Just an Ordinary Day: Stories

by Shirley Jackson

  “Can’t hear you,” the woman said. She was a little woman, and had a pleasant face, and Miss Morgan smiled, and raised her voice to say, “I said, how long is this parade going to last?”

  “What parade?” she asked. “That one?” She nodded at the street. “I haven’t any idea, miss. I’m trying to get to Macy’s.”

  “Do you know anything about this Miss X?” Miss Morgan said daringly.

  The woman laughed. “It was over the radio,” she said. “Someone’s going to get a lot of prizes. You have to do some kind of a puzzle or something.”

  “What’s it for?” Miss Morgan asked.

  “Advertising,” the woman said, surprised.

  “Are you looking for Miss X?” Miss Morgan asked daringly.

  The woman laughed again. “I’m no good at that sort of thing,” she said. “Someone in the company of the people putting it on always wins those things, anyway.”

  Just then they were allowed to cross again, and Miss Morgan and the woman hurried across, and on down the next block. Walking beside the woman, Miss Morgan said finally, “I think I’m the Miss X they’re talking about, but I don’t know why.”

  The woman looked at her and said, “Don’t ask me” and then disappeared into the crowd of people ahead.

  Out in the street a prominent cowboy movie star was going by on horseback, waving his hat.

  Miss Morgan retreated along a quiet side street until she was far away from the crowds and the parade; she was lost, too far away from her office to get back without finding another taxi, and miles away from the address on the package. She saw a shoe repair shop, and struck by a sudden idea, went inside and sat down in one of the booths. The repair man came up to her and she handed him her shoes.

  “Shine?” he said, looking at the shoes.

  “Yes,” Miss Morgan said. “Shine.” She leaned back in the booth, her eyes shut. She was vaguely aware that the repair man had gone into the back of the shop, that she was alone, when she heard a footstep and looked up to see a man in a blue suit coming toward her.

  “Are you Miss X?” the man in the blue suit asked her.

  Miss Morgan opened her mouth, and then said, “Yes,” tiredly.

  “I’ve been looking all over for you,” the man said. “How’d you get away from the sound truck?”

  “I don’t know,” Miss Morgan said. “I ran.”

  “Listen,” the man said, “this town’s no good. No one spotted you.” He opened the door of the booth and waited for Miss Morgan to come.

  “My shoes,” Miss Morgan said, and the man waved his hand impatiently. “You don’t need shoes,” he said. “The car’s right outside.”

  He looked at Miss Morgan with yellow cat eyes and said, “Come on, hurry up.”

  She stood up and he took her arm and said, “We’ll have to do it again tomorrow in Chicago, this town stinks.”

  That night, falling asleep in the big hotel, Miss Morgan thought briefly of Mr. Lang and the undelivered package she had left, along with her hatbox, in the shoe repair shop. Smiling, she pulled the satin quilt up to her chin and fell asleep.

  DINNER FOR A GENTLEMAN

  IT IS NOT POSSIBLE, I frequently think, to walk down the street as fast as you can and kick yourself at the same time. You can stop, of course, and try if you really want to, but, I mean, you’re apt to look a little foolish, and foolish, if you’re me, is what you generally look too much of already.

  I mean, every time I try to show off I get caught; that’s what it boils down to. Every time I get into one of those conversations where I don’t really know what I’m talking about, but I pretend I do, first thing I know there I am saying something I’ve got to back up with proof, and then, I mean, where am I? Well, this day, at any rate, I was walking down the street wishing I could kick myself, with both arms full of bags of groceries and a great dismal cloud of foreboding located somewhere around the back of my neck. So all right, Hugh Talley was a cook. So I mean, I could have left it at that, couldn’t I? I hadn’t needed to say anything, not a word; I hadn’t even needed to listen. But no. So here I was, going down the street, going home to cook dinner for Hugh Talley, just because I wanted to show off, and if I thought I looked foolish now, what was going to happen in about an hour when Hugh Talley sat himself down at the little table in my apartment all grinning and ready for dinner? I mean, I could have kicked myself.

