Nancy Casteel Vogel

“ THERE IS AN indefinable air about every motel cabin that is felt, I imagine, by all but the most insensitive of motel owners. It's the composite spirit of all the people who have slept in that cabin. It's nothing more tangible than memory, actually, yet it's very real.
Miss Nestleburt and Mr. Hawkins had been with us so long that their presence still seemed to cling to their cabins. ”

“ The motel business must be one of the best cures known for shyness. Before we came to Banning the sight of a stranger used to make me ill at ease, and the idea of an introduction sometimes almost paralyzed me. All this culminated, of course, in my first bad attacks of customerphobia. After that I grew braver and braver until now, after meeting travelers from all parts of the country and even all parts of the world, I can actually be the one to begin a conversation with a stranger. ”

“ I sometimes think that if an earthquake should suddenly shatter our motel to a level with the ground, if I should run away with another man, if David should put all our possessions into a glorious bonfire, and Donna should get her hand caught in the wringer of the washing machine--all simultaneously--Grant would be able, by a few incisive words or actions, to bring the entire situation back to normal. ”

“ The advantage of a window would be that Grant would be able to lure customers in by sitting comfortably in the office reading a paper, instead of having to run outside whenever a slow car approached, so that its occupants would be sure to see him. One summer of that had been enough for him, and I knew exactly how he felt. The idea of a huge window facing the highway appealed to me, too; never again would I have to perch on top of a typewriter case set precariously on a chair, while with one eye I watched out the kitchen window for slow cars from the east, and with the other eye tried to read. ”

“ Whenever a car would slow down during the day, as though it might come in, when I was in or near the office--if I'd glance up at it, it would quicken its speed; and I could almost hear the driver saying, "Oh, horrors, they've noticed us! Come on, let's get going!" Sort of a customerphobia in reverse, I mused.
Our kitchen window faces east, and Grant usually stayed in the kitchen nights, standing by the window watching the highway and passing time by eating various strange concoctions that would be enough to gag a normal person. ”

“ A sense of humor is one of the principal requisites for any one who aspires to own or manage a motel. For instance, if I answer the bell late at night when Grant is out, and if the legs of my pajamas unroll suddenly while I'm showing a cabin, and leave me presenting an old-fashioned pantalette effect, I simply laugh and tuck them back up, without even bothering to explain that I just slipped my dress on over my pajamas. ”

“ I was still in a bad mood that evening when I came back from cabin 15 and climbed up on the typewriter case on the kitchen chair, after sprinkling a clothesbasket full of clean clothes and getting them ready to iron. The difficulty of reading, and the headlights which clamored for my attention and turned out to belong to cars which were going so fast that it was obvious they weren't likely to stop, began to irritate me more than they ever had before. ”

“ The only customers--or, rather, people--who unfailingly make Grant angry are those who use our driveway as a traffic circle. Several times a day a car from the east will swing into one of our driveways, making us think we have a prospect--only to swing out the other driveway and head back toward the east. Or a young fellow plummeting along the highway from the west will belatedly heed the words of Horace Greeley, and will splash gravel in all directions as he whirls into our driveway. ”

“ Being in the motel business adds a clarity to one's view of life that few other businesses could give. It lets one see things in a new, truer perspective. What were unalive, unreal news stories, for instance, become to me true, believable facts when people who have just come from the locality in question discuss them. It makes me realize that the places where I've never been really exist, and that people whom I have never seen are as human and as vulnerable as I am. ”

“ Grant was full of plans for what we would do when we had saved a little money. We'd put in kitchens; we'd have a bigger, more eye-catching neon sign; we might make the back half acre into a deluxe trailer park. With all that and the repeat trade bound to come to a new motel that's clean and well-managed, we'd never suffer another summer slump like this one, he prophesied. ”

“ If I don't hear anything, I open the door slowly and stick my head out. If only Grant is in the living room, and if the door between the living room and the office is closed, so that no one can suddenly open the outer office door and see me in all my pajama-ed glory, I rush across the floor and jump into bed.
When winter was well under way, our irascible old neighbor Mr. Featherbrain still had not spoken to us since summer, when he had been so incensed at Grant's pulling in off the highway customers that might have been his. ”

