Timidly, I pushed the door open farther. The room was illuminated by a
big, old-fashioned lamp that stood in a corner, its shade dripping with
fawn-colored fringe. There was a large four-poster bed covered with a
patchwork quilt, an old wooden rocking chair, and a heap of clothes on
the floor beside the bed. The heap of clothes turned out to be a
wizened old lady. Her frail body was swathed in layer after layer of
garments, and her small head was covered by a black cloth, under which
her bright eyes sparkled up at me.
"Come on in and close the door, come on in," she hissed. I closed the
door and stared at her. But I knew I shouldn't just stand there and
stare; I had to say something.
"What on earth are you doing down there on the floor?" I asked. It
wasn't the type of thing I had intended to say, at all.
The old lady proudly smoothed the thick layers of material that
surrounded her. She reminded me of a hen preening, fluffing out her
feathers.
"I'm going to have a baby," she confided, still in a whisper.
"Well--" I gulped. "That's--that's fine. Motherhood is so--" I felt
behind me for the doorknob. "Motherhood is so--well, so--"
"So broadening! Just like travel!" Her loud, sudden cackle was
startling. "And how it is broadening!" she hissed. "But not the way I'm
doing it. I've got a better way. Chickens have a better way than
humans. All they do is sit on eggs. That way they don't get fat, they
don't suffer, it's very simple. So I'm profiting by their example. See?"
The old lady half rose, lifting her voluminous skirts, revealing
skinny, knobby legs and--an egg!
The egg, a large white one that looked almost as though it were made of
china, rested on a pile of old dresses. After allowing me one quick
glance, the old lady ruffled her clothes about her again and sank down
gently onto the egg.
By this time I had found the doorknob, and I hurried out of the room.
The old lady's stage whisper followed me: "I'm Mrs. Bradley. You must
come back to see me soon, when my baby is born."
The election of officers was held later that evening. Mr. Cruz of the
Rosarita Motel was to be president and I, it developed, was to be
permanent secretary. I was relieved to hear that the next meeting was
not to be at the Bradley's motel.
Every evening while we are eating dinner we keep the light turned out
in the living room. My chair is placed at the end of the kitchen table
nearest the range and sink, so that I am in the most strategic position
possible for mopping up whatever food Donna spills, for catching
David's plate on one of its sudden trips to the floor, and for serving
hot second helpings from the covered pans that are simmering on the
stove. (I never put all the food on the table; it would just get cold
before we would be able to finish eating it, because of our many
interruptions.) My position at the table is strategic in another way,
too. I face the door to the living room and the moment a car drives in
its lights shine through our Venetian blinds and form stripes on the
wall of the darkened living room. (Months of experience have taught me
the difference in angle and appearance between the stripes cast by the
headlights of cars going into Moe's and those driving into our
driveway). When a car drives in I tell Grant, who sits in the chair
nearest the doorway, with his back toward the living room. As long as
we have been at the Moonrise Motel, I don't believe Grant has eaten one
evening meal without having to get up and rent a cabin or talk to
someone, while the food on his plate loses its heat and its savor.
As for me, I don't believe I have ever washed dishes after dinner
without having to stop once or twice, dry my hands, answer the doorbell
and be a gracious landlady, and then go back and dip my dry hands into
the unappetizing dish water again. Grant usually chooses this period of
the day to shave, and it is easier for me to go to the door in the
middle of dishwashing than it is for him to wipe off every trace of
shaving cream and go.
The actual work connected with the motel seems easier now than it did
at first--and, of course, that isn't surprising, since we do very
little of it ourselves. Mrs. Clark cleans the cabins thoroughly every
day, and after she has stripped all the beds Grant and I whisk through
the laundry, getting it sorted and ready to go in about half an hour.
About once a week Grant works with Mrs. Clark, and they give the cabins
a very thorough cleaning, vacuuming under the beds, washing windows,
and doing all the other little jobs that don't have to be done every
day. Occasionally he does a little redecorating, painting a bathroom or
repairing the damage done to the side of a garage when a car was backed
out carelessly--and on such days it is my job to get the laundry out
alone.
Watering, a big job in the summer time, can be practically forgotten
about during the winter.
The last task before bedtime is to go around and check all the license
numbers, to be sure that we have the correct ones. This is a safeguard
in case of theft or damage to the cabins.
