The Price of Salt

by Highsmith, Patricia

  Therese let a crack of air in at her window. It was quite cold and the heater felt good on her ankles. The clock on the dashboard said quarter to ten, and she thought suddenly of the people working in Frankenberg's, penned in there at a quarter of ten in the morning, this morning and tomorrow morning and the next, the hands of clocks controlling every move they made. But the hands of the clock on the dashboard meant nothing now to her and Carol. They would sleep or not sleep, drive or not drive, whenever it pleased them. She thought of Mrs. Robichek, selling sweaters this minute on the third floor, commencing another year there, her fifth year.

  "Why so silent?" Carol asked. "What's the matter?"

  "Nothing." She did not want to talk. Yet she felt there were thousands of words choking her throat, and perhaps only distance, thousands of miles, could straighten them out. Perhaps it was freedom itself that choked her.

  Somewhere in Pennsylvania they went through a section of pale sunshine, like a leak in the sky, but around noon, it began to rain. Carol cursed, but the sound of the rain was pleasant, drumming irregularly on the windshield and the roof.

  "You know what I forgot?" Carol said. "A raincoat. I'll have to pick one up somewhere."

  And suddenly, Therese remembered she had forgotten the book she was reading. And there was a letter to Carol in it, one sheet that stuck out both ends of the book. Damn. It had been separate from her other books, and that was why she had left it behind, on the table by the bed. She hoped Florence wouldn't decide to look at it. She tried to remember if she had written Carol's name in the letter, and she couldn't. And the check. She had forgotten to tear that up, too.

  "Carol, did you get that check?"

  "That check I gave you?—You said you were going to tear it up."

  "I didn't. It's still under the cloth."

  "Well, it's not important," Carol said.

  When they stopped for gas, Therese tried to buy some stout, which Carol liked sometimes, at a grocery store next to the gas station, but they had only beer. She bought one can, because Carol didn't care for beer. Then they drove into a little road off the highway and stopped, and opened the box of sandwiches Richard's mother had put up. There was also a dill pickle, a mozzarella cheese, and a couple of hard-boiled eggs. Therese had forgotten to ask for an opener, so she couldn't open the beer, but there was coffee in the thermos. She put the beer can on the floor in the back of the car.

  "Caviar. How very, very nice of them," Carol said, looking inside a sandwich. "Do you like caviar?"

  "No. I wish I did."

  "Why?"

  Therese watched Carol take a small bite of the sandwich from which she had removed the top slice of bread, a bite where the most caviar was.

  "Because people always like caviar so much when they do like it," Therese said.

  Carol smiled, and went on nibbling, slowly. "It's an acquired taste.

  Acquired tastes are always more pleasant—and hard to get rid of."

  Therese poured more coffee into the cup they were sharing. She was acquiring a taste for black coffee. "How nervous I was the first time I held this cup. You brought me coffee that day. Remember?"

  "I remember."

  "How'd you happen to put cream in it that day?"

  "I thought you'd like it. Why were you so nervous?"

  Therese glanced at her. "I was so excited about you," she said, lifting the cup. Then she looked at Carol again and saw a sudden stillness, like a shock, in Carol's face. Therese had seen it two or three times before when she had said something like that to Carol about the way she felt, or paid Carol an extravagant compliment. Therese could not tell if she were pleased or displeased. She watched Carol fold the wax paper around the other half of her sandwich.

  There was cake, but Carol didn't want any. It was the brown-colored spicecake that Therese had often had at Richard's house. They put everything back, into the valise that held the cartons of cigarettes and the bottle of whisky, with a painstaking neatness that would have annoyed Therese in anyone but Carol.

  "Did you say Washington was your home state?" Therese asked her.

  "I was born there, and my father's there now. I wrote him I might visit him, if we get out that far."

  "Does he look like you?"

  "Do I look like him, yes—more than like my mother."

  "It's strange to think of you with a family," Therese said.

  "Why?"

  "Because I just think of you as you. Sui generis."

