'A kind of animal?' Egg asked.
'Never mind,' said Mother.
'I think we should concentrate on the Exeter weekend,' Father said.
'Yes, and getting yourselves, and me, all moved in,' said Iowa Bob. There's lots of time to discuss the summer.'
'The whole summer is booked in advance?' Mother asked.
'You see?' Father said. 'Now, that's good business! Already we've taken care of the summer, and the Exeter weekend. First things first. Now all we have to do is move in.'
That happened a week before the Exeter game; it was the weekend when Iowa Bob's ringers rang up nine touchdowns -- to match their ninth straight victory, against no defeats. Franny didn't get to see it; she had decided not to be a cheerleader anymore. That Saturday Franny and I helped Mother move the last things that the moving vans hadn't already taken to the Hotel New Hampshire; Lilly and Egg went with Father and Coach Bob to the game; Frank, of course, was in the band.
There were thirty rooms over four floors, and our family occupied seven rooms in the southeast corner, covering two floors. One room in the basement was dominated by Mrs. Urick; that meant that, together with the fourth-floor resting place of Max, there were twenty-two rooms for guests. But the headwaitress and head maid, Ronda Ray, had a dayroom on the second floor -- to gather herself together, she'd said to Father. And two southeast-corner rooms on the third floor -- just above us -- were reserved for Iowa Bob. That left only nineteen rooms for guests, and only thirteen of those came with their own baths; six of the rooms came with the midget facilities.
'It's more than enough,' Father said. This is a small town. And not popular.'
It was more than enough for the circus called Fritz's Act, perhaps, but we were anxious how we were going to handle the full house we expected for the Exeter weekend.
That Saturday we moved in, Franny discovered the intercom system and switched on the 'Receiving' buttons in all the rooms. They were all empty, of course, but we tried to imagine listening to the first guests moving into them. The squawk-box system, as Father called it, had been left over from the Thompson Female Seminary, of course -- the principal could announce fire drills to the various classrooms, and teachers who were out of their homerooms could hear if the kids were fooling around. Father thought that keeping the intercom system would make it unnecessary to have phones in the rooms.
'They can call for help on the intercom,' Father said.
'Or we can wake them for breakfast. And if they want to use the phone, they can use the phone at the main desk.' But of course the squawk-box system also meant that it was possible to listen to the guests in their rooms.
'Not ethically possible,' Father said, but Franny and I couldn't wait.
That Saturday we moved in, we were without even the main-desk phone -- or a phone in our family's apartment -- and we were without linen, because the linen service that was going to handle the hotel laundry had also been contracted to do ours. They weren't starting service until Monday, Ronda Ray wasn't starting until Monday, either, but she was there -- in the Hotel New Hampshire -- looking over her dayroom when we arrived.
'I just need it, you know?' she asked Mother. 'I mean, I can't change sheets in the morning, after I wait on the breakfast eaters -- and before I serve lunch to the lunch eaters -- without having no place to lay down. And between lunch and supper, if I don't lay down, I get feeling nasty -- all over. And if you lived where I lived, you wouldn't wanna go home.
Ronda Ray lived at Hampton Beach, where she waitressed and changed sheets for the summer crowd. She'd been looking for a year-round arrangement for her hotel career -- and, my mother guessed, a way to get out of Hampton Beach, forever. She was about my mother's age, and in fact claimed to remember seeing Earl perform in Earl's casino years. She had not seen his ballroom dancing performance, though; it was the bandstand she remembered, and the act called 'Applying for a Job.'
'But I never believed it was a real bear,' she told Franny and me, as we watched her unpack a small suitcase in her dayroom. 'I mean,' Ronda Ray said, 'I thought nobody would get a kick out of undressing no real bear.'
We wondered why she was unpacking nightclothes from the suitcase, if this dayroom was not where she intended to spend the night; she was a woman Franny was curious about -- and I thought she was even exotic. She had dyed hair; I can't say what colour it was because it wasn't a real colour. It wasn't red, it wasn't blonde; it was the colour of plastic, or metal, and I wondered how it felt. Ronda Ray had a body that I imagined was formerly as strong as Franny's but had grown a little thick -- still powerful, but straining. It is hard to say what she smelled like, although -- after we left Ronda -- Franny tried.
'She put perfume on her wrist two days ago,' Franny said. 'You following me?'
'Yes,' I said.
'But her watchband wasn't there then -- her brother was wearing her watch, or her father,' Franny said. 'Some man, anyway, and he really sweated a lot.'
'Yes,' I said.
Then Ronda put the watchband on, over the perfume, and she wore it for a day while she was stripping beds,' Franny said.
'What beds?' I said.
Franny thought a minute. 'Beds very strange people had slept in,' she said.
'The circus called Fritz's Act slept in them!' I said.
'Right!' said Franny.
'The whole summer!' we said, in unison.
'Right,' Franny said. 'And what we smell when we smell Ronda is what Ronda's watchband smells like -- after all that.'