PEOPLE WHO MANAGE motels shouldn't throw stones, for they live in glass houses just as surely as does any goldfish. In fact, a goldfish in a bowl placed in the center of Grand Central Station would live a life of privacy and seclusion, compared to the life of a motel owner.
I am so inured, by now, to the lack of privacy, that I can calmly continue dusting furniture or changing Donna's clothes if a couple of strange men barge into the living room, mistaking it for the office. I am not in the least upset if, after I have gone to bed, someone rings the bell and asks to use the telephone. Since the telephone is in our living room, the person who makes the call cannot help seeing that I am in bed. The fact usually proves more embarrassing to him than to me. Repeated occurences have toughened me to the sight of a stranger telephoning a few feet away from my bedside, and regarding me curiously or nervously.
Having a normal amount of feminine vanity, I like to cream my face at night, and do up stray wisps of hair in curlers and bobby pins, after removing every trace of makeup. That same feminine vanity, though, makes such a praiseworthy routine impractical. If people must see me after I'm in bed, I like to look as attractive as possible. So, after conscientiously removing all my makeup, I add a quick dab of lipstick. I rub the face cream into my skin until it disappears. And if any stray locks of hair need doing up, I fix them the following morning, when they can be hidden under the confining bandana that Banning's whirling, incessant wind makes a desirable accessory anyway.
Grant wants to get an extension cord for the telephone, so that when customers want to use it it can be taken into the office. Whenever he brings up the idea, though, I discourage it. I don't mind the intrusion of strangers nearly as much as I would mind missing the chance to overhear their conversations! When people make calls in the daytime, I yield to the dictates of etiquette, and ostentatiously absent myself. (Sometimes I go only as far as the next room, however, where, if I try hard enough, I can usually hear most of what is being said.)
At night, though, when I am in bed, of course there is no question of my leaving politely so that the person who is telephoning can talk without being overheard. However private the nature of the conversation--and there have been some ear-sizzlers!--Emily Post herself could find no fault with my remaining to listen.
Continual interruption has become as ordinary, and usual, as the sight of strangers in our living room. The doorbell and the telephone ring intermittently all day long. Customers who are staying over want ice cubes, information, or an audience for the recital of their grievances, successes, or favorite jokes. Prospective customers want to know if we have kitchens, and if not, whether we'll show them a cabin anyway, so that in case they come out this way again in a year or two, as they may quite possibly do, they'll know exactly what they have reason to expect. Salesmen try to sell us weatherstripping, paint, fire extinguishers, rugs, lawn furniture, and DDT. Neighboring motel owners drop in to discuss business. Bees in their hives have nothing on us.
Nothing reveals just how impossible it is to do one thing from start to finish without interruption (unless it is a thing that takes only a split second to do) more accurately than a letter I wrote to Miss Nestleburt a few weeks after she had left. (I knew their honeymoon must be over, and so I sent the letter to their Burbank home, the address of which she had given me before she was married, before she had ever seen the place.) Rereading it, when at last I had signed my name to it, I felt that it was a masterpiece of revelation of our kind of life.
"Dear Miss Nestleburt--or, rather, Mrs. Hawkins," I had written. "It's ten o'clock, a beautiful morning, and I hope that
10:25. To resume, I hope that you and your husband
10:45. Twice now I have been interrupted by people who wanted to look at cabins, so they'd know what we have to offer in the way of accommodations in case they ever come through here in the future and need a place to
11 a.m. I'll write a few more lines before I have to feed the baby and put her to bed. The weather has been
11:45. She was too hungry to wait any longer, so I had to
12:15 p.m. Grant has been helping Mrs. Clark clean cabins. He just came in to tell me he's taking her home now, and to ask what we need from the store. We always buy our groceries in town because these little highway markets are very
12:25. Well, I just took a reservation by phone, for next Saturday night. Business is certainly
1 p.m. I was just cornered by a long-winded salesman. I would have sent him on his way sooner but
1:10. I just rented a cabin, to a man who's going to spend the day in Palm Springs and wants to be sure he'll have a place to sleep tonight. As I was about to write a few minutes ago, business
1:30.1 just had to leave that time, I thought it was a wreck. A screeching of brakes outside--turned out to be just a dog run over. He didn't seem to be hurt very
2:30. I had to take time out to make lunch, as Grant came back. Our hours of eating and sleeping are certainly erratic. Grant has gone now to pick up David from school. I hear the baby waking up now so I'll have to close. Please write to us."
At the same time I mailed the letter to Miss Nestleburt, I mailed a small box to her husband. The box contained a cockroach David had found outside and borne into the house triumphantly. I thought of Mr. Hawkins the moment I saw the creature. "Two can play his game," I thought to myself.
I had put the cockroach carefully into the well-padded box, not really expecting it to be still alive when it reached its destination, but satisfied that, dead or alive, it would be a handsomely macabre gift.
I didn't make a practice, of course, of sending out such incoherent letters as the one to Miss Nestleburt that accompanied the cockroach. Usually after an interruption I returned to the letter I had been writing, picked up the thread of what I had been saying, and resumed as though there had been no interruption. But occasionally it amused me to let evidence of each interruption appear in the letter.
It's so customary to find strangers in the living room, talking or using the telephone, that when I am ready for bed at night I don't dart out of the bathroom and leap into bed as I did at first. First I press my ear against the door, so that I can hear the rumble of voices if anyone is in the living room. If I don't hear anything, I open the door slowly and stick my head out. If only Grant is in the living room, and if the door between the living room and the office is closed, so that no one can suddenly open the outer office door and see me in all my pajama-ed glory, I rush across the floor and jump into bed.
When winter was well under way, our irascible old neighbor Mr. Featherbrain still had not spoken to us since summer, when he had been so incensed at Grant's pulling in off the highway customers that might have been his. Whenever I met him in the grocery store across the street, I smiled up at him sweetly, only to be rewarded with a tightening of the thin line of his mouth and a slight quivering of his roseate chin.
One night when Grant was in Arizona on a business trip, the office bell rang. I put on my robe sleepily and went to the door. Our "no vacancy" sign had been blazing for hours, so I was surprised to hear the bell.
It was the young sailor to whom I had rented the last cabin that night.
"We was just gettin' ready to turn in," he explained, "and we was gonna take a shower, but there wasn't any water. Not even enough for a drink. We can get along okay, we'll just turn in without a shower, but I thought I oughta let you know, so you could maybe get it fixed by morning so we could take a shower before we pull out."
