Just an Ordinary Day: The Uncollected Stories of Shirley Jackson (43 page)

“Not right for a person not to eat,” Martha said.

“My God,” I said, “I can’t live on it.”

“You’re not sick,” Martha said reasonably. “After she’s gone, after all,
you’ll
still be eating good meals.”

“Doesn’t seem fair, does it? You and me eating kidney stew, and Charlotte…” I looked at Martha and she looked at me. “Why not?” I said.

“Shouldn’t do it,” Martha said.

“I don’t care.” I fixed a tray with a generous serving of kidney stew, threw on a couple of Martha’s hot yeast rolls, and a cup of coffee with plenty of cream and sugar. Then I stuck my tongue out at Martha and took the tray upstairs.

After that, whenever Martha made anything particularly nice, I took Charlotte along a tray; it was always done as a special treat, and Martha and I always pretended it was something unusual for Charlotte, and Charlotte and I always pretended it was a trick on Martha, and then after a while it seemed silly and Martha went back to making her regular meals and Charlotte and I got strawberry preserves for breakfast again.

The cards stopped coming, but Charlotte began finding little boxes of candy everywhere. Now, candy, and especially chocolate, was one thing she was absolutely
not
supposed to have, and leaving it around was about the crudest practical joke anyone could try, because Charlotte was one of those people who just can’t turn her back on a piece of candy. Not the way you and I eat candy, you see—if there was a dish of candy on the table, Charlotte couldn’t sit still until she’d polished it off, just keep coming back and coming back and knowing all the time she shouldn’t. I like candy well enough, and I used to keep some in my room until once Charlotte found out about it and made me give it to her, but as far as the house in general was concerned, I kept it out. Cooking chocolate in the pantry and not even Charlotte could eat
that
—but no sweets of any kind around where anyone could get at them. Even Charlotte hadn’t the nerve to go dipping sugar out of the sugar bowl, so we were all right until this joker started getting little boxes of candy to Charlotte. First it came in the mail, a small sample box of sweet chocolate, and naturally I couldn’t stop Charlotte from going right at it, even in the middle of breakfast. Then one day I found a box of chocolates on the living room table, and I knew Martha hadn’t put them there, and I didn’t dare ask Charlotte, so I gave them to Martha to take home, but Charlotte wandered into the kitchen and saw them. Then it got worse. Little wax paper packages, two or three pieces, would turn up on her dresser—homemade fudge, sometimes, or caramels, or orange creams, or plain chocolate—and sometimes I found them and of course sometimes I didn’t. I remember once I found a package in the pocket of her dressing gown, and one in the drawer of her desk, next to her checkbook. I knew I wasn’t finding them all because she was always asking Martha for soda for indigestion or heartburn, and of course that was no good for her either. Then one day I came into her room without knocking, just to catch her, and there she was eating candy and with a cigarette in her hand, and of course I was just as mad as could be. I threw the candy into the wastebasket and took away the cigarette—and the pack of cigarettes in her pocket, too, by the way—and said, “Now, look, hon, this is really getting out of hand. What on
earth
do you think you’re
doing?
”

It was the first time she was ever sullen with me. As I say, we did a good deal of fighting, back and forth, but always giving as good as we got, and here she was now, acting like a child caught stealing a nickel out of its mother’s pocketbook, and I felt awful. “I’ve got a right to do as I please,” she said.

“Not if you deliberately harm yourself. You
know
this is all bad for you. Smoking, and eating rich candy, and trying to keep it all a secret.”

“I don’t care,” she said. “I can enjoy myself if I want to.”

“Don’t be silly,” I said, and then something occurred to me, because that didn’t sound at all like Charlotte, and I went and put my hand into her bathrobe pocket and took out a note, written the way the cards had been addressed—left-handed, and in purple ink—and the note said, “You got a right to enjoy yourself.”

“Where did you get
this?”
I asked, disgusted.

“It was with the cigarettes,” she said, and then she smiled up at me, like my old Charlotte.
“Don’t
I have a right?” she wanted to know.

