The Times Are Never So Bad by Andre Dubus Page B

written grammatical compositions she did not feel or believe, choosing topics that seemed both approachable and pleasing to the teacher. She discovered a pattern: all topics were approachable if she simply rendered them, with an opening statement, proper paragraphs, and a conclusion; and every topic was difficult if she began to immerse in it; but always she withdrew. In one course she saw herself: in sociology, with amusement, anger, resignation, and a suspended curiosity that lasted for weeks, she learned of the hunters, the gatherers, the farmers, saw herself and her parents defined by survival; and industrialization bringing about the clock that, on her bedside table, she regarded as a thing which was not inanimate but a conscience run on electricity, and she was delighted, knowing that people had once lived in accord with the sun and weather, and that punctuality and times for work and food and not-work and sleep were later imposed upon them, as she felt now they were imposed upon her.
    In her other classes she listened, often with excitement, to a million dead at Borodino, Bismarck’s uniting Germany, Chamberlain at Munich, Hitler invading Russia on the twenty-second of June because Napoleon did, all of these people and their actions equally in her past, kaleidoscopic, having no causal sequence whose end was her own birth and first eighteen years. She could say ‘On honeydew he hath fed / And drunk the milk of paradise’ and ‘… the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo,’ but they, and Captain Vere hanging Billy Budd, and Huck choosing Nigger Jim and hell, joined Socrates and his hemlock and Bonhoeffer’s making an evil act good by performing it for a friend, and conifers and deciduous trees, pistils and stamens, and the generals and presidents and emperors and kings, all like dust motes in the sunlight of that early summer, when she went to work so she could move to an apartment an hour’s walk from the house she had lived in for nineteen years, and which she forced herself to call my parents’ house instead of home until that became habitual.
    She was a clerk in a department store in town. The store was old and had not changed its customs: it had no cash registers. She worked in the linen department, and placed bills and coins into a cylinder and put that in a tube which, by vacuum, took the money to a small room upstairs where women she never met sent change down. She worked six days a week and spent the money on rent and heat and a used Ford she bought for nine hundred and eighty-five dollars; she kept food for breakfasts and lunches in her refrigerator, and ate dinners with her parents or dates or bought pieces of fish, chicken, or meat on the way home from work. On Sundays she went to the beach.
    A maternal uncle was a jeweler and owned a store, and in fall she went to work for him, learned enough about cameras and watches to help customers narrow their choices to two or three; then her uncle came from his desk, and compared watches or cameras with a fervor that made their purchase seem as fraught with possibilities of happiness and sorrow as choosing a lover. She liked the absolute cleanliness of the store, with its vacuumed carpets and polished glass, its lack of any distinctive odors, and liked to believe what she did smell was sparkle from the showcases. Her greyhaired uncle always wore a white shirt and bow tie; he told her neckties got in the way of his work, the parts of watches he bent over with loupe and tweezers and screwdriver and hand remover. She said nothing about a tie clasp, but thought of them, even glanced at their shelf. She liked them, and all the other small things in their boxes on the shelves: cuff links and rings and pins and earrings. She liked touching them with customers.
    She worked on Saturdays, but on Wednesday afternoons her uncle closed the store. It was an old custom in the town, and most doctors and lawyers and dentists and many owners of