  Carol smiled, her head lifted as she drove. "All right, go ahead."

  "Brothers and sisters?" Therese asked.

  "One sister. I suppose you want to know all about her, too? Her name is Elaine, she has three children and she lives in Virginia. She's older than I am, and I don't know if you'd like her. You'd think she was dull."

  Yes. Therese could imagine her, like a shadow of Carol, with all Carol's features weakened and diluted.

  Late in the afternoon, they stopped at a roadside restaurant that had a miniature Dutch village in the front window. Therese leaned on the rail beside it and looked at it. There was a little river that came out of a faucet at one end, that flowed in an oval stream and turned a windmill.

  Little figures in Dutch costume stood about the village, stood on patches of live grass. She thought of the electric train in Frankenberg's toy department, and the fury that drove it on the oval course that was about the same size as the stream.

  "I never told you about the train in Frankenberg's," Therese remarked to Carol. "Did you notice it when you—"

  "An electric train?" Carol interrupted her.

  Therese had been smiling, but something constricted her heart suddenly.

  It was too complicated to go into, and the conversation stopped there.

  Carol ordered some soup for both of them. They were stiff and cold from the car.

  "I wonder if you'll really enjoy this trip," Carol said. "You so prefer things reflected in a glass, don't you? You have your private conception of everything. Like that windmill. It's practically as good as being in Holland to you. I wonder if you'll even like seeing real mountains and real people."

  Therese felt as crushed as if Carol had accused her of lying. She felt Carol meant, too, that she had a private conception of her, and that Carol resented it. Real people? She thought suddenly of Mrs. Robichek.

  And she had fled her because she was hideous.

  "How do you ever expect to create anything if you get all your experiences second hand?" Carol asked, her voice soft and even, and yet merciless.

  Carol made her feel she had done nothing, was nothing at all, like a wisp of smoke. Carol had lived like a human being, had married, and had a child.

  The old man from behind the counter was coming toward them. He had a limp. He stood by the table next to them and folded his arms. "Ever been to Holland?" he asked pleasantly.

  Carol answered. "No, I haven't. I suppose you've been. Did you make the village in the window?"

  He nodded. "Took me five years to make."

  Therese looked at the man's bony fingers, the lean arms with the purple veins twisting just under the thin skin. She knew better than Carol the work that had gone into the little village, but she could not get a word out.

  The man said to Carol, "Got some fine sausages and hams next door, if you like real Pennsylvania made. We raise our own hogs and they're killed and cured right here."

  They went into the whitewashed box of a store beside the restaurant.

  There was a delicious smell of smoked ham inside it, mingled with the smell of wood smoke and spice.

  "Let's pick something we don't have to cook," Carol said, looking into the refrigerated counter. "Let's have some of this," she said to the young man in the earlapped cap.

  Therese remembered standing in the delicatessen with Mrs. Robichek, her buying the thin slices of salami and liverwurst. A sign on the wall said they shipped anywhere, and she thought of sending Mrs. Robichek one of the big cloth-wrapped sausages, imagined the delight
on Mrs. Robichek's face when she opened the package with her trembling hands and found a sausage. But should she after all, Therese wondered, make a gesture that was probably motivated by pity, or by guilt, or by some perversity in her? Therese frowned, floundering in a sea without direction or gravity, in which she knew only that she could mistrust her own impulses.

  "Therese—"

  Therese turned around, and Carol's beauty struck her like a glimpse of the Winged Victory of Samothrace. Carol asked her if she thought they should buy a whole ham.

  The young man slid all the bundles across the counter, and took Carol's twenty-dollar bill. And Therese thought of Mrs. Robichek tremulously pushing her single dollar bill and a quarter across the counter that evening.

  "See anything else?" Carol asked.

  "I thought I might send something to somebody. A woman who works in the store. She's poor and she once asked me to dinner."

  Carol picked up her change. "What woman?"

  "I don't really want to send her anything." Therese wanted suddenly to leave.

