Let Me Tell You

by Shirley Jackson

  Before the snow had fully melted, in the inexorable round of the university year, Anne had, besides the ankle bracelet and the pen-and-pencil set and the gray teddy bear, a black satin slip she had found on the floor of a closet and washed carefully and folded neatly before setting it away in her mother’s trunk; she had a carbon copy of a sonnet, neatly typed and dated (it had been sent away, Anne knew, to a poetry magazine not long before, but the rejection notice was not attached to the carbon), and a small leather-covered notebook, virgin except for the first page, on which was written largely: “BUY ASPIRIN. WRITE HOME. GET SPANISH ASSGNMT. DRESS FROM CLEANERS.”

  Also by this time, of course, many of the losses had been discovered. Cheryl, going one day to her desk drawer to make a shy point about her own worth, was not able to find her pen-and-pencil set inscribed “Voted Most Likely to Succeed,” and after much thought and consideration, she mentioned the fact cautiously to several of her friends.

  “Not that I think it’s been stolen, or anything,” Cheryl insisted over and over again. “I don’t think anyone in the house steals. I just can’t imagine where my pen-and-pencil set has gone.”

  “Perhaps you left it somewhere,” one of the girls might suggest incautiously, to which Cheryl would reply with indignation, “Naturally I’d never take it anywhere—not with ‘Voted Most Likely to Succeed’ written all over it. But I just know it hasn’t been stolen.”

  When the loss of the black satin slip became a topic of conversation, Cheryl’s apprehensions became “But who around here steals?” and “I just can’t believe it of anyone in the house.” Maggie, who had lost the gray teddy bear, never mentioned it, although she did say she was almost positive that a silver signet ring was gone from her top right-hand drawer, and she was fairly certain that she had seen one of the maids hovering near the dresser shortly before she’d discovered that the ring was gone. The girl whose carbon copy of a sonnet was missing admitted blushingly that she could not say for sure how many copies of the sonnet she had made. One of the girls managed to recall that at one time she had owned a compact with her name on it, which she was no longer able to find; another believed that the yellow blouse she had blamed the laundry for losing had most likely been stolen. Anne softly contributed, during one discussion, the additional fact that she herself had lost a couple of things, but no one noticed particularly, probably on the theory that Anne’s possessions were so anonymous anyway that loss of any of them would be superfluous.

  “I can’t believe it of the maids,” Cheryl was saying by now. “Surely not the maids.”

  “Someone must have come in from outside, then,” said the girl who had lost the black satin slip. “Imagine, if anyone sneaked into the house and went through our clothes.” She shivered delightedly.

  “I don’t think anyone could have come in,” Helena said firmly.

  They circled joyfully around the fact that it might be one of themselves, and eyed one another with pleased suspicion. There was a group, made up of Helena, Cheryl, and several of the others, who believed excitedly that Maggie was doing it, and Cheryl said feelingly, “I can’t believe it of Maggie.”

  “Well,” someone offered hesitantly, “she doesn’t have a lot of money, you know. She could have sold some of the jewelry.”

  “She has a new sweater,” Helena said. “You know—the red one. And you can take my word for it, that sweater cost a lot more than anything Maggie’s ever worn before.”

  “Of course,” Cheryl said thoughtfully, “she wouldn’t dare wear any of those things—you know. But still, I can’t—”

  There was another group, made up of Maggie and several others, including the three girls with the bathroom darkroom, who believed Cheryl was responsible.

  “Of course,” Maggie said charitably, “if it was Cheryl, you couldn’t really blame her. I mean, sometimes people have something wrong with them and they’ve got to steal.”

  “Dipsomania,” one of the darkroom girls contributed knowingly. “It can only be cured by psychoanalysis.”

  The girls moved closer to one another, listening, and someone offered, softly, “Do you suppose her family knows? And let her come back to college?”

  “Her family,” Maggie said, “probably they don’t want her stealing their stuff.”

