CHAPTER ELEVEN
PEOPLE WHO MANAGE motels shouldn't throw stones, for they live in glass houses just as surely as does any goldfish. In fact, a goldfish in a bowl placed in the center of Grand Central Station would live a life of privacy and seclusion, compared to the life of a motel owner.
I am so inured, by now, to the lack of privacy, that I can calmly continue dusting furniture or changing Donna's clothes if a couple of strange men barge into the living room, mistaking it for the office. I am not in the least upset if, after I have gone to bed, someone rings the bell and asks to use the telephone. Since the telephone is in our living room, the person who makes the call cannot help seeing that I am in bed. The fact usually proves more embarrassing to him than to me. Repeated occurences have toughened me to the sight of a stranger telephoning a few feet away from my bedside, and regarding me curiously or nervously.
Having a normal amount of feminine vanity, I like to cream my face at night, and do up stray wisps of hair in curlers and bobby pins, after removing every trace of makeup. That same feminine vanity, though, makes such a praiseworthy routine impractical. If people must see me after I'm in bed, I like to look as attractive as possible. So, after conscientiously removing all my makeup, I add a quick dab of lipstick. I rub the face cream into my skin until it disappears. And if any stray locks of hair need doing up, I fix them the following morning, when they can be hidden under the confining bandana that Banning's whirling, incessant wind makes a desirable accessory anyway.
Grant wants to get an extension cord for the telephone, so that when customers want to use it it can be taken into the office. Whenever he brings up the idea, though, I discourage it. I don't mind the intrusion of strangers nearly as much as I would mind missing the chance to overhear their conversations! When people make calls in the daytime, I yield to the dictates of etiquette, and ostentatiously absent myself. (Sometimes I go only as far as the next room, however, where, if I try hard enough, I can usually hear most of what is being said.)
At night, though, when I am in bed, of course there is no question of my leaving politely so that the person who is telephoning can talk without being overheard. However private the nature of the conversation–and there have been some ear-sizzlers!–Emily Post herself could find no fault with my remaining to listen.
Continual interruption has become as ordinary, and usual, as the sight of strangers in our living room. The doorbell and the telephone ring intermittently all day long. Customers who are staying over want ice cubes, information, or an audience for the recital of their grievances, successes, or favorite jokes. Prospective customers want to know if we have kitchens, and if not, whether we'll show them a cabin anyway, so that in case they come out this way again in a year or two, as they may quite possibly do, they'll know exactly what they have reason to expect. Salesmen try to sell us weatherstripping, paint, fire extinguishers, rugs, lawn furniture, and DDT. Neighboring motel owners drop in to discuss business. Bees in their hives have nothing on us.
Nothing reveals just how impossible it is to do one thing from start to finish without interruption (unless it is a thing that takes only a split second to do) more accurately than a letter I wrote to Miss Nestleburt a few weeks after she had left. (I knew their honeymoon must be over, and so I sent the letter to their Burbank home, the address of which she had given me before she was married, before she had ever seen the place.) Rereading it, when at last I had signed my name to it, I felt that it was a masterpiece of revelation of our kind of life.
"Dear Miss Nestleburt–or, rather, Mrs. Hawkins," I had written. "It's ten o'clock, a beautiful morning, and I hope that
10:25. To resume, I hope that you and your husband
10:45. Twice now I have been interrupted by people who wanted to look at cabins, so they'd know what we have to offer in the way of accommodations in case they ever come through here in the future and need a place to
11 a.m. I'll write a few more lines before I have to feed the baby and put her to bed. The weather has been
11:45. She was too hungry to wait any longer, so I had to
12:15 p.m. Grant has been helping Mrs. Clark clean cabins. He just came in to tell me he's taking her home now, and to ask what we need from the store. We always buy our groceries in town because these little highway markets are very
12:25. Well, I just took a reservation by phone, for next Saturday night. Business is certainly
1 p.m. I was just cornered by a long-winded salesman. I would have sent him on his way sooner but
1:10. I just rented a cabin, to a man who's going to spend the day in Palm Springs and wants to be sure he'll have a place to sleep tonight. As I was about to write a few minutes ago, business
1:30.1 just had to leave that time, I thought it was a wreck. A screeching of brakes outside–turned out to be just a dog run over. He didn't seem to be hurt very
2:30. I had to take time out to make lunch, as Grant came back. Our hours of eating and sleeping are certainly erratic. Grant has gone now to pick up David from school. I hear the baby waking up now so I'll have to close. Please write to us."
