THERE IS AN indefinable air about every motel cabin that is felt, I imagine, by all but the most insensitive of motel owners. It's the composite spirit of all the people who have slept in that cabin. It's nothing more tangible than memory, actually, yet it's very real.
Miss Nestleburt and Mr. Hawkins had been with us so long that their presence still seemed to cling to their cabins. I felt almost guilty the first time I rented their cabins to other people after they left. A stern, rigid old couple fell heir to Mr. Hawkins' cabin, and I couldn't help contrasting their stiff seriousness with the sly humor of the former occupant.
Grant and I sat on the davenport that night after the children were in bed, and discussed the motel business. It was raining, so he wasn't going to go outside to bring any customers in.
"What we need is a rifle," Grant observed, lifting up the top slice of bread of his sandwich to make sure that the peanut butter, Worcestershire sauce, and apple jelly were still there. I averted my eyes, and asked him what we would do with a rifle if we had one--shoot people who tried to go into any motel but ours?
"Shoot out all the signs around us," he replied, his cheeks bulging. "Then we'd fill up right away. As soon as we filled up we'd quick shoot our own sign out, so the other motel owners wouldn't get suspicious the next morning because ours was the only sign that hadn't been shot out. We'd make twenty or thirty dollars extra that way; we'd pay Rosco seven-fifty to fix the sign, and that's all there'd be to it."
"You're wonderful," I said admiringly.
"We should at least change our own sign once," Grant went on, licking his lips. "The Winking Eye's sign, with its big eye flashing on and off, is almost as much of an eyecatcher as the Peacock's. Here we are between them with a sign no better than Featherbrain's."
"Maybe we could have a picture on top of the word 'Moonrise,'" I suggested. "A big orange moon--only half of it showing because it's supposed to be rising--all made out of bright neon."
Grant took another bite of his sandwich. "Have to talk to Oian Rosco about that," he observed. "He'll know if it can be done, and how much it would cost. I'll have to find out about neon myself one of these days. I don't like to have to hire anyone to make repairs."
We were silent for a while. "Another way to get customers," Grant mused, "would be to put up a sign outside: 'Limit--one cabin to a customer.' They'd come rushing in then, I'll bet."
We talked for a while about what different characters and personalities people possess--differences evidenced by the very manner in which they ask for cabins. There are several general types of opening remarks. There's the one that goes something like this: "Have you a nice, soft bed for a poor weary traveler to lay his tired body in?" The person--almost invariably a man--who asks for a cabin in this manner is without doubt good-natured, easy-going and generous, and has a good sense of humor. Then there's the thin-nosed man who thrusts that slender appendage a cautious inch inside the office doorway and demands, "Whatcha get for your cabins?" And there's the woman--too many of her--who inquires thoroughly into every detail before she will condescend even to examine a cabin.
"Have you bedbugs?" she inquires. There are two appropriate responses to such a query that, so far, I've been able to hold back. One is, "I'm sorry, we haven't any, but I think you can get some at the little store across the street." The other response would be a sigh, a confidential motion to her to come closer, and the words: "No, but I'm eaten alive by lice. Have you found any good ways to get rid of lice?"
Not only is a woman of this type not satisfied with asking about bedbugs, but she must also ask whether there is hot water (really hot?) and whether we actually wash the sheets, or whether we just iron the wrinkles out each time they are used and put them back on the beds.
But the most common four words--I've heard them so often I can almost tell by a prospective customer's expression when I am about to hear them again--are: "Have you any vacancies?"
Obviously, since our sign is proclaiming to all the world that we have, the question seems superfluous. The question irritated me at first, until I realized that everyone who asks it knows perfectly well that we do have a vacancy, but can't think of a better way to start the conversation.
The telephone interrupted our discussion and reverie, and Grant answered it.
"A reservation for two?" he said presently. "Yep ... I got that . . ." He began writing on a piece of paper by the telephone.
"The twin beds!" I hissed. "Ask them if they want twin beds!"
Our two twin bed cabins often seem to be a drug on the market, even though, except when business is rushing, we lock off the back bedroom, with its double bed, and rent the twin beds for only a dollar more than the price of a regular single cabin for two. When we remind people that we have twin beds, or ask them as they register if they wouldn't prefer them, we have better luck in getting rid of those cabins.
We often have trouble remembering to ask them, though. I prodded Grant in the back and hissed again, "Ask them if they want twin beds!"
"Do you want twin beds?" Grant said into the telephone mouthpiece. And then, to my amazement, he began to blush. He concluded the conversation hurriedly and with confusion, and then he turned to me.
"After this, will you leave me alone once when I'm telephoning?" he asked. "The man told me right away he wanted to reserve a cabin for his honeymoon. And then you quick pester me into asking him if he wants twin beds!"
Grant rented a cabin to a gushy, heavily upholstered woman, and we picked up our conversation where we had left off. "People certainly have a lot of different subjects to talk about while they register," I remarked.
"She certainly did have," Grant replied. "More than most." The principal topics of conversation are weather (both "here" and "where we came from") traveling conditions, and motels. Frequently an out-of-state customer will linger in the office to complain about the search that was made of his luggage and belongings at the border. And occasionally a customer will take the opportunity to expound his entire philosophy of life.
"We're missing a bet," Grant said, "by not having another business or two as a sideline. We could make a fortune selling the little things people leave behind and never call for--tooth brushes, bobby pins, things like that. And," he added bitterly, "we could sell wigs, and pillows stuffed with human hair."
His worst objection to cleaning the bathrooms in the cabins is the hair that is usually all over the sink and floor. He has often talked, in fact, of trying to get a law passed that would bar women from motels. Scattered bobbypins, lipstick smears on towels, hair and powder would be automatically eliminated in that way. (So would most of our income.)
