The Lottery and Other Stories (18 page)

It was very late; there were only a few people still sitting at the counter in the corner drugstore. She sat on a stool, reconciled to the time, and waited patiently until the clerk came down the counter with her orange juice. “Hello, Tommy,” she said dismally.

“Morning, Miss Style,” he said, “lousy day.”

“Isn’t it,” she said. “A fine day not to go out.”

“I came in this morning,” Tommy said. “I would have given my right arm to stay home in bed. There ought to be a law against rain.”

Tommy was little and ugly and alert; looking at him, Miss Style thought, He has to get up and come to work in the mornings just like I do and just like everyone else in the world; the rain is just another break in the millions of lousy things, in getting up and going to work.

“I don’t mind snow,” Tommy was saying, “and I don’t mind the hot weather, but I sure do hate rain.”

He turned suddenly when someone called him, and went dancing down to the other end of the counter, bringing up with a flourish before his customer. “Lousy day, isn’t it?” he said. “Sure do wish I was in Florida.”

Miss Style drank her orange juice, remembering her dream. A sharp recollection of flowers and warmth came into her mind, and then was lost before the cold driving rain outside.

Tommy came back with her coffee and a plate of toast “Nothing like coffee to cheer you up in the morning,” he said.

“Thanks, Tommy,” she said, unenthusiastic. “How’s your play coming, by the way?”

Tommy looked up eagerly. “Hey,” he said, “I finished it, I meant to tell you. Finished the whole thing and sent it away day before yesterday.”

Funny thing, she thought, a clerk in a drugstore, he gets up in the morning and eats and walks around and writes a play just like it was real, just like the rest of us, like me. “Fine,” she said.

“I sent it to an agent a guy told me about, he said it was the best agent he knew.”

“Tommy,” she said, “why didn’t you give it right to me?”

He laughed, looking down at the sugar bowl he was holding for her. “Listen,” he said, “my friend said you didn’t want stuff like mine, you want people, like, from out of town or something, they don’t know if they’re any good or not. Hell,” he went on anxiously, “I’m not one of these guys fall for ads in the magazines.”

“I see,” she said.

Tommy leaned over the counter. “Don’t get sore,” he said, “You know what I mean, you know your business better than I do.”

“I’m not sore,” she said. She watched Tommy hurry away again, and she thought—Wait till I tell Robbie. Wait till I tell him the soda jerk thinks he’s a bum.

“Listen,” Tommy said to her, from halfway down the counter, “how long do you think I ought to wait? How long will they take to read it, these agents?”

“Couple of weeks, maybe,” she said. “Maybe longer.”

“I figured it might be,” he said. “You want more coffee today?”

“No, thanks,” she said. She slid down from the stool and walked across the store to pay her check. They’re probably going to buy that play, she was thinking, and I’m going to start eating in the hamburg joint across the street.

She went out into the rain again to see her bus just pulling up across the street. She ran for it, against the light, and pushed into the crowd of people getting on. With a kind of fury left over from Tommy and his play she thrust her way against the people, and a woman turned to her and said, “Who do you think you’re pushing?” Vengefully she put her elbow into the woman’s ribs and got on the bus first. She dropped her nickel in and got to the last available seat, and heard the woman behind her. “These people who think they can shove anybody around, they think they’re important.” She looked around to see if anyone knew who the woman was talking about; the man beside her on the seat next to the window was staring straight ahead with the infinitely tired expression of the early-morning bus passenger; two girls in the seat in front were looking out the window after a man passing, and in the aisle next to her the woman was standing, still talking about her. “People who think their business is the only important thing in the world. Think they can just push anyone around.” No one in the bus was listening: everyone was wet and uncomfortable and crowded, but the woman went on monotonously—“Think no one else has a right to ride on buses.”

She stared past the man out the window until the crowds coming into the bus pushed the woman past her down the aisle. When she came to her stop she was timid for a minute about pushing her way out, and when she reached the door the woman was near it, staring at her as though wanting to remember her face. “Dried-up old maid,” the woman said loudly, and the people around her in the bus laughed.