At the same time I mailed the letter to Miss Nestleburt, I mailed a small box to her husband. The box contained a cockroach David had found outside and borne into the house triumphantly. I thought of Mr. Hawkins the moment I saw the creature. "Two can play his game," I thought to myself.
I had put the cockroach carefully into the well-padded box, not really expecting it to be still alive when it reached its destination, but satisfied that, dead or alive, it would be a handsomely macabre gift.
I didn't make a practice, of course, of sending out such incoherent letters as the one to Miss Nestleburt that accompanied the cockroach. Usually after an interruption I returned to the letter I had been writing, picked up the thread of what I had been saying, and resumed as though there had been no interruption. But occasionally it amused me to let evidence of each interruption appear in the letter.
It's so customary to find strangers in the living room, talking or using the telephone, that when I am ready for bed at night I don't dart out of the bathroom and leap into bed as I did at first. First I press my ear against the door, so that I can hear the rumble of voices if anyone is in the living room. If I don't hear anything, I open the door slowly and stick my head out. If only Grant is in the living room, and if the door between the living room and the office is closed, so that no one can suddenly open the outer office door and see me in all my pajama-ed glory, I rush across the floor and jump into bed.
When winter was well under way, our irascible old neighbor Mr. Featherbrain still had not spoken to us since summer, when he had been so incensed at Grant's pulling in off the highway customers that might have been his. Whenever I met him in the grocery store across the street, I smiled up at him sweetly, only to be rewarded with a tightening of the thin line of his mouth and a slight quivering of his roseate chin.
One night when Grant was in Arizona on a business trip, the office bell rang. I put on my robe sleepily and went to the door. Our "no vacancy" sign had been blazing for hours, so I was surprised to hear the bell.
It was the young sailor to whom I had rented the last cabin that night.
"We was just gettin' ready to turn in," he explained, "and we was gonna take a shower, but there wasn't any water. Not even enough for a drink. We can get along okay, we'll just turn in without a shower, but I thought I oughta let you know, so you could maybe get it fixed by morning so we could take a shower before we pull out."
I thanked him feebly, a little stunned at the realization of what a calamity had befallen me. I tried the faucet in our kitchen; there was a hiss of air and a dispirited gurgling, and three large drops fell into the sink.
It lacked ten minutes of being midnight–hardly a time to be making phone calls. Anyway, I didn't know whom to call. All the service shops were closed, and the workers home in bed.
The office of the Blue Bonnet motel, across the street, was dark. All the motels in town were full by now, of course; therefore the owners would all be asleep.
Oddly enough, though, there was a light at the Palace Motel, in the room that I knew was Featherbrain's living room.
Well, I wasn't going to ask them for help, I resolved. Mr. Featherbrain would be very pleased to know that I was having trouble.
I tried to figure out what Grant would do about the situation if he were home. Of course, he would have the difficulty resolved, and everything going smoothly, in less than twenty minutes–but how would he do it? And why couldn't I myself do whatever it would be that he would do?
I drew my robe more tightly around me, and sat down on a cold kitchen chair. I thought.
Dimly I recalled hearing something about the water having been turned off, before we bought the motel, by a bunch of mischievous Indian boys. I knew that the meter was out back in the field, near the deserted road where I had learned to drive. Maybe there was a handle out there with which our water could I be turned on and off.
My duty was clear. I put my coat on top of my robe, took a quick glance at David and Donna to be sure that they were sleeping soundly and wouldn't be apt to awaken before I came back, armed myself with a flashlight, and set forth into the frigid night.
Nothing can describe the utter blackness of a midnight in Banning, six hundred feet from the highway and civilization. When my back was turned to the few neon signs that were still shining, and the intermittent flash of headlights, it was as though I were alone in a cold, windy world of pressing, almost tangible darkness. There was no moon to point up the ghostly, shadow-like mountains–lowering shapes that I felt, rather than saw–and the stars, so many and so brilliant that they looked like glittering jewels that had been tossed up there by a lavish, wasteful hand, selfishly drew their light closely around them.
