty about pulling the customers in.
Grant agreed with me that we shouldn't take Featherbrain's potential
customers away from him; neither of us had looked at it in exactly this
light before.

For two nights we let the slow cars approach unchallenged. A few of
them came into our driveway; none at all went into Featherbrain's. The
majority went at a turtle's pace past our place, undecided whether or
not to stop, and ended by turning into one of the motels nearer town or
continuing on through Banning.

After two nights we were convinced we weren't robbing Featherbrain of
anything; no one stopped at his little Palace Motel anyway. And it was
heartbreaking to let all those prospects go by without doing anything
to bring them in. So Grant resumed his old tactics, and business
improved again after its two-day slump within a slump.

Grant was full of plans for what we would do when we had saved a little
money. We'd put in kitchens; we'd have a bigger, more eye-catching neon
sign; we might make the back half acre into a deluxe trailer park. With
all that and the repeat trade bound to come to a new motel that's clean
and well-managed, we'd never suffer another summer slump like this one,
he prophesied. And, knowing him and his ability to devise ways of doing
what he wants done, so that the ultimate results on which he sets his
mind are achieved, I knew that his prophecy was right.

Miss Nestleburr came into the office three days before the date set for
the wedding, to pay up her rent for the remaining days.

"We got our license this morning," she told me tremulously, taking the
bills I gave her in change, and tucking them into her purse--a new,
shiny black purse that glittered against the pale blue of her suit. Her
entire outfit was new, and in contrast to the dull, unnoticeable
clothes she had always worn before. The fine network of wrinkles
beneath her eyes was almost hidden by a well-applied layer of pancake
makeup, and the whole office tingled with the scent of her perfume.

"I made a simply wonderful discovery while I was filling out the blank
for the license," Miss Nestleburt said. "I happened to take my glasses
off just before I started to write, and--" she paused impressively. "I
don't need glasses at all!" I laughed. Everyone but Miss Nestleburt,
apparently, had known that all along.

In the few days that intervened before the wedding, we had a lot of bad
luck--so much, in fact, that I began to get discouraged.

"Maybe this motel is jinxed," I said to Grant. "Maybe we were never
meant to be in the motel business."

First it was our electricity. A high truck, going to the parking lot
directly behind Moe's restaurant next door, tore down the wires that
led from the row of cabins beside the restaurant to the main lines. One
whole side of our motel was without electricity, and therefore
unrentable, for two days and two nights, until the understaffed
electrical department could send some men out. And Grant had a battle
on his hands to keep from being stuck with the expense. The truck
driver who had done the damage was gone; if Moe knew who he was, he
wouldn't admit it. Truck drivers gave him the better part of his
income, and he didn't want to anger any of them.

Finally, on the grounds that the wires must have been strung
dangerously low in the first place, Grant succeeded in making the
electric company repair the damage free.

I hadn't worried that we would have to pay for repairing the wires,
even when I knew that there was no trace of the truck that had done the
damage. I knew Grant would work out some way to get them fixed, without
its costing us a cent. I had no idea how he'd do it, but I knew he
would do it.

Grant can always figure a way out of anything. He is so ingenious that
I see no reason why, someday, I shouldn't be swathed in emeralds and
diamonds. (None of these have materialized as yet, though.) For
instance, one night when he ran out of gas, being able barely to coast
into a station before the car stopped, he made the dismaying discovery
that the station was closed. Refusing to be cast into the gloom that
would have overcome an average person, he got out of the car and
emptied into the gas tank the dregs of gasoline remaining in the hoses
attached to each pump, amounts which totalled up to enough gas to get
the car to a station where he could order, "Fill 'er up!"

On another occasion, after getting a flat tire when we were on an open
stretch of highway near Hemet, he changed the tire for his spare, only
to discover that there was no air in the spare. He had no pump. There
was no civilization around, except for some old ramshackle barns near
the highway, beside one of which was a sort of spray gun for painting.
It was a huge container with a hose attached. The container was empty
of paint, fortunately, and, after toying with the hose awhile, Grant
discovered how to make it shoot a jet of air--air that would have been
paint, if the container hadn't had the courtesy to be empty. Grant
moved the limping car close to the paint sprayer, and after repeated
efforts somehow succeeded in getting quite a bit of the squirted air
into the soft tire.

I sometimes think that if an earthquake should suddenly shatter our
motel to a level with the ground, if I should run away with another
man, if David should put all our possessions into a glorious bonfire,
and Donna should get her hand caught in the wringer of the washing
machine--all simultaneously--Grant would be able, by a few incisive
words or actions, to bring the entire situation back to normal. In
case, since he is my husband, this sounds like bragging, let me add
that there is nothing so deflating to the ego, so utterly crushing to
one's sense of having any worth or value, so completely paralyzing to
one's latent, potential abilities, if any, as being married to such a
paragon of accomplishment.

After our electricity was fixed--on the house, as it were--our neon
sign went bad again. It flickered uneasily for a while, and finally
went off altogether. We called the cherubic-faced Oian Roscoe again,
and he fixed it for us promptly; but we were beginning to get
disgusted. This neon sign w

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/35703