“ There are people who can get into all kinds of difficulties over such an apparently harmless and simple an object as a key. Nearly every day some brilliant soul, after opening the door of his cabin and deposting one suitcase (and his key) inside, locks himself out when he starts back to get the rest of his belongings from his car. I have so thoroughly learned the expression that accompanies this predicament that when anyone wearing it comes into the office I hand him a master key before he speaks, and say "This key will open it." ”

“ I took the other cabins, except for the back row of singles, which were occupied, in rotation. I rushed around frantically, the rain beating my face and whipping my hair into my eyes as though it had a personal grudge against me. I was beginning to wish I had awakened Grant so that he could help me close windows, for the beds in several of the cabins were soaked clear through to the mattress pads. ”

“ PEOPLE WHO MANAGE motels shouldn't throw stones, for they live in glass houses just as surely as does any goldfish. In fact, a goldfish in a bowl placed in the center of Grand Central Station would live a life of privacy and seclusion, compared to the life of a motel owner.
I am so inured, by now, to the lack of privacy, that I can calmly continue dusting furniture or changing Donna's clothes if a couple of strange men barge into the living room, mistaking it for the office. I am not in the least upset if, after I have gone to bed, someone rings the bell and asks to use the telephone. ”

“ We couldn't help laughing to ourselves whenever such customers had small children in the car. We knew, even if it hadn't occurred to them yet, that their children had been dozing in the car all night, and would be refreshed and ready to greet the new day with the leaps, yells, and fights that distinguish children from the young of any other species. Any sleeping the adults might accomplish during the daylight hours would be purely coincidental.
The bigger and healthier and noiser our own children grew, the more cramped and tiny our living quarters seemed. ”

“ When I had put the children to bed Grant said, "It's too nice to be inside. Let's go outside once." We sat on the curb of the front island of grass and watched our sign proudly. The island in which the sign stood was planted in myrtle and bright Martha Washington geraniums, and now, with the reflection of the soft neon light on them, they were a mass of color.
Cars were thick in front of the cocktail lounge across the street. Every once in a while a car, leaving, would make a turn in the highway preparatory to going back to the business district, and we'd catch our breaths. ”

“ The person--almost invariably a man--who asks for a cabin in this manner is without doubt good-natured, easy-going and generous, and has a good sense of humor. Then there's the thin-nosed man who thrusts that slender appendage a cautious inch inside the office doorway and demands, "Whatcha get for your cabins?" And there's the woman--too many of her--who inquires thoroughly into every detail before she will condescend even to examine a cabin. ”

“ Equality of sexes, and equality of races, are two points about which I have carried on so many arguments and written so many articles--many of which have never seen print--that I have almost admitted defeat. Stupid prejudice is virtually invincible, and not worth battering one's head against. But it's very, very maddening all the same.
It was a subject I had discussed several times, heatedly, in the small bi-weekly Los Angeles newspaper, called "Now," in which, as I told the pleasant editor of the Banning paper, I had had a regular column. ”

“ Featherbrain called me over, and I sat with them in their nicely furnished living room. It was the day after a highly advertised celebration had been held in the desert northeast of Banning, to which movie stars and humbler creatures had flocked to watch the laying of the cornerstone of what was to be Pioneertown, the future setting of the cream of Hollywood's horse opera crop. Every motel in town had been full.
"We wented four cabins last night!" Mrs. Featherbrain told me ecstatically, waving one of her ever-present cigarettes. She is a plump, dark woman with a very mobile face. ”

“ This type would study the mailbox for a long time, read and reread the words on the front of it, ponder the safety pin, and peer into the slot to see whether there actually were any keys there--and sometimes, even after all these preliminaries, would ring the bell and hand one of us the key.
One morning I was dusting the Venetian blinds in the office when a plump woman in cerise slacks, with a hat that looked like a ring mold of feathers, minced toward the office door. A key was dangling from her hand, and I moved away from the window to watch her unobserved. ”

“ Even on a dull night, though, a stranger to the vicinity might have thought traffic heavy enough to justify us in hoping to fill up; what a stranger wouldn't know would be that every night, every motel owner must take a little jaunt in the car from one end of town to the other, inspecting all the signs to see if any have their "no" uncovered; straining to see into the garages, in order to know how many customers the motel in question has hooked. The parade of motel owners alone, if they all happen to go on their tours of inspection about the same time, is enough to make the highway look busy. ”

