But it’s so different with you, Terry, Richard had said to her.
You’ve got an absolute conviction you’ll be out of it in a few
weeks and the others haven’t. Richard said she could be in France
next summer. Would be. Richard wanted her to go with him, and
there was really nothing that stood in the way of her going with
him. And Richard’s friend Phil McElroy had written him that he
might be able to get her a job with a theater group next month.
Therese had not met Phil yet, but she had very little faith that he
could get her a job. She had combed New York since September,
gone back and combed it a few times more, and she hadn’t found
anything. Who gave a job in the middle of the winter to a stagedesigner
apprentice just beginning to be an apprentice? It didn’t
seem real either that she might be in Europe with Richard next
summer, sitting with him in sidewalk cafés, walking with him in
Arles, finding the places Van Gogh had painted, she and Richard
choosing towns to stop in for a while and paint. It seemed less
real these last few days since she had been working at the store.
She knew what bothered her at the store. It was the sort of
thing she wouldn’t try to tell Richard. It was that the store
intensified things that had always bothered her, as long as she
could remember. It was the pointless actions, the meaningless
chores that seemed to keep her from doing what she wanted to
do, might have done—and here it was the complicated
procedures with moneybags, coat checkings, and time clocks that
kept people even from serving the store as efficiently as they
might—the sense that everyone was incommunicado with
everyone else and living on an entirely wrong plane, so that the
meaning, the message, the love, or whatever it was that each life
contained, never could find its expression. It reminded her of
conversations at tables, on sofas, with people whose words seemed
to hover over dead, unstirrable things, who never touched a string
that played. And when one tried to touch a live string, looked at
one with faces as masked as ever, making a remark so perfect in
its banality that one could not even believe it might be
subterfuge. And the loneliness, augmented by the fact one saw
within the store the same faces day after day, the few faces one
might have spoken to and never did, or never could. Not like the
face on the passing bus that seems to speak, that is seen once and
at least is gone for ever.
She would wonder, standing in the time-clock queue in the
basement every morning, her eyes sorting out unconsciously the
regular employees from the temporary ones, just how she had
happened to land here—she had answered an ad, of course, but
that didn’t explain fate—and what was coming next instead of a
stage-designing job. Her life was a series of zigzags. At nineteen,
she was anxious.

“You must learn to trust people, Therese. Remember that,”
Sister Alicia had often told her. And often, quite often, Therese
tried to apply it.
“Sister Alicia,” Therese whispered carefully, the sibilant
syllables comforting her.
Therese sat up again and picked up her fork, because the
clean-up boy was working in her direction.
She could see Sister Alicia’s face, bony and reddish like pink
stone when the sunlight was on it, and the starched blue billow of
her bosom. Sister Alicia’s big bony figure coming around a corner
in a hall, between the white enamel tables in the refectory. Sister
Alicia in a thousand places, her small blue eyes always finding her
out among the other girls, seeing her differently, Therese knew,
from all the other girls, yet the thin pink lips always set in the
same straight line. She could see Sister Alicia handing her the
knitted green gloves wrapped in tissue, not smiling, only
presenting them to her directly, with hardly a word, on her eighth
birthday. Sister Alicia telling her with the same straight mouth
that she must pass her arithmetic. Who else had cared if she
passed her arithmetic? Therese had kept the green gloves at the
bottom of her tin locker at school, for years after Sister Alicia
had gone away to California. The white tissue had become limp
and crackleless like ancient cloth, and still she had not worn the
gloves. Finally, they were too small to wear.
Someone moved the sugar container, and the propped
booklet fell flat.
Therese looked at the pair of hands across from her, a
woman’s plump, ageing hands, stirring her coffee, breaking a roll
now with a trembling eagerness, daubing half the roll greedily
into the brown gravy of the plate that was identical with
Therese’s. The hands were chapped, there was dirt in the parallel
creases of the knuckles, but the right hand bore a conspicuous
silver filigree ring set with a clear green stone, the left a gold
wedding ring, and there were traces of red polish in the corners of
the nails. Therese watched the hand carry a forkful of peas
upward, and she did not have to look at the face to know what it
would be like. It would be like all the fifty-year-old faces of
women who worked at Frankenberg’s, stricken with an everlasting
exhaustion and terror, the eyes distorted behind glasses that
enlarged or made smaller, the cheeks splotched with rouge that
did not brighten the grayness underneath. Therese could not look.
“You’re a new girl, aren’t you?” The voice was shrill and clear
in the din, almost a sweet voice.
“Yes,” Therese said, and looked up. She remembered the face.
It was the face whose exhaustion had made her see all the other
faces. It was the woman Therese had seen creeping down the
marble stairs from the mezzanine at about six-thirty one evening
when the store was empty, sliding her hands down the broad
marble banister to take some of the weight from her bunioned
feet. Therese had thought: she is not ill, she is not a beggar, she
simply works here.
“Are you getting along all right?”
And here was the woman smiling at her, with the same
terrible creases under her eyes and around her mouth. Her eyes
were actually alive now, and rather affectionate.
“Are you getting along all right?” the woman repeated, for
there was a great clatter of voices and dishes all around them.
Therese moistened her lips. “Yes, thank you.”
“Do you like it here?”
Therese nodded.
“Finished?” A young man in a white apron gripped the
woman’s plate with an imperative thumb.
The woman made a tremulous, dismissing gesture. She pulled
her saucer of canned sliced peaches towards her. The peaches, like
slimy little orange fishes, slithered over the edge of the spoon
each time the spoon lifted, all except one which the woman
would eat.
“I’m on the third floor in the sweater department. If you want
to ask me anything”—the woman said with nervous uncertainty,
as if she were trying to deliver a message before they would be cut
off or separated—“come up and talk to me some time. My name
is Mrs. Robichek, Mrs. Ruby Robichek, five forty-four.”
“Thank you very much,” Therese said. And suddenly the
woman’s ugliness disappeared, because her reddish-brown eyes
behind the glasses were gentle, and interested in her. Therese
could feel her heart beating, as if it had come to life. She watched
the woman get up from the table, and watched her short, thick
figure move away until it was lost in the crowd that waited behind
the barricade.
Therese did not visit Mrs. Robichek, but she looked for her
every morning when the employees trickled into the building
around a quarter to nine, and she looked for her in the elevators
and in the cafeteria. She never saw her, but it was pleasant to have
someone to look for in the store. It made all the difference in the
world.

