CHAPTER FIVE
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. If there isn't any, she creates some, or snoops around the various cabins and garages and the grounds until she finds something we have neglected.
It was she who made Donna's little play yard habitable, after Grant had put up a white picket fence around a patch of ground at the end of one row of cabins. "The little stinkpot has to have a place to play!" she exclaimed. She painstakingly cleared the stony ground of Russian thistles, embryo tumbleweeds, stickers, and rocks. She hosed the ground, spaded it, and planted devil grass seeds. In a few weeks Donna had a lawn to play on; during the time before it grew, she dug in the loose dirt with a spoon, and required three complete baths every day. (A big disadvantage to the yard, though, was that it was so inaccessible; it was a nuisance to take her all the way out there, and to go out to check up on her every once in a while. Knowing that she couldn't get back into the house until I came for her, and knowing how far from it her yard was, Donna began to develop symptoms of loneliness which became more and more acute, and gradually I gave up taking her out to the yard at all.)
"My land, you know what a woman that's staying in one of your cabins told me?" Grandma asked, looking up from a lapful of mending the day after she met Miss Nestleburt. "She told me that a dream I had last week, about a fire, meant I would soon be injured." Grandma held up one finger, on the end of which glistened a tiny pinpoint of blood. "And I'll be swear'n if I didn't prick myself just now, on this needle! Ain't she good? Maybe she'll be able to tell me if I'm ever gonna marry Hellwig! Ayah, she's just like a fortune teller--a sight better than one, even! I never see anything like it!"
Something else Grandma "never see anything like" was the number and variety of articles left behind in their cabins by our customers. Nearly every morning we find something. We have a big box in which we put them all, and there they stay until they are called for--which is almost always never--or until their owners write, giving an address to which to send the objects, and requesting that they be mailed. Usually such requests are accompanied by a dollar for our trouble and for postage. If every article left behind would cause one letter with a dollar in it to be sent to us, we'd have a very nice little business on the side, wrapping and mailing packages. Most of the things, though, lie quietly forgotten, and accumulate. After about six months we paw through the pajama tops, bottles of shaving lotion, slippers, garter belts, cosmetic jars and hair nets, and salvage whatever we think we can use. The rest we give to Mrs. Clark, who bears it triumphantly home in the manner of a hunter returning with an elusive and long-sought deer. What she ever manages to do with it all, I have never asked her.
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.