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CHAPTER SEVEN

IN THE MIDDLE of September school started, and David, who was a little over five and a half years old, entered the first grade of the Banning grammar school. And with the start of school came the "summer slump" that our irritable neighbor, Mr. Featherbrain, had been forecasting.

Business was terrible. The highway was almost deserted, and of the few cars that did appear, most of them plowed right on toward their destinations. The occasional customer who rang our bell professed to be shocked at our rates, and it was only by lowering our rates that we were able to rent any cabins at all. There were many nights during that period that only two or three of our cabins were occupied; and I remember one night when we had only one customer, a young man who slept in his single cabin in solitary splendor all night.

Obviously, the income from the place wasn't enough to meet the payments and the expenses. We were beginning to think Grant had been premature in leaving General Motors, and to wish that he were still collecting his weekly check from them. Like a stone over our heads hung the realization that there was a possibility we might lose the motel–and all the money we had put into it.

Jed didn't come every day for our laundry now; he came only once or twice a week. I asked him if the motels all over town were doing as badly as we were, or whether it was just us.

"The motels that have kitchens are still doing all right," he said, smoothing his fingers over his nose as though trying to find a spot where there were no freckles. "One whole side of the Peacock, eight of its cabins, have kitchens, and I still get two big sacks of laundry every day from there."

"I guess we need kitchens," I said. I had known that all along, of course. When we first came here, when business was still good, we had turned away four or five would-be customers every day because they had wanted kitchens. Even now, with business so poor, hardly a day went by that one or two groups of people didn't ask us if we had kitchens. And most of those who required kitchens planned on staying anywhere from a week to three months–and were willing to pay the standard rate for cabins with kitchens: twenty-five dollars a week.

Yes, six or eight kitchens would fix us up. Those would be rented all the time, and even in'the summer slump each year there'd be at least two or three new customers for the other cabins. And a year or two of being in business would begin to bring us an increased amount of repeat trade, so that we could look forward safely to a profitable business–if we could just hang onto the motel right now!

We didn't have enough money to put in kitchens; each kitchen, we figured, even if Grant did all the labor himself, would cost four hundred dollars. They would have to be nice kitchens, to be in keeping with the cabins; ranges and refrigerators and steel cabinet sinks were expensive. Since it would be the second bedrooms in the double cabins that we would convert to kitchens, the carpeting would have to be replaced by linoleum, and the plastered walls redone, so that they would have a smooth, painted surface. Pipes would have to be connected.

It would be a lot of work and a lot of expense, and we resolved not to consider beginning until early the following summer, before the next slump.

In the meantime, something must be done. We had very little money in the bank; we owed nearly fifty thousand dollars on the motel, and two thousand to Grandma. Our income had become insignificant.

Grant got a job digging ditches.

That job was symbolic, I suppose, of the depths to which we had sunk. But it wasn't a regular ditch-digging job; he was working for a contractor, and the ditches were preparatory for construction work, on which Grant would be employed when it was begun.

Those were hard days. Grant worked ten hours every day, and after work he came home and helped me finish whatever part of the motel work I had been unable to complete. We didn't dare to hire Mrs. Clark even occasionally, with business so poor. We did all the work ourselves, so that we wouldn't be spending an unnecessary penny. Not only were we working hard, but we weren't getting much sleep–we had to get up nights to rent cabins, and often a customer would request to be called at four or five or six the next morning, which meant setting the alarm for whatever hour he specified, crawling out of bed and plodding over to his cabin to knock on his door. We couldn't simply lend him the alarm clock, because we didn't dare be without it–there was always the possibility that another customer might want to be called.

Grant's salary, plus the low income from the motel, wasn't enough to make our payments and to take care of our laundry and utility bills. We had to draw on our tiny, dwindling reserve in the bank. We hoped that we would be able to hold out until Palm Springs opened, and the winter season got under way.

