Bu the neighborhood had turned out to be more than a convenience. She liked the small shops, the narrow, crooked streets, the low buildings, the quiet people who led unhurried lives. She liked the Italian markets on Bleecker, the Armenian restaurant on Charles, the benches in Washington Square. Parts of the Village were too noisy, especially on weekends. Parts were too loudly commercial, too cluttered with tourists, too overwhelmed by bearded boys and bra-less girls toying with rebellion. She avoided those areas and loved what remained.

Her job was on one of those commercial streets. She worked at a small shop on Eighth Street near Macdougal called Heaven’s Door. Her employer was a quiet little man named Seguri Yamatari, a stoop-shouldered and myopic Japanese who eked out a tenuous living selling Oriental goods to tourists. He stocked prints, saki sets, salt and pepper shakers, long bamboo cigarette holders, ivory and teak Buddhas, remaindered sets of steak knives, small porcelain elephants, and similar functional and non-functional bits of bric-a-brac. Occasionally he would escort a customer into the back room, and the customer would leave five or ten minutes later, carrying a package wrapped carefully in brown paper. Rhoda had guessed that Mr. Yamatari carried on some clandestine backroom trade which had little to do with prints or saki sets or porcelain elephants, but she didn’t dig deeper.

She liked the man, and her work. He was always perfectly polite to her, calling her Rhoda or Loda depending upon his whim of the moment, and never much caring if she came to work late or spent extra time on her lunch hour. The work itself could hardly have been simpler. When customers came into the store (which did not happen too often) she waited on them. She showed them whatever they wanted to see, gave them whatever advice she guessed that they wanted to hear, and took their money and sent them on their way with their purchases in hand. For this Mr. Yamatari paid her sixty-five dollars a week. It was not much, but it was enough for her to live on.