  I’m not stupid; I know it sounds like I am, and I suppose not many people would get caught all the time the way I do. But I’ve noticed that Hugh Talley has that effect on a lot of people—he’s so very handsome, in that man-to-man sort of way that’s horribly effective in the movies, and just pretty awful when you meet it day after day in the office. He makes the other men in the office look pale and sort of shabby. He has a good sunlamp tan and he plays golf and he eats robustly and, more than anything else, Talley loves to put on a silly apron and get out in the kitchen and show the womenfolk how to cook. There is no woman in the world, Talley is fond of saying, who knows how to cook a steak the way a man likes it. Or spaghetti. Or fried chicken. Women—and you should see the look of pained disgust on Talley’s face when he says it—take good meat and cover it with gooey sauces. That, not to put too fine a point on it, is Hugh Talley.

  And me? Well, I don’t play golf, and even though I’ve got a good healthy appetite, my tan tends to build up sort of spottily during the summer and disappear with the first frost. I’m like a thousand other girls in the city—I’ve got a job I like, and I used to share my apartment with another girl, but she got married and so now I live alone, and someday I’ll probably get married to some nice fellow and have two children (a boy first, I think, and then a girl) and I’m strong and healthy and I have nice legs and my hair is naturally curly. And, like a thousand other girls, I do hate to have a man—any man—tell me anything in that faintly patronizing voice men use sometimes that begins: “The trouble with women…”

  Except that of all the girls who had ever tried to make Hugh Talley eat his words with their cooking, I guess I’m the first one who ever tried it without first learning how to cook.

  You see what I mean?

  I’d skipped out of the office early that day to do my shopping for dinner and then get home and hunt up a cookbook. I knew there was one in my apartment somewhere; my roommate and I got it long ago to find out how to make fudge. When I got home and let myself into the apartment I went right over to the bookcase without putting my packages down and looked, and there it was, looking just as new as when we bought it. Right then a voice spoke up from in back of me:

  “Dimity Baxter!” it said.

  Well, I jumped, and I dropped my packages, and I turned around, and there was this little old lady standing there smiling at me, and while I stood there, still half bent down in front of the bookcase with my mouth open, she put her knitting down and came over and started to pick up the groceries, which had fallen to the floor.

  “Let me just get these put away,” she said. “What were you planning for dessert? Lemon pie?”

  “What?” I said, and at that it was more than I thought I could say.

  “Just ran over to see if I couldn’t give you a hand,” she said. She started for the kitchen, her arms full of packages.

  “But listen—” I said.

  “Your hired man let me in,” she said, and sniffed. “Said he figured he could trust me.”

  Automatically, I had gathered together some of the stuff on the floor and followed her out into the kitchen with it. “My hired man?” I said stupidly. “You mean the super?”

  “Super,” she said. “He figured he could trust me. Call me Mallie,” she added.

  “Mallie,” I said.

  “From upstate,” she said. “Guess you could call me an old friend of your mother’s,” and she laughed.

  Well, it was rather too much. Not that my mother isn’t the nicest person in the world, and this little lady was a lot like her, but somehow my mother and her friends just simply don’
t look right in a business girl’s apartment, if you know what I mean. Mallie just sort of glanced around the little kitchenette there, and I could see her face when she saw the cup and saucer I’d left in the sink that morning (I can make coffee, after all, with hot water and one of those concentrates) and when she looked around still more and saw that I had only a couple of saucepans, and the rolling pin and mixing bowls were all that sort of small-sized, cute kind of stuff they turn out for people who don’t cook much, and when she opened the cupboard door and I could see her looking at the two cans of soup and the can of sardines that were all that was in there, and those were left over from when I had a roommate—well, it was all pretty embarrassing, and I felt more like a fool than ever.

  So, naturally, I had to go and be rude to her, because I felt like such a fool myself. “Will you excuse me,” I said to her with that sort of deadly politeness you use when you really wish you weren’t saying what you are saying—“Will you please excuse me if I go right ahead with my work? I’m having a guest for dinner and I really must hurry.”