  Carol frowned at her through her cigarette smoke. "Do it."

  "I don't want to. Let's go, Carol." It was like the nightmare again, when she couldn't get away from her.

  "Send it," Carol said. "Close the door and send her something."

  Therese closed the door and chose one of the six-dollar sausages, and wrote on a gift card: "This comes from Pennsylvania. I hope it'll last a few Sunday mornings. With love from Therese Belivet."

  Later, in the car, Carol asked her about Mrs. Robichek, and Therese answered as she always did, succinctly, and with the involuntary and absolute honesty that always depressed her afterward. Mrs. Robichek and the world she lived in was so different from that of Carol, she might have been describing another species of animal life, some ugly beast that lived on another planet. Carol made no comment on the story, only questioned and questioned her as she drove. She made no comment when there was nothing more to ask, but the taut, thoughtful expression with which she had listened stayed on her face even when they began to talk of other things. Therese gripped her thumbs inside her hands. Why did she let Mrs. Robichek haunt her? And now she had spread it into Carol and could never take it back.

  "Please don't mention her again, will you, Carol? Promise me."

  CHAPTER 15

  CAROL WALKED barefoot with little short steps to the shower room in the corner, groaning at the cold. She had red polish on her toenails, and her blue pajamas were too big for her.

  "It's your fault for opening the window so high," Therese said.

  Carol pulled the curtain across, and Therese heard the shower come on with a rush. "Ah, divinely hot!" Carol said. "Better than last night."

  It was a luxurious tourist cabin, with a thick carpet and wood-paneled walls and everything from cellophane-sealed shoe rags to television.

  Therese sat on her bed in her robe, looking at a road map, spanning it with her hand. A span and a half was about a day's driving, theoretically, though they probably would not do it. "We might get all the way across Ohio today," Therese said.

  "Ohio. Noted for rivers, rubber, and certain railroads. On our left the famous Chillicothe drawbridge, where twenty-eight Hurons once massacred a hundred—morons."

  Therese laughed.

  "And where Lewis and Clark once camped," Carol added. "I think I'll wear my slacks today. Want to see if they're in that suitcase? If not, I'll have to get into the car. Not the light ones, the navy-blue gabardines."

  Therese went to Carol's big suitcase at the foot of the bed. It was full of sweaters and underwear and shoes, but no slacks. She saw a nickel plated tube sticking out of a folded sweater. She lifted the sweater out.

  It was heavy. She unwrapped it, and started so she almost dropped it. It was a gun with a white handle.

  "No?" Carol asked.

  "No." Therese wrapped the gun up again and put it back as she had found it.

  "Darling, I forgot my towel. I-think it's on a chair."

  Therese got it and took it to her, and in her nervousness as she put the towel into Carol's outstretched hand her eyes dropped from Carol's face to her bare breasts and down, and she saw the quick surprise in Carol's glance as she turned around. Therese closed her eyes tight and walked slowly toward the bed, seeing before her closed lids the image of Carol's naked body.

  Therese took a shower, and when she came out, Carol was standing at the mirror, almost dressed.

  "What's the matter?" Carol asked.

  "Nothing."

  Carol turned to her, combing her hair that was darkened a little by the wet of the shower. Her lips were bright with fresh lipstick, a cigarette between them. "Do you realize how many times a day you make me ask you that?" she said. "Don't you think it's a little inconsiderate?"

  During breakfast, Therese said, "Why did you bring that gun along, Carol?"

  "Oh. So that's what's bothering you. It's Harge's gun, something else he forgot." Carol's voice was casual. "I thought it'd be better to take it than to leave it."

  "Is it loaded?"

  "Yes, it's loaded. Harge got a permit, because we had a burglar at the house once."

  "Can you use it?"

  Carol smiled at her. "I'm no Annie Oakley. I can use it. I think it worries you, doesn't it? I don't expect to use it."