I thanked him feebly, a little stunned at the realization of what a calamity had befallen me. I tried the faucet in our kitchen; there was a hiss of air and a dispirited gurgling, and three large drops fell into the sink.
It lacked ten minutes of being midnight--hardly a time to be making phone calls. Anyway, I didn't know whom to call. All the service shops were closed, and the workers home in bed.
The office of the Blue Bonnet motel, across the street, was dark. All the motels in town were full by now, of course; therefore the owners would all be asleep.
Oddly enough, though, there was a light at the Palace Motel, in the room that I knew was Featherbrain's living room.
Well, I wasn't going to ask them for help, I resolved. Mr. Featherbrain would be very pleased to know that I was having trouble.
I tried to figure out what Grant would do about the situation if he were home. Of course, he would have the difficulty resolved, and everything going smoothly, in less than twenty minutes--but how would he do it? And why couldn't I myself do whatever it would be that he would do?
I drew my robe more tightly around me, and sat down on a cold kitchen chair. I thought.
Dimly I recalled hearing something about the water having been turned off, before we bought the motel, by a bunch of mischievous Indian boys. I knew that the meter was out back in the field, near the deserted road where I had learned to drive. Maybe there was a handle out there with which our water could I be turned on and off.
My duty was clear. I put my coat on top of my robe, took a quick glance at David and Donna to be sure that they were sleeping soundly and wouldn't be apt to awaken before I came back, armed myself with a flashlight, and set forth into the frigid night.
Nothing can describe the utter blackness of a midnight in Banning, six hundred feet from the highway and civilization. When my back was turned to the few neon signs that were still shining, and the intermittent flash of headlights, it was as though I were alone in a cold, windy world of pressing, almost tangible darkness. There was no moon to point up the ghostly, shadow-like mountains--lowering shapes that I felt, rather than saw--and the stars, so many and so brilliant that they looked like glittering jewels that had been tossed up there by a lavish, wasteful hand, selfishly drew their light closely around them.
All I knew about the water meter was that it was somewhere toward the back of our land, near the road. The smug certainty of men in general that men are superior to women in every respect, except possibly motherhood, has always annoyed me. However, I admitted to myself as I stumbled over the rocky road toward the back of our land, the chances were excellent that no man who had lived at the motel as long as I had would fail to know the exact location of the water meter, and what to do to it if the water suddenly refused to come into the cabins and be sociable. I resolved, feeling my way along with tentative, reluctant toes, that from this bleak hour forward I would take an efficient, masculine attitude toward everything that had bolts or screws. I'd show the world that it's due to early training and environment that women aren't mechanically inclined or good fixers, and not to any lack of brain power; while it is mostly the pressure of public opinion that makes the average boy grow up to be a minor mechanical genius.
I turned the flashlight on only intermittently, only at the moments when the darkness was pressing too forcibly upon me. I felt the presence of ogres and banshees (whatever they are) and even a few werewolves. I didn't want to make myself conspicuous by shining the flashlight any more than necessary; if all these horrible things could hide from me in the dark, then I could just as well hide from them, too, instead of lighting myself up so they'd know exactly where to pounce.
When at last I reached Williams street, which marked the end of our property, I turned the flashlight on bravely and began to search for the water meter. Coyotes were howling close in the hills to the north, which didn't help matters any. All of the land around me was settled by fat, stickery bushes which regarded me stolidly, defying me to dispute their squatters' rights or to try to get any information from them. They knew where the meter was, all right, but they had no intention of letting me in on the secret.
I stood on our private road, in a rocky tire-rut, and began to flash the beam of the flashlight systematically across the field in such a way that the light had finally covered every foot of the area in which I thought the meter must be. There was no sign of the meter, though. I wasn't really surprised, because the wind-battered, huddled-together bushes, which by now wore faintly mocking expressions, were high enough to obscure the meter from any eye except that of the person who knew exactly where to look.
I waded a few feet into the despicable little bushes and repeated the process of flashing the light around systematically. No soap. No water meter.
After a lull the cold wind was coming up again, and the bushes began to move and whisper among themselves. I could almost make out what they were saying.
"Can you imagine," one seemed to hiss indignantly, "Thinks she can find the meter we've got hidden!"
"Yeah, look at the fool," another replied with derision. "Trying to find it with just a little flashlight. Think we ought to trip her up and stick a few thorns into her?"
Apparently they decided against it, and perhaps they even took pity on me, because eventually I found the meter, about ten feet from Williams street and twenty feet from our private road.
When I found it, of course, I didn't know what to do with it. It was a small, complicated structure of curving pipes and gadgets and smooth, leering faces of glass. One round handle was particularly conspicuous, and I felt certain that it was with this handle that I must commune. I turned the handle cautiously. It seemed agreeable, so I turned it still further. And then I came upon another hurdle I must jump: no matter with how much firmness and artistry I turned the handle, I wouldn't know what effect it was having, if any, until I trotted back the whole cold, black, dismal distance to the house and tried the faucets. I girded up my loins, grasped the flashlight grimly, and started back.
I was approaching the rear cabins, which were silhouetted against the occasional headlight-glow from the highway, when I remembered that there were faucets spaced regularly in the field. I captured the nearest one with the flashlight beam, went up to it and turned it on. To my joy, water gushed out--the loveliest, most sparkling, most appreciated water in the world.
The children were still asleep when I got back, and all seemed to be well. I went to the kitchen, to try the water at the sink. It spurted forth as gloriously as had the water from the faucet in the field. I looked out the kitchen window at the drowsy highway. The two service-station markets were closed, their lights out. There were no cars on the road at the moment; no lights except the rotating beacon at the airport. The Peacock's sign was out, Featherbrain's sign was out--but wait! There was still that light in Featherbrain's living room.
Even as a horrible suspicion was crawling over me, Mr. Featherbrain's gaunt shoulders and head appeared in his window. A smile (probably ill at ease in such an unaccustomed place, I thought) was on his face.
Mr. Featherbrain shoved up his window and thrust out his head. I opened our kitchen window so that I could hear what he was going to say.
"I betcher durned old water wouldn't turn on!" he cackled. "Durned old Indians are allus turnin' it off, ain't they? Yuh oughta put the Indian sign on 'em, that'd fix 'em!" He chortled at his own wit.
