CHAPTER TEN
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.
I never did get over my hatred of walking back with a prospective customer to show one of the rear cabins. Weather is such a trite, obviously last-resort topic of conversation that I determined never to descend to using it--but it's hard to begin a conversation on any other subject with a person you've never seen before. And to walk with such a person all the way back to the rear cabins in a stony silence makes me overly conscious of little things like my gait, my posture, and the corner of my slip that may be showing. The customer probably is no more happy than I over the situation. If ever I figure out a solution to this problem, I'll write another book about it.
For Grant, of course, that particular problem is no problem at all. Before he and the customer are a tenth of the way out to the rear cabins, they are usually laughing and talking together as though they had known each other all their lives. Grant's competence in everything from mechanics to human relationships can be very irritating.
One night a rather inebriated gentleman opened our living room door instead of the office door, and swayed on into the room. It was about ten o'clock. I was in bed, and Grant was reading the comic section of a newspaper that had been left in one of the cabins that morning.
"I wanna rent a cabin," the man informed Grant. "I'm all alone, all alone. You oughta have an office, so everybody wouldn't disturb mama in the bed there when they wanna rent a cabin."
"We do have an office," Grant pointed out. "Right over there."
The man's gaze followed Grant's gesture carefully. "Well," he said indignantly, after a moment, "why don't you use it then?"
That alcohol scented gentleman wasn't the only person who ever mistook our front door for the office door. Every few days we found a confused, apologetic stranger in the process of backing hurriedly out. For awhile we kept the door locked, in such a way that a turn of the knob would open it from the inside, but not from the outside. That meant, of course, that I had to let David in approximately twenty times every hour of the time that he was home. Also, it meant that we locked ourselves out once in a while, and had to lift David through the window so that he could unlock the door. I dreaded the day we'd lock ourselves out when David was in school, and I'd be the one to be lifted through the window. Finally we decided we'd save ourselves a lot of worry by just leaving the door unlocked all day, and by not being surprised or upset if an occasional stranger joined our family group temporarily. I made a mental note, though, never to run around in my slip or to get dressed anywhere except behind the locked door of the bathroom.
Incredibly enough, there is a mistake that Grant makes far more often than I do--that of going into an occupied cabin, thinking it's vacant. Almost invariably if the car of the occupants of a certain cabin is gone, and it is nearly checking out time (noon) it is safe to assume that the occupants of the cabin have gone. Most of our customers are gone, anyway, before ten o'clock. If there is any doubt, of course, we can knock before entering; but after you knock, and wait before entering, upon about fifty different occasions when you're positive anyway that the cabin is empty, only to find that it is, as you had supposed, quite empty, you become less careful.