“Look,” I said, “what I want is that you’ll still be enjoying yourself next year at this time. You’ve gotten into a state of mind where you think fooling me is enjoying yourself. Go ahead and fool me all you like—send me spiders in the mail if it gives you any pleasure—but just keep off the cigarettes and the candy and stuff.”

I shouldn’t have reminded her of the spiders; her face got all sick again and she turned away from me and wouldn’t talk anymore. And I suppose the candy and stuff kept coming because she kept talking about indigestion and she began to look frightened, as though she couldn’t stop herself anymore and knew just the same that she was getting worse. We weren’t making our little jokes anymore; somehow people had stopped thinking of her as being so courageous, I suppose because she looked so terrible, and had started talking about how long she could last, and where she had left the money. I was pretty sure she had left the money to me, but I was getting more and more worried about how long she could last, so I went and had a talk with Doctor West in the village about the secret candy and cigarettes.

“There’s no controlling her,” I said to him, and he shook his head.

“I don’t know of any cruelty like it,” he said. “You might better give her a dose of arsenic on the spot, and get it over with fast. This way, she’s not only pushing herself into the grave, she feels guilty about it besides. I can’t do anything except warn her.”

“I can’t even do that,” I said. “She’s stopped listening to me at all and if I try to keep an eye on her she just laughs at me.”

“Keep after her as much as you can,” he said. “All you
can
do.”

Well, the roses bloomed and kept their blossoms and got heavier and richer as the summer went on, and by the end of August our garden was so lovely, I would have liked to die there myself. Charlotte was tired and lethargic all the time; she might come downstairs for an hour or so in the morning, but she spent most of her time in her room, looking down at the roses from her window and I suppose stuffing herself with the lavish gifts from her unknown friend. It was all I could do to coax her out into the air for five minutes, and of course in the end that was what finally did it.

We had had breakfast together, eating buckwheat cakes and country sausage and toast and Martha’s strawberry preserves, and the mail had been good—one invitation for me, to a dance; one subscription renewal and one dividend check for Charlotte—and I asked her if she’d like to spend half an hour in the garden, after being indoors so much.

“I don’t think so.” Charlotte shook her head. “I believe I’ll just go back to bed.”

“You haven’t seen the rock garden. You can’t see it from your window. And you’re not sick enough to stay in bed and pamper yourself; you’ve
got
to get outdoors more.”

Charlotte sighed. “I’m so tired,” she said. “I hate walking around or standing up.”

“Half an hour?” I asked.

She shrugged. “These days,” she said wearily, “it’s more trouble to resist. Ten minutes.”

I took her arm, because she had trouble walking, and we went together out into the garden, among the roses. I knew I was right, when she stopped at once and just touched a rose with one finger. “They’re lovely this year,” she said.

“Each summer they’re lovelier than the last. That’s one of the things about roses.”

She laughed. “You thinking that next summer they’ll be just as lovely without me?”

“I’ll plant some on your grave,” I said amiably. “Come and see the rock garden.”

We went slowly down the path beside the cottage, between the rows of roses, past Martha’s kitchen window, and she leaned out to say, “Good to see
you
outdoors at last,” and then we went around past the house down to the back, to the rock garden that Charlotte and I had built together, and which I had tended alone this summer. “You’ve been spending too much time on
me
” Charlotte said critically. “Look at those weeds.”

“I’ve been more concerned about you.” I gave her a little hug. “Next year—” I said.

“Anne,” she said as though she hadn’t expected to be saying anything, and was a little bit surprised, and even shocked, to hear her own voice saying this, “Anne, you know I’ve left you all of it?”

“Have you, Charlotte?”

“The house, and the money, and everything. I thought you knew.”

“I just think it’s silly to talk about it.”

“I suppose it is. I’ve been wondering if maybe they weren’t wrong, Nathan and this other fellow. If maybe I’m not going to—”

“Look out,” I shouted,
“snake
, Charlotte, look
out!
” I jumped away from her, screaming, “Martha, Martha, help,
snake!”

Martha ran out, gasping, and killed the snake with a shovel, and Doctor West told me afterward that of course it was not a rattler, but only a milk snake.

“I feel so awful,” I told him, “I keep thinking of how we were standing there talking quietly, and if I had only kept my head…”

“You couldn’t know, of course,” he said.