I was quivering with reaction, cold, and indignation. I realized that the "Indian" who had turned off our water tonight had been a tall, thin black-haired one, with a white stubble sprouting over a pink chin. But I couldn't think of an appropriate, biting enough retort.
I didn't know exactly what I was going to say, but I leaned forward, waiting for the enraged words to come.
They did. "I oughta bust evvy bone in yer head!" I snarled.
One day the grapevine which twined around the various motels in town, linking them together, vibrated with the information that Mr. and Mrs. Garner had sold the Peacock. And for one hundred thousand dollars!
"One hundred thousand. A tenth of a million," we said, rolling the words around on our tongues and tasting them critically.
They tasted wonderful to Grant. "A hundred thousand," he mused. "Do you suppose, if we advertised once and really tried, we could get anything like that for this place?"
"Well, this place is worth more than the Peacock," I said cautiously. "But we don't want to sell, do we?"
"No--o--o, I guess not," he said; but the thoughtful expression didn't fully leave his eyes for several weeks.
When, after the period of escrow had passed, the Peacock was taken over by its new owners, Mr. and Mrs. Needham, it was fun to stand by the kitchen window as dusk crept through the Pass and watch them struggle with their neon sign switches. It was a gaudy sight. First the green "vacancy" sign would flash on and off; then, gaining certainty, it would go on and stay on. Then the lamps at the highway end of the white walls surrounding the motel would light up brilliantly. Then the "vacancy" sign would go off. Then the peacock would burst into glorious color, only to leap back into darkness again. Next, the bright red words "Peacock Motel" would flare out of the blackness like a splash of red paint, followed by the green "vacancy." Then, one after another, all the signs would be turned off, as the new owners sought, by the trial and error method, the switch that turned on the little light outside the office. And by the time they located that switch, they turned the office light off again hunting for the switch that turned on the big white "vacancy" sign on their lawn, between the rows of units, or for the one which turned the ordinary-looking, roof-sheltered little well between the office and the highway into a blazing, neon-outlined wishing well that could have dropped out of a fairy story.
I knew exactly what the new owners of the Peacock were going through. I remembered how hard it had been for us--or for me, rather--to know which switch would turn on which light or sign. And the Peacock, obviously, had a lot more switches than we did. But even though I sympathized completely with their bewilderment, I never missed standing at the kitchen window in the early evening when the contagious wave of sign-turning-on began to sweep along the highway through Banning.
The aurora borealis had nothing on the Peacock, for a couple of weeks.
When we left Los Angeles we brought with us two radios, one of them the small white one Grant had given me before we were married, and which I had, in Los Angeles, kept on the kitchen sink so that music could mingle with the splashings of dish water. We planned to rent it now, at fifty cents a night, to our customers.
We put the radio on the desk in the office, but for some reason we didn't get around to putting on it a sign that would apprise our customers of the fact that it was for rent. Naturally, no one asked to rent it, and when we had been there for several months it hadn't earned us a penny.
Fixing a sign to put on the radio was one of those things that seem inexplicably to suggest procrastination, like changing the lining paper in bureau drawers, or like writing to your husband's Aunt Minnie and inviting her to come out for a few weeks.
One day, though, when I had a few minutes to spare and was wondering what useful thing I should do during that short time (and afraid I would think of something pressing enough to get me out of the chair where I was lolling) I decided to make a "for rent" sign for the radio. I printed the words neatly on a piece of white cardboard and stood it up against the radio.
Within a few days I was beginning to think that magazine editors who pay ten cents a word for manuscripts were cheapskates. Those two words I had written began to bring in fifty-cent piece after fifty-cent piece, until at last the radio had paid for itself over and over again.
We discussed getting a few more radios, but that, too, was easy to put off. Occasionally one of the many motel-to-motel salesmen with whom we were blessed would want to install in our cabins, at no expense to us, coin-operated radios, from which we were to have a percentage of the take. I felt that such radios in the cabins would put our motel on too obviously commercial a basis, while Grant was beginning to toy with the idea of putting ordinary little radios in each cabin for the free use of our customers, as a deluxe touch to the accommodations. Unaccustomed to such luxurious details as free radios, many of the people who occupied the cabins would be sure to choose our motel in preference to any other if they ever went through Banning again. However, putting a thirty dollar radio in each of thirteen units would cost nearly four hundred dollars--a large sum to pay for the good will of customers who already seemed pleased with our motel. We filed both that idea, and the idea of letting a salesman install coin-operated radios, away in our minds for future reference.
Grant, after working on the children's bedroom so long that I had really given up any idea that it would ever be completed, finally finished it. The walls and ceiling were covered with cedar siding, the floor with linoleum of a swirling green color, and we hung crisp white curtains at the windows. I put one of the motel spreads, a green one, on David's bed.
I had converted into draperies a matching green spread which had been burned by a smoker-in-bed, and these I hung over the closet doorway and in front of a big cabinet of shelves Grant had made. After I had cut away the burned parts and made the draperies, there were still several fairly good-sized pieces of the material left, and of these I made scarves for the two small chests in the room. (From remaining scraps I made little curtains for the window of the door between the office and the living room--curtains that would be easy for me to move slightly in order to peek into the office to see what might be going on there.)
The total effect was very pleasing. The room looked a lot different than the ugly garage into which we had put the children's beds the day we arrived.
I had been in the habit of hurriedly shutting the bedroom door whenever anyone came to visit or to telephone, so that they couldn't see into the upset, unfinished room. Now, however, I always made it a point to see that the door was boastfully, confidently ajar.
I gestured vaguely toward the telephone one evening when Grant ushered in a man who wanted to make a long distance phone call. I pulled the bedroom door open with an unostentatious gesture, and sat down, apparently to read a book, but actually to study the man and listen to what he would say. If you were to stand on the corner of a busy street and watch the hordes of people hurrying past, you'd mark them off as just ordinary, unoriginal, all-alike people, none of them possessing noticeable peculiarities or even individuality; but if those hordes were to separate and come singly into your living room, to sit for five or ten minutes using your telephone, the realization would slap you in the face that people are different from one another, that they do possess amazing or amusing idiosyncrasies, and that whatever scientist it was who stated that every human being has a counterpart somewhere, must have had his fingers--or his wires--crossed.