All I knew about the water meter was that it was somewhere toward the back of our land, near the road. The smug certainty of men in general that men are superior to women in every respect, except possibly motherhood, has always annoyed me. However, I admitted to myself as I stumbled over the rocky road toward the back of our land, the chances were excellent that no man who had lived at the motel as long as I had would fail to know the exact location of the water meter, and what to do to it if the water suddenly refused to come into the cabins and be sociable. I resolved, feeling my way along with tentative, reluctant toes, that from this bleak hour forward I would take an efficient, masculine attitude toward everything that had bolts or screws. I'd show the world that it's due to early training and environment that women aren't mechanically inclined or good fixers, and not to any lack of brain power; while it is mostly the pressure of public opinion that makes the average boy grow up to be a minor mechanical genius.
I turned the flashlight on only intermittently, only at the moments when the darkness was pressing too forcibly upon me. I felt the presence of ogres and banshees (whatever they are) and even a few werewolves. I didn't want to make myself conspicuous by shining the flashlight any more than necessary; if all these horrible things could hide from me in the dark, then I could just as well hide from them, too, instead of lighting myself up so they'd know exactly where to pounce.
When at last I reached Williams street, which marked the end of our property, I turned the flashlight on bravely and began to search for the water meter. Coyotes were howling close in the hills to the north, which didn't help matters any. All of the land around me was settled by fat, stickery bushes which regarded me stolidly, defying me to dispute their squatters' rights or to try to get any information from them. They knew where the meter was, all right, but they had no intention of letting me in on the secret.
I stood on our private road, in a rocky tire-rut, and began to flash the beam of the flashlight systematically across the field in such a way that the light had finally covered every foot of the area in which I thought the meter must be. There was no sign of the meter, though. I wasn't really surprised, because the wind-battered, huddled-together bushes, which by now wore faintly mocking expressions, were high enough to obscure the meter from any eye except that of the person who knew exactly where to look.
I waded a few feet into the despicable little bushes and repeated the process of flashing the light around systematically. No soap. No water meter.
After a lull the cold wind was coming up again, and the bushes began to move and whisper among themselves. I could almost make out what they were saying.
"Can you imagine," one seemed to hiss indignantly, "Thinks she can find the meter we've got hidden!"
"Yeah, look at the fool," another replied with derision. "Trying to find it with just a little flashlight. Think we ought to trip her up and stick a few thorns into her?"
Apparently they decided against it, and perhaps they even took pity on me, because eventually I found the meter, about ten feet from Williams street and twenty feet from our private road.
When I found it, of course, I didn't know what to do with it. It was a small, complicated structure of curving pipes and gadgets and smooth, leering faces of glass. One round handle was particularly conspicuous, and I felt certain that it was with this handle that I must commune. I turned the handle cautiously. It seemed agreeable, so I turned it still further. And then I came upon another hurdle I must jump: no matter with how much firmness and artistry I turned the handle, I wouldn't know what effect it was having, if any, until I trotted back the whole cold, black, dismal distance to the house and tried the faucets. I girded up my loins, grasped the flashlight grimly, and started back.
I was approaching the rear cabins, which were silhouetted against the occasional headlight-glow from the highway, when I remembered that there were faucets spaced regularly in the field. I captured the nearest one with the flashlight beam, went up to it and turned it on. To my joy, water gushed out–the loveliest, most sparkling, most appreciated water in the world.
The children were still asleep when I got back, and all seemed to be well. I went to the kitchen, to try the water at the sink. It spurted forth as gloriously as had the water from the faucet in the field. I looked out the kitchen window at the drowsy highway. The two service-station markets were closed, their lights out. There were no cars on the road at the moment; no lights except the rotating beacon at the airport. The Peacock's sign was out, Featherbrain's sign was out–but wait! There was still that light in Featherbrain's living room.
Even as a horrible suspicion was crawling over me, Mr. Featherbrain's gaunt shoulders and head appeared in his window. A smile (probably ill at ease in such an unaccustomed place, I thought) was on his face.
