The Price of Salt

by Claire Morgan

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 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.

“You must learn to trust people, Therese. Remember that,” Sister Alicia had often told her. And often, quite often, Therese tried to apply it.

Therese watched the hand carry a forkful of peas upward, and she did not have to look at the face to know what it would be like. It would be like all the fifty-year-old faces of women who worked at Frankenberg’s, stricken with an ever-lasting exhaustion and terror, the eyes distorted behind glasses that enlarged or made smaller, the cheeks splotched with rouge that did not brighten the grayness underneath. Therese could not look.

She remembered the face. It was the face whose exhaustion had made her see all the other faces.

Therese would stop for a moment to watch a certain toy train. The train was on a table by itself near the elevators. It was not a big fine train like the one that ran on the floor at the back of the toy department, but there was a fury in its tiny pumping pistons that the bigger trains did not possess. Its wrath and frustration on the closed oval track held Therese spellbound.

But the women in the cheap cloth coats, the timid men huddled inside shabby mufflers would be gone, wistfully glancing at other counters as they made their way back to the elevators. If people came for a doll, they didn’t want anything else. A doll was a special kind of Christmas gift, practically alive, the next thing to a baby.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sometimes she thought she was in love with him, waking up in the morning and looking blankly at the ceiling, remembering suddenly that she knew him, remembering suddenly his face shining with affection for her because of some gesture of affection on her part, before her sleepy emptiness had time to fill up with the realization of what time it was, what day, what she had to do, the soldier substance that made up one’s life. But the feeling bore no resemblance to what she had read about love. Love was supposed to be a kind of blissful insanity. Richard didn’t act blissfully insane either, in fact.

Their eyes met at the same instant, Therese glancing up from a box she was opening, and the woman just turning her head so she looked directly at Therese. She was tall and fair, her long figure graceful in the loose fur coat that she held open with a hand on her waist. Her eyes were gray, colorless, yet dominant as light or fire, and caught by them, Therese could not look away. She heard the customer in front of her repeat a question, and Therese stood there, mute. The woman was looking at Therese, too, with a preoccupied expression as if half her mind were on whatever it was she meant to buy here, and though there were a number of salesgirls between them, Therese felt sure the woman would come to her. Then Therese saw her walk slowly toward the counter, heard her heart stumble to catch up with the moment it had let pass, and felt her face grow hot as the woman came nearer and nearer.

She was conscious of the moments passing like irrevocable time, irrevocable happiness, for in these last seconds, she might turn and see the face she would never see again. She was conscious, too, dimly now and with a different horror, of the old, unceasing voices of customers at the counter calling for assistance, calling to her, and of the low, humming rrrrr of the little train, part of the storm that was closing in and separating her from the woman.

She got something out of her handbag, a lipstick and compact, and Therese looked at her lipstick case—golden like a jewel, and shaped like a sea chest. She wanted to look at the woman’s mouth, but the gray eyes so close drove her away, flickering over her like fire.

“I—” Should she tell her she usually worked on her stage models? Sketched and painted sometimes, carved things like cats’ heads and tiny figures to go in her ballet sets, but that she liked best to take long walks practically anywhere, liked best simply to dream? Therese felt she did not have to tell her. She felt the woman’s eyes could not look at anything without understanding completely.

“You’re a very pretty girl,” she said. “And very sensitive, too, aren’t you?” She might have been speaking of a doll, Therese thought, so casually had she told her she was pretty. “I think you are magnificent,” Therese said with the courage of the second drink, not caring how it might sound, because she knew the woman knew anyway.

“What a strange girl you are.” “Why?” “Flung out of space,” Carol said.

She saw his eyes open like unexpected spots of blue sky in the darkness.

“Are you tired?” Carol asked calmly. The question seemed not of now but of always. “Yes.”

She remembered reading—even Richard once saying—that love usually dies after two years of marriage. That was a cruel thing, a trick. She tried to imagine Carol’s face, the smell of her perfume, becoming meaningless. But in the first place could she say she was in love with Carol? She had come to a question she could not answer.

“And now you make a wish,” Richard said. Therese wished it. She wished for Carol.

This morning she had awakened in Carol’s house. Carol was like a secret spreading through her, spreading through this house, too, like a light invisible to everyone but her.

“Are you a painter, too?” “No,” Carol said with another smile. “I’m nothing.” “The hardest thing to be.”

I think there’s a definite reason for every friendship just as there’s a reason why certain atoms unite and others don’t—certain missing factors in one, or certain present factors in the other—what do you think? I think friendships are the result of certain needs that can be completely hidden from both people, sometimes hidden forever.”

“They’re not horrid. One’s just supposed to conform. I know what they’d like, they’d like a blank they could fill in. A person already filled in disturbs them terribly.

It shook Therese in the profoundest part of her where no words were, no easy words like death or dying or killing. Those words were somehow future, and this was present. An inarticulate anxiety, a desire to know, know anything, for certain, had jammed itself in her throat so for a moment she felt she could hardly breathe. Do you think, do you think, it began. Do you think both of us will die violently someday, be suddenly shut off? But even that question wasn’t definite enough. Perhaps it was a statement after all: I don’t want to die yet without knowing you. Do you feel the same way, Carol? She could have uttered the last question, but she could not have said all that went before it.

January. It was all things. And it was one thing, like a solid door. Its cold sealed the city in a gray capsule. January was moments, and January was a year. January rained the moments down, and froze them in her memory: the woman she saw peering anxiously by the light of a match at the names in a dark doorway, the man who scribbled a message and handed it to his friend before they parted on the sidewalk, the man who ran a block for a bus and caught it. Every human action seemed to yield a magic. January was a two-faced month, jangling like jester’s bells, crackling like snow crust, pure as any beginning, grim as an old man, mysteriously familiar yet unknown, like a word one can almost but not quite define.