Worse than hair, in my opinion, are ashes (the scattering of which is a pastime engaged in by more men than women.) Both sexes sprinkle them blithely all over the cabins--a trifle more thickly in the general neighborhood of ashtrays. That part of "ring a round the rosy" which goes "ashes, ashes, all fall down!" was probably written by a cabin-cleaner-upper as she fell down, exhausted, after removing the results of an average smokefest.
If ever the WCTU is supplemented by an organization to squelch dat ole debbil Nicotine, I shall join it. I shall be one of its most vociferous members, agitating violently for the suppression of tobacco, and for the relegation to dungeons of those whose lips, pockets, or thoughts are contaminated by cigarettes.
Grant and I had been in bed for about ten minutes when the doorbell rang. It was the male half of the rigid old couple to whom I had rented Mr. Hawkins' cabin. The door between the living room and the office was slightly ajar, and when Grant answered the bell I proceeded to engage in my favorite pastime--eavesdropping.
The man's voice was as severe and unyielding as his face. "May I inquire, young man," he said, "what was the idea behind the way you fixed our bed?"
Grant, of course, didn't know what he was talking about, and said so.
"Perhaps it is your idea of humor," the icy voice went on, fading as Grant followed the man back to his cabin to see what was the matter.
I was uneasy while I waited for Grant. Obviously, whatever was wrong, it was Mr. Hawkins' doing. I should have known there was something behind his eagerness to prepare his cabin for new occupants.
Grant came back in about twenty minutes. "Apple pie bed," he said. "Your friend Hawkins got in a last lick."
And then we sat on the bed and laughed until our sides ached.
Business was beginning to pick up again, to such an extent that Grant stayed up to pull in customers only a few nights a week. The Palm Springs season was to open October first, and the motel owners around us who had been in Banning more than a year assured us that the eight-month Palm Springs season would guarantee our being full almost every night.
Grandma came up from Los Angeles toward the end of September, exactly two weeks--as usual--from her last visit, and we decided to drive the twenty miles to Palm Springs and look the place over on its opening day.
The first of October was a bright, sunny day. Grant wasn't feeling very well--he had overindulged, the previous night while pulling in customers, on "tomato rolls," his own invention. These were cinnamon rolls, pulled apart and with slices of fresh tomato inserted. Too many of them cause the complexion to assume a greenish tinge, as Grant discovered. (The mere contemplation of them had that effect on me.)
In spite of the uneasiness of his stomach, Grant assured me that he could manage all right, and he and Donna waved to us as we swung onto the highway and headed east toward Palm Springs. I had never driven the road before.
My driving was still far from perfect, and Grandma's habit of excitedly calling my attention to sights along the way was very irritating. My curiosity about everything she pointed out was very maddening and intense, but the highway was so busy that I didn't dare take my eyes off it, even though I wasn't driving very fast.
A few miles east of Banning we turned off the main highway onto the road that led to Palm Springs. Desert stretched and sloped around us, its sand dotted with cacti and sagebrush, and mountains towered almost menacingly above us as we drew closer to Palm Springs. Gleaming white sand, beaten into purity by months of insistent pounding wind, cascaded up the sides of some of the mountains.
The little city of Palm Springs seemed like something out of a fairy story as we drove into the outskirts--low pastel stucco dwellings, pink and blue and yellow and green, dotted the sides of the road. And the lush greenness of the lawns, and the brilliance of the flowers, made the spot seem like an oasis.
Almost anything will grow in the desert, if it gets enough water. The growth of well-cared-for grass in Palm Springs amazes even the natives. If the earth is spaded and the seed planted on a Monday, the green shoots will be up on Wednesday, and on the next Monday, one week after the planting, the lawn will be thick and luxuriant and badly in need of mowing.
Clouds were hanging low over the city--or the "village," as habitues call it. I parked the car on the main street, near the famous Desert Inn, and we got out of the car. We hadn't brought coats or sweaters, of course, since it had been warm in Banning, and Palm Springs is supposed to have a warmer climate than Banning's.
There was a dull chill in the air. The streets were busy with cars and pedestrians, but no one was wearing a coat. In fact, nearly everyone was wearing shorts, with brief tops or no tops, depending on their sex--scanty outfits that left their goose pimples plainly visible.
One very protuberant man, standing in front of a swanky little novelty shop, was wearing bright yellow shorts, with yellow bobby sox to match. White sandals completed the ensemble. The hair on his chest was curly and thick, but it couldn't have done much toward keeping him warm. On his fat, slightly blue face was an expression I had noticed already on several faces since we had arrived--an expression that seemed to say, "Well, I came here so I could wear practically nothing, and by golly, I'm going to do it!"
Shivering, we walked past him. The main street of the village was lined with low, expensive looking stores, with show windows full of merchandise that sparkled and beckoned. Bars with extravagantly fancy interiors invited the thirsty into their dusky interiors. But we found the people more interesting than the surroundings. Not only were they determinedly wearing shorts and sun clothes, but many of them were wearing dark glasses--in spite of the fact that most of the low clouds were sitting on the ground now, and those that were still up in the sky were beginning to leak spasmodically.
"Godfrey Mighty, maybe they're movie stars!" Grandma exploded suddenly. "That's what they be, sure as anything."
"They couldn't all be movie stars," I protested. "Look at this dog coming, though--he seems to have gone Hollywood, all right."
We looked--or maybe we even stared. A plump, heavily jeweled woman wearing a silver fox jacket (the most appropriate garment I had seen here yet) was leading a tiny chihuahua. The creature was bundled into a bright green sweater, and around one of its frail forelegs was a glittering diamond bracelet.
