“Who sold it?”
“Fred did. Somebody he knows.”
“Does he get the commission?” Some dispute had arisen as to whether the repairmen deserved to get commissions on sets they sold.
“Yes,” she said.
“That’s okay by me,” he said. He drew a flat one percent on all the major appliances sold, no matter who sold them. Washing his hands, he said, “That may make some of the potted palm brigade march out the door.”
No answer. She has left, he decided. Drying his hands he picked up his newspaper and opened the door.
At noon, while he was considering where he wanted to have lunch, he looked up to see Chic Bonner parking his red Ford station wagon. Ah, Herb Tomford said. The mighty man himself.
Chic’s face, swollen and red from his hayfever, showed no particular emotion as he entered the store. “Morning, Herb,” he said. “Anything stirring?”
“Couple of things,” Tomford said, showing him the tags.
“Yes,” Chic said vaguely. “Say look, Herb. I want to see the floor-sanding man in here after we close up tonight. Can you get hold of him?”
“I think so,” Tomford said. “I have his number around somewhere.”
Kneeling down, Chic ran the palm of his hand over the floor past the edge of the carpet. “See those indentations? You know what does that? High school kids’ cleated shoes. I’m going to put up a sign that any kids with cleated shoes have to take their shoes off before they come in here. What do they want anyhow?”
“What does anybody want?” Tomford said, thinking to himself that a floor had to be kept up whether kids came in or not. “I sold a kid a Zenith portable, the other day. If that’s what you’re alluding to.”
“Did he make that rasping noise as he walked?”
“You mean, with his mouth?”
“I mean with his shoes.”
Tomford said, “I’m sorry, Mr. B. I was so hungry for the sale I didn’t stop to notice.”
Gazing around the store, Chic said, “It seems to me the Philco display has been up since September.”
“I’ll take it down.”
“Did they put in that window? Or did you?”
“I let them put it in,” Tomford said, knowing that Chic did not approve of letting the wholesalers climb into the store’s display windows. “That’s their job,” he said. “They have all the junk, the stapling guns and junk. I’m not going to tear my pants crawling around in the window. I wasn’t hired to do that. If you want us to do the windows you better get some gal or some fairy from one of the department stores. The last time I was out in the window a bunch of children stood there making faces at me as if I was something to be laughed at.”
“I see your point,” Chic said. “Well, we’ll see.” He passed on, then, into the general activity of the store.
Later, when Herb Tomford went upstairs, Mrs. L called him into the office. “This is your tag, isn’t it?” she said.
Something more, he thought to himself. “Yes,” he said. “That’s my tag. Tell me the part you can’t read.”
“Neither I nor the bookkeeper can read the street address.” She handed him the tag and he seated himself at the desk to read it. “Why don’t you use a ballpoint pen?” she asked. “Like everybody else. Those machines are made to work with ballpoint pens, not fountain pens. Fountain pens don’t create a firm enough impression.” She sat waiting. The tag, on blue paper, was the fourth carbon; the store operated a complex system to discourage employees from stealing.
“I can’t read it either,” Herb Tomford said. “I’ll look it up in the telephone book.” He returned the tag and picked up the phone book from the other desk.
“What was Chic talking to you about down at the front counter?” Mrs. L asked.
“The windows.”
“Don’t you consider it part of your job to do the windows? You have all the stuff supplied to you.”
Herb Tomford said, “When I came here Mr. L was doing the windows. I didn’t know it was going to become my job.”
“You know Roger only comes in at night to use the bench.”
“What’s he working on?” Tomford said.
“Ask him. Don’t you see him before you leave?”
Embarrassed, Tomford said, “You know I get the hell out of here at six.”
“Yes,” Mrs. L said. “That’s right. You do.”
Later, when Chic Bonner had come upstairs to the office, Virginia said to him, “Do you think we should keep Herb on?”
“I can’t make up my mind,” Chic said. “Maybe he’s got another iron or so in the fire. He doesn’t really take an interest.”
