Four and Twenty Beds. Nancy Casteel Vogel
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"