Mr. Featherbrain shoved up his window and thrust out his head. I opened our kitchen window so that I could hear what he was going to say.
"I betcher durned old water wouldn't turn on!" he cackled. "Durned old Indians are allus turnin' it off, ain't they? Yuh oughta put the Indian sign on 'em, that'd fix 'em!" He chortled at his own wit.
I was quivering with reaction, cold, and indignation. I realized that the "Indian" who had turned off our water tonight had been a tall, thin black-haired one, with a white stubble sprouting over a pink chin. But I couldn't think of an appropriate, biting enough retort.
I didn't know exactly what I was going to say, but I leaned forward, waiting for the enraged words to come.
They did. "I oughta bust evvy bone in yer head!" I snarled.
One day the grapevine which twined around the various motels in town, linking them together, vibrated with the information that Mr. and Mrs. Garner had sold the Peacock. And for one hundred thousand dollars!
"One hundred thousand. A tenth of a million," we said, rolling the words around on our tongues and tasting them critically.
They tasted wonderful to Grant. "A hundred thousand," he mused. "Do you suppose, if we advertised once and really tried, we could get anything like that for this place?"
"Well, this place is worth more than the Peacock," I said cautiously. "But we don't want to sell, do we?"
"No–o–o, I guess not," he said; but the thoughtful expression didn't fully leave his eyes for several weeks.
When, after the period of escrow had passed, the Peacock was taken over by its new owners, Mr. and Mrs. Needham, it was fun to stand by the kitchen window as dusk crept through the Pass and watch them struggle with their neon sign switches. It was a gaudy sight. First the green "vacancy" sign would flash on and off; then, gaining certainty, it would go on and stay on. Then the lamps at the highway end of the white walls surrounding the motel would light up brilliantly. Then the "vacancy" sign would go off. Then the peacock would burst into glorious color, only to leap back into darkness again. Next, the bright red words "Peacock Motel" would flare out of the blackness like a splash of red paint, followed by the green "vacancy." Then, one after another, all the signs would be turned off, as the new owners sought, by the trial and error method, the switch that turned on the little light outside the office. And by the time they located that switch, they turned the office light off again hunting for the switch that turned on the big white "vacancy" sign on their lawn, between the rows of units, or for the one which turned the ordinary-looking, roof-sheltered little well between the office and the highway into a blazing, neon-outlined wishing well that could have dropped out of a fairy story.
I knew exactly what the new owners of the Peacock were going through. I remembered how hard it had been for us–or for me, rather–to know which switch would turn on which light or sign. And the Peacock, obviously, had a lot more switches than we did. But even though I sympathized completely with their bewilderment, I never missed standing at the kitchen window in the early evening when the contagious wave of sign-turning-on began to sweep along the highway through Banning.
The aurora borealis had nothing on the Peacock, for a couple of weeks.
When we left Los Angeles we brought with us two radios, one of them the small white one Grant had given me before we were married, and which I had, in Los Angeles, kept on the kitchen sink so that music could mingle with the splashings of dish water. We planned to rent it now, at fifty cents a night, to our customers.
We put the radio on the desk in the office, but for some reason we didn't get around to putting on it a sign that would apprise our customers of the fact that it was for rent. Naturally, no one asked to rent it, and when we had been there for several months it hadn't earned us a penny.
Fixing a sign to put on the radio was one of those things that seem inexplicably to suggest procrastination, like changing the lining paper in bureau drawers, or like writing to your husband's Aunt Minnie and inviting her to come out for a few weeks.
One day, though, when I had a few minutes to spare and was wondering what useful thing I should do during that short time (and afraid I would think of something pressing enough to get me out of the chair where I was lolling) I decided to make a "for rent" sign for the radio. I printed the words neatly on a piece of white cardboard and stood it up against the radio.
Within a few days I was beginning to think that magazine editors who pay ten cents a word for manuscripts were cheapskates. Those two words I had written began to bring in fifty-cent piece after fifty-cent piece, until at last the radio had paid for itself over and over again.
