Four and Twenty Beds

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

OUR MOTEL HAS always had a high average, in comparison with other motels, of repeat business. Part of our success in drawing customers back again and again has been due to the fact that our motel is new and that we make a point of keeping it spotless; part of our success in this direction has been due to the deluxe service rendered by Grant, who acts the part of general handyman par excellence. The goodwill of the customers, that intangible thing so vital to any business, we make a special effort to capture. The customers are legion for whom Grant has fixed minor mechanical defects in their cars or traveling equipment, or whose cars he has pushed down the highway until they would start. I often think he is so helpful more from a spirit of natural kindness than from a mercenary sense of good business. One time the occupants of a car, after learning our rates, declined to stay. Their car, however, declined to leave. After the driver had tried for several minutes to start the motor, muttering beneath his breath curses that seemed directed toward the battery, Grant good-naturedly got into our car and pushed them around off the driveway, onto the highway and on the road to our competitors.

Occasionally we get customers who are traveling with a house trailer. Their usual explanation is, "We wanted the comfort of a real cabin for once!" Sometimes we have customers who are so pleased with the accommodations that on a repeat trip they bring us a little gift. The most valuable–and most annoying–of these gifts was a half dozen baby chickens, which were presented to David. Grant fixed a small, inconspicuous yard for them behind the single cabins, but they developed a sly technique for getting out when they were hungry. Since they were supposed to be David's responsibility, and since he is a typical forgetful boy, they were frequently hungry. Often when I showed a prospective customer cabin 7, which was the closest cabin to their yard, the chickens would appear suddenly, to perch on the threshhold and watch me with ravenous, reproachful eyes. It lent a very quaint and rural aspect to the proceedings.

The excuses people use for getting away without renting a cabin may not be rural, but they certainly are quaint. It seems to be almost impossible for most people to refuse frankly to rent a cabin, to admit outright that the cabin isn't suitable or that the price is too high. Most people seem to feel that they must offer some logical excuse to get away–and that then, once they have escaped, they needn't return. Typical excuses are that they "have to run to the other end of town a minute first, and will be right back" or that they'll "grab a bite at a restaurant and come back to sign up inside half an hour."

After one trip to a Banning department store where I tried many little coats, all too expensive, on Donna, I found myself making excuses to the attentive salesgirl. "I'll go home and think about it," I said, "and I might come back and buy one." Of course, I knew perfectly well that I wasn't going to buy one of the coats at those prices. I tried to analyze my own reasoning in making the excuse, so I would understand what motivated the customers who fished up frantic excuses so that they could get away.

They must feel guilty, I decided, for using so much of my time and courtesy without repaying me for it; they want to justify themselves in my sight, even if falsely and temporarily, by leaving me under the impression that my trouble will be repayed when they return from "the other end of town" or from "grabbing a bite in a restaurant." They'd be embarrassed if they knew how clearly I understood that they had no intention of returning–as embarrassed as I was when, after thinking it over, I realized that the clerk in the department store knew perfectly well that I had no intention of coming back after "going home to think about it," and that I was just easing myself out gracefully, trying to keep her from thinking I was the ungrateful wretch I actually felt myself to be.

Banning, on the whole a sane and level-headed little town, isn't without its cult members and its intense haranguers about "vibrations."

The vibrations were, no doubt, very strong in these dabblers in pseudo-metaphysics when the members of the Los Angeles Temple of Yahweh bought about nine hundred acres in the desert east of Banning, announcing that they would build there a settlement to be known as Yahweh Springs. Spokesmen for the sect revealed, for the edification of Banningites, that Los Angeles would be blown up by an atomic bomb in the near future, and members of the sect were taking advantage of their special knowledge to build a refuge in the desert.

On a trip to Banning's well-stocked library, I was searching the Encyclopedia Britannica for "Mother Carey's Chickens," in order to use correctly a reference to them in a farcical story I planned to write about a sea voyage. Whenever I look up a certain thing in a reference book I am compelled, by the intriguing lure of the other words in big, bold-face capitals, to waste time and energy studying the details of five or six subjects which bear no relation to the subject I'm looking up except in that they start with the same letters. My eye being caught by "motet" (which is, I learned against my will, vocal music in the contrapuntal style) it occurred to me that it would be interesting to look up "motel," since I must be in the immediate vicinity of the word.

