Four and Twenty Beds. Nancy Casteel Vogel
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