BANNING'S WEATHER COMES assorted, like a box of chocolates. Some of the
tidbits are sweet, some have a bitter tang; some, wrapped in glittering
tinsel, turn out to be not as nice as you expected them to be. But they
are all delicious, once you have developed the taste for them.
When winter is barely under way in Banning, suddenly it's spring. In
mid-January, when the enclosing mountains are still shivering and
huddled under their white fur coats, spring tiptoes through the Pass,
breathing warmly upon the wind-swept grass and tossing handfuls of
popcorn onto the branches of the almond trees. Vast orchards bloom, a
paradox of nature, with the giant snow-covered mountains leaning over
them.
I used to worry about those first frail, brave blossoms. I worried
about them, and about the possibility of a frost, as industriously as
though I were a mother almond tree.
One night late in January there was a shower of hail that lasted for
about half an hour. The little hailstones splattered and clanked
against the windows, and chattered on the little cement porch and on
the door, pounding for admittance. When at last the shower subsided, we
opened the door to look out, and saw that our entire driveway, even the
islands of grass and the sidewalk in front of the cabins, were white
with a thick layer of hail. It looked like snow.
The morning after the hail storm, when the solid layer of ice the hail
had formed over the ground was melting, and crackling like a huge
bonfire, we found that our neon "office" sign had a tiny hole in the
top of it. About the time Grant was telephoning Oian Rosco, I happened
to think of the almond blossoms. If hail could do this to our sign--and
presumably it had been a hailstone, a particularly aggressive one, that
had done it--what might it not have done to those delicate blossoms?
The next afternoon I drove to David's school, picking him up and
bringing him home. Williams street, which led straight to David's
school a mile away, was lined with almond trees. I looked at the trees
anxiously. I was amazed to see that the branches were as fluffy as ever
with their heavy load of bloom.
After that, I never worried about the almond blossoms any more. If the
trees the following year had begun to bloom on Christmas day, and
Christmas had been followed by twenty successive days of frost, I
wouldn't have given it a thought.
Before our second summer at the Moonrise Motel Grant, by dint of much
telephoning, exhorting, explaining, pleading, and even threatening,
organized the motel owners in Banning into what started out as the
Banning Motel Owners' Association, and later grew more inclusive and
changed its name to the Banning Hotel and Motel Owners' Association.
The purpose of this organization was to advertise Banning so thoroughly
and so blatantly, principally by means of highway advertising signs,
that even during the summer there would be more eager tourists than
there were accommodations.
Banning had two small weekly newspapers, and ever since we came to the
motel I had been toying with the idea of working for one of them on a
part-time basis, if I could get the editor's approval. At least ninety
percent of the wrecks that occurred in Banning happened right in front
of the Moonrise Motel; there couldn't be any question about that. I
could write up the story of each wreck for the paper; and maybe the
editor would have some ideas as to further work I could do.
A few days before the first meeting of the new motel owners'
association was scheduled, I bearded the editor of one of the Banning
papers in her den. The story of the association's first meeting would
be, I figured, a good opening wedge.
I had always had a yen to work on a newspaper. It had struck me that in
nearly every biography of great writers there was a sentence or two
testifying to the fact that the writer had at one time been a newspaper
reporter. And since, of course, I hoped some day to be listed among the
great, I should attend to that little prerequisite.
Reporting for a country paper would be an interesting experience, and
with Grant home all the time, Donna would be able to spare me for two
or three hours each day.
The editor of the paper, a pleasant-faced woman of about forty, with
short, curly dark hair, was very interested when I revealed my
background of magazine writing, and the fact that I had written a
regular column in a Los Angeles newspaper until we left that city. Her
present "reporter," the most literate she could find in this small
town, was a recent high school graduate who used such sentences as "he
capitulated through the air," and "the drunk driver was convicted of
auto-intoxication."
We argued for about an hour. She'd like to have me work for her, all
right, but she wanted me to work full time.
Her office was large, airy and cluttered. Two huge old desks stood
against each other, their battered tops nearly obscured by a litter of
papers, pencils and telephones.
A door at one end of the office led into a much bigger, still more
cluttered room. From that room came the crash of machinery, and the
voices of the men who were setting type, reading proof, putting the
paper to bed, or whatever the technical terms are for whatever they do
in such places. It was confusing, noisy, and somehow delicious.
By the time I had worn the editor down to a point where she was willing
to let me work just part time, at a salary surprisingly large for a
small town newspaper to offer, my natural laziness woke up with a start
to the fact that I was actually about to let myself in for regular
hours of extra, unnecessary work, and I took advantage of woman's
privilege. I changed my mind.
"I don't want to tie myself down to definite hours after all, I guess,"
I said. "I'll work on sort of a free lance basis. I'll bring you
several news stories every week."
I promised to be back with a story on the first meeting of the motel
owners' association in time to meet her deadline.