Nearly every morning when she came to work on the seventh
floor, Therese would stop for a moment to watch a certain toy
train. The train was on a table by itself near the elevators. It was
not a big fine train like the one that ran on the floor at the back
of the toy department, but there was a fury in its tiny pumping
pistons that the bigger trains did not possess. Its wrath and
frustration on the closed oval track held Therese spellbound.
Awrr rr rr rrgh! it said as it hurled itselfblindly into the
papier-mâché tunnel. And Urr rr rr rrgh! as it emerged.
The little train was always running when she stepped out of
the elevator in the morning, and when she finished work in the
evening. She felt it cursed the hand that threw its switch each day.
In the jerk of its nose around the curves, in its wild dashes down
the straight lengths of track, she could see a frenzied and futile
pursuit of a tyrannical master. It drew three Pullman cars in
which minuscule human figures showed flinty profiles at the
windows, behind these an open boxcar of real miniature lumber, a
boxcar of coal that was not real, and a caboose that snapped
round the curves and clung to the fleeing train like a child to its
mother’s skirts. It was like something gone mad in imprisonment,
something already dead that would never wear out, like the
dainty, springy-footed foxes in the Central Park Zoo, whose
complex footwork repeated and repeated as they circled their
cages.

This morning, Therese turned away quickly from the train,
and went on towards the doll department, where she worked.
At five past nine, the great block-square toy department was
coming to life. Green cloths were being pulled back from the
long tables. Mechanical toys began to toss balls into the air and
catch them, shooting galleries popped and their targets rotated.
The table of barnyard animals squawked, cackled, and brayed.
Behind Therese, a weary rat-tat-tat-tat-tat had started up, the
drumbeats of the giant tin soldier who militantly faced the
elevators and drummed all day. The arts and handicrafts table
gave out a smell of fresh modeling clay, reminiscent of the art
room at school when she was very small, and also of a kind of
vault on the school grounds, rumored to be the real tomb of
someone, which she had used to stick her nose into through the
iron bars.
Mrs. Hendrickson, section manager of the doll department,
was dragging dolls from the stock shelves and seating them,
splay-legged, on the glass counters.
Therese said hello to Miss Martucci, who stood at the
counter counting the bills and coins from her moneybag with
such concentration she could give Therese only a deeper nod of
her rhythmically nodding head. Therese counted twenty-eight
fifty from her own moneybag, recorded it on a slip of white paper
for the sales receipts envelope, and transferred the money by
denominations into her drawer in the cash register.

By now, the first customers were emerging from the
elevators, hesitating a moment with the bewildered, somewhat
startled expressions that people always had on finding themselves
in the toy department, then starting off on weaving courses.
“Do you have the dolls that wet?” a woman asked her.
“I’d like this doll, but with a yellow dress,” a woman said,
pushing a doll towards her, and Therese turned and got the doll
she wanted out of a stock shelf.
The woman had a mouth and cheeks like her mother’s,
Therese noticed, slightly pocked cheeks under dark pink rouge,
separated by a thin red mouth full of vertical lines.
“Are the Drinksy-Wetsy dolls all this size?”
There was no need of salesmanship. People wanted a doll, any
doll, to give for Christmas. It was a matter of stooping, pulling
out boxes in search of a doll with brown eyes instead of blue,
calling Mrs. Hendrickson to open a showcase window with her
key, which she did grudgingly if she were convinced the particular
doll could not be found in stock, a matter of sidling down the
aisle behind the counter to deposit a purchased doll on the
mountain of boxes on the wrapping counter that was always
growing, always toppling, no matter how often the stock boys
came to take the packages away. Almost no children came to the
counter. Santa Claus was supposed to bring the dolls, Santa
Claus represented by the frantic faces and the clawing hands. Yet
there must be a certain good will in all of them, Therese thought,
even behind the cool, powdered faces of the women in mink and
sable, who were generally the most arrogant, who hastily bought
the biggest and most expensive dolls, the dolls with real hair and
changes of clothing. There was surely love in the poor people,
who waited their turn and asked quietly how much a certain doll
cost, and shook their heads regretfully and turned away. Thirteen
dollars and fifty cents for a doll only ten inches high.
“Take it,” Therese wanted to say to them. “It really is too
expensive, but I’ll give it to you. Frankenberg’s won’t miss it.”
But the women in the cheap cloth coats, the timid men
huddled inside shabby mufflers would be gone, wistfully glancing
at other counters as they made their way back to the elevators. If
people came for a doll, they didn’t want anything else. A doll was
a special kind of Christmas gift, practically alive, the next thing to
a baby.
There were almost never any children, but now and again one
would come up, generally a little girl, very rarely a little boy, her
hand held firmly by a parent. Therese would show her the dolls
she thought the child might like. She would be patient, and
finally a certain doll would bring that metamorphosis in the
child’s face, that response to make-believe that was the purpose of
all of it, and usually that was the doll the child went away with.

Then one evening after work, Therese saw Mrs. Robichek in
the coffee and doughnut shop across the street. Therese often
stopped in the doughnut shop to get a cup of coffee before going
home. Mrs. Robichek was at the back of the shop, at the end of
the long curving counter, dabbling a doughnut into her mug of
coffee.
Therese pushed and thrust herself towards her, through the
press of girls and coffee mugs and doughnuts. Arriving at Mrs.
Robichek’s elbow, she gasped, “Hello,” and turned to the counter,
as if a cup of coffee had been her only objective.
“Hello,” said Mrs. Robichek, so indifferently that Therese was
crushed.
Therese did not dare look at Mrs. Robichek again. And yet
their shoulders were actually pressed together! Therese was half
finished with her coffee when Mrs. Robichek said dully, “I’m
going to take the Independent subway. I wonder if we’ll ever get
out of here.” Her voice was dreary, not as it had been that day in
the cafeteria. Now she was like the hunched old woman Therese
had seen creeping down the stairs.
“We’ll get out,” Therese said reassuringly.
Therese forced a path for both of them to the door. Therese
was taking the Independent subway, too. She and Mrs. Robichek
edged into the sluggish mob at the entrance of the subway, and
were sucked gradually and inevitably down the stairs, like bits of
floating waste down a drain. They found they both got off at the
Lexington Avenue stop, too, though Mrs. Robichek lived on
Fifty-fifth Street, just east of Third Avenue. Therese went with
Mrs. Robichek into the delicatessen where she was going to buy
something for her dinner. Therese might have bought something
for her own dinner, but somehow she couldn’t in Mrs. Robichek’s
presence.
