Read Highsmith, Patricia for Free Online

like a wolf’s looked at Therese. “Don’t let Roberta hear you,” Miss Martucci said with a glance around her. “Don’t let anybody hear you, but those dolls are in the basement.”
    “Oh.” The upstairs toy department was at war with the basement toy department. The tactics were to force the customer into buying on the seventh floor, where everything was more expensive. Therese told the woman the dolls were in the basement.
    “Try and sell this today,” Miss Davis said to her as she sidled past, slapping the battered imitation alligator suitcase with her red-nailed hand.
    Therese nodded.
    “Do you have any stiff-legged dolls? One that stands up?”
    Therese looked at the middle-aged woman with the crutches that thrust her shoulders high. Her face was different from all the other faces across the counter, gentle, with a certain cognizance in the eyes as if they actually saw what they looked at.
    “That’s a little bigger than I wanted,” the woman said when Therese showed her a doll. “I’m sorry. Do you have a smaller one?”
    “I think so.” Therese went farther down the aisle, and was aware that the woman followed her on her crutches, circling the press of people at the counter, so as to save Therese walking back with the doll. Suddenly Therese wanted to take infinite pains, wanted to find exactly the doll the woman was looking for. But the next doll wasn’t quite right, either.
    The doll didn’t have real hair. Therese tried in another place and found the same doll with real hair. It even cried when it bent over. It was exactly what the woman wanted. Therese laid the doll down carefully in fresh tissue in a new box.
    “That’s just perfect,” the woman repeated. “I’m sending this to a friend in Australia who’s a nurse. She graduated from nursing school with me, so I made a little uniform like ours to dress a doll in. Thank you so much.
    And I wish you a merry Christmas!”
    “Merry Christmas to you!” Therese said, smiling. It was the first merry Christmas she had heard from a customer.
    “Have you had your relief yet, Miss Belivet?” Mrs. Hendrickson asked her, as sharply as if she reproached her.
    Therese hadn’t had it. She got her pocketbook and the novel she was reading from the shelf under the wrapping counter. The novel was Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which Richard was anxious for her to read. How anyone could have read Gertrude Stein without reading any Joyce, Richard said, he didn’t know. She felt a bit inferior when Richard talked with her about books. She had browsed all over the bookshelves at school, but the library assembled by the Order of St.
    Margaret had been far from catholic, she realized now, though it had included such unexpected writers as Gertrude Stein.
    The hall to the employees’ rest rooms was blocked by big shipping carts piled high with boxes. Therese waited to get through.
    “Pixie!” one of the shipping cart boys shouted to her.
    Therese smiled a little because it was silly. Even down in the cloakroom in the basement, they yelled “Pixie!” at her morning and night.
    “Pixie, waiting for me?” the raw-edged voice roared again, over the crash and bump of the stock carts.
    She got through, and dodged a shipping cart that hurtled toward her with a clerk aboard.
    “No smoking here!” shouted a man’s voice, the very growly voice of an executive, and the girls ahead of Therese who had lighted cigarettes blew their smoke in the air and said loudly in chorus just before they reached the refuge of the women’s room, “Who does he think he is, Mr. Frankenberg?”
    “Yoo-hoo! Pixie!”
    “Ah’m juss bahdin mah tahm, Pixie!”
    A shipping cart skidded in front of her, and she struck her leg against its metal corner. She went on without looking down at her leg, though pain began to blossom there, like a slow explosion. She went on into the different chaos of women’s voices, women’s figures, and the smell of disinfectant. Blood