“I guess I’m about as afraid of snakes as she was of spiders. But still… it was my job to take care of
her
. If I had only thought in time…”

“It was bound to happen sometime,” Doctor West said.

About the worst job Martha and I had was going over Charlotte’s clothes. There was still chocolate in some of the pockets, and in one pocket, in the sweater she was wearing that morning, I found another note, saying, “They’re just trying to leave you out. You better show them you can still be in the center of things.” It was the only one of those things that I hadn’t written left-handed, and I burned it.

O
NE
O
RDINARY
D
AY, WITH
P
EANUTS

Fantasy and Science Fiction,
January 1955

M
R
. J
OHN
P
HILIP
J
OHNSON
shut his front door behind him and went down his front steps into the bright morning with a feeling that all was well with the world on this best of all days, and wasn’t the sun warm and good, and didn’t his shoes feel comfortable after the resoling, and he knew that he had undoubtedly chosen the very precise tie that belonged with the day and the sun and his comfortable feet, and, after all, wasn’t the world just a wonderful place? In spite of the fact that he was a small man, and though the tie was perhaps a shade vivid, Mr. Johnson radiated a feeling of well-being as he went down the steps and onto the dirty sidewalk, and he smiled at people who passed him, and some of them even smiled back. He stopped at the newsstand on the corner and bought his paper, saying, “
Good
morning” with real conviction to the man who sold him the paper and the two or three other people who were lucky enough to be buying papers when Mr. Johnson skipped up. He remembered to fill his pockets with candy and peanuts, and then he set out to get himself uptown. He stopped in a flower shop and bought a carnation for his buttonhole, and stopped almost immediately afterward to give the carnation to a small child in a carriage, who looked at him dumbly, and then smiled, and Mr. Johnson smiled, and the child’s mother looked at Mr. Johnson for a minute and then smiled, too.

When he had gone several blocks uptown, Mr. Johnson cut across the avenue and went along a side street, chosen at random; he did not follow the same route every morning, but preferred to pursue his eventful way in wide detours, more like a puppy than a man intent upon business. It happened this morning that halfway down the block a moving van was parked, and the furniture from an upstairs apartment stood half on the sidewalk, half on the steps, while an amused group of people loitered, examining the scratches on the tables and the worn spots on the chairs, and a harassed woman, trying to watch a young child and the movers and the furniture all at the same time, gave the clear impression of endeavoring to shelter her private life from the people staring at her belongings. Mr. Johnson stopped, and for a moment joined the crowd, then he came forward and, touching his hat civilly, said, “Perhaps I can keep an eye on your little boy for you?”

The woman turned and glared at him distrustfully, and Mr. Johnson added hastily, “We’ll sit right here on the steps.” He beckoned to the little boy, who hesitated and then responded agreeably to Mr. Johnson’s genial smile. Mr. Johnson took out a handful of peanuts from his pocket and sat on the steps with the boy, who at first refused the peanuts on the grounds that his mother did not allow him to accept food from strangers; Mr. Johnson said that probably his mother had not intended peanuts to be included, since elephants at the circus ate them, and the boy considered, and then agreed solemnly. They sat on the steps cracking peanuts in a comradely fashion, and Mr. Johnson said, “So you’re moving?”

“Yep,” said the boy.

“Where you going?”

“Vermont.”

“Nice place. Plenty of snow there. Maple sugar, too; you like maple sugar?” Sure.

“Plenty of maple sugar in Vermont. You going to live on a farm?”

“Going to live with Grandpa.”

“Grandpa like peanuts?”

“Sure.”

“Ought to take him some,” said Mr. Johnson, reaching into his pocket. “Just you and Mommy going?”

“Yep.”

“Tell you what,” Mr. Johnson said. “You take some peanuts to eat on the train.”

The boy’s mother, after glancing at them frequently, had seemingly decided that Mr. Johnson was trustworthy, because she had devoted herself wholeheartedly to seeing that the movers did not—what movers rarely do, but every housewife believes they will—crack a leg from her good table, or set a kitchen chair down on a lamp. Most of the furniture was loaded by now, and she was deep in that nervous stage when she knew there was something she had forgotten to pack—hidden away in the back of a closet somewhere, or left at a neighbor’s and forgotten, or on the clothesline—and was trying to remember under stress what it was.

