The lunch hour in the co-workers' cafeteria at Frankenberg's had reached its peak.

There was no room left at any of the long tables, and more and more people were arriving to wait back of the wooden barricades by the cash register. People who had already got their trays of food wandered about between the tables in search of a spot they could squeeze into, or a place that somebody was about to leave, but there was no place. The roar of dishes, chairs, voices, shuffling feet, and the bra-a-ack of the turnstiles in the bare-walled room was like the din of a single huge machine.

Therese ate nervously, with the "Welcome to Frankenberg" booklet propped up in front of her against a sugar container. She had read the thick booklet through last week, in the first day of training class, but she had nothing else with her to read, and in the co-workers' cafeteria, she felt it necessary to concentrate on something. So she read again about vacation benefits, the three weeks' vacation given to people who had worked fifteen years at Frankenberg's, she ate the hot plate special of the day -- a grayish slice of roast beef with a ball of mashed potatoes covered with brown gravy, a heap of peas, and a tiny paper cup of horseradish. She tried to imagine what it would be like to have worked fifteen years in Frankenberg's department store, and she found she was unable to. "Twenty-five Yearers" got four weeks' vacation, the booklet said. Frankenberg's also provided a camp for summer and winter vacationers. They should have a church, too, she thought, and a hospital for the birth of babies. The store was organized so much like a prison, it frightened her now and then to realize she was a part of it.

She turned the page quickly, and saw in big black script across two pages:"Are You Frankenberg Material?"

She glanced across the room at the windows and tried to think of something else. Of the beautiful black and red Norwegian sweater she had seen at Saks and might buy for Richard for Christmas, if she couldn't find a better-looking wallet than the ones she had seen for twenty dollars. Of the possibility of driving with the Kellys next Sunday up to West Point to see a hockey game. The great square window across the room looked like a painting by -- Who was it? Mondrian. The little square section of window in the corner open to a white sky. And no bird to fly in or out. What kind of a set would one make for a play that took place in a department store? She was back again.

But it's so different with you, Terry, Richard had said to her. You've got an absolute conviction you'll be out of it in a few weeks and the others haven't. Richard said she could be in France next summer. Would be. Richard wanted her to go with him, and there was really nothing that stood in the way of her going with him. And Richard's friend Phil McElroy had written him that he might be able to get her a job with a theatre group next month. Therese had not met Phil yet, but she had very little faith that he could get her a job. She had combed New York since September, gone back and combed it a few times more, and she hadn't found anything. Who gave a job in the middle of the winter to a stage designer apprentice just beginning to be an apprentice? It didn't seem real either that she might be in Europe with Richard next summer, sitting with him in sidewalk cafes, walking with him in Aries, finding the places Van Gogh had painted, she and Richard choosing towns to stop in for a while and paint. It seemed less real these last few days since she had been working at the store.

She knew what bothered her at the store. It was the sort of thing she wouldn't try to tell Richard. It was that the store intensified things that had always bothered her, as long as she could remember. It was the waste actions, the meaningless chores that seemed to keep her from doing what she wanted to do, might have done -- and here it was the complicated procedures with money bags, coat checkings, and time clocks that kept people even from serving the store as efficiently as they might -- the sense that everyone was incommunicado with everyone else and living on an entirely wrong plane, so that the meaning, the message, the love, or whatever it was that each life contained, never could find its expression. It reminded her of conversations at tables, on sofas, with people whose words seemed to hover over dead, unstirrable things, who never touched a string that played. And when one tried to touch a live string, looked at one with faces as masked as ever, making a remark so perfect in its banality that one could not even believe it might be subterfuge. And the loneliness, augmented by the fact one saw within the store the same faces day after day, the few faces one might have spoken to and never did, or never could. Not like the face on the passing bus that seems to speak, that is seen once and at least is gone forever.

She would wonder, standing in the time-clock queue in the basement every morning, her eyes sorting out unconsciously the regular employees from the temporary ones, just how she had happened to land here -- she had answered an ad, of course, but that didn't explain fate -- and what was coming next instead of a stage-designing job. Her life was a series of zigzags. At nineteen, she was anxious.

