Carol

Chapter 1

THE LUNCH HOUR in the co-workers' cafeteria at Frankenberg's had reached its peak.

There was no room left at any of the long tables, and more and more people were arriving to wait back of the wooden barricades by the cash register.
People who had already got their trays of food wandered about between the tables in search of a spot they could squeeze into, or a place that somebody was about to leave, but there was no place. The roar of dishes, chairs, voices, shuffling feet, and the bra-a-ack of the turnstiles in the bare-walled room was like the din of a single huge machine.

Therese ate nervously, with the "Welcome to Frankenberg" booklet propped up in front of her against a sugar container. She had read the thick booklet through last week, in the first day of training class, but she had nothing else with her to read, and in the co-workers' cafeteria, she felt it necessary to concentrate on something. So she read again about vacation benefits, the three weeks' vacation given to people who had worked fifteen years at Frankenberg's, she ate the hot plate special of the day—a grayish slice of roast beef with a ball of mashed potatoes covered with brown gravy, a heap of peas, and a tiny paper cup of horseradish. She tried to imagine what it would be like to have worked fifteen years in Frankenberg's department store, and she found she was unable to. "Twenty-five Yearers" got four weeks' vacation, the booklet said. Frankenberg's also provided a camp for summer and winter vacationers. They should have a church, too, she thought, and a hospital for the birth of babies. The store was organized so much like a prison, it frightened her now and then to realize she was a part of it.

She turned the page quickly, and saw in big black script across two pages:"Are You Frankenberg Material?"

She glanced across the room at the windows and tried to think of something else. Of the beautiful black and red Norwegian sweater she had seen at Saks and might buy for Richard for Christmas, if she couldn't find a better-looking wallet than the ones she had seen for twenty dollars. Of the possibility of driving with the Kellys next Sunday up to West Point to see a hockey game. The great square window across the room looked like a painting by-Who was it? Mondrian. The little square section of window in the corner open to a white sky. And no bird to fly in or out. What kind of a set would one make for a play that took place in a department store ? She was back again.

But it's so different with you, Terry, Richard had said to her. You've got an absolute conviction you'll be out of it in a few weeks and the others haven't. Richard said she could be in France next summer. Would be. Richard wanted her to go with him, and there was really nothing that stood in the way of her going with him. And Richard's friend Phil McElroy had written him that he might be able to get her a job with a theatre group next month. Therese had not met Phil yet, but she had very little faith that he could get her a job. She had combed New York since September, gone back and combed it a few times more, and she hadn't found anything. Who gave a job in the middle of the winter to a stage designer apprentice just beginning to be an apprentice? It didn't seem real either that she might be in Europe with Richard next summer, sitting with him in sidewalk cafes, walking with him in Aries, finding the places Van Gogh had painted, she and Richard choosing towns to stop in for a while and paint. It seemed less real these last few days since she had been working at the store.

She knew what bothered her at the store. It was the sort of thing she wouldn't try to tell Richard. It was that the store intensified things that had always bothered her, as long as she could remember. It was the waste actions, the meaningless chores that seemed to keep her from doing what she wanted to do, might have done and here it was the complicated procedures with money bags, coat checkings, and time clocks that kept people even from serving the store as efficiently as they might-the sense that everyone was incommunicado with everyone else and living on an entirely wrong plane, so that the meaning, the message, the love, or whatever it was that each life contained, never could find its expression. It reminded her of conversations at tables, on sofas, with people whose words seemed to hover over dead, unstirrable things, who never touched a string that played. And when one tried to touch a live string, looked at one with faces as masked as ever, making a remark so perfect in its banality that one could not even believe it might be subterfuge. And the loneliness, augmented by the fact one saw within the store the same faces day after day, the few faces one might have spoken to and never did, or never could. Not like the face on the passing bus that seems to speak, that is seen once and at least is gone forever.