"My God, that's the first time I ever see a dog with jewelry on!" Grandma hissed, as the pair met us and went on.
"I imagine we'd see a lot of things here if we'd hang around long enough," I remarked. "And incidentally," I added, "I want to congratulate you again for stopping swearing. It was a bad habit, and I'm glad you got over it."
About half of the hotels and apartment houses had "no vacancy" signs. If the accommodations were this nearly taken on the opening day, visitors would have a hard time finding a place to stay in Palm Springs a little later in the season. Besides, a night in a Palm Springs hotel would probably cost as much as a week at a motel in Banning. It looked as though Palm Springs would have a good season; and that would mean a good season for Banning. The overflow from Palm Springs, plus the usual number of winter tourists coming to California from the east, should mean a few thousand dollars extra knocked off our mortgage.
We crossed the busy street and paused in front of the window of a dress shop. There were wax models almost hidden under cascades of ruffles, models buried in layers of pleats and fluff. I had never seen such fancy clothes. There were elaborate dresses for tiny girls, and the prices calmly jotted on little tags attached to each were staggering. One little slip, for a girl of about three, was valued at nineteen dollars. The prices of the other garments were in proportion.
"Gee whittaker, I never see anything like it!" Grandma said, her small black eyes bright with amazement. "It's most a wonder it don't cost nothing to breathe here!"
"Don't worry, they'll give you the bill for that when you leave, they will all right!"
We turned around. There, behind us, stood a small, birdlike old man.
"This is Palm Springs," he chirped. "Nothin's free, not nothin', it ain't."
His lips closed tightly beneath his little beak of a nose, and he regarded us as curiously as we were looking at him.
"Have you been here long?" I asked finally, not being able to think of anything else to say.
"I've been here all day, I have," he stated. He resumed his scrutiny of Grandma, apparently pleased with her short, stocky figure.
"You ain't gonna stay here, be you?" Grandma asked him.
"Not here, I ain't, not for nothin'. I'm going back to Los Angeles tonight, I am, all right. Where you from?" he asked, indicating Grandma with a quick nod of his little head.
"I live in L.A. too," Grandma said, adding modestly, "I'm a fancy presser. I'm going back in a day or two."
The man seemed to be lost in thought. "If everything wasn't so expensive here, I'd buy you a meal, I would all right. But I'll tell you what. Give me your address, and I'll buy you a dinner next week in Los Angeles."
Grandma gasped and looked at me, half thrilled and half dismayed.
"Good Godfrey Mighty," she murmured.
"Go ahead," I whispered, knowing what she was worrying about. "Hellwig won't have to know anything about it."
"He'd be madder'n a wet hen," she hissed back.
"Well," chirped the old man, "does that sound all right to you? It does to me, all right."
Grandma said, "Ayah," feebly, and wrote her name and address on a piece of paper he handed her.
"A week from tonight I'll be there, I will all right," he said, examining what she had written on the paper. "Seven o'clock. Goodbye!" He turned abruptly and walked away.
We strolled on in the opposite direction, and paused outside a real estate office. I read the placards in the window while Grandma discussed our birdlike friend.
"He's a odd critter, awful odd," she said. "But he ain't bad looking. I knew pretty plaguey well he was interested in me. Just so Hellwig don't find out, ding bust it. He'd be madder'n Fury."
"Look," I interrupted, pointing out to her one of the signs in the window. I read it aloud. "Unfinished residence. Situated on large lot. Twenty-nine thousand. Another good buy: A choice business lot, ninety thousand down."
"Thunderation, we better get out of here. This land under us is too valuable for us to be walking around on it like this."
"Beg your pardon."
It was Grandma's little admirer again. "I forgot to tell you my name. I'm Ansil J. Wagonseller. Pleased to meet you ladies, I am all right. Goodbye."
We watched him walk perkily along the sidewalk. He got into a beautiful new car that was parked on a side street near the corner.
"Ansil J. Wagonseller," I remarked. "He must have sold a lot of wagons to be able to buy a car like that one."
"Gee cracky, I never see such a car," Grandma cried ecstatically. "Do you think he'll really show up? Or was that just a lot of talk?"
The rest of our stay in Palm Springs was lost upon her. She worried about whether or not Mr. Wagonseller would actually call on her, while we wandered about the streets. She accompanied me dumbly, paying no attention while I bought a delectable white ivory Chinese backscratcher. As we strolled back toward the car I told Grandma more about Palm Springs, from the store of wisdom presented to me by Jed, the laundry truck driver. The whole area, it seemed, was divided up into squares, like a checkerboard. Alternate squares were Indian land. It seemed too bad that, with miles of worthless desert land all around, the precious--although actually, equally worthless--land of Palm Springs should have been given back to the Indians. Of course, all this was arranged long before Palm Springs began to ascend toward its zenith of exclusiveness and popularity. Although the land now belonged irrevocably to the Indians, it was possible for white people to secure ninety-nine year leases from the Indian agent. These leases were fragile and precarious things, though, containing a clause providing for cancellation at any time. Houses built upon land so leased, therefore, were quite literally built upon stilts, ready to be moved on short notice. And since no one cared to put much money into the building of a house that might have to be removed at any time, these houses were hovels indeed compared to the sleek, expensive, modern pastel stucco creations that abounded in all the streets of Palm Springs--all the streets, that is, except those that went through Indian land.
Grandma paid no attention to my discourse. She only roused from her reverie when I pointed out to her a rotund, slightly bald man who, I said, was without doubt Bing Crosby.
Bing Crosby is her favorite actor. She clutched me feverishly as we neared the man, who was leading a sad-eyed collie.
