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  He made a small modest gesture. “Mine. I have fun doing them, and every once in a while somebody buys one.” He smiled. “Why don’t you look around, if you’re not in any hurry? I mean, if you’re interested in books. You don’t have to buy anything.”

  It was true, the place was empty except for the two of them. She knew the story: the boy sensitive, working in a store or an office at a job perhaps made for him by an uncle or friend of the family, always out of things, always nervous about his hidden personal life. Dismissals, the staff being cut, the company reorganized, never the real reason, always an embarrassed excuse.

  He was looking at her. She said, “Thanks, maybe I will. I just moved here from Chicago, and I haven’t met anybody yet.” And remembered the freshly curled hair and the printed silk, the idiotic ruffle. Take off your mask, but how? He said politely, “It’s not a very interesting town,” and turned away. She had no answer. If she said, “Yes, but I have to go where my husband goes,” it would only bear out the lying testimony of the ruffled dress.

  It seemed odd, now, that she had never had a close male friend. Bake had half a dozen, two nice boys who shared an apartment on the floor above her, a gray-haired man with an invalid wife who took her to concerts—you saw him in Karla’s now and then, having a drink with one girl or another before going back to his furnished room. But she had never known any man well enough to count him as a friend. She thought she might like to know this boy better.

  The doorbell jingled again. Sunshine poured in, outlining the figure of a girl on the threshold. She came in slowly, pulling the door shut behind her. In outline, against the harsh outdoor light, she seemed like a slender boy of fifteen or sixteen, his angles not yet blunted into manhood. Once in the room she was neither fifteen nor a boy. There were fine creases at the corners of her eyes and around her thin neck, and the line of her shoulders was purely feminine. She had high cheekbones and ash-blonde hair cut short; where it curled around her forehead it was dark with perspiration. She wore blue slacks and a striped cotton shirt, with sneakers; her bare ankles were fine-boned.

  She said, ignoring Frances, “I just wanted to tell you the committee meets tonight at Joe’s. The books they ordered have come.”

  “All right.”

  I ought to leave, Frances thought. They know each other and I’m an outsider. But she was unable to go. Embarrassed and a little frightened, but compelled, she said, “You look like someone I know.”

  “Are you a parent? I’m a teacher, so naturally I meet a lot of parents.”

  “No. I only meant—”

  She was floundering. The boy came to her rescue. He said, “She’s new in town and she likes John’s cats. If she has any sense at all,” he said, lifting his narrow shoulders, “she’ll go right back where she came from. No matter where it is, it can’t be as bad as here.”

  The girl was sizing her up. Frances gave back the look. She looked like Kay. There was no real physical resemblance; Kay was taller and more filled out, and her hair was reddish-brown. It was the boylike air. Put this one in tights and tunic and she could play Rosalind, half boy and half woman, a face crossed by fleeting part-expressions. Looks or no looks, in some way that really mattered, she was like Kay.

  She said, “No, you look like a girl I know. Used to know. Would you both like to go somewhere and have a drink?”

  The appraising silence was like Kay’s, too. Then the fair girl gave her a polite smile with no depth to it. “Thanks, but I have an engagement. Maybe another time.”

  Frances was helpless. She wanted to grab this stranger by the sleeve and beg her not to go away. To say, “Look at me, listen to me, I’m not what you think I am, so don’t look at this disguise I have on. I’m your kind of person and I need to know you. Because I’ve been away from home for a long time.”

  You can’t do these things.

  She might be wrong, tricked by an accidental resemblance. She stood silent while the girl left, the little bell over the door fading away into silence. Walking lightly in dirty sneakers, moving like a dancer, she was gone.

  The boy said, “Don’t let Erika bother you. She’s a wonderful person and she’s had a rough time. Her best friend was killed in an accident last winter and she was in the hospital for a long time.”

  “I like her.”

