Four and Twenty Beds

FOUR AND TWENTY BEDS

By

Nancy Vogel

New York: The Beechhurst Press

Copyright 1950, by Mrs. Nancy Vogel

[Chapter One]
[Chapter Two]
[Chapter Three]
[Chapter Four]
[Chapter Five]
[Chapter Six]
[Chapter Seven]
[Chapter Eight]
[Chapter Nine]
[Chapter Ten]
[Chapter Eleven]
[Chapter Twelve]
[Chapter Thirteen]
[Chapter Fourteen]
[Chapter Fifteen]
[Chapter Sixteen]
[Chapter Seventeen]
[About the Author]

CHAPTER ONE

ANYONE CAN MANAGE a motel successfully--anyone who can subsist on meals snatched a mouthful at a time, and requires no sleep; anyone who is a mechanic, gardener, publicity agent, handyman, psychologist, carpenter, and midwife combined; anyone who can cheerfully greet as "Mrs. Beaulabottom" each of the various women who accompanies salesman Mr. Beulabottom on his frequent trips; anyone who is gregarious to the point of welcoming the strangers who will witness, interrupt, and discuss the intimate details of his life.

I'm shy, poor at dealing with people, helpless, lazy, and definitely the clinging vine type. The extra-curricular activities of the average husband shock me. I like to eat leisurely meals, and to sleep nine or ten hours a night; and the prime requirement of my soul is privacy.

I love the motel business.

My husband, Grant, is the one who possesses the qualifications that make our partnership in this business a success. He is efficient, patient (if there is money in it) and ingenious--and buying a motel was his idea in the first place.

It was all very sudden.

For a month Los Angeles had been having the kind of weather the Chamber of Commerce members mention only in whispers. Grant and I and our two children had colds, already a month old, which the fog and dampness were cherishing lovingly. Memorial Day and a weekend had been courteous enough to get together and arrange a three-day holiday; and so we decided to take a trip to the desert.

We stopped in Banning, a little town on the edge of the Mojave desert which boasts both altitude (2350 feet) and dryness, and which is popular with sufferers from all kinds of bronchial and respiratory troubles. Banning is about ninety miles from Los Angeles, and has a population of under eight thousand. It has a lot of motels, and of these we selected the one we considered the most attractive, and engaged a cabin for the next three nights.

The Moonrise Motel was a big, new, sparkling-white, green-shuttered structure, shaped a little like a horseshoe with its open end toward the highway. Wide graveled driveways curved in front of the cabins and around three central islands of grass. The interior of our cabin--artistically plastered, carpeted, well-furnished, and with superlatively rich details--was in keeping with the exterior. From the beginning I was awed by the beauty and the size of the motel, but no premonitory tickle hinted to me the incredible fact that within two months it would be ours. After unloading the car, we put David and Donna into the back seat again and drove around idly exploring Banning. Trees and flowers flourished everywhere, and high, rocky, beautiful mountains towered close toward the north and south and more distantly in the east.

"Let's move to Banning," I said. "Perfect scenery, perfect climate--what more could we want?"

Grant looked at me. He has a habit of simply looking at me on the occasions when he thinks I am more stupid than usual--a look that any fair-minded judge would consider ample grounds for divorce. Fortunately his endearing qualities so far outweigh his annoying ones that I have never considered testing any judge's fair-mindedness. The last time Grant gave me that look was when I came home from an antique shop with five perfectly matched silver deer bookends. The deer were bent forward in attitudes of straining, so that when their antlered heads were placed against a row of books they appeared to be holding them up by sheer force of muscle.

"But why five bookends?" Grant had asked, exasperated.

He is very unimaginative and practical. There's no use in trying to explain to a person of his type what effect the contents of an antique shop can have on a susceptible browser. Besides, I always get too mad to say anything at all when he looks at me like that.

And now he was giving me that same look.

"I'll speak to the manager of General Motors about moving the Los Angeles factory to Banning," he said.

It was hot, but there was a cooling wind all afternoon, and when we went to bed it was so chilly that it felt good to snuggle under the blankets. The children were asleep in their bed, and we lay there and talked--or, rather, I did.

"How much do you suppose a motel like this is worth?"

"Uh . . . uh . . . mm h'm."

"Let's see, they have fourteen cabins," I went on. "I counted them. The owners live in one, so that leaves thirteen to rent. There are eight other cabins that seem to be as big as this one, with two rooms, and they must get six and a half dollars a night for them, like they do for this one. And then those four cabins in the back; they seem to be smaller, just one room and one bed, probably, but they must bring in at least three or four dollars a night. Why, this place must earn about seventy dollars a night! Why, that's over two thousand a month!"

"Uh."

"And what wouldn't I do with two thousand dollars a month," I went on reverently.

Grant, it seemed was more than half awake, after all. "I don't know what you wouldn't do," he said, "but I know what you would do. You'd quick go to some junk shop and buy three earrings. You'd come home with half a pair of scissors, or one giant size bronze shoe tree."

"Seriously, though," I said, "Why don't we buy a motel--this very one, maybe? It would pay for itself in a few years, and then--"

"Uh. Mm h'm."

While he slept, I lay there and thought about going into the motel business. Grant could quit his job at General Motors, and together we could keep the cabins clean and the place looking its best. The more I thought about it, the more excited I became.

In the morning we drove into the business district of Banning, about a mile from the Moonrise Motel, and went into Pillyer's cafe, for breakfast. Pillyer was a thin, stooped old man with an embittered expression and a few lonely hairs on a broad expanse of skull.

"What's he mad about, Mama?" David whispered, when Pillyer had taken our orders and disappeared into the dim regions beyond the counter.

"Probably because everyone calls him Pill," I ventured.

Grant shifted Donna onto his other knee, feeling her diaper gingerly. He took a sip of water, and drummed his lean fingers on the counter.

"How would you like to go into the motel business?" he asked me.

I gasped for air.

"I've been figuring," he said. "Why, I'll bet a horned toad the Moonrise takes in two thousand a month. Say they want fifty thousand for the place, it would just about pay itself off, interest and expenses and all, in three years. It sounds pretty good to me. What do you think--shall we look into it?"

As I said, our going into the motel business was all Grant's idea.

While Donna took her nap that afternoon, and David alternately dug in the gravel and drew out from his mouth for inspection a long string of gum, we lay in the sunshine on one of the green islands and talked feverishly. Grant had been wanting to get away from factory work; for a year he had been looking around in his spare time for a profitable business. He had wanted an automobile agency or a farm implement agency, but now he was willing to give up those plans in favor of getting a motel. Ever since our marriage six years ago we had saved our money; aside from our house and furniture, our only big expenses had been David, born five years ago, and Donna, born one year ago. We hoped that what we had saved--five thousand dollars--would be enough for a down payment on a motel.

When I saw the manager of the motel digging weeds out of the gravel I sauntered up to him and engaged him in a long conversation that dealt with everything from black widow spiders to the cost of living, and worked itself slowly to the subject of motels.

I told him frankly that we were thinking of going into the motel business, and asked if the Moonrise happened to be for sale.

He was a handsome, stocky man whose face dripped water continually. Sweat rolled in oily beads from his eyebrows, from his chin, and from the end of his nose, and it ran in a rivulet down the vertical wrinkle above his nose.

"Yes," he said, wiping the perspiration from his forehead with the back of his hand. "We've just decided to put it up for sale. The income varies from fifteen hundred to over two thousand, depending on the season. Wonderful climate, here in the San Gorgonio Pass, even if it is a little windy sometimes. It's a new motel, six months old; all the furniture is maple, everything brand new. Sixty-seven thousand."

I gulped. "And--how much down?" I asked timidly.

"Thirty thousand."

It was my turn to wipe away perspiration.

We spent the remaining days of our vacation haunting real estate offices and discovering that there was nothing new and nice for less than thirty thousand down.

We went back to Los Angeles, but we hadn't given up the idea of getting a motel. Every day for nearly a month, while Grant was working, I studied the classified sections of the papers and called real estate brokers. We even went to look at a few motels that were within our means, but they didn't seem to be worth the money--and, after the Moonrise, everything looked cheap and shabby and old.

It was exactly a month after we had first seen the Moonrise that we left the children with Grandma and took another trip to Banning. Perhaps somewhere in that lovely little city, we thought, we might find another motel that would satisfy us--and that we could afford.

But first, before driving around, we had to see the Moonrise again. Grant drove slowly as the Moonrise Motel came into view, and I looked wistfully out the window. The sun gleamed on the white stucco, and the bright green shutters were magnets to the eye.

"Isn't it beautiful?" I asked sadly.

"Look!" Grant exclaimed. "There's the manager, out digging weeds! Let's stop once and talk to him."

Grant is of Holland Dutch ancestry, a fact which shows itself principally in his tendency to insert a "once" or a "quick" into as many of his sentences as possible. He doesn't fall back on the superfluous "yet's" and "already's" that sprinkle the speech of his relatives, but his method of expressing himself is rather quaint.

(It was in a very quaint way, in fact, that he proposed to me. "Let's get married once," he said. I was so intrigued by his way of putting it that I agreed.)

The manager of the motel took out a large, clean handkerchief and mopped his face and neck when we drove in.

"You folks bought a motel yet?" he wanted to know.

"Nope," Grant said. "We've been looking around, but we can't find anything we like as well as this."

The stocky man wiped his face again, and I noticed that under the moisture of his skin there was a yellowish pallor.

"Got to sell now," he said. "I'm sick; going to a sanitarium the minute I get this place off my hands. You can have it for sixty-three thousand, five hundred."

"But the down payment ..." I said.

"You got fifteen thousand?"

Grant and I looked at each other. During the last month we had asked a real estate broker what we could get for our home, if we wanted to raise some money in a hurry. Eight thousand, he had told us.

That, with the five we had saved, would make thirteen thousand. Our furniture should bring close to a thousand, and we could borrow the rest from Grandma.

After six years, we were able to read each other's thoughts pretty well.

"Yep, we could raise fifteen thousand," Grant told the motel manager.

And that was the beginning.

When the deal was in escrow we advertised in the local newspaper that we had furniture for sale. The manager's apartment at the motel was completely furnished, and we intended to keep only our washing machine, our book-case, and the children's beds.

It was to be a thirty day escrow, but we wanted to begin selling our furniture immediately. Last minute sales usually bring low prices, Grant pointed out, and we needed every penny we could get. We could only hope that non-essential furniture, like rugs, end tables, and lamps, would be the first to go.

When I was a child--a typically selfish and demanding one--Grandma used to remind me "it ain't what you want that makes you fat, by gorry, it's what you get."

What we got, immediately after our ad was printed, was a fat, heavily perfumed woman who bought our dining room set and our kitchen table--items which we had hoped to keep until the last week before we left. Her husband, she said, would bring a trailer and get the tables later in the afternoon.

I stood in the doorway a while after she had gone, looking at the quiet little street where we had lived for six years. Palm trees rose majestically from the parkways, one in front of every house. The houses were neat, stucco squares set close together behind green lawns, and a brooding afternoon quiet hung over the neighborhood.

Our own house, too, was white stucco set behind a green lawn. The white stucco was trimmed with violet where Donna had rubbed it with a crayon, and there were patches of dirt in the grass where David and his friends had staged a "rasslin match." But it was home; I had come here as a bride, and my babies had been born here. Life at the motel would never be as smooth and peaceful as life here had been.

A wail from the bedroom announced that Donna was awake. It was time for David to come crashing home from kindergarten. I was busy with the children for about an hour, and then I heard heavy footsteps on the porch.

A round little man was standing there. "I come for the tables," he explained, taking the cap off his small basketball of a head.

"Oh, yes--come in."

He clumped into the house and began loading the two tables and the chairs onto a trailer. When he had gone Donna pointed to the spot where the kitchen table had stood.

"All gone," she mourned.

"All gone is right," I said grimly. "But at least we still have your high chair." I lifted her into it and tied a diaper around her fat middle, pulling it around the bars of her chair so that she couldn't climb out.

The doorbell rang.

"Hawve you a bedroom set for sale?" asked the tall, thin woman who stood at the door.

I showed her the bedroom set. She examined it through a lorgnette, thumped the mattress with a long, bony hand, and demanded to know how much I was "awsking" for it.

I told her.

She bought it.

"The moving vawn will be along in an hour," she informed me briskly, and she was gone.

I addressed the kitchen sink bitterly. "Is there any particular reason," I inquired of it, "why they have to buy our most necessary possessions first? Somewhere in this city are the people who are going to buy our lamps and end tables; what are they waiting for? I suppose they're going to be sweet about it and let us have the use of them until the day before we leave."

I was in a bad mood when Grant got home from work. He started to put his lunch bucket where the kitchen table should have been. He put it on the sink instead and asked me why I looked so unhappy.

"They bought our kitchen table and our dining room set and the bedroom set," I wailed.

"For the price we wanted?"

I nodded miserably.

"Wonderful!" He seized me in his grease-stained hands and swung me above his head.

"You won't think it's so wonderful after you've slept on the floor a few nights," I prophesied grimly.

The doorbell rang. "Ah," I said, "it must be the moving vawn."

While two muscular men dismantled the bedroom set and carried it out, I prepared dinner. I had no idea how or where we were going to eat it, but I decided not to face that problem until it came.

It came soon enough. The moving van had gone, taking with it all hope for the next month's nocturnal comfort, and the potatoes were done. The pork chops were brown and sizzling, and the peas were steaming.

I pondered.

Should we put the plates on the kitchen floor and squat around them?

That wouldn't be very comfortable.

I could put the breadboard over the bathroom sink, making a small table out of it. David and I could sit on the edge of the bathtub, and Grant could sit on the--

No, that wouldn't do.

I settled it by filling our plates and carrying them into the living room. Grant's and David's plates I set on each arm of the davenport. I put my own plate on an arm of the overstuffed chair. The salt, pepper, bread and butter were in the middle of the living room floor.

"Are you still glad we sold our tables?" I asked Grant, when we had started eating.

He's always willing to put up with a little inconvenience if there's profit in it.

"Yep," he said. "If we hadn't quick sold them the first day, it might have turned out that no one would want them at all, and we'd have to come way down in the price. Please pass the bread."

"Just the same," I said, getting down on my hands and knees to get him a piece of bread, "I'm going to add twenty dollars to what we planned on asking for the living room set. If anyone wants it tomorrow they're going to have to really pay for it!"

"You split your infilitive, Mama," David said.

There's one thing that must be said for David. Maybe he does usually sound more like a herd of elephants than like one small, agreeable little boy, and maybe he does create a very reasonable facsimile of chaos when he gets hold of a piece of gum--but he recognizes a split infinitive when he hears it. My friends all think he's an infant prodigy--in that one respect, anyway. But sometimes I wish I'd never taught him anything about grammar. I didn't know what a split infinitive was until I was in high school, and I got along just as well without knowing. I never made Grandma want to swing me by the heels and smack my head against a wall, either.

"I'm very sorry I split an infinitive," I told David. "I'll try to be more careful in the future. But just the same," I went on, turning back to Grant, "whoever buys that living room set is going to really pay for it!"

"Fine," Grant said, getting up and going into the kitchen; "the more money we can raise, the better." He came back carrying a jar of horseradish; he sat down and put some horseradish on his plate, and proceeded to mix it thoroughly with his peas.

One of the strangest things about Grant, hardly compatible with the efficiency and practicality of his nature, is his passion for weird combinations of food. I have learned to look the other way while he improves upon what I have prepared; if I were to watch while he mixes and eats his little gastronomical horrors, I doubt if I'd be able to do much eating myself.

I slept--or, rather, spent the night--on the davenport, and Grant slept in David's twin-size bed with David. In the middle of the night I sat up and felt the welts across my back that the ridges in the davenport cushions had made. I went through the empty bedroom where our lovely, comfortable bed used to be, into the children's bedroom.

Grant was lying slantwise across David's bed, with David draped across him. The baby was sleeping peacefully on her stomach in her crib. I considered crawling in with her, but I was afraid the crib wouldn't hold an additional hundred and twelve pounds.

I went back into the living room, put another blanket over the davenport cushions to cover the ridges more thoroughly, and lay down again.

After breakfast I felt more kindly toward the davenport, though. In our hour of need it was serving as table, chairs, and bed. What were a few welts in the face of all that?

Just then the doorbell rang. It was a short, dark, bristling man who actually tinkled whenever he moved. I was so fascinated by this discovery that he was inside the house punching at the davenport before I realized that he wanted my precious living room set.

"How much?" he shot at me suddenly.

I told him, adding twenty dollars to the price we had originally planned to ask for the set.

"Fine! Sold!" he barked, tinkling as he peeled off crisp green bills into my hands.

"What are you staring at?" he cried.

I backed away timidly. "It's just that--that noise you make," I said. "I was just wondering--"

He put a thumb under the watch chain that was draped against his vest and thrust it out where I could see it. There was a tiny golden bell attached to the chain.

He let go of the chain suddenly and strode to the overstuffed chair, picking it up as though it had been a child's chair.

"Open the door, please."

He loaded the chair and davenport onto his pickup truck and drove away.

I sat down in the middle of the living room floor, my hands full of the crisp green bills, and burst into tears.

The rest of that month crawled by. I visualized the angel in charge of time chortling and slowing down the time machine so that he'd have longer to watch us sitting on boxes and eating from boxes, and to watch me sleeping on the floor--which I chose in preference to sleeping with David and being kicked all night.

The general inconvenience, and living in such a state of upset and excitement, didn't seem to bother Grant very much. What annoyed him most about the whole proceeding, I think, was the fact that since a part of our savings was in small government bonds that had to be cashed, he'd had to sign his name and address seventy-five times. He learned from experience what the term "writer's cramp" means.

We had sold our home, of course, getting all cash for it and retaining possession of it until the day we were to take over the motel. Actually it was the real estate broker whose advice we had asked about its value, who bought it. The rise in prices that followed the war had made it worth a lot more than we paid for it, and we knew that the realtor too would make a profit on it. But we needed the cash in a hurry, so we were glad to sell it to him.

Grandma had lent us two thousand dollars. Grandma is a short, sturdy widow without a lazy bone in her body or a wrinkle in her face. Her eighty-year-old "boyfriend," Hellwig, had offered us five hundred dollars more, but we thought we'd be able to get along without the bachelor's mite.

That made our fifteen thousand. What we got for the furniture, and Grant's weekly paychecks from General Motors, would have to see us through the moving and whatever extra expenses might come up.

Our furniture kept selling steadily, and I put a lot of our accumulated, surplus household goods on display, too. We wouldn't have room for it in the new place; I was resolved to get rid of as much of it as I possibly could.

The woman who bought our lamps and rugs, a Mrs. Alexander, kept coming back to see what else I'd brought out from closets and drawers in the way of household goods. Every time she came, she bought several armloads of things. Toward the end of the month, when nearly everything was gone, she even bought our half-empty cans and jars of spices and cereals, and on her next trip she bought Grant's rusty tools and half-used cans of paint. She bought at least twenty dollars worth of junk that we would otherwise have thrown away. I couldn't help wondering what her house must look like. She had probably been acquiring things as avidly as this ever since she got married. I even sold her the five silver deer bookends!

We were all getting very tired of eating and sitting on boxes.

"I never want to see another box, once we get away from here," I said. "Just think, some day all of this will be only a memory. Some day I'll sleep on a bed again, and we'll have chairs to sit on, and a real table to eat from. Someday, this will all be over."

And then, suddenly, it was. Suddenly it was the day before we were to leave, and there was a flurry of last minute packing to do, and a last night of sleeping on the hard floor, and then it was the Saturday we were to take possession of the motel.

Grant hadn't given up his job. Our monthly payments on the first and second trust deeds were to be three hundred dollars each (one of them would be four hundred after the first of the year) and he didn't dare to quit his job until we had a little money saved. We'd get settled this first weekend, and after that I'd have to manage the place alone, while he came back to Los Angeles to work. He would live with Grandma, in her apartment.

I had been so busy selling things and packing, all month, that I hadn't had time to become frightened at the prospect, but now, putting the last of our things in the two-wheeled trailer Grant had borrowed from a friend, I found myself dwelling upon it more and more, and feeling more and more certain that I'd never be able to do it. Even the average woman might not succeed at a new job of such proportions, and anyway, the resemblance between me and the average woman is purely superficial. I am the type who would call in a plumber to put a new washer in a faucet. I remember that on one occasion when, with unusual brilliance and energy, I tightened a screw with a knife, it was weeks before I finished telling people about my exploit.

When everything was packed on the trailer and squeezed into the back seat of the car, I took the camera out of the glove compartment. I handed it to Grandma and told her to take a picture of us, with the loaded trailer as background.

Grant is inclined to be a little impatient when he has a big job ahead. "Come on, come on, we haven't got time to be fooling with pictures," he said.

"Oh, yes we have," I said firmly. "This is a historic occasion, and we must have a picture of it."

Grumbling, he came to stand beside me. I held Donna in my arms, and David stood beside Grant. Grandma focused the camera and took our picture.

I put the camera back into the glove compartment, and kissed a weeping Grandma goodbye.

"They wun't nothing seem right, with you folks gone!" she exclaimed.

I told her to say goodbye to Hellwig for us, and I climbed into the front seat with the children. I took a last look at our prim white house, gleaming in the morning sunlight, and at all the other prim houses on the palm-lined street.

