The Price of Salt, or Carol Read online

  “We’ll get out,” Therese said reassuringly.

  Therese forced a path for both of them to the door. Therese was taking the Independent subway, too. She and Mrs. Robichek edged into the sluggish mob at the entrance of the subway, and were sucked gradually and inevitably down the stairs, like bits of floating waste down a drain. They found they both got off at the Lexington Avenue stop, too, though Mrs. Robichek lived on Fifty-fifth Street, just east of Third Avenue. Therese went with Mrs. Robichek into the delicatessen where she was going to buy something for her dinner. Therese might have bought something for her own dinner, but somehow she couldn’t in Mrs. Robichek’s presence.

  “Do you have food at home?”

  “No, I’m going to buy something later.”

  “Why don’t you come and eat with me? I’m all alone. Come on.” Mrs. Robichek finished with a shrug, as if that were less effort than a smile.

  Therese’s impulse to protest politely lasted only a moment. “Thank you. I’d like to come.” Then she saw a cellophane-wrapped cake on the counter, a fruit cake like a big brown brick topped with red cherries, and she bought it to give to Mrs. Robichek.

  It was a house like the one Therese lived in, only brownstone and much darker and gloomier. There were no lights at all in the halls, and when Mrs. Robichek put on the light in the third-floor hall, Therese saw that the house was not very clean. Mrs. Robi­chek’s room was not very clean either, and the bed was unmade. Did she get up as tired as she went to bed, Therese wondered. Therese was left standing in the middle of the room while Mrs. Robichek moved on dragging feet toward the kitchenette, carrying the bag of groceries she had taken from Therese’s hands. Now that she was home, Therese felt, where no one could see her, she allowed herself to look as tired as she really was.

  Therese could never remember how it began. She could not remember the conversation just before and the conversation didn’t matter, of course. What happened was that Mrs. Robichek edged away from her, strangely, as if she were in a trance, suddenly murmuring instead of talking, and lay down flat on her back on the unmade bed. It was because of the continued murmuring, the faint smile of apology, and the terrible, shocking ugliness of the short, heavy body with the bulging abdomen, and the apologetically tilted head still so politely looking at her, that she could not make herself listen.

  “I used to have my own dress shop in Queens. Oh, a fine big one,” Mrs. Robichek said, and Therese caught the note of boasting and began to listen despite herself, hating it. “You know, the dresses with the V at the waist and the little buttons running up. You know, three, five years ago—” Mrs. Robichek spread her stiff hands inarticulately across her waist. The short hands did not nearly span the front half of herself. She looked very old in the dim lamplight that made the shadows under her eyes black. “They called them Caterina dresses. You remember? I designed them. They come out of my shop in Queens. They famous, all right!”

  Mrs. Robichek left the table and went to a small trunk that stood against the wall. She opened it, talking all the while, and began to drag out dresses of dark, heavy-looking material, which she let fall on the floor. Mrs. Robichek held up a garnet-red velvet dress with a white collar and tiny white buttons that came to a V down the front of the narrow bodice.

  “See, I got lots of them. I made them. Other stores copied.” Above the white collar of the dress, which she gripped with her chin, Mrs. Robichek’s ugly head was tilted grotesquely. “You like this? I give you one. Come here. Come here, try one on.”

  Therese was repelled by the thought of trying one on. She wished Mrs. Robichek would lie down and rest again, but obediently Therese got up, as if she had no will of her own, and came toward her.

  Mrs. Robichek pressed a black velvet dress upon Therese with trembling and importunate hands, and Therese suddenly knew how she would wait on people in the store, thrusting sweaters upon them helter-skelter, for she could not have performed the same action in any other way. For four years, Therese remembered, Mrs. Robichek had said she had worked at Frankenberg’s.

  “You like the green one better? Try it on.” And in the instant Therese hesitated, she dropped it and picked up another, the dark red one. “I sell five of them to girls at the store, but you I give one. Left over, but they still in style. You like this one better?”

