Authors: Colm Tóibín
“Miss Fortini is going to teach you how to use the cash system, which is easy once you know it. And if you have any problems, go to her first, even the smallest thing. The only way for the customers to be happy is for the staff to be happy. You work nine to six, Monday through Saturday, with forty-five minutes for lunch
and one half-day a week. And we encourage all our staff to do night classes—”
“We were speaking about that just now,” Father Flood interrupted.
“So if you wanted to do night classes, we would pay part of the tuition. Not all of it, mind. And if you want to purchase anything in the store, you tell Miss Fortini and with most things there will be a reduction in the price.”
Miss Fortini asked Eilis if she was ready to start. Father Flood took his leave as Miss Bartocci went to her desk and briskly began to open the post. When Miss Fortini led her to the shop floor and showed her the cash system, Eilis did not want to say that they had exactly the same system in Bolger’s in Rafter Street at home, where the cash and a docket were put into a metal holder that was sent through the shop by a system of tubes until it arrived at the cash office, where the docket was marked paid, put back in the container with the change and returned. Eilis allowed Miss Fortini to explain it to her carefully, as though she had never seen anything like it before.
Miss Fortini then alerted the cash office that she would be sending a number of dummy dockets, each with five dollars enclosed. She showed Eilis how to fill out the dockets, writing her own name and the date at the top, then below the item purchased with the quantity on the left-hand side and the price on the right-hand side. She should also, Miss Fortini said, note the amount of money she was sending on the back of the docket, just so there would be no misunderstanding. Most customers would have to wait for their change, Miss Fortini said. Hardly anyone ever came up with the right amount, and most items, in any case, cost some number of dollars and then ninety-nine cents, or an uneven number of cents. If a customer were purchasing more than one item, Miss Fortini advised, Eilis should do the maths herself, but it would always be checked as well in the cash office.
“If you don’t make mistakes, they’ll notice you and they’ll get to like you,” she added.
Eilis watched as Miss Fortini wrote out several dockets for her and sent them and then waited for them to return. She then filled some out herself, the first for a single item purchased, the second for a number of the same item, and the third for a complicated mixture of items. Miss Fortini stood over her as she did the addition.
“It’s better to go slowly and then you won’t make mistakes,” she said.
Eilis did not tell Miss Fortini that she never made mistakes when she did addition. Instead, she worked slowly, as she had been advised, making sure that the figures were correct.
She was surprised by some of the items of clothing for sale. The cups of some of the brassieres seemed much more pointed than anything she had seen before, and an item called a two-way stretch, which looked as though it had plastic bones in the middle, was new to her. The first thing she sold was called a brasalette, and she decided that, when she knew the other boarders at Mrs. Kehoe’s well enough, she would ask one of them to take her through these items of American women’s underwear.
The work was easy. Miss Fortini was interested only in time-keeping and tidiness and making sure that the slightest complaint or query was immediately conveyed to her. She was not hard to locate, Eilis discovered, as she was always watching, and if you seemed to be having the slightest difficulty with a customer and if you were not seen to be smiling, Miss Fortini would notice and begin to move towards you signalling to you, stopping only if she saw that you looked both busy and pleasant.
Eilis learned quickly where she could have a fast lunch at a counter and then have twenty minutes to explore the other shops around Fulton Street. Diana and Patty and Mrs. Kehoe all told her
that the best clothes shop near Bartocci’s was Loehmann’s on Bedford Avenue. Downstairs at Loehmann’s at lunchtime was always busier than Bartocci’s, and the clothes seemed cheaper, but the minute Eilis made her way upstairs she thought of Rose because it was the most beautiful shop floor she had ever seen, not really like a shop at all, closer to a palace, with fewer people shopping and elegantly dressed assistants. When she looked at the prices she had to convert them into pounds to make any sense of them. They appeared very low. She tried to remember some of the dresses and costumes and their prices so she could give Rose a precise description of them, but each time she went there she had only a few minutes to spare, as she did not want to return late to the shop floor at Bartocci’s. She had had no difficulties so far with Miss Fortini and she did not want to have any problems so early in her time working for her.
One morning, when she had been there for three weeks and was on her fourth, Eilis knew that something strange had happened as soon as she reached the other side of Fulton Street and could see the windows of Bartocci’s. They were covered in huge banners saying
FAMOUS NYLON SALE
. She did not know that they had planned to have a sale, presuming that they would not do so until January. In the locker room she met Miss Fortini, to whom she expressed surprise.
“Mr. Bartocci always keeps it a secret. He supervises all the work himself overnight. The whole floor is nylon, everything nylon, and most at half price. You can buy four items yourself. And this is a special bag to keep the money in because you can only accept exact change. We’ve put even prices on everything. So no dockets today. And there will be tight security. It will be the biggest scramble you’ve ever seen in your life because even the
nylon stockings are half price. And there’s no lunch break, instead there will be free sandwiches and soda down here, but don’t come more than twice. I’ll be watching. We need everyone working.”
Within half an hour of opening there were queues outside. Most women wanted stockings; they took three or four pairs before moving to the back of the store, where there were nylon sweater sets in every possible colour and in most sizes, everything at least half off the regular price. The job of the sales assistant was to follow the crowd with Bartocci carrier bags in one hand and the cash bag in the other. All the customers seemed to know that there would be no change given.
Miss Bartocci and two of the office staff manned the doors, which had to be kept shut from ten o’clock as the crowds surged. The people who normally worked in the cash department had special uniforms and worked on the shop floor as well. A few stood outside and made sure that the queue was orderly. The shop, Eilis thought, was the hottest and busiest place she had ever seen. Mr. Bartocci walked through the crowd taking the cash bags and emptying them into a huge canvas sack that he carried.
