Guestward Ho! (2 page)

The station wagon Bill bought (you'll be pleased to know it
doesn't
have a cute name, or any name at all) just cost
eighteen hundred dollars secondhand. This was exactly
the marked-down, end-of-the-season, employee's-discount
price of a perfectly gorgeous mink coat at Bergdorf's fur
department that I'd tried on so many times it felt like my
own skin. And don't think I didn't remind my husband
of
that
a good many times. Today he still has the station
wagon and I don't have so much as a Davy Crockett hat.
And you know, I don't even care.

We started out in typical style, several hours late. This was because Bill's driver's license had lapsed some little
time before and he had to take all the tests over again,
along with some nervous old women and a gaggle of gig
gling teenagers. I got a certain sadistic pleasure out of
watching him have to start and stop and park and turn
around for a mean-eyed inspector after having driven an
American Field Service ambulance some fifty thousand miles during the war. But I'm proud to say that my boy
passed with flying colors and we were off in a cloud of dust and Siamese cat hair. That station wagon!

Our first brush with death occurred on the Pennsyl
vania Turnpike, where the speed limit is seventy miles an
hour. Bill, being very law-abiding, drove at exactly sev
enty and that was just how fast we were going when he
lost complete control of the car. We managed to come to
a stop without killing anybody and piled out to inspect
the wretched thing. I know absolutely nothing about engines
and mechanics and axles and things like that, while
Bill believes that you just give a car a kick to show it who's boss. He kicked, but nothing happened.

"Well, as long as we're stopped," I said, "I may as
well give The Girls a little airing—sort of get them used
to the great out-of-doors."

"Go ahead," Bill said from under the car. Believe me,
there's no sight like a man in a Chesterfield coat sprawled
under a station wagon unless it's a woman in French heels
chasing two Siamese cats over hill and dale.

The Girls had never been out in the wide-open spaces
before in their lives, but they took to nature like ducks
to water. And I use that well-worn old cliche advisedly, be
cause no sooner had they ventured suspiciously out of
the car and shot across a field of mud, thistles, and rusty
beer cans than the heavens opened and we were caught in a real old-fashioned cloudburst.

And so what did I do? I did just what any other
woman would do. I had a little cloudburst of my own,
screaming at the cats with tears and rain running down my face and cursing Bill for being warm and dry under the station wagon.

I don't drive, myself. That is to say, I
have
driven, but
that one occasion the only way the car could be brought to a halt was by means of a head-on collision with a
gasoline pump. The experience did not encourage me to
man the wheel ever again. That meant that poor Bill had
to drive every inch of the way, and what a lot of horrible
inches that trip was.

We went through a blizzard in Indiana, heavy snow
in Illinois, torrential rains in Missouri, a dust storm in
Oklahoma, and a blowout near Ponca City that nearly
caused a six-car pile-up and was the occasion for Bill's
buying five brand-new tires with almost the last of our
ready cash. Engine, wheel, or tire trouble was an almost
hourly occurrence and our progress through a number of little towns I had never heard of before and never
wish to hear of again left a dozen garage mechanics fi
nancially fixed for life. But except for the sheer agony of
it all, our trip was unmemorable. There was no nice weather, no pretty scenery. The cats were miserable, cooped up in the back of the car; Bill must have been a physical and nervous wreck at the end of each long
day's driving. As for me, I felt more lost, more depressed,
and more unsure of myself with every mile.

I was so mad at Bill for getting me into this Godforsaken place, and he was so mad at me for being mad at
him, that our conversation was limited to an icy but chill
ingly polite series of exchanges, each leading exactly no
where.

Around mealtimes, when we were both ravenous, our gay banter would go something like this:

he
: Hungry?

me
: Mmmmm.

(Long pause.)

he
: Well, do you want to stop somewhere and eat?

me
: Just as you wish.

he
: Well,
do you
want to eat or
don't
you?

me
: Whatever
you
want—
dear.

he
: It makes no difference to me.

me
: Nor to me.
You
seem to make the decisions in this
family. .

he
: Well,
are
you
hungry?

me
: Not esss-pesshh-yully.

he
: All right, then, we won't bother to eat.

me
: Just as you say.

{My stomach rumbles loudly.)

he
: What did you say?

me
:
(
Icily
)
Nothing!

Great fun, that motor trip!

It was Friday, March 13, when we finally reached New Mexico. "Land of Enchantment" is the motto
stamped on all New Mexican license plates, but at that point I found it about as enchanting as the Jersey Flats.
True, the sun was shining and the altitude and the dry
ness made me warm for the first time since we left New
York, but I felt wan and lost, like some of those pioneer
women who had starved along the way or been scalped
by the Indians. I looked surreptitiously for sun-whitened
skeletons along the roadside. There weren't any. Probably carried off by vultures, I thought. However, Santa
Fe—and a more or less permanent roosting place—was
within reach, and that meant a lot to me.

Nightfall fell and we were within fifty miles of Rancho
del Monte when the station wagon
again
took sick. Al
though the climate of New Mexico is said to be splendid
for respiratory ailments, it did nothing for our station
wagon. In fact, before we reached the town of Santa Fe,
the poor car started coughing and gasping and choking like an Italian diva in the final act of
La Traviata.

Bill pressed down harder on the accelerator, firm again
about showing the car who was boss. The car was. In a
final consumptive spasm, it shuddered and heaved over to
the side of the road with a death rattle that shook loose
the suitcases and the cat carriers in the back. I was all for
administering the last rites and taking the next plane
home. Not so Bill. He persevered and, by means of a se
ries of fits and starts—caused by the onset of
rigor mortis,
I think—our caravan lurched into one of the nastiest little
motor courts it has ever been my hard luck to visit.

