“That’s very expensive,” said Mrs. Melville immediately.
“It’s what it says on the tag,” said the girl. “I don’t set the prices.”
“I’m not at all sure about that pink,” said Mrs. Melville.
“I have that blouse in pink, chartreuse, blue, black, and white,” said the girl wearily.
“Well,” said Mrs. Melville, “I can’t take black, and white just isn’t right for me. I need color near my face.”
The girl looked up at Mrs. Melville and said without interest, “It comes in black, white, blue, pink, or chartreuse.”
“The pink is very nice,” said Mrs. Melville, considering. She held it up against herself and looked at herself in the mirror over the counter. Then she put it down and held up the chartreuse. “I really think the pink does more for me,” she said.
The girl yawned, covering her mouth politely, and said, “They’re both very good numbers.”
“But, on the other hand,” said Mrs. Melville, “the chartreuse… somehow, it’s more sophisticated. Don’t you think so?”
“The chartreuse is a very good number,” said the girl. “So is the pink.”
“Which one do you think?” said Mrs. Melville.
“I really couldn’t say,” said the girl.
Mrs. Melville looked at her sharply; this girl was really being very annoying. “I’ll take this one,” Mrs. Melville said abruptly. The girl nodded without interest, not glancing at the blouse Mrs. Melville held out. She took the blouse indifferently, with Mrs. Melville’s money, and went off. Mrs. Melville had to wait again.
By the time the girl came back with Mrs. Melville’s blouse in a bag and her change, Mrs. Melville was angry again. “Before I leave,” she said to the girl in a voice that implied that the quality of service Mrs. Melville had been vouchsafed in this store was very low indeed, “will you please give me your name and number?”
“It’s on the sales slip,” said the girl. “In the bag.”
“You may as well know,” said Mrs. Melville, “that I intend to report you for insolence. I think that your attitude toward this sale has been perfectly dreadful, and I shall make every effort to—”
“Excuse me,” said the girl. “I have to go and wait on another customer.”
She was smiling as she went off, and then she turned and came back. “The complaint department,” she said. “Report your complaints to the complaint department. On the ninth floor, near the elevator.”
Mrs. Melville turned with anger and marched away.
She was on the second floor. She knew from past experience that it would do her no good at all to report the insolent girl to the floorwalker or to the elevator operator. With her jaw set and her package under her arm, Mrs. Melville headed for the escalator and the ninth floor, thinking as she went that in any well-regulated store the complaint department would be more accessible. When she came to the escalator she stepped on as one who goes toward a duty not entirely unpleasant.
The third floor was to Mrs. Melville nothing more than a brief display of bathing suits, all obviously size nine, and, Mrs. Melville thought righteously, all far too shocking to be seen on a public beach. The fourth floor was suits, extravagantly cut, overdecorated, and seeming to come no larger than about a fourteen. The fifth floor was china and glassware and Mrs. Melville thought, as she passed, that they must lose a lot of sales because they had placed their tables full of china displays so close together that no one but a very slim person could pass between them without danger of upsetting something.
On the sixth floor was the restaurant. It was called Ye Olde Taverne, and was heavily decorated in dark red and old oak. The walls were paneled and tapestried, with small leaded windows looking out onto the rug and credit departments on one side, facing a blank wall on the other.
Mrs. Melville was not able to pass by a restaurant. Restaurant, her mind ran, food, sit down, menu, eat. The complaint department, it occurred to her, would be there as well in an hour. The salesgirl, kept in suspense that much longer, would probably learn a more severe lesson. With no more resistance than a glance at the escalator, Mrs. Melville passed through the ornamental wooden portals and into Ye Olde Taverne. She sat down at a table comfortably near the back, and stretched her feet out with a sigh.