We discussed getting a few more radios, but that, too, was easy to put off. Occasionally one of the many motel-to-motel salesmen with whom we were blessed would want to install in our cabins, at no expense to us, coin-operated radios, from which we were to have a percentage of the take. I felt that such radios in the cabins would put our motel on too obviously commercial a basis, while Grant was beginning to toy with the idea of putting ordinary little radios in each cabin for the free use of our customers, as a deluxe touch to the accommodations. Unaccustomed to such luxurious details as free radios, many of the people who occupied the cabins would be sure to choose our motel in preference to any other if they ever went through Banning again. However, putting a thirty dollar radio in each of thirteen units would cost nearly four hundred dollars–a large sum to pay for the good will of customers who already seemed pleased with our motel. We filed both that idea, and the idea of letting a salesman install coin-operated radios, away in our minds for future reference.
Grant, after working on the children's bedroom so long that I had really given up any idea that it would ever be completed, finally finished it. The walls and ceiling were covered with cedar siding, the floor with linoleum of a swirling green color, and we hung crisp white curtains at the windows. I put one of the motel spreads, a green one, on David's bed.
I had converted into draperies a matching green spread which had been burned by a smoker-in-bed, and these I hung over the closet doorway and in front of a big cabinet of shelves Grant had made. After I had cut away the burned parts and made the draperies, there were still several fairly good-sized pieces of the material left, and of these I made scarves for the two small chests in the room. (From remaining scraps I made little curtains for the window of the door between the office and the living room–curtains that would be easy for me to move slightly in order to peek into the office to see what might be going on there.)
The total effect was very pleasing. The room looked a lot different than the ugly garage into which we had put the children's beds the day we arrived.
I had been in the habit of hurriedly shutting the bedroom door whenever anyone came to visit or to telephone, so that they couldn't see into the upset, unfinished room. Now, however, I always made it a point to see that the door was boastfully, confidently ajar.
I gestured vaguely toward the telephone one evening when Grant ushered in a man who wanted to make a long distance phone call. I pulled the bedroom door open with an unostentatious gesture, and sat down, apparently to read a book, but actually to study the man and listen to what he would say. If you were to stand on the corner of a busy street and watch the hordes of people hurrying past, you'd mark them off as just ordinary, unoriginal, all-alike people, none of them possessing noticeable peculiarities or even individuality; but if those hordes were to separate and come singly into your living room, to sit for five or ten minutes using your telephone, the realization would slap you in the face that people are different from one another, that they do possess amazing or amusing idiosyncrasies, and that whatever scientist it was who stated that every human being has a counterpart somewhere, must have had his fingers–or his wires–crossed.
There couldn't have been, anywhere on the face of the earth, a counterpart of the man whom Grant had just brought in. He looked like an expectant elephant, nearing the end of a two year pregnancy. His long nose, which drooped a little at the end, was a dull violet color; and the skin of the surrounding rather insignificant face was a brilliant shade of peach–occasioned, I guessed, by either dipsomania or habitual bad temper. His ears were deformed; they were simple holes in his head, with a small external bulge of flesh to indicate the location of each. His small eyes were obscured by horn-rimmed spectacles. The glasses were apparently held up by some natural law (seemingly in conflict with the law of gravity) which my high school science teacher had neglected to explain. Certainly those impotent little bulges of flesh that masqueraded as ears couldn't have had anything to do with supporting the glasses.
The man, putting in a long distance call, was trying to make the operator understand his unusual name. The back of his fat neck was getting redder and redder. It wasn't surprising, though, I thought, that she found it hard to understand his name.
"No, not Dugan!" he spat at her. "Dubaf! DUBAF!" He moved his bulk heavily on the chair, and I half expected it to fold under him. His free hand, drumming irritably on the desk top, was shaking with rage, the veins knotting up as he shouted "Dubaf! Dubaf!" into the mouthpiece. "I didn't say Dusle!" he screamed. "Dubaf! D-U-B-A-F. No, I said D-U-B-A-F!" He mopped his forehead. He clenched the telephone tighter, his eyes distended.
"D as in dammit!" he roared. "U as in you silly slut–"
I retreated hurriedly, throwing down my book and rushing into the kitchen to see whether I had remembered to wash yesterday's breakfast dishes.