"You must learn to trust people, Therese. Remember that," Sister Alicia had often told her. And often, quite often, Therese tried to apply it.

"Sister Alicia," Therese whispered carefully, the sibilant syllables comforting her.

Therese sat up again and picked up her fork, because the cleanup boy was working in her direction.

She could see Sister Alicia's face, bony and reddish like pink stone when the sunlight was on it, and the starched blue billow of her bosom. Sister Alicia's big bony figure coming around a corner in a hall, between the white enamel tables in the refectory, Sister Alicia in a thousand places, her small blue eyes always finding her out among the other girls, seeing her differently, Therese knew, from all the other girls, yet the thin pink lips always set in the same straight line. She could see Sister Alicia handing her the knitted green gloves wrapped in tissue, not smiling, only presenting them to her directly, with hardly a word, on her eighth birthday. Sister Alicia telling her with the same straight mouth that she must pass her arithmetic. Who else had cared if she passed her arithmetic? Therese had kept the green gloves at the bottom of her tin locker at school, for years after Sister Alicia had gone away to California. The white tissue had become limp and crackle-less like ancient cloth, and still she had not worn the gloves. Finally, they were too small to wear.

Someone moved the sugar container, and the propped booklet fell flat.

Therese looked at the pair of hands across from her, a woman's plump, aging hands, stirring her coffee, breaking a roll now with a trembling eagerness, daubing half the roll greedily into the brown gravy of the plate that was identical with Therese's. The hands were chapped, there was dirt in the parallel creases of the knuckles, but the right hand bore a conspicuous silver filigree ring set with a clear green stone, the left a gold wedding ring, and there were traces of red polish in the corners of the nails. Therese watched the hand carry a forkful of peas upward, and she did not have to look at the face to know what it would be like.

It would be like all the fifty-year-old faces of women who worked at Frankenberg's, stricken with an ever- lasting exhaustion and terror, the eyes distorted behind glasses that enlarged or made smaller, the cheeks splotched with rouge that did not brighten the gray-ness underneath.

Therese could not look.

"You're a new girl, aren't you?" The voice was shrill and clear in the din, almost a sweet voice.

"Yes," Therese said, and looked up. She remembered the face. It was the face whose exhaustion had made her see all the other faces. It was the woman Therese had seen creeping down the marble stairs from the mezzanine at about six thirty one evening when the store was empty, sliding her hands down the broad marble banister to take some of the weight from her bunioned feet. Therese had thought: she is not ill, she is not a beggar, she simply works here.

"Are you getting along all right?"

And here was the woman smiling at her, with the same terrible creases under her eyes and around her mouth. Her eyes were actually alive now, and rather affectionate.

"Are you getting along all right?" the woman repeated, for there was a great clatter of voices and dishes all around them.

Therese moistened her lips. "Yes, thank you."

"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 forty-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 rr rrgh!" it said as it hurled itself blindly into the papier-mache tunnel. "And Urr rr rr rrgh!" as it emerged.

The little train was always running when she stepped out of the elevator in the morning, and when she finished work in the evening. She felt it cursed the hand that threw its switch each day. In the jerk of its nose around the curves, in its wild dashes down the straight lengths of track, she could see a frenzied and futile pursuit of a tyrannical master. It drew three Pullman cars in which minuscule human figures showed flinty profiles at the windows, behind these an open boxcar of real miniature lumber, a boxcar of coal that was not real, and a caboose that snapped round the curves and clung to the fleeing train like a child to its mother's skirts. It was like something gone mad in imprisonment, something already dead that would never wear out, like the dainty, springy-footed foxes in the Central Park Zoo, whose complex footwork repeated and repeated as they circled their cages.

This morning, Therese turned away quickly from the train, and went on toward the doll department where she worked.

At five past nine, the great block-square toy department was coming to life. Green cloths were being pulled back from the long tables. 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 faced the elevators and drummed all day. The arts and handicrafts table gave out a smell of fresh modeling clay, reminiscent of the art room at 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.

Thirteen dollars and fifty cents for a doll only ten inches high.

"Take it," Therese wanted to say to them. "It really is too expensive, but I'll give it to you. Frankenberg's won't miss it."

