I'M TOLERANT ABOUT it when men customers flirt with me, but when women customers flirt with Grant, that's different.
Grant and I had been pulling weeds from around the shrubs in front of cabin 3 when a lank, stick-shaped woman appeared by the office. Grant went to talk to her, while I stayed on my knees pulling weeds and wondering what it was about the woman that disturbed me. I had seen her before, I felt sure; no doubt she had occupied one of our cabins recently. But there seemed to be something different about her now; all I could think of was that she seemed much thinner and more shapeless than she had been before. Perhaps at the moment she was simply wearing a dress that didn't flatter her.
I glanced up, studying her as she talked to Grant, trying to decide whether it could be her clothing that made that annoyingly intangible difference in her.
She was alternately smiling at Grant, and looking down toward her feet with apparent embarrassment; and she was making vague gestures toward her chest. I began to watch more closely. I couldn't quite hear what she was saying.
The woman was definitely blushing now, laughing and pointing toward her chest. I brushed the earth from my hands, stood up, and stalked over to where they were standing.
I didn't know exactly what was going on, but I felt that my presence would do no harm.
". . . you might call them eye-catchers," the woman was saying, cupping her hands at strategic points over the flatness of her dress.
I tucked my arm possessively through Grant's, and stood there tapping my foot.
To my surprise, the woman seemed glad to see me. "Oh, never mind, your wife will know what I mean," she said. With a dismissing sweep of her eyes she brushed Grant out of earshot. When he had gone back to his weeding she said, "It's so hard to talk to a man, isn't it? You can't call a spade a spade for fear of embarrassing them."
I was still a little suspicious of her. "What was it you wanted?" I asked, my tone aloof.
"I stayed here overnight last Tuesday, and my figure hasn't been the same since! I left my--oh, I can't think what they call them in the stores, but--you know, cheaters!"
The woman turned crimson again, as she saw that I didn't know what she meant. She glanced at Grant, busy pulling weeds out of the ground, as though she were afraid that he might overhear.
"I'm tired of trying to explain what I left!" she cried. "Have you got a mail order catalogue?"
I brought out our catalogue and handed it to her. She flipped through the unmentionably medical section, through the lingerie section, and finally pounced with triumph on a page that displayed brassieres. The color in her face deepened still more as she pointed to an illustration, at the bottom of the page, of bust pads.
"Have you found any of those, left in one of the cabins?" she asked.
I remembered vaguely that Mrs. Clark had mentioned, recently, finding a pair of "funny lookin' satiny things." I could well imagine that the robust cleaning woman would have had only a vague, thoroughly vicarious idea of their use.
When I had found the bust pads, which were in the linen closet in the stack of left-behind articles, and returned them to the woman, Mr. Buxley, the owner of the Westward Motel, stopped in to talk to Grant. I sat in the living room with them, working on a rag doll I was making for Donna's second birthday, and listening idly while they discussed business and advertising.
The conversation turned finally to short stops. Motel owners are so accustomed to short stops, and to discussing details about them, that they never consider mixed company a deterrent to such a conversation. Mr. Buxley, it seemed, had built up a small, substantial short stop trade. Far to the west of town, his motel offered the privacy and seclusion that most short stop customers wanted, and apparently the grapevine kept his lowered quickie rates on file.
Mr. Buxley was a short, plump, amiable man. Settled comfortably on the davenport, he polished his glasses with a hanky while he told us how his short stop customers, aware that they would get reduced rates if it were known that they wouldn't stay long, identified themselves.
"Most of 'em," he explained, "say they just want to clean up, and won't be there long. Some of 'em come right out and say they want a cabin for a couple of hours--how much?"
He held his glasses up, squinted through them critically, and huffed his warm breath onto them.
"Sometimes they come an' don't say anything. Maybe they don't want anyone to know what they're comin' for, maybe they just don't realize they'd get the cabin cheaper if I knew. I'd like to know so I can give 'em the reduced rate so they'll come back, but I don't dare give 'em the reduced rate if I'm not sure they'll leave, 'cause that might tie up a cabin all night for half price. Like one young fella last night, came in about ten, they sat out in the car for a few minutes before he came into the office, and when he came in he was all smeared with lipstick. Been drinkin' a little, too. Well, I figured sure that was a quickie, so I let 'em have the cabin cheap. Next morning they were still there, pulled out about noon, and I found out they were married and had a couple of kids with 'em. The kids had slept on the floor all night."