Then Grant started the car, and we were off!

CHAPTER TWO

IT WAS A long, hot, uncomfortable ride. The children, who ordinarily ride in the back seat, had to ride in front because the back seat was piled to the ceiling with clothes, pans, boxes and suitcases.

Grant had fastened an old blanket over the trailer to protect its contents from dirt and wind. It wouldn't stay fastened, though, and when we were on the highway headed toward Banning he had to stop the car and get out about every ten minutes to adjust it and to see how the things in the trailer were riding. The ironing board was slowly working its way loose from the ropes with which he had tied it to David's bed. Several books had slid forward from the crevice where I had tucked them, and their pages were fluttering and waving as though, I thought sentimentally, in farewell to the life we had known.

"Those mmm things," Grant mumbled.

I had put a lot of the odds and ends we hadn't been able to sell, and that Grant wouldn't let me throw away, into some small cardboard boxes. I had packed these onto the rear of the trailer with my own little lily-white hands, giving Grant another occasion for disgust at my inefficiency. For now, one by one, they were freeing themselves and plopping onto the road. After a few stops, to pick up the boxes and try to repack them in a trailer that was so loaded there was no room for them, Grant gave up the time-wasting game. When one of the cardboard boxes dropped off, slapping itself against the highway, he'd just let it go, and keep on driving.

I was very happy over the situation. I hadn't wanted to take all those unnecessary articles along with us to our new tiny living quarters anyway. Every time a box fell off, I looked back to be sure it wasn't something else--something we'd have to stop for. "This is just like Hansel and Gretel," I told Grant cheerfully.

The baby got tired of being so crowded, and she began to cry. David was restless, and Grant was getting more and more provoked with the way the things on the trailer were unpacking themselves. We were driving through beautiful scenery--orange groves and tall palm trees with their dead branches drooping like old-fashioned pantalettes, and mountains in the background--but none of us paid much attention to it. We were too anxious to get the trip over with.

When we got to the Moonrise Motel, after a three-hour drive, the manager and his wife were ready to leave. They gave us the keys, and showed us briefly how they registered guests and how they kept track of the laundry; and, assuring us that people wouldn't start coming for cabins until evening, they got into their car and left. A lost, scared feeling spread from my chest to my stomach as I realized that from now on, what ever might happen, we ourselves would have to handle it.

A hot, hot wind was blowing from the east, across the desert. Perspiration dribbled down our faces and necks as we got to work.

When we had unpacked the trailer and had lunch, Grant set up the baby's crib and I put her to bed for her nap. Then I went outside to see if the place looked any different, now that it was actually ours.

The motel is built in three sections, which are arranged in the shape of a square-cornered U, with the open end toward the highway. The angles of the U are disconnected; the three sections are separate buildings. The back section, parallel to the highway, consists of four single, externally joined cabins without garages.

The other two sections of the motel, facing each other across the wide driveways and the islands of cool-looking grass between them, are identical. Each consists of five double cabins with garages between. There is no cabin number 13, and for some strange reason, no number 5; so our fourteen cabins are numbered up to 16. Cabin 16 is the one directly opposite the one we live in, which is number 1. Cabins 16 and 1 are the closest to the highway, only sixty feet from that roaring, screaming wide ribbon that is flung across the burning desert and stretches clear through to the coast.

The three islands of grass are surrounded by white cement curbs, and the graveled driveways curve around and between the islands as well as in a direct path in front of every cabin. Each island of lawn has three small Chinese elm trees, and the nine trees form a prim, straight row.

In front of the motel is a big green and red neon sign which says "Moonrise Motel." Directly beneath that is a smaller sign saying "no vacancy," or, if the metal cover is over the "no," saying "vacancy." The sign is double; each "no" has a cover.

Behind the four rear cabins which face the highway is half an acre of rocky, desert ground, with a bumpy private road on one side leading from our driveways back through one of the open angles of the U to the dirt road, Williams street, at the end of our property line, which runs parallel with the highway and leads into town.

I wandered out behind the rear cabins and looked at our big back yard. After six years of living in the crowded outskirts of a big city, that barren half-acre looked like a little chunk of heaven. It was a safety valve as far as the busy highway was concerned. We would fix it up so that the children could play out here happily and safely. We could plant an orchard. We could even build a little house out here for Grandma. The opportunities presented by that half acre of ground were limitless. But that would all come in the future. Right now, there was the present to consider.

I stood at the edge of the highway and looked in each direction. We are nearly a mile from the business district of Banning, and that mile is thick with motels. Directly west of us is a new restaurant, and east, toward the desert, there are only a few motels between us and the Mojave. Across the highway are a cocktail lounge, several small motels and two service-station markets. Beyond those, I saw the beautiful ranges of mountains, with the afternoon sun forming little cups of shadow, like dark dimples, on their steep sides--Mt. San Gorgonio towering on the north, and Mt. San Jacinto rearing its lovely head on the south.

I breathed deeply. Banning had a scent all its own, one I had noticed before--a scent compounded of freshness and clear skies and blossoms, and the essence of the mountains. My tour of inspection completed, I went back into our cabin. It was small, but so attractive and so new that living in it, I thought, should be more pleasant than in our old home in Los Angeles. There was a large living room, which contained, besides the usual amount of living room furniture, the bed we would sleep on; a small kitchen, and a bathroom and closet; and the adjoining garage at the time was half converted into a bedroom--that is, two windows and a cement floor had been put in it, and a door connected it with the living room. Unfinished as that bedroom was, the children would have to sleep in it.

The office was actually the partitioned-off front part of the children's bedroom. It was completed, and plastered to match the rest of the interior, with dull red broadfelt carpeting like that in all the cabins. There was a large built-in desk in the office--chest high, to be stood at rather than sat at--with registration cards and a desk set on top of it.

We finished unpacking and storing our belongings in the few inadequate drawers and shelves. Donna was still asleep in her crib, and David was out exploring.

Grant and I sat down and looked at each other.

Grant has blue eyes and coarse brown hair, just as I do. Our children never had a chance to have different coloring; they, too, have brown hair and blue eyes. David has long black curly lashes, and thick hair, while Donna's hair is so fine it won't even hold a bobby pin or a ribbon. It grows straight forward on her head, and usually hangs down over her face. We call her "Little Chief Hair-in-the-Face." I have consistently refused to have her hair cut into bangs, in spite of the arguments of Grant and Grandma. "It'll grow long enough to curl or braid one of these days," I always tell them.

"Well," Grant said, "it's five o'clock--about time we were getting our first customer."

He is tall and slenderly built, and so wonderfully competent--even if he isn't very systematic--that I always feel awkward by contrast. But I never in my life felt so helpless as when, just as he finished speaking, we heard the scrunch of tires on the graveled driveway outside.

"Oh, someone's coming," I said nervously. "You go see who it is. You go."

I sat in a corner of the living room where I could hear and not be seen from the office. I alternately twisted my hands and bit my nails as Grant opened the office door and stepped out to meet the driver of the car. This was a momentous occasion. I strained to hear as the men began to speak.

"This motel's just changed hands, hasn't it?"

"Yep, that's right."

"Well, I've got something here that I know will interest you, as the new owner. A revolutionary kind of vacuum cleaner ... cuts your work and your cleaning bill in half ... no motel owner should be without one."

I sighed and relaxed.

If the rule is true that women are the worst gossips, Grant must be the exception that proves that rule. He can outtalk any woman; he has more endurance, more lung power, and far more enthusiasm, when it comes to a prolonged conversation on any subject, than any avid old lady, or any young girl draped about a telephone. This habit of his annoys me, partly because he usually indulges it just when I have some work for him to do, and partly because I am jealous of his ability to get along well with everyone. I have such a shy nature that I am seldom able to get past the polite amenities with anyone whom I have known less than three years ... a great disadvantage for anyone as extremely inquisitive and curious as I.

Being so talkative, and so unable to end a conversation, Grant is easy prey for salesmen. That is, although he seldom buys what they are trying to sell, he lets them waste hours of his time.

When Grant finally got rid of the vacuum cleaner salesman, I went in to get the baby. The conversation about vacuum cleaners had awakened her. It wasn't, I realized, the last time that noises from the office, so close to her bed, would awaken her.

I fixed dinner, clumsy in a new, differently arranged kitchen. While I washed dishes, Grant dried them, and there followed an uneasy evening during which we both pretended to read, but actually sat straining to hear above the children's voices the sound of a car driving into our driveway.

The sun was sinking, and the mountains were clothed in soft shadows. I stood looking out the kitchen window, which faced the darkened east, and I saw the neon sign of the second motel from us turned on. It was a big, impressive sign, with the name of the motel--the Peacock--in bright red letters, and a green "vacancy" sign above it. There was the likeness of a huge, stately, graceful peacock above the name of the motel, blazoned in bright blue and red neon.

"Our sign!" I exclaimed suddenly. "It's time to turn it on!"

Grant had thought of it the same instant I had, and, like greedy children with a new toy, we rushed to the dark office. The light switches--five of them--were side by side in a neat and very confusing little row on the wall behind the desk.

I yanked Grant's outstretched hand aside. "I want to do it!"

He offered a compromise. "We'll take turns once."

"All right. Me first!"

I hovered over the switches with loving indecision. Finally I pushed up the one on the extreme right.

The office light beamed suddenly on us from the ceiling. "Oh, that isn't fair!" I cried. "I didn't know that was the office light--I didn't--"

"You had your turn," Grant said firmly. He reached out one thin brown finger and flipped up the switch that was second from the left. I looked out the window woefully. Sure enough, he had lit up the "Moonrise Motel" part of the sign.

"You've been experimenting," I accused him. "You knew that was the right switch."

I should have realized he'd know all about the switches. He always investigates everything, and if there is something he doesn't know how to do, he learns how. He's a jack of all trades--and a master of all of them, too! Usually that makes me very proud of him, but right now I was just exasperated. "Now I'm going to turn on the 'vacancy' sign," I said, jabbing grimly at another switch.

Grant laughed. "You turned on the porch light outside the office door." He put his finger on a switch. "Now look out the window."

I looked out, and saw the green "vacancy" spring into brilliant being.

Furiously I flipped up the other switch. That, it developed, lit up the red "office" sign outside and above the office door.

It was a beautiful evening. After the hot day the breeze was cooling and refreshing. The branches of the slender little Chinese elms waved gently.

When I had put the children to bed Grant said, "It's too nice to be inside. Let's go outside once." We sat on the curb of the front island of grass and watched our sign proudly. The island in which the sign stood was planted in myrtle and bright Martha Washington geraniums, and now, with the reflection of the soft neon light on them, they were a mass of color.

Cars were thick in front of the cocktail lounge across the street. Every once in a while a car, leaving, would make a turn in the highway preparatory to going back to the business district, and we'd catch our breaths.

"I thought sure that one was coming in," Grant remarked, at intervals, about five times while we sat there. And then suddenly the neon lights flickered and went out, leaving a complete and utter blackness.

We sat there, horrified. Without a neon sign, there wasn't the slightest possibility that any of the cars on the highway would stop at our motel . . . indeed, their drivers couldn't possibly realize that there was a motel here at all.

By the light of a match. Grant called up the electricity company. No doubt twenty other people were calling them, too, but he wanted to be sure they'd have the lines repaired at once. I happened to remember that I had put some candles on one of the shelves under the kitchen sink. We lighted two candles, setting one in a saucer on the desk in the office, and the other in the living room.

The electricity was off until after eleven-thirty. It wasn't the whole city of Banning that was affected; just an area of about two blocks, starting with us and extending west, toward the business district. The Peacock's sign was blazing twice as brightly beside all that darkness, and every once in a while a car left the surge of traffic and slipped into the Peacock's driveway.

And then, at nearly midnight, our sign flashed on again. Of course all the other signs did too, but ours was the only one we saw, even though its modest, steady colors were put to shame by the flashing red, white and blue eye of the Winking Eye, the second motel to the west of us. The lights hadn't been on ten minutes when a sleek black sedan nosed into our driveway.

"A customer!" Grant exclaimed.

"You go, you go," I chattered, wondering how on earth I'd manage when he went back to Los Angeles and I'd have to overcome my shyness and talk to our customers myself.

But Grant was already approaching the driver.

I was sitting on the curb of the island, and I couldn't quite hear their voices. But after a few seconds of conversation the man got out of the car and followed Grant into one of the cabins. Then he went back with Grant into the office. "He's registering!" I thought with awe.

Presently the man came out of the office, got back into his car and drove into the garage adjoining the cabin he had looked at. I could see now that there were two people in the back seat.

I hurried into the office, where Grant, with a dazed expression, stood looking at a five dollar bill and a fifty-cent piece.

"Our first money from the motel," he said. "Shall we frame it?"

There was no door between the office and our living room. The whole interior of the cabin was lighted up by our neon sign. When we lay in bed we could see the desk in the office; and, conversely, people standing in the office would be able to see us.

Grant hung a filmy curtain over the doorway, fastening it at the top with thumb tacks. When the office light was on and the living room light was off, we discovered by experimentaion, it was possible to see from the living room into the office, but not the reverse.

That, I reflected as I lay in bed, would be very cozy. I'd be able to lie in bed and watch while people filled out registration cards (which would be a soothing agent to my rather abnormal curiosity)--but they wouldn't be able to see me. This seemed like the ultimate in privacy. And to have a real bed, a soft comfortable bed again, seemed the ultimate in luxury.

After we went to bed people began driving in, thick and fast. Grant had to hop out of bed so many times that finally he decided to stay up. He put on his robe and slippers and sat in a chair in the office doorway. I watched avidly as he rented cabins, admiring again the ease and sureness with which he did something he had never done before.

I had dozed off, in spite of the lumbering of trucks and the zipping of traffic along the highway. I felt someone shaking me. "Come and look once," Grant said.

I followed him sleepily and looked out the window where he pointed.

Our sign proclaimed, "No vacancy!"

"You mean they're all rented?" I cried.

"Every one. It's three o'clock; we rented them all in a little over three hours."

"How much did we take in?" I asked.

"Over sixty-five dollars," he said smugly. "I guess it's a good omen, the cabins being full the first night."

He got into bed and, with his customary annoying suddenness, fell asleep.

I was too excited to sleep. I padded happily around the room in my bare feet. I went into the children's bedroom to see if they were covered. The light from the highway, and the glow from neon signs, made the room so light that I could see them clearly.

David, as sound a sleeper as his daddy, was asleep and covered with a thin blanket. Donna was wide awake, motionless, her big blue eyes watching me fixedly behind the screen of hair that hung over her forehead, as I approached her crib. The traffic, the lack of her accustomed bedtime darkness, and the voices of people in the office, had apparently kept her awake ever since I put her to bed.

I patted her head, pulled the thin blanket snugly around her plump neck, and went back to bed. At five, awakened by the rumble of an unusually noisy truck, I went in again and looked at her. She was still gravely awake. I'm sure she didn't sleep at all that first night.

That ended her tendency to be a light sleeper, though. Since that first night she has slept as well as David.

Sunday is supposed to be a day of rest, but the next day was one Sunday when rest was the most remote possibility in the world for us. The people in our cabins were checking out one after the other, leaving their keys in the doors of the cabins or coming into the office and tossing them on the desk. (One man, leaving early, had got Grant out of bed at five-thirty just to hand him a key!)

Now, after a happy, exciting night of renting cabins, we were faced with the result--thirteen dirty cabins to be cleaned.

We had contacted Mrs. Clark, the strongly-built, dark-haired cleaning woman who did the work for the former owners, but she wasn't coming until Monday. She would work for us only every other day, because we were too low on funds to dare spend any on having work done that we could do ourselves.

I put the baby in her playpen, reminded David again not to play near the highway, and Grant and I set to work on the cabins. We were tired anyway after a day of moving and a night of very little sleep, and whenever I happened to catch a glimpse of myself in one of the little round mirrors that hung on the wall of each cabin as I worked, I was shocked. My thick, long hair was tangled and untidy, because of Banning's cooling but too incessant wind. My eyes looked sunken, and my face pale. (With so much work before me, I hadn't taken time to put on any makeup.) I tried to avoid looking in mirrors, because it made me feel twice as bad to realize how tired and bedraggled I looked.

Grant cleaned the bathrooms, scouring until every fixture shone, while I stripped the cabins of their dirty towels and sheets, brought clean ones, and made the beds. I emptied ash trays and wastebaskets and dusted while Grant vacuumed the floors. That may sound simple, but, multiplied by thirteen, it becomes drudgery. We plodded along, almost without hope that we would ever finish. Emptying and polishing the twentieth ashtray, I cursed the day that cigarettes had been invented. My hands grew rough and sore from tucking in so many sheets and blankets, slipping so many pillows into clean cases, and adjusting and smoothing so many spreads. My back ached. I began to wish I was in Los Angeles again. I wondered dully how I could ever have considered it work to clean up just one five-room house, with only two beds in it to be made.

Every once in a while I had to stop and see that the baby was all right. David helped by playing in our cabin near her playpen, so that she wouldn't get lonesome and begin to cry.

At lunchtime there was just one cabin left to clean. Grant said he'd clean that one, while I fixed lunch. I carried in clean sheets and pillowslips, hand towels, bath towels, wash cloths, and a bath mat, and went in to prepare lunch.

I was too tired to do anything but open a can of soup; we were both too tired to appreciate anything more elaborate, anyway.

Just one task remained for Grant before his return to Los Angeles--to put up David's tent, in the back yard. I hated to insist on his putting up the tent when he was so tired, but I knew that having the tent up back there would be the only thing that would keep David away from the front of the motel, occupied, and out of mischief. We had agreed to keep the children as invisible from the front of the motel as possible; the sight of children is too likely to suggest to travelers that here is a place where their cars and belongings might be tampered with, and where there will be so much noise that sleeping will be difficult.

About nine o'clock that night Grant went back to Los Angeles. He rented three of the cabins before he left, and we agreed on a method of keeping books.

Grant would come back each weekend and possibly once during each week, although to drive ninety miles each way just to be here for a few hours would hardly be worthwhile. He wouldn't quit his job until our income from the motel was consistently so good that we knew we'd be able to make our payments and repay Grandma.

I'd have all the renting to do, I'd have to supervise and help the cleaning woman, on alternate days I'd have to do all the cleaning; I'd have the two children to take care of, I'd be completely responsible for anything that might go wrong with the motel. The lights might all go off again, or the plumbing might get stopped up. I had visions of careless customers tossing towels and hairbrushes blithely down the toilets.

Many authors mention, when they want to portray intense feeling, that their heroine views a certain happening with "mixed emotions." Well, my emotions as I watched Grant drive off the gravel onto the highway weren't mixed in the least. They were all the same. I was scared to death.

CHAPTER THREE

FORTUNATELY I HAD the children in bed, where I didn't have to worry about them, when the next customer drove in. He was a brisk-looking, gray-haired man in a new coupe.

Often during my life I had heard people speak of "buck fever." It had seemed strange to me that any hunter should, at his first sight of a deer, tremble and shiver and find his fingers too numb and unresponsive to pull the trigger.

Now, though, I understood. With no capable, confident husband to talk to the man, I would have to do it myself. My fingers were icy as I opened the door, and I forced my lips apart in what I hoped looked like a pleasant smile of greeting.

My knees were quivering (visibly, no doubt) and my voice, when I squeaked "hello" to the man, was so like the sound of a rusty hinge that I glanced around in surprise.

The tall, gray-haired man looked at me strangely and asked if I had a vacancy.

I throttled the moronic impulse to gibber "I feel like there's a great big one in my head!" and carefully mouthed the words I had rehearsed for such an emergency as this.

"Yes, I have," I chirped. "Would you care to see it?"

"Please," he replied, with a pained expression that seemed to say, "Well, what in hell do you think I'm here for?"

I led the way to one of the single cabins in the rear. He followed close behind me. It was about three hundred feet from the office to the single cabins--much too far for two people to walk together without saying a word. Coyotes were howling in the blackness of the hills, and I felt like howling with them.

I was hot with embarrassment as his footsteps padded along behind me. I cast about frantically in my mind for a topic of conversation. If only I had noticed the state on his car license I could ask him how the weather was where he came from. But I couldn't risk saying merely, "How's the weather where you came from?" He might sneer, "Same as it is here. I just came from the other side of town."

He tramped along close behind me, without saying a word. We still had more than half the distance to go to get to the cabin. Suddenly I had an idea. Maybe something in his costume, or an emblem or pin he might be wearing, would give me a topic for conversation. I turned and looked back at him, searching for pins or ornaments in his lapel and working slowly up to his face, which was ten or twelve inches higher than my own. The yard lights, bright lights on a pole on one of the grass islands, made the details of his clothing visible. Just as I got up to his eyes I was struck by his expression. He didn't say it, but I could literally feel him thinking it: "Well, what the hell are you staring at?"

We went the rest of the way in silence--still more of it. I sighed with relief as we reached the door of the single cabin--at last the ordeal was over.

And then I realized I had forgotten to bring the key!

His eyes were on me, impatient, obviously bored with my stupidity and slowness.

"I--I forgot the key. I'm very sorry. I'll go get it," I stammered.

Throwing dignity to the Banning breezes, I broke into a run as I headed back toward the office. Not only was I in a hurry to get away from the pitying contempt in his expression, but I was afraid that if he didn't get a little satisfaction soon he'd just get into his car and drive away. It would be terrible if I lost my first customer, especially after such a bad start. I'd never have the courage to tackle one again.