“This all, lady?” the chief mover said, completing her dismay.

Uncertainly, she nodded.

“Want to go on the truck with the furniture, sonny?” the mover asked the boy, and laughed. The boy laughed, too, and said to Mr. Johnson, “I guess I’ll have a good time at Vermont.”

“Fine time,” said Mr. Johnson, and stood up. “Have one more peanut before you go,” he said to the boy.

The boy’s mother said to Mr. Johnson, “Thank you so much; it was a great help to me.”

“Nothing at all,” said Mr. Johnson gallantly. “Where in Vermont are you going?”

The mother looked at the little boy accusingly, as though he had given away a secret of some importance, and said unwillingly, “Greenwich.”

“Lovely town,” said Mr. Johnson. He took out a card, and wrote a name on the back. “Very good friend of mine lives in Greenwich,” he said. “Call on him for anything you need. His wife makes the best doughnuts in town,” he added soberly to the little boy.

“Swell,” said the little boy.

“Goodbye,” said Mr. Johnson.

He went on, stepping happily with his new-shod feet, feeling the warm sun on his back and on the top of his head. Halfway down the block he met a stray dog and fed him a peanut.

At the corner, where another wide avenue faced him, Mr. Johnson decided to go on uptown again. Moving with comparative laziness, he was passed on either side by people hurrying and frowning, and people brushed past him going the other way, clattering along to get somewhere quickly. Mr. Johnson stopped on every corner and waited patiently for the light to change, and he stepped out of the way of anyone who seemed to be in any particular hurry, but one young lady came too fast for him, and crashed wildly into him when he stooped to pat a kitten, which had run out onto the sidewalk from an apartment house and was now unable to get back through the rushing feet.

“Excuse me,” said the young lady, trying frantically to pick up Mr. Johnson and hurry on at the same time, “terribly sorry.”

The kitten, regardless now of danger, raced back to its home. “Perfectly all right,” said Mr. Johnson, adjusting himself carefully. “You seem to be in a hurry.”

“Of course I’m in a hurry,” said the young lady. “I’m late.”

She was extremely cross, and the frown between her eyes seemed well on its way to becoming permanent. She had obviously awakened late, because she had not spent any extra time in making herself look pretty, and her dress was plain and unadorned with collar or brooch, and her lipstick was noticeably crooked. She tried to brush past Mr. Johnson, but, risking her suspicious displeasure, he took her arm and said, “Please wait.”

“Look,” she said ominously, “I ran into you, and your lawyer can see my lawyer and I will gladly pay all damages and all inconveniences suffered therefrom, but please this minute let me go because
I am late
.”

“Late for what?” said Mr. Johnson; he tried his winning smile on her but it did no more than keep her, he suspected, from knocking him down again.

“Late for work,” she said between her teeth. “Late for my employment. I have a job, and if I am late I lose exactly so much an hour and I cannot really afford what your pleasant conversation is costing me, be it
ever
so pleasant.”

“I’ll pay for it,” said Mr. Johnson. Now, these were magic words, not necessarily because they were true, or because she seriously expected Mr. Johnson to pay for anything, but because Mr. Johnson’s flat statement, obviously innocent of irony, could not be, coming from Mr. Johnson, anything but the statement of a responsible and truthful and respectable man.

“What
do
you mean?” she asked.

“I said that since I am obviously responsible for your being late, I shall certainly pay for it.”

“Don’t be silly,” she said, and for the first time the frown disappeared. “I wouldn’t expect you to pay for anything—a few minutes ago I was offering to pay
you
. Anyway,” she added, almost smiling, “it
was
my fault.”

“What happens if you don’t go to work?”

She stared. “I don’t get paid.”

“Precisely,” said Mr. Johnson.

“What do you mean, precisely? If I don’t show up at the office exactly twenty minutes ago I lose a dollar and twenty cents an hour, or two cents a minute or”—she thought—“almost a dime for the time I’ve spent talking to you.”

Mr. Johnson laughed, and finally she laughed, too. “You’re late already,” he pointed out. “Will you give me another four cents’ worth?”

