Colm Tóibín - Brooklyn

At work on Monday, Miss Fortini was waiting for her. Eilis thought at first that she had done something wrong, as Miss Fortini asked her and Miss Delano, one of the other sales assistants, to follow her to Miss Bartocci's office. When they entered the room, Miss Bartocci seemed grave as she signalled to them to sit down opposite her.

"There is going to be a big change in the store," she said, "because there is a change going on outside the store. Coloured people are moving into Brooklyn, more and more of them."

As she looked at all of them, Eilis could not tell whether they viewed this as a good thing for business or a piece of ominous news.

"We're going to welcome coloured women into our store as shoppers. And we're starting with nylon stockings. This is going to be the first store on this street to sell Red Fox stockings at cheap prices and soon we're going to add Sepia and Coffee."

"These are colours," Miss Fortini said.

"Coloured women want Red Fox stockings and we are selling them and you two are going to be polite to anyone who comes into this store, coloured or white."

"Both of them are always very polite," Miss Fortini said, "but I'll be watching once the first notice goes in the window."

"We may lose customers," Miss Bartocci interjected, "but we're going to sell to anyone who will buy and at the best prices."

"But the Red Fox stockings will be apart, away from the other normal stockings," Miss Fortini said. "At least at first. And you two will be at that counter, Miss Lacey and Miss Delano, and your job is to pretend that it's no big deal."

"The sign is going in the window this morning," Miss Bartocci added. "And you stand there and smile. Is that agreed?"

Eilis and her companion looked at one another and nodded.

"You probably won't be busy today," Miss Bartocci said, "but we're going to hand leaflets out in the right places and by the end of the week you won't have a moment if we're lucky."

Miss Fortini then led them back to the shop floor, where to the left at a long table men were piling up new packages with nylon stockings that were almost red in colour.

"Why did they choose us?" Miss Delano asked her.

"They must think we are nice," Eilis said.

"You're Irish, that makes you different."

"And what about you?"

"I'm from Brooklyn."

"Well, maybe you are nice."

"Maybe I'm just easy to kick around. Wait until my dad hears about this."

Eilis saw that Miss Delano had perfectly plucked eyebrows. She had an image of her in front of the mirror for hours with a tweezers.

All day they stood at the counter chatting quietly, but no one approached them to look at the red-coloured nylon stockings. It was only the next day that Eilis spotted two middle-aged coloured women coming into the store and being approached by Miss Fortini and directed towards her and Miss Delano. She found herself staring at the two women and then, when she checked herself, looked around the store to find that everyone else was staring at them. The two women were, she saw when she looked at them again, beautifully dressed, both in cream-coloured woollen coats and each chatting casually to the other as though there were nothing unusual about their arrival in the store.

Miss Delano, she observed, stood back as they came close, but Eilis stayed where she was as the two women began to examine the nylon stockings, looking at different sizes. She studied their painted fingernails and then their faces; she was ready to smile at them if they looked at her. But they did not once glance up from the stockings and, even as they selected a number of pairs and handed them to her, they did not catch her eye. She saw Miss Fortini watching her across the store as she added up what they owed and showed it to them. As she was handed the money, she noticed how white the inside of the woman's hand was against the dark skin on the back of her hand. She took the money as busily as she could and put it in the container and sent it to the cash department.

As she waited for the receipt and the change to be returned, her two customers continued talking to each other as though no one else existed. Despite the fact that they were middle-aged, Eilis thought that they were glamorous and had taken great care with their appearance, their hair perfect, their clothes beautiful. She could not tell if either of them was wearing make-up; she could smell perfume but did not know what the scent was. When she handed them the change and the nylon stockings wrapped carefully in brown paper, she thanked them but they did not reply, merely took the change and the receipt and the package and moved elegantly towards the door.

As the week went on more of them came and as each one entered Eilis noticed a change in the atmosphere in the store, a stillness, a watchfulness; no one else appeared to move when these women moved in case they would get in their way; the other assistants would look down and seem busy and then glance up in the direction of the counter where the stockings in Red Fox were heaped before looking down again. Miss Fortini, however, never lifted her eyes from the scene at the counter. Each time the new customers approached, Miss Delano stood back and let Eilis serve them, but if a second set of customers came she moved forward as though it were part of some arrangement. Not once did a coloured woman come into the store alone, and most who came did not look at Eilis or address her directly.

The few who did speak to her used tones of such elaborate politeness that they made her feel awkward and shy. When the new colours of Coffee and Sepia came it was her job to point out to the customers that these were lighter colours but most of them ignored her. By the end of each of these days she felt exhausted and found her lectures in the evening almost relaxing, relieved that there was something to take her mind off the fierce tension in the store, which lay heaviest around her counter. She wished she had not been singled out to stand at this counter and wondered if, in time, she would be moved to another part of the store.

Eilis loved her room, loved putting her books at the table opposite the window when she came in at night and then getting into her pyjamas and the dressing gown she had bought in one of the sales and her warm slippers and spending an hour or more before she went to bed looking over the lecture notes and then rereading the manuals on bookkeeping and accounting she had bought. Her only problem remained the law lectures. She enjoyed watching the gestures that Mr. Rosenblum made and the way he spoke, sometimes acting out an entire case for them, the litigants vividly described even if they were a company, but neither she nor any of the other students she spoke to knew what was expected of them, how this might appear as a question in an examination paper. Since Mr. Rosenblum knew so much she wondered if he might expect all of them to have the same detailed knowledge of cases and what they meant, and precedents, and the judgments, prejudices and peculiarities of individual judges.

It worried her enough to decide to explain to him exactly what her problem was. Just as he spoke quickly in his lectures, moving from one case to another, from what a certain law could mean in theory to how it had been applied up to then, so he disappeared as soon as the lecture was over, as though he had another pressing appointment. Eilis determined to sit in the front row and approach him the very second he had finished speaking, but as it came to the time she was nervous. She hoped that he would not think that she was criticizing him; she also worried that he might begin talking in a way that she would not understand. She had never come across anyone like him before. He reminded her of waiters in some cafés near Fulton Street who had no patience, who needed her to make up her mind about everything there and then and always had a further question for her no matter what she asked for, if she wanted small or large, or if she wanted it heated or with mustard. In Bartocci's she had learned to be brave and decisive with the customers, but once she herself was a customer she knew she was too hesitant and slow.