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."