Seizing the master key out of the desk drawer, I rushed back and opened the door, snapping on the light and motioning him into the cabin.

His eyes flicked over the maple furniture, the red carpet, the Venetian blinds, and back to me.

"Well, the cabin's okay," he said.

We embarked on the trip back to the office, while I pondered over the inflection of his words.

He filled out the registration card, paid me four dollars, accepted the key from my frigid hand, and turned to give me one last contemptuous glance before he stepped out of the office.

I sank onto the davenport, weak with relief that my initiation into the horrors of cabin-renting was over.

I suppose the affliction from which I suffered would be called customerphobia. Such a word, if it existed, would be defined in the dictionary as "a morbid fear of customers." No doubt in extreme cases the victim would run shrieking at the sight of a customer. (As a matter of fact, I had had to exert a lot of self-control to keep from doing that very thing!) I grace the ailment by the coining of a name only because I discovered others can suffer from it too. Grandma, later, was to go through a violent attack of it, with much more disastrous results.

The next car that drove in that night disgorged a dark, trim looking man with big ears who demanded, "How mocha get two people?"

"Four dollars," I said.

"How mocha get three people, four people?"

"Five dollars and a half; six-fifty for four people," I said. "I wanna to buy it," the man declared.

"All right," I said indulgently. "Just fill out this registration card."

"No, no--no, no no!" he cried, shoving the registration card away in horror. "I means, I wanna to buy it, I wanna to buy it to belong to me. I got thirty thousand dollars down pay. You wanna to sell your motel?"

"Well," I hedged, "we hadn't really thought of selling. How much did you want to pay?"

He fingered one huge ear, and I saw the glitter of a diamond on his finger. "Let's let me look at it, first. Then I make you offer."

I showed some of the empty cabins to him and his wife, a meek little woman who clambered out of their car and trailed along after us. I led them out to the land behind the back row of courts. It was just a gigantic splotch of blackness at this time of night, but I described it to them. They were very much impressed.

When we were back in the office Mr. Gorvane--for he had introduced himself by now--said, "I been looking around, this is nicest court in Banning. I wanna it to belong to me. I offer you seventy-five thousand."

I gasped. By selling, we would make eleven and a half thousand dollars profit. That was a lot of money, especially considering the short length of time involved.

I promised him I would talk it over with my husband the following weekend. I took his address--he lived in Los Angeles--and told him that Grant would stop in to see him in a little over a week.

Every once in a while during the rest of that evening, I caught myself almost on the verge of tears. I tried to figure out what was the matter with me, and I realized that I was unhappy because I was afraid Grant would insist on selling the motel. I wanted to keep it, no matter how much we might be offered for it.

Still, I was glad Mr. Gorvane had made the offer. My relatives and the few of our closer friends to whom we had told the price we were paying for the motel had insisted that we were being fools, that the motel couldn't possibly be worth it; that the business about the owner being sick and having to sell was an old, old gag, that we'd lose every penny. I had never really doubted the wisdom of our course, but it was nice to have my faith in the value of our motel upheld. And if some one offered to buy it for seventy-five thousand the day after we took possession, probably in a couple of months, with the beginning of the season at Palm Springs, (a popular winter resort twenty miles from us) and the influx of winter tourists into California, we'd be offered even more.

After those two encounters, the edge wore off my customerphobia. I rented two more cabins before I went to bed. I checked carefully to be sure that all the neon lights were on. Then I locked the office door and the door that led outside from the living room, and lay down on the bed with my clothes on.

The scrunch of wheels on gravel brought me off the bed several times, but it turned out to be cars going into the restaurant next door. The beam of the headlights of cars turning around in the restaurant parking lot shone between the cracks of our Venetian blinds, casting stripes of light against the wall, and made me think cars were coming into our driveway.

There was no doubt, though, that the next car I heard was in our driveway. Besides the agitation of the gravel, there was a thud, and then loud, excited male voices.

I hurried to the door and looked out. A battered roadster, which had apparently come from Williams street along our private road and entered the graveled driveway from the rear, had banged up against the curb of one of the grass islands. Two young men in the roadster were arguing in a heated and highly alcoholic manner.

The idea of approaching two angry, unpredictable drunks didn't appeal to me, but I knew I couldn't let them stay there, making a disturbance that would be sure to annoy our customers. "Thish ish too the highway!" one of the men roared.

"No, it ish not! Thash the highway over there, where the lightsh are! You better let me drive, you're drunk, don't even know where the highway ish."

They struggled for a moment over possession of the steering wheel. Finally the one who had been driving said, "You're drunk yourshelf. Here, you better drive."

They traded seats, with painstaking clumsiness. Then they sat quietly for a moment, apparently about to go to sleep.

I was trying to coax my reluctant legs to carry me fiercely toward them when, to my relief, the new driver started the car and pulled out onto the highway. I hoped they would get safely wherever they were going.

At last I relaxed and went to sleep. Anyone who drove up wanting a cabin would ring the bell by the office door, anyway.

I couldn't have been asleep more than five minutes when the bell rang for the first time. I rented four more cabins during the night, each about an hour after the other. Nervousness and excitement kept me awake about half an hour after I rented each cabin, and I'd just be drifting into the sounder stages of sleep when the bell would ring again.

It wasn't a very restful night.

In the morning Mrs. Clark, the husky maid, came to work in the cabins. She was, in a bristling way, proud of her dark complexion and her Irish-Italian ancestry, and contemptuous of "them funny-lookin' foreigners that's always stayin' in your cabins," but she seemed to enjoy the work of cleaning the cabins, and did it with a zest and speed I could never have equaled. When I got the children fed and dressed and the baby in her playpen, I decided to tackle the mountainous heap of laundry. The laundry truck was due in a couple of hours; and I felt sure that, on the first day at least, it would take me almost as long to sort and count and list the dirty things as it would have to actually wash and iron them myself.

In the garages between cabins number 2 and 3 there were several strips of leftover linoleum standing against the back wall. I rolled these flat on the floor and brought armfuls of dirty linens from a compartment in the linen closet, putting them on one side. Then I sorted the things into six different piles--sheets, slips, hand towels, bath mats, wash cloths, bath towels. My arms began to ache from lifting each sheet and shaking it to be sure no smaller articles were wrapped up in it. Then I stuffed the sheets into a laundry bag, counting them carefully. There were sixty sheets, and I had to get a second laundry bag out of the linen closet.

The linen closet was a huge, roomy affair built against the back of the garage adjoining cabin 2, and it left plenty of room for a car in the garage. There were three gigantic shelves in it. On the bottom shelf were extra blankets and bedspreads, cleaning equipment of all kinds, and supplies such as soap, toilet paper, small boxes of matches, and water pitchers. On the middle shelf were stacks of clean linens--about two hundred of each item. On the top shelf we had stored as many of our personal belongings as we could get along without temporarily, since there was no room for them in our cabin.

I was exhausted by the time I had counted all the laundry, stuffed it into bags, and listed it in the laundry book. Just as I finished, the laundry truck roared into the driveway and stopped suddenly in front of the garage where I stood, gravel flying in all directions. The driver got out. He was a likeable, lanky, red-haired youth with a very few tiny patches of white skin showing between his freckles.

"How d'you like the motel business by now?" he asked me, as he lifted the heavy bags into the back of the truck.

"It's fun," I said, "all except cleaning cabins, and sorting laundry, and keeping books, and getting up in the night to rent cabins!"

He laughed, and rubbed his brown-speckled nose. "You'll get used to it," he said.

That night wasn't as bad as my first night alone had been. I rented five cabins before I went to bed, and I did it with so much nonchalance that I was proud of myself.

Once I got into bed, though, reaction from two days of worry and hard work and a night of very little sleep set in. I slept deeply, dreamlessly, without moving, until the shriek of the office bell shattered my sleep.

Dazedly I went into the office, snapped on the light, and unlocked the door. Two young men came in. "We want a cabin with two double beds," the taller man said.

He filled out the registration card which I shoved sleepily toward him. "How much?" he asked.

"Five-fifty," I replied. Our rate for a double cabin with two double beds was five and a half or six and a half dollars, depending on the number of people that were to occupy it. We had decided to charge that much or less, depending on the demand for cabins and the number of "vacancy" signs along the highway, following the custom of the former owners.

Each of the young men laid a five dollar bill on the counter. I looked at the bills groggily. I was still half asleep.

"Just one of those will do, with fifty cents beside," I said.

"We want to pay separately," said the shorter man. "Give us each change, please."

I missed Grant, with his quick mind and his easy competence, more intensely at that moment than I missed him yet. I smothered a yawn and tried to concentrate on the difficult task before me. My reasoning, if you could call it that, was hazy and confused.

"Well," I thought, opening the cash drawer and looking at the array of five and one dollar bills, and fifty cent pieces and quarters, "they're each paying half of five and a half. How much is half of five and a half, anyway? Half of five would be two and a half, so half of five and a half would be a little more than that. How much more? Well..." At that point I lost the thread of the whole thing and had to begin over. "Suppose," I thought, starting on a new tack, "I would give each of them a dollar. That would mean they each had paid four dollars, which would be too much. Well, then, suppose I gave them each three dollars. That would mean they had each paid me two dollars, which wouldn't be quite enough. But how much would it lack of being enough?"

Arithmetic had always stirred up a swirling fog inside my head. My eyelids were drooping more and more, and yet I was beginning to feel beneath my drowsiness a desperate panic. The men were growing impatient.

I frowned and stared more sternly at the money in the cash drawer. I summoned all my powers of concentration. I handled the money in the drawer ostentatiously, as a bluff, so that they would think I was beginning to go into action.

I still don't remember how I did it--unless maybe it was by doling out the money slowly and watching their faces until their expressions suggested they had received the full amount--but somehow the awful situation ended and the men went to their cabin.

The following morning when I did the day's bookkeeping I found that there was fifty cents too much in the cash drawer. Still, I didn't feel that the system I had used the previous night had much to recommend it, and I resolved not to try it again.

Traffic noises along the highway were loud and almost ceaseless--they quieted down a little just often enough to give the next crescendo the greatest possible impact. Planes roared up and down from the airport which was about a block to the southeast; trains whistled and roared along the track that was a block to the south; cars and trucks and busses roared along the highway. The whole highway, in fact, was one big, solid roar.

After the first few days, though, the noise faded to the back of my consciousness. The peal of the office bell would rouse me instantly, even if I were working in a cabin several doors away, but the sky-shattering whine of jet-propelled planes made no impression on me at all.

Travelers and newcomers to the vicinity nearly always commented on the noise. Often they'd have to raise their voices to be heard above it. I got so used to the noise that when someone would yell above the din, "What an awful racket that train makes'." I'd shriek back, "What train?"

I was beginning to become acquainted with some of our neighbors. Moe, the bald, thick-set, beak-nosed man who owned the restaurant next door, had a son, Moejy (no doubt a corruption of Moe, Jr.) who was about a year older than David. The first moment I laid eyes on Moejy I had a premonition that he would turn out to be the most obnoxious child I had ever encountered--a premonition which, as later events were to prove, was correct.

He was a wiry boy with a small head, close set ears, and eyes that darted about continually in search of insects to be dismembered or walls to be scribbled on. He was about a head taller than David, and in the second grade. For the first few days after we took possession of the motel, he and David were inseparable.

Directly to the east of us, between us and the imposing Peacock, was a four-unit motel that was unfinished and had no neon sign. The owner of the place was a tall, gaunt black-haired old man with a curiously pink chin. His name, I had learned, was Featherbrain; and I reflected that he must posses more sterling and endearing qualities than were immediately visible, to have inspired in the woman who married him such affection that she was willing to accept him, name and all.

He worked each day on his little motel, painting and hammering, while his wife, always with a cigarette in one hand, planted shrubs, lined the driveways with big rocks which she painted white, and did the watering--an important job in this part of the country. Our own shrubs, the islands of grass and the geraniums beneath our sign needed a thorough watering every day. We discovered that watering every other day was not enough; the grass would turn brown and die in spots unless it received a daily watering.

There were advantages to the heat and dryness, though. Besides being contributing factors to what must be one of the most healthful climates in the world, they made it possible for one to hang clothes up on a line, stand and wait a few seconds while the things were whipped by the wind, and take them down, completely dry.

I never had to worry about not having enough clothesline space, even though there were only three short lines between the posts Grant put up behind the rear cabins a few weeks after we took over the motel. When the three lines were full, the first line of clothes was ready to be taken down, making room for the rest of the wet things.

Donna, even though I had less time to be with her, and she had to remain in the safety of her playpen for the greater part of the day, was growing and developing rapidly. She was becoming more agile, and she could climb on and off the furniture--something she hadn't yet been able to do when we left Los Angeles. It was a problem what to do with her when a customer came while she was out of her playpen. I never dared leave her alone in the house on such occasions, for fear she might somehow get outside and onto the highway. If I chucked her suddenly into her playpen, though, and went to talk to the customer, she would howl with indignation. Since her playpen was in the unfinished bedroom right behind the office, where her howls would be plainly audible, that had to be prevented. So I put a bag of cookies on the bookcase, and whenever I had to rush her to the playpen suddenly, I gave her a cookie in each hand. She became too absorbed with enjoying her feast to protest over where she had it.

I bathed her sometimes in the kitchen sink, sometimes in the dishpan. Our cabin, like the other thirteen, had a lovely tile shower, but no bathtub. One morning I had just set her in the dishpan of warm water on the kitchen table when the office bell rang. It must be a salesman, I reasoned; we very seldom had customers this early in the morning. I'd get rid of him in short order. I picked up the baby's celluloid duck, which was on a chair beside the table, and gave it to her to keep her entertained. Then I hurried into the office.

Three very distinguished looking men stood there. They introduced themselves; they were representatives of some motel and apartment house association, which they wanted us to join.

They launched into an exposition of the various benefits connected with belonging to their organization, and described the exalted position of the member. The principal spokesman of the group, a dignified creature with a glistening bald head, was waxing very eloquent indeed when suddenly he stopped, coughed, and delicately adjusted the white handkerchief in his pocket. Obviously he was rattled about something, and behind his close, even shave a faint red was rising. The other two men laughed uncomfortably, and I realized they were looking at a point behind me. I turned, to see what they were looking at.

There, with her celluloid duck in one hand, stood Donna, as naked as the spokesman's head, beaming graciously and impartially upon the three men.

It was so hard to handle the baby and the motel, doing half of the work of cleaning cabins, taking care of the laundry, answering customer's questions and listening to their views on life when there were a dozen other things I should be doing, that I persuaded Grant to quit his job. Business was good, even better than we had hoped it would be, and every night our garages were filled with sleek, shiny automobiles from every part of the country. The income from the motel was almost as much in one night as Grant was earning in a week. Unless something went terribly wrong, there was no reason why we wouldn't make a financial success.

So Grant left Southgate (the suburb of Los Angeles in which the General Motors plant was located) and came to Banning, bag and baggage; and I shucked my new capability, that had been born of necessity, and reverted to being my old helpless self, which was more natural--and a lot more fun.

Grant and I had discussed Mr. Gorvane's offer to buy the place, and had decided that we wanted the motel more than we wanted the quick, easy profit.

That is, Grant decided that--I had known all along that that was how I felt about it.

CHAPTER FOUR

THERE'S A LOT of work to running a motel, and no matter how many people there are to do the work, there's never a moment when they are completely caught up. Always there are the big jobs awaiting any rare moments of leisure--digging out the insidious weeds that thrust their way through the gravel, planting flowers and improving the external appearance of the place, utilizing the extra land, and repairing the inevitable damage done by careless customers.

Mr. Featherbrain, the old man next door--whose black hair, I suspected, was dyed--finally got his motel finished to the point where it was ready to operate; and one day some men came and installed a big neon sign (Palace Motel--Vacancy) in front of his place. It was a great day for him. He came over to talk to us about it. He leaned his tall form against our office door, stroked his rosy chin, and said, "Well sir, I'm a goin to have muh 'no vacancy' up tonight afore anybody else. Yep, two hours after dark, and we'll be full."

"Good for you," I said. "With only three cabins to rent, you should be able to do it, too!"

"Durned old fellers that put up the sign," he grumbled, "they went'n knocked all muh white rocks out of line with theit truck. I shoulda busted evvy bone in their head."

A customer drove into our driveway, and the irascible old man went home. A middle-aged woman in a mouse-colored dress got out of the car, and just as she began to speak another car, a green coupe, whirled up on to the gravel. A well built, fiftyish man with his dark hat at a rakish angle stepped out of the car and said, "Do you rent any of your cabins by the week, madame? I've got some work to do in Palm Springs--I'm a contractor, don't know just how long I'll want to stay, but--" Realizing suddenly that he had interrupted the middle-aged woman, he swept off his hat and bowed before her.

"I apologize deeply, madame," he said. "It was unforgivable. Pray go ahead and do your business with this young lady, while I wait my turn."

The woman smiled timidly, first at him and then at me. She was a dainty, plump, small-boned creature with white, slightly rouged skin and tiny white hands. Her blue eyes, underlined with a criss-cross of faint wrinkles, sparkled behind rimless glasses.

"Bon jour," she said. "I'm Miss Nestleburt. I, too, was wondering if you rent cabins by the week or month. I have to live in this climate for my health for a few weeks ... the doctor says I'm just on the verge of asthma, and a few months of desert air should prevent it from developing."

"We usually rent our cabins on an overnight basis," I said, "but there's no reason why we couldn't rent them by the week."

"Of course I know it will be simply terribly expensive," she said, "but I want a nice place like these you have here, and I'm willing to pay for it." She took a deep, rattling breath.

"Come on, I'll show you what we have," I said, my smile including the man with the dark hat. His eyes, I noticed, were sparkling with love of life and a private amusement.

Miss Nestleburt and the man, whose name turned out to be Hawkins, were both pleased with the newness and the cleanness of the cabins. I gave them cabins 7 and 8, and as they left the office after filling out registration cards he set his hat back on his head in order, apparently, to be able to lift it gallantly.

"May I call upon you tonight?" I heard him ask. A truck thundered past and I couldn't hear her reply, but I watched them as they walked together toward their cars. Her birdlike head was fluttering in agreement with the remarks he was making, and his steps were jaunty.

I turned my attention to the desk, to put the date and the cabin number on each of the two registration cards. About to pick up a pencil, suddenly I gasped and jumped backward. There, leering at me with strangely human eyes, was an enormous black spider, motionless on one of the registration cards.

I would have called Grant, but I knew he was behind the rear cabins, cleaning out the incinerator. I was on my own.

I picked up a newspaper that was on one edge of the desk, moving quietly and carefully, and folded it until it was narrow and stiff.

I hated to think of having squashed spider all over the top of the desk, but I hated even more to think of letting the huge, loathsome creature escape. I raised the folded newspaper, with grim slowness, and then I brought it crashing down on the registration card.

I sighed with relief. There, that would fix him! I lifted the paper, preparing to clean up the mess.

There, still watching me mockingly, sat the spider, still motionless--and completely unharmed!

About that time it began to dawn on me that this was a very strange spider, indeed. I had seen every imaginable sort of insect since we came to Banning, including black widows, but I had never in all my life seen anything resembling this.

I moved a little closer and, bending down, looked the spider over carefully. Then I laughed and picked him up in my hand. He was made of rubber. Either Miss Nestleburt or Mr. Hawkins must have left him there, since he was on top of the registration cards.

I put him in the cash drawer, where he would give Grant a shock.

I went back into our cabin and set to work on a "Vacancy" sign I was making, to hang up just outside the office door under the neon sign that said "Office."

We had been thinking of getting a neon "vacancy" sign, but we were afraid it would be too expensive. One night the "Moonrise Motel" sign had begun to flicker on and off, so we telephoned Oian Rosco, the only neon expert within fifty miles. Grant was disgusted at the idea of having to hire anyone to fix something for him, but neon signs are one thing--probably about the only thing--he doesn't know how to fix.

While Rosco, a small man with an innocent-looking round face, was fixing our sign, we asked him how much a neon "vacancy" sign would cost. He told us he'd figure it out and let us know when he brought back the parts for our broken sign.

When he returned with the parts, he not only gave us an estimate of the cost, but brought along a penciled sketch of the sign as he planned it, in its full size.

It was very attractive, and he could make it for us in a very short time, but it would cost a little more than we wanted to spend, with what neighboring motel owners called the "late summer slump" due at almost any time. We'd think it over, though, we told him.

He left the penciled sketch for us to consider, assuring us, his round eyes guileless, that he had no use for it.

We decided that, even though we didn't feel that we could afford a neon sign, we should have a "vacancy" sign of some kind to hang under the "office" sign. It would catch the eyes of the minority of people who look toward the office, instead of at the big sign in front of a motel, to determine whether or not accommodations are available.

"I'll get a board the size of the 'office' sign," Grant, the ever resourceful, said: "I'll paint it white, and you can put the letters on carefully with pencil. Then we'll paint the letters black."

"A good idea," I agreed, glancing at the paper Rosco had left, and at the beautiful, perfect lettering on it.

When Grant put the dry, white-painted board before me a few days later, I had a battle with my conscience. Should I take a ruler and painstakingly create my own letters, or should I cut out Rosco's letters and trace them onto the board?