Mr. Buxley put his glasses back on. "I've got a new system I'm going to try, starting tonight," he said. "If I'm not sure if they want to stay all night or not, I'll just tell 'em I have two cabins left, but one's reserved for some people coming in at three a.m. An' I'll tell 'em they can have the cabin half price if they can manage to pull out that early. Otherwise they can have the other one, full price. That'll save their face in case they're only goin' to be there a little while and would like to do it cheap."
The office bell rang, and I left the men talking and went to answer it. A grey-colored, fat-cheeked man--a complete stranger to me--came breezing into the office.
"Hello, hello!" he cried. "Well, here I am back again! You didn't expect to see me again so soon, I'll bet!"
I forced a cordial smile. "No, I certainly didn't," I exclaimed, matching his tone.
This was an old, old refrain to me. The routine was so familiar to me I went into it automatically, straining my ears to catch any stray spicy bit from the living room. When the man asked if I could give him the same cabin again for that night, I said, "No, I'm sorry, but number 7 is already taken for tonight."
"Seven!" he exclaimed. "I had ten last time."
"You did? Well! I could have sworn we put you in 7. When you first came in I thought, 'Oh, oh, he's going to be disappointed that I can't give him 7 again!' We have so many people coming and going all the time, you know, I get mixed up sometimes about who has which cabin." And so on, ad nauseam, ad extreme boredom.
I slid a registration blank toward him, still acting as though I remembered him. Actually, though, as time goes on and we see more and more people, most of whom we have never seen before, it becomes harder and harder for us to recognize customers who have been here before--unless they come on several close-together occasions, or possess some unusual and striking characteristic; a white beard braided and tied with pink ribbons, for instance, or a tendency to stand with one leg draped across the desk while they fill out the registration card; or a pyramid of a hat which ends at the top in a bird's nest, complete with eggs and proud parent.
When I went back into the living room, Mr. Buxley was just taking his leave. "Those signs," he was saying, "read: 'We take your license number. If you leave something we send it to you. If you take something we send for you.' An' believe me, if one more towel gets stolen from my place, I'm going to buy some of those signs and put one up in every cabin."
We have been fortunate in that very few things have been stolen from our cabins. And the few people who do decide to steal something seldom set their sights on anything higher than a towel or two.
The Banning police, we discovered, are not willing to interrupt their checker games (or whatever it is that occupies their time in this peaceful little town) to recover anything so trivial as towels--even if they are notified of the theft while the culprits must still be in the vicinity. They can be freely quoted as saying, "That's one of the risks of being in the motel business. You've got to expect to lose a few towels now and then."
In view of their lassitude in this respect, I have composed a classic letter, designed to simultaneously make the thief ashamed, to save his face, and to persuade him to return at once what he has stolen. To make him ashamed, I lead off with a paragraph about how hard we are working to make our motel a success, and how vital our linens are in carrying on our business, and how expensive to replace; to save his face, I mention my certainty that no doubt the missing article was somehow mixed up with his own belongings and taken away by mistake. To persuade him to return what he has stolen, I insert a few casual sentences of highly unmerited flattery about the local police department.
This classic letter of which I am so proud has never, I might add, never once resulted in the return of a stolen article.
The weather was growing more and more summerlike, with the gaps between hot stretches fewer and fewer. The warm, indescribably sweet scent so characteristic of Banning grew stronger every day. Grant was finding out about the various types of air conditioning and their respective prices. He didn't want to install and advertise air conditioning until the summer was so well under way that we wouldn't be apt to get competition this year in that field from other motel owners who would notice the improvement in our business.
Palm Springs trade had fallen off because of the tapering off of cold weather, and the rental rates in that celestially exclusive village had been cut in half. The press agents of the little desert town were going wild cooking up rodeos, fiestas, and everything else they could think of. Big organizations were enticed, by various means, to hold meetings there that could be played up in the papers; the Shriners had an initiation ceremony there that was the talk of the surrounding cities for weeks. When John Payne and Gloria De Haven spent a weekend in the village they received enough newspaper mention to satisfy a conceited President, with their activities detailed, and the suggestion explicit that many other even more glittering Hollywood personalities were about to descend upon Palm Springs, where the lowly vacationist could rub elbows with them at the neighborhood grocery store or bar. The cream of all the publicity stunts, though, was the appearance in Palm Springs of a "divine healer," the greatest on earth for centuries! Those who had feasted their eyes on his rotund majesty were whispering, it was reported, that he was Buddha reincarnated. Newspapers throughout the west carried stories of the marvellous cures he was effecting left and right (neglecting to list traceable addresses of the curees), and at last the whole publicity campaign built up to a crescendo of suspense when a "famous" European millionaire brought his adolescent daughter, supposedly afflicted with epilepsy since babyhood, to Palm Springs, to see whether the great healer could cure her. The healer didn't bring his divine powers to bear on the daughter until there had been time for the papers to play up the coming event and create suspense, and for readers of the papers to develop a proper attitude of interest and excited anticipation. When at last the case had aroused enough attention, the healer healed the "epileptic" girl, completely and dramatically, in one treatment.
