FromChapter 1: The Ship Ahoy

The White Gull was the really nice motel in town. The Brinnesis had run it since 1964, and they kept it up, with white trim renewed every few years on the sixteen shingled cabins, firewood for the fireplaces, a flower box by every doorstep, good stoves and refrigerators in the kitchenettes. The last few years, they were asking sixty dollars a night for the ocean-view cabins, and on weekends in the season taking reservations only for two-night occupancy, and still filled up every weekend. Mrs. Brinnesi wore dresses, never pants; she was a religious-minded woman, attending Sunday mass at St. Joseph's up the coast and various retreats and Catholic women's meetings. Mr. Brinnesi would tell people right to their faces that if they wanted to have loud drinking parties or behave immorally they could go to another motel in another town. They were strict people, the Brinnesis. Their son had not turned out well. He had raised hell in high school, and run off to Portland and become some kind of hippie, and they did not even know where he lived now. Somebody told Tim Merion at the gas station that he had AIDS and was in San Francisco. But the Brinnesis were good neighbors, and the White Gull was a place people in town could be proud of.

Then across the loop road, up in the spruce and alder woods, was Hannah's Hideaway. Most people thought Hannah was a woman it was named for, but people like Mr. Voder could tell you that the man who built it way back in the Depression years had been named John Hannah, an eccentric Portlander with lumber money. He had started out building a cabin for himself there in the woods above Klatsand Creek when there wasn't anything much in town hut an old falling-down hotel and the General Store and a few houses and summer cabins scattered around between the road and the beach, the loop road was the main road then, before they built the coast highway. John Hannah built his wife a second cabin, a sort of tower, two rooms one on top of the other. He said she got on his nerves sitting knitting in his cabin. Then some friend of his came to visit, and John Hannah built a cabin for him. And some more friends came to visit. It ended up with seven different cabins sitting there in the woods on two and a half acres. After the Hannah estate sold it, there were times the Hideaway had been, as Mr. Voder said, "a very shady retreat," rented out to parties of men who brought their liquor by the case and their women by the carload and never came into town at all. Other owners had cleaned up the old cabins and made it almost a private club kind of resort. In the seventies it had changed hands again and run down into an on-again-off-again second-rate seasonal motel. Now that the Shotos had it, it was doing a lot of week-long and even month-long summer rentals, and a nicer kind of people stayed there, although there was still something a little queer about the place, all those cabins with their gables and dormers and ladder lofts in the thick woods, compared to the White Gull right in town at the top of the beach, with its white trim and sunny marigolds.

And then there was the Ship Ahoy. The Tuckets took over the Ship Ahoy in the mid-eighties, when it was pretty badly run down. It never had amounted to much: a double row of jerry-built cabins with a carport between each pair, on a U-shaped driveway with a grass plot in the middle, The office and apartment were on the right coming in, and a storage building connected the two rows at the west end. The four cabins on the left had kitchens and could sleep five apiece; the three on the right were duplexes, a room and bath with one queen or two twin beds. All the showers were some kind of plastic unit made for motels, installed when the place was built in the fifties, and they were really decrepit by now, cracked through, with dirt in the cracks, and leaking. The faucets were cranky and the plumbing was explosive. The TV sets were huge old things fixed on imitation wood stands; in the smaller rooms you could barely get between them and the foot of the bed. Most of the sets picked up three or four of the five cable channels available, hut none of them got all of them. The bedspreads and curtains and carpets of all the rooms smelled of cigarettes and mildew, and the equipment in the kitchens was sorry: groaning refrigerators, stoves with dead burners, a couple of thin pots, a scratched no-stick frying pan that stuck, table knives and forks from the Goodwill, one dull serrated cutting knife, and odd plastic plates and cups that had been scraped and scorched and battered and worn till their aggressive pink and orange and aqua and chartreuse colors had gone whitish-grey. But then, the Tuckets seemed a little run down, too.