“Do you have food at home?”
“No, I’m going to buy something later.”
“Why don’t you come and eat with me? I’m all alone. Come
on.” Mrs. Robichek finished with a shrug, as if that were less
effort than a smile.
Therese’s impulse to protest politely lasted only a moment.
“Thank you. I’d like to come.” Then she saw the cellophane
wrapped cake on the counter, a fruit cake like a big brown brick
topped with red cherries, and she bought it to give to Mrs.
Robichek.

Chapter Two
“Terry, remember that fellow Phil McElroy I told you about?
The one with the stock company? Well, he’s in town, and he says
you’ve got a job in a couple of weeks.”
“A real job? Where?”
“A show in the Village. Phil wants to see us tonight. I’ll tell
you about it when I see you. I’ll be over in about twenty minutes.
I’m just leaving school now.”
Therese ran up the three flights of stairs to her room. She was
in the middle of washing up, and the soap had dried on her face.
She stared down at the orange washcloth in the basin.
“A job!” she whispered to herself. The magic word.
She changed into a dress, and hung a short silver chain with a
St. Christopher medallion, a birthday present from Richard,
around her neck, and combed her hair with a little water so it
would look neater. Then she set some loose sketches and
cardboard models just inside the closet where she could reach
them easily when Phil McElroy asked to see them. No, I haven’t
had much actual experience, she would have to say, and she felt a
sink of failure. She hadn’t even an apprentice’s job behind her,
except that two-day job in Montclair, making that cardboard
model that the amateur group had finally used, if that could be
called a job. She had taken two courses in scenic design in New
York, and she had read a lot of books. She could hear Phil
McElroy—an intense and very busy young man, probably a little
annoyed at having come to see her for nothing—saying
regretfully that she wouldn’t do after all. But with Richard
present, Therese thought, it wouldn’t be quite as crushing as if she
were alone. Richard had quit or been fired from about five jobs
since she had known him. Nothing bothered Richard less than
losing and finding jobs. Therese remembered being fired from
Pelican Press a month ago, and she winced. They hadn’t given her
notice, and the only reason she had been fired, she supposed, was
that her particular research assignment had been finished. When
she had gone in to speak to Mr. Nussbaum, the president, about
not being given notice, he had not known, or had pretended not
to know, what the term meant. “Notiz?—Wuss?” he had said
indifferently, and she had turned and fled, afraid of bursting into
tears in his office. It was easy for Richard, living at home with a
family to keep him cheerful. It was easier for him to save money.
He had saved about two thousand in a two-year hitch in the
Navy, and a thousand more in the year since. And how long
would it take her to save the fifteen hundred dollars that a junior
membership in the stage designers’ union cost? After nearly two
years in New York, she had only about five hundred dollars of it.
“Pray for me,” she said to the wooden Madonna on the
bookshelf. It was the one beautiful thing in her apartment, the
wooden Madonna she had bought the first month she had been in
New York. She wished there were a better place for it in the
room than on the ugly bookshelf. The bookshelf was like a lot of
fruit crates stacked up and painted red. She longed for a
bookshelf of natural-colored wood, smooth to the touch and
sleek with wax.
She went down to the delicatessen and bought six cans of beer
and some blue cheese. Then, when she came upstairs, she
remembered the original purpose of her going to the store, to buy
some meat for dinner. She and Richard had planned to have
dinner in tonight. That might be changed now, but she didn’t like
to take it on her own initiative to alter plans where Richard was
concerned, and she was about to run down again for the meat
when Richard’s long ring sounded. She pressed the release button.
Richard came up the steps at a run, smiling. “Did Phil call?”
“No,” she said.
“Good. That means he’s coming.”
“When?”
“In a few minutes, I guess. He probably won’t stay long.”
“Does it really sound like a definite job?”
“Phil says so.”
“Do you know what kind of play it is?”
“I don’t know anything except they need somebody for sets,
and why not you?” Richard looked her over critically, smiling.
“You look swell tonight. Don’t be nervous, will you? It’s just a
little company in the Village, and you’ve probably got more talent
than all the rest of them put together.”
She took the overcoat he had dropped on a chair and hung it
in the closet. Under the overcoat was a roll of charcoal paper he
had brought from art school. “Did you do something good
today?” she asked.
“So-so. That’s something I want to work on at home,” he said
carelessly. “We had that red-headed model today, the one I like.”
Therese wanted to see his sketch, but she knew Richard
probably didn’t think it good enough. Some of his first paintings
were good, like the lighthouse in blues and blacks that hung over
her bed, that he had done when he was in the Navy and just
starting to paint. But his life drawing was not good yet, and
Therese doubted that it ever would be. There was a new charcoal
smudge all over one knee of his tan cotton trousers. He wore a
shirt inside the red and black checked shirt, and buckskin
moccasins that made his big feet look like shapeless bear paws.
He was more like a lumberjack or a professional athlete of some
sort, Therese thought, than anything else. She could more easily
imagine him with an ax in his hand than a paintbrush. She had
seen him with an ax once, cutting wood in the yard back of his
house in Brooklyn. If he didn’t prove to his family that he was
making some progress in his painting, he would probably have to
go into his father’s bottled-gas business this summer, and open
the branch in Long Island that his father wanted him to.
“Will you have to work this Saturday?” she asked, still afraid
to talk about the job.
“Hope not. Are you free?”
She remembered now, she was not. “I’m free Friday,” she said
resignedly. “Saturday’s a late day.”
Richard smiled. “It’s a conspiracy.” He took her hands and
drew her arms around his waist, his restless prowling of the room
at an end. “Maybe Sunday? The family asked if you could come
out for dinner, but we don’t have to stay long. I could borrow a
truck and we could drive somewhere in the afternoon.”
“All right.” She liked that and so did Richard, sitting up in
front of the big empty gas-tank, and driving anywhere, as free as
if they rode a butterfly. She took her arms from around Richard.
It made her feel self-conscious and foolish, as if she stood
embracing the stem of a tree, to have her arms around Richard. “I
did buy a steak for tonight, but they stole it at the store.”
“Stole it? From where?”
“Off the shelf where we keep our handbags. The people they
hire for Christmas don’t get any regular lockers.” She smiled at it
now, but this afternoon she had almost wept. Wolves, she had
thought, a pack of wolves, stealing a bloody bag of meat just
because it was food, a free meal. She had asked all the salesgirls if
they had seen it, and they had all denied it. Bringing meat into
the store wasn’t allowed, Mrs. Hendrickson had said indignantly.
