They struggled for a moment over possession of the steering wheel. Finally the one who had been driving said, "You're drunk yourshelf. Here, you better drive."
They traded seats, with painstaking clumsiness. Then they sat quietly for a moment, apparently about to go to sleep.
I was trying to coax my reluctant legs to carry me fiercely toward them when, to my relief, the new driver started the car and pulled out onto the highway. I hoped they would get safely wherever they were going.
At last I relaxed and went to sleep. Anyone who drove up wanting a cabin would ring the bell by the office door, anyway.
I couldn't have been asleep more than five minutes when the bell rang for the first time. I rented four more cabins during the night, each about an hour after the other. Nervousness and excitement kept me awake about half an hour after I rented each cabin, and I'd just be drifting into the sounder stages of sleep when the bell would ring again.
It wasn't a very restful night.
In the morning Mrs. Clark, the husky maid, came to work in the cabins. She was, in a bristling way, proud of her dark complexion and her Irish-Italian ancestry, and contemptuous of "them funny-lookin' foreigners that's always stayin' in your cabins," but she seemed to enjoy the work of cleaning the cabins, and did it with a zest and speed I could never have equaled. When I got the children fed and dressed and the baby in her playpen, I decided to tackle the mountainous heap of laundry. The laundry truck was due in a couple of hours; and I felt sure that, on the first day at least, it would take me almost as long to sort and count and list the dirty things as it would have to actually wash and iron them myself.
In the garages between cabins number 2 and 3 there were several strips of leftover linoleum standing against the back wall. I rolled these flat on the floor and brought armfuls of dirty linens from a compartment in the linen closet, putting them on one side. Then I sorted the things into six different piles–sheets, slips, hand towels, bath mats, wash cloths, bath towels. My arms began to ache from lifting each sheet and shaking it to be sure no smaller articles were wrapped up in it. Then I stuffed the sheets into a laundry bag, counting them carefully. There were sixty sheets, and I had to get a second laundry bag out of the linen closet.
The linen closet was a huge, roomy affair built against the back of the garage adjoining cabin 2, and it left plenty of room for a car in the garage. There were three gigantic shelves in it. On the bottom shelf were extra blankets and bedspreads, cleaning equipment of all kinds, and supplies such as soap, toilet paper, small boxes of matches, and water pitchers. On the middle shelf were stacks of clean linens–about two hundred of each item. On the top shelf we had stored as many of our personal belongings as we could get along without temporarily, since there was no room for them in our cabin.
I was exhausted by the time I had counted all the laundry, stuffed it into bags, and listed it in the laundry book. Just as I finished, the laundry truck roared into the driveway and stopped suddenly in front of the garage where I stood, gravel flying in all directions. The driver got out. He was a likeable, lanky, red-haired youth with a very few tiny patches of white skin showing between his freckles.
"How d'you like the motel business by now?" he asked me, as he lifted the heavy bags into the back of the truck.
"It's fun," I said, "all except cleaning cabins, and sorting laundry, and keeping books, and getting up in the night to rent cabins!"
He laughed, and rubbed his brown-speckled nose. "You'll get used to it," he said.
That night wasn't as bad as my first night alone had been. I rented five cabins before I went to bed, and I did it with so much nonchalance that I was proud of myself.
Once I got into bed, though, reaction from two days of worry and hard work and a night of very little sleep set in. I slept deeply, dreamlessly, without moving, until the shriek of the office bell shattered my sleep.
Dazedly I went into the office, snapped on the light, and unlocked the door. Two young men came in. "We want a cabin with two double beds," the taller man said.
He filled out the registration card which I shoved sleepily toward him. "How much?" he asked.
"Five-fifty," I replied. Our rate for a double cabin with two double beds was five and a half or six and a half dollars, depending on the number of people that were to occupy it. We had decided to charge that much or less, depending on the demand for cabins and the number of "vacancy" signs along the highway, following the custom of the former owners.
Each of the young men laid a five dollar bill on the counter. I looked at the bills groggily. I was still half asleep.
"Just one of those will do, with fifty cents beside," I said.
"We want to pay separately," said the shorter man. "Give us each change, please."
I missed Grant, with his quick mind and his easy competence, more intensely at that moment than I missed him yet. I smothered a yawn and tried to concentrate on the difficult task before me. My reasoning, if you could call it that, was hazy and confused.
"Well," I thought, opening the cash drawer and looking at the array of five and one dollar bills, and fifty cent pieces and quarters, "they're each paying half of five and a half. How much is half of five and a half, anyway? Half of five would be two and a half, so half of five and a half would be a little more than that. How much more? Well…" At that point I lost the thread of the whole thing and had to begin over. "Suppose," I thought, starting on a new tack, "I would give each of them a dollar. That would mean they each had paid four dollars, which would be too much. Well, then, suppose I gave them each three dollars. That would mean they had each paid me two dollars, which wouldn't be quite enough. But how much would it lack of being enough?"
Arithmetic had always stirred up a swirling fog inside my head. My eyelids were drooping more and more, and yet I was beginning to feel beneath my drowsiness a desperate panic. The men were growing impatient.
I frowned and stared more sternly at the money in the cash drawer. I summoned all my powers of concentration. I handled the money in the drawer ostentatiously, as a bluff, so that they would think I was beginning to go into action.
I still don't remember how I did it–unless maybe it was by doling out the money slowly and watching their faces until their expressions suggested they had received the full amount–but somehow the awful situation ended and the men went to their cabin.
The following morning when I did the day's bookkeeping I found that there was fifty cents too much in the cash drawer. Still, I didn't feel that the system I had used the previous night had much to recommend it, and I resolved not to try it again.
Traffic noises along the highway were loud and almost ceaseless–they quieted down a little just often enough to give the next crescendo the greatest possible impact. Planes roared up and down from the airport which was about a block to the southeast; trains whistled and roared along the track that was a block to the south; cars and trucks and busses roared along the highway. The whole highway, in fact, was one big, solid roar.
After the first few days, though, the noise faded to the back of my consciousness. The peal of the office bell would rouse me instantly, even if I were working in a cabin several doors away, but the sky-shattering whine of jet-propelled planes made no impression on me at all.
Travelers and newcomers to the vicinity nearly always commented on the noise. Often they'd have to raise their voices to be heard above it. I got so used to the noise that when someone would yell above the din, "What an awful racket that train makes'." I'd shriek back, "What train?"
I was beginning to become acquainted with some of our neighbors. Moe, the bald, thick-set, beak-nosed man who owned the restaurant next door, had a son, Moejy (no doubt a corruption of Moe, Jr.) who was about a year older than David. The first moment I laid eyes on Moejy I had a premonition that he would turn out to be the most obnoxious child I had ever encountered–a premonition which, as later events were to prove, was correct.
He was a wiry boy with a small head, close set ears, and eyes that darted about continually in search of insects to be dismembered