The Silence on the Shore. Hugh Garner

to get her signature. “Listen, Kitty,” he said, pulling some order forms from his inside pocket, “just sign one of our free trial receipts. There’s no obligation.” He walked over to her, but she jumped to her feet.

      “Listen, Buster, Rita’ll be here in a minute. How about you coming back this afternoon, eh?”

      “Sure. If you’ll just —”

      “You got a nice smile, Buster,” she said, pressing herself against him.

      He turned her chin up and kissed her. She grabbed his wrist as he tried to put his hand down inside her housecoat.

      “Not now, Buster. Later, eh?” She led him into the hallway. “Come back later, will you, sweetheart?”

      “Right after lunch,” he promised. “I should really get you to —”

      “It can wait, Buster, if you can,” she said, winking at him.

      He laughed. “I can wait, Kitty, but not too long.” He tried to pull her to him again, but she sidestepped.

      “I’ll be waiting for you, Buster,” she said, opening the door and shoving him into the hall.

      The door was closed gently, and he stared at it, then down at the order forms in his hand.

      He sat in a neighbourhood park for a while, smoking and thinking of Kitty. He should really go down to Cartwright’s office and get another demonstrator, but what the hell, there was time enough for that tomorrow. Anyway, Cartwright would ask him for a signed order form. By afternoon Kitty would be drunk enough to sign anything — and agree to anything too, he’d bet.

      He’d have to promote a car somehow. Without a car he wasted too much time on the job, and the floor polishers were heavy. Not having a car had taught him something that he hadn’t realized before: some would-be customers were mistrustful of him because he wasn’t driving an automobile. He knew now that a car was not only a status symbol to the middle class, but was also a mark of division among the workers, dividing the merely poor from the poverty-stricken. A big car might enhance the economic and social status of the professional man, but a member of that class could do without one through eccentricity or choice. That wasn’t true of the working man; to him the lack of a car meant only one thing, poverty.

      He wondered why he always thought of himself as working class. Probably because he had belonged to it in his childhood, the son of an often unemployed plasterer. Though he thought little and cared less about sociology he was aware that the working class was shrinking. He supposed that now he could call himself middle class, the same as everybody else did, unless they were drawing home relief.

      After sitting for a half hour or so in the park he began walking back toward the rooming house.

      The grandiose plans he had made for himself after leaving the army hadn’t jelled. After quitting the gas-heater job he had fallen a week behind in his rent. He’d been saved that time by a chance meeting with an old army buddy who was trying to get rid of three hot typewriters. Clark had taken them on commission, and had sold one to the gas-heating company, one through an ad in the evening paper, and he’d gotten rid of the third, while drunk, by selling raffle tickets on it to the members of a college journalism class. The whole deal had netted him forty dollars, but that was gone, along with the fourteen dollars and change he had made in floor polisher commissions that week.

      It felt good to walk along the bright summer street without the weight of the polisher pulling at his arm. On the way up Adford he met the French-Canadian woman from the third floor with her children. He smiled and said hello, but she only answered with a frozen little smile. There might be something doing there if he played it right.

      He was halfway up the stairs when Grace Hill came out of her quarters and called to him.

      “Yes, Mrs. Hill?” he said, leaning over the banister.

      “You been eating in your room,” she said accusingly.

      “Just some delicatessen I bought downtown,” he said. “What’s wrong with that?”

      She ignored his question and said, “I see you haven’t got your polisher today?”

      “It was a demonstrator. I just sold it.”

      “You can make money working at that job?”

      “I get by.”

      “You can’t live on pies and — that junk you eat in your room,” she said. “How come you don’t have your meals out no more?”