Sea Glass by Anita Shreve Page B

and Lowell and Worcester. They’ll go to Boston and to Woonsocket and to Pawtucket and finally to Providence. After that, they’ll see.
    “You can keep me in clean shirts,” he says.
    “Where will we stay?”
    “Cabins.”
    Honora knows all about cabins. The one-room buildings with counters for kitchens and communal bathrooms out back are popular destinations with tourists visiting the lakes near Taft.
    Still, though, it’s an adventure.
    Sexton passes her off as Miss Willard, his assistant. She wears her butter yellow wedding suit and removes her ring. In a routine that takes shape as the days unfold, she shakes the client’s hand and very slowly draws off her gloves, finger by finger. She sits in front of the typewriter and feels the tiny ovals with their silver rings. She can type nearly as fast as Sexton can speak, and her hands are a blur over the keys. Her husband keeps up a running sales pitch with the customer, and when he is done, Honora offers up the beautifully typed page like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat. She will have typed a verbatim transcript of the conversation that has just taken place.
    A thing worth having is worth having now,
she will have typed.
    The sooner you get it, the sooner it will start earning you money,
Sexton will have said.
    Putting it off is like paying more for it.
    Decide now, when it will cost you the least.
    Honora watches the customer’s face begin to work its way toward a purchase. No client fails to be impressed by the transcript.
    “Which carriage would you prefer?” Sexton asks. “The wide or the narrow? Which stand do you think would be best — the high or the low?”
    The customer chews the inside of his cheek, all the while watching Honora’s flying hands.
    “Would you prefer to take a discount?” Sexton asks. “Or divide the amount into four monthly installments?”
    Perhaps thinking about the uses of dictation for himself, or a pretty assistant of his own, the client is silent for a moment.
    “This is a description of what you want,” Sexton says, moving in for the kill. “May I take your order now?”
    Sometimes, however, a customer is recalcitrant. “Yes, but . . . ,” the customer says.
    “That’s the very reason why . . . ,” Sexton counters.
    “I’m not sure about . . . ,” the client adds, waffling.
    “I’m coming to that,” Sexton says. And then, with precisely calibrated insistence, Sexton asks, “What’s the real reason for hesitating?”
    As soon as the client puts pen to paper, Honora rises and slips her gloves back on. The most important part of a sale, Sexton has impressed upon her, is to get out of the room once the deal has been made. Nothing is to be gained by lingering. The customer might change his mind.
    Occasionally, Honora worries about Sexton’s sales pitch. Is it true, for example, that a thing worth having is worth having now? That the sooner one buys a typewriter, the sooner it will start earning money? It seems to her that there might be a flaw in this logic, that it might not be absolutely accurate that putting a purchase off is like paying more for it.
    She worries too about the slow drawing off of the gloves and the absence of her wedding ring. When she and Sexton thought up the routine, it was fun and frivolous, a lark that made them laugh. But by the third or fourth time they perform it, the gestures seem to have grown more serious, and Honora feels uneasy. There is the undeniable implication that Miss Willard — or the
idea
of Miss Willard — might go with the typewriter.
    On their first road trip, Sexton sells twenty-three machines for a total sales commission of more than $135. It seems to both of them a fortune. In the cabins, in the afternoons, with the smell of mildew in the blankets, Sexton and Honora make love to the sound of the occasional car passing by on Route 4 or 111. The beds sag in the middle, the pillows are as thin as quilts, and when they are finished, they have to sleep squashed