“ EMBARRASSING MOMENTS ARE the rule, rather than the exception, around a motel. If, as Grant puts it, he had a dollar for every time he has gone busting, with his cleaning equipment and fresh linens, into a cabin he thought was empty, only to find the cabin still occupied, he'd be able to buy a new neon sign that would make the Peacock's big blue and red bird gallop away in shame. With so many strangers about the place almost constantly, embarrassing incidents are inevitable. ”

“ She would work for us only every other day, because we were too low on funds to dare spend any on having work done that we could do ourselves.
I put the baby in her playpen, reminded David again not to play near the highway, and Grant and I set to work on the cabins. We were tired anyway after a day of moving and a night of very little sleep, and whenever I happened to catch a glimpse of myself in one of the little round mirrors that hung on the wall of each cabin as I worked, I was shocked. My thick, long hair was tangled and untidy, because of Banning's cooling but too incessant wind. ”

“ In my opinion, the worst, most nearly unbearable phase of the motel business is that our lives are brushed daily by the fascinating lives of salesmen, vacationists, businessmen and travelers who each has secret, important affairs of his own--and that etiquette and lack of time (principally lack of time) prevent me from prying around the roots of these affairs and unearthing them. ”

“ There is often a lot of confusion among customers about the word "double" as applied to cabins and beds. A double cabin is, of course, a cabin with two rooms, each of which has a double bed. A single cabin is a single room with a double bed. For short, these are called "doubles" and "singles."
About half of the people who come into the office ask if we have a "double" available. Whenever anyone asks me that, I glance out at his car, which usually contains just one other person, and show him a single, without comment. People like this mean, of course, double bed. ”

“ 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 dust.
It wasn't long before I heard the sound I had been hoping for--the scrunch of tires on the gravel, and a squeak of brakes. Faster than I had ever done it before, I stood up, zipped down my dress, took it off and tossed it under the table.
About that time Grandma noticed that there was a car outside, and that a fat, middle-aged couple were getting out of it. ”

“ Anyway, the one crowning virtue of black widows is that they're as much afraid of people as people are of them; and I didn't think there was much danger that she'd ever be able to catch one. A glimpse of a child with a face apparently made of brown hair should have been enough to send any bug scurrying for cover, I thought. Donna's hair, although it was growing longer and thicker rapidly, was still too fine and soft to hold a bobby pin, or to submit itself to any kind of confinement that I had yet been able to discover. ”

“ He is tall and slenderly built, and so wonderfully competent--even if he isn't very systematic--that I always feel awkward by contrast. But I never in my life felt so helpless as when, just as he finished speaking, we heard the scrunch of tires on the graveled driveway outside.
"Oh, someone's coming," I said nervously. "You go see who it is. You go."
I sat in a corner of the living room where I could hear and not be seen from the office. I alternately twisted my hands and bit my nails as Grant opened the office door and stepped out to meet the driver of the car. ”

“ GRANDMA COMES OUT from Los Angeles to see us every other Friday, and returns the following Monday morning to her job as fancy presser in a cleaning plant, and to her small apartment, which is a ten-minute streetcar ride from Hellwig's apartment. She is a creature of such infallibly regular habits that I sometimes wonder if there isn't a small, precise clock or calendar, or some mechanism for keeping track of time, tucked away inside her.
She works hard whenever she comes. If there's work at hand to be done, she plunges into it. ”

“ We are always glad, in one sense, when such valuable things are left behind; the owners, when they get them back, are so grateful and so impressed with our integrity that they will probably patronize our motel loyally for years to come. The woman who came feverishly back for the silver fox coat was so overwhelmed with gratitude that she promised Grant a job, at whatever time in the future he might need it, at her husband's sanitary belt factory. So in case we ever go broke in the motel business. Grant will be able to go right to work. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Less than a mile from the highway, Hathaway rose to a small peak on top of which was a cow guard, with metal grillwork extending across the road, the bars--between which cows would catch their hooves if they tried to cross--at right angles to it. A fence divided all the land past the cow guard from that on the side I was coming from; except for the open gateway at the road, there was no entrance to the land which a formidable-looking sign declared to be the Indian reservation.
The sign thrust its large white face forward pugnaciously as it stated:
WARNING! ”