The latter course seemed the most practical. Still, a stern inner voice told me, Rosco had put his time and work into that sample sign with the hope of selling us its counterpart in neon, not so that we might make use of his labor by tracing his letters and making a sign ourselves, thereby pushing ourselves still further out of the market for the neon sign he might have sold us.

I finally decided that the only honorable thing to do would be to start from scratch. Pushing his sign aside, I set laboriously to work making new letters. If I cast an occasional glance at the formation of his lettering as I worked, it was accidental.

I was intently studying the proportions of his "Y" when the office bell rang. I put aside my work guiltily and hurried to the door.

It was Miss Nesdeburt. She gave me a timid smile.

"My cabin is just lovely," she said, her tiny white hands fluttering up to her glasses. She took them off, as though she could see me better without a barrier of glass between us; "it's really lovely," she continued. "I was wondering if I could borrow a pencil? I'd like to write some postcards and tell every one I've found a cabin, and I seem to have forgotten to bring a pen or pencil."

"Certainly. We've got dozens of them," I said lightly. I opened the cash drawer and put my hand into it.

Then I shrieked and leaped backward. There, in the drawer, sat a huge black spider!

Then I remembered, and I could feel the color flooding into my face. I had been taken in by my own trick--and before an audience, too!

"It's just--just an artificial spider, made of rubber. I forgot, for a minute, that I'd put him in there. I was going to play a little joke on my husband, you know. But I guess the joke was on me." I produced a laugh that was meant to be hearty, but which actually was sickly and aggrieved.

Miss Nestleburt's sparkling blue eyes had never left my face. Her expression was sad and horrified. "Et tu, Brute?" she asked, with more pathos than Caesar could possibly have squeezed into the three words.

"What do you mean?" I asked uneasily.

"Why, what kind of a den of practical jokers have I gotten myself into?" she wanted to know. "First Mr. Hawkins, now you."

"Oh, but I'm not really a practical joker," I assured her hastily. "In fact, it must have been Mr. Hawkins who left this spider to scare me, and I just thought as long as I had it anyway I'd scare my husband. I'm not in the habit of doing things like that. Did Mr. Hawkins scare you with a spider too?"

She shuddered daintily. "Mais non! It was worse than that."

I leaned across the desk eagerly.

"I'll--I'll tell you when I know you better," she said in confusion. "Really, it was quite a dreadful thing. Maybe I shouldn't let him come to call tonight after all."

She took the pencil I handed her, smiled her thanks, and went thoughtfully out the office door.

We hadn't been in the motel business long before we discovered that the proper name for customers is "clients" or "guests"--not the common, vulgar "customers" that came so naturally to our lips. In spite of the good example set by practically all the other motel owners we knew, who were careful not to use the uncouth word, we continued calling our customers what they were--customers.

Grant, falling as easily and competently into the role of motel owner as he had into his many former roles, must have convinced our customers from his very first day that he was a veteran of the motel business. His every action, his every remark led people to believe he had been in this part of the country, at this work, for years. He freely employed such words and phrases as "usually," "generally in the summer here," and "every winter." If a customer were to ask him, "Isn't it warmer than usual here?" he'd reply something like, "Nope, it always gets pretty hot here, this time of year. In a month or so it'll get cool, though; there'll even be snow on those mountains."

The sweating customer, glancing at the close, towering mountains to the north and south, would mention that it didn't seem possible, and Grant would say, "Yep, it's a surprise, every winter, when the desert heat turns into snow and cold wind. It happens, though." Of course it does happen, too, but at the time he had only our neighbor's word for it. Snow near Banning was something as incredible to us as it was to any traveler across the hot desert.

When I was still in the last stages of customerphobia, Grant was dealing with the people who stayed in our cabins, and their often outlandish requests, with ease and confidence. He had at his fingertips the answers to the amazing array of questions customers put to him, and the distances between most of the fairly well known cities in the country. If anyone who had rented a cabin wanted to know the distance to Los Angeles, Grant told him: eighty-nine miles. But if someone who hadn't yet registered wanted the same information, Grant would tell him that it was "almost a hundred miles" (merely another way of putting it) and the prospective customer would usually decide, since it was so far, he might as well stay for the night instead of driving on in.

Grant could describe the location of the nearest (or best-in-Banning) bar, restaurant, skating rink or lumber yard. He could get rid of the west-bound, cross-country truck drivers who, preparatory to going to the bar across the highway for a quick beer, parked their long, two-sectioned trucks so that the rear section blocked one of our two driveways. We had one driveway on each side of our sign; they led from the highway and were the initial source of all our income.

Getting rid of truck drivers was one thing I could never do; and there had been many occasions during the time Grant was still working at General Motors, and later, when he was away during the day on business, that it had been necessary for me to try. I had two approaches, one stern, the other sweet, which I varied. Actually, I guess I alternated them, on the theory that last time one hadn't worked, so this time I'd try the other! My stern approach called forth two general reactions on the part of the drivers, who were always about to descend from their puffing, steaming contraptions as I ran up. My tough expression and sharp, short order to the driver to get his truck away at once!--would bring forth (a) an amused "Look who's talkin'" smile, and a significant glance from the lofty perch of the truck seat, at my slender height of slightly over five feet; or (b) it would kindle an equally warm response, and I'd find myself showered by abuse, epithets, and threats from a mouth twisted frighteningly sidewise, full of tobacco juice, and topping off a frame composed of so much bulging muscle that I'd start back to the cabin without arguing.

My "sweet" approach was just as unsatisfying. There were two reactions to it, too, and neither resulted in the removal of the truck.

"I know you don't realize it," I'd say, my voice dripping saccharin, "but your truck is blocking our driveway. I wonder if you'd mind moving it?" And I'd smile and flutter my eyelashes.

Either the truck driver would exclaim something like, "Well, hi there, honey! You just forget about the truck and think about who's drivin' it. How about givin' me your phone number, honey, so's next time I come through here--"

Or else he'd reply in a falsetto imitation of my too-sweet voice, "Oh, dearie me, is that dreat big bad truck really block ing your itsy bitsy driveway? 'oo just stand there and pout at it while I go get me a itsy bitsy glass of beer."

Both these types of reply were quite beside the point. Truck drivers are one breed of men with whom I can't commune.

Grant, of course, never has any trouble with them. Whenever possible, I watch out the window as he runs up to whatever truck is the offender at the moment and speaks with the driver a few moments. He smiles, the driver waves a hand good naturedly, and the truck moves off. I have never been able to understand how he does it.

Grant is so irritatingly competent, in fact, that I can't help being secretly overjoyed about his one weak point. He has no sense of system or organization, and he can seldom make the money in the cash drawer, when he takes out the day's profits, add up to exactly the amount our penciled list, filled in customer by customer, says it should. When I was running the place alone it always balanced out to the penny, with the exception of that one morning when I found fifty cents too much. When Grant left General Motors and came to Banning, he began adding money to the cash drawer if there weren't enough small bills, taking money out of the drawer on any pretext, and in general getting things so confused that I wiped my hands of the whole affair.

"You handle the money," I said. "I'm tired of trying to keep it straight, with you dipping into it and adding to it all the time. From now on it's your job to make it come out right."

And from that day on I have never worried about the amount of money in the drawer.

Grant's lack of system concerning book-keeping and handling money is characteristic of his general lack of system in regard to everything; with so little sense of order and preciseness, it amazes me that he can always get so much accomplished, and so well. He's always starting something that he knows perfectly well he won't, due to other obligations, be able to finish. And then, of course, so that his initial effort wont be wasted, I have to stop whatever I'm doing and finish what he started. Perhaps, on second thought, I do understand how he gets so much accomplished.

When the broadfelt carpet in one of the rear single cabins--number 9--began to wear out, we bought a new one, a gorgeous thing with a swirling dark red pattern. We would have liked to add a final note of luxuriousness to the cabins by substituting lovely new carpeting for the plain red broadfelt in each--but that would have cost a penny that would be not only pretty, but downright beautiful.

When Grant tried to get the old carpeting up, he made the discovery that it had been glued to the cement floor. He would have left it there to serve as a pad for the new rug, but he wanted to keep the good portions of it to substitute for parts of the other carpets that were on the verge of looking too shabby to be in keeping with the rest of the furnishings.

The glue with which the old carpet had been secured to the floor must have been the strongest in the world. Or perhaps, as Grant suggested, the builders of the place had laid the carpet before the cement of the floor had dried, and the cement had hardened with a firm grip on the fabric of the rug.

Anyway, it took us, working together, about an hour to get each square of the old carpet up. Grant chopping at it from underneath with a sharp, knife-like tool while I pulled as hard as I could on the part that was loose, so that the free parts would be lifted out of the way and he could see in just what spots the rug was still attached to the floor.

My hands ached before I had been on the job long. "I wasn't raised to be a carpet yanker," I remarked at frequent intervals; but Grant, steaming and clenching his teeth, his brown hair hanging over his forehead like Donna's, wouldn't let me escape. "I'll never get the mmm thing finished," he grunted, "if you don't help me."

I tried standing while I pulled, and then sitting in various positions to relieve the strain on various parts of my body. I tried leaning backward and pulling with all my might, relaxing all the other muscles of my body and depending on the rug to hold me up. Of course the inevitable happened; Grant struck an area where the rug wasn't attached so firmly to the floor, the part I was holding yielded suddenly to my pulling, and I sprawled backward with my legs in the air.

When Grant was through laughing we began again. My thumbs were getting sore, and my whole hands ached. I glared out the open door of the cabin at a fat couple sunning themselves indolently on one of the grass islands. That's what's wrong with this country, I thought darkly--too many loafers.

When at last the rug was completely pried and hacked loose, Grant began cutting the new rug to fit the room, while I went up front and administered poison verbally to Moejy, who had brought an armful of glass jars from his father's restaurant next door and was breaking them on our sidewalk. Moejy, in my opinion, had only one redeeming feature: a tendency to spend most of his time at the Auto Haven Motel half a mile west of us. The Bradleys, who owned the court, must certainly be lovers of childhood in general--and in the raw--to be able to endure him.

Miss Nesdeburt fluttered into the office the next morning before I was through bathing the baby. Grant had started cleaning cabins.

I could tell she was in a talkative mood, so I invited her to sit in the kitchen while I scrubbed Donna.

"I had the nicest dream last night," Miss Nesdeburt began. "And I believe people should share their dreams, don't you? I dream nearly every night, and I have a little book I write the dreams in. I do it the first thing when I wake up, because you know how dreams slip out of a person's mind. And if I forgot them I wouldn't be able to share them with other people." I smiled vaguely.

"Dreams are important, you know," she said, lowering her voice mysteriously. "Much more important than most people realize. Anyone who can interpret them correctly can forecast coming events. I'm learning to interpret them."

"Oh, you read those dream books?" I asked, rinsing the soap off Donna's plump, firm little body and brushing the hair away from her eyes.

"Oh, no!" Miss Nesdeburt cried. "I was studying under Eimo, who is known as the famous somnologist, until I started getting this asthma. His method is entirely new. Why, he--"

"Tell me about your dream," I interposed hastily.

She clasped her little white hands. "Well, it was like most of my dreams. I was alone, walking through a big empty place, and then all of a sudden there were a lot of other people, couples, all around me, but they stayed just beyond me, and I couldn't reach them, no matter how I tried. Now, I'll interpret that for you, according to Elmo's teaching. It means that I'm going to make a trip soon and go where there'll be crowds of people!"

I don't pretend to be a dream interpreter, but her dream sounded to me more like the dream of a frustrated, man-starved old maid than anything else I could think of.

That line of thought prompted me to ask whether Mr. Hawkins had called on her the previous night.

Her blue eyes brightened, and she took off her glasses. She smiled, and her smile had lost its first timidity.

"Yes, he did," she confessed. "He's a very nice man, really, even if--well, he does have a strange sense of humor." She flushed a little, apparently remembering whatever it was he had done soon after they met, and I ruefully remembered the black spider. (I had left it in the cash drawer, but it didn't draw even a gasp from Grant. Reaching into the drawer for some money, he had said, "Well, look here once! Someone's left a fake spider in the drawer! Lucky I found it instead of you. You'd have been running yet.")

"I hope Mr. Hawkins was more gentlemanly last night," I said. I am, I must admit in all modesty, an expert at drawing forth information without appearing to pry. Actually, I employ this gift principally because a writer needs to know as much as possible of the thoughts and actions and experiences of other people. What many of my friends and relatives call my accursed curiosity has dug out for me plots which eventually, garnished a little, appear in magazines. I suppose I should confess that my curiosity isn't completely scientific, though; a fraction of it--(about nine-tenths) is just the plain old garden variety.

"Last night . . ." Miss Nestleburt began reminiscently, wheezing a little. "Well, I don't know whether you'd say he was gentlemanly or not. He--he brought me a large bag of tomatoes, which I thanked him for and put on the bed. Then, just as I was sitting down on a chair, he grabbed the bag and shoved it under me, like lightning. I couldn't help sitting on it and squashing the tomatoes."

Miss Nestleburt sighed and replaced her glasses. "He laughed and laughed, and then he said in that gallant way of his, 'I apologize deeply, madame! I had no idea you were going to sit in that particular chair! It was a most unfortunate coincidence!' And then, while I stood there dripping tomato juice, he started laughing again, and he laughed until the tears rolled down his face." The fine lines under Miss Nesdeburt's eyes crinkled with reluctant amusement.

I finished drying Donna and began pulling her tiny gingham dress over her head. Miss Nestleburt rose.

"Well, I must go lie in the sun for a while," she said. "It's such a fine, bright day, n'est-ce pas? Be sure to remember your dreams from now on, and I'll interpret them for you."

I assured her that I would, although I seldom had a chance to get more than a third of the way into a dream before some cabin-hunter rang our bell.

I went out to help Grant clean cabins. He was working in the rear group, in number 9, at the moment. Donna pulled newspapers out of the wastebasket while I set to work making the bed for which Grant had just brought clean sheets. We "bolster" the pillows by smacking an arm down the middle of each pillow when the clean slip is on it, folding it back over the arm. This gives a stiff, smart appearance to the bed when the spread is drawn taut around the pillows. There's all the difference between pillows au naturel and pillows bolstered, that there is between a slovenly woman without a brassiere, and a sprightly one who is wearing the latest style uplift.

Although I bolstered the pillows faithfully, I never put the sheets on the beds in accordance with the rules. I never bothered with "square corners," but simply tucked the sheets in all around in my own speedier, although slightly less neat, way.

Grant was just finishing the bathroom when I saw, through the slats of the Venetian blind, that a car had pulled up in front of the office.

"You go," I said. "I'm tired of galloping way up there just to tell people we don't have any cabins with kitchens."

Grant set down his bucket of soapy water, and through the slats I watched his tall figure hurrying toward the car. He talked a few seconds to the man and woman who were standing by the car; then, preparatory to leading them to a cabin, he turned and started away from them. But he had been standing just off the sidewalk, which jutted up an inch above the gravel. He caught his toe on the sidewalk and thrust his other foot forward quickly to regain his balance. He half ran, half staggered, in a crouching position, for several grotesque, humiliating steps, until at last he recovered his equilibrium and was able to stand upright.

I howled with laughter. If I had been closer to him I would have pretended not to notice his lack of dignity, but I was so far away--completely out of earshot--that I knew I could enjoy myself without causing him further embarrassment. I bent double, clutching my aching sides. I took a step backward, and stepped against Grant's bucket of soapy water.

In my struggle to extricate myself from the unexpected situation I flailed the air wildly with my arms, and concluded the performance by falling flat on the floor, tipping the bucket so that its contents surged all over the brand new rug.

Donna looked up from the newspapers she was taking out of the wastebasket. "Mama down," she stated, a little superfluously.

CHAPTER FIVE

GRANDMA COMES OUT from Los Angeles to see us every other Friday, and returns the following Monday morning to her job as fancy presser in a cleaning plant, and to her small apartment, which is a ten-minute streetcar ride from Hellwig's apartment. She is a creature of such infallibly regular habits that I sometimes wonder if there isn't a small, precise clock or calendar, or some mechanism for keeping track of time, tucked away inside her.

She works hard whenever she comes. If there's work at hand to be done, she plunges into it. If there isn't any, she creates some, or snoops around the various cabins and garages and the grounds until she finds something we have neglected.

It was she who made Donna's little play yard habitable, after Grant had put up a white picket fence around a patch of ground at the end of one row of cabins. "The little stinkpot has to have a place to play!" she exclaimed. She painstakingly cleared the stony ground of Russian thistles, embryo tumbleweeds, stickers, and rocks. She hosed the ground, spaded it, and planted devil grass seeds. In a few weeks Donna had a lawn to play on; during the time before it grew, she dug in the loose dirt with a spoon, and required three complete baths every day. (A big disadvantage to the yard, though, was that it was so inaccessible; it was a nuisance to take her all the way out there, and to go out to check up on her every once in a while. Knowing that she couldn't get back into the house until I came for her, and knowing how far from it her yard was, Donna began to develop symptoms of loneliness which became more and more acute, and gradually I gave up taking her out to the yard at all.)

"My land, you know what a woman that's staying in one of your cabins told me?" Grandma asked, looking up from a lapful of mending the day after she met Miss Nestleburt. "She told me that a dream I had last week, about a fire, meant I would soon be injured." Grandma held up one finger, on the end of which glistened a tiny pinpoint of blood. "And I'll be swear'n if I didn't prick myself just now, on this needle! Ain't she good? Maybe she'll be able to tell me if I'm ever gonna marry Hellwig! Ayah, she's just like a fortune teller--a sight better than one, even! I never see anything like it!"

Something else Grandma "never see anything like" was the number and variety of articles left behind in their cabins by our customers. Nearly every morning we find something. We have a big box in which we put them all, and there they stay until they are called for--which is almost always never--or until their owners write, giving an address to which to send the objects, and requesting that they be mailed. Usually such requests are accompanied by a dollar for our trouble and for postage. If every article left behind would cause one letter with a dollar in it to be sent to us, we'd have a very nice little business on the side, wrapping and mailing packages. Most of the things, though, lie quietly forgotten, and accumulate. After about six months we paw through the pajama tops, bottles of shaving lotion, slippers, garter belts, cosmetic jars and hair nets, and salvage whatever we think we can use. The rest we give to Mrs. Clark, who bears it triumphantly home in the manner of a hunter returning with an elusive and long-sought deer. What she ever manages to do with it all, I have never asked her.

To Grandma, the conglomeration of left-behind articles is "one H. of a mess," and I am inclined to share her view.

Mr. Featherbrain's little motel, next door, didn't do very well for a couple of months after it opened. It was in a bad spot, between us and the Peacock. Whenever I went to the store across the street and looked at it from that vantage point, I couldn't help thinking of a tiny, pale, bashful man squeezed to insignificance between two fat, husky, rouged and mascara-ed women. One day while I was waiting for Mr. Bertram, the plump grocer, to finish making a sale to someone else, I leaned back against the counter and gazed dreamily across the highway, at our motel. (I never got over the thrill of pride I felt every time I reminded myself that those beautiful buildings were ours--or would be, when we had paid about fifty thousand dollars more on them!) The high, mistily blue mountains rose behind the motel, reaching into the dimmer blue of the sky.

And then I looked at Featherbrain's small place, which--new and nice though it was--appeared to have a wistful, bewildered air about it. I smiled, and the thought about the little man between two huge gaudy women must have been written on my face, for the customer on whom the grocer had been waiting snarled suddenly, "Just wait'll the summer slump comes. You're a goin' to have your "vacancy" sign on all night, every night, and it ain't a goin' to do you no good, neither. Durned old cars won't stop, any more'n they're a stoppin' at my place now."

It was Mr. Featherbrain, his chin pinker than ever now with indignation. I flushed guiltily, and tossed him an airy, "Oh, I wasn't thinking what you thought I was thinking!" smile. I turned to the grocer, whose jaws were clamping spasmodically upon a wad of something in his mouth, as the gaunt old man stamped out of the store.

At least once every day since we have been in Banning, a dark-skinned man or woman with straight black hair has strolled through the grounds of our motel. Sometimes they come in groups of three or four, coming from the little country road--Williams street--to which the back portion of our land extends, and ambling on out to the highway. These, I learned, are Indians. There is an Indian reservation a mile or so north of us, in the first hills that comprise the sloping upward into the mountains. Jed, our freckled laundry truck driver, told me as much as he knew about them, one day after he had finished lifting our heavy sheet-filled laundry bags into his truck. They still hold their tribal ceremonies at regular intervals far back in the hills and, according to legend, no white man has ever witnessed any of these ceremonies.

The principal pastime of these Indians, according to Jed, is to maintain and increase their fearsomeness and mystery. They give special attention to fostering awe of themselves in those people, most of them from the Eastern parts of the country, who believe that Indians still go on the warpath and scalp people--or that, if they haven't actually done either of those things recently, they are quite capable of doing either at any moment.

"Far as I'm concerned, they're just a bunch of showoffs," Jed said, rubbing his nose. "D'you know what they did? They even put a curse on Banning in 1935. You'd be surprised how many people were terrified, and left."

"Why did they put a curse on the city?" I wanted to know.

"They were mad because so many curious white people kept coming out and snooping around their reservation."