But what was one to do, if all the meat stores closed at six
o’clock?
Richard lay back on the studio couch. His mouth was thin
and its line uneven, half of it downward slanting, giving an
ambiguity to his expression, a look sometimes of humor,
sometimes of bitterness, a contradiction that his rather blank and
frank blue eyes did nothing to clarify. He said slowly and
mockingly, “Did you go down to the lost and found? Lost, one
pound of beefsteak. Answers to the name Meatball.”
Therese smiled, looking over the shelves in her kitchenette.
“Do you think you’re joking? Mrs. Hendrickson did tell me to go
down to the lost and found.”
Richard gave a hooting laugh and stood up.
“There’s a can of corn here and I’ve got lettuce for a salad.
And there’s bread and butter. Shall I go get some frozen pork
chops?”
Richard reached a long arm over her shoulder and took the
square of pumpernickel bread from the shelf. “You call that
bread? It’s fungus. Look at it, it’s blue as a mandrill’s behind.
Why don’t you eat bread once you buy it?”
“I use that to see in the dark with. But since you don’t like
it—” She took it from him and dropped it into the garbage bag.
“That wasn’t the bread I meant anyway.”
“Show me the bread you meant.”

The doorbell shrieked right beside the refrigerator, and she
jumped for the button.
“That’s them,” Richard said.
There were two young men. Richard introduced them as Phil
McElroy and his brother, Dannie. Phil was not at all what
Therese had expected. He did not look intense or serious, or even
particularly intelligent. And he scarcely glanced at her when they
were introduced.
Dannie stood with his coat over his arm until Therese took it
from him. She could not find an extra hanger for Phil’s coat, and
Phil took it back and tossed it on to a chair, half on the floor. It
was an old dirty polo coat. Therese served the beer and cheese and
crackers, listening all the while for Phil and Richard’s conversation
to turn to the job. But they were talking about things that had
happened since they had seen each other last in Kingston, New
York. Richard had worked for two weeks last summer on some
murals in a roadhouse there, where Phil had had a job as a waiter.
“Are you in the theater, too?” she asked Dannie.
“No, I’m not,” Dannie said. He seemed shy, or perhaps bored
and impatient to leave. He was older than Phil and a little more
heavily built. His dark brown eyes moved thoughtfully from
object to object in the room.
“They haven’t got anything yet but a director and three
actors,” Phil said to Richard, leaning back on the couch. “A fellow
I worked with in Philly once is directing. Raymond Cortes. If I
recommend you, it’s a cinch you’ll get in,” he said with a glance at
Therese. “He promised me the part of the second brother in the
play. It’s called Small Rain.”
“A comedy?” Therese asked.
“Comedy. Three acts. Have you done any sets so far by
yourself?”
“How many sets will it take?” Richard asked, just as she was
about to answer.
“Two at the most, and they’ll probably get by on one. Georgia
Halloran has the lead. Did you happen to see that Sartre thing
they did in the fall down there? She was in that.”
“Georgia?” Richard smiled. “Whatever happened with her and
Rudy?”
Disappointedly, Therese heard their conversation settling
down on Georgia and Rudy and other people she didn’t know.
Georgia might have been one of the girls Richard had had an
affair with, Therese supposed. He had once mentioned about five.
She couldn’t remember any of their names except Celia.
“Is this one of your sets?” Dannie asked her, looking at the
cardboard model that hung on the wall, and when she nodded he
got up to see it.
And now Richard and Phil were talking about a man who
owed Richard money from somewhere. Phil said he had seen the
man last night in the San Remo bar. Phil’s elongated face and his
clipped hair was like an El Greco, Therese thought, yet the same
features in his brother looked like an American Indian. And the
way Phil talked completely destroyed the illusion of El Greco. He
talked like any of the people one saw in Village bars, young
people who were supposed to be writers or actors, and who
usually did nothing.
“It’s very attractive,” Dannie said, peering behind one of the
little suspended figures.
“It’s a model for Petrushka. The fair scene,” she said,
wondering if he would know the ballet. He might be a lawyer, she
thought, or even a doctor. There were yellowish stains on his
fingers, not the stains of cigarettes.
Richard said something about being hungry, and Phil said he
was starving, but neither of them ate any of the cheese that was in
front of them.
“We’re due in half an hour, Phil,” Dannie repeated.
Then, a moment later, they were all standing up, putting on
their coats.
“Let’s eat out somewhere, Terry,” Richard said. “How about
the Czech place up on Second?”
“All right,” she said, trying to sound agreeable. This was the
end of it, she supposed, and nothing was definite. She had an
impulse to ask Phil a crucial question, but she didn’t.
And on the street, they began to walk downtown instead of
up. Richard walked with Phil, and only glanced back once or
twice at her, as if to see if she were still there. Dannie held her
arm at the curbs, and across the patches of dirty slippery stuff,
neither snow nor ice, that were the remains of a snowfall three
weeks ago.
“Are you a doctor?” she asked Dannie.
“Physicist,” Dannie replied. “I’m taking graduate courses at
N.Y.U. now.” He smiled at her, but the conversation stopped
there for a while.
Then he said, “That’s a long way from stage designing, isn’t
it.”
She nodded. “Quite a long way.” She started to ask him if he
intended to do any work pertaining to the atom bomb, but she
didn’t, because what would it matter if he did or didn’t? “Do you
know where we’re going?” she asked.
He smiled broadly, showing square white teeth. “Yes. To the
subway. But Phil wants a bite somewhere first.”
They were walking down Third Avenue. And Richard was
talking to Phil about their going to Europe next summer.

Chapter Three
Roberta Walls, the youngest D.S. in the toy department, paused
just long enough in her midmorning flurry to whisper to Therese,
“If we don’t sell this twenty-four ninety-five suitcase today, it’ll be
marked down Monday and the department’ll take a two-dollar
loss!” Roberta nodded at the brown pasteboard suitcase on the
counter, thrust her load of gray boxes into Miss Martucci’s hands,
and hurried on.
Down the long aisle, Therese watched the salesgirls make way
for Roberta.
Roberta flew up and down counters and from one corner of
the floor to the other, from nine in the morning until six at night.
Therese had heard that Roberta was trying for another
promotion. She wore red harlequin glasses, and unlike the other
girls, always pushed the sleeves of her green smock up above her
elbows. Therese saw her flit across an aisle and stop Mrs.
Hendrickson with an excited message delivered with gestures.