Miss Style put on an expression of contempt, stepping carefully down to the curb, looking up just as the bus pulled away to see the woman’s face still watching her from the window. She walked through the rain to the old building where her office was, thinking, That woman was just waiting for anyone to cross her path this morning, I wish I’d said something back to her.

“Morning, Miss Style,” the elevator operator said.

“Morning,” she said. She walked into the open-work iron elevator and leaned against the back wall.

“Bad day,” the operator said. He waited for a minute and then closed the door. “Fine day not to go out,” he said.

“Sure is,” she said. I wish I’d said something to that woman in the bus, she was thinking. I shouldn’t have let her get away with it, let the day start off like that, with a nasty incident, I should have answered her back and got to feeling good and pleased with myself. Start the day off right.

“Here you are,” the operator said. “You don’t have to go out again for quite a while.”

“Glad of that,” she said. She got out of the elevator and walked down the hall to her office. There was a light on inside, making the
ROBERT SHAX, Literary Agents
, stand out against the door. Looks almost cheerful, she thought, Robbie must be in early.

She had worked for Robert Shax for nearly eleven years. When she came to New York the Christmas she was twenty, a thin dark girl with neat clothes and hair and moderate ambition, holding on to her pocketbook with both hands, afraid of subways, she answered an ad, and met Robert Shax before she had even found a room to live in. It had been one of those windfall ads, an assistant wanted in a literary agency, and there was no one around to tell Elizabeth Style, asking people timidly how to find the address, that if she got the job it wasn’t worth getting. The literary agency was Robert Shax and a thin clever man who had disliked Elizabeth so violently that after two years she had taken Robert Shax away to start his own agency. Robert Shax was on the door and on all the checks, and Elizabeth Style hid away in her office, wrote the letters, kept the records, and came out occasionally to consult the files she allowed Robert Shax to keep on display.

They had spent much time in the eight years trying to make this office look like a severe environment for a flourishing business: a miserable place that its owners were too busy to pretty up more than enough to meet the purposes of its clients. The door opened into a tight little reception room, painted tan the year before, with two cheap chrome and brown chairs, a brown linoleum floor, and a framed picture of a vase of flowers over the small desk which was occupied five afternoons a week by a Miss Wilson, a colorless girl who answered the phone sniffling. Beyond Miss Wilson’s desk were two doors, which did not give the effect of limitless offices, stretching on down the building, that Robert Shax had hoped they might; the one on the left had, on the door, “Robert Shax,” and the one on the right had, on the door, “Elizabeth Style,” and through the pebbled glass doors you could see, dimly, the shape of the narrow window each office owned, crowding close enough to the door and walls to admit that the two offices together were no wider than the reception room, and to hint darkly that all that protected the privacy of Mr. Shax and Miss Style was a beaverboard partition painted to look like the walls.

Every morning Elizabeth Style came into the office with the idea that something might be done for it still, that somehow there might be a way to make it look respectable, with Venetian blinds or paneling or an efficient-looking bookcase with sets of classics and the newest books that Robert Shax had presumably sold to their publishers. Or even an end table with expensive magazines. Miss Wilson thought it would be nice to have a radio, but Robert Shax wanted an expensive office with heavy carpeting and desks sitting solidly on the floor and a battery of secretaries.

This morning the office looked more cheerful than usual, probably because it was still raining outside, or else because the lights were already on and the radiators were going. Elizabeth Style went over to the door of her office and opened it, saying, “Morning, Robbie,” because, since there was no one in the office, there was no need to pretend that the beaverboard partitions were walls.

“Morning, Liz,” Robbie said, and then, “Come on in, will you?”

“I’ll take my coat off,” she said. There was a tiny closet in the corner of her office where she hung up her coat, squeezing in back of the desk to do it. She noticed that there was mail on her desk, four or five letters and a bulky envelope that would be a manuscript. She spread the letters out to make sure there was nothing of any particular interest, and then went out of her office and opened the door of Robbie’s.

