Four and Twenty Beds

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 unti