There couldn't have been, anywhere on the face of the earth, a counterpart of the man whom Grant had just brought in. He looked like an expectant elephant, nearing the end of a two year pregnancy. His long nose, which drooped a little at the end, was a dull violet color; and the skin of the surrounding rather insignificant face was a brilliant shade of peach--occasioned, I guessed, by either dipsomania or habitual bad temper. His ears were deformed; they were simple holes in his head, with a small external bulge of flesh to indicate the location of each. His small eyes were obscured by horn-rimmed spectacles. The glasses were apparently held up by some natural law (seemingly in conflict with the law of gravity) which my high school science teacher had neglected to explain. Certainly those impotent little bulges of flesh that masqueraded as ears couldn't have had anything to do with supporting the glasses.
The man, putting in a long distance call, was trying to make the operator understand his unusual name. The back of his fat neck was getting redder and redder. It wasn't surprising, though, I thought, that she found it hard to understand his name.
"No, not Dugan!" he spat at her. "Dubaf! DUBAF!" He moved his bulk heavily on the chair, and I half expected it to fold under him. His free hand, drumming irritably on the desk top, was shaking with rage, the veins knotting up as he shouted "Dubaf! Dubaf!" into the mouthpiece. "I didn't say Dusle!" he screamed. "Dubaf! D-U-B-A-F. No, I said D-U-B-A-F!" He mopped his forehead. He clenched the telephone tighter, his eyes distended.
"D as in dammit!" he roared. "U as in you silly slut--"
I retreated hurriedly, throwing down my book and rushing into the kitchen to see whether I had remembered to wash yesterday's breakfast dishes.
BANNING'S WEATHER COMES assorted, like a box of chocolates. Some of the tidbits are sweet, some have a bitter tang; some, wrapped in glittering tinsel, turn out to be not as nice as you expected them to be. But they are all delicious, once you have developed the taste for them.
When winter is barely under way in Banning, suddenly it's spring. In mid-January, when the enclosing mountains are still shivering and huddled under their white fur coats, spring tiptoes through the Pass, breathing warmly upon the wind-swept grass and tossing handfuls of popcorn onto the branches of the almond trees. Vast orchards bloom, a paradox of nature, with the giant snow-covered mountains leaning over them.
I used to worry about those first frail, brave blossoms. I worried about them, and about the possibility of a frost, as industriously as though I were a mother almond tree.
One night late in January there was a shower of hail that lasted for about half an hour. The little hailstones splattered and clanked against the windows, and chattered on the little cement porch and on the door, pounding for admittance. When at last the shower subsided, we opened the door to look out, and saw that our entire driveway, even the islands of grass and the sidewalk in front of the cabins, were white with a thick layer of hail. It looked like snow.
The morning after the hail storm, when the solid layer of ice the hail had formed over the ground was melting, and crackling like a huge bonfire, we found that our neon "office" sign had a tiny hole in the top of it. About the time Grant was telephoning Oian Rosco, I happened to think of the almond blossoms. If hail could do this to our sign--and presumably it had been a hailstone, a particularly aggressive one, that had done it--what might it not have done to those delicate blossoms?
The next afternoon I drove to David's school, picking him up and bringing him home. Williams street, which led straight to David's school a mile away, was lined with almond trees. I looked at the trees anxiously. I was amazed to see that the branches were as fluffy as ever with their heavy load of bloom.
After that, I never worried about the almond blossoms any more. If the trees the following year had begun to bloom on Christmas day, and Christmas had been followed by twenty successive days of frost, I wouldn't have given it a thought.
Before our second summer at the Moonrise Motel Grant, by dint of much telephoning, exhorting, explaining, pleading, and even threatening, organized the motel owners in Banning into what started out as the Banning Motel Owners' Association, and later grew more inclusive and changed its name to the Banning Hotel and Motel Owners' Association. The purpose of this organization was to advertise Banning so thoroughly and so blatantly, principally by means of highway advertising signs, that even during the summer there would be more eager tourists than there were accommodations.
Banning had two small weekly newspapers, and ever since we came to the motel I had been toying with the idea of working for one of them on a part-time basis, if I could get the editor's approval. At least ninety percent of the wrecks that occurred in Banning happened right in front of the Moonrise Motel; there couldn't be any question about that. I could write up the story of each wreck for the paper; and maybe the editor would have some ideas as to further work I could do.
A few days before the first meeting of the new motel owners' association was scheduled, I bearded the editor of one of the Banning papers in her den. The story of the association's first meeting would be, I figured, a good opening wedge.
I had always had a yen to work on a newspaper. It had struck me that in nearly every biography of great writers there was a sentence or two testifying to the fact that the writer had at one time been a newspaper reporter. And since, of course, I hoped some day to be listed among the great, I should attend to that little prerequisite.
Reporting for a country paper would be an interesting experience, and with Grant home all the time, Donna would be able to spare me for two or three hours each day.
The editor of the paper, a pleasant-faced woman of about forty, with short, curly dark hair, was very interested when I revealed my background of magazine writing, and the fact that I had written a regular column in a Los Angeles newspaper until we left that city. Her present "reporter," the most literate she could find in this small town, was a recent high school graduate who used such sentences as "he capitulated through the air," and "the drunk driver was convicted of auto-intoxication."
We argued for about an hour. She'd like to have me work for her, all right, but she wanted me to work full time.
Her office was large, airy and cluttered. Two huge old desks stood against each other, their battered tops nearly obscured by a litter of papers, pencils and telephones.
A door at one end of the office led into a much bigger, still more cluttered room. From that room came the crash of machinery, and the voices of the men who were setting type, reading proof, putting the paper to bed, or whatever the technical terms are for whatever they do in such places. It was confusing, noisy, and somehow delicious.
By the time I had worn the editor down to a point where she was willing to let me work just part time, at a salary surprisingly large for a small town newspaper to offer, my natural laziness woke up with a start to the fact that I was actually about to let myself in for regular hours of extra, unnecessary work, and I took advantage of woman's privilege. I changed my mind.
"I don't want to tie myself down to definite hours after all, I guess," I said. "I'll work on sort of a free lance basis. I'll bring you several news stories every week."
I promised to be back with a story on the first meeting of the motel owners' association in time to meet her deadline.
The meeting was held at the Auto Haven, the big, rather old motel about half a mile from us, farther toward town, where Moejy spent what part of his time he wasn't devoting to harassing us or David. Grant and I, having engaged Mrs. Clark to take care of the children and rent the one cabin that was not yet occupied, were the first ones there.