Mrs. Hendrickson nodded agreement, Roberta touched her
shoulder familiarly, and Therese felt a small start of jealousy.
Jealousy, though she didn’t care in the least for Mrs.
Hendrickson, even disliked her.
“Do you have a doll made of cloth that cries?”
Therese didn’t know of such a doll in stock, but the woman
was positive Frankenberg’s had it, because she had seen it
advertised. Therese pulled out another box, from the last spot it
might possibly be, and it wasn’t.
“Wotcha lookin’ fuh?” Miss Santini asked her. Miss Santini
had a cold.
“A doll made of cloth that cries,” Therese said. Miss Santini
had been especially courteous to her lately. Therese remembered
the stolen meat.
But now Miss Santini only lifted her eyebrows, stuck out her
bright red underlip with a shrug, and went on.
“Made of cloth? With pigtails?” Miss Martucci, a lean,
straggly-haired Italian girl with a long nose like a wolf’s, looked at
Therese. “Don’t let Roberta hear you,” Miss Martucci said with a
glance around her. “Don’t let anybody hear you, but those dolls
are in the basement.”
“Oh.” The upstairs toy department was at war with the
basement toy department. The tactics were to force the customer
into buying on the seventh floor, where everything was more
expensive. Therese told the woman the dolls were in the
basement.
“Try and sell this today,” Miss Davis said to her as she sidled
past, slapping the battered imitation alligator suitcase with her
red-nailed hand.
Therese nodded.
“Do you have any stiff-legged dolls? One that stands up?”
Therese looked at the middle-aged woman with the crutches
that thrust her shoulders high. Her face was different from all the
other faces across the counter, gentle, with a certain cognizance in
the eyes as if they actually saw what they looked at.
“That’s a little bigger than I wanted,” the woman said when
Therese showed her a doll. “I’m sorry. Do you have a smaller
one?”
“I think so.” Therese went farther down the aisle, and was
aware that the woman followed her on the crutches, circling the
press of people at the counter, so as to save Therese walking back
with the doll. Suddenly Therese wanted to take infinite pains,
wanted to find exactly the doll the woman was looking for. But
the next doll wasn’t quite right, either.
The doll didn’t have real hair. Therese tried in another place
and found the same doll with real hair. It even cried when it bent
over. It was exactly what the woman wanted. Therese laid the doll
down carefully in fresh tissue in a new box.
“That’s just perfect,” the woman repeated. “I’m sending this to
a friend in Australia who’s a nurse. She graduated from nursing
school with me, so I made a little uniform like ours to dress a doll
in. Thank you so much. And I wish you a merry Christmas!”
“Merry Christmas to you!” Therese said, smiling. It was the
first merry Christmas she had heard from a customer.
“Have you had your relief yet, Miss Belivet?” Mrs.
Hendrickson asked her, as sharply as if she reproached her.
Therese hadn’t had it. She got her pocketbook and the novel
she was reading from the shelf under the wrapping counter. The
novel was Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which
Richard was anxious for her to read. How anyone could have read
Gertrude Stein without reading any Joyce, Richard said, he didn’t
know. She felt a bit inferior when Richard talked with her about
books. She had browsed all over the bookshelves at school, but
the library assembled by the Order of St. Margaret had been far
from catholic, she realized now, though it had included such
unexpected writers as Gertrude Stein.
The hall to the employees’ rest rooms was blocked by big
shipping carts piled high with boxes. Therese waited to get
through.
“Pixie!” one of the shipping-cart boys shouted to her.
Therese smiled a little because it was silly. Even down in the
cloakroom in the basement, they yelled “Pixie!” at her morning
and night.
“Pixie, waiting for me?” the raw-edged voice roared again,
over the crash and bump of the stock carts.
She got through, and dodged a shipping cart that hurtled
toward her with a clerk aboard.
“No smoking here!” shouted a man’s voice, the very growly
voice of an executive, and the girls ahead of Therese who had
lighted cigarettes blew their smoke in the air and said loudly in
chorus just before they reached the refuge of the women’s room,
“Who does he think he is, Mr. Frankenberg?”
“Yoo-hoo! Pixie!”
“Ah’m juss bahdin mah tahm, Pixie!”
A shipping cart skidded in front of her, and she struck her leg
against its metal corner. She went on without looking down at
her leg, though pain began to blossom there, like a slow
explosion. She went on into the different chaos of women’s
voices, women’s figures, and the smell of disinfectant. Blood was
running to her shoe, and her stocking was torn in a jagged hole.
She pushed some skin back into place, and feeling sickened,
leaned against the wall and held to a water pipe. She stayed there
a few seconds, listening to the confusion of voices among the girls
at the mirror. Then she wet toilet paper and daubed until the red
was gone from her stocking, but the red kept coming.
“It’s all right, thanks,” she said to a girl who bent over her for
a moment, and the girl went away.
Finally, there was nothing to do but buy a sanitary napkin
from the slot machine. She used a little of the cotton from inside
it, and tied it on her leg with the gauze. And then it was time to
go back to the counter.

Their eyes met at the same instant, Therese glancing up from
a box she was opening, and the woman just turning her head so
she looked directly at Therese. She was tall and fair, her long
figure graceful in the loose fur coat that she held open with a
hand on her waist. Her eyes were gray, colorless, yet dominant as
light or fire, and caught by them, Therese could not look away.
She heard the customer in front of her repeat a question, and
Therese stood there, mute. The woman was looking at Therese,
too, with a preoccupied expression as if half her mind were on
whatever it was she meant to buy here, and though there were a
number of salesgirls between them, Therese felt sure the woman
would come to her.
Then Therese saw her walk slowly toward the counter, heard
her heart stumble to catch up with the moment it had let pass,
and felt her face grow hot as the woman came nearer and nearer.
“May I see one of those valises?” the woman asked, and leaned
on the counter, looking down through the glass top.
The damaged valise lay only a yard away. Therese turned
around and got a box from the bottom of a stack, a box that had
never been opened. When she stood up, the woman was looking
at her with the calm gray eyes that Therese could neither quite
face nor look away from.
“That’s the one I like, but I don’t suppose I can have it, can I?”
she said, nodding toward the brown valise in the show window
behind Therese.
Her eyebrows were blonde, curving around the bend of her
forehead. Her mouth was as wise as her eyes, Therese thought,
and her voice was like her coat, rich and supple, and somehow full
of secrets.
“Yes,” Therese said.
Therese went back to the stockroom for the key. The key
hung just inside the door on a nail, and no one was allowed to
touch it but Mrs. Hendrickson.