To my surprise, "motel" wasn't listed in the Britannica. Piqued, I searched in several other encyclopedias and reference books for "motel," and finally even for the more lowly terms "auto court" and "tourist camp." Not even those words were mentioned. Finally, in desperation, I tackled the huge unabridged dictionary, with the same result. Compilers of the dictionary had not allowed the word "motel" to sully its sacred pages.

Obviously, according to authorities, there is no such thing as a motel. However, I feel that I can with safety state that the authorities are all wet.

One day Grant came home for dinner after one of his two-hour talk fests.

"I thought I'd run up once and see Mr. Bradley," he said, sitting down at the table. "I wanted to talk over some business with him, about the motel association, but he was too upset to even think about that."

David made a remark, which we ignored, about Grant's split "infilitive."

Mrs. Bradley, it seemed, had at last become so bad that they had had to take her to an asylum. Someone had substituted a fertile, ready-to-hatch egg for the china egg Mr. Bradley had provided for her to amuse herself with, and after a few days of basking in the warmth under the layers and layers of her garments, the egg had hatched–not into the human baby Mrs. Bradley had wanted, but, understandably enough, into a fluffy yellow baby chicken. The shock and disappointment had pushed her tottering reason completely into the abyss.

"It was bound to happen sooner or later," Grant said. "Mr. Bradley says he knew, himself, that he wouldn't be able to keep her home with him much longer."

"Who substituted the real egg?" I asked finally.

Grant buttered a slice of bread grimly.

"Moejy," he said.

Two weeks after Grandma and Hellwig visited us, I got an airmail letter from Grandma. Before I opened it I knew it must contain exciting news, because Grandma wouldn't have sent the letter airmail if she had been completely calm and in full possession of her faculties. Airmail takes about twice as long in getting from Los Angeles to Banning as regular mail does. It is such a short distance between the two cities that the time gained by the speedier flight of the plane is more than lost in the transportation to and from the airports.

Grandma's letter began with a burst of enthusiasm. "I'm going to be married! I'm going to be a bride!" it gurgled. "Wagonseller proposed to me. I never see anything like the way he carried on. He had a big diamond ring with him, he said it was his mother's and he said he wanted it to be mine if I'd accept him along with it, 'he did, all right'!"

I was a little disappointed in Grandma. After twenty-five years of going with Hellwig, I hadn't thought that a wad of money, a beautiful car and a big diamond could influence her so strongly. I resumed reading the letter.

"I told him I wouldn't marry him, though, and Thunderation, how he took on. I thought sure he was going to cry. When he finally got over it and left I hopped on the streetcar and went to see Hellwig. I told him what had happened, and you were right, you little stinkpot. All he was waiting for was for me to say something. So I said it, and, well, plague take it anyway, that's all there is to tell you. Except he was madder'n a wet hen to think Wagonseller'd been after me. The wedding's going to be two weeks from today, and in the meantime he's going to find us a little place in the country and we'll have a garden and raise a few chickens. He's going to retire at last."

Grandma was a long time getting her man, but she finally got him.

In the same mail with Grandma's joyous airmail letter was a large box with no return address. It bore a Burbank postmark, and I opened it warily.

When I had torn off all the wrappings and lifted the cover from the box, several anemic-looking cockroaches struggled out. And in the box was a solid mass of their relatives, who had been less hardy, and were quite dead.

A note reposed in the midst of the unsavory mess. It was face up, fortunately, and could be read without being touched. "I thought you might be interested," it said, "to know that Ermintrude had a blessed event. I know that you will give her children a good home. She had quite a litter, didn't she?"

The note wasn't signed, but there was no need for it to be.

I resolved that I'd never again try to compete with an expert at his own game.

Grandma's plans for her future as a bride started us planning for the future again. We had decided against putting in a trailer court in back, or kitchens in any of the cabins, on the ground that they would cheapen the place. But Grant was beginning to draw plans for ten small complete houses, to be set on the back part of the land, each with its own pleasant little yard, to be rented at weekly rates to vacationists during the winter. During the summer they could be rented by the month to more permanent tenants.

There would still be room for a small swimming pool. These things were, as yet, more or less in a dream stage; but the air conditioning units were a present reality at last, actually being installed. And the second story two-bedroom addition to our living quarters would be next.