But the women in the cheap cloth coats, the timid men huddled inside shabby mufflers would be gone, wistfully glancing at other counters as they made their way back to the elevators. If people came for a doll, they didn't want anything else. A doll was a special kind of Christmas gift, practically alive, the next thing to a baby.

There were almost never any children, but now and again one would come up, generally a little girl, very rarely a little boy, her hand held firmly by a parent. Therese would show her the dolls she thought the child might like. She would be patient, and finally a certain doll would bring that metamorphosis in the child's face, that response to make-believe that was the purpose of all of it, and usually that was the doll the child went away with.

Then one evening after work, Therese saw Mrs. Robichek in the coffee and doughnut shop across the street. Therese often stopped in the doughnut shop to get a cup of coffee before going home. Mrs. Robichek was at the back of the shop, at the end of the long curving counter, dabbling a doughnut into her mug of coffee.

Therese pushed and thrust herself toward her, through the press of girls and coffee mugs and doughnuts. Arriving at Mrs. Robichek's elbow, she gasped, "Hello," and turned to the counter, as if a cup of coffee had been her only objective.

"Hello," said Mrs. Robichek, so indifferently that Therese was crushed.

Therese did not dare look at Mrs. Robichek again. And yet their shoulders were actually pressed together! Therese was half finished with her coffee, when Mrs. Robichek said dully, "I'm going to take the Independent subway. I wonder if we'll ever get out of here." Her voice was dreary, not as it had been the day in the cafeteria. Now she was like the hunched old woman Therese had seen creeping down the stairs.

"We'll get out," Therese said reassuringly.

Therese forced a path for both of them to the door. Therese was taking the Independent subway, too. She and Mrs. Robichek edged into the sluggish mob at the entrance of the subway, and were sucked gradually and inevitably down the stairs, like bits of floating waste down a drain.

They found they both got off at the Lexington Avenue stop, too, though Mrs. Robichek lived on Fifty-fifth Street, just east of Third Avenue.

Therese went with Mrs. Robichek into the delicatessen where she was going to buy something for her dinner. Therese might have bought something for her own dinner, but somehow she couldn't in Mrs. Robichek's presence.

"Do you have food at home?"

"No, I'm going to buy something later."

"Why don't you come and eat with me? I'm all alone. Come on." Mrs. Robichek finished with a shrug, as if that were less effort than a smile.

Therese's impulse to protest politely lasted only a moment. "Thank you. I'd like to come." Then she saw a cellophane wrapped cake on the counter, a fruit cake like a big brown brick topped with red cherries, and she bought it to give to Mrs. Robichek.

It was a house like the one Therese lived in, only brown-stone and much darker and gloomier. There were no lights at all in the halls, and when Mrs. Robichek put on the light in the third-floor hall, Therese saw that the house was not very clean. Mrs. Robichek's room was not very clean either, and the bed was unmade. Did she get up as tired as she went to bed, Therese wondered. Therese was left standing in the middle of the room while Mrs. Robichek moved on dragging feet toward the kitchenette, carrying the bag of groceries she had taken from Therese's hands. Now that she was home, Therese felt, where no one could see her, she allowed herself to look as tired as she really was.

Therese could never remember how it began. She could not remember the conversation just before and the conversation didn't matter, of course. What happened was that Mrs. Robichek edged away from her, strangely, as if she were in a trance, suddenly murmuring instead of talking, and lay down flat on her back on the unmade bed. It was the continued murmuring, the faint smile of apology, and the terrible, shocking ugliness of the short, heavy body with the bulging abdomen, and the apologetically tilted head still politely looking at her, that she could not make herself listen.

"I used to have my own dress shop in Queens. Oh, a fine big one," Mrs. Robichek said, and Therese caught the note of boasting and began to listen despite herself, hating it. "You know, the dresses with the V at the waist and the little buttons running up. You know, three, five years ago --" Mrs. Robichek spread her stiff hands inarticulately across her waist. The short hands did not nearly span the front half of herself. She looked very old in the dim lamplight that made the shadows under her eyes black. "They called them Caterina dresses. You remember? I designed them. They come out of my shop in Queens. They famous, all right!"