Miss Davis saw her and gasped, but Therese said, “I need it,”
and went out.
She opened the show window and took the suitcase down and
laid it on the counter.
“You’re giving me the one on display?” She smiled as if she
understood. She said casually, leaning both forearms on the
counter, studying the contents of the valise, “They’ll have a fit,
won’t they?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Therese said.
“All right. I’d like this. That’s C.O.D. And what about
clothes? Do these come with it?”
There were cellophane-wrapped clothes in the lid of the
suitcase, with a price tag on them. Therese said, “No, they’re
separate. If you want doll clothes—these aren’t as good as the
clothes in the dolls’ clothing department across the aisle.”
“Oh! Will this get to New Jersey before Christmas?”
“Yes, it’ll arrive Monday.” If it didn’t, Therese thought, she
would deliver it herself.
“Mrs. H.F. Aird,” the woman’s soft, distinct voice said, and
Therese began to print it on the green C.O.D. slip. The name,
the address, the town appeared beneath the pencil point like a
secret Therese would never forget, like something stamping itself
in her memory forever.
“You won’t make any mistakes, will you?” the woman’s voice
asked.
Therese noticed the woman’s perfume for the first time, and
instead of replying, could only shake her head. She looked down
at the slip to which she was laboriously adding the necessary
figures, and wished with all her power to wish anything, that the
woman would simply continue her last words and say, “Are you
really so glad to have met me? Then why can’t we see each other
again? Why can’t we even have lunch together today?” Her voice
was so casual and she might have said it so easily. But nothing
came after the “will you?” Nothing to relieve the shame of having
been recognized as a new salesgirl, hired for the Christmas rush,
inexperienced and liable to make mistakes. Therese slid the book
toward her for her signature.
Then the woman picked up her gloves from the counter, and
turned, and slowly went away, and Therese watched the distance
widen and widen. Her ankles below the fur of the coat were pale
and thin. She wore plain black suede shoes with high heels.
“That’s a C.O.D. order?”
Therese looked into Mrs. Hendrickson’s ugly, meaningless
face. “Yes, Mrs. Hendrickson.”
“Don’t you know you’re supposed to give the customer the
strip at the top? How do you expect them to claim the purchase
when it comes? Where’s the customer? Can you catch her?”
“Yes.” She was only ten feet away, across the aisle at the dolls’
clothing counter. And with the green slip in her hand, she
hesitated a moment, then carried it around the counter, forcing
herself to advance, because she was suddenly abashed by her
appearance, the old blue skirt, the cotton blouse—whoever
assigned the green smocks had missed her—and the humiliating
flat shoes. And the horrible bandage through which the blood was
probably showing again.
“I’m supposed to give you this,” she said, laying the miserable
little scrap beside the hand on the edge of the counter, and
turning away.
Behind the counter again, Therese faced the stock boxes,
sliding them thoughtfully out and back, as if she were looking for
something. Therese waited until the woman must have finished at
the counter and gone away.
She was conscious of the moments passing like irrevocable
time, irrevocable happiness, for in these last seconds, she might
turn and see the face she would never see again. She was
conscious, too, dimly now and with a different horror, of the old,
unceasing voices of customers at the counter calling for
assistance, calling to her, and of the low, humming rrrrr of the
little train, part of the storm that was closing in and separating
her from the woman.

But when she turned finally, she looked directly into the gray
eyes again. The woman was walking toward her, and as if time
had turned back, she leaned on the counter again and gestured to
a doll and asked to see it.
Therese got the doll and dropped it with a clatter on the glass
counter, and the woman glanced at her.
“Sounds unbreakable,” the woman said.
Therese smiled.
“Yes, I’ll get this, too,” she said in the quiet slow voice that
made a pool of silence in the tumult around them. She gave her
name and address again, and Therese took it slowly from her lips,
as if she did not already know it by heart. “That really will arrive
before Christmas?”
“It’ll come Monday at the latest. That’s two days before
Christmas.”
“Good. I don’t mean to make you nervous.”
Therese tightened the knot in the string she had put around
the doll box, and the knot mysteriously came open. “No,” she
said. In an embarrassment so profound there was nothing left to
defend, she got the knot tied under the woman’s eyes.
“It’s a rotten job, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” Therese folded the C.O.D. slips around the white
string, and fastened them with a pin.
“So forgive me for complaining.”
Therese glanced at her, and the sensation returned that she
knew her from somewhere, that the woman was about to reveal
herself, and they would both laugh then, and understand. “You’re
not complaining. But I know it’ll get there.” Therese looked
across the aisle, where the woman had stood before, and saw the
tiny slip of green paper still on the counter.
“You really are supposed to keep that C.O.D. slip.”
Her eyes changed with her smile now, brightened with a gray,
colorless fire that Therese almost knew, almost could place. “I’ve
gotten things before without them. I always lose them.” She bent
to sign the second C.O.D. slip.
Therese watched her go away with a step as slow as when she
had come, saw her look at another counter as she passed it, and
slap her black gloves across her palm twice, three times. Then she
disappeared into an elevator.
And Therese turned to the next customer. She worked with
an indefatigable patience, but her figures on the sales slips bore
faint tails where the pencil jerked convulsively. She went to Mr.
Logan’s office, which seemed to take hours, but when she looked
at the clock, only fifteen minutes had passed, and now it was time
to wash up for lunch. She stood stiffly in front of the rotating
towel, drying her hands, feeling unattached to anything or
anyone, isolated. Mr. Logan had asked her if she wanted to stay
on after Christmas. She could have a job downstairs in the
cosmetic department. Therese had said no.
In the middle of the afternoon, she went down to the first
floor and bought a card in the greeting-card department. It was
not a very interesting card, but at least it was simple, in plain blue
and gold. She stood with the pen poised over the card, thinking
of what she might have written—“You are magnificent” or even
“I love you”—finally writing quickly the excruciatingly dull and
impersonal: “Special salutations from Frankenberg’s.” She added
her number 645-A in lieu of a signature. Then she went down to
the post office in the basement, hesitated at the letter drop, losing
her nerve suddenly at the sight of her hand holding the letter half
in the slot. What would happen? She was going to leave the store
in a few days, anyway. What would Mrs. H.F. Aird care? The
blonde eyebrows would perhaps lift a little, she would look at the
card a moment, then forget it. Therese dropped it.

On the way home, an idea came to her for a stage set, a house
interior with more depth than breadth, with a kind of vortex
down the center, from which rooms would go off on either side.
