Even after a year, Rachel can relive the trauma of the event at will. She can call every moment into a fever of the present tense.
On the morning of the Episode, she is looking into the mirror above her vanity and asks Aaron about a scarf. It is a zebra print, this scarf, like the one she has seen Audrey Hepburn wearing in Vogue, and she has it loosely wrapped around her neck. But maybe it is too much for the sales floor at Bonwit Teller? They are supposed to be stylishly dressed, but not so stylish that they detract from the merchandise. So she asks her husband: Is it too much? He looks at her, his eyebrows raised in appraisal as he buttons his shirt cuffs, but all he has to offer is, “I dunno, honey. It’s a scarf. Looks fine to me.”
“You are such a fat help,” she declares crossly, whipping the scarf from her neck.
“A big help,” he corrects.
“What?”
“I’m such a big help.”
“No,” she says. “You are not.”
Riding the train into work, Rachel is still incensed that Aaron is so poorly equipped to live life with a woman. Displaying herself like a mannequin modeling the scarf, she had been willing to submit herself to his judgment, and yet he had carelessly shrugged her off. Simply tossed the opportunity into the trash like he was tossing the wadded remains of the mail into the wastebasket.
The front entrance of Bonwit Teller is a spacious, modern portico under a limestone deco facade that rises austerely twelve stories above the sidewalk. Flashing glass doors revolve like cylinders of light in the bright sunshine. But that’s for customers. Employees enter through a featureless door on 56th Street. The corridor is vivid with the sterile glow from the overhead fluorescents.
Rachel waits with the women queuing for their turn to punch in, listening to the mechanical ka-thunk of the time-clock stamp repeating itself in an assembly-line rhythm. Ka-thunk, stop, ka-thunk, stop, ka-thunk.
From the Fifth Avenue entrance, the grand dames themselves arrive to cruise the richly carpeted interior boulevards of the store. These are not the wily shoppers come to wrangle tooth and nail over bargains in Klein’s on Union Square. These are the ladies who have come to rack up towering charges to their accounts at the gleaming glass carousels of first floor fine jewelry and the perfume counters under the luminosity of ornamental chandeliers. These are the ladies who have come to lunch on watercress sandwiches in the Caffe Orsini, second floor, sip coffee from Italian demi-cups as a pageant of shapely young models, their daughters’ age, parade the best-selling creations of the Bonwit label for their perusal, fourth floor collections. These are the ladies who have come to consider their reflections in queenly mirrors, swathed in mink stoles and sable coats, second floor, West 57th Street wing.
On the sales floor, Rachel is covering for Suzy Quinlan—seventh floor, Miss Bonwit Jr.: junior dresses, junior sportswear, junior coats and accessories. Normally, Rachel works a different department: La Boutique, third floor bed and bath shop. But today, since they are so shorthanded with Gladys Mulberry down with a cold and Nancy Kirk having quit after her engagement, the floor walker, Mr. Bishop, has assigned Rachel to cover the section while Suzy catches a quick bite down in the store commissary. Rachel is busy refolding a white knit cardigan embroidered with pink and red roses. Such a sweet little sweater for a damsel in first bloom. Assez jolie. She feels the first pinch of heartbreak at this point yet ignores it.
When a customer appears, trailing a light mist of Yardley, she quickly summons her smile. The lady is obviously a regular by her air of imperial familiarity. She asks for Suzy by name but must settle for Rachel. She’s a slim specimen creeping toward the autumn of her life, wearing an azure silk blazer with snow-white gloves. She’s looking for a little something as a gift. Just a little something for “my granddaughter, aged twelve,” the lady whispers, obviously unprepared for the news to leak that she could have reached such a grandmaternal age. She displays waxy bright lips that crinkle when she smiles. Hair expensively dyed, eyebrows erased and replaced by perfect penciled-in arches. Obviously, a woman denying her age.
Rachel maintains her smile for the lady as she has coached herself to do. Even if she’s not on commission like the full-time staff, she has learned to take satisfaction in the act of the transaction. Providing for customers’ desires permits her a feeling of utility that she seldom experiences otherwise. Certainly not when she opens her sketch pad or—it shouldn’t happen!—she is confronted by a blank canvas from the rack at Lee’s Art Shop.
So Rachel is happy to oblige, ready to suggest the freshly folded embroidered cardigan. An adorable choice, she calls it. Perfect for la jeune fille about to enter her première rougeur de féminité. The lady compliments her French. Votre français est très naturel, she tells Rachel. But the lady has a roving eye. Something else has caught her attention. “Oh, I like this,” she declares softly with an elevated chin, as if announcing the news to herself alone. It’s a beret. A simple thing. The lady has lifted it from the padded display stand and is modeling it for herself, boosting it aloft on her white-gloved fingertips. She coos appreciatively. “Just darling. She’ll look si parisien, tu ne trouves pas? Tout à fait chérie!”
Yes, Rachel nods. Très charmante, such a thing. A burgundy beret. Eine burgunderrote Baskenmütze. Such a darling little thing. So stylish. So Parisian. And so vulnerable, a girl at that age. So very vulnerable to the world. So easily victimized. So easily extinguished.
Rachel doesn’t really remember what happens beyond that moment, once the Episode begins. The darkness floods her consciousness and scalds her heart. And then she sees the face. The innocent caramel-brown eyes. The brunette braid and the burgundy beret. For so many years, she has kept the memory of this face submerged. Suppressed. Locked in an iron vault. Yet suddenly the past confronts her on the seventh floor of Bonwit Teller. The schoolgirl is there before her, conjured from the past, her velvety eyes staring out from death. Rachel feels the world turn on its ear. She hears the sound of shattering glass. Hears a scream that might be her own or might not be. Hears the lady shouting frantically. There’s blood splattering and a trembling pain shooting through her hand. That’s the last thing she remembers.
“Do you love your husbands, ladies?” This is the question posed by a sweetly smug voice on the radio. “If you do, then you should serve him only the finest of instant coffees, Imperial Blend. It’s freeze-dried for a richer coffee taste!”
Gray light hangs outside the wrought-iron fire escape over West 22nd Street like dingy, overbleached sheets clothespinned to a line. In honor of the reappearance of her mother’s work, Rachel has decided it’s best to destroy her own. Eema had always talked about her daughter’s God-given talent, but again and again, the real lesson to be learned was that there was only room for one superior artist in the space between them, and it was never going to be Rashka. So Rachel has just set her latest shmittshik afire, lighting it from the stove burner and washing the remains down the sink. It made her feel good to burn it. A satisfying pain to see her own face turned to char. Eingeäschert is the word in German. Reduced to ashes.
Now she lights a cigarette to mask the smell of the burned paper as she hears the sound of Aaron’s key in the door.
“I got you the vegetable lo mein,” he announces as he enters, crossing to the kitchen table with the paper sack smelling of hot fish oils. He is wearing his Brooks Brothers overcoat and a felt Alpiner with the silk headband and a tufted feather. A narrow maroon necktie divides the crisp white of his shirt, and he’s smoking a cigarette. But his face is blotchy and tired. The end of the day, dealing with the Wednesday matinee crowd, dealing with Leo’s craziness, dealing with the help. The grindstone. The salt mines. The calamity before curtain time. That’s his joke. “You said to surprise you, right? So surprise.” His voice is drained. He removes his cigarette from his lips as he bends down to kiss her.