Mr. Bradley, our middle-aged host, motioned us to chairs. He was an ordinary-looking, likeable man; the only thing about him incomprehensible to me was his toleration--his apparent liking--for Moejy. Well, I philosophized, we all have our little eccentricities.
And then the motel owners began to arrive. Mr. Buxley of the Westward; Mr. Vernon of the Bon Ton; Mr. Featherbrain of the Palace; Mr. Renault of the Mountain Lodge; Mr. Dale of the Cherry; Mr. Anderson, of the Desert Breeze. All misters. It began to look as though I would be the only woman present. This bothered me a little, particularly after Grant's broad hints that this was to be a businessmen's meeting, and his slightly more veiled ones that women don't know much and should try not to get into situations where their ignorance will be conspicuous. It would have pleased me very much if the majority of the people at the meeting had been women, very intelligent ones who thought of and discussed and settled every problem before the few men present could get their inferior minds to functioning. However, such was not to be; after the last of the twenty-eight arrivals had come there was only one other woman, and that one was my plump, shabby friend Mrs. Barkin, of the Sylvan Motel, who had, obviously, no husband to come in her stead.
I couldn't help feeling rather superfluous. I sat there seething, as many feminist-minded women have done before me, at the age-old theory of masculine supremacy.
Assuming that I must feel out of place, the kind Mr. Bradley--who took charge of the first meeting, pending election of regular officers--remarked at one time during the evening, "Of course, we'll be glad to have the wives of the motel owners attend the meetings too."
This irritated me still further, and while the meeting progressed I considered drowning Grant, so that, like the owner of the Sylvan motel, I'd be treated as an individual rather than as the ineffectual shadow of another. (I decided, though, that there'd be too much work for me to do alone.)
"Or if ever one of the owners is unable to come, his wife can come alone to represent him," Mr. Bradley went on.
After that, I seethed much more violently. Why was it taken for granted always that the man was the owner, and that his wife was simply "the owner's wife?" But, while Mr. Bradley's remarks were accepted quite naturally, how unheard of an occurrence it would be for a remark like this to be made: "Husbands of the owners are invited to come to meetings too; or if necessary the man can come alone to represent his wife."
How unheard of, even, that it be assumed that property owned by a married couple is owned mutually, and that whichever partner attended a meeting, it needn't be in order to represent the other.
Equality of sexes, and equality of races, are two points about which I have carried on so many arguments and written so many articles--many of which have never seen print--that I have almost admitted defeat. Stupid prejudice is virtually invincible, and not worth battering one's head against. But it's very, very maddening all the same.
It was a subject I had discussed several times, heatedly, in the small bi-weekly Los Angeles newspaper, called "Now," in which, as I told the pleasant editor of the Banning paper, I had had a regular column. In this column I could disport as I pleased, provided I stayed within the bounds of propriety and common sense, and all my favorite subjects got a thorough airing. "Now" folded up its tents and quietly stole away into oblivion about the time we left Los Angeles. Writing for "Now" was my first venture from the medium of magazines into that of newspapers, and I have always felt a little guilty about its demise.
I had brought along to the motel meeting a little notebook and my fountain pen, so that I could record pertinent facts about the meeting for the newspaper article I would write. Trying to be as inconspicuous about it as possible, I opened the notebook and wrote in it the names of the men arriving as Mr. Bradley introduced them.
Mr. Bradley spotted my notebook and pen, though, and almost before I knew what was happening, he had me sitting beside him at the table in the center of the room, taking notes on the meeting and acting as temporary secretary.
At one point in the meeting, after many methods of advertising had been discussed and rehashed, and it had been my job as secretary to read aloud a great deal of explanatory literature from advertising sign companies, I became very thirsty. During a dull, lengthy free-for-all about the relative merits of the different companies whose literature had been read, I acquainted Mr. Bradley with the fact that I was nearing death from acute dehydration.
Mr. Bradley waved toward a doorway at one end of the big, people-cluttered living room.
"Kitchen's right in there," he informed me. "Go along the hall and turn left. Go on in and help yourself."
I weaved my way between the chairs toward the doorway. The smoky air was heavy and thick and reluctant to let me through. I closed the door behind me and found myself in a murky hallway. The only light was that which seeped under the door I had just shut, and the glow from a partly open door at the end of the hall.
There was an open doorway at the left of the hall, and I was about to enter the kitchen through it when I heard a whisper.
"Pssst! Come in here, in here a minute."
My curiosity was stronger than my fright. I tiptoed slowly along the hall toward the partly open door and toward the whisper. Outside the door, I hesitated.
Then I heard the whisper again. "Come on in here, in here."
Timidly, I pushed the door open farther. The room was illuminated by a big, old-fashioned lamp that stood in a corner, its shade dripping with fawn-colored fringe. There was a large four-poster bed covered with a patchwork quilt, an old wooden rocking chair, and a heap of clothes on the floor beside the bed. The heap of clothes turned out to be a wizened old lady. Her frail body was swathed in layer after layer of garments, and her small head was covered by a black cloth, under which her bright eyes sparkled up at me.
"Come on in and close the door, come on in," she hissed. I closed the door and stared at her. But I knew I shouldn't just stand there and stare; I had to say something.
"What on earth are you doing down there on the floor?" I asked. It wasn't the type of thing I had intended to say, at all.
The old lady proudly smoothed the thick layers of material that surrounded her. She reminded me of a hen preening, fluffing out her feathers.
"I'm going to have a baby," she confided, still in a whisper.
"Well--" I gulped. "That's--that's fine. Motherhood is so--" I felt behind me for the doorknob. "Motherhood is so--well, so--"
"So broadening! Just like travel!" Her loud, sudden cackle was startling. "And how it is broadening!" she hissed. "But not the way I'm doing it. I've got a better way. Chickens have a better way than humans. All they do is sit on eggs. That way they don't get fat, they don't suffer, it's very simple. So I'm profiting by their example. See?"
The old lady half rose, lifting her voluminous skirts, revealing skinny, knobby legs and--an egg!
The egg, a large white one that looked almost as though it were made of china, rested on a pile of old dresses. After allowing me one quick glance, the old lady ruffled her clothes about her again and sank down gently onto the egg.
