by John Updike
The salesgirl is patient, with something sultry about her dispassion. Some of the silky weightiness of precious metals has rubbed off onto her. “You know, the old-fashioned cartwheel” -she makes an illustrative circle with daggerlike forefinger and thumb - “the U.S. Mint put out until fifteen years ago. Each one contains point seventy-five troy ounces of silver. Silver this noon was going for” - she consults a slip on her desk, next to the vanilla push-dial telephone - “$23.55 a troy ounce, which would make each coin, irrespective of collector value, worth” - the calculator again “$17.66. But there’s some wear on some of the coins, so were you and your wife to decide to buy now I could give you a quote under that.”
“These are old coins?” Janice asks, that Ma Springer edge in her voice.
“Some are, some aren’t,” the girl answers coolly. “We buy them by weight from collectors who have sifted through them for collector value.”
This isn’t what Harry had pictured, but Webb had sworn that silver was where the smart money was. He asks, “How many could we buy with the gold money?”
A flurry of computation follows; $14,662.50 would convert to the magical number of 888. Eight hundred eighty-eight silver dollars priced at $16.50 each, including commission and Pennsylvania sales tax. To Rabbit eight hundred eighty-eight seems like a lot of anything, even matchsticks. He looks at Janice. “Sweetie. Whaddeya think?”
“Harry, I don’t know what to think. It’s your investment.”
“But it’s our money.”
“You don’t want to just keep the gold.”
“Webb says silver could double, if they don’t return the hostages.”
Janice turns to the girl. “I was just wondering, if we found a house we wanted to put a down payment on, how liquid is this silver?”
The blonde speaks to Janice with new respect, at a softer pitch, woman to woman. “It’s very liquid. Much more so than collectibles or land. Fiscal Alternatives guarantees to buy back whatever it sells. These coins today, if you brought them in, we’d pay” she consults the papers on her desk again -“thirteen fifty each.”
“So we’d be out three dollars times eight hundred eighty-eight,” Harry says. His palms have started to sweat, maybe it’s the overcoat. Make a little profit in this world and right away the world starts scheming to take it from you. He wishes he had the gold back. It was so pretty, that little delicate deer on the reverse side.
“Oh, but the way silver’s been going,” the girl says, pausing to scratch at some fleck of imperfection adjacent to the corner of her lips, “you could make that up in a week. I think you’re doing the smart thing.”
“Yeah, but as you say, suppose the Iran thing gets settled,” Harry worries. “Won’t the whole bubble burst?”
“Precious metals aren’t a bubble. Precious metals are the ultimate security. I myself think what’s brought the Arab money into gold was not so much Iran as the occupation of the Great Mosque. When the Saudis are in trouble, then it’s really a new ballgame.”
A new ballgame, hey. “O.K.,” he says, “let’s do it. We’ll buy the silver.”
Platinum-hair seems a bit surprised, for all of her smooth sales talk, and there is a long hassle over the phone locating so many coins. At last some boy she calls Lyle brings in a gray cloth sack like you would carry some leftover mail in; he is swaying with the effort and grunts right out, lifting the sack up onto her desk, but then he has a slender build, with something faggy about him, maybe his short haircut. Funny how that’s swung completely around: the squares let their hair grow now and the fags and punks are the ones with butches. Harry wonders what they’re doing in the Marines, probably down to their shoulders. This Lyle goes off, after giving Harry a suspicious squint like he’s bought not only the massage but the black-leather-and-whip trick too.
At first Harry and Janice think that only the girl with the platinum hair and all but perfect skin may touch the coins. She pushes her papers to one side of her desk and struggles to lift a corner of the bag. Dollars spill out. “Damn.” She sucks at a fingernail. “You can help count if you would.” They take off their coats and dig in, counting into stacks of ten. Silver is all over the desk, hundreds of Miss Libertys, some thinned by wear, some as chunky as if virgin from the mint. Handling such a palpable luxury of profiles and slogans and eagles makes Janice titter, and Harry knows what she means: playing in the mud. The muchness. The stacks proliferate and are arranged in ranks of ten times ten. The bag at last yields its final coin, with a smidgeon of lint the girl flicks away. Unsmiling, she waves her red-tipped hand across her stacks. “I have three hundred and ninety.”