“It wouldn’t surprise me,” Virginia said. “One day he’ll tell us he’s moved down the street or across the street. I have a feeling he wants to get out of retail entirely. Somebody told me he’s been talking to Emerson. They need somebody to take over their Northern California office.”
Chic put on his peevish look; she saw that a little bit of begging was on the way. “Why don’t you ask Roger about doing the windows again? That wouldn’t kill him. He’s got plenty of time on his hands.”
“He’d have to do it during the day.” And both she and Chic knew Roger’s reluctance to come into the store while it was open for business.
“Why not at night?”
“He can’t see the colors,” she said. “Except in daylight. Everybody who does windows holds to that.”
“What about the weekends?”
“No,” she said. And that’s final, she said to herself. It was the arrangement between herself and Roger. The weekend was his. But of course Chic did not grasp that. For him, the world beyond the store had no substance. And for me, too, she thought. Except that I know about it; I understand it. Which is more than you can say for Mr. B.
“You decide about it,” Chic said. He had spread order sheets out on his desk; with a pencil he began to make tentative marks. “I’d rather leave it up to you.”
“There’s no urgency,” she said.
After he had worked on his order sheets for a time, Chic said to her, “Is it all right if I write Liz’s check this month against the store account? Those hayfever shots I’ve been taking… I’ve had to dip into my checking account. I’ll do what we’ve done in the past; I’ll have the bookkeeper list it as part of my salary paid in advance.”
“I don’t care,” Virginia said.
At his own desk, the bookkeeper heard and nodded.
“What is it?” Virginia asked. “Three hundred, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Chic said.
“Maybe she’ll remarry.”
“That wouldn’t help,” Chic said. “It’s child support; it’s for the two boys.” He stopped working and laid down his pencil in order to blow his nose. Then he tipped his head back and gave himself his nosedrops. “That man would have to legally adopt them.”
“You take that off your income tax, don’t you?”
“You bet,” Chic said, sniffling.
“Do you miss her?”
Chic said, “I miss the boys. I haven’t had time to miss her.” He added, “The store, I mean.”
“I think you did the right thing,” Virginia said. But I really don’t think that, she said to herself. I know that. There would have been no harmony here, with her banging around. I’m glad, she said to herself, that she could be persuaded.
“She’s living up in Santa Barbara,” Chic said.
“I know.” She did not feel much like discussing it; she went on with her own work.
Chic said, “You always saw through her, didn’t you? I give you credit for that.”
“Okay,” she said, knowing that he would go on and on.
“What did Roger think of her?” Chic said, turning his chair around so that he faced her, not his work. “Now there’s something that frankly baffles me. There’s a man I consider to have an innate ability to handle people and get along in the business world, but I’m convinced that when it comes to judging peo
ple on a personal level, he’s almost as faulty as I am. Present company excepted, of course. But—I really think Roger had an idealized image of Liz. Not so much different from my own, originally. My God, it took me ten or eleven years to begin to realize how fundamentally—” Gesturing, he mulled about for the word. “How fundamentally one-dimensional her viewpoint was.”
The phone rang downstairs. Then, at the bookkeeper’s desk, a buzzer buzzed twice. “It’s for you, Mrs. L,” the bookkeeper said, passing her the upstairs phone.
“Hello,” she said.
It was RCA, calling to report on some back-orders from the previous month. “No, they’re not dropped,” the distributor’s office girl said. “Do you want them dropped?”
She said no. “Thanks,” she said, and hung up.
During her phone conversation, Chic sat with his hands clasped together, meditating. “Before Liz decided to leave me,” he said, “did she come to you and ask you your opinion?”
“Yes,” Virginia said. In a sense, that could be said of it.
“What did you tell her?”
“I told her that I thought if she had no interest in your affairs then it was pretty ridiculous for her to hang around and pretend something she didn’t feel.”
