Price Of Salt, The

by Claire Morgan

  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 her 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 blond, 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 m
istakes, 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

  "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 the 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?"

  "Ail 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 da
y 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?"