"H'm." It would be interesting to look an Indian reservation over, especially if the inhabitants--or inmates--or whatever you'd call them--were the curse-putting kind. My own curiosity, seldom dormant, was definitely aroused, and I promised myself that the Indians would have one more white person to be angry at, as soon as I could possibly arrange it.

The ubiquity of the Smiths never became a personal thing to me until we moved to Banning. Never a week goes by that a car doesn't drive up in a flurry of gravel and belch forth a person who rings the bell and inquires, "Have you a party staying here by the name of Smith?" The only variation in this routine is the wording. Sometimes it's "Is dere a guy, name a' Smith, stayin' here?"

It happens so often that, if there weren't so many different people involved, I'd think it was some kind of a gag. As it is, whenever a Smith actually registers to spend a night with us, I can hardly resist telling him, in a coy and enigmatic manner, that someone has been looking for him.

With two children playing noisily and constantly, and customers ringing the office bell blithely at the most inconvenient moments, and Grant coming into our cabin every now and then to ask me where's that mmm screwdriver, it was impossible for me to be able to concentrate enough to do any writing. Therefore, each day while the baby took her nap, when the cabins were cleaned up, the laundry sent out, and everything as nearly under control as possible, I loaded up with paper, pen, a reference book or two, and the partially done article or story I had been working on, and went to cabin number 15, which is almost directly across from the cabin in which we live. There, in glorious solitude, I wrote, interrupted only by the occasional intriguing sight of customers driving up to the office, ringing the bell, and being confronted by Grant. Whenever such an event occurred, I had to stop my work, go to the window, and peek breathlessly between the slats of the Venetian blind at all that went on. This is always an unnecessary distraction from my work, and I know I should have more will power and self control; but there is something in me ('your damn curiosity!' I've heard it called by irritated objects of it) that won't allow me to sit by, quietly absorbed in something that can wait, when things are happening which I might just as well be investigating.

I did my writing in longhand, although I had always used the typewriter before we came to Banning. I wrote longhand now because, with all my other paraphernalia, I didn't want to haul the typewriter back and forth all the time. To relieve the boredom which frequently attacked me, while I was writing, I used different colored ink on different days. My original manuscripts were gorgeous things of purple, green, red and blue. I couldn't leave my writing equipment in any cabin overnight, naturally, because we hoped to rent every cabin every night--although we weren't at all sure of filling up, except on Saturday nights.

That's why, also, when Grandma comes to visit us every other week, we don't give her one of the cabins. She can sleep in our cabin, even if it is a little crowded; but, obviously, the customers can't. She sleeps on David's bed, and David sleeps on the floor, using Donna's playpen pad for a mattress; and everyone is happy--except, possibly, David.

Grandma suffers from customerphobia far more acutely than I ever did. The trembling and quivering I suffered were mild compared to the tremors, amounting practically to convulsions, she goes through at even the mere thought of waiting on a customer. I know better now than to attempt to break her in to the gentle art of renting cabins, but there was a time when I was not so wise. That was on one of her first visits, when I thought I'd teach her to be a substitute motel manager, in much the same manner of the man who teaches his little boy to swim by throwing him shrieking into six feet of cold water.

Grant had tossed David and Donna into the back seat of the car and taken them along for the ride on a trip to the drug store. They were going to buy a jar of salve for David's nose, which sunburns, peels, and sunburns all over again, with painful persistence. Grandma and I were alone. I hoped that a customer would come during the brief time that Grant would be gone, for I had mapped out a campaign for ridding Grandma of her fear of customers for once and for all.

I was sitting in the kitchen reading, wearing a dress that had a zipper all the way down the front. Grandma, unsuspecting and happy, was bustling about the living room with a dustdoth, searching for dust.

It wasn't long before I heard the sound I had been hoping for--the scrunch of tires on the gravel, and a squeak of brakes. Faster than I had ever done it before, I stood up, zipped down my dress, took it off and tossed it under the table.

About that time Grandma noticed that there was a car outside, and that a fat, middle-aged couple were getting out of it. She came rushing into the kitchen with that near panic that always overcomes her when customers approach, even when she knows perfectly well she won't have to talk to them.

"My land, here's a customer! Come on, come on!" She hurried into the kitchen, her black eyes sparkling with excitement in her unwrinkled face.

I gasped with what I hoped sounded like dismay. "A customer? Oh, dear, and I was just getting ready to take a shower! See, I'm in my slip. I can't possibly wait on them like this. You'll have to do it, I'm afraid."

"Good Godfrey Mighty," Grandma breathed. "I can't--"

The doorbell pealed a strident summons.

"My God!" exclaimed Grandma. "What am I gonna do?" Grandma, to my great regret and mortification, swears. She insists that she doesn't, and that she hasn't uttered a single word that would be inappropriate at a Ladies' Aid meeting, since two years ago when she made a New Year's resolution to stop swearing. Actually, that resolution proved to be only the mildest sort of damper on her powers of expression; but she maintains that she no longer swears. The only time she'll admit it is when she's caught in the act, and confronted with the echo of what she has said. And even at such times, she tries to persuade me that, with the exception of that one time ...

The doorbell rang again, more insistently. Grandma's black eyes darted around with lightning speed. Whether she was looking for my dress, or for a means of escape, I didn't know.

"Go ahead," I prodded. "I've explained to you how to do it. You know where the keys are, and what we charge for each cabin."

Grandma gave a low moan and started for the office. I sat down again, still in my slip, and chuckled. I glanced at the book I had been reading, but I strained to hear what was going on in the office. I could hear only a low rumble of voices.

Well, she could tell me all about it afterward. I tucked one leg under me on the kitchen chair, fingered the satiny material of my slip, and began reading my book again.

I was absorbed in a faintly lavender passage in the book when suddenly I realized that I was not alone. There, in the doorway of the kitchen, stood a middle-aged couple, their eyes busily engaged in examining my slip and the broad expanses of skin above and below it.

"There she is," Grandma, behind them, was saying weakly. "I'm new here--she knows how to rent cabins--she's the owner--I ain't--Godfrey, I don't know how--" Her voice tapered off. She gave a despairing little bleat, and disappeared.

I clutched the book to my bosom, and began moving my feet under the table, hoping perhaps I could hook my dress on one of them.

"Er--uh--you wanted to rent a cabin?" I asked, with as much poise as I could muster under the circumstances.

"Well, I must say!" exclaimed the middle-aged woman, finding her voice at last. "Well, I never. Indeed, no, we do not wish to rent a cabin. Come, Horace."

And she swirled out the door, Horace behind her.

Grandma was abject. We had quite a discussion while I put my dress back on.

"You wouldn't come," she kept protesting, rather feebly. She rubbed the burn scars on her arms--scars that, in spite of her years of experience with irons and mangles and press machines, she reinforces frequently with fresh burns. "I see you wasn't coming, so--"

"Something on the order of 'Mohammed won't go to the mountain, so the mountain must come to Mohammed'?" I asked bitterly.

But I couldn't be too harsh with her. After all, it was due to my own scheming that she had found herself in a position so terrifying that she had put me in a worse one. However, as I zipped up my dress, I made a little promise to myself that I would never again try to make Grandma do anything she didn't want to do.

One thing she never minded doing was taking care of the children whenever I wanted to go anywhere. Or, when all the cabins were filled and our "no vacancy" sign was on, Grant and I could go away for one of our rare respites from the motel business.

Unless the cabins were full, and Grant could leave also, it didn't do me much good that there was someone to take care of the children, unless I felt like walking in the hot sun three quarters of a mile to town. I didn't know how to drive the car. There was no reason why I shouldn't learn, though, I decided. Now we were out of Los Angeles with its traffic and its careless drivers; there was a little, seldom-used country road--Williams street--way out behind our cabins, at the end of our land, which had probably been designed specifically for beginners to practice driving upon.

Grant explained the rudiments of driving to me. I learned to tell the gear shift lever, the clutch and the brake apart. All this, and my first experiments with making the car go, had to be done in the driveways leading to our various cabins, since a customer might arrive at any moment--and Grandma, as I well knew, would not be able to cope with such a situation. Obviously, my opportunities for practicing there, with Grant beside me to instruct and to point out my errors, were limited. When I thought I had the idea pretty well, I drove alone out our rocky driveway that extended along the side of our land behind the cabins, onto Williams street.

It was my first solo flight, and I was full of pride as the car bounced over the rocks. A glimpse into the mirror showed me that Grant and Grandma and David were standing in front of our cabin, watching me, their eyes shaded from the hot sunlight by their hands. Their faces, I assured myself smugly, were alight with admiration--although of course I couldn't see their expressions that far away.

At the end of our little private road there was a small ditch, and just beyond it was a sudden steep rise. I'd have to get out here and do some hoeing, I reflected, clinging desperately to the steering wheel as the car forged ahead over the obstacles.

And then I was on the road. I turned the car to the left, waved airily so that my tiny, faraway audience could see how well I was doing, and stepped harder on the gas until I was racing along at eighteen miles an hour.

Well, so far so good. But I recalled what I had said to Grant just before taking off--"In order to really learn to handle the car, what should I do besides just driving down the road?"

"You split an infilitive, Mama," David said reproachfully.

"Back it up, turn around in the road, pretend you're parking between two cars," Grant said.

I considered his three suggestions now. I could have done any of them to an airplane or to a steamship as easily as to our suddenly formidable automobile. I knew that shifting into reverse would make the car go backward, but I had no idea how to steer or control it under such circumstances. Well, all that was rather advanced anyway, I comforted myself; for this first time, just driving around the road, going around a few blocks and coming home would be enough.

I looked ahead on the road, trying to figure out where the first cross street was. All I saw was a huge house at the far end of the road. I hadn't realized the road ended there, but there was a house, so it must.

I drove on. The house was growing larger rapidly, much faster than it should, considering the rate of speed at which I was creeping.

Maybe the house was moving toward me, while I was moving toward it! I laughed gaily at my own whimsy, but I began to watch the house more sharply.

I wondered if the excitement and nervous strain of driving had made me suddenly delirious. That house was coming toward me.

Sweat broke out in drops on my forehead, and my palms were clammy on the steering wheel. Was this a nightmare? There was no doubt whatever now that the house was approaching me rapidly. And did I imagine it, or was there a malevolent gleam in its windows?

When it was only a couple of blocks away I realized suddenly that there was a truck under it. Obviously the house was simply being moved to another location. But in spite of the renewed faith in my sanity this discovery brought me, I kept right on perspiring. There was no side road into which I could turn off, and there probably would be none before I met the truck. Since it is, naturally, easier for a car to turn around and go back the way it came than it is for a house-laden truck to do so, the driver of the truck was undoubtedly entertaining the foolish notion that I would turn my car around.

We drew closer and closer together. There was no possibility of my squeezing by; the house stuck far out, even over the edges of the road, on each side of the truck.

I was in despair. Why had this happened to me on my first time out alone with the car?

But I didn't have much time for dramatic, rhetorical questions. Hoping for a miracle, I had continued slowly along the road, until now the truck and I were face to face. We both stopped. I sat there and pondered, my face growing hot with embarrassment. The driver of the truck honked, and the unshaven man beside him yelled, "Turn it around! Get it out of here, sister!"

I sighed. There was no other way out of the mess, I realized. It might take me all afternoon, but I'd turn the car around--if it killed all of us!

Knowing that they were waiting impatiently didn't add anything to the grace and sureness of my movements. I yanked alternately at the choke and the throttle, between bouts with the gear shift lever and the gas. In my confusion, I forgot which of the various gadgets was which, and it was by a process of wild experimentation that I finally got the car to back up. I turned the steering wheel all the way to one side, and found myself careening backward in a violent arc. I stepped on the brake abruptly, assaulted the choke once more while I tried to remember just how to start the car, and finally I got it going forward again. Just as I got the back of the car turned squarely on the truck, and heaved a sob of relief, I realized that the car had ceased to respond to my pushing on the gas.

Finally one of the men in the truck, the one who was sitting beside the driver, clambered out of the truck and came over to me.

"What's a matter, sister?" he demanded.

"My house won't go," I explained. "I mean, my truck won't go."

"You mean your car won't go?"

"Yes, yes," I said feverishly. "That's it. My car won't go. I must be out of gas."

"Lemme in."

I was too far gone to question the propriety or the safety of letting a strange, unshaven man get into the car with me. I moved meekly aside, and he sat behind the wheel and tried to start the car.

"You flooded it," he stated.

I tried to look as though I knew what he was talking about.

"You just learnin' to drive sister?" he wanted to know. I nodded unhappily.

He must have pitied me in my obvious misery. He smiled, patted one of my cold hands, and climbed out of the car. "Don't you worry none," he advised. "We'll give you a push."

He climbed back into the truck, and pretty soon I felt the car being shoved firmly forward. The entire mass of gadgets, pedals and levers before me were by this time as incomprehensible to me as a Hebrew essay on the fourth dimension. I knew that the men in the truck expected me to get the car going under its own power soon, but I didn't even try. When we approached our private road behind the cabins I signaled (that much, at least, I knew how to do) that I was about to make a right turn. I turned onto our road; the momentum and the slight downgrade combined to let the car slide ahead along the road, onto the driveway that led around to the cabins, and to the front of our own cabin. I emerged from the haze long enough to identify and apply the brake. Then I lay back in the seat like a dead woman until Grant and David, who were still outside, came running up.

"How come you pullled a house almost all the way home?" David demanded, moving his loose lower teeth back and forth with grimy, gum-stuck fingers.

"Was I dreaming," Grant asked, "or--"

I waved my hand at them by way of answer, staggered out of the car and into our cabin, where I flung myself upon the bed.

CHAPTER SIX

EVERY NIGHT WHEN Grant goes to bed he lays out his clothes in exactly the places and positions where they will be easiest to get into in a hurry. (Except on the nights when all the cabins are full by bedtime; then, knowing he won't have to get up to answer the doorbell, he reverts to type and tosses all his things in a heap on the floor!)

But on the nights when our "vacancy" sign is on, he likes to be prepared for the inevitable summons. He wears his underclothes to bed. His trousers hang over a chair beside the bed, and are the first garment he grabs when the bell rings. He thrusts his legs into them quickly, hobbling across the room toward the office at the same time. In the middle of the room is his shirt, hanging on another chair which has been carefully placed halfway between the bed and the doorway to the office. Halting his clumsy gait long enough to seize the shirt, he puts it on and tries to button it with one hand while he zips his trousers with the other. By this time he has reached the doorway which separates the office from the living room; and there wait his slippers. He steps into them hastily, hurries to the outer office door, and opens it--to face a customer who is on the verge of giving up and leaving.

I've often tried to talk him into going to the door in his robe, which wouldn't take a tenth as long to slip into. But he insists that that would look sloppy.

"Any sloppier than going with your pants half zipped, and your shirt buttoned into the wrong buttonholes?" I ask. I don't complain or make suggestions too much, though, because I realize how lucky I am that he takes it for granted it is his job to wait on the customers who come during the night.

Mr. Featherbrain probably never had to untangle his tall frame from the bedclothes to wait on nocturnal customers for the first couple of months after he opened his place. The people who were attracted by his little place were very few and far between. One morning, though, Mrs. Featherbrain called me over, and I sat with them in their nicely furnished living room. It was the day after a highly advertised celebration had been held in the desert northeast of Banning, to which movie stars and humbler creatures had flocked to watch the laying of the cornerstone of what was to be Pioneertown, the future setting of the cream of Hollywood's horse opera crop. Every motel in town had been full.

"We wented four cabins last night!" Mrs. Featherbrain told me ecstatically, waving one of her ever-present cigarettes. She is a plump, dark woman with a very mobile face. She smiles, frowns, raises and lowers her eyebrows, and blinks rapidly while she talks. She is probably twenty years younger than Mr. Featherbrain.

"That's wonderful!" I said warmly. And then I realized what she had said. "Four?" I repeated. "Why, you only have three units to rent."

"Of course, but one couple left about eleven last night, and we wented their cabin over again."

"Really? What time had they come?"

"About ten."

"You mean they left the key, and took all their stuff, and really checked out?"

"That's wight," Mrs. Featherbrain replied, the wrinkles in her forehead appearing and disappearing.

"Did they ask for part of their money back?" I persisted.

"No."

"Well--that's odd," I said.

"Why, that must have happened at your court lots of times!" she protested, a cloud of smoke pouring out from her fluttering nostrils. "Hasn't it? Do you ever go out and look, about midnight, to see if some of the cars haven't pulled out?"

"Why--why, no," I said. "I can't imagine why they would leave. After all, they've paid their money, and if they didn't want to spend the night before traveling on, why would they--"

Mr. and Mrs. Featherbrain exchanged glances. "Have you ever seen any of the motels on Ventura Boulevard, in Los Angeles?" Mrs. Featherbrain asked.

"Mmm--yes, I think so," I said. "There are quite a few of them, aren't there? I remember wondering, in fact, how they could possibly get enough tourists to keep them filled up, right in a big city like that."

My hostess shot a look at her husband, and blinked rapidly several times.

"Well, sir," Mr. Featherbrain began, speaking with apparent difficulty, "Yuh know, not ewybody that stays in motels is tourists."

I looked at him blankly.

His chin was growing red.

Mrs. Featherbrain's features were moving violently, and all at the same time.

"You never were in the motel business before, were you?" she asked.

I shook my head.

She sighed. "Well, you see," she explained, "sometimes young couples that are out together--well, they don't have any place to go, and so--of course it isn't wight, and the sort of people we know don't do it, but--and of course the motel owner isn't to blame if some people, instead of using the cabins to spend the night and sleep in, use them to ..." Her eyebrows were leaping wildly, and she turned to Mr. Featherbrain. "You tell her, dear," she begged him.

But at last I understood. I got up, embarrassed partly at the conversation and partly at my own display of stupidity, and went home.

This was an aspect of the motel business which was new to me, and I resolved to find out whether such use of motels on the highway was common. I had developed a library-born friendship with Mrs. Barkin, the owner of the rather shabby Sylvan Motel toward town, and I planned to bring up the subject at our next meeting.

I didn't let my unhappy experience with the house movers prevent me from learning to drive. "Twice in a lifetime it couldn't happen!" I told Grant; and I took the car out on Williams street day after day, sometimes staying out only ten minutes, and other times staying half an hour or more; and finally I was so adept at handling the car that I went to the Banning police department on a day when driving tests were being given, took the test, passed it, and received my driver's license.

I clutched the slip of paper proudly to my bosom. This, I knew, rated a special little trip. I must try my wings--or my wheels, rather--somewhere besides on Williams street and the downtown block around which the driving examiner had just accompanied me.

Grant was taking care of the motel; Grandma was taking care of the children; everything had been arranged so that I'd be sure to have enough free time to take both my written and my driving tests, and to get my license. Duty wasn't calling me back to the motel; now that I was a licensed driver our insurance would fully cover any accident I might have. (Not that I contemplated having any; but visions of liability suits had danced through my head every time I had been inspired, by my growing aptitude at driving, to take a little spin away from the dull safety of Williams street.)

So now I had some free time and a driver's license. And there was no place better to explore, I decided, than--the Indian reservation.

"I hope they don't put a curse on me," I thought, zipping along the highway to, and past, our motel at twenty-five miles an hour. I turned left on Hathaway, the cross street east of our motel; Mrs. Clark had told me Hathaway led back into the hills where the reservation was.

Less than a mile from the highway, Hathaway rose to a small peak on top of which was a cow guard, with metal grillwork extending across the road, the bars--between which cows would catch their hooves if they tried to cross--at right angles to it. A fence divided all the land past the cow guard from that on the side I was coming from; except for the open gateway at the road, there was no entrance to the land which a formidable-looking sign declared to be the Indian reservation.

The sign thrust its large white face forward pugnaciously as it stated:

WARNING!

INDIAN RESERVATION

The introduction of

INTOXICATING LIQUOR

into or its possession within this reservation,

or its sale to Indians, is

FORBIDDEN BY LAW

under a penalty of fine and imprisonment

NO TRESSPASSING OR HUNTING

The fact that "tresspassing" was misspelled made the sign a trifle less awesome and pompous than it had seemed at first glance, but I brought the car to a complete stop and pondered for a while.

Well, I wasn't "introducing" any liquor (from what I'd heard, most Indians didn't need an introduction) but to go into the reservation would be trespassing, I guessed. Still, the gateway was open and white people, I knew, drove through it frequently. Maybe by "tresspassing" in this case, they simply meant getting out of the car and going off the road.

Anyway, I had looked forward to this a long time, and, having come this far, I wasn't going to let a misspelled sign stop me.

I drove over the cow guard, my heart bumping as hard as the car. Strangely enough, the character of the land inside the reservation didn't change; it was the same as it was everywhere else, dry, flat until it began to roll up toward the mountains, covered with bristly bushes and a few stunted trees.

A peculiar lump beside the road far ahead turned out to be a fat brown woman sitting huddled inside a soiled shawl. An Indian! In her native habitat! I put on the brake, rolled down the window and called, "Want a ride?"

My temerity amazed me. This would be something interesting to tell people about, though. I was glad I had followed my impulse to stop, because if I had taken time to think it over I would probably never have done it.

The woman's bright dark eyes slid over me and the car in amazement. Afraid that this exotic prize would escape me, I pushed open the car door on her side and smiled invitingly.