Presently Chic said, “Sometimes I really do miss her.”
“Not very much,” Virginia said.
“No,” he agreed. “I guess not.” He continued to ponder, and then he picked up his pencil and returned to his order sheets. “I thought of visiting her one of these days,” he said. “If for no other reason than to see the boys.”
“She can send them down on the bus,” Virginia said. “How old are they? Fourteen? That’s old enough for them to come down here by themselves.”
“True,” Chic said. “She’s probably got them so mollycoddled by now that they’d be afraid to. That’s what bothers me, Virginia. Are they going to grow up to be sissy-like, and confused in their thinking, the way she is?”
Virginia said, “She only has them on weekends. As long as she keeps them in the school they’re receiving a balanced environment.”
With gloom, Chic said, “They only have the rest of this term. That’s as high as the school goes.”
“By then their minds will be formed,” Virginia said. Getting up, she went to the file to see about a bad debt, one of a group that she was considering turning over to a collection agency. “You want to write Watt off?” she asked Chic. “Give it up and hope for fifty percent from the agency?”
“Suits me,” he said, in his indifferent tone. At his orders he sat rubbing his forehead and breathing noisily. “This goddamn hayfever. I get it every year at this time.”
“It’s common,” Virginia said. “Allergies of one kind or another. Gregg’s tests showed that he’s allergic to string beans, potatoes, cat fur, wool, kapoc, house dust, and six or seven pollen-bearing plants. So consider yourself lucky.”
“What do they feed him, then?”
“The regular meals, but he leaves the potatoes and string beans. He never did eat wool or cat fur.”
“But he must have special blankets.”
“Yes,” she said. “He has had, for a year or so. It was the house dust that caused most of his asthma, not the smog. But on the smoggy days we kept the windows shut, and he usually played around in the house. That’s where he picked it up. Up there, he gets pollens quite a bit, but it doesn’t affect him anything like the house dust did.”
Blowing his nose, Chic said, “It’s a darn shame.”
At six o’clock, Herb Tomford locked the front door, said good night, and departed, in his gray topcoat, with his newspaper rolled up under his arm. The salesmen followed him out, and then the two repairmen.
“Good night, Mrs. L,” the bookkeeper said, taking down his coat from its hanger in the closet. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Good night, Mr. B.”
“Good night,” Virginia said.
“Is it six?” Chic said. He had been comparing a replacement Zenith price list with an older one, changing the selling prices on their display tags. On his desk, representing an hour or so of work, was a heap of clean new tags. “I’ll tie these on tomorrow,” he said to Virginia.
All afternoon writing out new tags, she thought. Going downstairs to the front counter, she opened the register and began counting the money into two cloth bags. Then she marked the register tape, stuck a slip in with the money, and closed up the bags. At the other register, Chic did the same.
“Good enough day,” Chic said.
“Yes,” she said.
“We’ll need dimes tomorrow.”
“Okay,” she said, examining the tags.
The front door opened, and Roger, key in hand, entered the store. “Hi,” he said to his wife.
“Hi,” she said. “How are you?” When she had left the house, that morning, he was still asleep.
“Fine. About ready?” He had come in with a cigarette in his hand, but now, as she glanced up at him, he dropped it into one of the ashtrays by the door and ground it out. Blinking, he wandered away. At sundown, getting off from work as he was, he had a gray spider-like quality; fatigue made him bend even more than usual, made him seem smaller and more dehydrated. His eyes, behind his glasses, were red-rimmed. Reaching up, he smoothed his hair back from his face.
“You look tired,” she said.
“Yeah.” He nodded absently. He still had on his workclothes, his stained trousers and shirt and jacket, and his high-topped shoes. Rubbing his lip, he said, “You feel much like dinner? I don’t. But I’ll go with you.”
“I’m hungry,” she said.
His meanderings carried him toward the rear of the store. “I’ll change,” he said. He disappeared through the door into the service department.
