Part 27 (2/2)

I had to pull my head out of her hands and turn around and look at her.

I said, ”But he was wrong.”

”Well, of course he was wrong. Men are not normal, Chrissy.

That's one thing you'll learn if you ever get married.”

”I never will, then. I never will get married.”

”He was just jealous,” she said. ”He was just so jealous.”

”Never.”

”Well, you and me are very different, Chrissy. Very different.” She sighed. She said, ”I am a creature of love.”

- 262*

I thought that you might see these words on a movie poster.

”A creature of love.” Maybe on a poster of one of the movies that had played at Queenie 's theater.

”You are going to look so good when I take these rollers out,”

she said. ”You won't be saying you haven't got a boyfriend for very long. But it'll be too late to go looking today. Early bird tomorrow. If Stan asks you anything, say you went to a couple of places and they took your phone number. Say a store or a restaurant or anything, just so long as he thinks you're looking.”

I was hired the next day at the first place I tried, though I hadn't managed to be such an early bird after all. Queenie had decided to do my hair still another way and to make up my eyes, but the result was not what she had hoped for. ”You're really more the natural type after all,” she said, and I scrubbed it all off and put on my own lipstick, which was ordinary red, not glimmering-pale like hers.

By this time it was too late for Queenie to go out with me to check on her Post Office box. She had to get ready to go to the movie theater. It was a Sat.u.r.day, so she had to work in the afternoon as well as in the evening. She got out her key and asked me to check the box for her, as a favor. She explained to me where it was.

”I had to get my own box when I wrote to your dad,” she said.

The job I got was in a drugstore in the bas.e.m.e.nt of an apartment building. I was hired to work behind the lunch counter. When I first came in I felt fairly hopeless. My hairstyle was drooping in the heat and I had a moustache of sweat on my upper lip. At least my cramps had moderated.

A woman in a white uniform was at the counter, drinking coffee.

- 263*

”Did you come about the job?” she said.

I said yes. The woman had a hard, square face, pencilled eyebrows, a beehive of purplish hair.

”You speak English, do you? ”

”Yes.”

”I mean you didn't just learn it? You're not a foreigner?”

I said I wasn't.

”I tried out two girls in the last two days and I had to let them both go. One let on she could speak English, but she couldn't and the other I had to tell her everything ten times over. Wash your hands good at the sink and I'll get you an ap.r.o.n. My husband is the pharmacist and I do the till.” (I noticed for the first time a gray-haired man behind a high counter in the corner looking at me and pretending not to.) ”It's slow now, but it'll get busy in a while. It's all old people in this block and after their naps they start coming down here wanting coffee.”

I tied on an ap.r.o.n and took my place behind the counter.

Hired for a job in Toronto. I tried to find out where things were without asking questions and had to ask only two-how to work the coffeemaker and what to do about the money.

”You make out the bill and they bring it to me. What did you think?”

It was all right. People came in one or two at a time mostly wanting coffee or a c.o.ke. I kept the cups washed and wiped, the counter clean, and apparently I made out the bills properly, since there was no complaint. The customers were mostly old people, as the woman had said. Some spoke to me in a kindly way, saying I was new here and even asking where I came from. Others seemed to be in a kind of trance. One woman wanted toast and I managed that. Then I did a ham sandwich. There was a little flurry with four people there at once. A man wanted pie and ice cream, and I found the ice cream hard as cement to scoop out.

But I did it. I got more confident. I said to them, ”Here you are”

when I set down their orders, and ”Here 's the damage” when I presented the bill.

- 264*

In a slow moment the woman from the till came over.

”I see you made somebody toast,” she said. ”Can you read?”

She pointed to a sign stuck on the mirror behind the counter.

NO BREAKFAst ITEMS SERVED AFTER II A.M.

I said that I thought it was okay to make toast, if you could make toasted sandwiches.

”Well, you thought wrong. Toasted sandwiches, yes, ten cents extra. Toast, no. Do you understand now?”

I said yes. I wasn't so crushed as I might have been at first. All the time I was working I thought what a relief it would be to go back and tell Mr. Vorguilla that yes, I had a job. Now I could go and look for a room of my own to live in. Maybe tomorrow, Sunday, if the drugstore was closed. If I even had one room, I thought, Queenie would have some place to run away to if Mr.

Vorguilla got mad at her again. And if Queenie ever decided to leave Mr. Vorguilla (I persisted in thinking of this as a possibility in spite of how Queenie had finished her story), then with the pay from both our jobs maybe we could get a little apartment.

Or at least a room with a hot plate and a toilet and shower to ourselves. It would be like when we lived at home with our parents except that our parents would not be there.

I garnished each sandwich with a bit of torn-off lettuce and a dill pickle. That was what another sign on the mirror promised.

But when I got the dill pickle out of a jar I thought it looked like too much, so I cut it in half. I had just served a man a sandwich in this way when the woman from the till came over and got herself a cup of coffee. She took her coffee back to the till and drank it standing up. When the man had finished his sandwich and paid for it and left the store she came over again.

”You gave that man half a dill pickle. Have you been doing that with every sandwich?”

I said yes.

”Don't you know how to slice a pickle? One pickle ought to last ten sandwiches.”

I looked at the sign. ”It doesn't say a slice. It says a pickle.”

- 265*

<script>