By this time I had found the doorknob, and I hurried out of the room. The old lady's stage whisper followed me: "I'm Mrs. Bradley. You must come back to see me soon, when my baby is born."
The election of officers was held later that evening. Mr. Cruz of the Rosarita Motel was to be president and I, it developed, was to be permanent secretary. I was relieved to hear that the next meeting was not to be at the Bradley's motel.
Every evening while we are eating dinner we keep the light turned out in the living room. My chair is placed at the end of the kitchen table nearest the range and sink, so that I am in the most strategic position possible for mopping up whatever food Donna spills, for catching David's plate on one of its sudden trips to the floor, and for serving hot second helpings from the covered pans that are simmering on the stove. (I never put all the food on the table; it would just get cold before we would be able to finish eating it, because of our many interruptions.) My position at the table is strategic in another way, too. I face the door to the living room and the moment a car drives in its lights shine through our Venetian blinds and form stripes on the wall of the darkened living room. (Months of experience have taught me the difference in angle and appearance between the stripes cast by the headlights of cars going into Moe's and those driving into our driveway). When a car drives in I tell Grant, who sits in the chair nearest the doorway, with his back toward the living room. As long as we have been at the Moonrise Motel, I don't believe Grant has eaten one evening meal without having to get up and rent a cabin or talk to someone, while the food on his plate loses its heat and its savor.
As for me, I don't believe I have ever washed dishes after dinner without having to stop once or twice, dry my hands, answer the doorbell and be a gracious landlady, and then go back and dip my dry hands into the unappetizing dish water again. Grant usually chooses this period of the day to shave, and it is easier for me to go to the door in the middle of dishwashing than it is for him to wipe off every trace of shaving cream and go.
The actual work connected with the motel seems easier now than it did at first--and, of course, that isn't surprising, since we do very little of it ourselves. Mrs. Clark cleans the cabins thoroughly every day, and after she has stripped all the beds Grant and I whisk through the laundry, getting it sorted and ready to go in about half an hour. About once a week Grant works with Mrs. Clark, and they give the cabins a very thorough cleaning, vacuuming under the beds, washing windows, and doing all the other little jobs that don't have to be done every day. Occasionally he does a little redecorating, painting a bathroom or repairing the damage done to the side of a garage when a car was backed out carelessly--and on such days it is my job to get the laundry out alone.
Watering, a big job in the summer time, can be practically forgotten about during the winter.
The last task before bedtime is to go around and check all the license numbers, to be sure that we have the correct ones. This is a safeguard in case of theft or damage to the cabins.
A typical day, with enough work of different kinds to keep us busy, but seldom enough to make us tired, and with the opportunity for meeting people from all parts of the country, is very interesting. The typical customer, however, is not. He is, in most cases, rather boring--not through any fault of his own, but because I know in advance exactly how he is going to behave and what he is going to say.
He comes in saying, "Got a vacancy?" After seeing and approving the cabin, if he wanted to look at it, he fills out the registration blank, omitting everything but his name and city and state. Prodded, he adds his address, fuming with belated alarm over the fact that he has written his home state immediately after the name of his town, in the blank left for "city," instead of putting it in its own blank space, labelled "state." Assured that it doesn't matter, he proceeds to the greatest hurdle of all--his car license. Laughing apologetically, he fingers through the papers in his wallet, trying to find it recorded on one or the other of his papers. Giving up at last, he darts outside, looks at his license, darts back in and writes it down quickly before he can forget it. Then he comments at some length on his persistent inability to remember his car license. I always smirk and assure him that I've never been able to remember ours, either (a lie). Having paid and obtained his key, he lingers a few minutes to comment on the travels he has made, the distance he has covered, and how tired he is; and to ask where's a good place to eat.
That's the typical customer. But there are a lot of unusual, amazing, intriguing, uncouth, and even frightening customers, and it's in the hope of encountering one of these that, when neither of us is busy, I fight to beat Grant to the door when a car drives in.
One night after we had gone to bed, expecting a night of good, uninterrupted sleep guarded by our bright "no vacancy" sign, someone rattled the knob of our door and then began to knock furiously. Grant pulled on a robe and went sleepily to the office door, so that the person who had been knocking on the living room door would go to the office to talk to him.
A few seconds later he was neck-deep in argument with the possessor of a shrill, strident, powerful voice. Prodded by my seldom dormant curiosity, I crept out of bed and slightly moved the curtains that hung over the window of the door to the office. I peeked into the office; there, confronting Grant, stood a behemoth of a woman who matched the voice in every respect. Her massive chin stuck out aggressively; and she was the possessor of a bosom that, if it could have been divided up among the female population, would have put several falsie manufacturers out of business.
"You get out of that bed!" the woman shrieked--a rather pointless command, since, obviously, Grant was not in bed. "Get your clothes on," she went on relentlessly, "and get out of that bed, and out of this cabin. They rented it to me and my husband, less than an hour ago, and I paid for it, and I intend to stick up for my rights. We rent a place, and then go out for a malt, and drive around a little, and what happens? They rent the place to someone else. I suppose they think they'll get double rent. Well, I hope they'll give you your money back, and of course you can't be blamed for renting a cabin when you didn't know it was already rented, but I'm telling you, I won't stand for it, so now hurry and get up and get out."
The woman folded her arms, with difficulty, around her jutting bosom, and stood waiting for Grant to slink away. When he didn't slink, but began to explain to her in a reasonable tone that she was mistaken, she howled with anger.
"No excuses," she screamed. "And I don't care if your wife has ulcers and can't be moved, or whatever corny excuse you're going to pull."
"Look," Grant said patiently. "We live here. We own this motel. Nobody rented us a cabin tonight, and what's more, we didn't rent you a cabin here at all. Now, if you'll excuse me once, I'll go back to bed--my bed, not yours."
But the woman's huge body remained planted in the doorway. She was quivering with determination. "My husband and I are going to have our cabin," she bellowed. "I'll call a cop."
"Fine. Would you like to quick use our phone?"
I leaped back into bed, just in time. The woman came into the room like a rhinoceros on the warpath, and glowered at me until I was almost ready to get up, apologize for sleeping in her bed, and creep away.
Grant handed her the telephone.
She glanced toward the kitchen. "I didn't--I didn't notice before that the place had a kitchen." Her voice was a little less like a foghorn.
"Nope. You've never been here, before," Grant said. "The number of the police department is 3322."
Her bosom seemed to shrink a trifle.
