Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings

by Shirley Jackson

  The letter from the Oberons looked, even on the outside, as though it carried some request, and Mrs. Spencer regarded it with distaste. The address straggled across the envelope, there was a dirty finger mark on the flap, and the stationery was obviously cheap; sighing, Mrs. Spencer opened it daintily. “Why would anyone with handwriting like this try to write a letter?” she asked irritably, and frowned up at her husband. “I can’t even read it.” Annoyed, not wanting to touch the letter, she threw it down onto the breakfast table.

  Harry Spencer, who breakfasted in a mingled fragrance of good coffee, good shaving lotion, and the printers’ ink of his morning paper, reached for his orange juice and said lazily, “Couldn’t be anything very important, anyway.” He smiled pleasantly at his wife. “Throw it away,” he said.

  “Nothing is ever important to you.” The lemon cream, and the dentist, and the flowers, and the silver to be polished; Mrs. Spencer sighed. “I have enough on my mind for one day,” she said. “You read it.”

  Mr. Spencer reached over and took up the letter and looked curiously at the sharp black handwriting. “It’s not really so bad,” he said. “A kind of puzzle, actually. He makes his e’s Greek style, and that funny little wiggle is an s. John Oberon—who is he, anyway?”

  “I certainly could not tell you. No one I know, I’m sure.”

  Mr. Spencer laughed. “You may get to know him,” he said. “This fellow wants you to find him a house.”

  “A house?” Mrs. Spencer stared as though she had not spent all her life in one house or another, adorning, cleaning, enriching. “A house?”

  “They liked our town when they drove through,” Mr. Spencer said, studying the letter. “Old friends of your sister’s.”

  Mrs. Spencer set the marmalade down abruptly. “Of Charlotte’s?”

  Mr. Spencer glanced up at her briefly, curiously, and then back to the letter, and Mrs. Spencer sighed again. “I can’t help it,” she said, almost apologetically. “You know I’m fond of my sister, and I do have them here every Thanksgiving, and I’d do just anything in the world for them—”

  Mr. Spencer glanced up again. “I never said a word,” he remarked mildly.

  Mrs. Spencer looked away. “It’s just,” she said helplessly, “that I feel it’s important for you, and your position at the bank, to have a house and a family you can point to with pride. I’m really terribly fond of Charlotte, you know I am, but even I can see that she’s not exactly the sort we want to know socially, and her husband is loud and coarse and vulgar and—”

  “I always liked him,” Mr. Spencer said.

  “Really? Would you want him working with you in the bank?”

  “He hasn’t asked me.” Mr. Spencer smiled across the table. “Never mind,” he said. “Throw the letter away if you want to.”

  “Some people really have no consideration for other people,” Mrs. Spencer said, touching the letter with one finger.

  “They only want to know if you’ve heard of any summer places nearby,” Mr. Spencer said. “Three bedrooms.”

  “Really,” Mrs. Spencer said. “Really, Harry.” She pushed away her half-finished coffee. “What earthly right…”

  “That old house down by the river is for rent,” Mr. Spencer said idly. “I heard the other day that Mrs. Babcock is very anxious to get a tenant this summer, and heaven knows she could use the money. Might just ask her,” he told his wife.

  “But why?” she demanded, staring. “Why?”

  Mr. Spencer gathered his newspaper and rose. “I don’t know why,” he said, not looking at his wife. “Why does anybody do anything?”

  Obscurely troubled, somehow defensive, Mrs. Spencer watched as her husband gathered his letters and left the breakfast room. “Don’t forget we’re having guests for dinner,” she said after him, but he did not turn. “Today, of all days,” she told herself, and took up the intruding, unreadable letter and carried it out to the garbage pail. She was putting the dishes into the washer when Mr. Spencer called goodbye from the front door, and she answered him absently, thinking lemon cream, silver, flowers; when she dropped the coffee grounds into the garbage pail the unreadable letter was covered, safely hidden away. I must try to get in a half hour of rest sometime during the day, Mrs. Spencer was thinking; I really cannot drive myself like this.