Our mouths hanging open, forgetting to keep on walking, we watched the man approach. Behind his dark glasses, he seemed to be returning our stares with interest.
To our amazement, he stopped in front of us and said, "Beg pardon, ladies, but is you all goin' to de annual Palm Springs dog show? It's gonna be de bigges' thing evah hit Palm Springs, dis yeah! Mah li'l poochie, here, is gonna be in it, and if he don' win every ribbon, Ah'll eat mah dark glasses!"
He sauntered on by us then, without waiting for us to reply. Grandma and I looked at each other.
"That was Bing Crosby," I stated, my tongue assuming a time-honored position in relation to my cheek.
"Pshaw, 'twarn't neither," Grandma replied. "Bing Crosby ain't bald headed. Besides, 'taint likely he'd be talking to us."
We argued about that until we got back to the car.
"Anyway, they wun't nobody come to his dog show if he don't take off his glasses and let 'em see who he is!" Grandma declared.
As we left the village she sighed and said, "So that's Palm Springs. It's a H. of a place, if you ask me. I swear'n, I like Banning a sight better."
There was one thing, though, that I liked about Palm Springs very much--and that was the effect the opening of the season there had on our business. People flocked toward the desert from Los Angeles, and those who couldn't afford to stay in Palm Springs stayed in towns that were close to Palm Springs. Besides this overflow from Palm Springs, we had the regular tourist trade, and October wasn't very old before our motel began to be full every night by nine.
It would have been full earlier if we had rented a cabin to everyone who applied for one. People have an annoying habit, though, of traveling in pairs or even singly, and now we always saved our nine double cabins until three or four people together appeared who wanted accommodations. Naturally, the rate for three or four is much higher than the rate for one or two. Until recently, on nights when couples wanted a cabin after our singles were full, we had been locking off the back bedroom of double cabins and renting the remainder of each as a single.
When our rollaway bed and the army cot were in use, we could accommodate a grand total of forty-seven people. And, since the parents of large families frequently put two children in each of the twin beds, and couples with one child often rented a single cabin and let the child sleep between them, there were many nights when our motel sheltered more than fifty persons besides ourselves.
There is often a lot of confusion among customers about the word "double" as applied to cabins and beds. A double cabin is, of course, a cabin with two rooms, each of which has a double bed. A single cabin is a single room with a double bed. For short, these are called "doubles" and "singles."
About half of the people who come into the office ask if we have a "double" available. Whenever anyone asks me that, I glance out at his car, which usually contains just one other person, and show him a single, without comment. People like this mean, of course, double bed. I've thought of explaining to all these people the difference between "single" and "double", but decided that a one-woman educational campaign of such magnitude would be too much for me.
Occasionally, though, the customer is more right than I give him credit for being. Sometimes two people request a double, and really mean it--they each want a bed and a separate room. In such cases, if I show them a single after they have asked for a double, they often make it a point to inquire if I have been in the motel business long.
The motel business must be one of the best cures known for shyness. Before we came to Banning the sight of a stranger used to make me ill at ease, and the idea of an introduction sometimes almost paralyzed me. All this culminated, of course, in my first bad attacks of customerphobia. After that I grew braver and braver until now, after meeting travelers from all parts of the country and even all parts of the world, I can actually be the one to begin a conversation with a stranger.
The lessening of my shyness is very fortunate, since many of the conversations and monologues that take place in a motel office are not the sort that would be accepted by the most lenient censor. I still find it hard to keep from withering with embarrassment, though, at the things some of our customers say when they register. The men, for instance, who casually describe other places they have stayed in--places where more of their desires have been taken into consideration than simply the desire for a shower and a place to sleep.
"Last place like that I was in," one male customer said, "They said, 'Y'wanta girl?' I said, 'Naw, I just wanta sleep.' Y'know what I mean? So they showed me my room and left me alone, and I wenta sleep. Guess I didn't get my money's worth at that, ha ha ha ha, y'know what I mean?"
Customers who came from Los Angeles were enthralled by the clear, pure air, so different from that big city's foggy, smokeladen air. Customers from the east were amazed at the daytime warmth and sunshine, and the fact that flowers were blooming and practically all of the trees still had their full foliage. (Our little Chinese elms, though, by this time were nine nude sticks all in a row, and I had to concede to Grant that he had been right in our argument about them.) Natives of California and Easterners alike were struck by the beauty of the surrounding mountains. They looked like high, jagged cakes now, to which white icing was being added, a new layer each night, till the frosting was thick and pure.
Mr. Gorvane's offer to buy the Moonrise Motel wasn't the only offer we received. There were quite a few others, ranging from his sublime one to several which were very ridiculous. (One man offered us two hundred dollars down, and half the motel's monthly income until the purchase price--whatever we might ask!--should be paid.) But, in spite of the fact that we had several opportunities to make a nice, easy profit and go back to a smoother, if duller, way of living, we had both become so attached to our motel and the steadily increasing repeat business that we were building up, that we decided to put out of our minds any thought of selling.
During the slack period, when we stayed up late and had customers coming in at all hours of the night, Grant and I had been so tired that we never had any difficulty in sleeping when we had the opportunity to do so. But now that it was suddenly possible for us to go to bed early and get long nights of undisturbed rest, I found suddenly that I was out of the habit. I couldn't go to sleep at night. I'd lie awake for an hour or more, envying Grant his faculty of becoming unconscious as his head first sank against the pillow.
I tried all the trite old remedies for insomnia, without success. I made my mind a blank; I counted sheep; I tried mentally adding huge numbers. It was no use. My mind was as alert and bright as a sunny morning. Finally, though, I discovered a method of inducing sleep that has been--for me--infallible ever since.
