Girls In 3-B, The (4 page)

Feeling snooty about the paintings made her feel better, but then she caught sight of herself in the full-length mirror beside the elevator grille and was depressed again. Her hair was either too long or too short, depending, and much too fuzzy in a town where other people wore theirs lacquered flat. Her navy-blue dress had a couple of buttons missing.
I
need about five hundred dollars worth of new clothes and a good diet,
she thought, stepping into the elevator and seeing with a sinking heart that it was self-service. Automatic elevators always made her nervous, not because she was too dumb to run them, of course
--
she was as smart as any elevator boy
--
but if the damn thing got stuck between floors she wanted it to be somebody else's fault. She punched the 14 button, put her fingers in her ears to equalize the pressure, and waited for the door to stick when the trip was over.

The door slid open smoothly, and she got out feeling cheated.

The gold paint was shiny on the outer door of The Fort Dearborn Press and the reception room, although small, was lushly carpeted and lined with shelves of books. There was a mahogany and plate-glass desk with three wire baskets labelled Incoming, Outgoing, and Proofs. The girl behind the desk was reading a long strip of printed paper, moving a plastic ruler down slowly, line by line. A sharp pencil was stuck through her sleek chignon. A cup half full of coffee sat on the edge of the desk, and three or four pink-stained butts lay in the pottery ashtray. She said, "Minute," and marked the paper in front of her. When she got to the end of a line she moved the ruler down and, raising here eyes, gave Pat a good searching look. "You're the girl Jonni called about. The regular receptionist isn't here, in fact she's quitting. That's why the job is open. I'll see if I can find somebody."

Pat sat down on a straight chair, looking at all the books in colorful jackets with the log-cabin colophon on the backs, wishing she could open some of them but not wanting to seem too much at home. There were some thin ones that were probably poetry, and she thought about Annice
--she ought to be here and not me, this is her kind of place.
Beyond the open window, office buildings cut sharply into a deep blue late-summer sky dotted with small cottony clouds.
The Loop,
she thought;
this is a Loop office.
And suddenly she wanted to work there more than she had ever wanted anything in her life.

The girl came back. "This way," she said indifferently, and Pat followed her down the corridor, aware that her feet hurt and wishing she had worn her straw sandals. The hall was painted fuchsia and was decorated with book jackets Scotch-taped to the walls. Through partly open doors she could see a man talking quietly into a dictating machine, a boy running dittos, a gray-haired woman typing with machine-gun rapidity. The atmosphere was one of quiet concentration.

"This is Miss Callahan."

"Thanks, Phyllis. Won't you sit down, Miss Callahan?"

Everything about this office said Executive, maybe even Top Executive. Signed photographs of authors covered one wall, there were flowers in a pottery jug on the windowsill, and the rug was what Pat vaguely thought of as Oriental. This at a glance, before she looked at the man behind the desk. The effect of that look was like sticking a wire hairpin into an electric outlet. The same jolt, the same zing down the arm and along the backbone.

He was tall and handsome, a college-athlete type getting a little heavier maybe, a little thick around the middle and soft under the chin, but still a man to turn and look after on the street. Maybe thirty-five. He looked like a salesman or a young politician, not bookish. He smiled. "I'm Blake Thomson. Now, this job
--
"

His voice held her; she lost what he was saying. Resonant, full, with troubling overtones, it stirred her like music. She tried to listen, fixing her eyes on his face. His eyes were not dark, as she had expected, but a deep gray. Blunt nose, charming smile. He picked up a pencil, and she saw that his hands were strong, with curly dark hair at the edge of the starched white cuffs.

This is crazy,
she thought.
You can't feel like this about somebody you've just met. Anyhow, he's probably married and has five or six kids.
She shut her eyes, partly to regain her balance and partly, she realized too late, to shut out all other sensations so that deep clear voice could flow over her unimpeded. At once she was conscious of a physical response she had read about and heard described in intimate talk, but had never experienced. Definite, local, unmistakable. She felt her face reddening and resisted a sudden impulse to cross herself.
Keep me from sin,
she prayed silently.