“I don’t understand why.”

“You’ll see,” Mr. Johnson promised. He led her over to the side of the walk, next to the buildings, and said, “Stand here,” and went out into the rush of people going both ways. Selecting and considering, as one who must make a choice involving perhaps whole years of lives, he estimated the people going by. Once he almost moved, and then at the last minute thought better of it and drew back. Finally, from half a block away, he saw what he wanted, and moved out into the center of the traffic to intercept a young man, who was hurrying, and dressed as though he had awakened late, and frowning.

“Oof,” said the young man, because Mr. Johnson had thought of no better way to intercept anyone than the one the young woman had unwittingly used upon him. “Where do you think you’re going?” the young man demanded from the sidewalk.

“I want to speak to you,” said Mr. Johnson ominously.

The young man got up nervously, dusting himself and eyeing Mr. Johnson. “What for?” he said. “What’d I do?”

“That’s what bothers me most about people nowadays,” Mr. Johnson complained broadly to the people passing. “No matter whether they’ve done anything or not, they always figure someone’s after them. About what you’re going to do,” he told the young man.

“Listen,” said the young man, trying to brush past him, “I’m late, and I don’t have any time to listen. Here’s a dime, now get going.”

“Thank you,” said Mr. Johnson, pocketing the dime. “Look,” he said, “what happens if you stop running?”

“I’m late,” said the young man, still trying to get past Mr. Johnson, who was unexpectedly clinging.

“How much you make an hour?” Mr. Johnson demanded.

“A Communist, are you?” said the young man. “Now will you please let me—”

“No,” said Mr. Johnson insistently,
“how
much?”

“Dollar fifty,” said the young man. “And
now
will you—”

“You like adventure?”

The young man stared, and, staring, found himself caught and held by Mr. Johnson’s genial smile; he almost smiled back and then repressed it and made an effort to tear away. “I got to
hurry
,” he said.

“Mystery? You like surprises? Unusual and exciting events?”

“You selling something?”

“Sure,” said Mr. Johnson. “You want to take a chance?”

The young man hesitated, looking longingly up the avenue toward what might have been his destination and then, when Mr. Johnson said, “I’ll pay for it” with his own peculiar convincing emphasis, turned and said, “Well, okay. But I got to
see
it first, what I’m buying.”

Mr. Johnson, breathing hard, led the young man over to the side, where the girl was standing; she had been watching with interest Mr. Johnson’s capture of the young man and now, smiling timidly, she looked at Mr. Johnson as though prepared to be surprised at nothing.

Mr. Johnson reached into his pocket and took out his wallet. “Here,” he said, and handed a bill to the girl. “This about equals your day’s pay.”

“But no,” she said, surprised in spite of herself. “I mean, I
couldn’t.”

“Please do not interrupt,” Mr. Johnson told her. “And
here,”
he said to the young man, “this will take care of
you.”
The young man accepted the bill dazedly, but said, “Probably counterfeit” to the young woman out of the side of his mouth. “Now,” Mr. Johnson went on, disregarding the young man, “what is your name, miss?”

“Kent,” she said helplessly. “Mildred Kent.”

“Fine,” said Mr. Johnson. “And you, sir?”

“Arthur Adams,” said the young man stiffly.

“Splendid,” said Mr. Johnson. “Now, Miss Kent, I would like you to meet Mr. Adams. Mr. Adams, Miss Kent.”

Miss Kent stared, wet her lips nervously, made a gesture as though she might run, and said, “How do you do?”

Mr. Adams straightened his shoulders, scowled at Mr. Johnson, made a gesture as though
he
might run, and said, “How do you do?”

“Now,
this,”
said Mr. Johnson, taking several bills from his wallet, “should be enough for the day for both of you. I would suggest, perhaps, Coney Island—although I personally am not fond of the place—or perhaps a nice lunch somewhere, and dancing, or a matinee, or even a movie, although take care to choose a really
good
one; there are
so
many bad movies these days. You might,” he said, struck with an inspiration, “visit the Bronx Zoo, or the Planetarium. Anywhere, as a matter of fact,” he concluded, “that you would like to go. Have a nice time.”