Four and Twenty Beds. Nancy Casteel Vogel
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