“Do you like it here?”
Therese nodded.
“Finished?” A young man in a white apron gripped the woman’s plate with an imperative thumb.
The woman made a tremulous, dismissing gesture. She pulled her saucer of canned sliced peaches toward her. The peaches, like slimy little orange fishes, slithered over the edge of the spoon each time the spoon lifted, all except one which the woman would eat.
“I’m on the third floor in the sweater department. If you want to ask me anything”--the woman said with nervous uncertainty, as if she were trying to deliver a message before they would be cut off or separated--“come up and talk to me sometime. My name is Mrs. Robichek, Mrs. Ruby Robichek, five fourty-four.”
“Thank you very much,” Therese said. And suddenly the woman’s ugliness disappeared, because her reddish brown eyes behind the glasses were gentle, and interested in her. Therese could feel her heart beating, as if it had come to life. She watched the woman get up from the table, and watched her short, thick figure move away until it was lost in the crowd that waited behind the barricade.
Therese did not visit Mrs. Robichek, but she looked for her every morning when the employees trickled into the building around a quarter to nine, and she looked for her in the elevators and in the cafeteria. She never saw her, but it was pleasant to have someone to look for in the store. It made all the difference in the world.
Nearly every morning when she came to work on the seventh floor, 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.
Awrr rr rrgh! it said as it hurled itself blindly into the papier-mache tunnel.
And Urr rr rr rgh! as it emerged.