  Well, that was not exactly the way I’d figured it might be. That is, to go right ahead with this dinner I was going to cook, while Mallie sat in the kitchen and watched me. She sort of belonged in a kitchen, if you know what I mean. She looked as though she could find the right shelf by instinct, and knew exactly how to pick things up to use them best, and she sort of melted comfortably into a corner between the sink and the stove. I mean, definitely not the sort of person to bring out a cookbook in front of.

  All I could do, though, was say “Well…” sort of helplessly, and go on back into the living room and get the cookbook. “Got to make sure I do everything right,” I said lamely to Mallie when I came back, and she nodded cheerfully over her knitting.

  My first problem, and the one that weighed most heavily on my mind, was that lemon pie. I remembered too distinctly telling Hugh Talley in an absolutely insufferable tone that unless he could make a lemon pie he really wasn’t much of a cook. I thought when I was telling him that, probably a lemon pie was easier than apple, or cherry, or something like that. Only one crust, you know.

  I was fairly sure that Mallie was watching me out of the corner of her eye when I turned to the index of the cookbook and ran my finger casually down the list until I came to Lemon Meringue Pie. I turned to the page, trying hard to look as though I made a lemon pie every day of my life and just intended to refresh my memory a little. I read the recipe twice. I had been right; it was easy. All I had to do…

  “Wash your hands first,” Mallie said sharply.

  I jumped, and then I went over to the sink and washed my hands. I was beginning to realize that when this Mallie said something as though she meant it, first you jumped, and then you did what she told you to do. After I had washed my hands and tied a bathtowel around my waist for an apron, I went to the bags of groceries I had brought home and took out the flour, the shortening, the lemons, the eggs, the condensed milk, the gelatin, the vanilla, the cream—all the things I had bought because it seemed to me that they might go into a lemon pie. “Now,” I said gaily.

  The first thing that happened was that I spilled the flour. I didn’t have a measuring cup, of course, so while I tried to guess how much flour I needed I dropped the bag and it broke on the floor, but there was enough on the table for me to use. The recipe said I could use more flour if necessary, anyway. But the pie crust I was making never did come out exactly as I thought I remembered it ought to. Somehow, one minute it was all crumbs when I tried to roll it out, and the next minute, when I finally picked it up and kneaded it between my hands until it got solid, it was hard as a rock and wouldn’t roll at all. Finally, after about four tries, I got the crust rolled into the right shape for the pie plate, although it got rolled too thin some places and I had to sort of piece it together and pinch it to make the edges stick, and even then it was pretty thick some places. “It won’t matter when the filling’s in,” I told myself. Finally I put it into the oven and turned around and looked at Mallie.

  “Well,” I said with some satisfaction, “that’s done.”

  Mallie hadn’t said anything while I was making the pie crust. Once I had turned around to look at her because I wondered for a minute if maybe she hadn’t been laughing at me—it was when the ball of dough I was working with had bounced out of my hands and across the table—but she had her head down over her knitting. The back of her neck and her ears were bright red, and she sounded like she was coughing, but I decided not to say anything if she didn’t. She’d been nice enough to pick up the pieces of the mixing bowl when it fell on the floor.

  When I put the pie in the oven and turned around to look at her she smiled at me innocently. “Better get those potatoes on,” she said.

  “I know,” I said. “Don’t worry about me.”

  I went back to the index of the cookbook. I really ought to start right in on the pie filling, but maybe if Mallie thought that the potatoes were next… Potatoes, Baked. I turned to the page and saw with dismay that the time given for potatoes, baked, was fifty minutes. And Hugh Talley would be here in forty-five minutes, allowing that he was five minutes late. “He’ll have to wait,” I told the clock grimly, and dived for the potatoes.

  “Wouldn’t of thought anyone could mess up a baked potato,” Mallie observed to her knitting.