“Well, Virginia,” Chic said, in his hat and coat, “I’ll see you. Take it easy.”
“Good night,” she said. Standing in the center of the store, she listened; she lifted her head to hear the various sounds. Anything left on? she asked herself.
No, she decided.
“Remind me to tag up those sets tomorrow first thing,” Chic said. He unlocked the front door. “So we don’t lose any money.”
The door closed after him, and he walked across the parking lot to his Ford station wagon. As he backed from the lot onto the street he waved at her. She made a faint motion. Enough for him.
When Roger reappeared, he had on a stringy necktie and a pair of slacks. “Do I need my coat?” he said. “I guess not.”
Virginia said, “How’s the testing?”
At his job with Dunn, Inc. he tested switches along an assembly line; the switches became elements in circuits of computing apparatus, some of which eventually became missiles.
“About the same,” Roger said.
“Wait,” she said. “Before we go.” Bending, she switched on the window lights. “Take a look at the windows, would you?”
“Why?”
“Because you know something about how they should look.”
Not budging, he said, “They look okay.”
“I wish you’d take them over again,” she said.
“I don’t have time for that.”
“You only work five hours a day; you could do them in the mornings.”
Roger said, “They’re okay. Why do you keep picking on Herb? He’s a good guy.”
“Yes,” she said, “but is he good at his job?”
“I don’t see the difference.”
“No, you don’t,” she agreed. And she thought to herself, That is why I am running our half of the store and you are not. That is why I am the L instead of you. It could have been you, my dear. But you would have wanted a store full of good guys.
And, she thought, you also wanted another good guy, a good pal, one with brown hair and bright, merry eyes, and a smile that never had anything in it except come and help yourself. She was a good guy, wasn’t she? She loved and still loves her two boys; she probably loved and still loves you. And she was lo
yal to you, except that she was too stupid to act out her loyalty. And on your part, you were pretty stupid about it, too. You didn’t do her much good, you who are another good guy.
Where is she now? Virginia said to herself. Off by herself in another town, living on child support money from Chic and on her salary as a clerical typist with a milk company. Is she happy? Who knows. Who cares. In her case, who can tell.
But at least she has her boys, Virginia said to herself. If Chic had found out about her and Roger, he would have divorced her and she would have lost her boys. That would not have been right. Nor, Virginia thought, would that have been fair to Roger. If Chic had found out he would have made trouble for everyone. There would be no store. There would be nothing for anyone. At least Liz had enough intelligence to see that.
In a way, she thought, you are lucky, Liz Bonner. Because you had such a dim consciousness, a sort of salamander-like view of the world, you were able to enjoy yourself. You had your short merry span of life. It had an element of purity; it was untainted by any alertness to the future, or to real consequences, or to facts such as your husband and children and the fact that Roger has a wife and a child and did have a store to manage. You carried it off in a flash, once you got started; you started it going, and enjoyed it, and then you were dismayed and astonished. But at least nobody can prove you didn’t do it.
She thought, Nobody can prove you didn’t get it for a while. And maybe, for your kind of mentality, it was a long while. Maybe, for your tiny lifespan, it was a long, long time. Perhaps even as long as you can remember. To the limit of your perspective.
Maybe, she thought, you got what you were after because that was all you were after. Maybe you could conceive nothing more.
I wish I could do that, she thought. I wish we all could get something like that.
“Anyhow,” she said to Roger, “I wish you’d see if you could change the windows. You’d be doing Herb a favor. This window business is going to be a bone of contention, either until he gives in and humbles himself out in plain sight of everybody, or you do it, or the wholesalers do a better job of it.”
“I hate those goddamn wholesalers,” Roger said. “They walk into the store while you’re busy and start gumming up posters on the walls. You look around and you’ve got RCA signs hanging all over the place. I used to rip them down while the guy was still there; I wanted him to see me rip them down.” He lit another cigarette. His hands shook; she saw the match quiver.