  There was still another group, of course, with shifting ringleaders, who believed that Helena had done it. “She can’t stand anyone having something she doesn’t have,” one girl said. “It drives her crazy just to see one of us with a new coat or something.”

  “Not that she doesn’t have enough, as it is,” said another. “I can’t really imagine Helena touching anything that didn’t belong to her. Except, of course, she’s really terribly jealous.”

  The remaining girls, who believed that the three girls with the bathroom darkroom had stolen the property, based their case on incontrovertible facts: 1) that people who have permission to turn a first-floor bathroom into a photographic darkroom think they own the world, anyway; 2) no one could really tell whether they were in their darkroom at any given time, no matter what they said; they could be anywhere in the house; and 3) one of the three girls had been heard expressing a most enthusiastic admiration of a china cat on the dresser of another girl in the house, and although the china cat was not missing yet, a pack of cigarettes she had put down next to it was, and anyone could get rattled and grab the first thing she saw.

  No one, for a minute, suspected Anne. Anne, in all of the suspicion and confusion, went from one to another of the little talking groups, offering her disregarded opinions, and at night, when the house was quiet, she took out her treasures and counted them over, setting the teddy bear next to the sonnet and the ankle bracelet next to the leather notebook, weighing the pen-and-pencil set in her hands and regarding its motto until she could have drawn from memory the peculiar angular script of it; trying on the black satin slip and walking silently around her room, with its door never locked.

  Eventually, it was Anne who brought a formal complaint to the house mother.

  It had occurred to Anne that the house mother, whose name was Miss McBride, had worn at various times a pair of dangling jet earrings, which Anne knew were kept in a cardboard box in Miss McBride’s dresser. As a result, one afternoon, in her bathrobe and carrying her towel, Anne approached the quiet, bookless room that Miss McBride had only just vacated to go shopping, and had, fortunately, only just stepped inside when Miss McBride returned unexpectedly. In the still atmosphere of the room Anne was speechless for a minute, as Miss McBride looked at her, and then Anne, making the best of her situation, said urgently, “Miss McBride, I was looking for you.”

  “Yes?” Miss McBride said, not prepared to commit herself. She was a fairly young, well-set-up, incredibly romantic woman, and was fond of the big-sisterly admiration she received from her girls; she was partial to sympathetic smiles and knowing nods, and allowed the rumor to circulate uncontradicted that she had permitted—even encouraged—one of her girls to elope several years before with an extremely wealthy chemistry major. Although she had heard the stories of thievery, and was completely aware of the many rumors going around in her house, she was not yet prepared to commit herself on the subject, and did not intend to take any action until she knew better what kind to take without offending anyone. By telling her precipitately, Anne would force her to do something immediately, and so Miss McBride’s tone when she said “Yes?” again to Anne was cold, and almost ominous.

  “Miss McBride,” Anne said, allowing her words to come almost in a rush, so that later, when Miss McBride questioned her, the easygoing mind would remember only her emotionality, “Miss McBride, I don’t know what to do. Really, it’s awful. I couldn’t have believed it of her,” Anne said, borrowing freely from Cheryl; “it must be some kind of a mental disease, or something,” borrowing freely from Maggie. “I mean, when I saw her I tried to think of something to say, and she looked so guilty. So I came right down to tell you and ask you what to do.” Anne hesitate
d for a minute, then added plaintively, “Please, can’t we sort of keep it quiet, not have a scandal?”

  “Who?” Miss McBride said, having fastened accurately on the one essential fact.

  Anne dropped her eyes. “I’d rather not say, please, Miss McBride.”

  “You won’t tell me?” Miss McBride’s voice rose. Anne blushed and remained silent.

  “Of course,” Miss McBride said, embarrassed for a minute at her own forwardness. There was no further attempt made by either of them to discuss the thievery. After a few minutes’ thought Miss McBride said, “I’ll post a notice on the bulletin board, for a house meeting tonight.”