“I think you’re being naïve.” Richard was looking at her stonily, resentfully, and Therese thought, it surely couldn’t be only this he was so resentful about. He resented the fact that she wasn’t and never could be what he wished her to be, a girl who loved him passionately and would love to go to Europe with him. A girl like herself, with her face, her ambitions, but a girl who adored him. “You’re not Phil’s type, you know,” he said.

They walked on under the first bridge over the path, where the path bent and the real park began. The air was cold and still, a little overcast, and Therese felt a motionlessness about everything, a lifeless stillness even in their slowly moving figures.

She stared at the darkness where Richard had disappeared. She did not feel guilty about tonight. It was something else. She envied him. She envied him his faith there would always be a place, a home, a job, someone else for him. She envied him that attitude. She almost resented his having it.

“I like being with her, I like talking with her. I’m fond of anybody I can talk to.” The phrases of some letter she had written to Carol and never mailed drifted across her mind as if to answer Richard. I feel I stand in a desert with my hands outstretched, and you are raining down upon me.

What could he ever understand of it, even if she explained it in a million words?

“It’s worse than being lovesick, because it’s so completely unreasonable. Don’t you understand that?” No, she didn’t understand a word.

“We may as well say good-by,” she said, “because neither of us will ever be any different from what we are this minute.”

Was life, were human relations like this always, Therese wondered. Never solid ground underfoot. Always like gravel, a little yielding, noisy so the whole world could hear, so one always listened, too, for the loud, harsh step of the intruder’s foot.

The lamp’s light framed her figure like a picture, and Therese had a feeling all this had happened before. She remembered suddenly: the woman in the window brushing up her long hair, remembered the very bricks in the wall, the texture of the misty rain that morning.

“Carol, I love you.” Carol straightened up. Therese stared at her with intense, sleepy eyes. Then Carol finished taking her pajamas from the suitcase and pulled the lid down. She came to Therese and put her hands on her shoulders. She squeezed her shoulders hard, as if she were exacting a promise from her, or perhaps searching her to see if what she had said were real. Then she kissed Therese on the lips, as if they had kissed a thousand times before. “Don’t you know I love you?” Carol said.

Happiness was like a green vine spreading through her, stretching fine tendrils, bearing flowers through her flesh. She had a vision of a pale-white flower, shimmering as if seen in darkness, or through water. Why did people talk of heaven, she wondered.

And she did not have to ask if this were right, no one had to tell her, because this could not have been more right or perfect.

How was it possible to be afraid and in love, Therese thought. The two things did not go together. How was it possible to be afraid, when the two of them grew stronger together every day? And every night. Every night was different, and every morning. Together they possessed a miracle.

But there were other days when they drove out into the mountains alone, taking any road they saw. Once they came upon a little town they liked and spent the night there, without pajamas or toothbrushes, without past or future, and the night became another of those islands in time, suspended somewhere in the heart or in the memory, intact and absolute.

There the eye and the brain played tricks with each other, for it was impossible to keep a steady concept of the proportion below, impossible to compare it on any human scale. Her own hand held up in front of her could look Lilliputian or curiously huge. And the town occupied only a fraction of the great scoop in the earth, like a single experience, a single commonplace event, set in a certain immeasurable territory of the mind. The eye, swimming in space, returned to rest on the spot that looked like a box of matches run over by a car, the man-made confusion of the little town.

Therese squeezed the wheel, then deliberately relaxed. She sensed a tremendous sorrow hanging over them, ahead of them, that was just beginning to reveal the edge of itself, that they were driving into. She remembered the detective’s face and the barely legible expression that she realized now was malice. It was malice she had seen in his smile, even as he said he was on no side, and she could feel in him a desire that was actually personal to separate them, because he knew they were together. She had seen just now what she had only sensed before, that the whole world was ready to be their enemy, and suddenly what she and Carol had together seemed no longer love or anything happy but a monster between them, with each of them caught in a fist.

Carol took her hand down from her face and sat back, and now in spite of the tiredness she looked as Therese always thought of her—the eyes that could be tender and hard at once as they tested her, the intelligent red lips strong and soft, though the upper lip trembled the least bit now.

“Of course.” Of course, of course. What else mattered except being with Carol, anywhere, anyhow? There was the Harkevy show in March, Harkevy might recommend her for a job somewhere else, but the jobs were uncertain and Carol was not.

We never fought, never came back knowing there was nothing else we wanted in heaven or hell but to be together. Did you ever care for me that much, I don’t know. But that is all part of it and all we have known is only a beginning. And it has been such a short time. For that reason it will have shorter roots in you. You say you love me however I am and when I curse. I say I love you always, the person you are and the person you will become. I would say it in a court if it would mean anything to those people or possibly change anything, because those are not the words I am afraid of. I mean, darling, I shall send you this letter and I think you will understand why I do, why I told the lawyers yesterday I would not see you again and why I had to tell them that, and I would be underestimating you to think you could not and to think you would prefer delay.

She stared at Richard’s envelope on her table, and felt all the words she wanted to say to him, that she had never said to him, rising in a torrent inside her. What right had he to talk about whom she loved or how? What did he know about her? What had he ever known?

I wonder do these men grade their pleasure in terms of whether their actions produce a child or not, and do they consider them more pleasant if they do. It is a question of pleasure after all, and what’s the use of debating the pleasure of an ice cream cone versus a football game—or a Beethoven quartet versus the Mona Lisa. I’ll leave that to the philosophers.

But the most important point I did not mention and was not thought of by anyone—that the rapport between two men or two women can be absolute and perfect, as it can never be between man and woman, and perhaps some people want just this, as others want that more shifting and uncertain thing that happens between men and women.