Mrs. Robichek got up from the bed and went to a small trunk that stood against the wall. She opened it, talking all the while, and began to drag out dresses of dark, heavy looking material, which she let fall on the floor. Mrs. Robichek held up a garnet-red velvet dress with a white collar and tiny white buttons that came to a V down the front of the narrow bodice.

"See, I got lots of them. I made them. Other stores copied." Above the white collar of the dress, which she gripped with her chin, Mrs. Robichek's ugly head was tilted grotesquely. "You like this? I give you one. Come here. Come here, try one on."

Therese was repelled by the thought of trying one on. She wished Mrs. Robichek would lie down and rest again, but obediently Therese got up, as if she had no will of her own, and came toward her.

Mrs. Robichek pressed a black velvet dress upon Therese with trembling and importunate hands, and Therese suddenly knew how she would wait on people in the store, thrusting sweaters upon them helter skelter, for she could not have performed the same action in any other way. For four years, Therese remembered, Mrs. Robichek had said she had worked at Frankenberg's.

"You like the green one better? Try it on." And in the instant Therese hesitated, she dropped it and picked up another, the dark-red one. "I sell five of them to girls at the store, but you I give one. Left over, but they still in style. You like this one better?"

Therese liked the red better. She liked red, especially garnet-red, and she loved red velvet. Mrs. Robichek pressed her toward a corner where she could take off her clothing and lay it on an armchair. But she did not want the dress, did not want to be given it. It reminded her of being given clothing at the Home, hand-me-downs, because she was considered practically as one of the orphan girls, who made up half the school, who never got packages from outside. Therese pulled off her sweater and felt completely naked. She gripped her arms above the elbow, and her flesh there felt cold and sensation less.

"I sewed," Mrs. Robichek was saying ecstatically to herself, "how I sewed, morning to night! I managed four girls. But my eyes got bad. One blind, this one. Put the dress on." She told Therese about the operation on the eye. It was not blind, only partially blind. But it was very painful. Glaucoma. It still gave her pain. That and her back. And her feet. Bunions.

Therese realized she was relating all her troubles and her bad luck so that she, Therese, would understand why she had sunk so low as to work in a department store.

"It fits?" Mrs. Robichek asked confidently.

Therese looked in the mirror in the wardrobe door. It showed a long thin figure with a narrowish head that seemed ablaze at the outline, bright yellow fire running down to the bright red bar on either shoulder. The dress hung in straight draped folds down almost to her ankles. It was the dress of queens in fairy tales, of a red deeper than blood. She stepped back, and pulled in the looseness of the dress behind her, so it fitted her ribs and her waist, and she looked back at her own dark-hazel eyes in the mirror. Herself meeting herself. This was she, not the girl in the dull plaid skirt and the beige sweater, not the girl who worked in the doll department at Frankenberg's.

"Do you like it?" Mrs. Robichek asked.

Therese studied the surprisingly tranquil mouth, whose modeling she could see distinctly, though she wore no more lipstick than she might if someone had kissed her. She wished she could kiss the person in the mirror and make her come to life, yet she stood perfectly still, like a painted portrait.

"If you like it, take it," Mrs. Robichek urged impatiently, watching from a distance, lurking against the wardrobe as saleswomen lurk while women try on coats and dresses in front of mirrors in department stores.

But it wouldn't last, Therese knew. She would move, and it would be gone.

Even if she kept the dress, it would be gone, because it was a thing of a minute, this minute. She didn't want the dress. She tried to imagine the dress in her closet at home, among her other clothing, and she couldn't.

She began to unbutton the buttons, to unfasten the collar.

"You like it, yes?" Mrs. Robichek asked as confidently as ever.

"Yes," Therese said firmly, admitting it.

She couldn't get the hook and eye unfastened at the back of the collar. Mrs. Robichek had to help her, and she could hardly wait. She felt as if she were being strangled. What was she doing here? How did she happen to have put on a dress like this? Suddenly Mrs. Robichek and her apartment were like a horrible dream that she had just realized she was dreaming.

Mrs. Robichek was the hunchbacked keeper of the dungeon. And she had been brought here to be tantalized.