Everyone knows that over the years motels have be
come respectable, comfortable, and, in many cases, even
quite spiffy—everyone, that is, except the proprietor of
this
motel. Roach Haven, as I called it, was simply
squalid. In a land of perfectly wonderful adobe houses,
which are miraculously insulated against heat and cold,
Roach Haven had chosen a crooked line of prefabricated
wooden army barracks to serve as its guest accommoda
tions. The wind howled eerily through the building and the place fairly rocked with each breeze. There was a
dripping wash basin in every room, but nothing more.
Toilets and showers were located at the far ends of the
barracks—ladies to the north, gents to the south—so that
after a numbing cold shower, it meant a fifty-yard dash
through the freezing New Mexico night.

Nor was it cheap. In fact, it was ruinously expensive,
plus a dollar deposit for the key—when a hairpin worked
much better. "Be here long?" the proprietor asked us.

"No longer than I can help it," I said.

"Just for the night," Bill said, somewhat more politely.

"Maybe you like the bridal suite?" he said with a lewd
wink at Bill.

"This isn't our honeymoon," Bill said.

"Oh?" the proprietor said, giving me a thick-lipped smile.

"No, it
isn't,"
I said, slapping my left hand onto the
counter so that he could see the wedding ring which has
never been off since the day Bill put it on my finger.

"We've been married since 1946 and all I want is dinner and a bath and a decent night's sleep."

I guess the shock of a genuine married couple at Roach Haven cooled his playful ardor down a bit, because he counted out our money, selected a key from the board, announced that the lunchroom was closed, and shuffled off along the cinder path with us following.

"You ain't got no animals, have yuh?" he asked as we came to the door of our room. "We don't allow pets."

"Well, as a matter of . . ." Bill began.

"No, we
ain't!"
I snapped.

"That's what I thought, lady," he said. "Here's yer room." He opened the door, snapped on the light, and made a fast getaway. I could understand why.

I never thought that one narrow bed, one straight chair, and one small chest could make a room seem crowded. But then I'd never thought of a room as being as tiny as that two-by-four at Roach Haven. "Not bad, is it?" Bill said dubiously.

"Not bad at all," I said. "It's perfectly revolting." With that I pulled down the shade, and I mean that literally, as it went crashing to the floor with a clatter that made Bill jump. From the flyblown paper curtains and the gray sheets to the rust spots in the basin and the fine film of dust everywhere, I could easily see that it was the kind of place where you don't want to touch
anything.
And, as a matter of record, I got in between those horrid sheets wearing two pairs of stockings, a slip, a nightgown, and a blouse so that no part of my flesh could come into contact with the appointments of Roach Haven.

It was in this quaint costume—plus my coat and galoshes—that I ventured out to the ladies' room, all ready for that steaming hot shower.

The showers were a real experience and I feel certain that they had deteriorated a good deal since our boys in khaki had occupied the barracks, since I can't recall reading of an open mutiny in our armed forces. The floor reminded me a bit of the ruins of Berlin, covered as they were with dust, dirt, grit, pebbles, tufts of Kleenex, bits of an old confession magazine, and things I don't even now like to speculate upon. I wondered for a while just how it would be to bathe while wearing my galoshes and I decided it would be lots better than
not
wearing them. Cautiously, I turned on one of the showers. There was a rumbling and shaking and shuddering of pipes, and then a thin, horrid trickle of rusty cold water appeared. At the same time there also appeared a most insidious kind of insect, with two large eyes and two hundred small legs. He worked his way valiantly up the clogged drain, winked at me, and disappeared under the onslaught of cold water. I screamed.

"What's that, honey?" a voice said.

I turned around; coming into the ladies' room was the kind of bleached blonde I hadn't seen since Mae West was at her zenith. She was wearing a dirty black chiffon negligee with dirty white fox trimming and enough makeup to last the average woman for a year—in fact, I think it had lasted her for
more
than a year.

"There's . . . there's a big black bug down the drain," I gasped. "It
winked
at me."

"Oh, him!" she said. "That's Charlie. Don't pay him
mo
mind, honey."

"D-don't worry," I said, "Charlie and I won't be meeting again."

"Say, you new here, dearie? I never seen yuh before. You workin' for Maxine or for Herman?" She began stenciling on an elaborate new mouth, squinting at her reflection in the speckled mirror.

"I—I'm kind of self-employed, I guess you'd say," I whispered, catching up my coat and edging toward the door.

"Yeah?"
she said. "Whooja get tonight, anything human?"

"Who? Bill," I said. "Oh, heh-heh, he's okay. You know—so-so."

"Yeah, honey, I know. Prob'ly a salesman. You oughta see the John I drew—strickly from herring. Really Jo-Jo the Dogfaced Boy."

"Well, give him my regards," I stammered and fled into the cold night.

"But Bill," I kept saying as I gave my dusty hair the customary strokes with the brush, "this isn't just a motel, it's a real disorderly house."

"Just your imagination," he said, opening the cat carriers and letting The Girls loose in our room. (And let me say that those cats were pretty shocked by the state of things, too.) "You've been reading too many lurid novels."

"Don't talk to me about lurid novels," I said, wrapping
my hairbrush in Kleenex before laying it down on the
greasy, cigarette-scorched chest of drawers. "I've never
read anything that's as lurid as
this
place."