I think of a particular cabin, selecting any one of the thirteen at random. Then I visualize the people who stayed in that cabin most recently; then I try to remember who occupied the cabin the night before that, and the night before that. A typical night's session of luring the sandman goes something like this:
"Let's see ... last night in cabin 10 there was that funny old couple who haggled so about the price. They insisted they wouldn't stay unless we'd let them have it fifty cents cheaper, and they even went back and got into the car. Then, when they saw we didn't care, and weren't going to follow them out and tell them they could have it cheaper, they got back out of the car and came into the office and registered without saying another word about it. The night before that there was that very tall old man who mentioned, while he was registering, that he had a "little pup"--would that be okay? And then the next morning he strolled out of his cabin being led by a majestic, gigantic St. Bernard. . . . Um . . . and the night before that--let's see. Oh, yes, the woman who had asthma. She was here three days, and before her there was--let's see. That was the old, old man who assured me over and over again that the old woman in the car was really his wife, and that he 'didn't go in for that sort of thing'. And before that--mm--was that those pilots who had to stay over a night because it was raining? Or--no, it's been longer than that since it rained last. Well, then, it must have been--well--um . . ."
Usually I can't think back any further than that. But by that time I'm usually asleep.
EMBARRASSING MOMENTS ARE the rule, rather than the exception, around a motel. If, as Grant puts it, he had a dollar for every time he has gone busting, with his cleaning equipment and fresh linens, into a cabin he thought was empty, only to find the cabin still occupied, he'd be able to buy a new neon sign that would make the Peacock's big blue and red bird gallop away in shame. With so many strangers about the place almost constantly, embarrassing incidents are inevitable.
I never did get over my hatred of walking back with a prospective customer to show one of the rear cabins. Weather is such a trite, obviously last-resort topic of conversation that I determined never to descend to using it--but it's hard to begin a conversation on any other subject with a person you've never seen before. And to walk with such a person all the way back to the rear cabins in a stony silence makes me overly conscious of little things like my gait, my posture, and the corner of my slip that may be showing. The customer probably is no more happy than I over the situation. If ever I figure out a solution to this problem, I'll write another book about it.
For Grant, of course, that particular problem is no problem at all. Before he and the customer are a tenth of the way out to the rear cabins, they are usually laughing and talking together as though they had known each other all their lives. Grant's competence in everything from mechanics to human relationships can be very irritating.
One night a rather inebriated gentleman opened our living room door instead of the office door, and swayed on into the room. It was about ten o'clock. I was in bed, and Grant was reading the comic section of a newspaper that had been left in one of the cabins that morning.
"I wanna rent a cabin," the man informed Grant. "I'm all alone, all alone. You oughta have an office, so everybody wouldn't disturb mama in the bed there when they wanna rent a cabin."
"We do have an office," Grant pointed out. "Right over there."
The man's gaze followed Grant's gesture carefully. "Well," he said indignantly, after a moment, "why don't you use it then?"
That alcohol scented gentleman wasn't the only person who ever mistook our front door for the office door. Every few days we found a confused, apologetic stranger in the process of backing hurriedly out. For awhile we kept the door locked, in such a way that a turn of the knob would open it from the inside, but not from the outside. That meant, of course, that I had to let David in approximately twenty times every hour of the time that he was home. Also, it meant that we locked ourselves out once in a while, and had to lift David through the window so that he could unlock the door. I dreaded the day we'd lock ourselves out when David was in school, and I'd be the one to be lifted through the window. Finally we decided we'd save ourselves a lot of worry by just leaving the door unlocked all day, and by not being surprised or upset if an occasional stranger joined our family group temporarily. I made a mental note, though, never to run around in my slip or to get dressed anywhere except behind the locked door of the bathroom.
Incredibly enough, there is a mistake that Grant makes far more often than I do--that of going into an occupied cabin, thinking it's vacant. Almost invariably if the car of the occupants of a certain cabin is gone, and it is nearly checking out time (noon) it is safe to assume that the occupants of the cabin have gone. Most of our customers are gone, anyway, before ten o'clock. If there is any doubt, of course, we can knock before entering; but after you knock, and wait before entering, upon about fifty different occasions when you're positive anyway that the cabin is empty, only to find that it is, as you had supposed, quite empty, you become less careful.
The keys, if not returned to the office, are left either in the doors of the cabins, or--more often--inside the cabins. Therefore, of course, the fact that a key is not at the office or sticking out the keyhole of the cabin to which it belongs does not necessarily indicate that the people are still in the cabin.
Grant was particularly embarrassed on one occasion when he walked into an occupied cabin. We had seen the car drive out of the garage adjacent to the cabin, and it was ten minutes before noon.
Grant told me later that he entered the cabin, set down his cleaning equipment, and went toward the bathroom to get the dirty towels. Just as he reached there a woman backed out toward him, saying,
"Here, honey, fasten my brassiere, will you? Goodness, you made a flying trip. I didn't expect you back so soon." Paralyzed, not knowing what else to do, Grant numbly fastened the hooks of her brassiere. Then he turned and bounded out of the place, gathering up his cleaning equipment as he fled.
Occasionally, too, through some mixup it happens that we try to rent the same cabin to two different groups of people. If several cars drive in at once, whichever of us is taking care of them might, in the confusion, forget to write down on the daily list that a certain cabin is rented to a certain party. Then, later, finding the space still blank after the cabin number on the list, one of us is apt to try to give that cabin to someone else. What usually stops the error before it has gone too far is the fact that the key for that cabin has, of course, been given to the first customer, and its absence makes us remember the unrecorded transaction. Sometimes, though, in such a case, we pick up a master key, and take the prospective customer to look at a cabin without noticing that the key to that cabin has been given out.
