Just an Ordinary Day: Stories

by Shirley Jackson

  “I guess Mallie ought to be a family secret,” Mother said. “Imagine trying to tell people that your dress—and that dinner—and the housework—and—”

  “Dottie’s cooking,” I said.

  “And Jerry’s ball team,” Dottie said.

  “No!” I put in, but Mother went on quickly, “Anyway, imagine trying to tell anyone all of that was magic”

  “Well,” I said, “magic or no magic, she was sure some cook.”

  Mother and I saw Dottie off on the train. Mother got sort of tearful and it was strange even to me to have Dottie gone. But then the time kept going on and Dottie came home for Christmas and she and Mother made the blue dress over so Dottie could wear it to some fancy party. I was sorry when they took the dandelions off; somehow they reminded me of Mallie as much as anything else I knew.

  Then in the spring Mother pulled her big surprise, getting married again. Dottie came home from college specially, and things were pretty exciting for a while. We heard from Mallie at last on the morning of the day Mother was getting married. Mother was all dressed and ready for the wedding to start, and she and Dottie and I were sitting there together sort of having one last family talk, when someone brought up a package that had just arrived. I think we all guessed who it was from right away, just from the sudden way it arrived. Mother took out the card and read: “With love, from Mallie.” Then she looked at Dottie and me and said, “Imagine her remembering us after all this time!”

  “I figured she would,” I said.

  “So did I,” said Dottie, and that surprised me a little.

  Inside the package was a mirror with blue flowers painted around the edge and funny old-fashioned cupid faces on the corners. Mother liked it the minute she saw it, and set it up on her dresser. And when she looked in it, she looked sort of surprised, and then she smiled and began to touch her hair, the way women do. She called Dottie and Dottie looked in the mirror and she began to smile and fiddle with her hair, and the two of them were laughing and fooling around with the mirror and I sat there and got more and more nervous because I had to walk down the aisle with Mother and I was sure I’d trip.

  Someone finally called them from downstairs and they went down together, looking all excited and pretty. Before I followed them I sneaked a look in the mirror for myself. It was funny; I looked different. My face was thinner, somehow, without that awful pink look you have when you’re what they call a healthy boy. And there was a shadow across the mirror that made it look almost as though I had a mustache, like a big-league pitcher, maybe, or an explorer. I looked really grown up, so I went downstairs, all set for the wedding.

  All day they kept going upstairs, Mother and Dottie and all the other women who were there, and they’d all take a look in the mirror and come downstairs again all smiles. I even took another couple of looks myself, when there was no one else around.

  After the wedding Mother put the mirror in the hall downstairs so that everyone coming in or going out of the house could look in it. You’d be surprised at how it seems to make people feel pleased with themselves. I keep thinking what Mallie would have said if I asked her why the mirror made people feel so much handsomer and smarter. She’d wink at me, as always, and say, “Magic.”

  I guess it was magic, all of it—though I wouldn’t like to say for sure. All of it, that is, except that game when my team beat the Nine-Man Wonders. I pitched that game and I know.

  THE WISHING DIME

  Good Housekeeping, September 1949

  MR. HOWARD J. KENNEY, trudging disconsolately, noticed the bright shine of a coin in the gutter and for a minute regarded it cynically, without attempting to pick it up. It was a dime, and Mr. Howard J. Kenney felt with some justice that one dime more or less would make very little difference in his life at present; this was the end of his second week of job-hunting. The two weeks’ salary with which he had been discharged had dwindled to an alarmingly small sum; his wife no longer tried to cover her worry with a brave smile; the whole world—or so it seemed to Mr. Kenney—saw them with a suspicious, no-credit eye. And so fate offered Mr. Kenney a dime, glittering brightly in the late afternoon sunlight. After a minute, Mr. Kenney shrugged, leaned over, and took up the dime. It felt light in his hand, and solid, but very small indeed. Mr. Kenney started to drop it into his pocket and then he thought suddenly: Always give away found money; brings luck. I could use some luck. He held the dime in his hand as he walked toward his home.