A typical day, with enough work of different kinds to keep us busy, but
seldom enough to make us tired, and with the opportunity for meeting
people from all parts of the country, is very interesting. The typical
customer, however, is not. He is, in most cases, rather boring--not
through any fault of his own, but because I know in advance exactly how
he is going to behave and what he is going to say.
He comes in saying, "Got a vacancy?" After seeing and approving the
cabin, if he wanted to look at it, he fills out the registration blank,
omitting everything but his name and city and state. Prodded, he adds
his address, fuming with belated alarm over the fact that he has
written his home state immediately after the name of his town, in the
blank left for "city," instead of putting it in its own blank space,
labelled "state." Assured that it doesn't matter, he proceeds to the
greatest hurdle of all--his car license. Laughing apologetically, he
fingers through the papers in his wallet, trying to find it recorded on
one or the other of his papers. Giving up at last, he darts outside,
looks at his license, darts back in and writes it down quickly before
he can forget it. Then he comments at some length on his persistent
inability to remember his car license. I always smirk and assure him
that I've never been able to remember ours, either (a lie). Having paid
and obtained his key, he lingers a few minutes to comment on the
travels he has made, the distance he has covered, and how tired he is;
and to ask where's a good place to eat.
That's the typical customer. But there are a lot of unusual, amazing,
intriguing, uncouth, and even frightening customers, and it's in the
hope of encountering one of these that, when neither of us is busy, I
fight to beat Grant to the door when a car drives in.
One night after we had gone to bed, expecting a night of good,
uninterrupted sleep guarded by our bright "no vacancy" sign, someone
rattled the knob of our door and then began to knock furiously. Grant
pulled on a robe and went sleepily to the office door, so that the
person who had been knocking on the living room door would go to the
office to talk to him.
A few seconds later he was neck-deep in argument with the possessor of
a shrill, strident, powerful voice. Prodded by my seldom dormant
curiosity, I crept out of bed and slightly moved the curtains that hung
over the window of the door to the office. I peeked into the office;
there, confronting Grant, stood a behemoth of a woman who matched the
voice in every respect. Her massive chin stuck out aggressively; and
she was the possessor of a bosom that, if it could have been divided up
among the female population, would have put several falsie
manufacturers out of business.
"You get out of that bed!" the woman shrieked--a rather pointless
command, since, obviously, Grant was not in bed. "Get your clothes on,"
she went on relentlessly, "and get out of that bed, and out of this
cabin. They rented it to me and my husband, less than an hour ago, and
I paid for it, and I intend to stick up for my rights. We rent a place,
and then go out for a malt, and drive around a little, and what
happens? They rent the place to someone else. I suppose they think
they'll get double rent. Well, I hope they'll give you your money back,
and of course you can't be blamed for renting a cabin when you didn't
know it was already rented, but I'm telling you, I won't stand for it,
so now hurry and get up and get out."
The woman folded her arms, with difficulty, around her jutting bosom,
and stood waiting for Grant to slink away. When he didn't slink, but
began to explain to her in a reasonable tone that she was mistaken, she
howled with anger.
"No excuses," she screamed. "And I don't care if your wife has ulcers
and can't be moved, or whatever corny excuse you're going to pull."
"Look," Grant said patiently. "We live here. We own this motel. Nobody
rented us a cabin tonight, and what's more, we didn't rent you a cabin
here at all. Now, if you'll excuse me once, I'll go back to bed--my
bed, not yours."
But the woman's huge body remained planted in the doorway. She was
quivering with determination. "My husband and I are going to have our
cabin," she bellowed. "I'll call a cop."
"Fine. Would you like to quick use our phone?"
I leaped back into bed, just in time. The woman came into the room like
a rhinoceros on the warpath, and glowered at me until I was almost
ready to get up, apologize for sleeping in her bed, and creep away.
Grant handed her the telephone.
She glanced toward the kitchen. "I didn't--I didn't notice before that
the place had a kitchen." Her voice was a little less like a foghorn.
"Nope. You've never been here, before," Grant said. "The number of the
police department is 3322."
Her bosom seemed to shrink a trifle.
"And I don't remember any Venetian blinds in the place. Maybe we got
twisted, driving around in a strange town, you know, when we got our
malt. Maybe it was the front cabin of another motel. I--well..." She
eased her bulk back toward the door. "I guess I made a mistake."