"So if you think you'd like to try it, you can begin tomorrow morning. Our other girl is married, and her husband's being transferred
--
"

She opened her eyes. She wasn't sure what he had been saying
--
had, in fact, no clear idea of what she would be expected to do if she took the job. As far as she knew it might be something of which she was totally incapable. Struggling for clarity, she said in a small voice, "I've never been in this sort of business before."

"It's not too different from regular office work. If you can type and answer the telephone you'll get along all right." He smiled. The smile was more than she could take. Something inside, some deep female instinct, warned her to run.
If
you had any sense,
she told herself,
you'd get out of here but quick.
This is more than you can handle. She felt suddenly short of breath, as if her lungs were being squeezed by an iron hand. The floor tilted. She grasped the edge of her chair, and the hard reality of the wood gave her stability. She smiled back at him. "I'd like to try it."

He walked back to the foyer with her. She wondered crazily what would happen if she brushed against him, swayed toward him in that narrow hallway.

"Phyllis, Miss Callahan is coming in tomorrow." He bent over the proofreader, his attitude at once casual and intimate. Envy flared up in Pat.

Going down in the elevator, she realized dizzily that she hadn't settled anything at all. She didn't know what she was going to do, or what her hours would be, or how much she was getting. She crossed the splendid lobby and went out through the revolving door without seeing anything or anyone.

The girls would be full of questions. Barby had made a special trip in to interview her boss and fill out application forms, and she had come back loaded with details: paid vacations, store discount, pension plans, Social Security cards, group insurance, company cafeterias. Annice, bored as she pretended to be by the idea of going back to school, had her schedule all made out for the semester and the pages of her college catalog were dogeared with handling.

Well, she would have to make up some answers. Or stall them off until she found out. She crossed Dearborn and Madison without noticing the traffic, the lights or the shopping crowds. A deep disturbing voice rang in her ears.
He doesn't even know I'm alive,
she thought,
but I'd go anywhere with him, or do anything in the world he wanted me to do.

New employees, and some old ones, were always complaining because the Store was so big, when they weren't complaining because the customers were snippy or their feet ached. They said you could get lost looking for the restrooms, and it was true. If you had to go to the office and see about deductions or sign up for insurance, it took half a day to find the damn place. You could punch the time-clock every day from now until Social Security and never see a familiar face in the waiting line; you could eat in the company cafeteria every day
--
but nobody did
--
and the macaroni casserole would be familiar but the face across the table wouldn't. The Store, always upper-cased in memos and bulletins, was a city of strangers.

The girls from Gary and Michigan City and Elgin griped, coming in from the commuters' trains in the morning. So did the college girls working part-time in the Junior Miss department and the tough old birds who had been with the company ninety-nine years, starting as cash girls back in the days when the money-boxes sailed across the ceiling on wires. The pretty Polish girls from South Chicago complained, brought up as they were to the close-knit life of the apartment building, the neighborhood movie, the Sunday family dinner and Mass at St. Ladislaw's Church. All of the complaints were variations on the same theme
--
sure, the pay was okay, and you got a fifteen per cent discount on everything you bought. But
--
well, you didn't feel like a person; more like part of a machine. Too big.

Barby liked it. She was the last stock girl in her department to go home after the credit books were filed away and the counters covered with muslin. Between five-twenty and five-forty the washroom was jammed with girls fixing their faces and having a quick smoke; then everyone rushed for the I.C. or subway or the Michigan bus, and quiet settled down. Barby liked to wait until the washroom was empty and take her time. She followed all her mother's teachings about grooming because they had become habitual
--
washing her face before she applied fresh makeup, rubbing lotion into her hands after she washed off the carbon smudges. That her face as reflected in the long mirror above the basins was prettier than most didn't bother her; it was her face and she was used to it. She put her lipstick on with a little brush, drawing a clear line.