  The statement fell on its face. He let it lie there. “Why don’t you just browse around, if you feel like it, and I’ll be in the back room if you find something you like. My name is Vince,” he added with a charming smile.

  She was too confused to look at books. She bought the carved cat, paid for it and left clutching it, with change in her sweaty hand.

  The heat didn’t bother her now, or the toe-pinching shoes, or the fact that she had missed both breakfast and lunch. She walked unseeing through the noon streets without considering where she was going. At the corner she almost bumped into a woman who swerved aside to miss her, then called her by name. Half a block later she realized that it was one of the Wives—which one, she had no idea. It didn’t matter.

  Thank God, there was someone. Someone whose last name she didn’t know, who had barely spoken to her and then only to rebuff her. Erika, a teacher—and she had lost someone in a tragic accident. “Best friend” was the way Vince had put it, of course. That meant she was alone and probably lonely.

  I have to see her again, Frances thought, worried. But how? And how to undo this horrible first impression?

  Through the bookstore boy, of course. Anyone can buy books.

  It was after twelve. The sun stood high in the sky behind a stone church with square towers, flying buttresses, and the most lurid stained glass windows she had ever seen, dominating a downtown corner as though the town had grown up around it. As it probably had.

  She felt tired. She signalled a cruising cab.

  Halfway home, she remembered that she had left her nylons and letter paper in the bookstore. That meant she would have to go back and pick them up. Blessed Freudian slip, giving her a good excuse for what she most wanted to do.

  It was Friday, the end of the week. There was the weekend to get through, and a triumphant Bill who was already in the swing of things at the plant, very much on top, already confident with success. Already the top-echelon men at the factory were replacing his city friends in his dinner-table monologues and, so far as she could tell, in his affections. He had found a good barber, a satisfactory place to lunch and a quiet bar for a five o’clock drink. At home he was happy and undemanding, asking only that she appreciate him. True, Sunday was coming up and he would probably start fumbling at her before she got the dinner dishes stacked, but she could stand it.

  She shut her eyes and leaned her head back against the slippery upholstery, thinking about a slender sad-faced girl with fair hair and a light way of walking.

  I’ll find her, she thought, smiling a little, and next time I’ll be myself. I’ll find some way to let her know.

  4 SHE LAY AWAKE FOR A LONG TIME AFTER BILL rolled over to his own side of the bed, turned his face to the wall and began to snore. The male smell was on her, the events of the last half hour were clear in her mind, yet it all seemed unreal, like something seen in the movies. She thought, I really am a whore. And she didn’t care.

  At last she got up, too restless to lie still anymore and afraid that her turning would wake Bill. She showered, put on her old terry robe, and went downstairs, feeling her way along stair railings and groping for doorknobs in the still-unfamiliar house. Under the bright overhead light of the kitchen she made coffee and sat writing shopping lists while it perked. Things she needed for the house: a sofa, rugs, curtains, a telephone stand. Things she needed for herself: a light jacket, gloves, shampoo. In the morning she would read it all over and decide how much of it made sense; she always felt wide-awake and alert at this hour, but in the light of day her ideas sometimes looked quite different.

  She knew, in the back of her mind, why she was doing all this. With a handful of lists she had a vali
d reason for going downtown in the morning, and while she was there she would visit the bookstore. That was what she had been waiting for all through Friday night, Saturday and Sunday—might as well admit it. She set down her empty cup and looked blindly out of the window.

  She was setting out to look for a girl she had seen only once, a girl who had no reason to be interested in her; who might even, if they met again, actively dislike her. No reason she shouldn’t.

  She put all the lists in her purse and picked her way back to bed. The radium dial of her clock said one twenty. She lay thinking about Erika’s greenish-gray eyes. Did they slant a little or didn’t they? Something gave her a slightly exotic look, piquant with that fair hair. She fell asleep trying to make up her mind.

