I have always worn my hair, which is quite thick, at shoulder-length, curly and with a bunch of little curls at the top. It used to be a fairly attractive and flattering style, but Banning's whirling wind has played havoc with it. I can spend half an hour combing it, smoothing it and adjusting the brown curls; then, after walking across the driveways to one of the cabins, I look as though I not only hadn't combed it for several days, but had lost a piece of thread in it and had allowed the children to search thoroughly for it for several hours. My hair style became what a fashion magazine might charitably christen a "windblown long bob." Whenever I brave the blasts that sweep across the open fields behind the motel, where I hang up clothes on washday, I wear a snugly tied bandana--but I can seldom get it tied so securely that the wind doesn't whip it off several times.
Strangely enough, other Banning women have neat, precisely waved hair which is seldom untidy or out of place. That is something I have never been able to figure out.
In the wintertime, it's people who swarm over Banning and the surrounding vicinities; in the summer, it's bugs. Every imaginable kind of bug spends the summer in Banning; bugs with wings, without wings, with and without antennae, and some with strange appendages whose uses, if any, seem hazy to the bugs themselves. Besides the common black widows, which are so plentiful that people simply ignore them, there are peculiar worms with large, mischievous eyes; there are beetles equipped with hard shiny hoods and galoshes, in case of rain; there are grasshoppers whose heads, instead of being in the place customary for grasshoppers' heads, pivot at the end of long, sticklike necks.
Before we came to Banning, and for a short time after our arrival, I wore open-toed sandals. But an uneasy knowledge of the desert's strange fauna, coupled with the loose gravel, the stickers rampant in the weeds, and the huge flesh-hungry black ants, to whom the presence of stockings were merely a snickerprovoking challenge, soon converted me to oxfords--and, if I hadn't been afraid of seeming too eccentric, I would have worn hip-length boots.
Banning has such hot summers, and such a dry, hot wind blowing continually off the desert, that I, like practically every other woman under seventy who weighs less than three hundred pounds, wear shorts. To this, Grant sometimes pretends to attribute our success.
"Yep, half of our customers just come in here because they see you running around in shorts," he says.
He can be very sweet at times, particularly when he has to go downtown and wants me to sort and count the laundry, or when he is hungry for a home made apple pie. One day--I believe it was a helping hand with some weed-pulling that he wanted--he had complimented me until I was beginning to believe I was rather a femme fatale in shorts. He had gone into the house to make a phone call, and I continued pulling weeds from around the geraniums in the little island under our big neon sign.
Suddenly I noticed a shiny car going past on the highway very slowly. It was full of well-dressed, distinguished looking men who were staring in my direction with absorbed interest. I pretended not to notice, and went on with my weed-pulling. But I was pleased. Maybe I wasn't so bad after all!
The car turned around in the highway, about fifty feet past our place, and cruised slowly by again. I was careful to stoop as gracefully as possible when I lunged for the weeds, and I tucked a geranium, that I had broken off by mistake, into my hair.
The car went more and more slowly, and finally it stopped right in front of the island. I stood up and went closer to the car, smiling graciously. I pretended to think the men wanted to rent a cabin.