  Therese said nothing more about it. But it disturbed her whenever she thought of it. She thought of it the next night, when a bellhop set the suitcase down heavily on the sidewalk. She wondered if a gun could ever go off from a jolt like that.

  They had taken some snapshots in Ohio, and because they could get them developed early the next morning, they spent a long evening and the night in a town called Defiance. All evening they walked around the streets, looking in store windows, walking through silent residential streets where lights showed in front parlors, and homes looked as comfortable and safe as birds' nests. Therese had been afraid Carol would be bored by aimless walks, but Carol was the one who suggested going one block farther, walking all the way up the hill to see what was on the other side. Carol talked about herself and Harge. Therese tried to sum up in one word what had separated Carol and Harge, but she rejected the words almost at once—boredom, resentment, indifference. Carol told her of one time that Harge had taken Rindy away on a fishing trip and not communicated for days. That was a retaliation for Carol's refusing to spend Harge's vacation with him at his family's summer house in Massachusetts. It was a mutual thing. And the incidents were not the start.

  Carol put two of the snapshots in her billfold, one of Rindy in jodhpurs and a derby that had been on the first part of the roll, and one of Therese, with a cigarette in her mouth and her hair blowing back in the wind. There was one unflattering picture of Carol standing huddled in her coat that Carol said she was going to send to Abby because it was so bad.

  They got to Chicago late one afternoon, crept into its gray, sprawling disorder behind a great truck of a meat-distributing company. Therese sat up close to the windshield. She couldn't remember anything about the city from the trip with her father: Carol seemed to know Chicago as well as she knew Manhattan. Carol showed her the famous Loop, and they stopped for a while to watch the trains and the homeward rush of five thirty in the afternoon. It couldn't compare to the madhouse of New York at five thirty.

  At the main post office, Therese found a post card from Dannie, nothing from Phil, and a letter from Richard. Therese glanced at the letter and saw it began and ended affectionately. She had expected just that, Richard's getting the general delivery address from Phil and writing her an affectionate letter. She put the letter in her pocket before she went back to Carol.

  "Anything?" Carol said.

  "Just a post card. From Dannie. He's finished his exams."

  Carol drove to the Drake Hotel. It had a black and white checked floor, a fountain in the lobby, and Therese thought it magnificent. In their room, Carol took off her coat and flung herself down on one of the twin beds.

  "I
know a few people here," she said sleepily. "Shall we look somebody up?"

  But Carol fell asleep before they quite decided.

  Therese looked out the window at the light-bordered lake and at the irregular, unfamiliar line of tall buildings against the still grayish sky. It looked fuzzy and monotonous, like a Pissarro painting. A comparison Carol wouldn't appreciate, she thought. She leaned on the sill, staring at the city, watching a distant car's lights chopped into dots and dashes as it passed behind trees. She was happy.

  "Why don't you ring for some cocktails?" Carol's voice said behind her.

  "What kind would you like?"

  "What kind would you?"

  "Martinis."

  Carol whistled. "Double Gibsons," Carol interrupted her as she was telephoning. "And a plate of canapes. Might as well get four Martinis."

  Therese read Richard's letter while Carol was in the shower. The whole letter was affectionate. You are not like any of the other girls, he wrote. He had waited and he would keep on waiting, because he was absolutely confident that they could be happy together. He wanted her to write to him every day, send at least a post card. He told her how he had sat one evening rereading the three letters she had sent him when he had been in Kingston, New York, last summer. There was a sentimentality in the letter that was not like Richard at all, and Therese's first thought was that he was pretending. Perhaps in order to strike at her later. Her second reaction was aversion. She came back to the old decision, that not to write him, not to say anything more was the shortest way to end it.

  The cocktails arrived, and Therese paid for them instead of signing. She could never pay a bill except behind Carol's back.

  "Will you wear your black suit?" Therese asked when Carol came in.

  Carol gave her a look. "Go all the way to the bottom of that suitcase?" she said, going to the suitcase. "Drag it out, brush it off, steam the wrinkles out of it for half an hour?"