Mechanical toys began to toss balls into the air and catch them, shooting galleries popped and their targets rotated. The table of barnyard animals squawked, cackled, and brayed. Behind Therese, a weary rat-tat-tat--tat-tat had started up, the drumbeats of the giant tin soldier who militantly faces the elevators and drummed all day. The arts and handcrafts table gave out a smell of fresh modeling clay, reminiscent of the art room at the school when she was very small, and also of a kind of vault on the school grounds, rumored to be the real tomb of someone, that she had used to stick her nose into through iron bars.
Mrs. Hendrickson, section manager of the doll department, was dragging dolls from the stock shelves and seating them, splay legged, atop the glass counters. Therese said hello to Miss Martucci, who stood at the counter counting the bills and coins from her moneybag with such concentration she could give Therese only a deeper nod of her rhythmically nodding head. Therese counted twenty-eight fifty from her own moneybag, recorded it on a slip of white paper for the sales receipts envelope, and transferred the money by denominations into her drawer in the cash register.
By now, the first customers were emerging from the elevators, hesitating a moment with the bewildered, somewhat startled expressions that people always had on finding themselves in the toy department, then starting off on weaving courses.
“Do you have the dolls that wet?” a woman asked her.
“I’d like this doll, but with a yellow dress,” a woman said, pushing a doll toward her, and Therese turned and got the doll she wanted out of a stock shelf. The woman had a mouth and cheeks like her mother’s, Therese noticed, slightly pocked cheeks under dark-pink rouge, separated by a thin red mouth full of vertical lines. “Are the Drinksy-Wetsy dolls all this size?” There was no need of salesmanship. People wanted a doll, any doll, to give for Christmas. It was a matter of stooping, pulling out boxes in search of a doll with brown eyes instead of blue, calling Mrs. Hendrickson to open a showcase window with her key, which she did grudgingly if she were convinced the particular doll could not be found in stock, a matter of sidling down the aisle behind the counter to deposit a purchased doll on the mountain of boxes on the wrapping counter that was always growing, always toppling, no matter how often the stock boys came to take the packages away. Almost no children came to the counter. Santa Claus was supposed to bring the dolls, Santa Claus represented by the frantic faces and the clawing hands. Yet there must be a certain good will in all of them, Therese thought, even behind the cool, powdered faces of the women in mink and sable, who were generally the most arrogant, who hastily bought the biggest and most expensive dolls, the dolls with real hair and changes of clothing. There was surely love in the poor people, who waited their turn and asked quietly how much a certain doll cost, and shook their heads regretfully and turned away.