After a moment of contemplation, she wrapped the dingy shawl about her broad shoulders more tightly against the wind, struggled to her feet and lumbered toward the car. She sat beside me, her thighs under the cheap cotton dress spreading so that the car seat between me and the right hand door was completely smothered in soft fat flesh. I lowered the window on my side before I started the car.

I glanced at the Indian woman as I pressed on the starter. Her face was round and greasy. Her eyes were like shiny black buttons, and her straight black hair was stringy. Her full, untinted lips did not move in response to my smile.

The road, which deteriorated rapidly from pavement to dirt once I was inside the reservation, led past occasional brown shacks that seemed made of weary old boards leaning against each other for support. A few of the houses, though, were made of stone, and fairly attractive. No doubt the chief and his relatives lived in these ... if the Indians still had chiefs. I recalled what the laundry truck driver had said about the Indians--that those who wanted to collect money from the government had to live on the reservation in order to be entitled to it, and that those who were willing to forfeit their right to the money could live away from the reservation and engage in any type of work they chose.

Livestock of various kinds and sizes meandered about most of the dwelling places. Some of the horses were beautiful, graceful brown creatures with jet black manes and tails that tossed in the wind. There were squat, heavy set cattle with broad heads and broad bodies. Except for the fact that they each displayed a few unmistakable signs of femininity, I would have sworn that they were all bulls.

"You live around here?" I asked, with a circling sweep of my hand, turning toward my obese passenger.

The black button eyes stared at me, not with hostility, but obviously without any particular liking for me.

The dirt road curved slowly back toward the highway. There were innumerable bumpy little roads leading off the dirt road toward primitive looking parts of the lower mountains, but I was afraid to follow them. I didn't want to get too completely into Indian territory!

When we came to a fence broken only by an open gateway across the road, I stopped the car and leaned across the Indian woman, opening the door.

"You'd better get out here," I said.

She didn't move.

"Listen, I don't dare to take you out of the reservation. It might be a violation of the Mann act, or something. Goodbye," I said suggestively.

The fat squaw rolled out of the car, and stood staring at me, her glittering eyes speculative as I started the car.

I bumped across the cow guard, which was a twin to the one I had crossed when I entered the reservation, and glanced into the mirror to see what she was doing. As the dust from the tires settled I saw her squatting beside the road, adjusting her filthy shawl as it whipped in the wind, and settling herself comfortably.

I drove along the stretch of pavement that led to the highway with a vague sense of disappointment.

I hadn't expected to find a bunch of Indians in full war dress, yelling and whooping; I hadn't expected to see any venerable, feather-headdressed chiefs smoking long pipes of peace; and I certainly hadn't expected to be scalped. And yet I left the reservation with a vague sense of disappointment.

I have always worn my hair, which is quite thick, at shoulder-length, curly and with a bunch of little curls at the top. It used to be a fairly attractive and flattering style, but Banning's whirling wind has played havoc with it. I can spend half an hour combing it, smoothing it and adjusting the brown curls; then, after walking across the driveways to one of the cabins, I look as though I not only hadn't combed it for several days, but had lost a piece of thread in it and had allowed the children to search thoroughly for it for several hours. My hair style became what a fashion magazine might charitably christen a "windblown long bob." Whenever I brave the blasts that sweep across the open fields behind the motel, where I hang up clothes on washday, I wear a snugly tied bandana--but I can seldom get it tied so securely that the wind doesn't whip it off several times.

Strangely enough, other Banning women have neat, precisely waved hair which is seldom untidy or out of place. That is something I have never been able to figure out.

In the wintertime, it's people who swarm over Banning and the surrounding vicinities; in the summer, it's bugs. Every imaginable kind of bug spends the summer in Banning; bugs with wings, without wings, with and without antennae, and some with strange appendages whose uses, if any, seem hazy to the bugs themselves. Besides the common black widows, which are so plentiful that people simply ignore them, there are peculiar worms with large, mischievous eyes; there are beetles equipped with hard shiny hoods and galoshes, in case of rain; there are grasshoppers whose heads, instead of being in the place customary for grasshoppers' heads, pivot at the end of long, sticklike necks.

Before we came to Banning, and for a short time after our arrival, I wore open-toed sandals. But an uneasy knowledge of the desert's strange fauna, coupled with the loose gravel, the stickers rampant in the weeds, and the huge flesh-hungry black ants, to whom the presence of stockings were merely a snickerprovoking challenge, soon converted me to oxfords--and, if I hadn't been afraid of seeming too eccentric, I would have worn hip-length boots.

Banning has such hot summers, and such a dry, hot wind blowing continually off the desert, that I, like practically every other woman under seventy who weighs less than three hundred pounds, wear shorts. To this, Grant sometimes pretends to attribute our success.

"Yep, half of our customers just come in here because they see you running around in shorts," he says.

He can be very sweet at times, particularly when he has to go downtown and wants me to sort and count the laundry, or when he is hungry for a home made apple pie. One day--I believe it was a helping hand with some weed-pulling that he wanted--he had complimented me until I was beginning to believe I was rather a femme fatale in shorts. He had gone into the house to make a phone call, and I continued pulling weeds from around the geraniums in the little island under our big neon sign.

Suddenly I noticed a shiny car going past on the highway very slowly. It was full of well-dressed, distinguished looking men who were staring in my direction with absorbed interest. I pretended not to notice, and went on with my weed-pulling. But I was pleased. Maybe I wasn't so bad after all!

The car turned around in the highway, about fifty feet past our place, and cruised slowly by again. I was careful to stoop as gracefully as possible when I lunged for the weeds, and I tucked a geranium, that I had broken off by mistake, into my hair.

The car went more and more slowly, and finally it stopped right in front of the island. I stood up and went closer to the car, smiling graciously. I pretended to think the men wanted to rent a cabin.

The man in the front seat nearest the window cleared his throat, grinned sheepishly, and said:

"Say, ma'am, I wonder if you could tell us what kind of trees those are, in that row down the middle of your place? We've been having a little argument about it."

My smile faded. I was furious. "They're Chinese elms!" I snapped, and I stomped away.

It was that same night that Grant, leaving for the postoffice, told me to be sure to get at least three customers while he was gone.

"Don't worry," I said sarcastically, "I'll just sit out here on the curb around the lawn where they can see me. I'm so beautiful they won't be able to resist driving in. If they try to escape I'll lure them right in."

I was standing idly at the office door about twenty minutes later when I saw our car, a blue sedan, slow down as Grant waited for traffic to clear so that he could make the left hand turn into our place. I smiled suddenly. I'd show him what I meant by luring them right in.

Pretending to assume that he was a prospective customer, I stepped out in full view and made elaborate motions of adjusting my hair, rolling my eyes, and making come-hither gestures with my head. I thrust out one leg and ran my hands over it as though I were pulling up a sheer stocking; I smiled in an over-exaggerated way that would have, I felt, put to shame any of the old time movie vamps. My legs were in a coy Betty Grable pose, and as Grant pulled into the driveway I repeated my gestures of eye-rolling and of motioning seductively with tosses of my head.

"You got a cabin for four people?" asked a woman sitting in the front seat. Why, who--(I would have thought whom, but I was too excited)--had Grant brought home with him? I looked at the man behind the steering wheel questioningly. It wasn't Grant.

The car--well, obviously, ours wasn't the only blue sedan of that particular make and age.

"A--a cabin?" I asked finally. "Sure, of course. Would you--uh--like to look at it?"

Two half-grown boys, in the back seat, were staring at me pop-eyed, their mouths half open.

I'll never forget their expressions, or my own humiliation.

My friend from the Sylvan motel, Mrs. Barkin, stopped in a few days later to give me a library book she wanted me to read, and she laughed heartily when I told her about my experience. She had managed a motel in Riverside, I knew, before she came to Banning after the death of her husband, and when she was through laughing I brought up the subject of motel cabins being rented by the hour instead of by the night.

"Short stops?" she said. "Oh, yeah, we used to get lots of 'em, when we were in Riverside. You get that in any big city, yeah. Lots of money in it too if you have a good location for it--you can rent each cabin several times a night. Only thing is you have to do a lot of work cleaning cabins in the night then, yeah, that is if you're gonna rent 'em again."

Mrs. Barkin was a very short, squat woman with broad hips and enormous arms. Her fat legs, which she had managed to cross, looked uncomfortable. There was a faintly shabby air about her wilted blue organdy dress.

"Ten minute quickies, my hubby called 'em," she giggled. "Yeah, we got lots of 'em. Yeah, the good old days. We don't get many of 'em here. I remember one fella used to come there--it was during the war, and he worked swing shift--every night after work, right after midnight, yeah, he'd come. Five nights a week. Every night he had a different girl with him, too. You know, he--" Mrs. Barkin went off into spasms of laughter--"he came to my hubby one time and says, 'Say, don't I get a weekly rate here?' Yeah, he came so often he wanted a weekly rate!"

I laughed with her.

"You're shocked, yeah, I can see that. Well, you're young yet, you'll learn. It shocked me too when we first got that place in Riverside and I saw what was going on. I used to watch the people come in, and I'd try to pick those kind from the ones who really wanted a place for the night. I'd pick out a nice, respectable looking couple, middle-aged, and say to my husband, 'Now, there's a couple that's married, that's been married a long time, and that's on the square.' And then, maybe an hour later, we'd see them come out of their cabin and drive off, leaving the key sticking in their door for us to pick up. Why, you just can't tell who'll do it. In this business you have to keep your mouth shut, yeah--but you can keep your eyes open if you want to. You'll see more'n you'd believe. Why, I got so I wouldn't have trusted my own grandmother not to rent a room with some fella for an hour!"

She uncrossed her legs with difficulty. "You'll see. One of these days even your Miss Nestleburt you were telling me about, and her boyfriend, yeah, the one that's always playing practical jokes--they'll be doubling up, and you'll have an extra cabin to rent!"

Miss Nestleburt and Mr. Hawkins were getting very friendly, all right. (But not that friendly!) Every afternoon she waited until he came back from his work in Palm Springs, and then they strolled together next door to Moe's cafe for dinner. On Saturdays and Sundays they went for long drives together in his car. Her incipient asthma seemed to have disappeared--she told me herself that the desert air had cured her completely--but she stayed on.

I was beginning to think that the desert air had even more marvelous properties than those that had been claimed for it: Mr. Hawkins hadn't played a practical joke in weeks, not since the time he poured a bottle of ink into Grant's bucket of soapy cleaning water. Whether it was the desert air, or the influence of his dainty companion, I didn't know.

One Saturday morning while Mr. Hawkins was getting his car filled with gas at the service station across the street, Miss Nesdeburt waited in the office. She was wearing a dull, inconspicuous dress. She watched Grant, who was putting a door between the office and the living room--to take the place of the filmy curtain that had been there. We had had very little privacy, with only a thin bit of drapery separating our living room from the office. We still wouldn't have complete privacy, since there was a window in the top half of the new door--but as soon as I made little curtains for the window, no one would be able to look into our living room.

When Grant laid down his tools and went out to the garage, Miss Nesdeburt smiled at me, and two delicate fans of wrinkles appeared about her eyes.

"I had a dream," she told me, "and I think people should share their dreams, don't you, ma cherie?"

"Absolutely," I agreed. I was at the desk in the office, catching up on the previous day's bookkeeping.

"I dreamed I was a beautiful young girl," she said, taking her glasses off with one tiny hand, and holding the other hand up, letting it droop gracefully at the wrist. "My hair was fiery red, simply terribly red, and so were my lips. I was built like a goddess. My bosom was high and proud, my waist was just the right size for a strong man's hands to encircle." She stopped, and stood there in ecstatic reverie.

"And then?" I prodded.

"Ah, and then. There was a prince--a gallant, polite prince with the most wonderful sense of humor. He wore a suit of armor and rode a white charger and went out to do battle for me--"

"Wasn't he a knight?" I interrupted.

"No, no, a prince; or at least, he said he was. And I see no reason to think he wasn't being truthful about it.... Anyway, he loved me more than anything else in the world, and he wanted me to marry him."

I finished adding a column of figures. "And did you do it?" I asked, writing down the total.

"No." Miss Nesdeburt's blue eyes were sad, and she replaced her glasses. "I got all dressed up in my hoop skirt and leg o' mutton sleeves, but when it was time for the ceremony it turned out he had worn just red flannel underwear to the church as a joke. He had such a sense of humor, you know."

"Mm hmm. And how do you interpret the dream?"

"Oh, I've figured it all out very carefully, according to Elmo's teaching, and there's only one possible meaning. I'm either going to inherit a large sum of money soon, or else it means a close relative of mine will inherit some."

I laughed as she went out to get into Mr. Hawkins' coupe, which had just driven up onto the gravel. The idea of Mr. Hawkins as a prince or as a knight amused me, and I was still smiling about her obvious little dream when the telephone rang, about half an hour later.

It was a gentleman who, in short, clipped phrases, wanted to reserve three cabins that evening, for a large party of people who were going to spend a few days in the desert.

I had hardly finished writing the name in which he made the reservations after the numbers of the three cabins on that day's list, when the telephone rang again. This time it was a clerk from a Banning hotel, who said that the hotel was full already. Could we accommodate three ladies who wanted separate beds?

We could, and I took the reservation. Then I surveyed the list happily. A few of our customers were staying over from the day before, and with all these reservations, we had only four vacancies left. At that rate we'd be full tonight--and early enough so that we could have one of our rare evenings away from the place.

I started joyously outside to tell Grant, who was cleaning cabins. Just as I shut the door, though, the telephone rang. It was the owner of the Crawley Motel, on the west edge of Banning, calling for "some clients he couldn't take care of"; did we have a cabin that would accommodate five?

No, but we could give them two separate cabins.

That would be fine; they'd be over within half an hour.

That left two vacancies, and it wasn't even noon yet! There must be a rodeo or celebration around, or the season for hunting some kind of animal which lived around here must have just opened; or else it was a holiday that had escaped my notice. According to the calendar, though, neither that day nor the next was a holiday; I couldn't quite figure out the rush for cabins.

I wasn't much surprised, though, when the telephone rang twice more in the next hour. I took the two reservations and went out to uncover the "no" of our sign.

"No Vacancy," our sign proclaimed; and the owner of the Blue Bonnet Motel directly across the highway hollered across wonderingly, "We haven't got a one! How'd ja do it?"

"Oh, you just have to know how," I laughed. Then I went inside, picked Donna up out of her playpen, and hurried out to help Grant finish cleaning the cabins.

All afternoon occasional cars slowed down by our motel, until their drivers noticed the "no vacancy" sign hanging there grandly. Then they picked up speed and drove on down the highway, turning into the driveway of one of the other motels.

By late afternoon I was beginning to get uneasy. Not one of the people for whom the cabins had been reserved had shown up. It was conceivable that one, or even two, might be late or might disappoint us altogether; but for all of them to do it--! I didn't dare, though, to cover the "no" again and start renting cabins. I'd be in a terrible spot then if--

Suddenly a brown roadster swung out of the lane of cars and drove up to the office. At last! I thought, they had started coming. If the rest of them would only hurry, maybe Grant and I and the children could still go out--at least for a little drive.

But the women in the car didn't have a reservation. They didn't even want a cabin. All they wanted to know was, did we have a man named Smith staying here?

"We don't have hardly anybody staying here," I told them savagely, if not very grammatically.

One of them laughed, and indicated our sign.

"Then why do you have your 'no vacancy' sign on?" she asked.

"I'm beginning to wonder about that, myself," I replied.

Mr. Hawkins and Miss Nestleburt drove in about seven-thirty. I was standing in the office doorway.

"Not very busy tonight, are you?" Mr. Hawkins called, his car slowing down. I had the familiar, uncomfortable feeling that he was secretly laughing at me.

"We're full already," I said, motioning unhappily toward our sign.

They drove on back toward their own cabins.

I stood thoughtfully in the doorway for a while. There had been something in that man's expression . . .

I walked furiously toward the "no vacancy" sign, and put the cover back over the "no." It would be Mr. Hawkin's idea of a good joke, I knew, to disguise his voice and call up several times for reservations. I was positive now that it had been he who had made all those phone calls.

Because of our late start, all the motels in our end of town filled up before we did. It wasn't until four-thirty the next morning that Grant could uncover the "no" again.

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--"

"You'll what?"

He must have remembered then that Moejy was quite a bit bigger than he was.

"Oh--nothing, I guess," he said, nibbling gum from his dirty fingers.

But I knew exactly how he felt about Moejy. I felt the same way, myself.

CHAPTER EIGHT

"MADAME, I WONDER if you would be so gracious as to do me a favor?" Mr. Hawkins, coming through the office door, put his dark hat on quickly so that he could remove it in a sweeping, deferential gesture.

"Of course," I said automatically, looking up from my morning's bookkeeping. "That is, maybe," I added warily.

His brown eyes, as usual, were sparkling with a private amusement. He always gave the impression that he loved people, but couldn't resist a few chuckles at their expense.

"I fear the matter of the black rubber spider has caused you to mistrust me," he said. "Ah, madame, I apologize deeply if my little joke frightened you. Pray have the kindness to forget it long enough to do for me something for which both my fiancee and I will be grateful."

"Your fiancee!" I exclaimed. "You mean Miss Nestleburt has--you're going to be--"

"Yes, she has done me the great honor of consenting to become my wife. Our nuptials will take place a week from today, when my work in Palm Springs will be done. And today, if your husband can spare you, I would be most happy if you would come with me and help me select a small gift for my bride-to-be."

Grant was just finishing a late and solitary breakfast. (A fried egg, smothered in applesauce.) He could manage, he told me sleepily. David was in school and the baby was playing quietly in her playpen; and not many customers come in the morning as a rule. I got my coat and purse while Mr. Hawkins waited, and then he helped me gallantly into his green coupe.

We stopped at a drugstore on the corner of San Gorgonio Avenue, in the heart of Banning. A sweet smell, compounded of fragrant cosmetics and candy and soda fountain concoctions, met us as we went in.

The drugstore was crowded. Children and a few men were clustered around the comic books at the magazine stand; the seats in front of the soda fountain were full of workers having a morning coke or cup of coffee. Matrons and business men thronged the store, and the clerks were rushing about busily.

We strolled farther into the drugstore, Mr. Hawkins' broad shoulders clearing a path for us, and finally he touched my arm respectfully. He had stopped at a table laden with merchandise. The table held everything from toothbrushes to expensive cosmetic sets. Probably, I thought, he wanted my opinion on whether one of the cosmetic sets would be an appropriate gift.

I was standing there in the crowd, smiling amiably, when suddenly he picked up a toothbrush, waved it in the air, and bellowed,

"What--you mean to say you actually haven't brushed your teeth for three years? Well, COME ON, I'm going to buy you a toothbrush!" And he took me by the elbow and herded me ostentatiously through a staring, shocked, and slightly revolted crowd, to the nearest clerk.

He put some coins into her hand and said loudly, "Don't bother to wrap it up, I'm going to get her home and make her use this toothbrush right away. Did you ever hear of anyone going three years without brushing their teeth? Why, the Board of Health ought to get after people like that!"

I was scarlet with rage and mortification. I summoned up a sickly smile for the benefit of the curious eyes that were around me. But then those eyes all darted down toward my mouth, eager for a glimpse of my teeth. I pressed my lips tightly together--a move which, I realized later, must have convinced everyone that my teeth were covered with enough film to shoot another Gone With the Wind.

I stalked out of the drugstore, and Mr. Hawkins, the toothbrush in one hand, followed, shrieking with laughter.

I got into the car silently and grimly. When he had controlled his mirth enough to start the car I said with venom, "Now don't give me any of that 'I apologize deeply, madame!' stuff."

I glanced sidewise at him. His cheeks were still quivering, and wet with tears.

Chuckling intermittently, he drove the car to a candy store a few blocks away.

He got out and made a flourish as though to help me out of the car. I sat there and stared at him stonily.

"I'm not going into another store with you," I stated. "If you really want my advice on a gift, just bring it out here to the car and I'll tell you what I think about it. I'd even tell you what I think about you, if I weren't a lady."

"Madame, I assure you--" he protested. Then, his words apparently evoking the memory of my expression in the drug store, he turned away quickly. His shoulders were shaking as he went through the doorway of the candy store.

Presently, followed by an anxious salesgirl, he came out, carrying several attractive, cellophane-wrapped boxes. With a regal disdain that must have puzzled the salesgirl, I indicated that a box of chocolate covered dates was the choicest delicacy of the lot.

I was still in a bad mood that evening when I came back from cabin 15 and climbed up on the typewriter case on the kitchen chair, after sprinkling a clothesbasket full of clean clothes and getting them ready to iron. The difficulty of reading, and the headlights which clamored for my attention and turned out to belong to cars which were going so fast that it was obvious they weren't likely to stop, began to irritate me more than they ever had before.

Finally, after I had made three unsuccessful attempts to read one sentence through to the end, I snapped my book shut, sighed loudly for the benefit of Grant, who was reading on the davenport--and leaned hard, with violent disgust, against the back of the chair.

My disgust was much more violent when I found myself sprawling helplessly in the clothesbasket, like a huge turtle on its back. I had forgotten that the height of the typewriter case was enough to make the chair back--short enough to start with--practically nonexistent.

Grant came running to help me out of the clothesbasket. I looked at him sharply. Yes, he was smiling a little.

