Four and Twenty Beds. Nancy Casteel Vogel

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 Grant could sit 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 СКАЧАТЬ