Harry taps his stacks and reports, “Two forty.”
Janice says of hers, “Two hundred fifty-eight.” She beat him. He is proud of her. She can become a teller if he suddenly dies.
The calculator is consulted: 888. “Exactly right,” the girl says, as surprised as they. She performs the paperwork, and gives Harry back two quarters and a ten-dollar pill in change. He wonders if he should hand it back to her, as a tip. The coins fit into three cardboard boxes the size of fat bricks. Harry puts them one on top of another, and when he tries to lift all three Janice and the girl both laugh aloud at the expression on his face.
Y “My God,” he says. “What do they weigh?”
The platinum-headed girl fiddles at her computer. “If you take each one to be a troy ounce at least, it comes to seventy-four pounds. There are only twelve ounces troy measure in a pound.”
He turns to Janice. “You carry one.”
She lifts one and it’s his turn to laugh, at the look on her ,face, her eyelids stretched wide. “I can’t,” she says.
“You must,” he says. “It’s only up to the bank. Come on, I gotta get back to the lot. Whaija play all that tennis for if you don’t have any muscles?”
He is proud of that tennis; he is performing for the blonde girl now, acting the role of eccentric Penn Park nob. She suggests, “Maybe Lyle could walk up with you.”
Rabbit doesn’t want to be seen on the street with that fag. “We can manage.” To Janice he says, “Just imagine you’re pregnant. Come on. Let’s go.” To the girl he says, “She’ll be back for her packages.” He picks up two of the boxes and pushes the door open with his shoulder, forcing Janice to follow. Out in the cold sunlight and shimmering wind of Weiser Street he tries not to grimace, or to return the stares of those who glance wonderingly at the two small boxes clutched so fiercely in his two hands at the level of his fly.
A black man in a blue watch cap, with bloodshot eyes like marbles dropped in orange juice, halts on the pavement and stumbles a step toward Harry. “Hey buddy you wanna hep out a fren’ - ‘ Something about these blacks they really zero in on Rabbit. He pivots to shield the silver with his body, and its swung weight tips him so he has to take a step. In moving off, he doesn’t dare look behind him to see if Janice is following. But standing on the curb next to a bent parking meter he hears her breathing and feels her struggle to his side.
“This coat is so heavy too,” she pants.
“Let’s cross,” he says.
“In the middle of the block?”
“Don’t argue,” he mutters, feeling the puzzled black man at his back. He pushes off the curb, causing a bus halfway down the block to hiss with its brakes. In the middle of the street, where the double white line has wobbled in summer’s soft tar, he waits for Janice to catch up. The girl has given her the mail sack to carry the third box of silver in, but rather than sling it over her shoulder Janice carries it cradled in her left arm like a baby. “How’re you doing?” he asks her.
“I’ll manage. Keep moving, Harry.”
They reach the far curb. The peanut store now not only has porno magazines inside but has put an array of them on a rack outside. Young muscular oiled boys pose singly or in pairs under titles such as DRUMMER and SKIN. A Japanese in a three-piece pinstripe suit and gray bowler hat steps smartly out of the door, folding a New York Times and a Wall Stree
t Journal together under his arm. How did the Japanese ever get to Brewer? As the door eases shut, the old circus smell of warm roasted peanuts drifts out to the cold sidewalk. Harry says to Janice. “We could put all three boxes in the bag and I could lug it over my shoulder. You know, like Santa Claus. Ho ho.”
A small crowd of pocked dark street kids mixed with shaggy rummies in their winter layered look threatens to collect around them as they confer. Harry tightens his grip on his two boxes. Janice hugs her third and says, “Let’s push on this way. The bank’s only a block more.” Her face is flushed and bitten by the cold, her eyes squinting and watering and her mouth a detennined slot.
