Guestward Ho!

by Patrick Dennis

  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 dryness 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. Although 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 series 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 become 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 accommodations. 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."

  "Onl
y because it hasn't been published yet," he said.

  "I may not know all about sin, but I do know all about other women and that wasn't Whistler's mother I saw in the shower room. She was the most obvious . . ."

  "Barbara," Bill said with that kindly superior male tone that simply makes my blood boil, "if I had your vivid imagination—your sense of the dramatic—I'd sit down and write a novel that would sell a million . . ."

  Bill’s literary career was interrupted by the crash of a bottle against the wall of the adjoining cubicle and the brassy voice of my recent acquaintance of the shower room shouting: "You lousy, good-for-nothing four-flusher! Bring a girl out here an' then welsh on . . ."

  Bill turned quite pale.

  "Shall I start writing the novel or will you?" I asked nastily. Then I got into bed and snapped off the light.

  What a night! The beds at Roach Haven may have been strong enough for two, but they were hardly wide enough for one. In addition to that, the mattress seemed to have been equipped with a ravine down the center so that Bill or I or both of us constantly rolled down into it. And in addition to all that, the nocturnal disturbances of Roach Haven were unbelievable. Cars kept streaming in at all hours. There was a steady roar of shrieks and shouts, soft moans and shrill giggles seeping through the cardboard walls. The conversations from the rooms on both the left and the right might have fascinated Kinsey or Krafft-Ebing, but they only kept me awake—and not because I wanted to eavesdrop.

  At just a little after three in the morning, when most of the occupants of Roach Haven had quieted down and I was just beginning to doze off, I felt a sudden weight on my stomach. "This is it," I said to myself. "We've been lured into this den of thieves and perverts to be done in. Whoever this is will rob Bill, rape me, and murder us both." I shut my eyes tight and tried to think of a short, all-inclusive prayer that would cover Bill, The Girls, and me and all of our past shortcomings, but before I could mumble a single word, I heard a soft little yowl. I opened my eyes and saw four glowing red eyes staring into mine. They belonged to The Girls.

  In my relief, I snapped on the light to embrace my darlings and just then I looked down on the stained coverlet to discover that the two cats had deposited there a very large and very dead mouse.

  It is perhaps only fitting and proper for the mother of two young Siamese cats to make much over their first mouse. I wasn't able to make anything more than one blood-curdling shriek. Then I darted out of the bed, into my clothes, and out to the station wagon where I sat bolt upright, shuddering, for the rest of the night.

  Shortly after six o'clock, Bill and The Girls joined me. "Up early, aren't you?" Bill said, yawning.

  "With the birds!" I said with a big false smile.

  "Not a very good motel, was it?" he said, gingerly starting the car.

  "Not very," I said.

  The car coughed and sputtered, got its breath, and then lurched out of the cinders of Roach Haven.

  3. Just the two of us

  We only began to cheer up when the station wagon heaved and gasped up the driveway of Rancho del Monte. We had leased the place almost sight unseen. That is to say, we had been there once before, but only on the briefest of visits. Neither one of us had set foot in the kitchen, the corral, or any of the bedrooms. The place had been owned and operated by a perfect pet of a woman named Bess Huntinghouse who agreed to rent it to us only because, I think, she liked Bill's looks. She knew nothing about us except that we were the greenest pair of tender-feet in the whole wild West, but she trusted us and we trusted her—to such a point, in fact, that the contract with Bess's signature hadn't even arrived at the time we left New York.

  After a straight two weeks of motor trouble and blowouts, after several days and nights of hearing Bill's family, while we visited them, tell us how insane we were, and after a few more days and nights of hearing my own family tell us the same thing when we were staying with them, Rancho del Monte looked like the Holy Grail—even if I did secretly agree with every word Bill's parents and my parents had to say.

  It wasn't that I wanted to end up at Rancho del Monte—or any other dude or non-dude ranch. This was just a case of pure female temporary thinking. Rancho del Monte was a place I knew, however slightly, unlike the hotels and motels and tourist courts and boardinghouses in which time, fate, and motor trouble had forced us to roost on our trip across the country. At the time the station wagon shuddered to a stop at the portale, Rancho del Monte meant a shampoo, a decent bed with non-gritty sheets, a place where I could suds my underwear and stop living out of a suitcase for a little while. But this, as you can see, was the pure clean-dresser-drawer attitude as opposed to the please-call-us-at-six-and-don't-bother-with-breakfast attitude. I still wasn't able to adjust myself to being anything more than an honored and off-season guest at Rancho del Monte. To me, arrival meant a visit of a week, two weeks, a month. I just wasn't able to think of the place in terms of five years with an option on the rest of my life.