That, as it was supposed to do, gave Palm Springs' trade a powerful shot in the arm. There were many skeptics, but also many who were awed by the healer's powers. Grandma was one of the latter. "I swear'n," she said defensively, "he's a sight better'n any fortune teller, that's a cinch." With the reduced rates, and the added attractions, Palm Springs built up a fairly good business again, in spite of the heat.
But there were still Palm Springers who stayed in Banning, where the climate was cooler and the rates were, even now, cheaper.
A middle-aged couple who had spent one night in Palm Springs and had, according to what they said, suffered from both the heat and the rate, came into the office one Saturday night when we had just one vacancy. All the other motels on our end of town happened to be full before us.
The woman, a slender, small-boned creature, stood in the office regarding me with somber eyes while her husband went outside to see what his license number was.
"Your cabins got a potty?" she demanded suddenly.
"Oh no," I said uncertainly. "We have well-equipped bathrooms, one to each cabin," I elaborated.
The woman was not appeased. Her gloomy eyes swept over the nearby "no vacancy" signs, visible from the office windows, and she sighed. "In Palm Springs, we had a potty, right outside da door," she stated.
Her husband came back to write his license number on the card, and she didn't say another word.
I felt a little uneasy after they had gone to their cabin. It is a policy of ours to give extra service and courtesy to every single customer, as the best insurance for our future business. Even to shoppers--those infuriatingly bland creatures who ascertain the price, inspect the cabin, and depart to look for something better--we are unfailingly polite.
The greatest strain on my politeness occurs when shoppers test the potential comfort of the bed by feeling it violently with their hands or by sitting on it and bouncing. To straighten up, before their eyes, the havoc they cause, would be too pointed a reproof; therefore, if they decide to "look around" a little, I must trot back later to the cabin to rearrange and smooth the bed.
One of my favorite daydreams is made up of the many satisfying retorts I could give to irritating customers and shoppers. When one of them is rude about our rates, it is an effort for me not to say something like "You'd better look for a cheaper place--a shack, in fact. You'd feel more at home there." But instead, habit and good sense force me to murmur something sweet and unresentful.
The only customers--or, rather, people--who unfailingly make Grant angry are those who use our driveway as a traffic circle. Several times a day a car from the east will swing into one of our driveways, making us think we have a prospect--only to swing out the other driveway and head back toward the east. Or a young fellow plummeting along the highway from the west will belatedly heed the words of Horace Greeley, and will splash gravel in all directions as he whirls into our driveway.
Such use of our driveways makes Grant seethe, but there doesn't seem to be anything he can do about it.
I knew that I could, if I wanted to, satisfy the strange longing of the woman who had just rented our last cabin. As I took the cover off the "no," fighting to keep my balance against the insistent thrust of the wind, I decided that I would do it.
I took Donna's little pink potty, and marched back toward their cabin. I set it just outside the door. I tapped on the door, and when the woman's voice called "Yes?" I answered, "Here's the potty you wanted!"
All evening I pondered the woman's strange whim, and in the morning when they brought the key into the office I waited for her to thank me for accommodating her. She didn't speak, so as they were about to go out the door I called, "Was everything satisfactory?"
"All except we didn't have a potty," the woman replied glumly. "I vanted a sun bath dis morning."
"My dahling, you mean a pahtio," her husband corrected her.
"Dat's vot I said--a potty!" she snapped.
If the potty incident made me feel a little foolish, I got over it quickly. Since we have been in the motel business we have learned to take everything in our stride. There is always something happening. During a typical one-hour period, for instance, a man--a suave, superior creature--tried to talk us into selling or leasing to him part of our land, so that he could put up a cold fruit juice stand on the highway; a carpenter came to ask permission to measure the exterior of one of our cabins because, he said, his client wanted a house built just like it; and we were embroiled in the first stages of what was to be a bitter commercial battle between the local laundry we patronized, and a laundry in Beaumont, a town six miles away.