  Therese liked the red better. She liked red, especially garnet red, and she loved red velvet. Mrs. Robichek pressed her toward a corner, where she could take off her clothing and lay it on an armchair. But she did not want the dress, did not want to be given it. It reminded her of being given clothing at the Home, hand-me-downs, because she was considered practically as one of the orphan girls, who made up half the school, who never got packages from outside. Therese pulled off her sweater and felt completely naked. She gripped her arms above the elbow, and her flesh there felt cold and sensationless.

  “I sewed,” Mrs. Robichek was saying ecstatically to herself, “how I sewed, morning to night! I managed four girls. But my eyes got bad. One blind, this one. Put the dress on.” She told Therese about the operation on the eye. It was not blind, only partially blind. But it was very painful. Glaucoma. It still gave her pain. That and her back. And her feet. Bunions.

  Therese realized she was relating all her troubles and her bad luck so that she, Therese, would understand why she had sunk so low as to work in a department store.

  “It fits?” Mrs. Robichek asked confidently.

  Therese looked in the mirror in the wardrobe door. It showed a long thin figure with a narrowish head that seemed ablaze at the outline, bright yellow fire running down to the bright red bar on either shoulder. The dress hung in straight draped folds down almost to her ankles. It was the dress of queens in fairy tales, of a red deeper than blood. She stepped back, and pulled in the looseness of the dress behind her, so it fitted her ribs and her waist, and she looked back at her own dark hazel eyes in the mirror. Herself meeting herself. This was she, not the girl in the dull plaid skirt and the beige sweater, not the girl who worked in the doll department at Frankenberg’s.

  “Do you like it?” Mrs. Robichek asked.

  Therese studied the surprisingly tranquil mouth, whose modeling she could see distinctly, though she wore no more lipstick than she might if someone had kissed her. She wished she could kiss the person in the mirror and make her come to life, yet she stood perfectly still, like a painted portrait.

  “If you like it, take it,” Mrs. Robichek urged impatiently, watching from a distance, lurking against the wardrobe as saleswomen lurk while women try on coats and dresses in front of mirrors in department stores.

  But it wouldn’t last, Therese knew. She would move, and it would be gone. Even if she kept the dress, it would be gone, because it was a thing of a minute, this minute. She didn’t want the dress. She tried to imagine the dress in her closet at home, among her other clothing, and she couldn’t. She began to unbutton the buttons, to unfasten the collar.

  “You like it, yes?” Mrs. Robichek asked as confidently as ever.

  “Yes,” Therese said firmly, admitting it.

  She couldn’t get the hook and eye unfastened at the back of the collar. Mrs. Robichek had to help her, and she could hardly wait. She felt as if she were being strangled. What was she doing here? How did she happen to have put on a dress like this? Suddenly Mrs. Robichek and her apartment were like a horrible dream that she had just realized she was dreaming. Mrs. Robichek was the hunchbacked keeper of the dungeon. And she had been brought here to be tantalized.

  “What’s the matter? A pin stick you?”

  Therese’s lips opened to speak, but her mind was too far away. Her mind was at a distant point, at a distant vortex that opened on the scene in the dimly lighted, terrifying room where the two of them seemed to stand in desperate combat. And at the point of the vortex where her mind was, she knew it was the hopelessness that terrified her and nothi
ng else. It was the hopelessness of Mrs. Robichek’s ailing body and her job at the store, of her stack of dresses in the trunk, of her ugliness, the hopelessness of which the end of her life was entirely composed. And the hopelessness of herself, of ever being the person she wanted to be and of doing the things that person would do. Had all her life been nothing but a dream, and was this real? It was the terror of this hopelessness that made her want to shed the dress and flee before it was too late, before the chains fell around her and locked.

  It might already be too late. As in a nightmare, Therese stood in the room in her white slip, shivering, unable to move.

  “What’s the matter? You cold? It’s hot.”