"What's the matter? A pin stick you?"

Therese's lips opened to speak, but her mind was too far away. Her mind was at a distant point, at a distant vortex that opened on the scene in the dimly lighted, terrifying room where the two of them seemed to stand in desperate combat. And at the point of the vortex where her mind was, she knew it was the hopelessness that terrified her and nothing else. It was the hopelessness of Mrs. Robichek's ailing body and her job at the store, of her stack of dresses in the trunk, of her ugliness, the hopelessness of which the end of her life was entirely composed. And the hopelessness of herself, of ever being the person she wanted to be and of doing the things that person would do. Had all her life been nothing but a dream, and was this real? It was the terror of this hopelessness that made her want to shed the dress and flee before it was too late, before the chains fell around her and locked.

It might already be too late. As in a nightmare, Therese stood in the room in her white slip, shivering, unable to move.

"What's the matter? You cold? It's hot."

It was hot. The radiator hissed. The room smelled of garlic and the fustiness of old age, of medicines, and of the peculiar metallic smell that was Mrs. Robichek's own. Therese wanted to collapse in the chair where her skirt and sweater lay. Perhaps if she lay on her own clothing, she thought, it wouldn't matter. But she shouldn't lie down at all. If she did, she was lost. The chains would lock, and she would be one with the hunchback.

Therese trembled violently. She was suddenly out of control. It was a chill, not merely fright or tiredness.

"Sit down," Mrs. Robichek's voice said from a distance, and with shocking unconcern and boredom, as if she were quite used to girls feeling faint in her room, and from a distance, too, her dry, rough-tipped fingers pressed against Therese's arms.

Therese struggled against the chair, knowing she was going to succumb to it, and even aware that she was attracted to it for that reason. She dropped into the chair, felt Mrs. Robichek tugging at her skirt to pull it from under her, but she couldn't make herself move. She was still at the same point of consciousness, however, still had the same freedom to think, even though the dark arms of the chair rose about her.

Mrs. Robichek was saying, "You stand up too much at the store. It's hard these Christmases. I seen four of them. You got to learn how to save yourself a little."

Creeping down the stairs clinging to the banister. Save herself by eating lunch in the cafeteria. Taking shoes off bunioned feet like the row of women perched on the radiator in the women's room, fighting for a bit of the radiator to put a newspaper on and sit for five minutes.

Therese's mind worked very clearly. It was astonishing how clearly it worked, though she knew she was simply staring into space in front of her, and that she could not have moved if she had wanted to.

"You just tired, you baby," Mrs. 'Robichek said, tucking a woolen blanket about her shoulders in the chair. "You need to rest, standing up all day and standing up tonight, too."

A line from Richard's Eliot came to Therese. That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all. She wanted to say it, but she could not make her lips move. Something sweet and burning was in her mouth. Mrs. Robichek was standing in front of her, spooning something from a bottle, and pushing the spoon between her lips. Therese swallowed it obediently, not caring if it were poison. She could have moved her lips now, could have gotten up from the chair, but she didn't want to move. Finally, she lay back in the chair, and let Mrs. Robichek cover her with the blanket, and she pretended to go to sleep. But all the while she watched the humpbacked figure moving about the room, putting away the things from the table, undressing for bed. She watched Mrs. Robichek remove a big laced corset and then a strap device that passed around her shoulders and partially down her back. Therese closed her eyes then in horror, pressed them tight shut, until the creaking of a spring and a long groaning sigh told her that Mrs. Robichek had gone to bed. But that was not all. Mrs. Robichek reached for the alarm clock and wound it, and without lifting her head from the pillow, groped with the clock for the straight chair beside the bed. In the dark, Therese could barely see her arm rise and fall four times before the clock found the chair.

I shall wait fifteen minutes until she is asleep and then go, Therese thought.

And because she was tired, she tensed herself to hold back that spasm, that sudden seizure that was like falling, that came every night long before sleep, yet heralded sleep. It did not come. So after what she thought was fifteen minutes, Therese dressed herself and went out the door silently. It was easy, after all, simply to open the door and escape. It was easy, she thought, because she was not really escaping at all.