Grant and I have almost never left the motel together that something didn't happen. Once it was the truck that swerved off the highway and crashed into the garage of cabin 16; once it was a careless smoker who, having fallen asleep with a lighted cigarette in his hand, set the blankets on fire. Another time there was an enormous oil tanker, Mrs. Clark related, which turned sharply off the highway to avoid hitting a child, and came plummeting up to within fifteen feet of the office before the driver could stop it. Another time we were driving home from a short trip we had made, during which we had left Mrs. Clark in charge. As we approached the motel we began talking about how something always happened while we were gone, and wondering whether anything had happened this time.
And then we saw, beside the edge of the highway in front of the motel, what looked like the smoking remains of charred furniture and mattresses.
Grant couldn't get out of the car fast enough, to run inside and ask Mrs. Clark how bad the fire had been, and in which cabin or cabins.
It turned out, though, that there hadn't been a fire in our cabins at all. It had been a house trailer that had caught fire on the highway, and the Negro family to whom it belonged had stopped their car quickly--directly in front of the motel, as it happened--to detach the trailer from the car.
Even when we stay home, there are innumerable small tragedies occurring on the highway. Dogs and cats are run over frequently, and--interspersing the few really serious accidents, there are many minor ones. Although a little further into town there is a twenty-five-mile an hour speed limit, there is no speed limit in our immediate neighborhood. There should be, because of the many motels, restaurants, and other places of business that make a great deal of turning in and out of the swift lanes of traffic inevitable. The scream of brakes has become a familiar part of the daily refrain of life.
I had been promising Grandma for some time that I would invite her "boy" friend, Hellwig, out to Banning. At last we settled on the time--it had to be a Saturday night because of his work. Although he is past eighty, he still works half-days in a printing plant.
Hellwig and Grandma arrived on the bus in the early afternoon, and Grant drove to the station to pick them up.
Hellwig was laden with several of the familiar brown-wrapped packages which, I knew, contained paper. His pockets were bulging with chocolate bars. Now that I have a family of my own, he brings three times as many chocolate bars when he comes to see us, knowing that if he brought candy enough for just me, David and Donna wouldn't leave me much of it.
Hellwig gathered me and Donna, whom I was holding, into his feeble embrace. The odor of mothballs was almost suffocating, but I was so glad to see him again that I didn't mind.
"So here is little Donna!" exclaimed Hellwig, his pale blue eyes twinkling. "Well, how do you do, what a nice little girl! And how she has grown!"
"Godfrey Mighty, but that's a long bus ride," Grandma exclaimed, shedding her purse and hat and sinking onto the davenport, her black eyes, bright in their setting of smooth, unlined skin, running over the house in a swift search for dust. I went out to wait on a customer then--a short, heavy set man whose glasses made his eyes look huge, misshapen and threatening.
"I'm driving on to Thousand Palms tomorrow," he remarked, as he paid me.
"Thousand Palms? That's going Twenty-Nine Palms one better, isn't it?" I said brightly.
His magnified eyes rested upon me for a moment.
"No," he replied, "that's going Twenty-Nine Palms nine hundred and seventy-one better."
When I went back into the living room Grandma was darting about with a dustdoth, peering into crevices and crannies, looking for dust. Hellwig was being entertained by David, who was showing him the report card he had just brought home.
"Well, how do you do!" Hellwig exclaimed. "An A in reading! Is that because you get so much practice reading the funny papers?"
David smiled, displaying the gap where his two center lower teeth had been. I watched Hellwig while he and David discussed David's school work. Although he had been "going steady" with Grandma for over twenty-five years, ever since her husband died, he had never popped the question. An unfortunate experience with a fiancee, when he was twenty (according to what he'd told Grandma, it was something about his advice concerning the use of cosmetics being scornfully rejected) had resulted in his snatching off her engagement ring, throwing it furiously into a river, and vowing never again to propose marriage to any woman.
It occurred to me suddenly that maybe a mere technicality stood in the way of his marrying Grandma. Maybe, since according to his vow he couldn't propose to her, he was waiting for her to propose to him. I'd have to suggest that to her before they left.
I told Hellwig that his cabin would be number 14. It was a double, but all of our singles were taken.
Picking his suitcase up carefully and slowly, he followed me to his cabin. He carried the suitcase into the back bedroom of the cabin, and announced that he was going to take a nap.