That settled it! The idea, him sitting and reading, and then laughing at me when I injured myself after working about fourteen hours in one stretch!

I'd fix him. I thanked him graciously for his help, smoothed the clothes in the basket, replaced the typewriter, and resumed my watch.

I glanced around at Grant, after a few minutes. He was immersed in his newspaper once more, and looked very comfortable.

I smiled diabolically. "Eep," I said.

Startled, he leaped up and dashed for the door. I chuckled as he hurried out to put on his act for a car that was going at least sixty miles an hour.

As soon as he returned, acknowledging defeat, and grew absorbed in his paper once more, I cried "Eep!" again. I kept that up until at last he came back wearily into the house and said,

"None of those cars were going slow! Are you getting so you can't tell a slow one from a fast one?"

"It's funny," I said, "but I've been noticing that they all begin to speed up just about the time you start out there."

He looked at me suspiciously and resumed his reading without saying anything. I was jubilant. It was illogical, of course, but somehow this was making up for what Mr. Hawkins had done to me.

Suddenly I noticed two cars creeping along the highway, one behind the other. They were past the Peacock and almost in front of Featherbrain's little motel.

This was too good to miss. Surely one of the two, at least, could be led in here.

"Eep! Two slow ones! Get out there!" I called excitedly to Grant.

For a moment he didn't move, and I was afraid I had cried "wolf!" (pronounced "eep!") too often. But he finally decided I was telling the truth, and hurried outside.

I had followed, to stand in the doorway between the living room and the office to watch. Those cars were going so slowly that they must be going to stop--either at Moe's restaurant or at whatever motel they might select.

Grant was outside, walking back toward the office, rustling his newspaper so the occupants of the cars would be sure to see him. The light of the neon "office" sign shown full on him. The first car turned into our driveway, its headlights silhouetting Grant's tall slender form. The car behind it had turned into Featherbrain's driveway.

I went into the kitchen and looked out the window. The car that had gone into Featherbrain's driveway, I saw now, was Featherbrain's own car. Mr. Featherbrain had stopped his car in his driveway and was getting out.

As soon as I realized he was heading for our place, I went back toward the office. Grant had finished renting a cabin to the driver of the car which had just come in, a man alone who hadn't cared to inspect the cabin before accepting it. The man had left, taking the key of his cabin, when Mr. Featherbrain came charging into the office. His ruddy chin was quivering with indignation above his long, skinny neck.

"That car oughta been mine!" he snarled. "If it hadn't a been for you and your durned old newspaper that anyone could see a mile away, they'd a come in my driveway! You allus been doin' that way, ewy evenin', I bet. No wonder I ain't been gettin' anybody. I oughta bust evvy bone in yer head!"

Grant pointed out logically that a man had a perfect right to stroll about on his own property, with or without a newspaper. He added that if, at any time, Mr. Featherbrain had an inclination to do likewise, he would have no objection whatever.

The old man stormed away without saying another word. And it was to be a long time before he would speak to either of us again.

After that, I felt a little guilty about pulling the customers in. Grant agreed with me that we shouldn't take Featherbrain's potential customers away from him; neither of us had looked at it in exactly this light before.

For two nights we let the slow cars approach unchallenged. A few of them came into our driveway; none at all went into Featherbrain's. The majority went at a turtle's pace past our place, undecided whether or not to stop, and ended by turning into one of the motels nearer town or continuing on through Banning.

After two nights we were convinced we weren't robbing Featherbrain of anything; no one stopped at his little Palace Motel anyway. And it was heartbreaking to let all those prospects go by without doing anything to bring them in. So Grant resumed his old tactics, and business improved again after its two-day slump within a slump.

Grant was full of plans for what we would do when we had saved a little money. We'd put in kitchens; we'd have a bigger, more eye-catching neon sign; we might make the back half acre into a deluxe trailer park. With all that and the repeat trade bound to come to a new motel that's clean and well-managed, we'd never suffer another summer slump like this one, he prophesied. And, knowing him and his ability to devise ways of doing what he wants done, so that the ultimate results on which he sets his mind are achieved, I knew that his prophecy was right.

Miss Nestleburr came into the office three days before the date set for the wedding, to pay up her rent for the remaining days.

"We got our license this morning," she told me tremulously, taking the bills I gave her in change, and tucking them into her purse--a new, shiny black purse that glittered against the pale blue of her suit. Her entire outfit was new, and in contrast to the dull, unnoticeable clothes she had always worn before. The fine network of wrinkles beneath her eyes was almost hidden by a well-applied layer of pancake makeup, and the whole office tingled with the scent of her perfume.

"I made a simply wonderful discovery while I was filling out the blank for the license," Miss Nestleburt said. "I happened to take my glasses off just before I started to write, and--" she paused impressively. "I don't need glasses at all!" I laughed. Everyone but Miss Nestleburt, apparently, had known that all along.

In the few days that intervened before the wedding, we had a lot of bad luck--so much, in fact, that I began to get discouraged.

"Maybe this motel is jinxed," I said to Grant. "Maybe we were never meant to be in the motel business."

First it was our electricity. A high truck, going to the parking lot directly behind Moe's restaurant next door, tore down the wires that led from the row of cabins beside the restaurant to the main lines. One whole side of our motel was without electricity, and therefore unrentable, for two days and two nights, until the understaffed electrical department could send some men out. And Grant had a battle on his hands to keep from being stuck with the expense. The truck driver who had done the damage was gone; if Moe knew who he was, he wouldn't admit it. Truck drivers gave him the better part of his income, and he didn't want to anger any of them.

Finally, on the grounds that the wires must have been strung dangerously low in the first place, Grant succeeded in making the electric company repair the damage free.

I hadn't worried that we would have to pay for repairing the wires, even when I knew that there was no trace of the truck that had done the damage. I knew Grant would work out some way to get them fixed, without its costing us a cent. I had no idea how he'd do it, but I knew he would do it.

Grant can always figure a way out of anything. He is so ingenious that I see no reason why, someday, I shouldn't be swathed in emeralds and diamonds. (None of these have materialized as yet, though.) For instance, one night when he ran out of gas, being able barely to coast into a station before the car stopped, he made the dismaying discovery that the station was closed. Refusing to be cast into the gloom that would have overcome an average person, he got out of the car and emptied into the gas tank the dregs of gasoline remaining in the hoses attached to each pump, amounts which totalled up to enough gas to get the car to a station where he could order, "Fill 'er up!"

On another occasion, after getting a flat tire when we were on an open stretch of highway near Hemet, he changed the tire for his spare, only to discover that there was no air in the spare. He had no pump. There was no civilization around, except for some old ramshackle barns near the highway, beside one of which was a sort of spray gun for painting. It was a huge container with a hose attached. The container was empty of paint, fortunately, and, after toying with the hose awhile, Grant discovered how to make it shoot a jet of air--air that would have been paint, if the container hadn't had the courtesy to be empty. Grant moved the limping car close to the paint sprayer, and after repeated efforts somehow succeeded in getting quite a bit of the squirted air into the soft tire.

I sometimes think that if an earthquake should suddenly shatter our motel to a level with the ground, if I should run away with another man, if David should put all our possessions into a glorious bonfire, and Donna should get her hand caught in the wringer of the washing machine--all simultaneously--Grant would be able, by a few incisive words or actions, to bring the entire situation back to normal. In case, since he is my husband, this sounds like bragging, let me add that there is nothing so deflating to the ego, so utterly crushing to one's sense of having any worth or value, so completely paralyzing to one's latent, potential abilities, if any, as being married to such a paragon of accomplishment.

After our electricity was fixed--on the house, as it were--our neon sign went bad again. It flickered uneasily for a while, and finally went off altogether. We called the cherubic-faced Oian Roscoe again, and he fixed it for us promptly; but we were beginning to get disgusted. This neon sign was costing us a lot of money.

And business hadn't yet picked up to a point where we were taking in much more than enough to make our payments. Then some boys stole David's red wagon--a shiny, deluxe job we had given him for a Christmas present, when we were still in Los Angeles.

David had left it out behind the single cabins, by his tent. He and Moejy, who had been throwing gravel at each other behind Moejy's father's restaurant, came running in to tell me that they had seen a bunch of big boys pulling the wagon away.

Grant had gone to the bank. I knew that if the wagon was to be recovered, it was up to me to do something--and do it quick.

Donna was in her playpen. Telling David to stay with her, I loped out toward the tent. Sure enough, there in the distance, across Williams street, and with what seemed like a mile of fields between them and me, were the boys with David's wagon. It looked like a tiny toy, sparkling red in the sunlight.

I ran determinedly toward the boys, and I could see them pulling the wagon after them as fast as they could go.

I was soon out of breath, and nervous at the thought of leaving the motel and the baby for so long, but I plugged on. I couldn't see that I was gaining on the boys, but they must have thought I was, because finally they let go of the wagon and ran on without it, disappearing behind a group of houses.

Then I still had to trot the remaining quarter of a mile, or however far it was, get the wagon, and trudge wearily homeward with it.

When I got home I discovered that Moejy, who had stayed with David, had locked the office doors and the bathroom door, and hidden the keys. When I tried to make him tell me what he had done with the keys, the wiry little creature ran outside and down the edge of the highway toward the Peacock. David had been giving the baby a piece of bread, he said, when Moejy hid the keys; he hadn't seen where he put them.

I was frantic. If a customer should come, what would I do? With the outer office door, and the one leading to the living room, locked, I wouldn't be able to get the keys to the cabins or a master key. I wouldn't be able to show a cabin to a prospect; even if I could, I wouldn't be able to get at the change or the registration blanks. "I won't be able to even show one cabin!" I wailed.

And as for the bathroom being locked--well, that situation, too, might become acute. But so far I wasn't worried about that.

Just then a bright red roadster pulled into our driveway. I opened the living room door and stepped out, so that they wouldn't go to the office.

"Gotta single?" asked the driver.

I gulped helplessly.

Just then David nudged me from behind, and handed me the three keys Moejy had hidden.

"I just remembered," David hissed, "Moejy was fooling around by the fork drawer in the kitchen. I looked, and there were the keys! And you split your infilitive a minute ago."

That wasn't the end of our run of trouble. The night before the wedding, the fields out back caught fire. Someone driving along Williams street must have thrown a cigarette or a lighted match from a car window. Any fire in Banning is a menace because of the brisk, whipping wind, and this one was no exception.

Grant was shaving when David clattered in to tell me about the fire. I called the fire department quickly, after a glance out the door; the licking flames were dramatic and beautiful out there in the blackness behind Moe's restaurant.

I ran toward the fire with David, beating Grant to the draw. One of us, naturally, had to stay with the baby and the motel, and I knew I'd be the one if I didn't hurry!

The fire department was there within five mintues, and before long they had the blazing weeds under control. The next morning we went out to inspect the path of the fire, marked by black weeds and burnt earth, and we saw that the fire had come up almost exactly to our property line, where it had been stopped.

"See, we aren't jinxed, after all," Grant said.

We realized how lucky we had been. If the wind had been blowing in another direction, or harder, and if the fire department hadn't been so prompt, the rear section of our motel--the four single cabins--might have burned.

Thursday was the day set for the wedding. Mr. Hawkins' well-built body was encased rakishly in a striped suit, and his brown eyes were sparkling with his characteristic sly amusement when he came into the office. I smiled, remembering Miss Nestleburt's remark about hoping he wouldn't embarass her by playing a practical joke or doing something eccentric at the ceremony. I couldn't blame her for not quite trusting him.

Mr. Hawkins swept off his hat. "I know, madame," he said, "what you think about me. I know what you're thinking right now. It is my fond hope that I can at least partially obliterate the bad impression I have made upon you. There are two hours yet before the ceremony, and in those two hours I propose to work for you. If you will give me cleaning equipment and fresh linens I shall clean my cabin from ceiling to floorboard, until it is so spotless it will look as though it had never been occupied."

Since Grant, who cleaned each occupied cabin each day, whether or not the occupants were staying over, had cleaned Mr. Hawkins' cabin the previous morning, it wasn't as much in need of a thorough cleaning as he implied.

We hadn't cleaned his cabin yet today, though. Since this was to be his last day here, we planned to wait until he left, and then to get it ready for a new customer.

I had tried to persuade the pair to stay at our motel for their honeymoon. Mr. Hawkins, though, insisted that they should travel for a few weeks, and then settle down in Burbank, where he had a nice home that had been rented out since the death of his first wife five years ago. Mr. Hawkins would have liked to spend a comfortable honeymoon in Banning, probably, but he didn't trust me. He knew that, although I had laughed off the rubber spider and several other of his little whimsicalities, I had never forgiven him for the tooth brush incident. He was afraid that I would seize upon his wedding night as an opportunity to revenge myself in full.

If he really wanted to clean up his cabin in readiness for a new occupant, I certainly wasn't going to stand in his way. I led him out to the linen closet, where I loaded him with a bucket of soapy water, disinfectant, a broom, a dustcloth, and clean linens.

"Don't get that gorgeous new suit dirty!" I called after him as he carried the load back toward his cabin.

Grant was mowing the grass on the last of the three white-curbed islands. The approach of winter had slowed down the growth of the grass, so that it didn't need as much mowing as it had a few weeks earlier. It didn't need so much watering, either. Some of the leaves of the Chinese elms were turning golden or red and dropping to the ground. It was the basis of a prolonged debate between Grant and me. Would the elms, or wouldn't they, lose all their leaves for the winter? "Yep," said Grant.

No, said I. With all the varieties of non-shedding trees in California, the people who built the motel wouldn't have been so foolish as to plant trees that would be bare sticks all winter long, when business was heaviest and it was most important for the motel to look attractive.

Whenever we couldn't think of anything else to talk about, we argued about that. And every day there were more leaves on the grass, and the trees were in a more advanced phase of their strip tease.

Mr. Hawkins returned the cleaning equipment about an hour after he had taken it, and invited me to inspect his handiwork. He had done a good job, all right. The place was spotless; the furniture all shone as though it had been polished, and even the Venetian blinds seemed cleaner than we had ever been able to get them. A new book of matches was in the ashtray; two new, fragrant little guest-size bars of Cashmere Bouquet soap were on the sparkling sink. The bed was made perfectly, without a wrinkle in or under the spread, and the soft, blue woolly extra blanket was folded precisely at the foot of the bed, as neatly as any of the extra blankets on the beds in the other cabins. The cabin would be ready to rent to the most discriminating customer as soon as Mr. Hawkins removed his suitcases and a few of his clothes that were hanging in the closet. They would return and get all their belongings after the ceremony, he said.

"The cabin looks wonderful," I said sincerely. "You've certainly saved us a lot of work." And I was beginning to think that I had perhaps misjudged his basic character, when he produced the piece de resistance. "A gift for you, madame," he said grandly, taking a small box from his pockets. "A little token of my regard for you and my appreciation for your forebearance."

Overcome, I was about to open it when Miss Nesdeburt fluttered into the cabin. She was resplendent in a pale blue satin dress, with four strands of pearls around her neck. Rhinestone earrings rivaled the pearls for glory, and her eyes rivaled the rhinestones.

"I can't get this dress zipped! Will you zip up the back of it?" she appealed to me.

I zipped it for her, and said, "Isn't it supposed to be bad luck to let the groom see you in your wedding dress before the wedding?"

"Bad luck? Mais non!" she scoffed. "I'm not superstitious."

She must have seen my incredulous smile. "I don't believe in dreams any more either," she went on. "I've decided Elmo's teachings about the meaning of dreams is just a lot of nonsense. None of the things that my dreams prophesied, according to his teaching, came true. I think," she confessed, her fair skin turning pink, "I just had all those dreams because I wanted to marry Mr. Hawkins!"

"Well, I suppose that's possible," I conceded.

They were married at the home of one of Banning's ministers. I was a witness; and after the brief ceremony (during which Mr. Hawkins behaved like a perfect gentleman) they drove back to the motel, to let me off and to stow their luggage in the car. Miss Nestleburt's car was stored in a garage; they hadn't figured out exactly how or when they were going to get it, but they didn't want to go on their honeymoon in separate cars!

They let me off at the office, and drove back toward the cabins they had been occupying. Fifteen minutes later they drove out, paused by the office to honk a raucous farewell, and began to edge into the line of traffic on the highway. Grant and I went outside to wave at them; Mr. Hawkins waved back, and from his hand hung what looked like the corner of a woolly blue blanket.

I stared after the car as it swung onto the highway, and then I said to Grant, "Did you see what I saw?"

But Grant had already started toward the back row of cabins. I followed him, and we burst into the spotless cabin that Mr. Hawkins had lived in. It was still beautifully neat, especially since his luggage and his clothes were gone--but now the extra blanket was gone from the foot of the bed! "He took our blanket!" Grant exclaimed.

"Let's be sure," I said. "Maybe it's just another of his jokes. Maybe he just wanted us to think he did." We searched the place thoroughly; we looked under the bed, in drawers, on the closet shelf. We even glanced into Miss Nesdeburt's cabin. We couldn't find the blanket.

"I guess he took it, all right," I said at last. "Well, he isn't going to get away with it. I'll go after him."

I would have let Grant, as a representative of the sterner, stronger sex, handle the situation, except that I was so furious with Mr. Hawkins that I couldn't bear to let anyone else have the pleasure of dealing harshly with him.

I got into our car, backed it out of the garage, and drove quickly to the highway. I turned left, in the direction in which Mr. Hawkins had gone, and pressed my foot down hard on the gas.

Mr. Hawkins must have been driving fast, too. I didn't catch up with them until we reached the side road that led to Twenty-Nine Palms. They were hesitating there, apparently trying to decide whether to go straight ahead or to have a look at Twenty-Nine Palms. About the time they decided to go straight ahead, I drove up beside them. "Pull over!" I yelled.

"Look, dear, a lady traffic cop," I heard Mr. Hawkins observe loudly; but he pulled meekly off the highway, near some clumps of sagebrush. The desert rolled in swells around us, its sands sparsely covered by cactus plants and by an occasional grotesque Joshua tree. Sharp mountains, partly covered with snow, walled us in, and ahead of us the highway disappeared into sloping hills.

I parked behind them, and got out of the car. I felt selfconscious as I stalked toward them. I was acting just like a traffic cop.

Mr. Hawkins narrow brown eyes were laughing at me as I said icily, "I'd like to have that blanket back, if you don't mind."

Miss Nestleburt drew in her breath in a sharp gasp. "What do you mean?" she asked, her tiny white hands going to her mouth.

"What blanket, madame?" Mr. Hawkins inquired courteously.

"The blanket you took from our motel!" I snapped. "There it is! Right on the seat between you!"

Mr. Hawkins didn't glance at the blanket. "Your suspicious nature grieves me," he stated. "Why, simply because I have a blanket, do you assume that it is your blanket?"

"Because the extra blanket is gone from your cabin, as you know."

"Madame," he replied, "I fear that you are mistaken. I am quite positive that the blanket to which you refer is still in the cabin it has been my happiness to occupy for awhile. Why don't you hurry back and look more thoroughly?" He started the motor of his car.

"Give me that blanket!" I cried.

"This blanket," he said, "is mine. It was a--a wedding present." His eyes shifted as he spoke, and his face wore a furtive, guilty expression.

Angrily I stepped on the running board, put my arm through the window and reached across him, seizing a corner of the blanket. I pulled. Mr. Hawkins held the rest of the blanket, and he pulled also.

Miss Nestleburt--she would always be Miss Nestleburt to me, even though she had made the mistake of marrying this sly, underhanded thief--clasped her little hands in distress.

After a brief tug of war Mr. Hawkins made what came as close to being a courtly bow as possible, under the conditions and in his position. He released the blanket, and I gathered it into my arms triumphantly. Mr. Hawkins sighed.

"If you are so determined to have my blanket, all right. I suppose, in the motel business, you must get supplies in any way you can. But there's just one thing," he said mildly. "Before you take it, will you identify it, or try to? I just want you to admit, before we part, that you know it isn't yours."

"But it is!" I cried. "Do you think I'd be so interested in getting it away from you if it weren't?"

"Frankly, yes."

Fuming, I held up the satin edges of the blanket. "It has 'Moonrise Motel' stamped on the edges somewhere," I said. "All of our blankets do. Just wait. I'll find it right away."

I searched fruitlessly for a few minutes, while Mr. Hawkins sat watching me, a widening grin on his face.

I kept on hunting for the "Moonrise Motel" stamp. I couldn't find it.

Finally I looked up at Mr. Hawkins. If I had been angry before, I was raging now. He had made a fool of me again.

"You knew perfectly well that wasn't my blanket!" I accused him.

"My dear madame, that's what I've been trying to tell you all along," he pointed out reasonably. He took the blanket from my numb hands, and they drove off, leaving me in a shower of sand.

When I got back to the motel I went again into the cabin Mr. Hawkins had occupied and looked about thoughtfully. Where could that blanket be?

It must be on the bed, smoothed out under the spread with the other blanket. I peeked under the spread, but the extra blanket wasn't there. Nevertheless, I felt that it must be secreted about the bed somewhere; there absolutly wasn't any place else in the cabin it could be!

I gazed at the bed for a while, and then, moved by some unaccountable impulse, I lifted one side of the mattress and peered under it. There, between the mattress and the box springs, was the blanket. .

I pulled it out, smoothed the bedspread, and put the blanket neatly at the foot of the bed. I left, making a mental note that the cabin was ready to rent.

