Guest House

A large woman of a certain age. Runs, with her 20 year old daughter, a “guest house” for tourists to the little-visited region in North Central New York. It features an underground cavern – not so big or famous as Howe – and a gorge – not as large and striking as Watkins Glen.

“We draw a certain trade of people,” says the woman. “They come looking for something not so commercial. Something a little different, with a different feel.”

They came there by accident, although she did not allow for “accidents”, believing everything was foreordained, pretty much. “You were meant to come here,” she would have said, if asked.

*

They had planned to arrive in Cooperstown early in the evening, stay overnight at an inn, and visit the baseball museum next day. However, they’d gotten a late start and by the time they arrived their accommodation had been given away. Nor was there anything else available in town. “Go Northwest,” the desk clerk at the inn had said. “Some little towns have guest rooms or cabins.”

On the map, illuminated by the overhead car light, the wife saw “Malstrom Caverns”, 40 or 50 miles further on.

“Let’s go there,” she said wearily. “They must have accommodations for people who come to see this wonder of the world.”

The wife hardly spoke to him. It had been his fault they were late to Cooperstown and had lost their place. Their child slept in the car seat in back. They were both exhausted and felt the discouragement travelers feel when they have been turned away and must drive on into the night seeking an unknown place to stop and rest.

They passed lighted houses where people sat in easy chairs before TVs, or read books before a fire; places that could easily accommodate the travelers – save them from the endless unknown – the dangerous night-drive on the narrow winding road with sudden blare of on-coming headlights -- or great shouldering trucks that know the road like the back of their hand and travel it at top speed.

With sinking hearts they pushed on, he guilty, she resentful, the child asleep.

As they approached the town they began to see old signs that hadn’t been kept up, advertising the caverns and the gorge. There was even the picture of a boat shooting rapids.

At the start of the town stood an abandoned motor court, Cavern Cabins. They passed through the dark town (it was 12:30), and were suddenly out on the dark highway again. The woman began to sob softly.

“Look!” cried the man suddenly. A small white shingle dangled out from an old elm: “Guests”. Another, smaller shingle, swung below it: “Vacancy”.

“Thank God,” said the man. The woman said nothing.

Leaving the car running, he went up onto the porch and rang the bell. He could hear chimes muffled somewhere within.

The woman was large. Her legs (he noticed later) were like old-fashioned piano legs, tapering down from huge thighs, suggested beneath her faded blue flowered robe.

She looked at him through the screen door.

“Would you have a room?” he asked. She didn’t respond for a moment, and he added, “For my wife and self and our daughter.”

“Yes, of course,” she said. She unlatched the screen door.

He glanced back at the car and made a hopeful sign. He could see his wife’s features reflected in the headlights off the garage door.

He followed the woman up a flight of wooden stairs with an old railing bannister. It was then that he noticed her legs.

She swung open a door to a room with a large four-poster bed.

“This is great,” he said. “We’ll take it.”

The woman seemed to glance at him obliquely, taking him in. He felt discomforted. His attempt at wit regarding the late hour produced no effect on her.

*

Next morning after a restless night when he got little sleep, with his wife and child waiting in the car, he rang the bell on a table in the lobby. The woman came out through a door which she closed behind her.

“I guess we’re ready to hit the road,” he said. “Can I pay you?”

The woman quoted a not unreasonable price. He paid her. Again, she glanced at him with those strange indifferent longing eyes.

“You’d like to stay,” she said.

He wasn’t quite sure he heard her.

“Yes,” came out of him, a soft explosion -- as though someone had hit him on the back.

She put the money in a drawer without looking at him.

*

He dreamed of her. He dreamed of her waiting for him.

He felt useless and finished, a failure by everyone’s standards, with none of his own. He felt guilty and ashamed and weary. By his own inadequacies – sloth, compromise, lack of perseverance, lack of discipline. He felt abandoned both by man and nature. Of God he knew nothing any more.

*

Details of how she accommodated him:

He disappeared utterly from the world. Even the world of that tiny town.

He lived for a long time though who was there to measure it.

In darkness.

In silence.

In simplicity.

In restricted movement.

He recorded nothing – present or past.

He no longer spoke or was addressed.

He was alone.

Gradually he was abandoned by thoughts, memories, desires, and lived on in a kind of emptiness. His end came as a gradual diminishing. He graded off into nothingness until one day the woman’s daughter (who had taken over from the woman after she died) found him and realized he was no longer there and that the duty begun by her mother had been done.

Richard Ploetz’s stories have appeared in The Quarterly, Outerbridge, Crazy Quilt, Timbuktu, American Literary Review, Hayden’s Ferry, Passages North, Nonbinary Review, Literary Oracle, Ravens Perch, Adelaide, Short Beast, and others. His children’s story THE KOOKEN was published by Henry Holt.

www.richardploetz.com