Grandma was sweeping around the edges of the carpet when I went back.
"Where in Tarnation's the vacuum cleaner?" she demanded. "I'll be swear'n if they ain't too much dirt here to get up with a broom. Them children must lug sand in all day."
"They do," I admitted. "Here, you sit down. I'll vacuum."
While I vacuumed, Grandma hurried about wiping fingerprints off the doors. Her energy inspired me, and we cleaned house for about an hour. Grant rented two cabins while we were working, and then he stuck his head in the doorway to inform me he was going across the street to talk to the owner of the Blue Bonnet motel.
"Old Wagonseller come over to see me twice last week," Grandma remarked, when we were alone. "He sure spends the dough, too. Both times he brought me a big box of candy, and the last time he brought me a real orchid! Thunderation, I never see anything like it!"
"He must like you," I observed.
"Ayah, he sure must. He must like me a sight better'n anyone else he ever met. Godfrey Mighty, I could catch him like a fly, if I was a mind to."
"Why don't you, then?"
"Well... Hellwig'd be pretty plaguey mad if I did anything like that!"
"He's had his chance. You've given him twenty-five years and he hasn't asked you to marry him. He hasn't any right to object now if you marry someone else."
"No..." Grandma said doubtfully.
And then I told her the idea I had had about Hellwig--that maybe it was his vow never to propose again that had prevented his popping the question; that maybe if she'd do the popping ... "He wun't never marry me," she said gloomily.
Grandma peeled potatoes while I added beaten eggs to a bowl of hamburger.
"Wagonseller . . . what a H. of a name," Grandma mused, scooping potato peelings into the sawed-off milk carton we used for a temporary garbage container. "An' he's the spittin' image of a pert little bird, ain't he? But he can sure spend the dough!"
"Oh, Wagonseller isn't a bad name," I said soothingly. "You should read some of the names on our registration cards. Last night, for instance, there were two or three outlandish ones. Let's see--well, Tinklingwhiskers for one. Mr. Tinklingwhiskers. How do you suppose the poor man ever gets to sleep at night?"
"Speaking of sleeping, I never see anything like the nap Hellwig's taking. Do you suppose we oughta go wake him up?"
"Oh, no. He's probably tired after the long bus ride. Let's just let him rest until dinner is ready."
Grant wasn't home by the time dinner was ready to put on the table. I went out into the office and looked through the window, across the street. He was standing on the porch in front of the office of the Blue Bonnet motel.
I pressed the switch, turning the "Moonrise Motel" sign on and off several times rapidly. It was one of the systems I used to break up his talk-fests, which might otherwise last for hours and hours. When he was at the grocery store, immersed in conversation with the plump Mr. Bertram, I could motion to him through the kitchen window that I wanted him to come home. (If he happened to be looking toward the kitchen window!)
When Grant came in I called to him, "Go wake up Hellwig and tell him to come to dinner, will you? He's in 14, you know."
Grant picked me up and swung me into the air. "Dinner? Good! I thought you were calling me home because you had some work for me to do." Then he set me down abruptly.
"14! Nope, you must be mistaken. I rented 14 to two girls while you and Grandma were cleaning house."
Grant showed me the day's list of cabin numbers and people's names. "Scoville" was written after number 14.
"Oh, I did forget to write Hellwig's name down," I said. "Grandma asked me for the vacuum cleaner as soon as I came in, and I forgot all about writing his name after 14. But you must have rented some other cabin to those girls, and accidently written their name down after 14 instead. You couldn't have rented them 14, because Hellwig was lying right there on the bed taking a nap."
"I rented the cabin as a single," Grant said. "The door to the back bedroom was shut, so I quick locked it--see, here's the key."
He brought a key out of his pocket. The little tag attached to it confirmed his story that this was the key to the back bedroom of 14.
We looked at each other in despair. "Are you sure you put Hellwig in 14?" Grant asked.
I nodded, and he sighed, pushing back his coarse brown hair.
"Well, I'll go see if I can get him out once."
We peeked through the slats of the Venetian blinds as Grant went across to 14 and knocked on the door. The door opened and after a few seconds of conversation he stepped inside and disappeared. Grandma rubbed the burn scars on her arms nervously, skirting around the newest, tender ones.
It wasn't long before Grant came back, escorting a pale, indignant Hellwig. An aura of mothballs entered the room with them.