"Yep. But not such a big one as your husband made," Grant said, as he
shut the outer door.
My first story for the newspaper was an account of the initial meeting
of the Banning Motel Owners' Association. (I omitted the encounter with
the host's wife!) The editor, Grandma, Grant, and most of the members
of the association were pleased with the quality of my first venture
into newspaper reporting.
I had closed the article with a list of the names of the motel owners
who had attended the meeting, and it turned out that one member of the
organization was not in the least happy over the situation.
I found that out the afternoon of the day the paper was published. Mr.
Featherbrain stormed into the office, spluttered for a while, and
finally came to the point.
"Durned old paper," he raged. "Durned old article. Who writ it,
anyways?"
I still remembered acutely l'affaire de water faucet. "I wrote it," I
replied coldly. "So what?"
He towered above me, thin and menacing, his chin quivering with violent
emotion. "So what!" he repeated. "So what? Ain't it bad enough to have
a name that sounds like 'Featherbrain' without spellin' it
'Featherbrain'?" His bony hand rasped across the white stubble of his
beard. He seemed about to break into tears.
"It's too bad, all right," I said, softening a little. "But lots of
people have funny names."
"I don't have a funny name!" he wailed. "You're just a-tryin' to make
evvybody think I have. I oughta--why--" he paused, trying to think up
an awful enough fate for me, and finally fell back on his old standby:
"I oughta bust evvy bone in yer head!"
I was bewildered, and finally he saw that I didn't know what he was
talking about. He checked his fury long enough to explain that his name
was, always had been, always would be, Featherbren, Feather b-r-e-n,
not Featherbrain.
He stalked away.
I ran outside and called after him, "Mr. Featherbrain!--I mean, Mr.
featherbren!"
He stopped haughtily, and waited for me to catch up with him.
"I'm really sorry," I said. "Maybe this makes us even now, even though
what I did wasn't intentional. Let's be friends again, shall we?"
A smile spread over his face like the sun bursting out from behind
clouds. His chin flushed rosily with pleasure. He grasped my hand and
pumped it up and down vigorously. "I been awful sorry, what I done
about yer water. I ain't been mad at yuh noways for a long time now,"
he said. "But a course I couldn't admit it."
A bout with housecleaning having kept me in the house most of the day,
I beat Grant to the office one evening when the bell rang.
"I haven't set eyes on a customer all day," I told Grant.
"You go read a book; I'll take care of this one."
'This one' was a lanky, nice-looking man of about forty.
"That radio on the desk there," he said without preamble. "I noticed
it's for rent. Guess I'll take it."
"Okay. Fifty cents," I said.
He flipped half a dollar toward me, picked up the radio, and exclaimed,
"Sold!"
"No, just rented," I answered wittily.
We laughed, and he went out, carrying the radio. Grant had been
listening.
"Who was that?" he asked casually as I came into the living room.
"A man from one of the cabins."
"Which cabin?"
"Well--well, I don't know. I've been cleaning house--you did the
renting today."
"Did you make sure that he really was staying in one of our cabins, and
wasn't just someone off the highway?" Grant pursued relentlessly.
"Of course. Well, that is, naturally he's not just someone--I mean,
after all, he said that it was when he was renting a cabin that he
noticed the radio."
Grant was silent, for the obvious purpose of giving me a chance to find
the flaws in my reasoning. He went into the kitchen, where he stripped
the outer leaves off a head of lettuce, rinsed it, and began cutting it
into shreds.
"Where did you get the lettuce?" I asked, partly from curiosity and
partly from a desire to change the subject.
"From a truck driver," Grant said, putting the shredded lettuce into a
bowl and spooning honey over it. "Truck parked in front of the
driveway--I asked the driver to move the truck once. He had a big load
of lettuce, said he'd give me some if I'd let him stay there long
enough to run across the street and get a beer." Grant opened the
cupboard door and inspected the cans of seasoning critically. After
some deliberation he selected nutmeg, and sprinkled it lavishly into
the bowl. Then he got a fork and began to eat.
I was hoping he had forgotten about the radio, but after he had
swallowed a few mouthfuls he continued, as though he hadn't drifted off
the subject:
"I'll bet a horned toad any stranger could pull in off the highway and
ask you for a roll of toilet paper and you've quick give it to him."
There are times when I wonder what, exactly, it was that I saw in Grant
that made me want to marry him.