Winter always brought travelers to the southern route, we knew, where they hoped to avoid the greater cold encountered along the northern route. The slackening off of the good season, in the early summer, is due to the understandable desire of many tourists to avoid the desert heat. And the "summer slump" that Featherbrain had forecast, with a knowledge born of previous summer visits to Banning, was due also to the fact that school and business vacations were over, and travelers were getting back to their offices and factories, and sending their children back to school.

The few customers who did stay at our motel during this slump came usually very late at night–or, rather, early in the morning. Two, three, and four were common hours for our office bell to startle us out of sleep. Now that Grant was working, I shared with him the unpleasant duty of getting up in the night to go to the door. The circles under our eyes were a little darker every morning. Just getting up out of a sound sleep to rent a cabin was bad enough, but often we'd have a customer inconsiderate enough to mention that he'd be back "in ten minutes, soon as he'd washed his face", to use the telephone. So whichever of us had gotten up to rent him a cabin would have to stay up, since it wouldn't be worthwhile to go back to bed for only ten minutes. More often than not, too, the ten minutes would stretch into half an hour or more, or the customer would forget about the phone call and not come back at all. If the one of us who was up went back to bed, though, after half an hour or so of fruitless waiting, the jangle of the bell almost invariably dragged us up again out of the just-attained depths of sleep, and the customer, "so sorry he had kept us up," came in to make his phone call.

The majority of customers, of course, are very considerate, however. In fact, so many of those who came late at night or toward morning were profuse in their apologies for waking us, that Grant began to ponder.

"If the ones who do come late hate it so much to wake us up, then there must be a lot who quick pass us by because they don't want to wake us."

We were sitting at the kitchen table, having a council of war. The children were in bed.

Grant spread mustard thoughtfully on a cracker, and sprinkled sugar over the top. "If we had the light on inside the office, and people could see that someone was up, then they wouldn't have to worry that they'd be getting anyone out of bed, and they wouldn't be afraid to come in."

He crunched his cracker, while I watched with the horrified fascination his strange tastes still inspired in me, even after six years.

"I'm going to stay up tonight," he announced. "I'll sit in the doorway or walk around just outside the office door where they can't help seeing me, and I'll bet a horned toad I can bring us in three or four extra customers!"

And he did. His theory had been correct; people who hesitated about selecting a motel after midnight, who hated to rouse anyone from bed, came to our motel like flies to a dish of honey when they saw that our inside lights were on and there was someone up and moving about.

Grant kept that up for three nights, sleeping from dawn until it was time to go to work, and sleeping again from the time he got home until about ten o'clock. And for those three nights we averaged fifteen dollars more per night than our average for the previous nights had been. Our motel was catching at least ninety per cent of the late travelers who stopped on the east side of the business district. (During his night vigils, Grant saw what a small percentage of them went into any of the other motels around us.)

Of course, Grant couldn't keep that up, though. He was earning less than fifteen dollars a day digging trenches for the contractor; obviously, then, since he could do only one, the most sensible course would be for him to quit his job, sleep days, and spend the night pulling customers in off the highway.

So he quit his job, and began to stay up every night, sleeping seven or eight hours during the day. That left him time to help me clean the cabins, and to do the watering. Business continued substantially better, and life began to look brighter. We were afraid that neighboring motel owners, suffering from the slump as we had done, would imitate our methods and so distribute the customers more evenly and more thinly. But perhaps they never realized what we were doing; the weeks slipped past, and still Grant was the only one up during the tiny hours; and our motel continued to get more night business than all the others put together.

Grant was still as full as ever of good ideas. The walls of the showers in two of the cabins were beginning to get moldy, and even after he had scraped off the mold and painted them with a special damp-resistant paint, there was a faintly musty smell lingering in those cabins.

He took a bottle of my perfume and put a little on the back of each chair and on the drapes. Although the perfume didn't obliterate the musty odor, it blended with it–as Grant had hoped it would–so that the result was far from unpleasant. We tested the scent by going out of the cabins and coming back into them from the fresh air outside after a few minutes. The cabins had a faint, warmly sweet fragrance. Grant touched them up with additional drops of perfume for a few days until the musty odor wore off.

