Price Of Salt, The

by Claire Morgan

  "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 FIFTEEN

  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 Ca
rol'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 tail 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 canapés. 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?"

  "We'll be a half hour drinking these."

  "Your powers of persuasion are irresistible." Carol took the suit into the bathroom and turned the water on in the tub.

  It was the suit she had worn the day they had had the first lunch together.

  "Do you realize this is the only drink I've had since we left New York?" Carol said. "Of course you don't. Do you know why? I'm happy."

  "You're beautiful," Therese said.

  And Carol gave her the derogatory smile that Therese loved, and walked to the dressing table. She flung a yellow-silk scarf around her neck and tied it loosely, and began to comb her hair. The lamp's light framed her figure like a picture, and Therese had a feeling all this had happened before. She remembered suddenly: the woman in the window brushing up her long hair, remembered the very bricks in the wall, the texture of the misty rain that morning.

  "How about some perfume?" Carol asked, moving toward her with the bottle. She touched Therese's forehead with her fingers, at the hairline where she had kissed her that day.

  "You remind me of the woman I once saw," Therese said, "somewhere off Lexington. Not you but the light. She was combing her hair up." Therese stopped, but Carol waited for her to go on. Carol always waited, and she could never say exactly what she wanted to say. "Early one morning when I was on the way to work, and I remember it was starting to rain," she floundered on. "I saw her in a window." She really could not go on, about standing there for perhaps three or four minutes, wishing with an intensity that drained her strength that she knew the woman, that she might be welcome if she went to the house and knocked on the door, wishing she could do that instead of going on to her job at the Pelican Press.

  "My little orphan," Carol said.

  Therese smiled. There was nothing dismal, no sting in the word when Carol said it.

  "What does your mother look like?"

  "She had black hair," Therese said quickly. "She didn't look anything like me." Therese always found herself talking about her mother in the past tense, though she was alive this minute, somewhere in Connecticut.

  "You really don't think she'll ever want to see you again?" Carol was stan
ding at the mirror.

  "I don't think so."

  "What about your father's family. Didn't you say he had a brother?"

  "I never met him. He was a kind of geologist, working for an oil company. I don't know where he is." It was easier talking about the uncle she had never met.

  "What's your mother's name now?"

  "Esther—Mrs. Nicolas Strully." The name meant as little to her as one she might see in a telephone book. She looked at Carol, suddenly sorry she had said the name. Carol might some day— A shock of loss, of helplessness came over her. She knew so little about Carol after all.

  Carol glanced at her. "I'll never mention it," she said, "never mention it again. If that second drink's going to make you blue, don't drink it. I don't want you to be blue tonight."

  The restaurant where they dined overlooked the lake, too. They had a banquet of a dinner with champagne and brandy afterward. It was the first time in her life that Therese had been a little drunk, in fact much drunker than she wanted Carol to see. Her impression of Lakeshore Drive was always to be of a broad avenue studded with mansions all resembling the White House in Washington. In the memory there would be Carol's voice, telling her about a house here and there where she had been before, and the disquieting awareness that for a while this had been Carol's world, as Rapallo, Paris, and other places Therese did not know had for a while been the frame of everything Carol did.