"And I don't remember any Venetian blinds in the place. Maybe we got twisted, driving around in a strange town, you know, when we got our malt. Maybe it was the front cabin of another motel. I--well..." She eased her bulk back toward the door. "I guess I made a mistake."
"Yep. But not such a big one as your husband made," Grant said, as he shut the outer door.
My first story for the newspaper was an account of the initial meeting of the Banning Motel Owners' Association. (I omitted the encounter with the host's wife!) The editor, Grandma, Grant, and most of the members of the association were pleased with the quality of my first venture into newspaper reporting.
I had closed the article with a list of the names of the motel owners who had attended the meeting, and it turned out that one member of the organization was not in the least happy over the situation.
I found that out the afternoon of the day the paper was published. Mr. Featherbrain stormed into the office, spluttered for a while, and finally came to the point.
"Durned old paper," he raged. "Durned old article. Who writ it, anyways?"
I still remembered acutely l'affaire de water faucet. "I wrote it," I replied coldly. "So what?"
He towered above me, thin and menacing, his chin quivering with violent emotion. "So what!" he repeated. "So what? Ain't it bad enough to have a name that sounds like 'Featherbrain' without spellin' it 'Featherbrain'?" His bony hand rasped across the white stubble of his beard. He seemed about to break into tears.
"It's too bad, all right," I said, softening a little. "But lots of people have funny names."
"I don't have a funny name!" he wailed. "You're just a-tryin' to make evvybody think I have. I oughta--why--" he paused, trying to think up an awful enough fate for me, and finally fell back on his old standby: "I oughta bust evvy bone in yer head!"
I was bewildered, and finally he saw that I didn't know what he was talking about. He checked his fury long enough to explain that his name was, always had been, always would be, Featherbren, Feather b-r-e-n, not Featherbrain.
He stalked away.
I ran outside and called after him, "Mr. Featherbrain!--I mean, Mr. featherbren!"
He stopped haughtily, and waited for me to catch up with him.
"I'm really sorry," I said. "Maybe this makes us even now, even though what I did wasn't intentional. Let's be friends again, shall we?"
A smile spread over his face like the sun bursting out from behind clouds. His chin flushed rosily with pleasure. He grasped my hand and pumped it up and down vigorously. "I been awful sorry, what I done about yer water. I ain't been mad at yuh noways for a long time now," he said. "But a course I couldn't admit it."
A bout with housecleaning having kept me in the house most of the day, I beat Grant to the office one evening when the bell rang.
"I haven't set eyes on a customer all day," I told Grant.
"You go read a book; I'll take care of this one."
'This one' was a lanky, nice-looking man of about forty.
"That radio on the desk there," he said without preamble. "I noticed it's for rent. Guess I'll take it."
"Okay. Fifty cents," I said.
He flipped half a dollar toward me, picked up the radio, and exclaimed, "Sold!"
"No, just rented," I answered wittily.
We laughed, and he went out, carrying the radio. Grant had been listening.
"Who was that?" he asked casually as I came into the living room.
"A man from one of the cabins."
"Which cabin?"
"Well--well, I don't know. I've been cleaning house--you did the renting today."
"Did you make sure that he really was staying in one of our cabins, and wasn't just someone off the highway?" Grant pursued relentlessly.
"Of course. Well, that is, naturally he's not just someone--I mean, after all, he said that it was when he was renting a cabin that he noticed the radio."
Grant was silent, for the obvious purpose of giving me a chance to find the flaws in my reasoning. He went into the kitchen, where he stripped the outer leaves off a head of lettuce, rinsed it, and began cutting it into shreds.
"Where did you get the lettuce?" I asked, partly from curiosity and partly from a desire to change the subject.
"From a truck driver," Grant said, putting the shredded lettuce into a bowl and spooning honey over it. "Truck parked in front of the driveway--I asked the driver to move the truck once. He had a big load of lettuce, said he'd give me some if I'd let him stay there long enough to run across the street and get a beer." Grant opened the cupboard door and inspected the cans of seasoning critically. After some deliberation he selected nutmeg, and sprinkled it lavishly into the bowl. Then he got a fork and began to eat.
I was hoping he had forgotten about the radio, but after he had swallowed a few mouthfuls he continued, as though he hadn't drifted off the subject:
"I'll bet a horned toad any stranger could pull in off the highway and ask you for a roll of toilet paper and you've quick give it to him."
There are times when I wonder what, exactly, it was that I saw in Grant that made me want to marry him.
It was one of these times, when I was standing at the office desk chewing a pencil and dwelling morbidly on the things about Grant that I didn't like, when a young woman stopped in and asked if we had cabins with kitchens. She was a very vivacious creature, with dark eyes and sparkling hair and a body that all seemed touched with electricity. Even my glum negative reply to her question seemed to bounce off the aura of her gaiety. She was so full of life that some of it had to spill out; apparently she couldn't pass up a human being without talking, happily and loudly, for a while.
She was one of those women whom, after a very short time, you feel as though you had known for ages. Suddenly, when she seemed on the verge of leaving, shrieking with laughter after telling me about a joke she had once played on someone, I gave birth to an idea that positively scintillated. Since she had a sense of humor and wasn't above a harmless joke herself, she'd enjoy this as much as I would. I'd show Grant he wasn't as smart as he thought he was!
I explained to the lively young woman what I wanted her to do. She agreed, her eyes dancing.
Grant, I knew, was sorting and putting away clean laundry. I led her out to the garage of cabin number 2, then I stood back so that Grant wouldn't be able to see me.
"My husband just rented cabin 16 from your wife," she said to Grant. "Now he's gone downtown and I seem to have locked myself out. I wonder if I could borrow your pass key?" Just then the telephone rang. I went inside to answer it; it was someone calling from Los Angeles, wanting to reserve a cabin for a week from Saturday night. There was a great deal of confusion, repetition, and mind-changing; and by the time I hung up and looked outside, I saw that the vivacious young woman had driven away.
I smiled as I went out toward the linen closet to bring my joke on Grant to its climax.
"Who was that woman talking to you just now?" I asked.
"Oh, she's the wife of the guy you rented 16 to," Grant replied airily, lifting an armful of neatly folded snowy sheets onto a shelf of the linen closet. "She was locked out. She just borrowed the pass key; she quick brought it back again."
