Four and Twenty Beds. Nancy Casteel Vogel
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