I know that if in years to come we ever leave the motel, as I look back one act will stand out in my mind as representative of everything we did here, one act will somehow be the symbol of our life here: the removing of the covers from the "no." I'll remember how it felt to stand carefully among the brittle, waxy-looking geraniums and the myrtle, the wind whipping through my dress and through my hair as I stretched to reach the covers, silhouetted against the neighboring neon lights and feeling curiously exposed, as though each occupant of all the cars that streamed past with brilliant headlights were staring at me … the cold feel of the metal in my hands as I slid the covers off the "no" so that the sign proclaimed in glowing neon "No Vacancy." I'll remember the smug feeling if we were the first of the nearby motels to fill up, or the relieved feeling if we were among the last. I'll remember the contented knowledge that the day's work was done, and that a night of uninterrupted sleep lay ahead. I'll never forget, either, how good it was to see lights in all the cabins and a car in each garage, and to know that the family or couple in each cabin was cozy and warm in its little haven-for-the-night.

And I'll remember the half guilty feeling that people might think I was snooping, when I went around at night the last thing before bed (if for some reason Grant couldn't do it) to write down the license number of each car, for later comparison with the license numbers written on the registration cards.

Being in the motel business adds a clarity to one's view of life that few other businesses could give. It lets one see things in a new, truer perspective. What were unalive, unreal news stories, for instance, become to me true, believable facts when people who have just come from the locality in question discuss them. It makes me realize that the places where I've never been really exist, and that people whom I have never seen are as human and as vulnerable as I am. There's as much difference between reading a newspaper about an event and talking with eye witnesses of that event, as there is between glancing at a faded snapshot and studying a picture through a stereoscope.

Another advantage of the motel business is that it prevents our marriage from sinking into the stale rut of custom and habit that afflicts so many marriages when the first rosy years have passed. No doubt Grant and I have some quarrels that we wouldn't have if we were leading a more normal life, where there would be less nervous tension and less intrusion of the public into our private life; but, on the other side of the ledger, it must be noted in big black letters that we never bore each other because of interests that lie in diverging directions, and that, with so much happening every day, we never run out of things to talk about.

Of course there are bad things about the motel business, too. Business is seasonal; we know that the winters will be good, and that the summers will have much room for improvement. Improvement is just what they'll get, though–Grant has made and will continue to make changes, some minor, some major, that will make our summers better and better, until finally, perhaps, they will be almost as good as our winters. Anyway, the winter tourist trade in the desert always is so good that it makes up for the slackest of summers.

Another bad thing about our being in the motel business is that our children are restricted more in their play than they would be if we had the average home life. David can never have his playmates around the front of the motel; nothing frightens prospective customers away more quickly than the sight of children playing. There are times, too, when the very sight of human beings nauseates me, I am so sick of being interrupted and constantly on call. Fortunately the times when I feel that way are rare.

A sense of humor is one of the principal requisites for any one who aspires to own or manage a motel. For instance, if I answer the bell late at night when Grant is out, and if the legs of my pajamas unroll suddenly while I'm showing a cabin, and leave me presenting an old-fashioned pantalette effect, I simply laugh and tuck them back up, without even bothering to explain that I just slipped my dress on over my pajamas.

In my opinion, the worst, most nearly unbearable phase of the motel business is that our lives are brushed daily by the fascinating lives of salesmen, vacationists, businessmen and travelers who each has secret, important affairs of his own–and that etiquette and lack of time (principally lack of time) prevent me from prying around the roots of these affairs and unearthing them. In addition to the rules we have now–that customers must check out by noon, that they must pay in advance, etc.–we should have a rule that each customer must give me a brief summary of his activities from birth until the present, explain the purpose of this particular trip, reveal his plans for the immediate future, and answer any questions that may occur to me.

Then the motel business would be perfect.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nancy Vogel's literary career began when, at the age of twelve, she had a poem published in a newspaper and won an essay contest. From then until the time she was married she wrote spasmodically; it wasn't until her first child was born, making free time for writing out of the question, that she began to write in earnest, producing fiction, articles, humor, poetry, book reviews, light verse, cartoon gags, newspaper columns, and everything else that varying kinds of word combinations might be termed.

A Casteel by birth, she feels that one nice thing about having traded that name for Vogel is that she is no longer vulnerable to "soap" gags. She is a "native" Californian, born in Great Falls, Montana, from which she was whisked when she was a baby.