It was one of these times, when I was standing at the office desk
chewing a pencil and dwelling morbidly on the things about Grant that I
didn't like, when a young woman stopped in and asked if we had cabins
with kitchens. She was a very vivacious creature, with dark eyes and
sparkling hair and a body that all seemed touched with electricity.
Even my glum negative reply to her question seemed to bounce off the
aura of her gaiety. She was so full of life that some of it had to
spill out; apparently she couldn't pass up a human being without
talking, happily and loudly, for a while.
She was one of those women whom, after a very short time, you feel as
though you had known for ages. Suddenly, when she seemed on the verge
of leaving, shrieking with laughter after telling me about a joke she
had once played on someone, I gave birth to an idea that positively
scintillated. Since she had a sense of humor and wasn't above a
harmless joke herself, she'd enjoy this as much as I would. I'd show
Grant he wasn't as smart as he thought he was!
I explained to the lively young woman what I wanted her to do. She
agreed, her eyes dancing.
Grant, I knew, was sorting and putting away clean laundry. I led her
out to the garage of cabin number 2, then I stood back so that Grant
wouldn't be able to see me.
"My husband just rented cabin 16 from your wife," she said to Grant.
"Now he's gone downtown and I seem to have locked myself out. I wonder
if I could borrow your pass key?" Just then the telephone rang. I went
inside to answer it; it was someone calling from Los Angeles, wanting
to reserve a cabin for a week from Saturday night. There was a great
deal of confusion, repetition, and mind-changing; and by the time I
hung up and looked outside, I saw that the vivacious young woman had
driven away.
I smiled as I went out toward the linen closet to bring my joke on
Grant to its climax.
"Who was that woman talking to you just now?" I asked.
"Oh, she's the wife of the guy you rented 16 to," Grant replied airily,
lifting an armful of neatly folded snowy sheets onto a shelf of the
linen closet. "She was locked out. She just borrowed the pass key; she
quick brought it back again."
I tried to look shocked as I said, "Sixteen! Why, I didn't rent sixteen
to anyone! Here, let me have your pass key!"
I seized the key and dashed across to 16. Grant, by the linen closet,
couldn't see me. I unlocked the door of 16, slammed it loudly for his
benefit, and raced back to him.
"She's cleaned the place out!" I cried, with a malicious enjoyment of
the expression on his face. "Lamp, throw rugs, ash trays--everything's
gone! And you're the smart boy who's been bawling me out for not
checking up on people before I give them what they want. I'd give
toilet paper to a stranger off the highway, maybe, but believe me,
before I'd give anyone a pass key I'd be pretty sure--"
Grant was getting up slowly, starting toward the cabin. I leaned
against him, giggling.
"It's all a joke!" I gasped. "I fixed it up with that woman to ask you
for the key--she didn't really take those things out of the cabin--so
I'd be able to get back at you for all the things you said about me. I
wanted you to feel foolish, for once. It was just a joke!"
A few minutes later Grant strode into the living room, where I was
reading a magazine Mrs. Clark found in one of the cabins.
"A joke, eh?" he said grimly. He was giving me that withering look
again, and this time I had a peculiar feeling that I deserved it.
"Well, if it was a joke, your peppy little girlfriend was the one who
played it. Both of the wool blankets are gone from the beds in 16!"
The influx into Banning of people with asthma, bronchitis, sinus
trouble, arthritis, and common colds continued into the spring.
Cultivated sweet peas were appearing in the wake of the almond and
peach blossoms, wild flowers were spreading themselves extravagantly
over the whole desert, and the fields behind our motel were splashed
with color. Some careless giant had trailed dirty fingers across the
snowy mountain tops. A pair of plucky birds were busily building a nest
in the rear of garage 16, almost directly above my washing machine. The
days were so breathtakingly lovely that it was hard to believe that
less than ninety miles away there were fog and cloudiness, and people
with persistent coughs and sniffles.
Nature's springtime orgy made us feel as though we should do a little
to keep up with her. So, the first time Oliv Snyder came around, we
made a deal with him.
Oliv Snyder was a gardener, obviously, and--so he said--an ex
journalism teacher.
The latter epithet I doubted. I never heard him saying "you was" or "I
seen," and David never caught him splitting an infinitive, but somehow
I couldn't visualize him lecturing to an absorbed audience on the
intricacies of slinging the English language around.