  Bill looked a little guilty at breakfast and a little resentful too, like a man who has been accused of something he didn’t do but would have liked to. He said, “It’s going to be a hot day,” and she said, scorning the weather, “I’m going downtown to look at some furniture. All right?”

  “Better fix yourself some breakfast then.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “You don’t need to diet. You women are all crazy when it comes to weight.”

  “That’s right.”

  He looked at her, unsatisfied but finding nothing to argue with.

  She put on an old cotton skirt, plain shirt and loafers, office clothes left over from the days when she was Bake’s girl—not to be confused with Mrs. William Ollenfield. Pushing the hangers along her closet bar and looking with distaste at her wardrobe, she wondered what had ever possessed her to buy so many clothes she didn’t like. Mrs. William Ollenfield seemed to be the sort of woman who goes shopping in a hat and gloves, who wears little printed silks and puts scatter pins on the lapel of a suit. Sooner or later, she would want and get a fur coat. Frances faced herself in the long mirror.

  She was no longer certain who she was or what she might hope to become, but she certainly didn’t intend to spend the rest of her life pretending to be Mrs. William Ollenfield, that smug little housewife. She didn’t even like the way the woman did her hair. She ran a wet comb through the lacquered curls, smacked down the resulting fuzz with a brush dipped in Bill’s hair stuff, and caught the subdued ends in a barrette. The plain styling brought out the oval shape of her face and the winged eyebrows, her only beauty. (Not quite the only one, Bake had argued, touching her lightly to remind her.) Now she was beginning to look like herself again.

  She ran downstairs, relishing the freedom of bare legs and old shapeless loafers.

  It was one of those lazy summer days that seem endless, with sunlight clear and golden over the world and great patches of shade under arching branches. Grass and trees still wore the bright green of early summer. People moved along with open, friendly faces, looking washed and ironed. She climbed aboard a fat yellow bus and handed the driver a dollar, not wanting to admit that she didn’t know what the fare was. He gave back eighty-five cents.

  She saw now that at some point during the weekend she had ceased to take for granted the continued backing of the Ollenfield income. She felt free and self-reliant. She wasn’t sure why, but no doubt she would find out in time.

  In front of the bookstore, however, she lost her courage. She stood looking into the display window, which was just as it had been on Friday except for a small ivory Madonna where her wooden cat had been. As long as she didn’t go in, anything was possible. But if she went in and Vince wasn’t there, or if he was cool to her or refused to tell her about Erika—well, she reminded herself, I won’t be any worse off than I was this time last week. Back where I started from.

  But she knew she would have lost something important. A hope so new and fragile she dared not examine it.

  She turned the knob and went in.

  The fair girl was sitting on a folding chair at the back of the room, writing on a clipboard. She looked up as Frances came in, heralded by the little silvery bell. Several expressions crossed her face—recognition, surprise, terror. She stood up, holding the clipboard stiffly at her side. “Vince. Customer.”

  A voice from somewhere in the back. “Don’t forget what I said.”

  “Vince says that I owe you an apology. I’m sorry I was rude.”

  “But you weren’t rude. You were terribly polite.”

  “That’s what Vince said. There is a rude kind of politeness.”

  “I know, you use it on people you don’t like. But there’s no reason you should like me,” Frances admitted. “You don’t even know me. I have no business going around asking strangers out for drinks—”

  “I keep telling her,” Vince said, coming in elegantly from a back room, dirty hands held out in front of him, “you either like people or you don’t, and why wait for a formal introduction? Personally,” he said airily, “I always know the first time I meet somebody, and I hardly ever change my mind. I must say this is an improvement over that terrible dress you had on the other time, though.”

  Frances was too embarrassed to answer. Vince came to a graceful stop between her and Erika. “It’s my day for apologies too,” he said nicely. “I didn’t get your name and address when you were here, or ask you what kind of books you were interested in. You left your packages, too.”

  “Frances Ollenfield.”