The meeting was held at the Auto Haven, the big, rather old motel about
half a mile from us, farther toward town, where Moejy spent what part
of his time he wasn't devoting to harassing us or David. Grant and I,
having engaged Mrs. Clark to take care of the children and rent the one
cabin that was not yet occupied, were the first ones there.
Mr. Bradley, our middle-aged host, motioned us to chairs. He was an
ordinary-looking, likeable man; the only thing about him
incomprehensible to me was his toleration--his apparent liking--for
Moejy. Well, I philosophized, we all have our little eccentricities.
And then the motel owners began to arrive. Mr. Buxley of the Westward;
Mr. Vernon of the Bon Ton; Mr. Featherbrain of the Palace; Mr. Renault
of the Mountain Lodge; Mr. Dale of the Cherry; Mr. Anderson, of the
Desert Breeze. All misters. It began to look as though I would be the
only woman present. This bothered me a little, particularly after
Grant's broad hints that this was to be a businessmen's meeting, and
his slightly more veiled ones that women don't know much and should try
not to get into situations where their ignorance will be conspicuous.
It would have pleased me very much if the majority of the people at the
meeting had been women, very intelligent ones who thought of and
discussed and settled every problem before the few men present could
get their inferior minds to functioning. However, such was not to be;
after the last of the twenty-eight arrivals had come there was only one
other woman, and that one was my plump, shabby friend Mrs. Barkin, of
the Sylvan Motel, who had, obviously, no husband to come in her stead.
I couldn't help feeling rather superfluous. I sat there seething, as
many feminist-minded women have done before me, at the age-old theory
of masculine supremacy.
Assuming that I must feel out of place, the kind Mr. Bradley--who took
charge of the first meeting, pending election of regular
officers--remarked at one time during the evening, "Of course, we'll be
glad to have the wives of the motel owners attend the meetings too."
This irritated me still further, and while the meeting progressed I
considered drowning Grant, so that, like the owner of the Sylvan motel,
I'd be treated as an individual rather than as the ineffectual shadow
of another. (I decided, though, that there'd be too much work for me to
do alone.)
"Or if ever one of the owners is unable to come, his wife can come
alone to represent him," Mr. Bradley went on.
After that, I seethed much more violently. Why was it taken for granted
always that the man was the owner, and that his wife was simply "the
owner's wife?" But, while Mr. Bradley's remarks were accepted quite
naturally, how unheard of an occurrence it would be for a remark like
this to be made: "Husbands of the owners are invited to come to
meetings too; or if necessary the man can come alone to represent his
wife."
How unheard of, even, that it be assumed that property owned by a
married couple is owned mutually, and that whichever partner attended a
meeting, it needn't be in order to represent the other.
Equality of sexes, and equality of races, are two points about which I
have carried on so many arguments and written so many articles--many of
which have never seen print--that I have almost admitted defeat. Stupid
prejudice is virtually invincible, and not worth battering one's head
against. But it's very, very maddening all the same.
It was a subject I had discussed several times, heatedly, in the small
bi-weekly Los Angeles newspaper, called "Now," in which, as I told the
pleasant editor of the Banning paper, I had had a regular column. In
this column I could disport as I pleased, provided I stayed within the
bounds of propriety and common sense, and all my favorite subjects got
a thorough airing. "Now" folded up its tents and quietly stole away
into oblivion about the time we left Los Angeles. Writing for "Now" was
my first venture from the medium of magazines into that of newspapers,
and I have always felt a little guilty about its demise.
I had brought along to the motel meeting a little notebook and my
fountain pen, so that I could record pertinent facts about the meeting
for the newspaper article I would write. Trying to be as inconspicuous
about it as possible, I opened the notebook and wrote in it the names
of the men arriving as Mr. Bradley introduced them.
Mr. Bradley spotted my notebook and pen, though, and almost before I
knew what was happening, he had me sitting beside him at the table in
the center of the room, taking notes on the meeting and acting as
temporary secretary.
At one point in the meeting, after many methods of advertising had been
discussed and rehashed, and it had been my job as secretary to read
aloud a great deal of explanatory literature from advertising sign
companies, I became very thirsty. During a dull, lengthy free-for-all
about the relative merits of the different companies whose literature
had been read, I acquainted Mr. Bradley with the fact that I was
nearing death from acute dehydration.
Mr. Bradley waved toward a doorway at one end of the big,
people-cluttered living room.
"Kitchen's right in there," he informed me. "Go along the hall and turn
left. Go on in and help yourself."
I weaved my way between the chairs toward the doorway. The smoky air
was heavy and thick and reluctant to let me through. I closed the door
behind me and found myself in a murky hallway. The only light was that
which seeped under the door I had just shut, and the glow from a partly
open door at the end of the hall.
There was an open doorway at the left of the hall, and I was about to
enter the kitchen through it when I heard a whisper.
"Pssst! Come in here, in here a minute."
My curiosity was stronger than my fright. I tiptoed slowly along the
hall toward the partly open door and toward the whisper. Outside the
door, I hesitated.