Most customers didn't notice the perfume, or at least didn't comment upon it. But to the few who remarked with pleasure about it. Grant said, "Yep, I guess there were some pretty sweet girls staying here last night"; and to those who didn't seem to like the odor, he said, "I guess the people that stayed here last night must have spilled some perfume."

Although, with my help, Grant was getting a lot of work accomplished these days, he was getting a lot of talking done too. Every time he "stopped in to see" another motel owner, I knew he'd be embroiled in conversation for at least two hours; and he was still as helpless as ever in the hands of a salesman.

One late afternoon right after dinner a salesman came into the office laden with descriptive literature about a well-known set of books–a set we already had, as it happened. I went into the kitchen to wash the dishes, thinking that here at last was a salesman Grant would be able to get rid of, since we possessed the product he was selling.

The rumble of voices in the office continued, and I began to get provoked. I wanted Grant to dry the dishes. I went into the living room and stood by the closed office door, listening.

"It's a great bargain, really a great bargain," the salesman was saying. So–evidently Grant, in his love of conversation and his inability to end one, hadn't yet broken the news to the salesman that we already had a set of the books. Well, I'd take care of that.

I opened the bookcase, took two of the books from the set and went into the office, laying them on the desk where the salesman could see them.

Then I went back and finished washing dishes. And in about two minutes Grant was beside me drying them, a sheepish expression on his face.

Winter came to Banning with grace and beauty. First the most distant, highest ranges of mountains were covered with snow. The majestic San Gorgonio range, to the north of us, looked gigantic and pure under its spotless woolly white blanket. Later in the season the closer mountains were sprinkled with snow, until all the mountains pressing in on the north and the south were white. The wind that still blew continually was crisp, and bright, and cold; and the heat from our little gas wall-heater was a welcome luxury after working outside.

Miss Nesdeburt stopped in one cold morning to pay her rent.

Her blue eyes were sparkling, and I knew she was eager to tell me something. She was humming beneath her breath as she started to write a check.

She hesitated, and pulled off her glasses. "Sometimes I can't see so well through these things!" she confessed. She signed her name on the check, blotted it, and replaced her glasses.

I took the check, thanked her, and gave her the opening she was obviously hoping for by saying, "Well, what did you dream about last night?"

"Oh, I dreamed I was peeling potatoes, wearing an apron, and there was a baby crying."

"And what do you think that dream signifies?" I asked, wondering if she could still be blind to the meaning of her dreams.

"According to Eimo, it means I must beware of a train accident," she said absently. "But that isn't what–I mean–"

"Something has happened," I broke into her confusion. "Tell me about it."

"Well . . ." Miss Nestleburt looked around to be sure there were no eavesdroppers. She leaned her plump little body partially across the desk. "Mr. Hawkins has proposed!"

She clasped her tiny white hands in joyous anticipation of my reaction.

"No!" I exclaimed. "When? How did he lead up to it? Are you going to accept him?"

"Je ne sais pas! It was last night. I–I really don't know if I will or not. Do you think I should?"

"Why, of course! That is, if you love him. And," I added, remembering the transparent dreams to which she had applied such painstakingly roundabout interpretations, "I'm sure you do."

"Yes, I'm sure, too," she admitted. "It's just–"

"Just what?"

Her laughter tinkled uneasily through the office. "Well, it would look so funny, wouldn't it, if he should come to the wedding wearing just red flannel underwear?"

The word "sudden" must have been coined to describe Banning's rainfall. One moment, it isn't raining; the next moment, the ocean itself seems to be streaming down from a sky that's not only weeping, as the poets have it, but actually howling with despair. Lightning etches a crazy brilliant pattern across the path of the rain, and thunder rumbles through San Gorgonio Pass.

It's awe-inspiring and very beautiful–except for the fact that when it rains, the wind-driven water is beaten through the cracks under the doors of the cabins, making a big puddle on each carpet, and unless the windows happened to be shut when the onslought began, the beds and bathrooms are soaked within three minutes.