He was leaning down over his desk, in an attitude meant to show extreme concentration; the faintly bald top of his head was toward her and his heavy round shoulders cut off the lower half of the window. His office was almost exactly like hers; it had a small filing cabinet and an autographed photograph of one of the few reasonably successful writers the firm had handled. The photograph was signed “To Bob, with deepest gratitude, Jim,” and Robert Shax was fond of using it as a happy example in his office conversations with eager authors. When she had closed the door Elizabeth was only a step away from the straight visitor’s chair slanting at the desk; she sat down and stretched her feet out in front of her.

“I got soaked coming in this morning,” she said.

“It’s an awful day,” Robbie said, without looking up. When he was alone with her he relaxed the heartiness that he usually stocked in his voice: he let his face look tired and worried. He was wearing his good grey suit that day, and later, with other people around, he would look like a golfer, a man who ate good rare roast beef and liked pretty girls. “It’s one hell of a day,” he repeated. He looked up at her. “Liz,” he said, “that goddamned minister is in town again.”

“No wonder you look so worried,” she said. She had been ready to complain at him, to tell him about the woman on the bus, to ask him to sit up straight and behave, but there was nothing to say. “Poor old Robbie,” she said.

“There’s a note from him,” Robbie said. “I’ve got to go up there this morning. He’s in that goddamned rooming-house again.”

“What are you planning to tell him?”

Robbie got up and turned around to the window. When he got out of his chair he had just room to turn around to get to the window of the closet or the filing cabinet; on a pleasanter day she might have an amiable remark about his weight. “I don’t know what in hell I’m planning to tell him,” Robbie said. “I’ll promise him something.”

I know you will, she thought. She had the familiar picture of Robbie’s maneuvers to escape an awkward situation in the back of her mind: she could see Robbie shaking the old man’s hand briskly, calling him “sir” and keeping his shoulders back, saying that the old man’s poems were “fine, sir, really magnificent,” promising anything, wildly, just to get away. “You’ll come back in some kind of trouble,” she said mildly.

Robbie laughed suddenly, happily. “But he won’t bother us for a while.”

“You ought to call him up or something. Write him a letter,” she said.

“Why?” She could see that he was pleased with the idea of coming back in trouble, of being irresponsible and what he would call carefree; he would make the long trip uptown to the minister’s rooming-house by subway and take a taxi for the last two blocks to arrive in style, and sit for a tiresome hour talking to the old man, just to be carefree and what he might call gallant.

Make him feel good, she thought. He has to go, not me. “You shouldn’t be trusted to run a business by yourself,” she said. “You’re too silly.”

He laughed again and walked around the desk to pat her head. “We get along pretty well, don’t we, Liz?”

“Fine,” she said.

He was beginning to think about it now; he was holding his head up and his voice was filling out. “I’ll tell him someone wants one of his poems for an anthology,” he said.

“Just don’t give him any money,” she said. “He has more than we have now.”

He went back to his closet and took out his coat, his good coat today, and threw it carelessly over his arm. He put his hat on the back of his head and picked up his brief case from the desk. “Got all the old guy’s poems in here,” he said. “I figured I could kill some time reading them aloud to him.”

“Have a nice trip,” she said.

He patted her on the head again, and then reached out for the door. “You’ll take care of everything here?”

“I’ll try to cope with it,” she said.

She followed him out the door and started into her own office. Halfway across the outer office he stopped, not turning. “Liz?” he said.

“Well?”

He thought for a minute. “Seems like there was something I wanted to tell you,” he said. “It doesn’t matter.”

“See you for lunch?” she asked.

“I’ll be back about twelve-thirty,” he said.

He closed the door and she heard his footsteps going emphatically down the hall to the elevator; busy footsteps, she thought, in case anyone was listening in this fearful old building.

She sat for a minute at her desk, smoking and wishing she could paint her office walls a light green. If she wanted to stay late at night she could do it herself. It would only take one can of paint, she told herself bitterly, to do an office like this, with enough left over to do the front of the building. Then she put out her cigarette and thought, I’ve worked in it this long, maybe some day we’ll get a million-dollar client and can move into a real office building where they have soundproof walls.