  It was hot. The radiator hissed. The room smelled of garlic and the fustiness of old age, of medicines, and of the peculiar metallic smell that was Mrs. Robichek’s own. Therese wanted to collapse in the chair where her skirt and sweater lay. Perhaps if she lay on her own clothing, she thought, it wouldn’t matter. But she shouldn’t lie down at all. If she did, she was lost. The chains would lock, and she would be one with the hunchback.

  Therese trembled violently. She was suddenly out of control. It was a chill, not merely fright or tiredness.

  “Sit down,” Mrs. Robichek’s voice said from a distance, and with shocking unconcern and boredom, as if she were quite used to girls feeling faint in her room, and from a distance, too, her dry, rough-tipped fingers pressed against Therese’s arms.

  Therese struggled against the chair, knowing she was going to succumb to it, and even aware that she was attracted to it for that reason. She dropped into the chair, felt Mrs. Robichek tugging at her skirt to pull it from under her, but she couldn’t make herself move. She was still at the same point of consciousness, however, still had the same freedom to think, even though the dark arms of the chair rose about her.

  Mrs. Robichek was saying, “You stand up too much at the store. It’s hard these Christmases. I seen four of them. You got to learn how to save yourself a little.”

  Creeping down the stairs clinging to the banister. Save herself by eating lunch in the cafeteria. Taking shoes off bunioned feet like the row of women perched on the radiator in the women’s room, fighting for a bit of the radiator to put a newspaper on and sit for five minutes.

  Therese’s mind worked very clearly. It was astonishing how clearly it worked, though she knew she was simply staring into space in front of her, and that she could not have moved if she had wanted to.

  “You just tired, you baby,” Mrs. Robichek said, tucking a woolen blanket about her shoulders in the chair. “You need to rest, standing up all day and standing up tonight, too.”

  A line from Richard’s Eliot came to Therese. That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all. She wanted to say it, but she could not make her lips move. Something sweet and burning was in her mouth. Mrs. Robichek was standing in front of her, spooning something from a bottle, and pushing the spoon between her lips. Therese swallowed it obediently, not caring if it were poison. She could have moved her lips now, could have gotten up from the chair, but she didn’t want to move. Finally, she lay back in the chair, and let Mrs. Robichek cover her with the blanket, and she pretended to go to sleep. But all the while she watched the humpbacked figure moving about the room, putting away the things from the table, undressing for bed. She watched Mrs. Robichek remove a big laced corset and then a strap device that passed around her shoulders and partially down her back. Therese closed her eyes then in horror, pressed them tight shut, until the creaking of a spring and a long groaning sigh told her that Mrs. Robichek had gone to bed. But that was not all. Mrs. Robichek reached for the alarm clock and wound it, and, without lifting her head from the pillow, groped with the clock for the straight chair beside the bed. In the dark, Therese could barely see her arm rise and fall four times before the clock found the chair.

  I shall wait fifteen minutes until she is asleep and then go, Therese thought.

  And because she was tired, she tensed herself to hold back that spasm, that sudden seizure that was like falling, that came every night long before sleep, yet heralded sleep. It did not come. So after what she thought was fifteen minutes, Therese dressed herself and went silently out the door. It was easy, after all, simply to open the door and escape. It was easy, she thought, because she was not really escaping at all.

  2

  “Terry, remember that fellow Phil McElroy I told you about? The one with the stock company? Well, he’s in town, and he says you’ve got a job in a couple of weeks.”

  “A real job? Where?”

  “A show in the Village. Phil wants to see us tonight. I’ll tell you about it when I see you. I’ll be over in about twenty minutes. I’m just leaving school now.”

  Therese ran up the three flights of stairs to her room. She was in the middle of washing up, and the soap had dried on her face. She stared down at the orange washcloth in the basin.

  “A job!” she whispered to herself. The magic word.

