"Thirty thousand."
It was my turn to wipe away perspiration.
We spent the remaining days of our vacation haunting real estate
offices and discovering that there was nothing new and nice for less
than thirty thousand down.
We went back to Los Angeles, but we hadn't given up the idea of getting
a motel. Every day for nearly a month, while Grant was working, I
studied the classified sections of the papers and called real estate
brokers. We even went to look at a few motels that were within our
means, but they didn't seem to be worth the money--and, after the
Moonrise, everything looked cheap and shabby and old.
It was exactly a month after we had first seen the Moonrise that we
left the children with Grandma and took another trip to Banning.
Perhaps somewhere in that lovely little city, we thought, we might find
another motel that would satisfy us--and that we could afford.
But first, before driving around, we had to see the Moonrise again.
Grant drove slowly as the Moonrise Motel came into view, and I looked
wistfully out the window. The sun gleamed on the white stucco, and the
bright green shutters were magnets to the eye.
"Isn't it beautiful?" I asked sadly.
"Look!" Grant exclaimed. "There's the manager, out digging weeds! Let's
stop once and talk to him."
Grant is of Holland Dutch ancestry, a fact which shows itself
principally in his tendency to insert a "once" or a "quick" into as
many of his sentences as possible. He doesn't fall back on the
superfluous "yet's" and "already's" that sprinkle the speech of his
relatives, but his method of expressing himself is rather quaint.
(It was in a very quaint way, in fact, that he proposed to me. "Let's
get married once," he said. I was so intrigued by his way of putting it
that I agreed.)
The manager of the motel took out a large, clean handkerchief and
mopped his face and neck when we drove in.
"You folks bought a motel yet?" he wanted to know.
"Nope," Grant said. "We've been looking around, but we can't find
anything we like as well as this."
The stocky man wiped his face again, and I noticed that under the
moisture of his skin there was a yellowish pallor.
"Got to sell now," he said. "I'm sick; going to a sanitarium the minute
I get this place off my hands. You can have it for sixty-three
thousand, five hundred."
"But the down payment ..." I said.
"You got fifteen thousand?"
Grant and I looked at each other. During the last month we had asked a
real estate broker what we could get for our home, if we wanted to
raise some money in a hurry. Eight thousand, he had told us.
That, with the five we had saved, would make thirteen thousand. Our
furniture should bring close to a thousand, and we could borrow the
rest from Grandma.
After six years, we were able to read each other's thoughts pretty well.
"Yep, we could raise fifteen thousand," Grant told the motel manager.
And that was the beginning.
When the deal was in escrow we advertised in the local newspaper that
we had furniture for sale. The manager's apartment at the motel was
completely furnished, and we intended to keep only our washing machine,
our book-case, and the children's beds.
It was to be a thirty day escrow, but we wanted to begin selling our
furniture immediately. Last minute sales usually bring low prices,
Grant pointed out, and we needed every penny we could get. We could
only hope that non-essential furniture, like rugs, end tables, and
lamps, would be the first to go.
When I was a child--a typically selfish and demanding one--Grandma used
to remind me "it ain't what you want that makes you fat, by gorry, it's
what you get."
What we got, immediately after our ad was printed, was a fat, heavily
perfumed woman who bought our dining room set and our kitchen
table--items which we had hoped to keep until the last week before we
left. Her husband, she said, would bring a trailer and get the tables
later in the afternoon.
I stood in the doorway a while after she had gone, looking at the quiet
little street where we had lived for six years. Palm trees rose
majestically from the parkways, one in front of every house. The houses
were neat, stucco squares set close together behind green lawns, and a
brooding afternoon quiet hung over the neighborhood.
Our own house, too, was white stucco set behind a green lawn. The white
stucco was trimmed with violet where Donna had rubbed it with a crayon,
and there were patches of dirt in the grass where David and his friends
had staged a "rasslin match." But it was home; I had come here as a
bride, and my babies had been born here. Life at the motel would never
be as smooth and peaceful as life here had been.
A wail from the bedroom announced that Donna was awake. It was time for
David to come crashing home from kindergarten. I was busy with the
children for about an hour, and then I heard heavy footsteps on the
porch.
A round little man was standing there. "I come for the tables," he
explained, taking the cap off his small basketball of a head.
"Oh, yes--come in."
He clumped into the house and began loading the two tables and the
chairs onto a trailer. When he had gone Donna pointed to the spot where
the kitchen table had stood.
"All gone," she mourned.
"All gone is right," I said grimly. "But at least we still have your
high chair." I lifted her into it and tied a diaper around her fat
middle, pulling it around the bars of her chair so that she couldn't
climb out.
The doorbell rang.
"Hawve you a bedroom set for sale?" asked the tall, thin woman who
stood at the door.
I showed her the bedroom set. She examined it through a lorgnette,
thumped the mattress with a long, bony hand, and demanded to know how
much I was "awsking" for it.