This results in a lot of confusion, needless to say, and to break ourselves of the carelessness which brings it about, Grant and I have worked out a system of penalizing each other for making the error of trying to rent a cabin twice, or for laying the groundwork for the other to make the error. If he is the guilty one, he has to wash the dishes for one day; if I'm at fault, I have to mow the lawn the next time it needs mowing.
One night after renting a cabin, Grant came out of the office and said, "There's a couple that won't stay long, I'll bet a horned toad. We'll be able to rent their cabin again in a couple of hours."
Sure enough, an hour later we saw their car, a cream-colored coupe, grinding along the gravel and swinging into the line of cars on the highway.
"I'm getting so I can spot a short stop pretty well," Grant bragged. "Guess I'll go get the cabin cleaned up once so we can rent it again."
Five minutes later he came back, his skin flushed and his blue eyes sheepish.
"The girl was still there," he said. "She was in bed. I guess the fellow--maybe it's her husband after all--just went out to get a paper or something. They seem to be planning on staying all night. She let out a scream when she saw me, and I had a lot of explaining to do. I had to pretend I got their cabin mixed up with another one. She would have been insulted if I told her the real reason why I was there."
It was surprising what a substantial proportion of our real short stop customers were sedate, respectable looking couples of middle age or even past. I couldn't help remembering, on several occasions, what Mrs. Barkin had said: "I got so I wouldn't have trusted my own grandmother not to rent a room with some fella for an hour!"
Although I am not a prude, I am glad our motel has more than a ninety-five percent tourist trade, rather than a big short stop trade, as many motels have. Even though there is more money involved where there are a lot of "quickies," since the cabins occupied can be rerented, there would be little satisfaction to me in carrying on a business of that type. And certainly it would not promote a wholesome atmosphere in which to raise children.
Grandma telephoned me from Los Angeles the night after her date with Mr. Wagonseller. Her call interrupted hostilities between me and Grant, who was pointing out to me carefully--for about the twentieth time--just why the lovely Chinese backscratcher I had bought in Palm Springs the time Grandma and I went there together was an unnecessary extravagance.
Just before the telephone rang he had brushed aside my arguments in favor of the backscratcher ("What would you do," I had asked him sensibly, "if your back tickled and you were alone in the house with no one to scratch all the places on your back that you can't reach? You should give a little thought to things like that.") He had brushed that aside, and given me that infuriating, withering look he is so expert at, and made his final remark on the subject (one that I'm sure it had taken him days to think up):
"If you ever had DT's you wouldn't see pink elephants--you'd see white ones!"
I was very pleased that the telephone rang just then, making what he probably considered his great wit fall rather flat.
I realized as I lifted the receiver that it was the day after the date Grandma was supposed to have had with Mr. Wagonseller. I suspected that this might be a report on the date; and sure enough, it was.
"He took me to dinner," Grandma burbled, "and Thunderation! You should have see the way he spends the dough. Money ain't nothing to him. I got a notion he was a awful tight old bird, the way he talked in Palm Springs. Well, I swear'n, I got fooled that time! We had the most expensive dinner on the menu, and then we went to the Paramount. And blessed if he didn't even buy me a big box of chocolates!--He's a odd critter, though, awful odd. Last thing he says to me was, 'I'd like to do this again a week from tonight, I would all right.' It beats anything the way he talks--it's a scream to hear him."
I smiled, and asked her if she was going to go out with him again.
"Ayah, I sure am, all right," she said. "Godfrey Mighty, he's got me doing it now--sticking a 'all right' on the end of everything. Sure, I'm going out with him again, you little stinkpot. If he's got all that dough, he might's well spend some of it on me. Just so Hellwig don't find out about it, damn it all."
"Grandma, please," I said. "You shouldn't swear over the phone. The operator might not like it."
"I didn't swear!" she exclaimed indignantly. "I just said, 'I hope Hellwig don't find out, darn it.'"
"That reminds me," I said, "How would you like it if I'd invite Hellwig up here for a weekend some time? I've been meaning to do it ever since we came here. He must get lonesome all alone there in his apartment."
"Ayah, he don't have brains enough to get married so's he wouldn't be alone," she interrupted. "You mean, you'd ask him to come sometime when it's my weekend to come there too?" she added doubtfully. "Plague take it all, just so they ain't no old man in one of your cabins that takes a shine to me--that'd make Hellwig pretty mad."
"Oh, don't worry about that. He can have a cabin all to himself, too--he won't have to pay anything for it, of course--and during the day you and he could walk around, maybe even get as far as the bottom of the mountains and start climbing them."
"Well, I guess he'd like that pretty well," she conceded.
David and Donna had always been normal, well-adjusted children, but my busyness with the motel, taking care of customers and the endless inevitable details connected with the business, led to a few minor behavior problems. The baby, soon after she learned to feed herself efficiently, went on a hunger strike. If a psychiatrist were to have one meal with us I am sure he would have it figured out that her sudden refusal to eat was her unconscious way of protesting against the fact that either Grant or I got up to answer the doorbell three or four times during every meal. I could see her point; sometimes I myself, after going on one of these little jaunts to rent cabins or to describe the service and the bill of fare of Moe's restaurant, for the benefit of doubting souls who weren't quite sure whether they should eat there or drive on downtown for a meal, felt like tossing my cooled food into the garbage can.
Anyway, Grant finally figured out a way to get Little Chief Hair-in-the-Face started eating again. Before each meal he captured a small black ant (either outdoors or on the sink, depending on the efficacy of our current ant poison) and imprisoned it on the tray of her high chair beneath her plate--a transparent glass plate, purchased especially for the experiment. Then, after allowing her one fascinated glimpse of the little creature, he filled her plate with food.