“A good block and a half,” he corrects.
Past then the Brewer Wallpaper Company with its display rolls stiffening in the dusty windows like shrouds, past Blimline’s Sandwiches and Manderbach Wholesale Office Supplies and a narrow place jammed with flat boxes called Hobby Heaven, past the cigar store with its giant rusting Y-B sign and the ornately iron-barred windows of the old Conrad Weiser Oyster House that now promises Live Entertainment in desperate red letters on its dark doors, across Fourth Street when the light at last turns green, past the long glass-block-inlaid facade of the Acme they say is going out of business at the end of the year, past Hollywood Beauty Supplies and Imperial Floor Coverings and Zenith Auto Parts and Accessories with its sweetish baked smell of fresh tires and window of chrome tailpipes they go, man and wife, as the wind intensifies and the sparkling sidewalk squares grow in size.
The squared-off weight in Harry’s hands has become a hostile thing, burning his palms, knocking against his crotch. Now when he would almost welcome being robbed he feels that the others on this west side of the street are shying from them, as somehow menacing, distorted into struggling shapes by the force-fields of their dense boxes. He keeps having to wait for Janice to catch up, while his own burden, double hers, pulls at his arms. The tinsel wound around the aluminum lampposts vibrates furiously. He is sweating across his back beneath his expensive overcoat and his shirt collar keeps drying to a clammy cold edge. During these waits he stares up Weiser toward the mauve and brown bulk of Mt. Judge; in his eyes as a child God had reposed on the slopes of that mountain, and now he can imagine how through God’s eyes from that vantage he and Janice might look below: two ants trying to make it up the sides of a bathroom basin.
They pass a camera store advertising Agfa film, the Hexerei Boutique with its mannequins flaunting their nippleless boobs through transparent blouses and vests of gold mail, a Rexall’s with pastel vibrators among the suggested Christmas gifts in the windows festooned with cotton and angel hair, the Crépe House with its lunching couples, the locally famous cigar store saved as an act of historical preservation, and a new store called PedalEase specializing in male and female footwear for jogging and tennis and even racquetball and squash, that young couples or pairs of young singles do together these days, to judge from the big cardboard blow-ups in the window. The Dacron-clad girl’s honey-colored hair lifts like air made liquid as she laughingly strokes a ball on easy feet. Next, at last, the first of the four great granite columns of the Brewer Trust looms. Harry leans his aching back against its Roman breadth while waiting for Janice to catch up. If she’s robbed in this gap between them it will cost them a third of $14,652 or nearly $5000 but at this point the risk doesn’t seem so real. Some distance away he sees spray-painted on the back of one of the concrete benches in the mall of trees a slogan SKEETER LIVES. If he could go closer he could be sure that’s what it says. But he cannot move. Janice arrives beside his shoulder. Red-faced, she looks like her mother. “Let’s not stand here,” she pants. Even the circumference of the pillar seems a lengthy distance as she leads him around it and pushes ahead of him through the revolving doors.
Christmas carols are pealing within the great vaulted interior. The high groined ceiling is painted blue here in every season, with evenly spaced stars of gold. When Harry sets his two boxes down on one of the shelves where you write checks, his relieved body seems to rise toward this false sky. The teller, a lady in an orchid pants suit, smiles to be readmitting them to their safe-deposit box so soon. Their box is a four by four - narrower, they discover, than the boxes of silver dollars three rows abreast. Hearts still laboring, their hands still hurting, Harry and Janice are slow to grasp the disparity, once the frosted glass door has sealed them into the cubicle. Harry several times measures the width of one paper lid against the breadth of tin before concluding, “We need a bigger box.” Janice is delegated to go back out into the bank and -request one. Her father had been a good friend of the manager. When she returns, it is with the news that there has been a run lately on safe-deposit boxes, that the best the bank could do was put the Angstroms on a list. The manager that Daddy knew has retired. The present one seemed to Janice very young, though he wasn’t exactly rude.
