ANTE-BELLUM HOME TURNED INTO A MOTEL

The painting goes back to my childhood in New Orleans. It is of an ante-bellum home on St. Charles Avenue, a run down place with a big sign on it, reading "MOTEL" An elderly eccentric woman in a white dress and cap asks me to stop hopping on a row of fully made-up beds with white sheets. The rows of beds are like the ones in an enormous ward at an Alabama mental hospital where senile homeless women mill around. These rows of beds are like the rows of polio-crippled children lying in deck chairs on a white painted porch of an old children’s hospital that I visited as a Girl Scout. These rows of beds are like the ones at an orphanage I visited as a teen-ager. I agree with this old woman and remake the beds.

The motel is rambling, each side painted a different color, dark faded colors. The side building belongs to someone else. There is a dining room chest with a silver and glass tray in the drawer, which is very, very defined. There are bedrooms each with its own tester top bed and each with a staircase for servants to attend patrons. Outside there is a large slide board slickened with water from a hose. It is a slide for a fire escape like the one at my elementary school, which I was very afraid to be in. Children are sliding up and down the slippery slide. People are trying to crawl up the slide to the top with the faucet going and in the dream they look like they are going downhill. Actually their heads are downward, but in the dream, they are trying to crawl up the slide with the water going on it. Going up and down the slide, up and down the stairs, hopping from one bed to another.

I am trying to go down the nearby staircase carrying a glass of wine, but the first few risers of the stairs are missing. My son, who looks like my Father, is in the bed in the adjoining room. A widower who was just remarried wants to sleep with me. I tell my husband and we begin to run past the dining room table down the side street; it is an alley. The woman denies bonuses s due pay to the hotel employees.

Do I become her? Later I realize that the tesster top bed in the dream was in the bridal suite of an elegant Baltimore hotel where I once stayed and alas, that all hotel rooms are not as fine!

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