  “This is Erika Frohmann. Now you’ve been introduced. You can be rude to each other if you want to.”

  He retreated into the back again. There was the sound of running water. Erika Frohmann seemed to be gathering up her courage. “I’m not very good at meeting people,” she said, looking not at Frances but at the floor. “And you reminded me of someone too. Not a parent.”

  “I look like a million other people.”

  Vince emerged again, drying his hands on a small grimy towel. “Don’t be modest, my dear. You have a lovely profile—now you’ve done away with those dreadful, horrible curls. If I didn’t give my customers a little shove they might never get acquainted. They’re such a small group I feel they ought to know one another.”

  Frances said, “I like small groups.” Take off your mask, let me see if you know. They wouldn’t, of course. Even if they wondered, caution was an hourly habit. She asked, hot faced, “Is it all right if I look at the books?”

  “Sure, go ahead. You can wash your hands when you get through.”

  Erika Frohmann said defensively, “Paper gets so dirty.” She sat down again, but tentatively, propping her clipboard against the edge of a counter and plainly trying to think of something to write. Her apology made and accepted, if only tacitly, the conversation was apparently over as far as she was concerned.

  Frances walked slowly to the shelves, conscious of the silent figure behind her. But the fascination of print took over. Bake had long ago introduced her to secondhand bookstores on Clark Street and Dearborn, a wonderful clutter of junk and treasure, with the three-for-a-dollar bins just outside their doors and tables of old tattered paperbacks just inside. She was still unable to pass a secondhand bookstore.

  This place was small, but there was enough to keep her here all day. She walked slowly, picking up volumes as she went along, now and then putting one back, scrupulously, where it had been in the first place.

  Here were the Ann Bannon books side-by-side with Jeanette Foster’s Sex Variant Women in Literature, North Beach Girl, and Take Me Home next to the Covici-Friede edition of The Well of Loneliness, dated 1928. Here, huddled together as though for warmth in an unfriendly world, were Gore Vidal and a tall thin volume of Baudelaire, translated by someone she had never heard of. Here were books in the field, for people with a special interest, a special orientation.

  Her voice came out shrill with self-consciousness. “Are these for sale?”

  Vince came to see what she was talking about. “That depends. Why do you want them?”

  Now. Tell him. But she could only say, “I’ve read most of them, but there are some I don’t know.”

  He looked at her. The right ans
wer evidently showed on her face; he nodded. “I’ll ask Erika. A lot of them belong to her. She may want them back.”

  Erika stood up, soundless in flat canvas shoes. He said, indicating Frances with his thumb, “Can she have your books?”

  “What for?”

  “I thought you wanted to get rid of them. That was the general idea of bringing them here, wasn’t it?”

  “But not to just anybody.”

  Frances waited. The books are here to be sold, she thought, this is a bookstore. Why are they on display if they’re not for sale? But she said nothing. Something more was involved—this was a matter with deep emotional implications, and anything she said was likely to be wrong. It was the boy, Vince, who said with an impatient edge to his voice, “You can have them back if you’ve changed your mind. Go on, take them home with you.”

  Erika’s face was hard and cold. She looked at Frances. “Let her take them if she wants. But not for money.”

  “Look, we went through this with the insurance money.”

  “It’s the same thing.”

  Vince said to Frances, “It’s not just curiosity, is it? You won’t pass them around for your friends to laugh at?”

  Frances said steadily, daring everything now, “If I had any friends here, they’d be interested for different reasons.”

  Vince smiled. “Okay, they’re yours. No charge. Get them out of Erika’s way. She likes to come here and brood.”

  Erika put the clipboard down on the counter, carefully, as though it might shatter. She walked soundlessly out of the store. The chimes over the door jingled. A streak of sunlight flashed across the floor and was gone.

  Vince took the half dozen assorted books Frances was holding, since she seemed unable to put them down. “Don’t look that way. I wasn’t trying to hurt your feelings.”