The neverending story: there once was a girl.

(Let’s start a story… – promoted by exmearden)

There once was a girl who grew up in a really small town, really far away from much of anything. Of course, the word “girl” doesn’t define her, didn’t then, doesn’t now, but definitions in those days were unimaginative and lame, and besides, all she knew at the time was that she was a girl, much as that meant anything to her or to anyone and after all, it implied someone of a specific age or gender, doesn’t it, and even then, she had no idea there was anything at all beyond being a girl, unless that led always to being a woman, which is what she imagined her mother was.

The girl’s imagination stretched just a bit oddly farther than other people’s imaginations, and their definitions, but alas, that would amble along later.

…words like “green chain” and “shrimp-pickers” and “gyppo truckers”.

This girl, in this small town, grew up with words of a vocabulary familiar to the culture and environment around her; words like “green chain” and “shrimp-pickers” and “gyppo truckers”. There was an exotic quality to certain aspects of small-town life in those days, it being the sixties and all. The Soviets were still Communists and most everyone called them all Russians, even if they weren’t. ‘Course, no one, or very few, who lived in this small town understood that there might be a world of difference between a Georgian and a Chechnyan, or Ukrainian and a Kazakhistani, or an Azerbaijani or a…well, you get the picture.

Nope. Everyone from the USSR was a Russian. And the Russian fishing boats that often tested the international boundaries of the US offshore, trawling less than twelve miles off the beach, were still the enemy.  She knew they were because when the duck-and-cover drills were run at school, it was the Russians everyone was worried about. Because you never knew when a bomb might land on the town and blow it to bits and into a mushroom cloud. And what was so cold about the Cold War if it could erupt in something so hot that your skin would be seared off? And why would anyone want to blow up Bandon, anyway?

Other words, like “tourist season” and “vacancy” and “wigwam burner” and “dredge” were common in the lingo of the locals.

This was a coastal town and the economy depended on a thriving tourist, logging, and fishing industry. Her own folks depended on thriving tourists because they owned a motel. The seasonal summer trade up and down Highway 101 meant room rates went up in May through the first of September on every motel on the coast. Rooms would go from $13 a night to $17, unless it was a double queen, and then you charged $25, instead of $18, because the queen beds were BeautyRest. The girl never could understand why she didn’t turn beautiful when she slept on one of those beds. What was the point of trying to get beautiful when you slept? OR maybe it was only the sleep you got that was beautiful. She was just satisfied with a good night’s sleep; it didn’t need to be a lovely sleep, after all.

The beds in the single rooms were only Sealy. That was a funny name for a bed. She often wondered if something about the Sealy beds were made from seals, like the seal pup her dad brought home in the back of his ’58 Chevy pickup one time. He’d found it trying to climb up on the docks where his day job was, and he watched for the mother, but she never appeared. Dad told her that he thought the mother might have been eaten by a whale. So he carted it up in the back of the pickup to the yard of the motel and she and Dad waited for the men from Charleston to come and pick the pup up. There was an ocean school there at Charleston, just starting and they were tracking seals along the Oregon coast. Anyway, she hoped the beds in the single rooms had nothing to do with things as cute as that mocha-colored, spotted, big-eyed seal pup.

…because the queen beds were BeautyRest.

The smaller units were only $9 a night, but they were really only meant for single men; in those days you could discriminate who you rented what to. Mother always felt that the little room was too small for a woman (not that there were very many singular women tourists, not in those days, and if there were, well, they were a bit suspicious), because the vanity in the bathroom was too small to put cosmetics on and there was no mirror in the main room.

You knew when the summer tourist season was going to start because the Canadian tourists always got the jump on summer and came down south along the coast a week or so before US schools got out for the summer. Mother told you that the Canadians always took the towels and every unopened bar soap in the bathrooms from their motel units, and you knew that there would be Canadian coins for your allowance when the bill was paid for the night in cash. They usually used the white towels to shine their shoes. And they would often try to negotiate the room price downwards if they knew there were other vacancies in town at other motels.

When Dad paved the gravel circular drive at the motel with asphalt, she learned that the way you set the asphalt so that it wouldn’t crack was to cover the freshly paved surface with a thin layer of motor oil, and then push-broom cement powder over the top – kind of like how mother would cover her face in Rose Beige foundation and use the powder compact to “seal her pores off”. Mother had big pores on her face, like flesh-colored orange peel. In those days, she applied “Rose Beige”, but as the years passed and the summer sun and salt air morphed Mother’s menopausal, aging skin to medium tan, she began to wear “Classic Tan” permanently. One year, the girl used Mother’s foundation to color her arms and legs so that she wouldn’t look so pasty white, but Mother was pretty mad at the waste of makeup. Fair skin doesn’t tan well in the coastal sea air on the Southwest coast, and the girl thought that Classic Tan would be just right to make her look like all the other girls whose mothers let them sit out and baste in the sun on warmer days, when her own mother forbid it. It was no good denying that she had done this; the telltale Classic Tan ring around her white tank top gave her right away.

Rose Beige was also the color Mother always painted the walls of the motel rooms. Never just white, and never yellow. The smokers would yellow up the walls anyway. Rose Beige warms the room. So every room in the motel was Sherwin-Williams Rose Beige. Except for the kitchen of the house attached to the motel. Those walls were Chiffon Yellow and the cabinets were Turquoise, and those newfangled fake plastic roll-ups shades were Orange. Capital letters, all. When the shades faded in the sun after a few months, the plastic fake bamboo tubes woven together to form the roll-up blind looked like so many flattened, chewed-on drinking straws laced together with kite string. And the formica and chrome kitchen table was banana yellow, along with the stuffed chrome and plastic chairs. It was a drop-leaf table and parked itself in the middle of the long, narrow kitchen, just off the short hallway from the motel office attached to the north side of the house. The coolest saloon-style louvered half-doors blocked the entry to the kitchen from the motel office.

…the girl thought that Classic Tan would be just right to make her look like all the other girls whose mothers let them sit out and baste in the sun.

When customers came into the office in the early evening, the smells of dinner filled the air, and often, the first question they’d ask was, “Where’s the best restaurant in town?”
(Continues tomorrow night…)