It's big,
she thought contentedly, taking her coin purse and tissues from the square plastic box that was like all other plastic boxes except for her name printed on the slip-in card. The Store was staffed by polite strangers who minded their own business and didn't look at her with curiosity or pry into her affairs. The garments she ticketed went out on the racks and were sold by salesgirls she knew as dimly familiar but nameless faces; the meals she ate were prepared by anonymous hands. The check she got twice a month was made out by some stranger to whom she was nothing but a clock number. If a man looked at her, eying the swing of her hips and the contour of her bosom, it was someone she would never see again and there was nothing to get excited about. She had been accosted on Van Buren two or three times, walking toward a late train, and had walked on calmly without giving the furtive men a second thought.

Everyone sank out of sight at five-forty-five, dismissed by the click of a time clock, and came to life ten minutes before opening time in the morning. It was a neat arrangement.

She walked past the shrouded counters, past the thin stooped Negro who ran a carpet sweeper between the aisles, and took the elevator to first. She went by the cosmetic counters, still delicately fragrant from the perfume that was sprayed into the air several times a day, and out of the employees' entrance, pausing to flash her I. D. card at the watchman. Real life, non-Store fife rushed up to meet her with the heat from the sidewalk. She remembered what she had been refusing to think about all day, that she was supposed to check apartment ads.

In her billfold she had a list of names and addresses in the Hyde Park area and two folded five-dollar bills with which to pay a deposit if she found anything at all possible. Apartments were hard to find and rents were high; even the lower-priced places, dirty and infested as they were, had waiting lists, and unscrupulous landlords extorted "fees" and "bonuses" that were nothing but bribes from desperate tenants in search of a place to live. Unemployment in other parts of the country brought Negroes, hillbillies and Latin Americans into the city at the rate of three or four thousand a day, to crowd into overflowing tenements and seek non-existent jobs. White-collar workers, who had a certain living standard to maintain but in many cases earned less than skilled mechanics, were caught between their way of life on one hand and the exorbitant cost of plain necessities on the other.

Annice had said dreamily that she wouldn't mind living in the slums, but Barby thought she was probably thinking about a Greenwich-Village type of quaint little place that had no relation to roaches and rats or noisy neighbors.

She walked up Randolph looking into shop windows. She passed the fifty-cent flower place where the man was putting button dahlias out in tin cans, thinking that when she had a place of her own she would stop and buy flowers every payday
--
they made a place look so nice. She passed the outdoor magazine stand and started down the concrete steps to the I.C. underground station, ignoring the whistle of a punk kid standing on the top step. She studied her list of addresses, walking briskly past the sign that said
Men
and the one that said
Telephones
and the souvenir stand with the silver-and-turquoise jewelry. The flats were all in Jonni Foster's neighborhood; Jonni had briefed her on rentals and utilities. She bought a ticket to 53rd and went out on the echoing wooden platform to catch the South Chicago Special.

It was hot for September, a good dry heat. Across the train aisle a young girl in cotton blouse and skirt snuggled up to a very young boy who put his arm around her shoulders and whispered into her ear. The woman in front of Barby, hatted and gloved, glared at them. Barby didn't like people who glared at smoochers, but she didn't much like all this public affection either
--
it made her uneasy, reminded her of things she didn't like to think about. She picked up a copy of the
Tribune
that some commuter had left on the seat and read the Carson Pirie Scott ads to see what the competition was doing.

The sunshine was beginning to slant when she got off at 53rd, and the neighborhood had a friendly late-afternoon look. The air was fresher here than downtown in spite of traffic fumes. There was a French film on at the art movie house. Two stout grandmothers were coming out of the supermarket with loaded baskets. At the corner, a vacant lot strewn with bricks gave an unobstructed view of the I.C. platform, and on the next block one of the city-subsidized housing projects stood proudly, all tan brick and shiny glass, among the older buildings. A young Negro mother turned in at the front walk, wheeling a stroller with a healthy-looking baby in one end and a sack of groceries in the other. Barby halfway hoped that this would be the building she was looking for; but it was a half-block farther on, dark-red brick in two wings with a recessed entrance like a glass showcase, displaying an inner door and a row of mailboxes. There was an eighteen-inch strip of tan grass and wilting petunias along the sidewalk. Barby pressed the doorbell and waited, but if there was an answering buzz it didn't reach her ears, so she stood uncertainly poised, unsure what to do.