  The phone rang at about eleven, when the lemon cream was safely in the refrigerator and the living room was dusted and the silver polished, and she answered it upstairs, where she was mending a tiny rip in her dinner dress. Mrs. Spencer never allowed her clothes, which were expensive, to fall into disrepair, and the tiny rip infuriated her, since it had not been there before she sent the dress to the cleaner, and this meant that now she would have to remember to speak sharply to the cleaner’s delivery man when he came on Monday. When the phone rang she immediately assumed that it was Harry calling from the bank to say that he would be home for lunch after all, and that would be too much, altogether too much, this day of all days. “Yes?” she said into the receiver.

  “Mrs. Harry Spencer? Long distance calling.”

  Her sister, Charlotte, had been in the back of her mind since breakfast, and Mrs. Spencer told herself that if this was really Charlotte calling just to chat over family news she would absolutely hang up; Charlotte ought to have more consideration, she thought, and tapped her finger irritably against the phone table. I will tell Charlotte frankly, she thought, I will tell her frankly that I simply have no time for—

  “Hello?” The voice was far away, truly a long-distance voice. “Hello?” it asked faintly.

  “Charlotte?” Mrs. Spencer said. “Hello?”

  “Maggie?”

  No one except Charlotte called Mrs. Spencer “Maggie” anymore, not since she had implored her husband to introduce her to his friends in this new town as Margaret. Margaret Spencer, it said on her stationery and her personal checks, Mrs. Harry Elliott Spencer. “Hello?” she said.

  “Maggie? It’s John. John Oberon.”

  “Who?”

  “Driving home today…” The voice was really very faint; perhaps there was something wrong with this upstairs phone. Mrs. Spencer raised her eyes to heaven, thinking, I will have to call the man to check the phone. “Drop in about four…say hello…”

  “I can’t hear you,” Mrs. Spencer said, speaking louder. “I really can’t hear you, I’m sorry. We must have a bad connection.”

  “Just a minute.” The voice came more faintly still. “Rosie wants to say hello.” Distantly, like that of tiny people talking thinly in a dollhouse, or a dream, the little voice said, “Here’s Rosie.”

  “I really cannot hear you at all,” Mrs. Spencer said firmly, and put the receiver down on the small little “Hello?” from a long, long distance. “Good heavens,” she said aloud, “why people think they have the right…”

  She rarely lunched improperly, because she felt that it was important to do things correctly even if one was alone, and she had her pretty salad and her cup of tea every day by the kitchen window, where it was sunny. Today, however, with the shopping and the dentist still to do, she had only a cup of tea, standing up to drink it, looking out over the handsome wide lawn that surrounded the house, making a mental note to locate the Carter boy and get him to trim the edges correctly next time if he wanted his money. After her cup of tea she forced herself to lie down on her bed for half an hour, dutifully going over in her mind the things she still had to do.

  —

  The Oberons must have come while she was waiting for Donnie at the dentist’s office, chafing over the magazines, impatient at the leisurely, reassuring tone of the dentist’s voice and Donnie’s half-nervous giggle. She had bought Donnie his usual ice cream cone on the way home and he was still toying with it, delighted that with the novocaine freezing his lip he could not feel the cold ice cream. When she drove into the driveway and hurried him out of the car to play on his swing until the ice cream was gone, she was brought up short by the sight of a note tacked to her fro
nt door. It had been put up with a pin, and there was a tiny scratch on the white paint where the pin had gone in; she set her lips thinly and tore down the note, remembering at once the angular, unreadable black writing. “Those frightful people,” she said, and then, to her son, “Look what they’ve done to our door.”

  Donnie pressed closer and his ice cream dripped onto the steps; it was really too much. Mrs. Spencer never slapped her children, or permitted them to be abused with any violent punishment, but today of all days she almost raised her hand to Donnie. Finally—because of course taking out one’s annoyance on children was unfair, and unladylike—she wiped up the ice cream with her handkerchief, which she must now remember to drop into the hamper when she went by it, and sent Donnie quietly around to his play set in the back. The note she had taken from the door she dropped into the kitchen wastebasket without trying to read it.