  There were two little girls ahead of him, about half a block away. They were the only people on the street, and they were playing together solemnly. They were about eight years old, Mr. Kenney decided as he came nearer to them, and he thought drearily what a pleasant age eight must be—no responsibilities, no thought for the future, nothing but sunlight and games. When he came close to the little girls, they both looked up at him, watching him approach with grave, unselfconscious interest. One of them was wearing a pink dress, the other, a blue blouse and yellow skirt. They looked like pleasant, agreeable little girls, and Mr. Kenney smiled tentatively at them.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Hello,” said the little girl in pink.

  “Here,” Mr. Kenney said. He held out the hand with the dime in it and took the hand of the little girl in pink. He put the dime into her hand, closed her fingers over it, and smiled again. “For luck,” he said, and walked on quickly.

  For a minute, the girls were silent with surprise; Mr. Kenney felt them watching him walk away. Then, after a minute, one of them—probably the one in pink—called, “Thank you. Thank you very much for the dime.”

  Mr. Kenney waved without looking around and walked on toward his home.

  Behind him, the two little girls bent their heads over the dime, shining in the hand of the little girl in pink.

  “Why’d he give it to us, do you think?” the little girl in pink, whose name was Nancy, asked the little girl in blue and yellow, whose name was Jill.

  “I don’t know,” Jill said. “He just gave it to us.”

  “He said it was for luck, though.”

  “I wonder why he didn’t keep it if it was so lucky,” Jill said. She turned all the way around to stare down the street at Mr. Kenney, now far distant. “Ten cents,” she said. “That’s a lot of money.”

  “What’ll we do with it?” Nancy asked.

  “We could get two Popsicles for ten cents,” Jill said.

  “Or two chocolate bars.”

  “Or ice cream.”

  Nancy was looking intently at the dime. “It doesn’t look like a regular dime, somehow,” she said. “Somehow it doesn’t look like a regular dime at all”

  Jill leaned over and looked at it. “It’s different, all right,” she said. “I don’t know how, but it’s most certainly different from a regular dime.”

  “A regular dime’s thinner, maybe,” Nancy said. She bent her head far down, next to Jill’s, and the two of them looked wonderingly at the dime.

  “Or maybe this is more silvery,” Jill said. “Anyway, it’s most certainly not a regular dime.”

  They lifted their heads suddenly and stared at each other for a minute with lovely, credulous speculation. Then Jill said softly, “Nancy, do you suppose—”

  “I’m almost sure of it,” Nancy said firmly. “It’s a magic dime.”

  “A wishing dime,” Jill added. “For wishes.”

  “That’s why he said, ‘For luck,’” Nancy said.

  “Three wishes,” Jill said.

  Nancy closed her fingers tight around the dime. “Jill,” she said, “we’ve got to be very, very careful with this wishing dime. We’ve got to be very careful.”

  “It’s not like ordinary wishing,” Jill agreed, “where you go on wishing and wishing and you know nothing’s going to happen because you don’t have something like a wishing dime.” She stopped for breath and then added, “This is very, very different.”

  “We can’t just go around wishing for anything,” Nancy said.

 
Jill sat down abruptly on the sidewalk, putting her chin into her hands and setting her small mouth; she was thinking. “We could wish for a million dollars,” she said finally.

  “We don’t need any more money,” Nancy pointed out. “We have a dime already.”

  “A pony?”

  “Where would we keep it?” Nancy objected. “There’s not room in your house, and I asked Mother to get us a baby brother and I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t let me have a pony, too.”

  “We could wish for all the candy in the world,” Jill said, “but then we’d be sick.”

  They both thought soberly for a few minutes, sitting together on the sidewalk, Nancy with her fingers carefully closed over the dime.

  “Christmas?” Jill suggested, but Nancy only shook her head. “Coming anyway,” she said briefly.

  “Listen,” Jill said suddenly. “What we’ve got to do is let someone else make the first wish. Then we’ll find out how to do it.”