Before I understood the character of these abrupt downpours, I stood about on one occasion enjoying idly the few drops that spattered down in warning. It was early in the day; most of the cabins were unoccupied, and I had left all the windows of those cabins wide open that morning to give the cabins an extra-special airing out.

An extra-special watering out was what they got, though. About the time it dawned upon me that it was really going to rain hard, it did. I grabbed my pass key out of the office drawer, not awakening Grant, who was sleeping soundly after a long night of pulling customers in. I dashed out into the downpour and hurried along the slippery walk to cabin 2, next to ours, where I yanked the windows shut. The bed in the second bedroom of that cabin was a little damp already.

I took the other cabins, except for the back row of singles, which were occupied, in rotation. I rushed around frantically, the rain beating my face and whipping my hair into my eyes as though it had a personal grudge against me. I was beginning to wish I had awakened Grant so that he could help me close windows, for the beds in several of the cabins were soaked clear through to the mattress pads. I knew, though, that I could finish them now myself sooner than I could go and get him. So I swam grimly to the remaining cabins, closed windows, snatched bath mats from bathrooms and tucked them around the bottoms of the front doors.

At last my battle with Nature was over. I was far from being the victor, but I had done all that I could do for now. I had stripped the more thoroughly soaked beds of their spreads and blankets, and in some cases even of their sheets and mattress pads, to keep the mattresses dry. As I dashed through the pelting water back to our cabin I knew I looked as though someone had taken me by the heels, dipped me into a deep well full of water, squished me about for several minutes, and pulled me out.

I had just gotten inside our cabin, in the blessed dryness and quiet, and was beginning to rip off my wet things, when I realized David wasn't inside. He had been out in the field behind the rear cabins, playing in his tent.

Grant, incredibly, was still sleeping. I felt an overpowering feminine urge to be protected, to stay where it was warm and calm and let him go chasing around out in the storm. But my common sense came to his rescue. After all, I was already dripping; a little more water, and a little more being beaten around, wouldn't make much difference.

I plunged out into the swirling water again. It was hailing now, and little chunks of ice were plopping onto the walk and bouncing up again, and then being rushed away in the streams that swept toward the highway.

I bent my head as I ran along the sidewalk, so that I could breathe what little air there was. If I walked upright, or dared to look toward the furious sky, I was afraid I would drown. Before I got to the end of the sidewalk I collided with David, and I turned around and we both shot toward our cabin.

"It was raining so hard, I couldn't see!" David cried, when we were inside. Water was dripping from the end of his sunburned nose and from his thick black eyelashes. "And big things kept falling out of the sky and hitting me. I didn't think I'd ever get home again."

"You should have stayed in your tent once," observed Grant, who was awake by this time.

Just then the office bell rang. We saw two cars waiting outside the office; the storm had driven the people off the highway, and they wanted cabins.

Grant took pity on me. While I answered the door and let the man who was ringing the bell into the office, Grant put on his raincoat.

"You're wet enough," he remarked to me, as he started out to show the people to their cabins. "I'll take over now."

Fortunately, rains like that didn't come very often. If they had, one of Grant's most effective methods of pulling in customers during the night would have been very uncomfortable.

This method was one that he evolved after the first few nights of staying up. Almost all of our customers came from the East, since the coast was so close to the west of us that people coming from the coast weren't yet ready to stop for the night when they reached Banning. Not until the Palm Springs season opened, when there would be a lot of travel to that resort and to adjacent cities from Los Angeles and Hollywood, would we get any appreciable trade from the west.

A few nights' experience had taught Grant that the cars which were going fast were those whose drivers had no intention of stopping for the night in the vicinity. Therefore, he reasoned, all he had to do was to watch the East for cars that were moving at a moderate or slow rate of speed. Whenever he saw one he went outside quickly, so that he could be strolling back into the office, without seeming to notice them, about the time they reached the motel. That method of getting them in was far more successful than just sitting in the office where they could see him. Besides, the door of the office faced west, and tourists from the east were nearly past before they caught a glimpse of him.

