Just an Ordinary Day: The Uncollected Stories of Shirley Jackson (48 page)

Well, that did for me, and I got out of there and ran all the way to Jane’s house, and, of course, she never believed me. She walked me home just so she could get a look at the outside of the house, and I will be everlastingly shaken if they hadn’t gone and put up curtains in that front bedroom, soft white net with a design of blue that Jane said looked like a blue jay’s feather. Jane said they were the prettiest curtains she ever saw, but they gave me the shivers every time I looked at them.

It wasn’t two days after that I began finding things. Little things, and even some inside my own house. Once there was a basket of grapes on my back steps, and I swear those grapes were never grown around our village. For one thing, they shone like they were covered with silver dust, and smelled like some foreign perfume. I threw them in the garbage, but I kept a little embroidered handkerchief I found on the table in my front hall, and I’ve got it still in my dresser drawer.

Once I found a colored thimble on the fence post, and once my cat, Samantha, that I’ve had for eleven years and more, came in wearing a little green collar and spat at me when I took it off. One day I found a leaf basket on my kitchen table filled with hazelnuts, and it made me downright shaking mad to think of someone’s coming in and out of my house without so much as asking, and me never seeing them come or go.

Things like that never happened before the crazy people moved into the house next door, and I was telling Mrs. Acton so, down on the corner one morning, when young Mrs. O’Neil came by and told us that when she was in the store with her baby she met Mallie the maid. The baby was crying because he was having a time with his teething, and Mallie gave him a little green candy to bite on. We thought Mrs. O’Neil was crazy herself to let her baby have candy that came from that family, and said so, and I told them about the drinking that went on, and the furniture getting arranged in the dark, and the digging in the garden, and Mrs. Acton said she certainly hoped they weren’t going to think that just because they had a garden they had any claim to be in the Garden Club.

Mrs. Acton is president of the Garden Club. Jane says I ought to be president, if things were done right, on account of having the oldest garden in town, but Mrs. Acton’s husband is the doctor, and I don’t know what people thought he might do to them when they were sick if Mrs. Acton didn’t get to be president. Anyway, you’d think Mrs. Acton had some say about who got into the Garden Club and who didn’t, but I had to admit that in this case we’d all vote with her, even though Mrs. O’Neil did tell us the next day that she didn’t think the people could be all crazy, because the baby’s tooth came through that night with no more trouble.

Do you know, all this time that maid came into the store every day, and every day she bought one chicken. Nothing else. Jane took to dropping in the store when she saw the maid going along, and she says the maid never bought but one chicken a day. Once Jane got her nerve up and said to the maid that they must be fond of chicken, and the maid looked straight at her and told her right to her face that they were vegetarians.

“All but the cat, I suppose,” Jane said, being pretty nervy when she gets her nerve up.

“Yes,” the maid said, “all but the cat.”

We finally decided that he must bring food home from the city, although why Mr. Honeywell’s store wasn’t good enough for them, I couldn’t tell you. After the baby’s tooth was better, Tom O’Neil took them over a batch of fresh-picked sweet corn, and they must have liked that, because they sent the baby a furry blue blanket that was so soft that young Mrs. O’Neil said the baby never needed another, winter or summer, and after being so sickly, that baby began to grow and got so healthy, you wouldn’t know it was the same one, even though the O’Neils never should have accepted presents from strangers, not knowing whether the wool might be clean or not.

Then I found out they were dancing next door. Night after night after night, dancing. Sometimes I’d lie there awake until ten, eleven o’clock, listening to that heathen music and wishing I could get up the nerve to go over and give them a piece of my mind. It wasn’t so much the noise keeping me from sleeping—I will say the music was soft and kind of like a lullaby—but people haven’t got any right to live like that. Folks should go to bed at a sensible hour and get up at a sensible hour and spend their days doing good deeds and housework. A wife ought to cook dinner for her husband—and not out of cans from the city, either—and she ought to run over next door sometimes with a home-baked cake to pass the time of day and keep up with the news. And most of all a wife ought to go to the store herself, where she can meet her neighbors, and not just send the maid.

Every morning I’d go out and find fairy rings on the grass, and anyone around here will tell you that means an early winter, and here next door they hadn’t even thought to get in coal. I watched every day for Adams and his truck, because I knew for a fact that cellar was empty of coal; all I had to do was lean down a little when I was in my garden and I could see right into the cellar, just as swept and clear as though they planned to treat their guests in there. Jane thought they were the kind who went off on a trip somewhere in the winter, shirking responsibilities for facing the snow with their neighbors. The cellar was all you could see, though. They had those green curtains pulled so tight against the windows that even right up close there wasn’t a chink to look through from outside, and them inside dancing away. I do wish I could have nerved myself to go right up to that front door and knock some night.

Now, Mary Corn thought I ought to. “You got a right, Addie,” she told me one day in the store. “You got every right in the world to make them quiet down at night. You’re the nearest neighbor they got, and it’s the right thing to do. Tell them they’re making a name for themselves around the village.”

Well, I couldn’t nerve myself, and that’s the gracious truth. Every now and then I’d see little Mrs. West walking in the garden, or Mallie the maid coming out of the woods with a basket—gathering acorns, never a doubt of it—but I never so much as nodded my head at them. Down at the store I had to tell Mary Corn that I couldn’t do it. “They’re foreigners, that’s why,” I said. “Foreigners of some kind. They don’t rightly seem to understand what a person says—it’s like they’re always answering some other question you didn’t ask.”