  Bess Huntinghouse bustled out to greet us in her usual warm, outspoken fashion. She herded us into the main house and showed us a room. "This is the room I thought you'd like," she said, "but if you'd prefer another one, it's entirely up to you."

  That shook me, but of course Bess was absolutely right. From that moment on I could have chosen to set up living quarters on the kitchen range, in the middle of the swimming pool, under the mam dining table—anywhere on our 2,400 acres—and there would have been no one to blame but myself. However, the room looked fine to me and the clean white bathtub looked even better.

  "Lunch will be in half an hour," Bess said, "or whenever you want it. It's steak. You just say. You're, the boss."

  Again the words just staggered me, but not quite enough. I still felt like Bess's guest.

  Of course, Bill was bustling around unpacking stiff, new blue jeans, whistling tunelessly (always a sign that he's uneasy), and saying bright, inane things about how lovely everything was. It was a brave attempt, I suppose, to put me at my ease and make me think he had no regrets whatever about throwing over our whole Eastern past and that he had a Master Plan for making our whole Western future one big bed of roses. But it rang about as true as a wooden nickel.

  At lunch even Bill began to crack.

  The main table in the dining room at del Monte was a massive, carved Spanish affair where, by tradition, the owner sat in what was easily the largest chair ever carved, and presided like the King of Spain over his guests.

  When lunch was announced, Bill was all courtly airs and graces and, bowing as deeply as the new jeans would allow, he pulled out the throne for Bess.

  "Oh, no," Bess said. "You sit there. This is your ranch now." Then she took her place in one of the smaller carved chairs along the side of the table.

  This, of course, was just Bess's way of making us feel at home, or saving by means of a courteous gesture that the place was incontrovertibly ours and that Bill was master of all he surveyed. However, it had just the opposite effect on my Bill.

  From the other end of the table—where I was pretty uncomfortable, too—I had a splendid view of Bill as lord, master, and ranchero of del Monte, and a pretty funny sight it was. If that chair had been fitted out with electrodes and fifty thousand volts he couldn't have looked more miserable. He went red. He went white. He squirmed and wriggled like those poor men in the underwear ads. He fumbled the bread, dropped a fork, nearly sent an ashtray clattering to the floor, and came close to overturning his water glass. The sight of my suave New Yorker acting like a tongue-tied schoolboy at the head of the table was just too much for me. I snickered helplessly into my soup—and don't think that that didn't make an astonishing pattern on Bess's place mat—my place mat, I guess.

  But the worst was yet to come.

  After lunch Bess tossed down her napkin, got up, handed the keys over to me, as chatelaine of Rancho del Monte, and said she thought she'd be running along. Just like that. Then she waved gaily, got into her car, and disappeared over a hilltop.r />
  Actually, she was going to her house, which was close by, but if the earth had opened up and swallowed her alive I couldn't have been more desolate. I hadn't felt so lonely and alien and abandoned since the day Mother took me off to kindergarten, checked on my hankie, whispered about the girls' room, and left me flat.

  This was exactly the same except that, unlike school, there wasn't any law stating I had to be here. Having absolutely nothing else to do, I wandered like a lost soul around the place with The Girls yowling dismally behind me. After having lived in three elegant little rooms in New York, the cats just weren't acclimated to Rancho del Monte and neither was I. I just hated it.

  Well, that's not absolutely fair. The ranch was really lovely—bigger and nicer than any place I'd ever lived in before—and as a guest I'd oh-ed and ah-ed about it the same as anyone else. As the boss-lady, it was just too much for me to digest.

  Maybe I'd better tell you something about it.

  The main house and the guest houses were made of real adobe in the Pueblo style: dreadful any place else—you know those ersatz hot dog stands and roadhouses that are called something like El Chico—but absolutely perfect for New Mexico. The living room in the main house was a U-shaped cavern fifty feet long at its greatest dimension. It was finished in white plaster with mammoth beams and furnished with massive pieces of carved Spanish Colonial furniture, which I always condemned as arty, self-conscious, and bogus back in the East, but which again is perfect in the Spanish Southwest.

  Besides that enormous living room, the ground floor also housed four bedrooms and baths, an office—what was I going to do with an office?—a big kitchen, larder, pantry, and laundry. There were also two big terraces, for sunning, eating, drinking, or just sitting.