  “We’ve got three wishes, after all,” Nancy said in agreement, “and we wouldn’t need more than one for ourselves. If we could even think of anything for one wish.”

  “Besides,” Jill said, “there might be someone around who’s been looking and looking for a wishing dime because they had a terribly important wish to make.”

  “We ought to go home, then,” Nancy said. “Maybe there’s someone in your family or someone in my family with a wish to make.”

  They stood up and carefully brushed off their skirts. Then, moving busily along side by side, they went to the house where Jill lived with her mother and father and two older brothers.

  “I don’t know who would be best to ask at my house,” Jill said uncertainly. “My brother George is out back painting the steps, but he’s so mean these days.”

  Nancy looked at the house next door, where she lived with her mother and father and sister. “Sally’s on the porch,” she said. “You think we could ask her?”

  “Will she do it?” Jill asked.

  “Sometimes she’s sort of funny,” Nancy said. “But we can ask her.”

  They went up the walk to Nancy’s front gate and then to the porch steps. Nancy’s older sister Sally was swinging in the porch swing, holding a book; but when Nancy and Jill arrived, Sally was staring at Jill’s house next door.

  “Sally,” Nancy said, and Sally jumped.

  “You scare a person to death,” she said. She glanced once, nervously, at Jill’s house, and then said hastily, “I was just wondering when Mother was coming home.”

  “She’s not at my house,” Jill said.

  “I wasn’t looking at your house,” Sally said. “I was looking to see if I could see Mother coming down the street.”

  Both Jill and Nancy had agreed that Sally was the prettiest girl they had ever seen. She was seventeen, and in high school, and she had curly hair that fell to her shoulders in pretty waves. Sally had brown eyes, and she crinkled up her nose whenever she smiled. Right now, however, she was frowning, and her nice mouth was twisted in discontent.

  “I wonder when Mother’s coming home,” she said aimlessly. “Nothing to do around here.”

  “Why don’t you go talk to my brother George?” Jill asked. “He’s out back, painting the steps.”

  “I don’t really care to talk to George, thank you,” Sally said. She lifted her chin a little higher and shrugged her shoulders. “I’m not really interested in anything George has to say.”

  “Mother said he had to paint the steps because he was so grouchy all day.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Sally said. “I’m not at all surprised that your mother thinks George is grouchy. George is one of the grouchiest—”

  “Listen, Sally,” Nancy said. “Will you make a wish for us on our magic dime?”

  “He is really unbearable,” Sally said. “What’s a magic dime?”

  Nancy showed Sally the magic dime, and she and Jill explained to Sally that there were three wishes attached to it, and it had been given them for luck, and Sally was to try the first wish.

  “Heavens,” Sally said. “What on earth would I wish for?” Because she was really a very kind and charming girl, she smiled at Jill and Nancy and said with interest, “I couldn’t think of a thing to wish for.”

  “That was our trouble, too,” Nancy said sadly.

  “Well, let me see,” said Sally. She stared into space and tapped her fingers thoughtfully on the edge of the book.

  “You could wish for George to finish painting and come over to see you,” Jill suggested.

  “Well, really” Sally said. Her smile disappeared and again she looked very haughty indeed. “If you think I’d waste a wish on something like that—”

  “Maybe we better ask someone else,” Nancy said.

  “Well,” Sally said hesitantly, “if you really want me to wish for something. How do I do it?”

  “I suppose,” Nancy said, “I suppose you just hold it in your hand.”

  “And count to ten,” Jill said.

  “And make my wish,” said Sally. She smiled again. “Do I have to tell what I wish?”

  Jill and Nancy consulted each other with their eyes. “I think you can say it to yourself if you want to,” Nancy said.

  “All right, then,” Sally said. She held out her hand, and Nancy put the dime into it.

  “One, two, three, four,” Sally counted while Jill and Nancy watched her breathlessly. “Five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.” Then, eyes shut and a half smile on her face, she made her wish to herself. “There,” she said. She handed the dime to Nancy.

