Four and Twenty Beds. Nancy Casteel Vogel

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 that I'd never 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 СКАЧАТЬ