A waitress in a full, starched yellow skirt came over to take her order, and when Mrs. Melville looked at the menu, she was wholeheartedly glad she had stopped. By some extraordinarily lucky chance, she had hit the exact moment when the Shopper’s Lunch gives way before the Shopper’s Tea, and so, if she wished, she might choose from either. Her eye was caught by the tuna fish salad on the Shopper’s Lunch, and by the cinnamon toast on the Shopper’s Tea. Hot roast beef sandwich? Mrs. Melville—who had lunched two hours before on chicken croquettes and French fried potatoes and chocolate cream pie—wondered if the beef was lean. Or the assorted tea sandwiches? Mrs. Melville dwelt lovingly on the thought of tiny crustless delicacies, filled perhaps with cream cheese and jelly, or a rich salmon filling, or peanut butter and bacon, and sighed again. She read the Fountain Suggestions, the lists of possible beverages, the desserts, and hesitated long over the butterscotch nut sundae. Perhaps a deviled egg? An English muffin? Mrs. Melville tapped the menu against her cheek in a long moment of indecision.
Finally, with the waitress standing impatiently over her, Mrs. Melville hesitated one last time, and chose the tuna fish salad. With another sigh, this time a sigh of pure satisfaction, Mrs. Melville carefully set her package on the chair beside her and slipped her coat from her shoulders. Easing her tired feet under the table, she leaned back and closed her eyes for a minute. Shopping was tiring, particularly with everything so hard to find and salesgirls so impudent and the complaint department so far away.
Her tuna fish salad, when it arrived, was not quite all that Mrs. Melville could have wished. The tuna fish was scanty, with little mayonnaise and much celery, the lettuce was wilted, and the waitress had, for some reason, decided to serve Mrs. Melville Ry-Krisp instead of the hot muffins promised by the menu. Finger upraised, Mrs. Melville summoned the waitress.
“I thought I was supposed to have hot muffins?” she said.
“Sorry,” said the waitress. “All out of muffins.”
“Rolls?”
“All gone.”
“Bread?” said Mrs. Melville, her voice rising slightly.
The waitress indicated the Ry-Krisp. “That’s all we got,” she said shortly.
“That woman over there has muffins,” Mrs. Melville pointed out.
“She was here before you.”
“This is disgraceful,” said Mrs. Melville. “I certainly would not have ordered the salad if I had known there were no more muffins. Don’t you tell customers these things?”
Without answering, the waitress began to move slowly away toward another table. “Miss!” Mrs. Melville said sharply. The waitress turned. “Bring me more mayonnaise,” Mrs. Melville directed, “another pat of butter, and coffee without cream or sugar at once.”
The waitress glanced at Mrs. Melville and moved away again. Mrs. Melville began her salad. She would report the girl in the blouse department and stand there until she was assured the girl was fired. She would report the waitress and insist upon a formal apology.
Someone sat down in the chair across the table from her.
Now, Mrs. Melville at all times hated to have anyone watch her eat, and she detested having to ask for more butter under the eye of an unknown person, particularly if, as it seemed in this case, the unknown person was small and quick-moving and a woman. To indicate her extreme disapproval, Mrs. Melville did not once glance up at the woman, but she could see from under her lashes that this was a woman in a dark suit or coat, and certainly someone very small, since she had gone into the narrow seat between the table and the wall without squeezing and without stirring the table or asking Mrs. Melville to move. When the waitress came, the other woman said, briefly, “Tea with lemon,” and further infuriated Mr
s. Melville. Anyone who came into a restaurant, where the serving and eating of food was an obligation, and ordered only a cup of tea with lemon, was automatically in Mrs. Melville’s bad graces. More annoyed than she had been all day, Mrs. Melville abandoned the vestiges of her salad and said, “Check, please,” to the waitress.
Without comment, the waitress wrote on the check and handed it to Mrs. Melville. Mrs. Melville, with an effort, began to edge into her coat, carefully avoiding looking at the woman across the table; Mrs. Melville did not like being watched while getting into her coat. Ye Olde Taverne was beginning to fill up with shoppers taking Shopper’s Tea, and the passage of people back and forth behind Mrs. Melville’s chair made her effort to don her coat more violent; as she gave the lapels a last pull together across the front, the waitress returned, set down a cup of tea in front of the woman across the table, and a tiny paper cup in front of Mrs. Melville. “Your mayonnaise,” said the waitress, and grinned.