There seemed to be something about the sight of him walking into the office that affected everyone who had any idea of stopping for the night, about the way a kitten is affected by the sight of a piece of string being dragged along in front of it. They couldn't resist coming into the driveway, getting out, and following him right into the office.

Grant's technique developed until it was practically perfect. He never looked directly toward the car he was trying to pull in; that would be too apt to scare the occupants away. For some reason, people don't like to be watched when they are considering stopping at a motel. If they are watched, or even glanced at, they're just as likely as not to drive on to the next motel.

Timing was important. He had to get outside before they saw him, and stroll back into the office so that they could see him in time to turn into the driveway.

His methods were effective only after dark. While it was daylight, the sight of anyone hanging around the office actually seemed to discourage people from coming in. We never could figure that out. Unless, I thought whimsically, daylight afflicts travelers with bashfulness. Whenever a car would slow down during the day, as though it might come in, when I was in or near the office–if I'd glance up at it, it would quicken its speed; and I could almost hear the driver saying, "Oh, horrors, they've noticed us! Come on, let's get going!" Sort of a customerphobia in reverse, I mused.

Our kitchen window faces east, and Grant usually stayed in the kitchen nights, standing by the window watching the highway and passing time by eating various strange concoctions that would be enough to gag a normal person. Whenever he saw a car that looked like a prospect, he hurried outside and went into his act.

I usually began the nightly watch at the kitchen window, being "on duty" from about nine to ten while Grant relaxed and read the paper, or took a little rest in preparation for his long vigil.

Standing at the kitchen window looking at the blackness, broken only by the lights of the service stations, the beacon of the airport, and two motel signs, grew tiresome; and I didn't care to copy Grant's method of entertaining himself by indulging in gustatory nightmares and inviting actual ones. For the first night or two, I contented myself with studying the Peacock's beautiful neon sign–a huge stately blue and red, haughty peacock. That began to pall, though, and my legs got tired. I felt sorry for Grant, who put in hours of this each night after I was in bed. I also felt sorry for myself.

Sitting in a chair, while it would have been far more comfortable than standing, was impossible because of the height of the window. When I sat down, no matter at what distance from the window or at what angle to it, all I could see was a sparkling array of stars. We had no books large enough to build the seat of a chair appreciably higher; and to sit on our thick medical book and a stack of smaller ones would be to ask for a couple of broken ribs.

The typewriter seemed to be the perfect solution. It's a portable, and, enclosed in its case, makes a solid seat. I put it on the chair in the kitchen, sat on top of it, and found that I could see the highway. Whenever I saw headlights of a car coming slowly I told Grant, and he put down his paper to go out after it. During the average early evening–the part that was my shift–there weren't, usually, more than two or three coming slowly enough to rate any attention, so Grant's reading or resting wasn't much disturbed. Of the two or three, he usually managed to get one, so I couldn't use the excuse that it didn't pay, to resign from my boring job.

Even though I was more comfortable, now that I could sit down, I was still bored. I decided to try to read. The impracticality of such frivolity became apparent at once. If I let the book rest on my lap, I had to look downward at it in order to read it. And if I looked downward, I couldn't see the flash of headlights on the highway. The only way I could keep watch on the highway as I read was to hold the book up in front of me, so high that the light of headlights would be visible beneath it, or, for variety, a little lower, so that the headlights would appear above it.

My arms began to ache before I had done that very long. Finally I put my feet on the typewriter case and rested the book on my knees. Except for the fact that I had no backrest, since the typewriter case came most of the way up the back of the chair, I was quite comfortable in this position. The only flaw in the arrangement was that every few seconds I'd catch a glimpse of lights down the highway, and I'd have to stop reading and gauge the speed of the car.

