Four and Twenty Beds
TextI tried all the trite old remedies for insomnia, without success. I made my mind a blank; I counted sheep; I tried mentally adding huge numbers. It was no use. My mind was as alert and bright as a sunny morning. Finally, though, I discovered a method of inducing sleep that has been–for me–infallible ever since.
I think of a particular cabin, selecting any one of the thirteen at random. Then I visualize the people who stayed in that cabin most recently; then I try to remember who occupied the cabin the night before that, and the night before that. A typical night's session of luring the sandman goes something like this:
"Let's see … last night in cabin 10 there was that funny old couple who haggled so about the price. They insisted they wouldn't stay unless we'd let them have it fifty cents cheaper, and they even went back and got into the car. Then, when they saw we didn't care, and weren't going to follow them out and tell them they could have it cheaper, they got back out of the car and came into the office and registered without saying another word about it. The night before that there was that very tall old man who mentioned, while he was registering, that he had a "little pup"–would that be okay? And then the next morning he strolled out of his cabin being led by a majestic, gigantic St. Bernard. . . . Um . . . and the night before that–let's see. Oh, yes, the woman who had asthma. She was here three days, and before her there was–let's see. That was the old, old man who assured me over and over again that the old woman in the car was really his wife, and that he 'didn't go in for that sort of thing'. And before that–mm–was that those pilots who had to stay over a night because it was raining? Or–no, it's been longer than that since it rained last. Well, then, it must have been–well–um . . ."
Usually I can't think back any further than that. But by that time I'm usually asleep.
CHAPTER TEN
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."
I smiled, and asked her if she was going to go out with him again.
"Ayah, I sure am, all right," she said. "Godfrey Mighty, he's got me doing it now–sticking a 'all right' on the end of everything. Sure, I'm going out with him again, you little stinkpot. If he's got all that dough, he might's well spend some of it on me. Just so Hellwig don't find out about it, damn it all."
"Grandma, please," I said. "You shouldn't swear over the phone. The operator might not like it."
"I didn't swear!" she exclaimed indignantly. "I just said, 'I hope Hellwig don't find out, darn it.'"
"That reminds me," I said, "How would you like it if I'd invite Hellwig up here for a weekend some time? I've been meaning to do it ever since we came here. He must get lonesome all alone there in his apartment."
"Ayah, he don't have brains enough to get married so's he wouldn't be alone," she interrupted. "You mean, you'd ask him to come sometime when it's my weekend to come there too?" she added doubtfully. "Plague take it all, just so they ain't no old man in one of your cabins that takes a shine to me–that'd make Hellwig pretty mad."
"Oh, don't worry about that. He can have a cabin all to himself, too–he won't have to pay anything for it, of course–and during the day you and he could walk around, maybe even get as far as the bottom of the mountains and start climbing them."
"Well, I guess he'd like that pretty well," she conceded.
David and Donna had always been normal, well-adjusted children, but my busyness with the motel, taking care of customers and the endless inevitable details connected with the business, led to a few minor behavior problems. The baby, soon after she learned to feed herself efficiently, went on a hunger strike. If a psychiatrist were to have one meal with us I am sure he would have it figured out that her sudden refusal to eat was her unconscious way of protesting against the fact that either Grant or I got up to answer the doorbell three or four times during every meal. I could see her point; sometimes I myself, after going on one of these little jaunts to rent cabins or to describe the service and the bill of fare of Moe's restaurant, for the benefit of doubting souls who weren't quite sure whether they should eat there or drive on downtown for a meal, felt like tossing my cooled food into the garbage can.
Anyway, Grant finally figured out a way to get Little Chief Hair-in-the-Face started eating again. Before each meal he captured a small black ant (either outdoors or on the sink, depending on the efficacy of our current ant poison) and imprisoned it on the tray of her high chair beneath her plate–a transparent glass plate, purchased especially for the experiment. Then, after allowing her one fascinated glimpse of the little creature, he filled her plate with food.
The first time that happened. Donna ate frantically, to get the food out of the way so that she could see the ant. After that, I expected the game to pall, but it never has. Since the first week or two Grant hasn't often put an ant under her plate, but she invariably cleans her plate, wipes off any remaining food particles with a piece of bread, and peers carefully through the glass. After all, she is obviously thinking, there might really be an ant this time! She has never tried, since the first day we played the game, to lift the plate and look under it. The first day, though, she was prepared to whisk the plate out of the way so that she could see what was going on under it. I brushed the forever-straggling brown hair out of her eyes and told her she must eat the food all gone–then she could see the ant.
She made one last, hopeful attempt to remove the plate. "Nope," I said sternly, "that wouldn't be cricket."
She shook her head vigorously. "Not cwicket," she corrected me. "Ant!"
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!"