She wanted to begin the cardboard model that night, but at last
she only elaborated on her pencil sketch of it. She wanted to see
someone—not Richard, not Jack or Alice Kelly downstairs,
maybe Stella, Stella Overton, the stage designer she had met
during her first weeks in New York. Therese had not seen her, she
realized, since she had come to the cocktail party Therese had
given before she left her other apartment. Stella was one of those
people who didn’t know where she lived now. Therese was on her
way down to the telephone in the hall, when she heard the short
quick rings of her doorbell that meant there was a call for her.
“Thank you,” Therese called down to Mrs. Osborne.
It was Richard’s usual call around nine o’clock. Richard
wanted to know if she felt like seeing a movie tomorrow night. It
was the movie at the Sutton they still hadn’t seen. Therese said
she wasn’t doing anything, but she wanted to finish a pillow cover.
Alice Kelly had said she could come down and use her sewing
machine tomorrow night. And besides, she had to wash her hair.
“Wash it tonight and see me tomorrow night,” Richard said.
“It’s too late. I can’t sleep if my head’s wet.”
“I’ll wash it tomorrow night. We won’t use the tub, just a
couple of buckets.”
She smiled. “I think we’d better not.” She had fallen into the
tub the time Richard had washed her hair. Richard had been
imitating the tub drain with writhings and gluggings, and she had
laughed so hard, her feet slipped on the floor.
“Well, what about that art show Saturday? It’s open Saturday
afternoon.”
“But Saturday’s the day I have to work to nine. I can’t get
away till nine-thirty.”
“Oh. Well, I’ll stay around school and meet you on the corner
about nine-thirty. Forty-fourth and Fifth. All right?”
“All right.”
“Anything new today?”
“No. With you?”
“No. I’m going to see about boat reservations tomorrow. I’ll
call you tomorrow night.”
Therese did not telephone Stella at all.
The next day was Friday, the last Friday before Christmas,
and the busiest day Therese had known since she had been
working at Frankenberg’s, though everyone said tomorrow would
be worse. People were pressed alarmingly hard against the glass
counters. Customers she started to wait on got swept away and
lost in the gluey current that filled the aisle. It was impossible to
imagine any more people crowding onto the floor, but the
elevators kept emptying people out.
“I don’t see why they don’t close the doors downstairs!”
Therese remarked to Miss Martucci, when they were both
stooping by a stock shelf.
“What?” Miss Martucci answered, unable to hear.
“Miss Belivet!” Somebody yelled, and a whistle blew.
It was Mrs. Hendrickson. She had been using a whistle to get
attention today. Therese made her way toward her past salesgirls
and through empty boxes on the floor.
“You’re wanted on the telephone,” Mrs. Hendrickson told
her, pointing to the telephone by the wrapping table.
Therese made a helpless gesture that Mrs. Hendrickson had
no time to see.
It was impossible to hear anything on a telephone now. And
she knew it was probably Richard being funny. He had called her
once before.
“Hello?” she said.
“Hello, is this coworker six-forty-five A, Therese Belivet?” the
operator’s voice said over clickings and buzzings. “Go ahead.”
“Hello?” she repeated, and barely heard an answer. She
dragged the telephone off the table and into the stockroom a few
feet away. The wire did not quite reach, and she had to stoop on
the floor. “Hello?”
“Hello,” the voice said. “Well—I wanted to thank you for the
Christmas card.”
“Oh. Oh, you’re—”
“This is Mrs. Aird,” she said. “Are you the one who sent it?
Or not.”
“Yes,” Therese said, rigid with guilt suddenly, as if she had
been caught in a crime. She closed her eyes and wrung the
telephone, seeing the intelligent, smiling eyes again as she had
seen them yesterday. “I’m very sorry if it annoyed you,” Therese
said mechanically, in the voice with which she spoke to
customers.
The woman laughed. “This is very funny,” she said casually,
and Therese caught the same easy slur in her voice that she had
heard yesterday, loved yesterday, and she smiled herself.
“Is it? Why?”
“You must be the girl in the toy department.”
“Yes.”
“It was extremely nice of you to send me the card,” the
woman said politely.
Then Therese understood. She had thought it was from a
man, some other clerk who had waited on her. “It was very nice
waiting on you,” Therese said.
“Was it? Why?” She might have been mocking Therese.
“Well—since it’s Christmas, why don’t we meet for a cup of
coffee, at least? Or a drink.”
Therese flinched as the door burst open and a girl came into
the room, stood right in front of her. “Yes—I’d like that.”
“When?” the woman asked. “I’m coming in to New York
tomorrow in the morning. Why don’t we make it for lunch? Do
you have any time tomorrow?”
“Of course. I have an hour, from twelve to one,” Therese said,
staring at the girl’s feet in front of her in splayed flat moccasins,
the black of her heavy ankles and calves in lisle stockings, shifting
like an elephant’s legs.
“Shall I meet you downstairs at the Thirty-fourth Street
entrance at about twelve?”
“All right. I—” Therese remembered now she went to work at
one sharp tomorrow. She had the morning off. She put her arm
up to ward off the avalanche of boxes the girl in front of her had
pulled down from the shelf. The girl herself teetered back onto
her. “Hello?” she shouted over the noise of tumbling boxes.
“I’m sow—ry,” Mrs. Zabriskie said irritatedly, plowing out the
door again.
“Hello?” Therese repeated.
The line was dead.

Therese said, “I’m sure you thought it was a man who sent
you the Christmas card, didn’t you?”
“I did,” she said through a smile. “I thought it just might be a
man in the ski department who’d sent it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, I’m delighted.” She leaned back in the booth. “I doubt
very much if I’d have gone to lunch with him. No, I’m delighted.”
The dusky and faintly sweet smell of her perfume came to
Therese again, a smell suggestive of dark-green silk, that was hers
alone, like the smell of a special flower. Therese leaned closer
toward it, looking down at her glass. She wanted to thrust the
table aside and spring into her arms, to bury her nose in the green
and gold scarf that was tied close about her neck. Once the backs
of their hands brushed on the table, and Therese’s skin there felt
separately alive now, and rather burning. Therese could not
understand it, but it was so. Therese glanced at her face that was
somewhat turned away, and again she knew that instant of half recognition.
And knew, too, that it was not to be believed. She
had never seen the woman before. If she had, could she have
forgotten? In the silence, Therese felt they both waited for the
other to speak, yet the silence was not an awkward one. Their
plates had arrived. It was creamed spinach with an egg on top,
steamy and buttery-smelling.
