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!"