He was a short, moody little creature with white hair which curled at
the ends. He wore a cap with a frayed, mothbeaten brim, and his elbows
and knees, and various other portions of his anatomy and underwear,
were visible through the holes in his clothing. His theme song,
patterned after that of Snow White's seven dwarves, must have been
"Hiccup while you work," for on the several occasions that he worked
around the grounds of the motel he devoted fully as much energy to his
gusty staccato hiccups as to his gardening.
Although he himself didn't seem to be much of a bargain, his
proposition was.
"Five rosebushes--hic!--the very finest Talisman, to be planted on out
to the highway and divide your property from the motel next door. And
then all in front of the motel to the highway planted in calendulas.
All for--hic!--ten dollars. You just clean the--hic! weeds out and get
the land ready and I'll--hic! do the rest."
Two days later Grant had cleared out all the puncture vine, Russian
thistles, and the other defiant weeds that never let up their efforts
to regain the tiny percentage of territory they had lost to
civilization. The wild flowers that bloomed with such mad splendor on
the fields behind us stayed bashfully back where they couldn't be seen
from the highway, and added nothing to the front view of our place.
Oliv Snyder appeared at the appointed time, his car loaded with boxes
of plants, rose bushes, and a box of rich mountain-dug dirt which had
its particular merit, he assured us, in the fact that it was "hundreds
of thousands of years old."
Personally, I doubted that it was any older than any other dirt.
I raked away a few loose weeds while Mr. Snyder began digging holes in
the rocky, hard ground. He paced out the distance between the holes so
that the rose bushes would be properly spaced; then he placed the
bushes in the holes, and poured the ancient dirt around their roots.
While he worked he talked, letting drop occasionally a four or five
syllable word that sounded affected and unnatural.
"Even though I am a very well educated man, and have had several books
published, I have--hic!--a few little idiosyncrasies," he confessed,
darting his bright, wrinkle-surrounded eyes at me.
"You're kidding!" I protested. "Surely you're too normal, too well
balanced for anything like that."
"No," he said seriously. "Of course I am--hic!--exceptionally well
balanced, but about even me there are--oddities, shall we say?"
"Yes, let's," I agreed.
Flailing his arms, the little man threw himself upon one of the newly
planted rose bushes, trampling it with his feet. Or so it appeared. I
was about to yank him back indignantly when I realized that his
tattered shoes were adroit in avoiding the bush.
"I'm just stamping the--hic!--stamping the dirt down," he explained.
"The roses like it better that way. Hic! They like things just so. They
have their own little idiosyncrasies, you know."
"Even the well-educated, well-balanced ones?" Then, afraid that sounded
too flippant, I said, "But what are your idiosyncrasies?"
Oliv seized a hoe from his car, leaned upon it, and said, "Look at me.
I'm--hic!--the man with the hoe, stolid and stunned, brother to
the--hic!--the ox."
I must have looked rather vague, for he explained, "That's from one of
the poems I use--hic!--to teach my journalism classes."
He began chopping at the ground. "One of my peculiarities," he said,
"is that I can't resist buying the bottles of things
the--hic!--apothecaries sell. Those rows and rows of neatly labeled
bottles on the shelves in drug stores--hic--they do something to me. I
don't know what it is exactly, but practically all the money I earn
doing gardening--hic--and odd jobs goes into the apothecaries' pockets.
You ought to see my domicile--it's just like being in a--hic!--a drug
store. Every shelf and drawer is loaded with bottles of pills and
tablets and--hic!--capsules."
"Well, that's--interesting," I remarked, not being able to think of a
more satisfactory adjective. "Sort of a hobby."
"But that isn't the sum total of my idiosyncrasies," he said, his face,
under its thatch of white hair topped by his frayed cap, turning a
mottled pink. He stopped, thrusting a small plant into the trench he
had dug.
"No, I--hic!--regret to say, that isn't all," he went on. "It's--well,
it's women. I can't resist them either."
I clicked my tongue sympathetically. "Lots of men are like that," I
comforted him.
That night, though, I awoke and sat upright in bed. Oliv Snyder
couldn't resist bottles of pills, so every drawer and shelf in his
house was loaded with them. He couldn't resist women, so ...
I was so overcome with curiosity about his home life that it took me an
hour to get back to sleep.