Mrs. Melville indignantly forbore leaving any tip, but got up with vast dignity and made her way to the cashier.
“I wish to report this waitress for impertinence,” she said. “The one over there in the yellow skirt.”
“What’d she do?” asked the cashier without interest.
“She refused to give me what I had ordered,” Mrs. Melville said. “She spoke rudely, and when I asked for more—”
“Complaint department,” said the cashier unenthusiastically. “I can’t do nothing about that here, miss.”
She looked up at Mrs. Melville without interest and said, “Complaint department” again wearily as she took Mrs. Melville’s money. “Ninth floor,” she said. “I think.”
With one final furious glance at the waitress, Mrs. Melville snatched up her change and made purposefully for the escalator. The salesgirl, the waitress, the cashier—what sort of a store could this be? Mrs. Melville, setting her shoulders firmly as she stood on the escalator, thought with satisfaction that she was certainly glad no one she knew ever came here to shop; how could anything be purchased in a store where the salesgirls criticized one’s figure, the waitress kidnapped one’s muffins, the cashiers had no sympathy for one’s feelings?
She stepped off the escalator at the eighth floor, started for her final escalator, and stopped dead. Her package. Her package, her bag with her precious blouse in it, was down in the restaurant.
“Now, why do you think no one reminded me?” Mrs. Melville said aloud, so that a woman passing her on the way to the next escalator looked at her disagreeably. Irritated beyond further words, Mrs. Melville turned silently and made her way across the store to the down escalator. Back she went, the way she had come, and back through the wooden portals of Ye Olde Taverne. There were people at the table she had used—indeed, almost all the tables were filled now—two young women, obviously suburban matrons, in neat pretty hats and neat pretty coats, sitting where Mrs. Melville and the unknown woman had sat so shortly before. Although one of the two young suburban matrons wore a dark green coat with a mink collar and a green straw hat and the other one wore a brown wool suit with a fur scarf and a tan straw hat, they looked somehow subtly, unbelievably alike, and both raised calm, assured eyes to Mrs. Melville as she came up to the table and said, restraining her voice:
“I beg your pardon, but I left a package here on the chair.” She indicated the chair in which the young woman in dark green was sitting. “Have you seen it?”
The two young women glanced at one another. “A bag, was it?” said the one in brown; she was, Mrs. Melville noticed, having tea with cinnamon toast. “A bag from this store?”
“Yes, certainly,” said Mrs. Melville, growing impatient again. “Where is it?”
“Good heavens,” the one in green said to the one in brown. She was having a ham and cheese sandwich on whole wheat; a good choice, Mrs. Melville thought.
“I know” said the one in brown, nodding. She turned to Mrs. Melville. “I think we did a terrible thing,” she said. “There was a woman here drinking tea when we came and she left just as we came and we found the package on the chair and I called her back and gave it to her.”
“Gave her my package?” said Mrs. Melville, mystified.
“We thought it was hers,” the one in green explained. “It was here on the chair, you see. Now that I think of it,” she said to the one in brown, “she did act sort of funny.”
“Sort of funny,” the one in brown agreed. “Very funny. When I gave her the package she sort of looked at me.”
“Yes,” the one in green agreed. “Why don’t you ask at the Lost and Found?” she inquired brightly of Mrs. Melville.
“What did she look like, this woman?” said Mrs. Melville.
“Well,” said the one in green, “she was small and dark. And sort of funny.”
“I thought she was definitely funny,” said the one in brown decisively. “Sort of dark, and small, she was.”
Mrs. Melville turned abruptly, without thanking them, and found the waitress who had been so rude to her. Marching up to the girl, Mrs. Melville said, “Did you see the other woman who sat at my table?”
The girl stared. “No,” she said. Mrs. Melville remembered that she had left no tip. When the girl continued to stare at her blankly, Mrs. Melville said persuasively, “She stole a package that belonged to me. I want to get my package back.”
“What was in the package?” said the waitress.
“A blouse,” said Mrs. Melville tensely. “Did you see her?”
The waitress looked sweetly at Mrs. Melville. “Try the complaint department,” she said. “It’s up on the ninth floor.”