  She changed into a dress, and hung a short silver chain with a St. Christopher medallion, a birthday present from Richard, around her neck, and combed her hair with a little water so it would look neater. Then she set some loose sketches and cardboard models just inside the closet where she could reach them easily when Phil McElroy asked to see them. No, I haven’t had much actual experience, she would have to say, and she felt a sink of failure. She hadn’t even an apprentice’s job behind her, except that two-day job in Montclair, making the cardboard model that the amateur group had finally used, if that could be called a job. She had taken two courses in scenic design in New York, and she had read a lot of books. She could hear Phil McElroy—an intense and very busy young man, probably, a little annoyed at having come to see her for nothing—saying regretfully that she wouldn’t do after all. But with Richard present, Therese thought, it wouldn’t be quite as crushing as if she were alone. Richard had quit or been fired from about five jobs since she had known him. Nothing bothered Richard less than losing and finding jobs. Therese remembered being fired from the Pelican Press a month ago, and she winced. They hadn’t even given her notice, and the only reason she had been fired, she supposed, was that her particular research assignment had been finished. When she had gone in to speak to Mr. Nussbaum, the president, about not being given notice, he had not known, or had pretended not to know, what the term meant. “Notiz?—Wuss?” he had said indifferently, and she had turned and fled, afraid of bursting into tears in his office. It was easy for Richard, living at home with a family to keep him cheerful. It was easier for him to save money. He had saved about two thousand in a two-year hitch in the Navy, and a thousand more in the year since. And how long would it take her to save the fifteen hundred dollars that a junior membership in the stage designers’ union cost? After nearly two years in New York, she had only about five hundred dollars of it.

  “Pray for me,” she said to the wooden Madonna on the bookshelf. It was the one beautiful thing in her apartment, the wooden Madonna she had bought the first month she had been in New York. She wished there were a better place for it in the room than on the ugly bookshelf. The bookshelf was like a lot of fruit crates stacked up and painted red. She longed for a bookshelf of natural-colored wood, smooth to the touch and sleek with wax.

  She went down to the delicatessen and bought six cans of beer and some blue cheese. Then, when she came upstairs, she remembered the original purpose of her going to the store, to buy some meat for dinner. She and Richard had planned to have dinner in tonight. That might be changed now, but she didn’t like to take it on her own initiative to alter plans where Richard was concerned, and she was about to run down again for the meat when Richard’s long ring sounded. She pressed the release button.

  Richard came up the steps at a run, smiling. “Did Phil call?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Good. That means he’s coming.”
r />   “When?”

  “In a few minutes, I guess. He probably won’t stay long.”

  “Does it really sound like a definite job?”

  “Phil says so.”

  “Do you know what kind of play it is?”

  “I don’t know anything except they need somebody for sets, and why not you?” Richard looked her over critically, smiling. “You look swell tonight. Don’t be nervous, will you? It’s just a little company in the Village, and you’ve probably got more talent than all the rest of them put together.”

  She took the overcoat he had dropped on a chair and hung it in the closet. Under the overcoat was a roll of charcoal paper he had brought from art school. “Did you do something good today?” she asked.

  “So-so. That’s something I want to work on at home,” he said carelessly. “We had that redheaded model today, the one I like.”

  Therese wanted to see his sketch, but she knew Richard probably didn’t think it good enough. Some of his first paintings were good, like the lighthouse in blues and blacks that hung over her bed, that he had done when he was in the Navy and just starting to paint. But his life drawing was not good yet, and Therese doubted that it ever would be. There was a new charcoal smudge all over one knee of his tan cotton trousers. He wore a shirt inside the red and black checked shirt, and buckskin moccasins that made his big feet look like shapeless bear paws. He was more like a lumberjack or a professional athlete of some sort, Therese thought, than anything else. She could more easily imagine him with an ax in his hand than a paintbrush. She had seen him with an ax once, cutting wood in the yard back of his house in Brooklyn. If he didn’t prove to his family that he was making some progress in his painting, he would probably have to go into his father’s bottled-gas business this summer, and open the branch in Long Island that his father wanted him to.