A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

This time she didn’t have to go looking. The job fell into her lap. Since the next day was a Saturday and most places were closed, she decided nothing much could be done until the following Monday. So she went out for a stroll in the sunshine, an element that her last two occupations had almost completely deprived her of. As she was passing a candy-store, one of a well-known chain scattered throughout the city, a sweet tooth she hadn’t realized she had started to kick up. On impulse she went in and bought herself a quarter’s worth of spiced gum-drops. Then noticing that the middle-aged woman who waited on her was alone behind the counter, she asked her: “Could you use any help back there?”

“I have an assistant,” the woman told her. “Only she’s out sick today. But if you’re looking for this kind of work, I’ll give you a tip that may help. We’re opening a new retail store on Monday,” and she gave her the location. “Don’t go there, but go down to the head office and ask for the personnel manager.”

Marie was down there by eight, long before he had arrived himself, and by eleven she had the job. In the interview, she slanted the truth a little, without departing from the letter of it. There had been a candy-store in Allentown she had hung around and haunted as a youngster. More than once she’d been asked to help out behind the counter after school-hours. So that in fact she had previously worked in such a place. All she neglected to add was that she had been twelve, not twenty-two.

He made some mention about sending there for references, but in the meantime Marie went right to work. The references never appeared. Either the store had gone out of business long before, or the inquiry never reached it, or the answering letter became sidetracked somewhere in the piled-up files of the huge organization and just lay there inert. Marie stayed on.

After she’d been with them about seven months, the woman she was working under, who had been married the statutory number of months before, took a temporary leave of absence because of climactic pregnancy, and Marie was moved up into her place in the interim. The former manager never returned — either she gave up work or was sent to manage some other store — and Marie kept the job permanently.

So that all within the space of less than a year-and-a-half she had obtained a small but responsible managerial job, was working in surroundings that were pleasant and predominantly feminine (an important point in her case), had an attractive small-apartment unit of her own, and was leading the secure, conventional — and colorless — existence of the typical big-city bachelorette. Which was pretty good advancement, she told herself whenever she felt downhearted or whenever she felt lonely, for a girl who had come up literally from the bottom.

Such were the main facets of her outer, day-by-day life, its canons, scope, and practice. As for her inner one, her dreams and hopes and aspirations — ah, therein lay the gist of the matter. She was a romanticist, an idealist, she lived in a world of illusion. For her, a straight line ran down the middle of the world. On one side all was black, on the other all was white. She thought perfection existed in this world. In love. She thought it could be found, could be had, even by such as she. A story-book love was waiting for her somewhere along the way. A story-book love with a story-book ending. And she was so naive, so unversed in non commercial love, she refused to compromise, to make any allowances. It must come to her letter-perfect, freshly minted, and go on like that unchanged. “They lived happily ever after.” It had never occurred to her what unhappiness, boredom, and misery could result from that.

Then one night she met a man. The man.

Her life had fallen into a pattern, as all lives do. Every evening she left the candy-store at six, and took a bus over toward where she lived. But the bus didn’t actually pass by there, and so she was left with a gap she had to walk. Close by the bus-stop there was a restaurant, and she usually stopped in there first and had her meal before continuing on her way. Then from there, when she’d finished, she’d walk the rest of the way home. Along this final stretch however there was a neighborhood picture-house, a very nice picture-house really. Not too expensive, and it showed quite good pictures at times, even though it was merely second-run.

One Thursday, which was the day the weekly change of program took effect, she stopped when she got to it and started to scan the stills displayed out front, to try to ascertain whether or not it was something she might care for. The title was noncommittal, and though the people in it were good, you couldn’t always go by that either, she realized. She disliked mysteries, Westerns, and gangster-pictures, and on the other hand was fond of musicals and romances, the more saccharine the better.