The morning was full of frenzy; she did not for one moment have peace to look around her. Everyone’s voice was loud, and there were times when she thought in a flash of an early evening in October walking with her mother down by the prom in Enniscorthy, the Slaney River glassy and full, and the smell of leaves burning from somewhere close by, and the daylight going slowly and gently. This scene kept coming to her as she filled the bag with notes and coins and women of all types approached her asking where certain items of clothing could be found or if they could return what they had bought in exchange for other merchandise, or simply wishing to purchase what they had in their hands.
Although Miss Fortini was not especially tall, she appeared to be able to oversee everything, answering questions, picking things
up from the floor that had fallen there, tidying and stacking goods neatly. The morning had gone by quickly, but as the afternoon wore on Eilis found herself watching the clock, discovering after a while that she was checking every five minutes in between dealing with what seemed like hundreds of customers as the supply of nylon goods began to dwindle slowly, enough for Miss Fortini to tell her to take what she needed herself, four items only, downstairs now. She could, she was told, pay for them later.
She selected a pair of nylon stockings for herself, one she thought might suit Mrs. Kehoe, and then one each for her mother and for Rose. Having taken them downstairs and put them in her locker, she sat with one of the other assistants and drank a soda and then opened another that she sipped until she thought that Miss Fortini would notice her absence. When she went back upstairs, she discovered that it was only three o’clock and some of the nylon items that were running short were being replaced, were being almost dumped on to the display cases by men who were overseen by Mr. Bartocci. Later, when she was having her evening meal at Mrs. Kehoe’s, she discovered that both Patty and Sheila had found out about the sale and had rushed around during their lunch break, running in to get some items and running out again so that they did not have time in the middle of all the crush to see where she was and say hello.
Mrs. Kehoe seemed pleased by the pair of stockings and offered to pay for them, but Eilis said they were a gift. That evening, during supper, they all talked about Bartocci’s Famous Nylon Sale, which always happened without warning, yet they were amazed when Eilis told them that even she who worked there had no idea the sale was going to happen.
“Well, if you ever hear, even a rumour,” Diana said, “you’ll have to let us all know. And the nylon stockings are the best, they don’t run as easily as some of the others. They’d sell you garbage, some of those other stores.”
“That’s enough now,” Mrs. Kehoe said. “I’m sure all the stores are doing their best.”
With all the excitement and discussion surrounding the nylon sale, Eilis did not notice until the end of the meal that there were three letters for her. The minute she came back from work every day she had checked the side table in the kitchen where Mrs. Kehoe left letters. She could not believe that she had forgotten to check this evening. She drank a cup of tea with the others, holding the letters in her hand nervously, feeling her heart beating faster when she thought about them, waiting to go to her room and open them and read the news from home.
The letters, she knew by the handwriting, were from her mother and Rose and Jack. She decided to read her mother’s first and leave Rose’s until the end. Her mother’s letter was short and there was no news in it, just a list of the people who were asking for her with some details of where her mother had met them and when. Jack’s letter was much the same, but with references to the crossing that she had told him about in her letter and had said very little about in her letter to her mother and Rose. Rose’s handwriting was, she saw, very beautiful and clear, as usual. She wrote about golf and work and how quiet and dull the town was and how lucky Eilis was to be in the bright lights. In a postscript, she suggested that Eilis might like sometimes to write to her separately about private matters or things that might worry their mother too much. She suggested that Eilis might use her work address for these letters.
The letters told Eilis little; there was hardly anything personal in them and nothing that sounded like anyone’s own voice. Nonetheless, as she read them over and over, she forgot for a moment where she was and she could picture her mother in the kitchen taking her Basildon Bond notepad and her envelopes and setting out to write a proper letter with nothing crossed out. Rose, she thought, might have gone into the dining room to
write on paper she had taken home from work, using a longer, more elegant white envelope than her mother had. Eilis imagined that Rose when she was finished might have left hers on the hall table, and her mother would have gone with both letters in the morning to the post office, having to get special stamps for America. She could not imagine where Jack had written his letter, which was briefer than the other two, almost shy in its tone, as though he did not want to put too much in writing.
She lay on the bed with the letters beside her. For the past few weeks, she realized, she had not really thought of home. The town had come to her in flashing pictures, such as the one that had come during the afternoon of the sale, and she had thought of course of her mother and Rose, but her own life in Enniscorthy, the life she had lost and would never have again, she had kept out of her mind. Every day she had come back to this small room in this house full of sounds and gone over everything new that had happened. Now, all that seemed like nothing compared to the picture she had of home, of her own room, the house in Friary Street, the food she had eaten there, the clothes she wore, how quiet everything was.
All this came to her like a terrible weight and she felt for a second that she was going to cry. It was as though an ache in her chest was trying to force tears down her cheeks despite her enormous effort to keep them back. She did not give in to whatever it was. She kept thinking, attempting to work out what was causing this new feeling that was like despondency, that was like how she felt when her father died and she watched them closing the coffin, the feeling that he would never see the world again and she would never be able to talk to him again.
She was nobody here. It was not just that she had no friends and family; it was rather that she was a ghost in this room, in the streets on the way to work, on the shop floor. Nothing meant anything. The rooms in the house on Friary Street belonged to her, she thought; when she moved in them she was really there. In the
town, if she walked to the shop or to the Vocational School, the air, the light, the ground, it was all solid and part of her, even if she met no one familiar. Nothing here was part of her. It was false, empty, she thought. She closed her eyes and tried to think, as she had done so many times in her life, of something she was looking forward to, but there was nothing. Not the slightest thing. Not even Sunday. Nothing maybe except sleep, and she was not even certain she was looking forward to sleep. In any case, she could not sleep yet, since it was not yet nine o’clock. There was nothing she could do. It was as though she had been locked away.