Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

in one or two at a time mostly wanting coffee or a Coke. I kept the cups washed and wiped, the counter clean, and apparently I made out the bills properly, since there was no complaint. The customers were mostly old people, as the woman had said. Some spoke to me in a kindly way, saying I was new here and even asking where I came from. Others seemed to be in a kind of trance. One woman wanted toast and I managed that. Then I did a ham sandwich. There was a little flurry with four people there at once. A man wanted pie and ice cream, and I found the ice cream hard as cement to scoop out. But I did it. I got more confident. I said to them, “Here you are” when I set down their orders, and “Here’s the damage” when I presented the bill.
    In a slow moment the woman from the till came over.
    “I see you made somebody toast,” she said. “Can you read?”
    She pointed to a sign stuck on the mirror behind the counter.
    NO BREAKFAst ITEMS SERVED AFTER II A.M.
    I said that I thought it was okay to make toast, if you could make toasted sandwiches.
    “Well, you thought wrong. Toasted sandwiches, yes, ten cents extra. Toast, no. Do you understand now?”
    I said yes. I wasn’t so crushed as I might have been at first. All the time I was working I thought what a relief it would be to go back and tell Mr. Vorguilla that yes, I had a job. Now I could go and look for a room of my own to live in. Maybe tomorrow, Sunday, if the drugstore was closed. If I even had one room, I thought, Queenie would have some place to run away to if Mr. Vorguilla got mad at her again. And if Queenie ever decided to leave Mr. Vorguilla (I persisted in thinking of this as a possibility in spite of how Queenie had finished her story), then with the pay from both our jobs maybe we could get a little apartment. Or at least a room with a hot plate and a toilet and shower to ourselves. It would be like when we lived at home with our parents except that our parents would not be there.
    I garnished each sandwich with a bit of torn-off lettuce and a dill pickle. That was what another sign on the mirror promised. But when I got the dill pickle out of a jar I thought it looked like too much, so I cut it in half. I had just served a man a sandwich in this way when the woman from the till came over and got herself a cup of coffee. She took her coffee back to the till and drank it standing up. When the man had finished his sandwich and paid for it and left the store she came over again.
    “You gave that man half a dill pickle. Have you been doing that with every sandwich?”
    I said yes.
    “Don’t you know how to slice a pickle? One pickle ought to last ten sandwiches.”
    I looked at the sign. “It doesn’t say a slice. It says a pickle.”
    “That’s enough,” the woman said. “Get out of that apron. I don’t take any back talk from my employees, that’s one thing I won’t do. You can get your purse and get out of here. And don’t go asking me where’s your pay because you haven’t been any use to me anyway and this was just supposed to be training.”
    The gray-haired man was peeking out, with a nervous smile.
    So I found myself out on the street again, walking to the streetcar stop. But I knew the way some streets went now and I knew how to use a transfer. I had even had experience at a job. I could say that I had worked behind a lunch counter. If anybody wanted a reference it would be tricky—but I could say the lunch counter was in my hometown. While I waited for the streetcar I took out the list of other places where I meant to apply, and the map that Queenie had given me. But it was later than I’d thought, and most places seemed too far away. I dreaded having to tell Mr. Vorguilla. I decided to walk back, in the hopes that when I got there he’d have gone.
    I had just turned up the hill when I remembered the Post Office. I found my way back to it and got a letter out of the box and walked home again. Surely he would be gone by now.
    But he wasn’t. When I walked past the open living-room window that overlooked the path beside the house, I heard music. It wasn’t what Queenie would play. It was the sort of complicated music that we had heard sometimes coming through the open windows of the Vorguillas’ house—music that demanded your attention and then didn’t go anywhere, or at least didn’t go anywhere soon enough. Classical.
    Queenie was in the kitchen, wearing another of her skimpy dresses, and all her makeup. She had