"Fine nap I had," the old man spluttered. "A fine nap, with those--those hussies in the next room. Those baggages, those tarts, those--"
"Please," I murmured.
"Those girls were pretty mad," Grant said
"Mad because there was a man in their cabin?"
"Nope--mad because they hadn't found him!"
"Those hussies," Hellwig went on. "How do you do, they acted as if they didn't know what clothes are for, running around with hardly a stitch on."
"He's a old prude," Grandma whispered.
"You mean to say, when Grant went in there to get you, they didn't have much on?" I asked fiercely.
"No, they were dressed then. But earlier, when they first came, they took showers and then they just ran around with nothing on. Then finally they began getting dressed. But they stuck a quarter in the radio and how do you do, they danced all around while they got dressed. It was the most disgusting thing I ever saw."
"But how did you know what they were doing? I thought the door between the rooms was locked," I interposed.
A dull red began to creep up from Hellwig's wrinkled neck to his face, surrounding his faded eyes. "Well," he said, "I--I just glanced through the keyhole to see what was going on."
OUR MOTEL HAS always had a high average, in comparison with other motels, of repeat business. Part of our success in drawing customers back again and again has been due to the fact that our motel is new and that we make a point of keeping it spotless; part of our success in this direction has been due to the deluxe service rendered by Grant, who acts the part of general handyman par excellence. The goodwill of the customers, that intangible thing so vital to any business, we make a special effort to capture. The customers are legion for whom Grant has fixed minor mechanical defects in their cars or traveling equipment, or whose cars he has pushed down the highway until they would start. I often think he is so helpful more from a spirit of natural kindness than from a mercenary sense of good business. One time the occupants of a car, after learning our rates, declined to stay. Their car, however, declined to leave. After the driver had tried for several minutes to start the motor, muttering beneath his breath curses that seemed directed toward the battery, Grant good-naturedly got into our car and pushed them around off the driveway, onto the highway and on the road to our competitors.
Occasionally we get customers who are traveling with a house trailer. Their usual explanation is, "We wanted the comfort of a real cabin for once!" Sometimes we have customers who are so pleased with the accommodations that on a repeat trip they bring us a little gift. The most valuable--and most annoying--of these gifts was a half dozen baby chickens, which were presented to David. Grant fixed a small, inconspicuous yard for them behind the single cabins, but they developed a sly technique for getting out when they were hungry. Since they were supposed to be David's responsibility, and since he is a typical forgetful boy, they were frequently hungry. Often when I showed a prospective customer cabin 7, which was the closest cabin to their yard, the chickens would appear suddenly, to perch on the threshhold and watch me with ravenous, reproachful eyes. It lent a very quaint and rural aspect to the proceedings.
The excuses people use for getting away without renting a cabin may not be rural, but they certainly are quaint. It seems to be almost impossible for most people to refuse frankly to rent a cabin, to admit outright that the cabin isn't suitable or that the price is too high. Most people seem to feel that they must offer some logical excuse to get away--and that then, once they have escaped, they needn't return. Typical excuses are that they "have to run to the other end of town a minute first, and will be right back" or that they'll "grab a bite at a restaurant and come back to sign up inside half an hour."
After one trip to a Banning department store where I tried many little coats, all too expensive, on Donna, I found myself making excuses to the attentive salesgirl. "I'll go home and think about it," I said, "and I might come back and buy one." Of course, I knew perfectly well that I wasn't going to buy one of the coats at those prices. I tried to analyze my own reasoning in making the excuse, so I would understand what motivated the customers who fished up frantic excuses so that they could get away.
They must feel guilty, I decided, for using so much of my time and courtesy without repaying me for it; they want to justify themselves in my sight, even if falsely and temporarily, by leaving me under the impression that my trouble will be repayed when they return from "the other end of town" or from "grabbing a bite in a restaurant." They'd be embarrassed if they knew how clearly I understood that they had no intention of returning--as embarrassed as I was when, after thinking it over, I realized that the clerk in the department store knew perfectly well that I had no intention of coming back after "going home to think about it," and that I was just easing myself out gracefully, trying to keep her from thinking I was the ungrateful wretch I actually felt myself to be.
Banning, on the whole a sane and level-headed little town, isn't without its cult members and its intense haranguers about "vibrations."
The vibrations were, no doubt, very strong in these dabblers in pseudo-metaphysics when the members of the Los Angeles Temple of Yahweh bought about nine hundred acres in the desert east of Banning, announcing that they would build there a settlement to be known as Yahweh Springs. Spokesmen for the sect revealed, for the edification of Banningites, that Los Angeles would be blown up by an atomic bomb in the near future, and members of the sect were taking advantage of their special knowledge to build a refuge in the desert.