He had been in the Marines, how long and how long ago nobody knew, but it was about all anybody did know about him. His first name was Bob, and this was his second marriage. People learned that from Mrs. Tucket. She joked that when she married Mr. Tucket she ought to have changed her name to Nan. But it was Rosemarie; and she had been married before, too; but she didn't say more about it than that. She was friendly enough, and pleasant mannered, but, people knew her only in the stores and from when she chatted with Tim at the filling station or had to have Bigley come out, for the plumbing, that kind of thing; she did not get to know any women in town well, for the motel kept her on a short chain. She hired no help to run it, and did almost everything herself. Mr. Tucket had some kind of health condition that got worse soon after they bought the Ship Ahoy. He could not move furniture or do any heavy work. He wheezed and looked shaky even when he ran the heavy old vacuum cleaner. Mostly he sat in the apartment living room and watched NBC, and answered the bell when anybody telephoned or came to the office to ask for a room. Nobody ever made reservations at the Ship Ahoy except maybe on the really big weekends: Memorial Day, Sandcastle Day at Cannon Beach, the Fourth, and Labor Day. People just saw the sign up on the highway as they drove by, or the Gull and Hannah's filled up and sent people to it. It was on the loop road a little out of town to the south. It didn't have a sea view, but was only one block of sandy road and a bit of dune grass away from the beach. It could have been a nice little place, and no doubt Rosemarie and Bob Tucket had meant to make it nicer; or anyway Rosemarie had, since he seemed to be one of those men who never meant anything they did but just got angry when it didn't come out right.

Rosemarie had talked with people in town about some of the things she hoped to do with the Ship Ahoy to fix it up and make it more attractive. She did plant petunias in front of the office, first thing. She made a good deal on weekly linen and towel rental with a nice young couple starting an agency in Astoria. The first week they had the place she threw out the old bedspreads that were fit for nothing but furniture packing and hounds to lie on in the back of pickups. She bought pale green fiber-filled coverlets that served both as blanket and bedspread and were fireproof. All a cigarette could do to them was melt a hole with hard brown edges. Several guests with cigarettes did so pretty soon. It took more money than she had figured on to buy the six queen, four double, and twelve twin spreads for the ten units (she kept the best of the old bedspreads for the rollaways and sofa beds). She bought good curtain material, beige with wide pale green stripes, and sewed the drapes for the front kitchen units, the best ones, 1 and 2; but putting in the hooks for the drapery installation took so long, it would take forever to make curtains for all the units, hundreds of hooks to be sewn in. When was she to do it? At night the light wasn't good enough to sew by. Cleaning up the units to be ready by two P.M. took the whole morning, and there was their own apartment to keep clean, and meals to cook and clear, and she had to have some time to herself. Hadn't they looked for a motel in a small town, a beach town, so that they could have some time free?

She had never minded being alone, indeed, she would have enjoyed it, if she had had time to enjoy it. Certainly she hadn't planned to socialize with the guests. That might be what people wanted at these fancy bed-and-breakfasts where there was champagne and orange juice and everybody used first names. But most people at motels wanted to be left alone, she thought; and all she wanted was to greet them in a nice way so they felt at home, take their money and give them their key, and then clean up after them next morning. And she knew what that involved. Working at her first husband's service station in Tucson years ago she had learned how people use public facilities, not only peeing on the floor and strewing paper around, but scraping off paint, unscrewing fixtures, uprooting toilets even, like crazy monkeys wrecking their cage. She didn't expect the cleaning to be pleasant, and sometimes it was disgusting, you wanted to rub their noses in it. But then some people left things neat, the wet towels in a pile, trash in the wastebaskets, sometimes even a dollar bill under the ashtray, as if she was a maid, but they meant well. And nobody came here for big wild parties, like in city motels. Mostly they were just driving through on the Coast Highway and pulled off for the night—single men, a good many elderly couples, some families with young children. Sometimes women staying with their families in the kitchen units for a couple of nights liked to talk with her while the children were down playing on the beach. Mostly they started out with a complaint about the refrigerator or the shower or they wanted extra cups, but sometimes they also got to talking about their lives, and that was interesting. In some of them she recognized right away the pain and strangeness she felt in her own life, but others interested her because they seemed to be so dull and so familiar, and the women living these lives complained about them comfortably, feeling no strangeness at all. Such conversations usually took place in the front office or at the doorway of the units. Once, an elderly lady staying alone for the weekend for a church conference up in Seaside invited her in for a glass of iced tea. Rosemarie did not feel that she should accept the invitation, and did not want to accept it, but she appreciated it.

The apartment kitchen was cramped. The living room was dark, because Bob kept the blind down and the TV on, and it smelled like his socks. Since he was always there to answer the bell, Rosemarie took to spending a good deal of time that fall in the storage room. It had the only west window in the motel, looking down through some big old black Sitka spruce trees to the grassy dunes. You couldn't see the sea, but you could hear it, if you wanted to. Or she would lie down on one of the twin beds in No. 10, a unit they had never rented even in the summer, saving it till last because its TV and heating unit both acted funny. She would lie down on the bed farther from the door and look at a mail-order catalogue or doze and think at the same time. Sometimes she read science-fiction books or magazines from the secondhand paperback book store in Astoria.