To Grandma, the conglomeration of left-behind articles is "one H. of a mess," and I am inclined to share her view.
Mr. Featherbrain's little motel, next door, didn't do very well for a couple of months after it opened. It was in a bad spot, between us and the Peacock. Whenever I went to the store across the street and looked at it from that vantage point, I couldn't help thinking of a tiny, pale, bashful man squeezed to insignificance between two fat, husky, rouged and mascara-ed women. One day while I was waiting for Mr. Bertram, the plump grocer, to finish making a sale to someone else, I leaned back against the counter and gazed dreamily across the highway, at our motel. (I never got over the thrill of pride I felt every time I reminded myself that those beautiful buildings were ours–or would be, when we had paid about fifty thousand dollars more on them!) The high, mistily blue mountains rose behind the motel, reaching into the dimmer blue of the sky.
And then I looked at Featherbrain's small place, which–new and nice though it was–appeared to have a wistful, bewildered air about it. I smiled, and the thought about the little man between two huge gaudy women must have been written on my face, for the customer on whom the grocer had been waiting snarled suddenly, "Just wait'll the summer slump comes. You're a goin' to have your "vacancy" sign on all night, every night, and it ain't a goin' to do you no good, neither. Durned old cars won't stop, any more'n they're a stoppin' at my place now."
It was Mr. Featherbrain, his chin pinker than ever now with indignation. I flushed guiltily, and tossed him an airy, "Oh, I wasn't thinking what you thought I was thinking!" smile. I turned to the grocer, whose jaws were clamping spasmodically upon a wad of something in his mouth, as the gaunt old man stamped out of the store.
At least once every day since we have been in Banning, a dark-skinned man or woman with straight black hair has strolled through the grounds of our motel. Sometimes they come in groups of three or four, coming from the little country road–Williams street–to which the back portion of our land extends, and ambling on out to the highway. These, I learned, are Indians. There is an Indian reservation a mile or so north of us, in the first hills that comprise the sloping upward into the mountains. Jed, our freckled laundry truck driver, told me as much as he knew about them, one day after he had finished lifting our heavy sheet-filled laundry bags into his truck. They still hold their tribal ceremonies at regular intervals far back in the hills and, according to legend, no white man has ever witnessed any of these ceremonies.
The principal pastime of these Indians, according to Jed, is to maintain and increase their fearsomeness and mystery. They give special attention to fostering awe of themselves in those people, most of them from the Eastern parts of the country, who believe that Indians still go on the warpath and scalp people–or that, if they haven't actually done either of those things recently, they are quite capable of doing either at any moment.
"Far as I'm concerned, they're just a bunch of showoffs," Jed said, rubbing his nose. "D'you know what they did? They even put a curse on Banning in 1935. You'd be surprised how many people were terrified, and left."
"Why did they put a curse on the city?" I wanted to know.
"They were mad because so many curious white people kept coming out and snooping around their reservation."
"H'm." It would be interesting to look an Indian reservation over, especially if the inhabitants–or inmates–or whatever you'd call them–were the curse-putting kind. My own curiosity, seldom dormant, was definitely aroused, and I promised myself that the Indians would have one more white person to be angry at, as soon as I could possibly arrange it.
The ubiquity of the Smiths never became a personal thing to me until we moved to Banning. Never a week goes by that a car doesn't drive up in a flurry of gravel and belch forth a person who rings the bell and inquires, "Have you a party staying here by the name of Smith?" The only variation in this routine is the wording. Sometimes it's "Is dere a guy, name a' Smith, stayin' here?"
It happens so often that, if there weren't so many different people involved, I'd think it was some kind of a gag. As it is, whenever a Smith actually registers to spend a night with us, I can hardly resist telling him, in a coy and enigmatic manner, that someone has been looking for him.
With two children playing noisily and constantly, and customers ringing the office bell blithely at the most inconvenient moments, and Grant coming into our cabin every now and then to ask me where's that mmm screwdriver, it was impossible for me to be able to concentrate enough to do any writing. Therefore, each day while the baby took her nap, when the cabins were cleaned up, the laundry sent out, and everything as nearly under control as possible, I loaded up with paper, pen, a reference book or two, and the partially done article or story I had been working on, and went to cabin number 15, which is almost directly across from the cabin in which we live. There, in glorious solitude, I wrote, interrupted only by the occasional intriguing sight of customers driving up to the office, ringing the bell, and being confronted by Grant. Whenever such an event occurred, I had to stop my work, go to the window, and peek breathlessly between the slats of the Venetian blind at all that went on. This is always an unnecessary distraction from my work, and I know I should have more will power and self control; but there is something in me ('your damn curiosity!' I've heard it called by irritated objects of it) that won't allow me to sit by, quietly absorbed in something that can wait, when things are happening which I might just as well be investigating.
I did my writing in longhand, although I had always used the typewriter before we came to Banning. I wrote longhand now because, with all my other paraphernalia, I didn't want to haul the typewriter back and forth all the time. To relieve the boredom which frequently attacked me, while I was writing, I used different colored ink on different days. My original manuscripts were gorgeous things of purple, green, red and blue. I couldn't leave my writing equipment in any cabin overnight, naturally, because we hoped to rent every cabin every night–although we weren't at all sure of filling up, except on Saturday nights.
That's why, also, when Grandma comes to visit us every other week, we don't give her one of the cabins. She can sleep in our cabin, even if it is a little crowded; but, obviously, the customers can't. She sleeps on David's bed, and David sleeps on the floor, using Donna's playpen pad for a mattress; and everyone is happy–except, possibly, David.
Grandma suffers from customerphobia far more acutely than I ever did. The trembling and quivering I suffered were mild compared to the tremors, amounting practically to convulsions, she goes through at even the mere thought of waiting on a customer. I know better now than to attempt to break her in to the gentle art of renting cabins, but there was a time when I was not so wise. That was on one of her first visits, when I thought I'd teach her to be a substitute motel manager, in much the same manner of the man who teaches his little boy to swim by throwing him shrieking into six feet of cold water.
Grant had tossed David and Donna into the back seat of the car and taken them along for the ride on a trip to the drug store. They were going to buy a jar of salve for David's nose, which sunburns, peels, and sunburns all over again, with painful persistence. Grandma and I were alone. I hoped that a customer would come during the brief time that Grant would be gone, for I had mapped out a campaign for ridding Grandma of her fear of customers for once and for all.
I was sitting in the kitchen reading, wearing a dress that had a zipper all the way down the front. Grandma, unsuspecting and happy, was bustling about the living room with a dustdoth, searching for