“If they’re foreigners,” Dora Powers put in, being at the store to pick up some sugar to frost a cake, “it stands to reason there’s something wrong to bring them here.”

“Well, I won’t call on foreigners,” Mary said.

“You can’t treat them the same as you’d treat regular people,” I said. “I went inside the house, remember, although not, as you might say, to pay a call.”

So then I had to tell them all over again about the furniture and the drinking—and it stands to reason that anyone who dances all night is going to be drinking, too—and my good doughnuts from my grandmother’s recipe going to the cat. And Dora, she thought they were up to no good in the village. Mary said she didn’t know anyone who was going to call, not being sure they were proper, and then we had to stop talking because in came Mallie the maid for her chicken.

You would have thought I was the chairman of a committee or something, the way Dora and Mary kept nudging me and winking that I should go over and speak to her, but I wasn’t going to make a fool of myself twice, I can tell you. Finally Dora saw there was no use pushing me, so she marched over and stood there until the maid turned around and said, “Good morning.”

Dora came right out and said, “There’s a lot of people around this village, miss, would like to know a few things.”

“I imagine so,” the maid said.

“We’d like to know what you’re doing in our village,” Dora said.

“We thought it would be a nice place to live,” the maid said. You could see that Dora was caught up short on that, because who picks a place to live because it’s nice? People live in our village because they were born here; they don’t just come.

I guess Dora knew we were all waiting for her, because she took a big breath and asked, “And how long do you plan on staying?”

“Oh,” the maid said. “I don’t think we’ll stay very long, after all.”

“Even if they don’t stay,” Mary said later, “they can do a lot of harm while they’re here, setting a bad example for our young folk. Just for instance, I heard that the Harris boy got picked up again by the state police for driving without a license.”

“Tom Harris is too gentle on that boy,” I said. “A boy like that needs whipping and not people living in a house right in town showing him how to drink and dance all night.”

Jane came in right then, and she had heard that all the children in town had taken to dropping by the house next door to bring dandelions and berries from the woods—and from their own fathers’ gardens, too, I’ll be bound—and the children were telling around that the cat next door could talk. They said he told them stories.

Well, that just about did for me, you can imagine. Children have too much freedom nowadays, anyway, without getting nonsense like that into their heads. We asked Annie Lee when she came into the store, and she thought somebody ought to call the police, so it could all be stopped before somebody got hurt. She said, suppose one of those kids got a step too far inside that house—how did we know he’d ever get out again? Well, it wasn’t too pleasant a thought, I can tell you, but trust Annie Lee to be always looking on the black side. I don’t have much dealing with the children as a rule, once they learn they better keep away from my apple trees and my melons, and I can’t say I know one from the next, except for the Martin boy I had to call the police on once for stealing a piece of tin from my front yard, but I can’t say I relished the notion that that cat had his eyes on them. It’s not natural, somehow.

And don’t you know it was the very next day that they stole the littlest Acton boy? Not quite three years old, and Mrs. Acton so busy with her Garden Club she let him run along into the woods with his sister, and first thing anyone knew they got him. Jane phoned and told me. She heard from Dora, who had been right in the store when the Acton girl came running in to find her mother and tell her the baby had wandered away in the woods, and Mallie the maid had been digging around not ten feet from where they saw him last. Jane said Mrs. Acton and Dora and Mary Corn and half a dozen others were heading right over to the house next door, and I better get outside fast before I missed something, and if she got there late to let her know everything that happened. I barely got out my own front door, when down the street they came, maybe ten or twelve mothers, marching along so mad they never had time to be scared.

“Come on, Addie,” Dora said to me. “They’ve finally done it this time.”

I knew Jane would never forgive me if I hung back, so out I went and up the front walk to the house next door. Mrs. Acton was ready to go right up and knock, because she was so mad, but before she had a chance the door opened and there was Mrs. West and the little boy, smiling all over as if nothing had happened.

“Mallie found him in the woods,” Mrs. West said, and Mrs. Acton grabbed the boy away from her; you could tell they had been frightening him by the way he started to cry as soon as he got to his own mother. All he would say was “kitty,” and that put a chill down our backs, you can imagine.

Mrs. Acton was so mad she could hardly talk, but she did manage to say, “You keep away from my children, you hear me?” And Mrs. West looked surprised.

“Mallie found him in the woods,” she said. “We were going to bring him home.”

“We can guess how you were going to bring him home,” Dora shouted, and then Annie Lee piped up from well in the back, “Why don’t you get out of our town?”

“I guess we will,” Mrs. West said. “It’s not the way we thought it was going to be.”

That was nice, wasn’t it? Nothing riles me like people knocking this town, where my grandfather built the first house, and I just spoke up right then and there.

“Foreign ways!” I said. “You’re heathen, wicked people, with your dancing and your maid, and the sooner you leave this town, the better it’s going to be for you. Because I might as well tell you”—and I shook my finger right at her—“that certain people in this town aren’t going to put up with your fancy ways much longer, and you would be well advised—very well advised, I say—to pack up your furniture and your curtains and your maid and cat, and get out of our town before we put you out.”