  By some odd coincidence every girl at the house meeting—in fact, every girl in the house—knew by the time Cheryl called the meeting to order that Miss McBride knew who the thief was, or had a clue, or meant to find out that night. Delicious apprehension made each girl tremble separately; many of them hoped that their most intimate friends would prove to be innocent; if a vote had been taken, the most likely candidate would have been Cheryl herself, just as she had been elected president of the house. As she stood in the center of the room, with the other girls around her draped over chairs and lying on the sofas and sitting on the floor, Cheryl knew perfectly well that each girl watching her imagined she saw some sign of guilt on her face.

  Miss McBride spoke, soberly and earnestly. “Look, kids,” she said, “this is a terrible thing. Everyone, all over campus, knows about it by now. They’re beginning to talk about us, how we’ve got someone in this house who borrows things that don’t belong to her and then forgets to return them. It’s not good for any of you. I know you all want to protect your own reputations, and all together we want to keep this a clean and decent house. I think that the girl who is responsible for all this doesn’t quite realize that she is hurting all of us by not stepping forward.” Miss McBride stopped for a minute, but no one came forward, hand raised. “Do you think,” Miss McBride went on, “that if I said we’d all go to our rooms quietly, and then I’d wait in mine until the girl came to me—do you think that would do any good?”

  There was a silence, and then one of the girls in a corner, who wanted action, said, “Not if she’s gotten away with it this far, she won’t.”

  “I think I ought to tell you,” Miss McBride said significantly, “that the name of the girl is known.”

  There was a dead silence of anticipation.

  “I’m not going to tell you her name,” Miss McBride said firmly. “And I’m not going to tell you who saw her. All I’m going to say is that I’m going to take steps to stop this business, once and for all.”

  There was another silence; Miss McBride was the one who had to take action. Miss McBride took a deep breath. “I’m going to search every room in this house,” she said with relish. “Tonight.”

  There was another long silence, finally broken when one of the girls said timidly, “I don’t think you have the right to do that, Miss McBride.”

  “Anyone who has anything to hide,” Miss McBride said emphatically, settling the matter once and for all, “can easily see the position she puts herself in.”

  Anne, unappalled, hugged herself secretly. This was the best of all; she was perhaps the only person who had read the diary in Cheryl’s desk, seen the letters in Helena’s dresser, penetrated the secrets buried in handkerchief boxes, under beds, in the darkest corners of closets, the secrets known to be there, yet believed inviolate until a good excuse made them common currency, sometimes shocking, sometimes laughable.

  “You can start with my room,” Cheryl said with dignity. There was a strong shift of sentiment toward Cheryl after this statement—unless, several of the girls wondered privately, Cheryl, as house president, had had warning of the search?

  Miss McBride rose purposefully and went to the stairs, where she stopped again. “Kids,” she said, her voice lacking eagerness, “isn’t there some other way of doing this?” As she spoke, she started up the stairs. Cheryl first, and then the whole roomful of girls, followed her. Miss McBride went up to the second floor and then, after another minute’s thought, up to the third floor. Here there lived only Anne and three others.

  “Whose room shall I start with?” Miss McBride asked indecisively.

  “Mine,” Anne said firmly. Miss McBride, looking at Anne across the line of girls standing still in the hall, tried to make her glance meaningful. “Anne,” she was trying to say, “I know it’s all right, you’re not the thief because you won’t tell me who is; I’ve got to search your room.” Miss McBride’s gesturing eyebrows tried to say eloquently, “But we know, you and I, that it’s only a formal gesture.” She looked at Anne until all the other girls looked at her too, and then, unseen, Miss McBride shrugged helplessly at Anne.