“How is it you live alone?” the woman asked, and before
Therese knew it, she had told the woman her life story.
But not in tedious detail. In six sentences, as if it all mattered
less to her than a story she had read somewhere. And what did the
facts matter after all, whether her mother was French or English
or Hungarian, or if her father had been an Irish painter, or a
Czechoslovakian lawyer, whether he had been successful or not,
or whether her mother had presented her to the Order of St.
Margaret as a troublesome, bawling infant, or as a troublesome,
melancholy eight-year-old? Or whether she had been happy
there? Because she was happy now, starting today. She had no
need of parents or background.
“What could be duller than past history!” Therese said,
smiling.
“Maybe futures that won’t have any history.”
Therese did not ponder it. It was right. She was still smiling,
as if she had just learned how to smile and did not know how to
stop. The woman smiled with her, amusedly, and perhaps she was
laughing at her, Therese thought.
“What kind of a name is Belivet?” she asked.
“It’s Czech. It’s changed,” Therese explained awkwardly.
“Originally—”
“It’s very original.”
“What’s your name?” Therese asked. “Your first name?”
“My name? Carol. Please don’t ever call me Carole.”
“Please don’t ever call me Thereese,” Therese said,
pronouncing the “th.”
“How do you like it pronounced? Therese?”
“Yes. The way you do,” she answered. Carol pronounced her
name the French way, Terez. She was used to a dozen variations,
and sometimes she herself pronounced it differently. She liked
the way Carol pronounced it, and she liked her lips saying it. An
indefinite longing, that she had been only vaguely conscious of at
times before, became now a recognizable wish. It was so absurd,
so embarrassing a desire, that Therese thrust it from her mind.
“What do you do on Sundays?” Carol asked.
“I don’t always know. Nothing in particular. What do you
do?”
“Nothing—lately. If you’d like to visit me sometime, you’re
welcome to. At least there’s some country around where I live.
Would you like to come out this Sunday?” The gray eyes
regarded her directly now, and for the first time, Therese faced
them. There was a measure of humor in them, Therese saw. And
what else? Curiosity and a challenge, too.
“Yes,” Therese said.
“What a strange girl you are.”
“Why?”
“Flung out of space,” Carol said.

They caught the uptown bus at Third Avenue, then walked east
to Therese’s house. Therese did not want to invite Richard
upstairs, but she did anyway.
“No, thanks, I’ll shove on,” Richard said. He put a foot on the
first step. “You’re in a funny mood tonight. You’re miles away.”
“No, I’m not,” she said, feeling inarticulate and resenting it.
“You are now. I can tell. After all, don’t you—”
“What,” she prompted.
“We aren’t getting very far, are we?” he said, suddenly earnest.
“If you don’t even want to spend Sundays with me, how’re we
going to spend months together in Europe?”
“Well—if you want to call it all off, Richard.”
“Terry, I love you.” He brushed his palm over his hair,
exasperatedly. “Of course, I don’t want to call it all off, but—” He
broke off again.
She knew what he was about to say, that she gave him
practically nothing in the way of affection, but he wouldn’t say it,
because he knew very well that she wasn’t in love with him, so
why did he really expect her affection? Yet the simple fact that
she wasn’t in love with him made Therese feel guilty, guilty about
accepting anything from him, a birthday present, or an invitation
to dinner at his family’s, or even his time.
Therese pressed her fingertips hard on the stone banister. “All
right—I know. I’m not in love with you,” she said.
“That’s not what I mean, Terry.”
“If you ever want to call the whole thing off—I mean, stop
seeing me at all, then do it.” It was not the first time she had said
that, either.
“Terry, you know I’d rather be with you than anyone else in
the world. That’s the hell of it.”
“Well, if it’s hell—”
“Do you love me at all, Terry? How do you love me?”
Let me count the ways, she thought. “I don’t love you, but I
like you. I felt tonight, a few minutes ago,” she said, hammering
the words out however they sounded, because they were true,
“that I felt closer to you than I ever have, in fact.”
Richard looked at her, a little incredulously. “Do you?” He
started slowly up the steps, smiling, and stopped just below her.
“Then—why not let me stay with you tonight, Terry? Just let’s
try, will you?”
She had known from his first step toward her that he was
going to ask her that. Now she felt miserable and ashamed, sorry
for herself and for him, because it was so impossible, and so
embarrassing because she didn’t want it. There was always that
tremendous block of not even wanting to try it, which reduced it
all to a kind of wretched embarrassment and nothing more, each
time he asked her. She remembered the first night she had let
him stay, and she writhed again inwardly. It had been anything
but pleasant, and she had asked right in the middle of it, “Is this
right?”
How could it be right and so unpleasant, she had thought.
And Richard had laughed, long and loud and with a heartiness
that had made her angry. And the second time had been even
worse, probably because Richard had thought all the difficulties
had been gotten over. It was painful enough to make her weep,
and Richard had been very apologetic and had said she made him
feel like a brute. And then she had protested that he wasn’t. She
knew very well that he wasn’t, that he was angelic compared to
what Angelo Rossi would have been, for instance, if she had slept
with him the night he stood here on the same steps, asking the
same question.
“Terry, darling—”
“No,” Therese said, finding her voice at last. “I just can’t
tonight, and I can’t go to Europe with you either,” she finished
with an abject and hopeless frankness.
Richard’s lips parted in a stunned way. Therese could not bear
to look at the frown above them. “Why not?”
“Because. Because I can’t,” she said, every word agony.
“Because I don’t want to sleep with you.”
“Oh, Terry!” Richard laughed. “I’m sorry I asked you. Forget
about it, honey, will you? And in Europe, too?”
Therese looked away, noticed Orion again, tipped at a slightly
different angle, and looked back at Richard. But I can’t, she
thought. I’ve got to think about it sometime, because you think
about it. It seemed to her that she spoke the words and that they
were solid as blocks of wood in the air between them, even
though she heard nothing. She had said the words before to him,
in her room upstairs, once in Prospect Park when she was winding
a kite string. But he wouldn’t consider them, and what could she
do now, repeat them? “Do you want to come up for a while
anyway?” she asked, tortured by herself, by a shame she could not
really account for.
“No,” Richard said with a soft laugh that shamed her all the
more for its tolerance and its understanding. “No, I’ll go on.
Good night, honey. I love you, Terry.” And with a last look at
her, he went.