Girls In 3-B, The Read Online Free PDF Page B

half a day to find the damn place. You could punch the time-clock every day from now until Social Security and never see a familiar face in the waiting line; you could eat in the company cafeteria every day -- but nobody did -- and the macaroni casserole would be familiar but the face across the table wouldn't. The Store, always upper-cased in memos and bulletins, was a city of strangers.
    The girls from Gary and Michigan City and Elgin griped, coming in from the commuters' trains in the morning. So did the college girls working part-time in the Junior Miss department and the tough old birds who had been with the company ninety-nine years, starting as cash girls back in the days when the money-boxes sailed across the ceiling on wires. The pretty Polish girls from South Chicago complained, brought up as they were to the close-knit life of the apartment building, the neighborhood movie, the Sunday family dinner and Mass at St. Ladislaw's Church. All of the complaints were variations on the same theme -- sure, the pay was okay, and you got a fifteen per cent discount on everything you bought. But -- well, you didn't feel like a person; more like part of a machine. Too big.
    Barby liked it. She was the last stock girl in her department to go home after the credit books were filed away and the counters covered with muslin. Between five-twenty and five-forty the washroom was jammed with girls fixing their faces and having a quick smoke; then everyone rushed for the I.C. or subway or the Michigan bus, and quiet settled down. Barby liked to wait until the washroom was empty and take her time. She followed all her mother's teachings about grooming because they had become habitual -- washing her face before she applied fresh makeup, rubbing lotion into her hands after she washed off the carbon smudges. That her face as reflected in the long mirror above the basins was prettier than most didn't bother her; it was her face and she was used to it. She put her lipstick on with a little brush, drawing a clear line.
    It's big, she thought contentedly, taking her coin purse and tissues from the square plastic box that was like all other plastic boxes except for her name printed on the slip-in card. The Store was staffed by polite strangers who minded their own business and didn't look at her with curiosity or pry into her affairs. The garments she ticketed went out on the racks and were sold by salesgirls she knew as dimly familiar but nameless faces; the meals she ate were prepared by anonymous hands. The check she got twice a month was made out by some stranger to whom she was nothing but a clock number. If a man looked at her, eying the swing of her hips and the contour of her bosom, it was someone she would never see again and there was nothing to get excited about. She had been accosted on Van Buren two or three times, walking toward a late train, and had walked on calmly without giving the furtive men a second thought.
    Everyone sank out of sight at five-forty-five, dismissed by the click of a time clock, and came to life ten minutes before opening time in the morning. It was a neat arrangement.
    She walked past the shrouded counters, past the thin stooped Negro who ran a carpet sweeper between the aisles, and took the elevator to first. She went by the cosmetic counters, still delicately fragrant from the perfume that was sprayed into the air several times a day, and out of the employees' entrance, pausing to flash her I. D. card at the watchman. Real life, non-Store fife rushed up to meet her with the heat from the sidewalk. She remembered what she had been refusing to think about all day, that she was supposed to check apartment ads.
    In her billfold she had a list of names and addresses in the Hyde Park area and two folded five-dollar bills with which to pay a deposit if she found anything at all possible. Apartments were hard to find and rents were high; even the lower-priced places, dirty and infested as they were, had waiting