On a trip to Banning's well-stocked library, I was searching the Encyclopedia Britannica for "Mother Carey's Chickens," in order to use correctly a reference to them in a farcical story I planned to write about a sea voyage. Whenever I look up a certain thing in a reference book I am compelled, by the intriguing lure of the other words in big, bold-face capitals, to waste time and energy studying the details of five or six subjects which bear no relation to the subject I'm looking up except in that they start with the same letters. My eye being caught by "motet" (which is, I learned against my will, vocal music in the contrapuntal style) it occurred to me that it would be interesting to look up "motel," since I must be in the immediate vicinity of the word.
To my surprise, "motel" wasn't listed in the Britannica. Piqued, I searched in several other encyclopedias and reference books for "motel," and finally even for the more lowly terms "auto court" and "tourist camp." Not even those words were mentioned. Finally, in desperation, I tackled the huge unabridged dictionary, with the same result. Compilers of the dictionary had not allowed the word "motel" to sully its sacred pages.
Obviously, according to authorities, there is no such thing as a motel. However, I feel that I can with safety state that the authorities are all wet.
One day Grant came home for dinner after one of his two-hour talk fests.
"I thought I'd run up once and see Mr. Bradley," he said, sitting down at the table. "I wanted to talk over some business with him, about the motel association, but he was too upset to even think about that."
David made a remark, which we ignored, about Grant's split "infilitive."
Mrs. Bradley, it seemed, had at last become so bad that they had had to take her to an asylum. Someone had substituted a fertile, ready-to-hatch egg for the china egg Mr. Bradley had provided for her to amuse herself with, and after a few days of basking in the warmth under the layers and layers of her garments, the egg had hatched--not into the human baby Mrs. Bradley had wanted, but, understandably enough, into a fluffy yellow baby chicken. The shock and disappointment had pushed her tottering reason completely into the abyss.
"It was bound to happen sooner or later," Grant said. "Mr. Bradley says he knew, himself, that he wouldn't be able to keep her home with him much longer."
"Who substituted the real egg?" I asked finally.
Grant buttered a slice of bread grimly.
"Moejy," he said.
Two weeks after Grandma and Hellwig visited us, I got an airmail letter from Grandma. Before I opened it I knew it must contain exciting news, because Grandma wouldn't have sent the letter airmail if she had been completely calm and in full possession of her faculties. Airmail takes about twice as long in getting from Los Angeles to Banning as regular mail does. It is such a short distance between the two cities that the time gained by the speedier flight of the plane is more than lost in the transportation to and from the airports.
Grandma's letter began with a burst of enthusiasm. "I'm going to be married! I'm going to be a bride!" it gurgled. "Wagonseller proposed to me. I never see anything like the way he carried on. He had a big diamond ring with him, he said it was his mother's and he said he wanted it to be mine if I'd accept him along with it, 'he did, all right'!"
I was a little disappointed in Grandma. After twenty-five years of going with Hellwig, I hadn't thought that a wad of money, a beautiful car and a big diamond could influence her so strongly. I resumed reading the letter.
"I told him I wouldn't marry him, though, and Thunderation, how he took on. I thought sure he was going to cry. When he finally got over it and left I hopped on the streetcar and went to see Hellwig. I told him what had happened, and you were right, you little stinkpot. All he was waiting for was for me to say something. So I said it, and, well, plague take it anyway, that's all there is to tell you. Except he was madder'n a wet hen to think Wagonseller'd been after me. The wedding's going to be two weeks from today, and in the meantime he's going to find us a little place in the country and we'll have a garden and raise a few chickens. He's going to retire at last."
Grandma was a long time getting her man, but she finally got him.
In the same mail with Grandma's joyous airmail letter was a large box with no return address. It bore a Burbank postmark, and I opened it warily.
When I had torn off all the wrappings and lifted the cover from the box, several anemic-looking cockroaches struggled out. And in the box was a solid mass of their relatives, who had been less hardy, and were quite dead.
A note reposed in the midst of the unsavory mess. It was face up, fortunately, and could be read without being touched. "I thought you might be interested," it said, "to know that Ermintrude had a blessed event. I know that you will give her children a good home. She had quite a litter, didn't she?"
The note wasn't signed, but there was no need for it to be.