  The trash would not go out to be burned until morning, so the note stayed there, covered by the papers from the groceries and the wrapping from the candles for the table, and eventually Harry’s evening paper. Mrs. Spencer gave Donnie and her daughter, Irma, their supper, and chilled the wine, and checked the lemon cream, which had come out admirably, and got the steak ready to broil, and whipped the potatoes, and made shrimp sauce. When she went upstairs to dress and say good night to her children, her kitchen was immaculate, dinner preparing invisibly, her table set and lovely in a quiet stillness of shining glass and white damask, and her living room, charming and so very like Margaret Spencer, people said, ready for the entrance of guests.

  By the time her first guests arrived, Margaret Spencer’s children slept, clean and warm and dreaming correctly, and she was waiting in the hall, as calm and lovely as always, gracious and elegant. “How well Margaret always manages,” her guests told one another on their way home. “Entertaining seems no effort to her, somehow; she’s done wonders for Harry’s position in town.” And one or two of the women reflected that Margaret Spencer might really be a very good choice for president of the Wednesday Club.

  Before she went to bed, Margaret saw to it that the ashtrays were emptied and the glasses washed and the chairs moved back where they belonged, and she put salt on a wine stain on her tablecloth (and even if the tablecloth was permanently stained, it was a small loss, since the wine had been spilled by old Mack Ramsey; this was the first dinner invitation the Ramseys had accepted from the Spencers, and Mrs. Ramsey had really been most gracious about the living room drapes) and checked that the windows in the children’s bedroom were open four inches from the top.

  She had not remembered to tell Harry about either the telephone call from the Oberons or the note on the front door. She had so completely forgotten the Oberons by the next morning that she only stared blankly when Mrs. Babcock—a plain woman, and not one of the sort who dined with the Spencers—stopped her on the street by actually putting a hand on her arm. “I was going to call you,” Mrs. Babcock said. “I saw the Oberons—” She waited, but Mrs. Spencer, moving her arm slightly away, still stared. “I thought I’d ask you,” Mrs. Babcock explained, “seeing as they’re friends of yours, and your family. About the house.”

  “What house?”

  Mrs. Babcock laughed. “I guess they never told you they looked at it, even though I thought they were pretty taken with it. My old house down by the river. Heaven knows it’s big enough for them, and they thought having the river right there would be nice for the children. Not,” she went on consideringly, “that it’s any kind of a fancy, dress-up place, but then they didn’t look to me like fancy people.” She glanced quickly at Mrs. Spencer and then away. “But of course I like to make sure,” she finished.

  “I’m really afraid—”

  “I thought,” said Mrs. Babcock, as though spelling it out, “that I would ask you what kind of people they are, these Oberons. They said they are old friends of yours, and it’s not as though I’d need references or anything, with the kind of people they seemed to be, so nice and friendly and all, but I did think I ought to mention it to you and you could tell me if you know anything against them. Anything that would mean I oughtn’t to rent them the house.”

  “Really,” Mrs. Spencer said. Mrs. Babcock was a dreadful person, she thought, always coming and putting her hands on people. “I assure you,” she said, “I know nothing against these people.”

  “Well, then, that’s all right, isn’t it?” Mrs. Babcock was clearly relieved. “It’s a nice house,” she explained, “and we’ve put some work in it, fixing it up, and it’s belonged to Carl’s folks for over a hundred years, and I wouldn’t want to see anyone living there who might let it go down.”

  “Yes, I can quite understand,” Mrs. Spencer said. “Goodbye.” I am such a busy person, she thought, moving quickly down the street; why does everyone come to me with their problems? Irma had to have shoes, the lawn furniture must be repainted; would it be wise to look around for a new dress to wear when the Ramseys returned the dinner invitation, or would a new dress look ostentatious, eager? She sighed, and hurried.

