The Price of Salt

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.

How was it possible to be afraid and in love,

Love was supposed to be a kind of blissful insanity.

“I like being with her, I like talking with her. I’m fond of anybody I can talk to.”

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.

Her life was a series of zigzags. At nineteen, she was anxious.

Carol wanted to know everything she had done, how the roads were, and whether she had on the yellow pajamas or the blue ones. “I’ll have a hard time getting to sleep tonight without you.”
“Yes.” Immediately, out of nowhere, Therese felt tears pressing behind her eyes.
“Can’t you say anything but yes?”
“I love you.”
Carol whistled. Then silence. “Abby got the check, darling, but no letter. She missed my wire, but there isn’t any letter anyway.”
“Did you find the book?”
“We found the book, but there’s nothing in it.”
Therese wondered if the letter could be in her own apartment after all. But she had a picture of the letter in the book, marking a place. “Do you think anybody’s been through

Should she tell her she usually worked on her stage models? Sketched and painted sometimes, carved things like cats’ heads and tiny figures to go in her ballet sets, but that she liked best to take long walks practically anywhere, liked best simply to dream?

She turned the page quickly, and saw in big black script across two pages:

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.