13. I Thought About This Girl

A cheerful Polish girl, working in a small bakery in the U.S.A. during World War II, suddenly became gloomy. What had happened to cause her change of mood? Why did she wish to quit? What was the awful reason she finally gave to the bakery owner's family?

I thought about this girl quite a lot. We all did—my mother, my father, my brothers, all of us. It seemed silly to let ourselves be upset by a girl who worked for us, but we couldn't help it. She worried us. All we knew was that for a long time she was happy with us, and then suddenly she wasn't.

She said nothing, of course, right up to the end. She was too considerate and friendly and kind to say anything, but we could tell. We could tell by the way she stood behind the counter in our little bakery, by the way she served a customer. She used to laugh all the time and keep the whole store bright with her energy and her smile and her pleasant voice. People spoke about it. It was such a pleasure to be served by her, they said.

"The smartest thing I ever did," my father would say with a smile as he watched her. "Hiring that girl was the smartest thing I ever did."

It wasn't that way very long, though. Not that we had any fault to find. She still came in early. She still worked hard. She still was polite and friendly and quick, but it wasn't the same. She didn't laugh any more. She stood very quietly when it wasn't busy and looked out of the window. She was worried about something.

At first we thought it would pass away, but it didn't. It got worse and worse. We did the obvious thing, of course. We asked her what was wrong.

"Nothing," she said at once, smiling quickly. "Nothing is wrong."

We asked her many times, but we still got the same answer, and knew it wasn't true.

It annoyed my mother.

"Why should we be bothered like this?" she asked sharply. "We've treated her like a daughter. Why should she be unhappy? Anyway, we didn't need her to start with."

And, of course, we didn't. We had always managed pretty well in the store. We were seldom overworked, because it is only a small bakeshop, though business is brisk and profitable. It happened very simply. A woman, a very good customer of ours, came in one day and told us about her—a poor girl from Poland, whose parents were still on the other side and who had no one here to take care of her except an old aunt, herself far from wealthy. Wouldn't it be wonderful, this customer said to my mother, if it were possible to find some sort of job for the girl, something to help her support herself and make her less of a burden to her aunt? My mother was sympathetic and interested at once—she is always like that—and the woman went on to wonder casually if we mightn't be able to find a place for this girl in our own shop. Poor mother was too far gone in compassion to realize that she had been trapped, and said quickly that we certainly could; she would talk to my father.

At first, of course, we laughed. There was scarcely enough work in the shop to keep all of us busy. It seemed ridiculous to hire anybody else.

"We'll be waiting on each other," my father said.

In the end, however, mother brought us around. We can afford it, she said, and think how nice it would be to have a young girl's face in the store, how nice for the customers. Here arguments weren't very impressive, but father seldom denies mother anything she wants, so he said all right, let's take a look at her. And then, of course, as soon as we saw her, we were lost. She was so fresh and cheerful and bright, with her round face and her ready smile and her yellow hair.

"My God," my father said, "she looks like she was made for a bakery."

He pinched his chin between his thumb and forefinger and said well, maybe now he'd be able to have a little time for himself. There was a book on elementary chemistry that he'd been nibbling at cautiously for almost thirty years, ever since he came to America. Now, he said, he might get a chance to read it. There were also a lot of things my mother had always wanted to do. There were dishes she had yearned to make but never dared try. Now she'd have time to experiment a little.

"You'll be able to cook," my father roared. "After thirty years you'll finally be able to cook."

It was a boisterous and happy occasion. The girl had done that for us.

After she had been with us a short while, however, we began to notice that my father hadn't made much progress with his chemistry and that there were no startling innovations at my mother's table. We knew the reason, of course. The habits of thirty years are not easily broken, and they were spending as much time as ever in the shop. But nobody seemed to mind. It was pleasant just to watch this girl with her bouncing energy and her happy laugh. Often my father would cock his head admiringly and repeat, "Smartest thing I ever did, hiring that girl."

Then suddenly he didn't say it any more. He still thought the world of her. We all did, but he was just as worried as the rest of us. What was wrong? Why was she no longer happy?

Before we could find an answer, and before our vague irritation could turn to anger, however, she came to us. She said she was leaving.

It was typical of her to wait until we were all together before she told us. She could have told my father or my mother or any one of us, but she knew how we felt about her. It was hard for her to say it to all of us at the same time. She picked the harder way, because it seemed to her to be the right way.

"Leaving?" we asked, startled.

"Yes," she said quietly, dropping her eyes from ours. "I must leave."

Apparently it was something she had been wanting to tell us for a long time, something she had been afraid to tell us.

"But why?" we asked. "Why are you leaving?"

She didn't answer. She just shook her head and bit her lip.

"Aren't you happy here," we said.

"Don't we pay you enough?" we asked. "Do you want more?"

She shook her head quickly.

"No," she said. "You pay me enough."

We didn't want to make her cry, but somehow we could not stop asking questions.

"You have another job, maybe? A better one?"

She shook her head again.

"No, I have no other job."

"But you need a job, don't you?"

"Yes," she said. "I need a job."

"Then why?"

She didn't want to tell us, but we liked her too well not to insist on knowing.

"You can tell us, Mary," my mother said kindly. "We are your friends. You can tell us."

She looked up at us. She seemed confused and beaten, but she saw she would have to tell us.

"My mother," she began almost inaudibly, "my mother wrote me a letter from Poland—"

She stopped to blink away the tears, and then began again.

"My mother wrote me it isn't right," she said softly, brokenly. "She says it isn't right to—it isn't right to work for Jews."

She kept her puzzled, tearful glance upon us for another moment. Then she turned and walked away, her shoulders shaking with her sobs.

From Human Dimensions in Fiction,

ed., Woolf, New Jersey, 1979.