  I glared at her, but I was moving too fast to answer. By then I was squeezing the lemons for the pie filling; when I was on about my eighth lemon the squeezer skidded across the table and took a nosedive onto the floor, and I had to finish the lemons by hand, and add a little canned lemon juice to get what I figured was a cupful. Then when I tried to beat the eggs I all of a sudden remembered the pie crust, and when I rushed to get it out of the oven, the eggbeater tipped over the bowl with the eggs in and they went down. But it didn’t really matter because the pie crust was burned black anyway. I just stood in front of the stove with the pie dish in my hand.

  “You put it in, in back of the potatoes,” Mallie said softly. “Then with the potatoes in front, you forgot it.”

  “Never mind,” I snarled at her. “I’ll buy a lemon pie.”

  “Buy a lemon pie?” Mallie said as though I had suggested stealing one off a windowsill.

  “Never mind,” I said again.

  I had planned to make biscuits, too, but the oven was getting so full and the time was getting so short that I gave up the idea. It was fifteen minutes before Hugh Talley was due to arrive—allowing that he was ten minutes late—and then I remembered vaguely that I had planned to have lamb chops, too.

  “Lamb chops,” I said. “Lamb chops.”

  “Lamb chops,” Mallie said soothingly.

  Could she be laughing at me? I looked at her again, and she looked back at me with those wide, friendly eyes.

  “Lamb chops,” I said doggedly. I searched among the litter of papers on the table and found the package of lamb chops. I knew they were to be fried, but the only frying pan I could find was too small for more than two, and knowing Hugh Talley’s famous appetite, I had bought six. I would just have to fry them two at a time. I glanced suspiciously at Mallie; she had her eyes shut, briefly, and her lips moved. I thought she was saying “lamb chops” to herself.

  There was absolutely no place in the kitchen to put down the package of lamb chops, so I held it in my hand while I turned the pages of the cookbook. It was also very hard to read the cookbook because by now the lemon pie filling had soaked through the pages and there was so much flour on my hands that it made a sort of paste. The page that told about lamb chops was also the page that told about lemon meringue pie, and was thoroughly stuck to the next one. I had to put the lamb chops down to separate the pages, and the only place I could find was the windowsill, and I had opened the window to let the odor of burning pie crust out, and, anyway, I suddenly smelled something else burning, and when I leaped to see what it was I joggled the package of lamb chops on the windowsill, and there I was. Mallie came over to th
e window beside me and looked out.

  “Well,” she said, “your lamb chops, down there on the sidewalk. From here,” she added severely, “they don’t look like first cut lamb chops, either.”

  I opened the oven door to see what was burning and found that the potatoes were still baking nicely, and so was my potholder, which I had left inside.

  “That does it,” I said with admirable restraint. I stood up and pushed my hair back with my floury paw. “That does it,” I said again, without quite so much restraint. “I’ll make him pay for this,” I said. “I’ll teach him to go tormenting nice girls with his old cooking. I’ll fry the leaves of the cookbook one by one—” I was going on, but Mallie stopped me.

  “You just calm down,” she said. And, once again, I did what she told me to. I stopped yelling and looked around the kitchen. The sink was piled high with dirty dishes. I had set the broken lemon squeezer on top of the pile of dishes in the sink because I couldn’t find anywhere else to put it, and half a lemon sat precariously on top of that. The mixing bowls were in the sink, too, except the one I broke. For some reason I had used four mixing bowls and a saucepan for that pie filling. On the table was a mess of eggshells and the wrappings from the food and the cookbook, sitting smack in the middle of the pool of pie filling. I had forgotten to turn on the heat under the coffeepot, which sat, cold and reproachful, next to the broken bag of flour, which, for some reason, I had set on the stove. There wasn’t enough flour left in the bag, though, to worry about; it was mostly on the floor. The potholder was cooked to a turn. The doorbell rang.

  I stared at the footprints in the flour on the floor. “Did I really walk that much?” I asked Mallie a little bit hysterically.

  Mallie set down her knitting at last, and rose. “You go along now,” she said. “You change into your blue dress; I pressed it this afternoon while I was waiting for you. You take a quick shower and get dressed, and I’ll take care of your young man.”