After I went back into our own cabin and told Grant ruefully what had happened, I noticed the little package Mr. Hawkins had given me, still on the desk by the telephone where I had put it before going to the wedding. I picked it up warily.

"I wonder what is his idea of a gift," I mused. "'A little token of his regard for me.' Is it more likely to be a baby rattlesnake, or a tear gas bomb?"

"Open it and see," Grant suggested, brushing back his brown hair with his thin fingers.

I tore the wrappings off the package gingerly, perched on the edge of my chair ready to throw the whole thing away quickly if necessary. I held a small, innocuous-looking box in my hand. Slowly, carefully, I opened the box.

Inside was the silver figure of a nude man, about four inches high, standing on tiptoe with his arms upraised. On the tips of his fingers was a balloon, with which he was, apparently, supposed to be playing.

"H'm," I said, "Rather immodest, and I don't know what it's for--an ornament, maybe--but I guess I didn't have to be so nervous about opening it."

Grant, with his quick perception, had figured out exactly what the thing was for before I had even completely made up my mind that it was harmless.

"It's an atomizer," he said. "The balloon is the bulb. It smells like there's perfume in it right now. Squeeze the bulb and see."

I squeezed the bulb, and we were sprayed with fragrance.

I stood the little silver man on top of the bookcase. He's there right now, the object of the admiration and titters of those who visit us. His silvery body still gleams brightly, he is as merrily nude as ever, and a little pressure on the balloon he is playing with still brings forth a gentle squirt of perfume--but where the perfume squirts from, I refuse to say.

CHAPTER NINE

THERE IS AN indefinable air about every motel cabin that is felt, I imagine, by all but the most insensitive of motel owners. It's the composite spirit of all the people who have slept in that cabin. It's nothing more tangible than memory, actually, yet it's very real.

Miss Nestleburt and Mr. Hawkins had been with us so long that their presence still seemed to cling to their cabins. I felt almost guilty the first time I rented their cabins to other people after they left. A stern, rigid old couple fell heir to Mr. Hawkins' cabin, and I couldn't help contrasting their stiff seriousness with the sly humor of the former occupant.

Grant and I sat on the davenport that night after the children were in bed, and discussed the motel business. It was raining, so he wasn't going to go outside to bring any customers in.

"What we need is a rifle," Grant observed, lifting up the top slice of bread of his sandwich to make sure that the peanut butter, Worcestershire sauce, and apple jelly were still there. I averted my eyes, and asked him what we would do with a rifle if we had one--shoot people who tried to go into any motel but ours?

"Shoot out all the signs around us," he replied, his cheeks bulging. "Then we'd fill up right away. As soon as we filled up we'd quick shoot our own sign out, so the other motel owners wouldn't get suspicious the next morning because ours was the only sign that hadn't been shot out. We'd make twenty or thirty dollars extra that way; we'd pay Rosco seven-fifty to fix the sign, and that's all there'd be to it."

"You're wonderful," I said admiringly.

"We should at least change our own sign once," Grant went on, licking his lips. "The Winking Eye's sign, with its big eye flashing on and off, is almost as much of an eyecatcher as the Peacock's. Here we are between them with a sign no better than Featherbrain's."

"Maybe we could have a picture on top of the word 'Moonrise,'" I suggested. "A big orange moon--only half of it showing because it's supposed to be rising--all made out of bright neon."

Grant took another bite of his sandwich. "Have to talk to Oian Rosco about that," he observed. "He'll know if it can be done, and how much it would cost. I'll have to find out about neon myself one of these days. I don't like to have to hire anyone to make repairs."

We were silent for a while. "Another way to get customers," Grant mused, "would be to put up a sign outside: 'Limit--one cabin to a customer.' They'd come rushing in then, I'll bet."

We talked for a while about what different characters and personalities people possess--differences evidenced by the very manner in which they ask for cabins. There are several general types of opening remarks. There's the one that goes something like this: "Have you a nice, soft bed for a poor weary traveler to lay his tired body in?" The person--almost invariably a man--who asks for a cabin in this manner is without doubt good-natured, easy-going and generous, and has a good sense of humor. Then there's the thin-nosed man who thrusts that slender appendage a cautious inch inside the office doorway and demands, "Whatcha get for your cabins?" And there's the woman--too many of her--who inquires thoroughly into every detail before she will condescend even to examine a cabin.

"Have you bedbugs?" she inquires. There are two appropriate responses to such a query that, so far, I've been able to hold back. One is, "I'm sorry, we haven't any, but I think you can get some at the little store across the street." The other response would be a sigh, a confidential motion to her to come closer, and the words: "No, but I'm eaten alive by lice. Have you found any good ways to get rid of lice?"

Not only is a woman of this type not satisfied with asking about bedbugs, but she must also ask whether there is hot water (really hot?) and whether we actually wash the sheets, or whether we just iron the wrinkles out each time they are used and put them back on the beds.

But the most common four words--I've heard them so often I can almost tell by a prospective customer's expression when I am about to hear them again--are: "Have you any vacancies?"

Obviously, since our sign is proclaiming to all the world that we have, the question seems superfluous. The question irritated me at first, until I realized that everyone who asks it knows perfectly well that we do have a vacancy, but can't think of a better way to start the conversation.

The telephone interrupted our discussion and reverie, and Grant answered it.

"A reservation for two?" he said presently. "Yep ... I got that . . ." He began writing on a piece of paper by the telephone.

"The twin beds!" I hissed. "Ask them if they want twin beds!"

Our two twin bed cabins often seem to be a drug on the market, even though, except when business is rushing, we lock off the back bedroom, with its double bed, and rent the twin beds for only a dollar more than the price of a regular single cabin for two. When we remind people that we have twin beds, or ask them as they register if they wouldn't prefer them, we have better luck in getting rid of those cabins.

We often have trouble remembering to ask them, though. I prodded Grant in the back and hissed again, "Ask them if they want twin beds!"

"Do you want twin beds?" Grant said into the telephone mouthpiece. And then, to my amazement, he began to blush. He concluded the conversation hurriedly and with confusion, and then he turned to me.

"After this, will you leave me alone once when I'm telephoning?" he asked. "The man told me right away he wanted to reserve a cabin for his honeymoon. And then you quick pester me into asking him if he wants twin beds!"

Grant rented a cabin to a gushy, heavily upholstered woman, and we picked up our conversation where we had left off. "People certainly have a lot of different subjects to talk about while they register," I remarked.

"She certainly did have," Grant replied. "More than most." The principal topics of conversation are weather (both "here" and "where we came from") traveling conditions, and motels. Frequently an out-of-state customer will linger in the office to complain about the search that was made of his luggage and belongings at the border. And occasionally a customer will take the opportunity to expound his entire philosophy of life.

"We're missing a bet," Grant said, "by not having another business or two as a sideline. We could make a fortune selling the little things people leave behind and never call for--tooth brushes, bobby pins, things like that. And," he added bitterly, "we could sell wigs, and pillows stuffed with human hair."

His worst objection to cleaning the bathrooms in the cabins is the hair that is usually all over the sink and floor. He has often talked, in fact, of trying to get a law passed that would bar women from motels. Scattered bobbypins, lipstick smears on towels, hair and powder would be automatically eliminated in that way. (So would most of our income.)

Worse than hair, in my opinion, are ashes (the scattering of which is a pastime engaged in by more men than women.) Both sexes sprinkle them blithely all over the cabins--a trifle more thickly in the general neighborhood of ashtrays. That part of "ring a round the rosy" which goes "ashes, ashes, all fall down!" was probably written by a cabin-cleaner-upper as she fell down, exhausted, after removing the results of an average smokefest.

If ever the WCTU is supplemented by an organization to squelch dat ole debbil Nicotine, I shall join it. I shall be one of its most vociferous members, agitating violently for the suppression of tobacco, and for the relegation to dungeons of those whose lips, pockets, or thoughts are contaminated by cigarettes.

Grant and I had been in bed for about ten minutes when the doorbell rang. It was the male half of the rigid old couple to whom I had rented Mr. Hawkins' cabin. The door between the living room and the office was slightly ajar, and when Grant answered the bell I proceeded to engage in my favorite pastime--eavesdropping.

The man's voice was as severe and unyielding as his face. "May I inquire, young man," he said, "what was the idea behind the way you fixed our bed?"

Grant, of course, didn't know what he was talking about, and said so.

"Perhaps it is your idea of humor," the icy voice went on, fading as Grant followed the man back to his cabin to see what was the matter.

I was uneasy while I waited for Grant. Obviously, whatever was wrong, it was Mr. Hawkins' doing. I should have known there was something behind his eagerness to prepare his cabin for new occupants.

Grant came back in about twenty minutes. "Apple pie bed," he said. "Your friend Hawkins got in a last lick."

And then we sat on the bed and laughed until our sides ached.

Business was beginning to pick up again, to such an extent that Grant stayed up to pull in customers only a few nights a week. The Palm Springs season was to open October first, and the motel owners around us who had been in Banning more than a year assured us that the eight-month Palm Springs season would guarantee our being full almost every night.

Grandma came up from Los Angeles toward the end of September, exactly two weeks--as usual--from her last visit, and we decided to drive the twenty miles to Palm Springs and look the place over on its opening day.

The first of October was a bright, sunny day. Grant wasn't feeling very well--he had overindulged, the previous night while pulling in customers, on "tomato rolls," his own invention. These were cinnamon rolls, pulled apart and with slices of fresh tomato inserted. Too many of them cause the complexion to assume a greenish tinge, as Grant discovered. (The mere contemplation of them had that effect on me.)

In spite of the uneasiness of his stomach, Grant assured me that he could manage all right, and he and Donna waved to us as we swung onto the highway and headed east toward Palm Springs. I had never driven the road before.

My driving was still far from perfect, and Grandma's habit of excitedly calling my attention to sights along the way was very irritating. My curiosity about everything she pointed out was very maddening and intense, but the highway was so busy that I didn't dare take my eyes off it, even though I wasn't driving very fast.

A few miles east of Banning we turned off the main highway onto the road that led to Palm Springs. Desert stretched and sloped around us, its sand dotted with cacti and sagebrush, and mountains towered almost menacingly above us as we drew closer to Palm Springs. Gleaming white sand, beaten into purity by months of insistent pounding wind, cascaded up the sides of some of the mountains.

The little city of Palm Springs seemed like something out of a fairy story as we drove into the outskirts--low pastel stucco dwellings, pink and blue and yellow and green, dotted the sides of the road. And the lush greenness of the lawns, and the brilliance of the flowers, made the spot seem like an oasis.

Almost anything will grow in the desert, if it gets enough water. The growth of well-cared-for grass in Palm Springs amazes even the natives. If the earth is spaded and the seed planted on a Monday, the green shoots will be up on Wednesday, and on the next Monday, one week after the planting, the lawn will be thick and luxuriant and badly in need of mowing.

Clouds were hanging low over the city--or the "village," as habitues call it. I parked the car on the main street, near the famous Desert Inn, and we got out of the car. We hadn't brought coats or sweaters, of course, since it had been warm in Banning, and Palm Springs is supposed to have a warmer climate than Banning's.

There was a dull chill in the air. The streets were busy with cars and pedestrians, but no one was wearing a coat. In fact, nearly everyone was wearing shorts, with brief tops or no tops, depending on their sex--scanty outfits that left their goose pimples plainly visible.

One very protuberant man, standing in front of a swanky little novelty shop, was wearing bright yellow shorts, with yellow bobby sox to match. White sandals completed the ensemble. The hair on his chest was curly and thick, but it couldn't have done much toward keeping him warm. On his fat, slightly blue face was an expression I had noticed already on several faces since we had arrived--an expression that seemed to say, "Well, I came here so I could wear practically nothing, and by golly, I'm going to do it!"

Shivering, we walked past him. The main street of the village was lined with low, expensive looking stores, with show windows full of merchandise that sparkled and beckoned. Bars with extravagantly fancy interiors invited the thirsty into their dusky interiors. But we found the people more interesting than the surroundings. Not only were they determinedly wearing shorts and sun clothes, but many of them were wearing dark glasses--in spite of the fact that most of the low clouds were sitting on the ground now, and those that were still up in the sky were beginning to leak spasmodically.

"Godfrey Mighty, maybe they're movie stars!" Grandma exploded suddenly. "That's what they be, sure as anything."

"They couldn't all be movie stars," I protested. "Look at this dog coming, though--he seems to have gone Hollywood, all right."

We looked--or maybe we even stared. A plump, heavily jeweled woman wearing a silver fox jacket (the most appropriate garment I had seen here yet) was leading a tiny chihuahua. The creature was bundled into a bright green sweater, and around one of its frail forelegs was a glittering diamond bracelet.

"My God, that's the first time I ever see a dog with jewelry on!" Grandma hissed, as the pair met us and went on.

"I imagine we'd see a lot of things here if we'd hang around long enough," I remarked. "And incidentally," I added, "I want to congratulate you again for stopping swearing. It was a bad habit, and I'm glad you got over it."

About half of the hotels and apartment houses had "no vacancy" signs. If the accommodations were this nearly taken on the opening day, visitors would have a hard time finding a place to stay in Palm Springs a little later in the season. Besides, a night in a Palm Springs hotel would probably cost as much as a week at a motel in Banning. It looked as though Palm Springs would have a good season; and that would mean a good season for Banning. The overflow from Palm Springs, plus the usual number of winter tourists coming to California from the east, should mean a few thousand dollars extra knocked off our mortgage.

We crossed the busy street and paused in front of the window of a dress shop. There were wax models almost hidden under cascades of ruffles, models buried in layers of pleats and fluff. I had never seen such fancy clothes. There were elaborate dresses for tiny girls, and the prices calmly jotted on little tags attached to each were staggering. One little slip, for a girl of about three, was valued at nineteen dollars. The prices of the other garments were in proportion.

"Gee whittaker, I never see anything like it!" Grandma said, her small black eyes bright with amazement. "It's most a wonder it don't cost nothing to breathe here!"

"Don't worry, they'll give you the bill for that when you leave, they will all right!"

We turned around. There, behind us, stood a small, birdlike old man.

"This is Palm Springs," he chirped. "Nothin's free, not nothin', it ain't."

His lips closed tightly beneath his little beak of a nose, and he regarded us as curiously as we were looking at him.

"Have you been here long?" I asked finally, not being able to think of anything else to say.

"I've been here all day, I have," he stated. He resumed his scrutiny of Grandma, apparently pleased with her short, stocky figure.

"You ain't gonna stay here, be you?" Grandma asked him.

"Not here, I ain't, not for nothin'. I'm going back to Los Angeles tonight, I am, all right. Where you from?" he asked, indicating Grandma with a quick nod of his little head.

"I live in L.A. too," Grandma said, adding modestly, "I'm a fancy presser. I'm going back in a day or two."

The man seemed to be lost in thought. "If everything wasn't so expensive here, I'd buy you a meal, I would all right. But I'll tell you what. Give me your address, and I'll buy you a dinner next week in Los Angeles."

Grandma gasped and looked at me, half thrilled and half dismayed.

"Good Godfrey Mighty," she murmured.

"Go ahead," I whispered, knowing what she was worrying about. "Hellwig won't have to know anything about it."

"He'd be madder'n a wet hen," she hissed back.

"Well," chirped the old man, "does that sound all right to you? It does to me, all right."

Grandma said, "Ayah," feebly, and wrote her name and address on a piece of paper he handed her.

"A week from tonight I'll be there, I will all right," he said, examining what she had written on the paper. "Seven o'clock. Goodbye!" He turned abruptly and walked away.

We strolled on in the opposite direction, and paused outside a real estate office. I read the placards in the window while Grandma discussed our birdlike friend.

"He's a odd critter, awful odd," she said. "But he ain't bad looking. I knew pretty plaguey well he was interested in me. Just so Hellwig don't find out, ding bust it. He'd be madder'n Fury."

"Look," I interrupted, pointing out to her one of the signs in the window. I read it aloud. "Unfinished residence. Situated on large lot. Twenty-nine thousand. Another good buy: A choice business lot, ninety thousand down."

"Thunderation, we better get out of here. This land under us is too valuable for us to be walking around on it like this."

"Beg your pardon."

It was Grandma's little admirer again. "I forgot to tell you my name. I'm Ansil J. Wagonseller. Pleased to meet you ladies, I am all right. Goodbye."

We watched him walk perkily along the sidewalk. He got into a beautiful new car that was parked on a side street near the corner.

"Ansil J. Wagonseller," I remarked. "He must have sold a lot of wagons to be able to buy a car like that one."

"Gee cracky, I never see such a car," Grandma cried ecstatically. "Do you think he'll really show up? Or was that just a lot of talk?"

The rest of our stay in Palm Springs was lost upon her. She worried about whether or not Mr. Wagonseller would actually call on her, while we wandered about the streets. She accompanied me dumbly, paying no attention while I bought a delectable white ivory Chinese backscratcher. As we strolled back toward the car I told Grandma more about Palm Springs, from the store of wisdom presented to me by Jed, the laundry truck driver. The whole area, it seemed, was divided up into squares, like a checkerboard. Alternate squares were Indian land. It seemed too bad that, with miles of worthless desert land all around, the precious--although actually, equally worthless--land of Palm Springs should have been given back to the Indians. Of course, all this was arranged long before Palm Springs began to ascend toward its zenith of exclusiveness and popularity. Although the land now belonged irrevocably to the Indians, it was possible for white people to secure ninety-nine year leases from the Indian agent. These leases were fragile and precarious things, though, containing a clause providing for cancellation at any time. Houses built upon land so leased, therefore, were quite literally built upon stilts, ready to be moved on short notice. And since no one cared to put much money into the building of a house that might have to be removed at any time, these houses were hovels indeed compared to the sleek, expensive, modern pastel stucco creations that abounded in all the streets of Palm Springs--all the streets, that is, except those that went through Indian land.

Grandma paid no attention to my discourse. She only roused from her reverie when I pointed out to her a rotund, slightly bald man who, I said, was without doubt Bing Crosby.

Bing Crosby is her favorite actor. She clutched me feverishly as we neared the man, who was leading a sad-eyed collie.

Our mouths hanging open, forgetting to keep on walking, we watched the man approach. Behind his dark glasses, he seemed to be returning our stares with interest.

To our amazement, he stopped in front of us and said, "Beg pardon, ladies, but is you all goin' to de annual Palm Springs dog show? It's gonna be de bigges' thing evah hit Palm Springs, dis yeah! Mah li'l poochie, here, is gonna be in it, and if he don' win every ribbon, Ah'll eat mah dark glasses!"

He sauntered on by us then, without waiting for us to reply. Grandma and I looked at each other.

"That was Bing Crosby," I stated, my tongue assuming a time-honored position in relation to my cheek.

"Pshaw, 'twarn't neither," Grandma replied. "Bing Crosby ain't bald headed. Besides, 'taint likely he'd be talking to us."

We argued about that until we got back to the car.

"Anyway, they wun't nobody come to his dog show if he don't take off his glasses and let 'em see who he is!" Grandma declared.

As we left the village she sighed and said, "So that's Palm Springs. It's a H. of a place, if you ask me. I swear'n, I like Banning a sight better."

There was one thing, though, that I liked about Palm Springs very much--and that was the effect the opening of the season there had on our business. People flocked toward the desert from Los Angeles, and those who couldn't afford to stay in Palm Springs stayed in towns that were close to Palm Springs. Besides this overflow from Palm Springs, we had the regular tourist trade, and October wasn't very old before our motel began to be full every night by nine.

It would have been full earlier if we had rented a cabin to everyone who applied for one. People have an annoying habit, though, of traveling in pairs or even singly, and now we always saved our nine double cabins until three or four people together appeared who wanted accommodations. Naturally, the rate for three or four is much higher than the rate for one or two. Until recently, on nights when couples wanted a cabin after our singles were full, we had been locking off the back bedroom of double cabins and renting the remainder of each as a single.

When our rollaway bed and the army cot were in use, we could accommodate a grand total of forty-seven people. And, since the parents of large families frequently put two children in each of the twin beds, and couples with one child often rented a single cabin and let the child sleep between them, there were many nights when our motel sheltered more than fifty persons besides ourselves.

There is often a lot of confusion among customers about the word "double" as applied to cabins and beds. A double cabin is, of course, a cabin with two rooms, each of which has a double bed. A single cabin is a single room with a double bed. For short, these are called "doubles" and "singles."

About half of the people who come into the office ask if we have a "double" available. Whenever anyone asks me that, I glance out at his car, which usually contains just one other person, and show him a single, without comment. People like this mean, of course, double bed. I've thought of explaining to all these people the difference between "single" and "double", but decided that a one-woman educational campaign of such magnitude would be too much for me.

Occasionally, though, the customer is more right than I give him credit for being. Sometimes two people request a double, and really mean it--they each want a bed and a separate room. In such cases, if I show them a single after they have asked for a double, they often make it a point to inquire if I have been in the motel business long.

The motel business must be one of the best cures known for shyness. Before we came to Banning the sight of a stranger used to make me ill at ease, and the idea of an introduction sometimes almost paralyzed me. All this culminated, of course, in my first bad attacks of customerphobia. After that I grew braver and braver until now, after meeting travelers from all parts of the country and even all parts of the world, I can actually be the one to begin a conversation with a stranger.