I tried to look shocked as I said, "Sixteen! Why, I didn't rent sixteen to anyone! Here, let me have your pass key!"
I seized the key and dashed across to 16. Grant, by the linen closet, couldn't see me. I unlocked the door of 16, slammed it loudly for his benefit, and raced back to him.
"She's cleaned the place out!" I cried, with a malicious enjoyment of the expression on his face. "Lamp, throw rugs, ash trays--everything's gone! And you're the smart boy who's been bawling me out for not checking up on people before I give them what they want. I'd give toilet paper to a stranger off the highway, maybe, but believe me, before I'd give anyone a pass key I'd be pretty sure--"
Grant was getting up slowly, starting toward the cabin. I leaned against him, giggling.
"It's all a joke!" I gasped. "I fixed it up with that woman to ask you for the key--she didn't really take those things out of the cabin--so I'd be able to get back at you for all the things you said about me. I wanted you to feel foolish, for once. It was just a joke!"
A few minutes later Grant strode into the living room, where I was reading a magazine Mrs. Clark found in one of the cabins.
"A joke, eh?" he said grimly. He was giving me that withering look again, and this time I had a peculiar feeling that I deserved it. "Well, if it was a joke, your peppy little girlfriend was the one who played it. Both of the wool blankets are gone from the beds in 16!"
The influx into Banning of people with asthma, bronchitis, sinus trouble, arthritis, and common colds continued into the spring. Cultivated sweet peas were appearing in the wake of the almond and peach blossoms, wild flowers were spreading themselves extravagantly over the whole desert, and the fields behind our motel were splashed with color. Some careless giant had trailed dirty fingers across the snowy mountain tops. A pair of plucky birds were busily building a nest in the rear of garage 16, almost directly above my washing machine. The days were so breathtakingly lovely that it was hard to believe that less than ninety miles away there were fog and cloudiness, and people with persistent coughs and sniffles.
Nature's springtime orgy made us feel as though we should do a little to keep up with her. So, the first time Oliv Snyder came around, we made a deal with him.
Oliv Snyder was a gardener, obviously, and--so he said--an ex journalism teacher.
The latter epithet I doubted. I never heard him saying "you was" or "I seen," and David never caught him splitting an infinitive, but somehow I couldn't visualize him lecturing to an absorbed audience on the intricacies of slinging the English language around.
He was a short, moody little creature with white hair which curled at the ends. He wore a cap with a frayed, mothbeaten brim, and his elbows and knees, and various other portions of his anatomy and underwear, were visible through the holes in his clothing. His theme song, patterned after that of Snow White's seven dwarves, must have been "Hiccup while you work," for on the several occasions that he worked around the grounds of the motel he devoted fully as much energy to his gusty staccato hiccups as to his gardening.
Although he himself didn't seem to be much of a bargain, his proposition was.
"Five rosebushes--hic!--the very finest Talisman, to be planted on out to the highway and divide your property from the motel next door. And then all in front of the motel to the highway planted in calendulas. All for--hic!--ten dollars. You just clean the--hic! weeds out and get the land ready and I'll--hic! do the rest."
Two days later Grant had cleared out all the puncture vine, Russian thistles, and the other defiant weeds that never let up their efforts to regain the tiny percentage of territory they had lost to civilization. The wild flowers that bloomed with such mad splendor on the fields behind us stayed bashfully back where they couldn't be seen from the highway, and added nothing to the front view of our place.
Oliv Snyder appeared at the appointed time, his car loaded with boxes of plants, rose bushes, and a box of rich mountain-dug dirt which had its particular merit, he assured us, in the fact that it was "hundreds of thousands of years old."
Personally, I doubted that it was any older than any other dirt.
I raked away a few loose weeds while Mr. Snyder began digging holes in the rocky, hard ground. He paced out the distance between the holes so that the rose bushes would be properly spaced; then he placed the bushes in the holes, and poured the ancient dirt around their roots. While he worked he talked, letting drop occasionally a four or five syllable word that sounded affected and unnatural.
"Even though I am a very well educated man, and have had several books published, I have--hic!--a few little idiosyncrasies," he confessed, darting his bright, wrinkle-surrounded eyes at me.
"You're kidding!" I protested. "Surely you're too normal, too well balanced for anything like that."
"No," he said seriously. "Of course I am--hic!--exceptionally well balanced, but about even me there are--oddities, shall we say?"
"Yes, let's," I agreed.
Flailing his arms, the little man threw himself upon one of the newly planted rose bushes, trampling it with his feet. Or so it appeared. I was about to yank him back indignantly when I realized that his tattered shoes were adroit in avoiding the bush.
"I'm just stamping the--hic!--stamping the dirt down," he explained. "The roses like it better that way. Hic! They like things just so. They have their own little idiosyncrasies, you know."
"Even the well-educated, well-balanced ones?" Then, afraid that sounded too flippant, I said, "But what are your idiosyncrasies?"
Oliv seized a hoe from his car, leaned upon it, and said, "Look at me. I'm--hic!--the man with the hoe, stolid and stunned, brother to the--hic!--the ox."
I must have looked rather vague, for he explained, "That's from one of the poems I use--hic!--to teach my journalism classes."
He began chopping at the ground. "One of my peculiarities," he said, "is that I can't resist buying the bottles of things the--hic!--apothecaries sell. Those rows and rows of neatly labeled bottles on the shelves in drug stores--hic--they do something to me. I don't know what it is exactly, but practically all the money I earn doing gardening--hic--and odd jobs goes into the apothecaries' pockets. You ought to see my domicile--it's just like being in a--hic!--a drug store. Every shelf and drawer is loaded with bottles of pills and tablets and--hic!--capsules."
"Well, that's--interesting," I remarked, not being able to think of a more satisfactory adjective. "Sort of a hobby."
"But that isn't the sum total of my idiosyncrasies," he said, his face, under its thatch of white hair topped by his frayed cap, turning a mottled pink. He stopped, thrusting a small plant into the trench he had dug.
"No, I--hic!--regret to say, that isn't all," he went on. "It's--well, it's women. I can't resist them either."
I clicked my tongue sympathetically. "Lots of men are like that," I comforted him.
That night, though, I awoke and sat upright in bed. Oliv Snyder couldn't resist bottles of pills, so every drawer and shelf in his house was loaded with them. He couldn't resist women, so ...
I was so overcome with curiosity about his home life that it took me an hour to get back to sleep.