The stock she was supposed to organize rose in pyramids of flimsy boxes. Beyond the few feet lit by a weak bulb, the vast basement was dark. Water dripped constantly in the farther reaches of the darkness. She heard rats. Once stepping outside the circle of sickly yellow light, she ran into a cardboard herd of monstrous deer propped up against a wall. Around their necks hung pine wreaths which disintegrated at her touch.

At midday, a voice shouted to her from above that she should go and get her lunch. She went to a lunchroom a block or so away and ate an egg-salad sandwich, blinking a little in the white dusty light that all but obscured the sky. People looked whey-faced. She passed through a Japanese section on the way back to the store. The toys and cups and fabrics in the display windows emitted a special cheap brightness; in the depths of these shops, small figures moved like silhouettes. In the morning, she had overheard the store manager say to a clerk, “They ought to send all those Japs back to Tokyo.” Walter had once described to her how Japanese soldiers were trained in the use of bayonets—they kept them away from women for months, “to harden them,” he’d said, and they used live Chinese prisoners for spearing. He’d shown her a photograph—soldiers bundled uplike children about to go out and play in the snow, plunging their bayonets in bound prisoners at the bottom of a ditch. A bleaching substance appeared to have affected the sunlight; the color of things ran together, turning the streets gray. All of Los Angeles was a basement.

In the last hour of the day, the manager summoned her upstairs. “Go help Miss Gluck,” he said. Miss Gluck, a middle-aged woman wearing an enormous pompadour of jet-black hair, twitched and shook and mumbled as she snatched dresses from the long metal bars on which they hung and pushed them brutally into the hands of old Negro women or Mexican girls or very fat white women looking for odd-size dresses.

“They don’t wash,” Miss Gluck whispered harshly to Annie as she stuffed dresses into paper bags. “They sweat like pigs—they can’t speak God’s language. One day, they’ll rise up and destroy us…there’ll be nothing left in God’s world. Close your pocketbook! Close it! Don’t ever leave it lying about like that! They’re so dumb. Imagine buying this shit. I wouldn’t buy this shit if I had to go stark naked up the Angel Flight Stairs. Here comes Aunt Jemima with an evil look in her eye! She’s a thief. That old nigger lady’d steal your teeth. Watch her!”

Miss Gluck’s own odor was suffocating, stale apricots and ammonia with an overlay of musky perfume.

The day ended; the clerks rushed out into the dusk. Tomorrow it would begin again.