  Miss McBride, with the advice and the occasional help of the other girls, searched quickly and ineffectually. All of the drawers in the dresser and the desk were opened and their contents stirred around. “Some of the stuff was too big to really hide,” one of the girls contributed, and Miss McBride, adopting this theory into her concept of searching, made only perfunctory gestures at the bookcase and the bedcovers, although she lifted the mattress to look underneath, and one of the girls took the pillow out of its case. Anne, standing near the door, watched the girls showing curiosity about her for the second time in her life, saw a girl whom she rather admired poke hastily and surreptitiously at Anne’s dresses in the closet, saw another girl stop by the desk to read a letter Anne was writing to a high school friend. Miss McBride, at the lid of Anne’s mother’s trunk, said superfluously, “This yours, Anne?”

  “My mother’s,” Anne said quietly. Miss McBride let the corner of the fur cape fall immediately from her fingers, and said questioningly to the other girls “I don’t think…?”

  “Of course not,” someone said uncomfortably, and the girl who had been reading Anne’s letter hurriedly dropped it back onto the desk.

  “Well,” Miss McBride said, and smiled at Anne. “That’s that,” she said. She moved with purpose out of the room, and the girls followed her in a flock. Although Miss McBride moved into the next room on the floor, some of the girls separated themselves from her and could be heard, farther down the hall, instituting a search of their own in another room. Miss McBride, her searching growing more and more haphazard, went through all the rooms on the third floor; by the time she had done all four rooms she was only opening drawers and glancing into closets, but the rest of the girls were going over the rooms like locusts, reading, confusing, examining everything they could find. Talk was circulating among the group (“Did you see what they found—” “I should think she’d die—”), but the girls held together. Miss McBride said occasionally, “Now, let’s play fair, kids. No one running off to her own room.” And always, when she said this, she counted them, rapidly, at a glance.

  On the second floor, Cheryl’s diary turned up, and a collection of scandalous love letters in Helena’s room, and a locket in which another girl had pasted a picture of one of her professors. The owner of the room always, without exception, stood by the door while her room was searched, ready to run if anything too awkward (something she never knew she had? perhaps something she had borrowed and not returned? perhaps something everyone would find unanimously, irresistibly funny? the stolen things, perhaps?) or too shaming turned up.

  Naturally the darkroom was not searched, but Miss McBride insisted on having the girls go through her room, which, carefully prepared, disclosed nothing except a picture of a handsome young man whom Miss McBride blushingly refused to identify as either a brother or a fiancé.

  When the search was over and they were all gathered together in the living room again, Miss McBride gave voice to the prevailing suspicion by saying, “Well, kids, it looks like one of you was warned in time and got rid of the stuff. But, as I told you before, we know who it is. Now I am going to say that if the girl who took these things that didn’t belong to her will come to me secretly in my room tonig
ht, nothing more will be said.” She started for her room and then stopped to turn back and add, “Needless to say, if nothing comes of this tonight I shall have to take further steps. I had hoped”—she sighed lightly—“I had hoped to settle this here among ourselves, but if that is not possible I shall have to take further steps.” She took herself with dignity into her own room, and the girls, knowing more now than they did before, separated and went silently off to their own. No one cared to speak; each one knew the secrets of all the others; no one was inviolate any longer. It would be a long and painful process to build new privacies, secure them safely against intrusion, learn to trust one another again; there was a great destruction that went on in the house that night, of ruined treasures being burned, torn, cut with nail scissors. The wastebaskets taken out the next day were filled with loose torn pages and destroyed photographs, and for many days after that the girls in the house spoke rarely, and very politely, to one another.

  When the house was finally quiet, Anne took out her ankle bracelet, her teddy bear and her sonnet, her pen-and-pencil set, her black slip and her leather notebook, added to them Miss McBride’s dangling jet earrings, which she had slipped into her pocket while helping search Miss McBride’s room, and set them in a row on her bed. All together, they were barely enough to fill a tiny overnight bag, so Anne stopped off in the house living room to slip three or four metal ashtrays into the bag with them. She stood for a minute just inside the front door, surveying the house, which was silent, with all its doors shut; it was her first minute of unalloyed pleasure since her mother’s funeral. Then she slipped quickly out the front door and down the street, carrying the overnight bag; mighty, armed.