"I'll manage. Keep moving, Harry."
They reach the far curb. The peanut store now not only has porno magazines inside but has put an array of them on a rack outside. Young muscular oiled boys pose singly or in pairs under titles such as DRUMMER and SKIN. A Japanese in a three-piece pinstripe suit and gray bowler hat steps smartly out of the door, folding a New York Times and a Wall Street Journal together under his arm. How did the Japanese ever get to Brewer? As the door eases shut, the old circus smell of warm roasted peanuts drifts out to the cold sidewalk. Harry says to Janice. "We could put all three boxes in the bag and I could lug it over my shoulder. You know, like Santa Claus. Ho ho."
A small crowd of pocked dark street kids mixed with shaggy rummies in their winter layered look threatens to collect around them as they confer. Harry tightens his grip on his two boxes. Janice hugs her third and says, "Let's push on this way. The bank's only a block more." Her face is flushed and bitten by the cold, her eyes squinting and watering and her mouth a detennined slot.
"A good block and a half," he corrects.
Past then the Brewer Wallpaper Company with its display rolls stiffening in the dusty windows like shrouds, past Blimline's Sandwiches and Manderbach Wholesale Office Supplies and a narrow place jammed with flat boxes called Hobby Heaven, past the cigar store with its giant rusting Y-B sign and the ornately iron-barred windows of the old Conrad Weiser Oyster House that now promises Live Entertainment in desperate red letters on its dark doors, across Fourth Street when the light at last turns green, past the long glass-block-inlaid facade of the Acme they say is going out of business at the end of the year, past Hollywood Beauty Supplies and Imperial Floor Coverings and Zenith Auto Parts and Accessories with its sweetish baked smell of fresh tires and window of chrome tailpipes they go, man and wife, as the wind intensifies and the sparkling sidewalk squares grow in size.
The squared-off weight in Harry's hands has become a hostile thing, burning his palms, knocking against his crotch. Now when he would almost welcome being robbed he feels that the others on this west side of the street are shying from them, as somehow menacing, distorted into struggling shapes by the force-fields of their dense boxes. He keeps having to wait for Janice to catch up, while his own burden, double hers, pulls at his arms. The tinsel wound around the aluminum lampposts vibrates furiously. He is sweating across his back beneath his expensive overcoat and his shirt collar keeps drying to a clammy cold edge. During these waits he stares up Weiser toward the mauve and brown bulk of Mt. Judge; in his eyes as a child God had reposed on the slopes of that mountain, and now he can imagine how through God's eyes from that vantage he and Janice might look below: two ants trying to make it up the sides of a bathroom basin.
They pass a camera store advertising Agfa film, the Hexerei Boutique with its mannequins flaunting their nippleless boobs through transparent blouses and vests of gold mail, a Rexall's with pastel vibrators among the suggested Christmas gifts in the windows festooned with cotton and angel hair, the Crépe House with its lunching couples, the locally famous cigar store saved as an act of historical preservation, and a new store called PedalEase specializing in male and female footwear for jogging and tennis and even racquetball and squash, that young couples or pairs of young singles do together these days, to judge from the big cardboard blow-ups in the window. The Dacron-clad girl's honey-colored hair lifts like air made liquid as she laughingly strokes a ball on easy feet. Next, at last, the first of the four great granite columns of the Brewer Trust looms. Harry leans his aching back against its Roman breadth while waiting for Janice to catch up. If she's robbed in this gap between them it will cost them a third of $14,652 or nearly $5000 but at this point the risk doesn't seem so real. Some distance away he sees spray-painted on the back of one of the concrete benches in the mall of trees a slogan SKEETER LIVES. If he could go closer he could be sure that's what it says. But he cannot move. Janice arrives beside his shoulder. Red-faced, she looks like her mother. "Let's not stand here," she pants. Even the circumference of the pillar seems a lengthy distance as she leads him around it and pushes ahead of him through the revolving doors.
Christmas carols are pealing within the great vaulted interior. The high groined ceiling is painted blue here in every season, with evenly spaced stars of gold. When Harry sets his two boxes down on one of the shelves where you write checks, his relieved body seems to rise toward this false sky. The teller, a lady in an orchid pants suit, smiles to be readmitting them to their safe-deposit box so soon. Their box is a four by four – narrower, they discover, than the boxes of silver dollars three rows abreast. Hearts still laboring, their hands still hurting, Harry and Janice are slow to grasp the disparity, once the frosted glass door has sealed them into the cubicle. Harry several times measures the width of one paper lid against the breadth of tin before concluding, "We need a bigger box." Janice is delegated to go back out into the bank and -request one. Her father had been a good friend of the manager. When she returns, it is with the news that there has been a run lately on safe-deposit boxes, that the best the bank could do was put the Angstroms on a list. The manager that Daddy knew has retired. The present one seemed to Janice very young, though he wasn't exactly rude.
Harry laughs. "Well we can't sell 'em back to Blondie down there, it'd cost us a fortune. Could we dump everything back in the bag and stuff it in?"
Crowded together in the cubicle, he and Janice keep bumping into each other, and he scents rising from her for the first time a doubt that he has led them well in this new inflated world; or perhaps the doubt he scents arises from him. But there can be no turning back. They transfer silver dollars from the boxes to the bag. When the silver clinks loudly, Janice winces and says, "Shh."
"Why? Who'll hear?"
"The people out there. The tellers."
"What do they care?"
"I care," Janice says. "It's stifling in here." She takes off her sheepskin coat and in the absence of a hook to hang it on drops it folded to the floor. He takes off his black overcoat and drops it on top. Sweat of exertion has made her hair springier; her bangs have curled back to reveal that high glossy forehead that is so much her, now and twenty years ago, that he kisses it, tasting salt. He wonders if people have ever screwed in these cubicles and imagines that a vault would be a nice place, one of those primped-up young tellers and a lecherous old mortgage officer, put the time-lock on to dawn and ball away. Janice feeds stacks of coins into the coarse gray pouch furtively, suppressing the clink. "This is so embarrassing," she says, "suppose one of those ladies comes in," as if the silver is naked flesh; and not for the first time in twenty-three years he feels a furtive rush of loving her, caught with him as she is in the tight places life affords. He takes one of the silver dollars and slips it down the neck of her linen blouse into her bra. As he foresaw, she squeals at the chill and tries to suppress the squeal. He loves her more, seeing her unbutton her blouse a button and frowningly dig into her bra for the coin; old as he is it still excites him to watch women fiddle with their underwear. Make our own coat hook in here.
After a while she announces, "It simply will not go in." Stuff and adjust as they will, hardly half of the bagged coins can be made to fit. Their insurance policies and Savings Bonds, Nelson's birth certificate and the never-discarded mortgage papers for the house in Penn Villas that burned down – all the scraps of paper preserved as evidence of their passage through an economy and a certain legal time – are lifted out and reshufed to no avail. The thick cloth of the bag, the tendency of loose coins to bunch in a clump, the long slender shape of the gray tin box frustrate them as side by side they tug and push, surgeons at a hopeless case. The eight hundred eighty-eight coins keep escaping the mouth of the sack and falling onto the floor and rolling into corners. When they have pressed the absolute maximum into the box, so its tin sides bulge, they are still left with three hundred silver dollars, which Harry distributes among the pockets of his overcoat.