The first time that happened. Donna ate frantically, to get the food out of the way so that she could see the ant. After that, I expected the game to pall, but it never has. Since the first week or two Grant hasn't often put an ant under her plate, but she invariably cleans her plate, wipes off any remaining food particles with a piece of bread, and peers carefully through the glass. After all, she is obviously thinking, there might really be an ant this time! She has never tried, since the first day we played the game, to lift the plate and look under it. The first day, though, she was prepared to whisk the plate out of the way so that she could see what was going on under it. I brushed the forever-straggling brown hair out of her eyes and told her she must eat the food all gone--then she could see the ant.
She made one last, hopeful attempt to remove the plate. "Nope," I said sternly, "that wouldn't be cricket."
She shook her head vigorously. "Not cwicket," she corrected me. "Ant!"
David, about this time, developed the habit of coming home with the pockets of his overalls stuffed full of dry bread. I grew tired of finding bread crumbs all over the house, but nothing I could say would prevent him from coming home the next day with his pockets full again. He was extremely reticent about the matter, but we finally discovered that the teachers in the cafeteria watched the children to be sure that they ate their lunch, and that David, not inclined to eat his bread, jammed it into his pockets so that the teachers would think he had eaten it.
After weeks of trying unsuccessfully to prevent David from bringing home pocketsful of bread crumbs, I sighed and gave up. I decided to be philosophical about it--to be glad it was the bread, and not the main course, he got rid of in that fashion. Some things, after all, could be worse than a pocketful of bread--a pocketful of spaghetti with tomato sauce, for instance!
Our first Hallowe'en in Banning was spent in fear and trembling. Pranksters could do us so much damage! We had tormented visions of fourteen cabins with windows smeared and streaked with soap. Each cabin has at least four windows, and we weren't at all eager to clean soap off that many windows.
Anything that children or ruffians might do would be inevitably worse than anything that could have been done to us in Los Angeles. We had, as a matter of fact, the normal citizen's amount of risk--multiplied by fourteen!
We were lucky, though. Aside from a few "trick-or-treaters," on whom we lavished candy and cookies in fervent gratitude that they were hungry, rather than full of mischief, no one bothered us except little Moejy, he of the small ears, the close-set eyes, and the tiny head with nothing in it.
What Moejy did was a masterpiece of malevolence, even for him.
We went to bed about ten o'clock. There were still two vacancies, but we were sure they would be filled within a couple of hours at the most. We slept through the night, though, without once being roused by the bell. And in the morning, we saw why no one had disturbed us.
There, draped grotesquely over our neon sign, and obscuring it completely from sight, was David's tent.
We still haven't figured out how Moejy did it. In fact, we have no proof that it was Moejy who did it. I just know that it was.
Our stout, olive-skinned helper, Mrs. Clark, began working for us fulltime when the winter season got well under way--seven days a week, three or four hours a day, cleaning the cabins and getting them ready to be occupied again. Every cabin was cleaned every day, including those whose occupants were staying over, except that the sheets weren't changed daily in a cabin which a customer rented for more than one night. I have never spent much time cleaning cabins since that first bad summer, except when people don't vacate their cabins before Mrs. Clark is through with all the others and ready to go home.
Grant kept busy every day for five or six hours making repairs, redecorating, keeping up the grounds, and figuring out ways to make more money and pay off our debt faster.
The first year we were at the motel, he decided to try selling Christmas trees. We had heard of several acquaintances who had made four or five thousand dollars a season with them. He wasn't going into it in a very big way, though; he was too cautious to do that until he found out if it were really as profitable a seasonal business as he had heard. If it were, he planned, he'd go into it more thoroughly the following year.
He ordered a small batch of trees from a firm in Oregon. While he was waiting for them to be delivered, he cleared off part of the land behind the cabins, where he would put the trees, and started painting the big sign that would, he hoped, lure purchasers off the highway.
He discussed his order with Mr. Bertram, the chubby man who owned the service station, grocery store, and small adjacent cabins across the street. Mr. Bertram, too, had ordered a few trees to sell, but he declared that he had never heard of the firm from which Grant had ordered his trees. And he had had to pay nearly twice as much for the trees he ordered. "It looks like I got a bargain," Grant remarked.
"Or else you got stung," Mr. Bertram said, rolling a wad of snuff around in his mouth. "Maybe they're running some kind of a racket, and your trees won't come at all!"
The trees came, though. They came at the time we had expected them, and in the number we had expected. But in appearance they weren't what we had expected at all.
"Something's wrong with them," Grant stated unnecessarily, when the truck had gone.
"They aren't even green. They're sort of--sort of--yellow", I said.
"They're funny," said David.
"They're dead," said Mr. Bertram, when he saw them. "Or--well, darned if I know. Maybe they just got some kind of disease that turned 'em yellow. If they were as dead as they look, I don't know why the needles wouldn't be falling off. Maybe they got dropped in a vat of yellow paint by mistake. Well, the people got your money and they've delivered you some trees, so I guess there's nothing you can do about it." Which proved that he didn't know Grant.
All over town, where Christmas trees were being sold, there were red ones, blue ones and white ones, as well as the more prosaic natural green.
"Nobody seems to want green trees any more, anyway," Grant mused, that evening after the children were in bed. Sitting at the kitchen table, he placed on a slice of bread the egg he had just fried, added a lavish knifeful of peanut butter, and munched thoughtfully.
"Where's that sign I painted?" he asked finally, drumming his fingers on the table.
I brought it to him quietly, not wanting to interrupt the obvious churning of his brain by telling him it was right where he had left it, on the desk.