If it was a fast one, I could return to my reading; if it was a slow one, I yelled, "Eep!" at Grant, and he'd go into action. At first I had said to him, when I saw a slow car, "Better go outside, dear. Here comes one that looks like it might stop."–or, "Hurry out there! Here comes a slow one!" But I reasoned that all that was a tremendous waste of energy. After all, he knew perfectly well I wasn't sitting in front of the kitchen window in such an uncomfortable position because I thought it would improve my complexion. He knew why I was sitting there, and there was no need for me to launch into detailed explanations whenever I saw a slow car. So I saved time and energy by simply remarking "Eep"; and he always knew exactly what I meant.

Cars came dribbling along the highway every few seconds, and although the actual prospects were few, the interruptions to my reading were many. I seldom was able to finish two consecutive sentences before the twinkle of headlights dragged me away from the printed words.

Sometimes I thought it might be easier just to give up the idea of reading.

It was difficult, too, to keep up with my writing. If I tried to write in our own cabin, the proximity of Grant and the children, and their noise, made it impossible for me to concentrate. And Grant didn't like having me go to cabin 15 for a few hours at a time, since that left him with a lot to handle. For a time I kept my writing to a minimum, neglecting every phase of it except a monthly feature I was doing regularly for a women's digest magazine. I grew very dissatisfied with the unproductiveness of my daily routine, though, and told Grant I must start writing again. He agreed to take over the entire responsibility of the place and the children during the baby's afternoon nap if I'd be gone only an hour; at any time after an hour, the baby might wake up and it was difficult for him to manage her and wait on customers at the same time.

The children were both in bed by seven-thirty every night, and each night at seven-thirty-five I went back to cabin 15, with my writing paraphernalia and my watch and a match to light the heater, to stay until nine, when I'd go back to look out the kitchen window for slow cars. (On the nights when we didn't have many vacancies left at that time, and it looked as though number 15 might be rented soon, I went into our kitchen to write, after first extracting a solemn promise–a new one each night–from Grant that he would keep out.)

Sometimes after I'd get across the driveways and the grass islands into number 15, it would start to rain. There was something wonderful about that, and yet it gave me a lost feeling too, knowing that my family was snug in a cabin across the chasm of downpour, while I was here alone. When it rained I usually spent as much time watching it as I did writing. I opened the door to a blast of cold air, and the sight of a lead-colored, darkening sky. Or I looked through the slats of the Venetian blind. I could see the sparkle-spattered highway shimmering like a smooth sheet of glass, glittering with the reflection of lights from the service stations, and rippled by the gusts of cold wind that danced continually across it. There were pools of black water in the gravel of our driveways, and the Chinese elms waved their wet, lacy branches mournfully. The neon signs glowed through the rain, and water trickled off the curbs of the islands of grass and the island of geraniums beneath our sign. Thunder shook all of San Gorgonio Pass intermittently, and lightning flashed the trees to a wet, brilliant green. The fury of it, and my own solitude, filled me with a kind of exultation.

Rainy weather never interfered much with David's school. We always drove him to the school, which was about a mile away, and got him after school. I usually drove him to school in the morning with Donna sitting primly in the back seat; by afternoon Grant was awake, and he picked him up after school.

David was experiencing the usual juvenile difficulties in learning to spell "cat" and "dog" and in mastering the shape and sounds of the multitude of confusing squiggles that made up the alphabet. During the first few weeks of school his class learned the first half of the alphabet.

One day David came home and told me happily that he was getting ahead of his class. Moejy, who was in the last half of the second grade, was helping him, he explained.

He exhibited a sheet of hieroglyphics, and said proudly, "I've memmerized every one of them! Moejy told me how each one sounds. This one, like a 'S' with a tail, is a 'doo'. And this one here's a 'sof'."

The marks on the paper were meaningless lines and curlicues; yet, to the untrained eye of a child they might look as much like letters as real letters do, I realized.

"I'm afraid Moejy has been fooling you," I said gently. "Those aren't real letters. They're just scribbling. They aren't anything at all."

David was furious. He pulled a long string of gum from his mouth, drawing it out so far that it broke. "All that memmerizing for nothing!" he wailed, picking the sticky gum from his chin. "Just wait'll I get my hands on that Moejy! I'll–"