  “Has anything happened?” Jill asked curiously.

  “It hasn’t come true yet, if that’s what you mean,” Sally said. She glanced again, as if involuntarily, at Jill’s house next door. “We ought to give it a while, anyway.”

  “You going to tell us what you wished?” Nancy asked.

  Sally leaned against the pillows and sighed deeply. “Someday,” she said. “If it comes true.”

  “It’ll come true,” Nancy said confidently. “It’s a wishing dime, isn’t it?”

  “We ought to find someone else,” Jill said. “There are two more wishes left, and we’ve got to be careful with them.”

  As the little girls started down the steps, Sally sighed again deeply. “Who you going to ask next?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” Nancy said. “George, I guess.”

  “Of all the people in the world!” Sally said. “Heaven only knows what George might wish for.” She sighed again and leaned her head on her hand.

  “We’ll ask him anyway,” Jill said to Nancy as they went down the walk. “He might want to make a wish.”

  George was at the back of Jill’s house. The can of paint he had been using stood on the top step, only half of which was painted. George sat on the unpainted bottom step, his fingers holding the brush idly and his handsome mouth set in a grim line.

  “Hi,” he said gloomily as the little girls came around the corner of the house.

  “He looks worse than Sally,” Jill said critically. “Doesn’t he, Nancy?”

  “Sally looks pretty bad,” Nancy said. “But George looks pretty bad, too.”

  “You’re a great pair to brighten a dreary afternoon,” George said. “Did you just come to cheer me up?”

  “We want you to make a wish,” Jill said. “Sally did.”

  “I don’t care what Sally—” George began, but Jill interrupted him.

  “We got a wishing dime from a man going down the street,” she said. “He just gave it to us for luck, and Sally made a wish and we want you to make a wish, too.”

  George asked, as if not able to stop himself in time, “What did Sally wish?”

  “She wished you would come over and see her,” Jill said promptly.

  “Right away this afternoon,” Nancy added.

  “So we want you to make a wish, too,” Jill said.

  “Wish?” George said. He stared at them vaguely. Then he stood up and put down the
paintbrush. “Wish?” he said.

  “Yes,” Jill said patiently. “Like Sally did. We want you to make a wish.”

  “You wish for me,” George said. Suddenly, without warning, he began to run. With one leap he cleared the low hedge between Jill’s backyard and Nancy’s backyard, and Jill and Nancy could see him racing for the front porch, where Sally was sitting.

  “They sure act funny, those two,” Jill said.

  “Now we’ve got to find someone else,” Nancy said.

  They went through Jill’s house, but no one was around. Then, outside again, they sat down to wait for someone to come along.

  “It’s wonderful to have a wishing dime,” Jill said.

  “And to be able to wish for anything you want,” Nancy said. “Suppose we wanted a fire engine all our own, we could wish for it.”

  “It’s lucky we don’t want a fire engine,” Jill pointed out. “We couldn’t drive it.”

  “Same with something like a doll as big as we are,” Nancy said. “We couldn’t play with it. It would be too big and too heavy for us to carry.”

  “Or going to the movies every night,” Jill said.

  They were quiet, sitting comfortably side by side with the dime still in Nancy’s hand. Then Nancy’s mother came around the corner from the bus stop and started toward them. She was carrying packages and walking slowly.

  Both Jill and Nancy got up and ran. Nancy reached her mother and hugged her enthusiastically. Mrs. Waite drew back, saying irritably, “Nancy dear, please watch what you’re doing. You’ll knock everything out of my hands.”

  Nancy and Jill began telling her about the magic dime, about the man who had given it to them for luck, about Sally’s wishing and George’s not wishing.

  “How do you children think of such things?” Mrs. Waite said.

  When they came to Nancy’s porch there was no sign of Sally on the swing, except for the book lying where it had fallen on the porch floor. Mrs. Waite went inside, closely followed by Nancy and Jill, still talking, and she put her packages on the table in the hall. “There,” she said. “I’m glad to get rid of those.” She stretched her arms wearily.