  She always did her own shopping, checking quality and price with care; it did not pay, she believed, to buy food for a family without considerable caution, and with prices on clothes and furniture and magazines and even Harry’s newspaper going up all the time, a good housekeeper had to watch carefully to be sure she was not cheated, or deceived, or foolish. Consequently, when Mrs. Spencer went into the supermarket across the street from Harry’s bank, she did not move idly but neither did she seize exciting novelties from the shelves or hurry to snatch the top head of lettuce or the special for the weekend. She walked slowly, pushing the shopping cart with the pride of one performing perfectly an exacting and delicate chore, and hesitated and debated and even, when the clerk was not looking, prodded at the melon with the tip of her gloved finger. It would not fit her position as Harry’s wife to serve poor food to her family. Her children must bear visibly on their faces the healthy evidence of the very best; no unripe fruit must mar the smooth curve of little Irma’s cheek or the growth of Donnie’s sturdy legs. Rapt, devoted, Mrs. Spencer was considerably annoyed at the interruptions from her neighbors, who bade her good morning or asked about her health or stood in her way before the shelves. When she moved to the counter where old Sanson added and made change, she answered his good morning with only a nod; did that can of peas look slightly swollen? had she by some chance taken down a faulty container?

  “That can doesn’t look sound, Mr. Sanson. Will you please get me another?”

  He glanced up at her, so briefly that she barely saw, and left the counter to fetch her another can of peas. “It’s such a nuisance,” she said to the woman waiting behind her in line. “These days, everything’s so poorly made.” The woman turned her head aside and looked impatient; she doesn’t care what she feeds her family, Mrs. Spencer thought, and shrugged as Mr. Sanson returned with a sounder can of peas. As he added up the prices of her groceries, she followed his gestures for any absentminded blunder; he might charge her twice for something, perhaps for two cans of peas. Then, at last, surveying the slip that listed the items, checking as each went into the box for the boy to carry to her car, she was astonished when Mr. Sanson said, as casually as he took her money, “Friend of yours was in yesterday, Mrs. Spencer. Moving into town for the summer.”

  “A friend of mine? Of mine?”

  “Mrs. Oberon. Nice-talking lady.”

  “A friend of mine?”

  “Said she was.” His old eyes lifted, shrewd. “She didn’t have any money with her,” he said.

  “Really—” Mrs. Spencer gasped, shocked. “You don’t expect me to pay…?”

  Mr. Sanson smiled oddly. “Seen a lot of people come through here,” he said, looking past Mrs. Spencer to the woman waiting behind her. “Back when this was a little country store, I used to know the ones I could trust. Still do. Can tell them every time. Her, I could trust. Being,” and he looked again at Mrs. Spencer, “as she was a friend of yours.”<
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  “I absolutely refuse—”

  “Besides,” Mr. Sanson went on reasonably, reaching past Mrs. Spencer to pull the cart behind her, “Liz Babcock rented them Carl’s old farm down by the river, and I guess they’ll be around for a while.”

  —

  “Those new people moved in,” Mrs. Finley said, breathing heavily as she leaned to take up the pail and mop. “Thought sure you’d be down there helping out.”

  “What new people?” Mrs. Spencer asked. “I want all those shelves washed today, Mrs. Finley.”

  “Those friends of yours. Down to Liz Babcock’s old man’s farmhouse.”

  “Those people are not—”

  “Half the town’s down there anyway. They likely don’t need you.” Mrs. Finley’s eye, on the bare edge of insolence, turned to her mop. “Nice folks,” Mrs. Finley said. “Easy to get along with, I’d think.”

  Mrs. Finley is really too old and too heavy for this kind of work, Mrs. Spencer thought; I ought to start looking around for someone younger.

  “New kid in my class,” Donnie announced over his supper. “Nice guy.”

  “Donnie, dear. ‘Guy’ is not a civilized word.”

  “Nice fellow,” said Donnie primly. “He’s got a two-wheel bike. And a microscope. And a dog. A dog.”

  “Animals are very well for the open country, dear. But with our lovely lawns and our pretty flowers— Imagine what a dog would do, digging and scratching!”

  “And he’s got a big brother who’s teaching him to pitch. He’s already the best marbles player in the school.”

  “What’s his name?” Irma asked. “Donnie? What’s his name? Donnie?”

  “Irma glirma,” Donnie said. “Irma dirma epiglirma.”

  “Donnie? Donnie?”

  “Joe,” Donnie said, reverently. “Joe.”

  “Joe what, dear?”

  “I don’t know. Joe something. You know what? He’s got a baseball with all the Yankees’ autographs on it. He’s going to bring it to school.”

  “Really, Donnie.” Mrs. Spencer spoke with some distaste. “Do you know what his father does? What kind of clothes does he wear? Does he speak nicely?”