I resolved that I'd never again try to compete with an expert at his own game.
Grandma's plans for her future as a bride started us planning for the future again. We had decided against putting in a trailer court in back, or kitchens in any of the cabins, on the ground that they would cheapen the place. But Grant was beginning to draw plans for ten small complete houses, to be set on the back part of the land, each with its own pleasant little yard, to be rented at weekly rates to vacationists during the winter. During the summer they could be rented by the month to more permanent tenants.
There would still be room for a small swimming pool. These things were, as yet, more or less in a dream stage; but the air conditioning units were a present reality at last, actually being installed. And the second story two-bedroom addition to our living quarters would be next.
I know that if in years to come we ever leave the motel, as I look back one act will stand out in my mind as representative of everything we did here, one act will somehow be the symbol of our life here: the removing of the covers from the "no." I'll remember how it felt to stand carefully among the brittle, waxy-looking geraniums and the myrtle, the wind whipping through my dress and through my hair as I stretched to reach the covers, silhouetted against the neighboring neon lights and feeling curiously exposed, as though each occupant of all the cars that streamed past with brilliant headlights were staring at me ... the cold feel of the metal in my hands as I slid the covers off the "no" so that the sign proclaimed in glowing neon "No Vacancy." I'll remember the smug feeling if we were the first of the nearby motels to fill up, or the relieved feeling if we were among the last. I'll remember the contented knowledge that the day's work was done, and that a night of uninterrupted sleep lay ahead. I'll never forget, either, how good it was to see lights in all the cabins and a car in each garage, and to know that the family or couple in each cabin was cozy and warm in its little haven-for-the-night.
And I'll remember the half guilty feeling that people might think I was snooping, when I went around at night the last thing before bed (if for some reason Grant couldn't do it) to write down the license number of each car, for later comparison with the license numbers written on the registration cards.
Being in the motel business adds a clarity to one's view of life that few other businesses could give. It lets one see things in a new, truer perspective. What were unalive, unreal news stories, for instance, become to me true, believable facts when people who have just come from the locality in question discuss them. It makes me realize that the places where I've never been really exist, and that people whom I have never seen are as human and as vulnerable as I am. There's as much difference between reading a newspaper about an event and talking with eye witnesses of that event, as there is between glancing at a faded snapshot and studying a picture through a stereoscope.
Another advantage of the motel business is that it prevents our marriage from sinking into the stale rut of custom and habit that afflicts so many marriages when the first rosy years have passed. No doubt Grant and I have some quarrels that we wouldn't have if we were leading a more normal life, where there would be less nervous tension and less intrusion of the public into our private life; but, on the other side of the ledger, it must be noted in big black letters that we never bore each other because of interests that lie in diverging directions, and that, with so much happening every day, we never run out of things to talk about.
Of course there are bad things about the motel business, too. Business is seasonal; we know that the winters will be good, and that the summers will have much room for improvement. Improvement is just what they'll get, though--Grant has made and will continue to make changes, some minor, some major, that will make our summers better and better, until finally, perhaps, they will be almost as good as our winters. Anyway, the winter tourist trade in the desert always is so good that it makes up for the slackest of summers.
Another bad thing about our being in the motel business is that our children are restricted more in their play than they would be if we had the average home life. David can never have his playmates around the front of the motel; nothing frightens prospective customers away more quickly than the sight of children playing. There are times, too, when the very sight of human beings nauseates me, I am so sick of being interrupted and constantly on call. Fortunately the times when I feel that way are rare.
A sense of humor is one of the principal requisites for any one who aspires to own or manage a motel. For instance, if I answer the bell late at night when Grant is out, and if the legs of my pajamas unroll suddenly while I'm showing a cabin, and leave me presenting an old-fashioned pantalette effect, I simply laugh and tuck them back up, without even bothering to explain that I just slipped my dress on over my pajamas.
In my opinion, the worst, most nearly unbearable phase of the motel business is that our lives are brushed daily by the fascinating lives of salesmen, vacationists, businessmen and travelers who each has secret, important affairs of his own--and that etiquette and lack of time (principally lack of time) prevent me from prying around the roots of these affairs and unearthing them. In addition to the rules we have now--that customers must check out by noon, that they must pay in advance, etc.--we should have a rule that each customer must give me a brief summary of his activities from birth until the present, explain the purpose of this particular trip, reveal his plans for the immediate future, and answer any questions that may occur to me.
Then the motel business would be perfect.