He stared at it a while. Finally he rose, went back to the desk with the sign and sat down. He turned the sign to its blank side and began sketching letters with a pencil. Curious, I got up and looked over his shoulder.
"Snow Saffrons for sale," he wrote. And then, in smaller letters: "Try a new color this year for your tree--Sunlight Yellow!"
Our little crop of Christmas trees was completely sold the next day.
Students of behaviour--and of marital relationships in particular--should have, as one requisite to a diploma, a period of managing a motel. The simple business of engaging a cabin for the night reveals a composite picture of all the quarrels a couple has ever had, highlights their differences and their individual idiosyncrasies, and stamps the dominant one as boss.
A couple named Mr. and Mrs. Godwin stayed with us for a week, waiting for their promised job in Palm Springs to open up. She was small and round and good-natured; he was big and round and good-natured. She was definitely the boss. It was she who, when they first came, registered and paid me; it was she who overrode his feeble protest about "changing motels."
"Y'see, we always stayed at the Peacock, before, whenever we were traveling through here," she explained. "Me, though, I want to try a new one."
"Variety is the spice of life," I remarked brilliantly.
"Y'know, we both like this place of yours better than the Peacock," Mrs. Godwin told me, one night when their week with us was about half gone. I noticed again her curious, confusing habit of stressing her most unimportant words. "Y'know, you people have the nicest court in Banning. I always thought the Garner's place, the Peacock, was supposed to be the nicest one, but me, I don't think it can compare with this one."
"We certainly wouldn't trade with them," I said; and I realized that I really meant it. Perhaps the Peacock had done a better business during the slack season; after all, though, it was an older motel than ours, with a greater number of regular customers. And the imposing external appearance of the place, with its white surrounding walls and its paved driveways, was something we could match, in time, if we were willing to go to the expense.
We were talking over cups of hot chocolate at Moe's. Our cabins were full, and Grandma was staying with the children. Grant and I had gone to the restaurant for a hot drink, and a few minutes later Godwins had come in.
Mr. Godwin sat down, shivering, beside Grant, at the circular counter of shining ebony, and they were quickly absorbed in a conversation which dripped with such phrases as "cylinder head," "transmission," and "propeller shaft." Grant mentioned that he needed a new gasket.
"A little yellow gasket?" I put in frivolously.
"Yes, it's the nicest motel we've stayed in," Mrs. Godwin, sitting beside me, went on. "Me, though, I'm not crazy about your heaters."
"Why--don't you like wall heaters?" I asked, surprised.
"Wall heaters are all right," she conceded.
"You mean you prefer electric heaters to gas?"
"No, gas is all right. Maybe I should say it's the cold weather I'm not crazy about. It made us stand too close to the heater. My husband scorched the seat of his pants tonight, and that wasn't enough to warn me, I had to go and do practically the same thing. I had a satin slip--y'know how they shrivel up if you try to iron them with your iron too hot? Well, I was standing close to the heater, with my back to it, when all of a sudden it felt like there was something crawling up my--well, my back. It was my slip, shrivelling all up short because I was so close to the heat. You should see it now--it looks like it was made out of crinkly crepe, with accordion pleats!"
She paused, aghast, and stared across me at Grant. The waitress had just brought him the tuna sandwich he had ordered, and he was lifting the top slice of bread and spooning sugar lavishly onto the tuna.
Her plump face looked shocked, but she glanced quickly away and began to talk politely about Palm Springs.
"Er--this sun time, y'know, that they have in Palm Springs--it's confusing, isn't it? Me, I think it should be the same time everywhere."
"It does seem silly for one little town to have its own time," I said.
"The whole idea," she went on, "is to save hours of daylight so the millionaires that go down there will have more time to spend their money. I guess they figure they're giving them more for their money that way too--they go down there for sunshine after all, and if daylight saving can give them more hours of sunshine . . ." her round, plump face looked suddenly perlexed. "How can it, though? How can it really make any difference? I've never been able to figure that out. Anyway, the only really nice thing about it is that the bars can stay open till three, instead of closing at two like the bars in Los Angeles, and around. Palm Springs time, three o'clock, that is--of course, y'know, that's really two, after all. I don't know who they're fooling, unless it's just themselves."
She sipped some of the coffee the waitress had brought her, made a wry face, and set the cup down.
"When we were in Palm Springs seeing about this job we're getting--I'm to be a maid at this resort, y'know, and he's to be a sort of handyman--we happened to see Van Johnson and Errol Flynn--together! Y'know, they're a couple of good looking boys. I wish I'd waited for something like that instead of grabbing the first man that asked me."
She smiled and took another sip of coffee.
"Y'know, the rents in Palm Springs are unbelievable," she said. "The place where we're going to work charges a hundred and fifty dollars a night for two people." She laughed. "That's why we're waiting in Banning for the job to open up!"
Mrs. Godwin wasn't the only one who considered the Palm Springs rates of rental too high. One night a thin, brisk little man came into the office and asked mildly what our rates were. As soon as I told him he began to fill in a registration card, and while he wrote, he talked.
I had become expert at reading names upside down as they were being written, partly so that I could flatter and surprise customers by calling them by name immediately, and partly so that I could write down at once on my list which cabin had been rented by whom.
This, I learned, was a Mr. Frank B. Shannon, and I wrote his name after the number of the cabin he would occupy that night.
"I've just come back from a vacation in Florida," he said. "Thought I'd stay in Palm Springs, but I'd have had to mortgage my home, sell my car, and take all my money out of the bank, just to stay there one week."
His tone wasn't particularly bitter, but, for the sake of making conversation, I remarked,
"You don't seem to care much for Palm Springs, Mr. Shannon."
He laughed, and replied, "Well, I am rather tired of the place. I was mayor there for seventeen years!"