Harry laughs. “Well we can’t sell ‘em back to Blondie down there, it’d cost us a fortune. Could we dump everything back in the bag and stuff it in?”
Crowded together in the cubicle, he and Janice keep bumping into each other, and he scents rising from her for the first time a doubt that he has led them well in this new inflated world; or perhaps the doubt he scents arises from him. But there can be no turning back. They transfer silver dollars from the boxes to the bag. When the silver clinks loudly, Janice winces and says, “Shh.”
“Why? Who’ll hear?”
“The people out there. The tellers.”
“What do they care?”
“I care,” Janice says. “It’s stifling in here.” She takes off her sheepskin coat and in the absence of a hook to hang it on drops it folded to the floor. He takes off his black overcoat and drops it on top. Sweat of exertion has made her hair springier; her bangs have curled back to reveal that high glossy forehead that is so much her, now and twenty years ago, that he kisses it, tasting salt. He wonders if people have ever screwed in these cubicles and imagines that a vault would be a nice place, one of those primped-up young tellers and a lecherous old mortgage officer, put the time-lock on to dawn and ball away. Janice feeds stacks of coins into the coarse gray pouch furtively, suppressing the clink. “This is so embarrassing,” she says, “suppose one of those ladies comes in,” as if the silver is naked flesh; and not for the first time in twenty-three years he feels a furtive rush of loving her, caught with him as she is in the tight places life affords. He takes one of the silver dollars and slips it down the neck of her linen blouse into her bra. As he foresaw, she squeals at the chill and tries to suppress the squeal. He loves her more, seeing her unbutton her blouse a button and frowningly dig into her bra for the coin; old as he is it still excites him to watch women fiddle with their underwear. Make our own coat hook in here.
After a while she announces, “It simply will not go in.” Stuff and adjust as they will, hardly half of the bagged coins can be made to fit. Their insurance policies and Savings Bonds, Nelson’s birth certificate and the never-discarded mortgage papers for the house in Penn Villas that burned down - all the scraps of paper preserved as evidence of their passage through an economy and a certain legal time - are lifted out and reshufed to no avail. The thick cloth of the bag, the tendency of loose coins to bunch in a clump, the long slender shape of the gray tin box frustrate them as side by side they tug and push, surgeons at a hopeless case. The eight hundred eighty-eight coins keep escaping the mouth of the sack and falling onto the floor and rolling into corners. When they have pressed the absolute maximum into the box, so its tin sides bulge, they are still left with three hundred silver dollars, which Harry distributes among the pockets of his overcoat.
When they emerge from the cubicle, the friendly teller in her orchid outfit offers to take the loaded box off his hands. “Pretty heavy,” he warns her. “Better let me do it.” Her eyebrows arch; she backs off and leads him into the vault. They go through a great door, its terraced edges gleaming, into a space walled with small burnished rectangles and floored in waxy
white. Not a good place to fuck, he was wrong about that. She lets him slide his long box into the empty rectangle. R.I.P. Harry is in a sweat, bent over with effort. He straightens up and apologizes, “Sorry we loaded it up with so much crap.”
“Oh no,” the orchid lady says. “A lot of people nowadays … all this burglary.”
“What happens if the burglars get in here?” he jokes.
This is not funny. “Oh … they can’t.”
Outside the bank, the afternoon has progressed, and shadows from the buildings darken the glitter of tinsel. Janice taps one of his pockets playfully, to hear him jingle. “What are you going to do with all these?”
“Give ‘em away to the poor. That bitch down the street, that’s the last time I buy anything from her.” Cold cakes his face as his sweat dries. Several guys he knows from Rotary come out of the Crépe House looking punchy on lunch and he gives them ‘the high sign, while striding on. God knows what’s happening over on the lot without him, the kid may be accepting roller skates for trade-in.
“You could use the safe at the lot,” Janice suggests. “They could go into one of these.” She hands him one of the empty cardboard boxes.