Mrs. Melville tightened her lips, and then decided not to bandy words with this impolite girl; she hurried over to the cashier, who turned her blond head tiredly. “Did you see a small, dark woman come out of here with a package?”
“I seen a million,” said the cashier.
“This one had a cup of tea, that’s all she had,” Mrs. Melville said.
“A thousand of them had a cup of tea,” the cashier said. “You was here before.”
“I lost a package,” Mrs. Melville said. “She stole it.”
The cashier shook her head. “Never seen it,” she said.
Irritably, Mrs. Melville stamped out of Ye Olde Taverne. Near the escalator to the seventh floor, and beyond it, on the way to the ninth floor, she stopped again. Her blouse had been stolen, certainly, but by a very small woman. Now, Mrs. Melville was very well aware that her blouse was a size forty-two, and, whatever else she knew about the small woman who had stolen it, she knew perfectly well that the small woman would not wear a blouse size forty-two; she had, after all, squeezed without complaint into the narrow space between the table and the wall; she had ordered only a spartan cup of tea. Furthermore, anyone who had taken illegally a blouse bought in the store would be in immediate terror of being found out. Now, Mrs. Melville reasoned, if she (perish the thought!) had stolen a package and, taking it to the nearest ladies’ room, had found that it contained a blouse several sizes too large, and the sales slip for the blouse, what would she do? Why, Mrs. Melville told herself triumphantly, she would hurry with the blouse to the department where it had been purchased, and, with some credible story, return it for a smaller size before any fuss could be raised about its loss. Obviously, Mrs. Melville deduced, the woman with the blouse was perhaps even now exchanging it.
Mrs. Melville doggedly got back onto the escalator again, this time going down. She went as quickly as possible back to the blouse department, looking as she went for a small, dark, suspicious size ten.
The blouse department was deserted. The salesgirl whom Mrs. Melville was still on her way to report lounged on the counter. Mrs. Melville headed for her.
“Miss,” she said loudly, even before she had reached the counter. “Do you remember me buying a blouse here?”
The girl nodded. She remembered.
Mrs. Melville said emphatically, “Someone stole that blouse.”
&nbs
p; The salesgirl took a deep breath. “What am I supposed to do about it?” she said. “Give you another?”
“Now, listen here,” Mrs. Melville began, and then stopped herself, and said instead, “What I want to know is this: has anyone come here to return that blouse for another size?”
“Let me see,” said the girl. “It was a size forty-two, wasn’t it? Or a forty-four?”
“A forty-two,” said Mrs. Melville.
“Well,” said the girl, “not very many people wear blouses that large. So if anyone came to return a blouse of that size, I’d surely notice it.”
Mrs. Melville clenched her hands around her pocketbook. “Someone in this store stole that blouse,” she said.
“You might try the complaint department,” the girl said innocently.
As Mrs. Melville was opening her mouth to answer, a woman came up beside her at the counter. “Miss?” she said softly.
Mrs. Melville turned slowly. The woman was small, and wearing a dark coat and hat. Moreover, she was carrying a package that looked suspiciously like Mrs. Melville’s package, and she was saying to the salesgirl:
“Earlier today I bought a blouse here. I think I bought it from the other girl, because I’m pretty sure you didn’t sell it to me.” She laughed embarrassedly. “Anyway,” she said, “when I bought it I told her I wanted to take it upstairs and try it on with a suit and perhaps exchange it for another color if it didn’t match the suit….” Her voice trailed off as she saw the salesgirl nod politely.
“Wrong color?” said the salesgirl professionally, beginning to open the bag.
“Oh, no,” said the woman. “I mean, the color is perfect. I love it. No, it’s the size. She must have got it mixed up, somehow.”
The salesgirl took the blouse out of the bag and spread it on the counter. Mrs. Melville looked at it and began to breathe more quickly; a deep happiness filled her.
“It’s just the right shade of pink,” the small woman said timidly. “But I mean, it’s a size forty-two. She must have given it to me by mistake.” The small woman laughed. “You can see I don’t wear a forty-two,” she said.
Just an Ordinary Day: Stories Page 32