The Dry Goods Store

Ruth Lichtenstein measured the broadcloth against the brass yardstick set into the edge of the counter, snapped the bolt over twice more, and cut it clean with the long shears while Mrs. Pardini watched and approved, the way she had watched and approved at this same counter for thirty years, since she was a young wife and Ruth was a girl doing sums in the back.

It was a Friday morning in October, and the light came in through the big plate windows that faced Sierra Street and lay across the oiled wood floor and the long counters and the shelves that went up the walls to the pressed-tin ceiling, bolts of cloth stacked to the top, the dark suitings and the cottons and the bright fall wools, with the rolling ladder on its rail for reaching them. Lichtenstein and Sons had stood on this block one street west of Virginia since her grandfather Jakob opened it in the eighteen nineties, and the sign over the door still said and Sons though there were no sons now, only Ruth, who had run it through the Depression with her father and ran it now mostly alone.

She wrote the sale in Mrs. Pardini’s charge book and her own, three and a half yards of broadcloth and a card of buttons, and put the cash slip and no cash into the little brass cylinder and screwed it shut and sent it up on the wire to the cashier’s cage, where her son Benjamin, fourteen and not yet tall, caught it and made the change against the account and sent the cylinder back down the wire with the receipt, the way the store had done it since before the first war, the canister flying overhead on its cable the whole length of the room.

“You spoil me,” Mrs. Pardini said, taking her parcel. “Nobody wraps anymore. You go to the Penney’s, they hand it to you in a sack.”

“We are not the Penney’s,” Ruth said, and Mrs. Pardini laughed and said no, you certainly are not, and went out, and the bell over the door rang her into the street.

Her father came in from the back at midmorning and took the chair by the radiator that was his chair. Aaron Lichtenstein was eighty-one. He had built the store up with Jakob and then past him, had sat on the board that put up the temple over on West Street in nineteen twenty-one and had been there the first Friday they prayed in it, and now he came down most mornings from the house and sat in the chair by the radiator and watched his daughter run the thing his father had started, and said little, and saw everything.

“The Connolly girl was in yesterday,” he said. “She bought nothing.”

“She looked at the coats.”

“She bought the coat at the Gray Reid’s,” Aaron said. “I saw the box. Her mother bought her coats here for twenty years.”

Ruth straightened a stack of handkerchiefs that did not need straightening.

“The Gray Reid’s has a parking lot now,” she said. “On the side. You can leave the car right there and walk in. People have cars, Papa. They want to leave the car somewhere.”

“We have the street.”

“The street is full,” Ruth said. “That is the trouble with the street. It is full and there is nowhere to put the car, and a young mother with two children is not going to circle the block to buy a coat she can buy at a store with a lot.”

Aaron was quiet a while. The wire sang as Benjamin sent a cylinder across to the far counter and back.

“When your grandfather came,” Aaron said, “there were six of us in the dry goods on this end of town and we all did well, because there was one street and everyone walked it. Now there is the Penney’s and the Sears and the Ward’s and the Gray Reid’s, all of them with ten of everything, and they buy by the railcar and sell for less than I can buy for. How does a man sell broadcloth for less than I can buy broadcloth.”

“He buys a thousand bolts,” Ruth said. “We buy four.”

“So we lose.”

“We don’t lose,” Ruth said, more sharply than she meant. “Mrs. Pardini did not go to the Penney’s. Forty people did not go to the Penney’s this week, and they came here, and they will come here, because here a person knows their name and cuts the cloth right and stands behind it. That is a thing the railcar cannot do.”

Her father looked at her with the old shrewd look that had not gone with anything else that had gone.

“For how long,” he said. It was not unkind. It was the question of a man who had watched a great many things last exactly as long as the people who needed them, and not one day more.

Ruth did not answer him, because she did not know the answer, and a customer came in, a woman after thread and a zipper, and the morning went on.

At closing Benjamin came down from the cage and counted the drawer and read her the figures, which were not bad for a Friday and were not what a Friday had been ten years ago, and she initialed the book and they pulled the shades on the big windows halfway, the way they did, so the goods would not fade over the Sabbath, and the store went dim and cool and smelled the way it had always smelled, of sized cotton and floor oil and the dust that lived in cloth.

“Grandpa thinks we’re going to close,” Benjamin said. He said it carefully, watching her, the way a boy says the thing the adults have been not saying.

Ruth took her coat from the hook.

“Your grandfather is eighty-one,” she said, “and he has buried more of Reno than you have met. He thinks everything is going to close, because in his life almost everything has, and he is mostly right, and it makes him a sad man to be right about.” She buttoned the coat. “But he came down those stairs this morning to sit in that chair, and he will come down tomorrow. People do not give up a thing because it is going to be hard. They give it up when they stop wanting it. I have not stopped wanting it.”

Benjamin took this in.

“So we’re staying.”

“We are staying,” Ruth said, “and on Monday you are going to help me trim the front window for the fall, the whole window, the good wools and the new hats, so that when the young mother with the two children does circle the block, she sees something through the glass that the Penney’s cannot put in a window, and she stops the car.” She turned off the last light. “Now go up and tell your grandfather we did four hundred dollars and let him be wrong for one night.”

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